Pope, ALEXANDER, the greatest poet of his age, and the most brilliant satirist that England, or perhaps the world, has ever produced, was born in London on the 21st of May 1688. He was of good middle-class parentage, but not, as he afterwards characteristically endeavoured to make out, of aristocratic descent. His grandfather, Alexander Pope the elder—whose pedigree he attempted to derive, though on very inadequate evidence, from the Earls of Doune—was a clergyman of the Church of England. His son, the poet's father, was placed with a merchant at Lisbon, where he became a convert to the Roman Catholic Church. On his return from Lisbon he seems to have followed the trade of a linen-draper in Broad Street, whence, after his marriage with Edith Turner, the poet's mother, he migrated to Lombard Street. Here, on the above-mentioned date—once the subject of much perplexing controversy, but now satisfactorily ascertained—Alexander the younger first saw the light. In his infancy, and indeed up to the age of ten, he does not seem to have been either weakly or deformed. In the opinion of a kinsman, 'it was the perpetual application he fell into in his twelfth year that changed his form and ruined his constitution;' and it is possible that this may have contributed to and aggravated a misfortune which could hardly have been due to any such cause alone. It is at any rate certain that Pope's application to study must have been both early and intense, for deep traces of thought and culture are no less conspicuous than natural precocity of genius even in his most juvenile poems; and he certainly owed little to his teachers. His education, thanks no doubt to the disabilities created by his inherited creed, was unmethodical and imperfect to the last degree. He seems to have passed from one incapable Catholic priest and ill-ordered Catholic seminary to another, until at twelve years of age he was removed, knowing little more apparently than the Latin and Greek rudiments, to Binfield near Wokingham, to which place his father had by that time retired. Yet in this very year he wrote his Ode on Solitude, an insignificant but not unpromising performance, and at fourteen, according to his own account, he composed the poem on Silence, in imitation of Rochester's Nothing, which both in manner and matter is astonishingly mature. It was at the same age that he produced the first of his works which attracted attention, a Translation of the First Book of the Thebais of Statius, a poem memorable above its intrinsic merits from the fact that in it the English heroic couplet, though of course falling far short of the technical perfection to which Pope afterwards brought it, is already beginning to take the new mould into which, in his hands, it was destined to be recast. It is during the next two years, that is to say, at the marvelously early age of from sixteen to eighteen, that Pope's career as a recognised English poet may be said to begin. For it was at some time during these years (1704-6) that he wrote his Pastorals, which, though not published till 1709, were shown to and highly commended by all the leading critics of the day, and were the means of bringing their young author acquainted with the dramatist Wycherley, then advanced in years, with whom he commenced a singular correspondence, the tenor of which he audaciously misrepresented in later life.
It was to Wycherley, too, that Pope owed his first introduction, which took place a little later, to London life, where the youth's extraordinary talents were quickly recognised, and where he was not long in establishing a friendship with Addison, Steele, Swift, Arbuthnot, and other famous wits and poets of the day. In 1711 he published his Essay on Criticism, a poem which, whether written in 1709 or 1707—and it may have been his invincible habit of committing small acts of dishonesty for still smaller gains that suggested the antedating of the composition—was a sufficiently splendid achievement for the age either of nineteen or twenty-one. It at once, or nearly at once—for it hung for a little at first at the booksellers—placed him in the front rank of the men of letters of his time. Critical opinions differed, and down to our own day have continued to differ, as to the degree of merit possessed by this remarkable poem in respect of its matter—some depreciating its critical aphorisms as platitudes, others elevating them into utterances of gnomic wisdom; but its excellences of form are not open to question in any competent judgment. Young as was its author, even on the highest computation of his age, his style had already reached maturity, and his matchless power of expression is here exhibited, if over a less varied subject-matter, yet certainly with a no less unerring mastery than in any of his later works. The year 1713 witnessed the publication of Windsor Forest (written, according to Pope's account adopted by Warburton, in 1709), a piece much admired in its day for the accuracy and force in its descriptions of nature; and this was succeeded in the following year by the poem on which Pope's claim to the gift of poetic imagination may perhaps be most securely rested, the Rape of the Lock. Necessarily precluded by the deliberate triviality of its subject from appealing to the higher emotions which imaginative poetry of the serious order arouses, this piece displays, in addition to the exquisite charm of its versification, a grace of delicate fancy which at times almost recalls the creator of Puck and Ariel, and the diviner of the dream-whispers of Queen Mab.
We now reach the commencement of what was probably the happiest and most prosperous period of the poet's life. His brilliant success had not yet brought with it much pecuniary profit, but in the year 1713 a project was set on foot by him, and warmly supported by Swift and others of his friends, which was destined not only to add to his fame, but to place his fortunes on a substantial basis for life. This was the translation of the Iliad, a work published by subscription, in six volumes, intended to appear yearly; the last two, as a matter of fact, were issued together after six years' intermission in 1720. Most imperfectly representative, as might be expected, of its great original, it is nevertheless a poem so remarkable for its union of force and elegance, and one which moves with an animation so inspiring and unflagging, that it can be read to-day with no inconsiderable portion of the pleasure which it gave to the contemporaries of the poet. The year of its composition was among the fullest and busiest of Pope's life. In 1716 his father removed from Binfield to a house at Chiswick, where he resided till his death in the following year. Pope was now the foremost of the literary lions of fashionable London, and almost as conspicuous a personage in the drawing-rooms of ministers and magistrates as in the coffee-houses of the wits. At this period, too, his mind, save for an interval of natural grief at the loss of his father, was probably as easy as his circumstances. Political differences, aggravated by well or ill-founded suspicions of the elder writer's jealousy of the younger, had alienated Pope from Addison; but, though he had already begun his almost life-long quarrel with the eccentric John Dennis, it had not yet taken on a character of any very extreme virulence. In 1718 he purchased out of the early profits of the Iliad the famous villa and grounds at Twickenham, which he occupied till his death.
A translation of the Odyssey, less successful because largely 'farmed out' to inferior hands, was published in 1725 and the following years; and in 1727 appeared the first two volumes of a collection of Miscellanies, from the joint authorship of Pope and Swift, a work famous as being the first shot fired in the war between the poet and 'the Dunces.' In March 1728 the third volume appeared, and the furious and scurrilous retorts wrung from the persons ridiculed in it elicited the retaliatory publication of the first three books of the Dunciad. This work Pope represented as having been written in reply to their attacks, but it (or a first draft of which) has been ascertained by recent inquiry to have been in existence as early as 1725, and to have been merely withheld until its author had deliberately stung his enemies into a blind and headlong charge. 'Martinus Scriblerus,' in fact, played the part of the lance with which the Spanish picador irritates the bull to frenzy; the Dunciad was the blade poised ready to transfix him. In this immortal lampoon—for it is too personal in all senses of the word to deserve the title of satire—Pope has rescued the names of a host of insignificant enemies from oblivion; and it is the highest tribute to the extraordinary artistic power of this poem that it can still be read with a pleasure unimpaired by the absolute obscurity of most of its heroes. The fourth book, added twelve years later, is of a more serious cast and of a more general application, and it contains one at least of the poet's most admired passages. But its incorporation with the earlier poem, with its infelicitous substitution of Cibber for Theobald as the personification of Dullness, is to be regretted. The Essay on Man, the first part of which was published in 1733, the Moral Essays, and The Imitations of Horace conclude the catalogue of Pope's poetic works. The first, a didactic poem, intended to commend to the world the not very profound philosophy which Pope had borrowed from Bolingbroke, is from the point of view of execution a masterpiece of weight and wit. The poet's mastery of terse and epigrammatic expression is here seen at its highest; and it has been declared, no doubt with truth, that the Essay on Man contains more lines which have won their way to the rank of universally familiar quotation than any poem of equal length in the language. The Moral Essays and the Imitations exhibited the same qualities exercised upon a series of selected subjects of, for the most part, a lighter order; and, as in the case of the still more famous Essay on Man, it is almost impossible to open a page without coming upon a line or a couplet which has become a household word.
The last few years of Pope's life were marked by no new creative activity, but devoted to the revision of his published works. He suffered during this period from asthma, which in time developed dropsy, a disease which ultimately proved fatal to him. He died on the 30th of May 1744, at the age of fifty-six, leaving behind him a literary fame which, despite the change of taste in poetry, has undergone no eclipse in a century and a half. As a man the figure which he presented to all but a few close friends was always an unamiable one, and modern research into the facts of his life has unfortunately only tended to deepen the impression. It cannot be denied that many of the smaller and meaner vices of humanity were painfully prominent in the character of Pope. His vanity was insatiable, and his vindictiveness came near to be so: he committed acts of treachery to men, brutality to women, and ingratitude to both. He showed an extraordinary and at times an almost ludicrous preference for the crooked to the straight path, and much of his time was occupied in laying elaborate plots for the deception of posterity and his contemporary public, including sometimes his most intimate friends. Yet it is certain that to these last he must have revealed many lovable qualities. He was undoubtedly capable of warm attachment, and his disposition when appealed to by the sight of want or suffering was genuinely benevolent. It should be remembered, too, in excuse for the acrimony of his satire, that physical misfortune and accidents of bringing up had combined to render him morbidly sensitive to the insults of his adversaries, and that his revenge was not more cruel than his sufferings.
The position of Pope in the history of poetry is easier to fix than his rank among English poets; and the historian of literature can in these days assign him a far higher place without fear of challenge than any critical admirer, however ardent, can hope to secure for him in contemporary esteem. For the importance and splendour of Pope's contribution to the development of English poetic art are beyond the denial of any one conversant with the facts. It is a truth superior to and independent of the endless and irreconcilable controversy as to the essence and 'true inwardness' of poetic matter. The poets of the naturalist revival at the end of the 18th century regarded Pope as the brilliant exponent of a false and artificial theory of poetry who had systematically, though of course unconsciously, led men away from the contemplation of the 'true truth' of things. It has on the other hand been contended with much learning and ingenuity by Mr Courthope that Pope's theory of poetry, if compared with that which it displaced, was a no less distinct and salutary return to nature than that of which Cowper became the pioneer in the later half of the century, and which Wordsworth preached and practised with such notable results towards its close. But even if this contention leaves us unconvinced, we can still find abundant reason for recognising as invaluable the services rendered by Pope to English poetry. He was virtually the inventor and artificer who added a new instrument of music to its majestic orchestra, a new weapon of expression to its noble armoury. Considered from the point of view of its descriptive and emotional capabilities, the heroic couplet as he received it from the hands of Dryden was an instrument of vast compass but of modulations few and rude. By force of exquisite sensibility wedded to untiring study Pope theoretically deduced and practically educed its hidden powers; discovered, formulated, and inimitably applied the rules for 'discoursing' upon it; and handed it on to posterity in a form whose easy mechanical perfection is attested by the fact that its powers are but too much within the reach of the inferior performer. Considered as a weapon of expression, the heroic couplet of Dryden was a mediæval broadsword which only the mighty thews of its master could wield with any effect. In the hands of Pope it became a rapier of perfect flexibility and temper; and he himself discovered, and acquired mastery over, every trick of fence which it was capable of executing. To have accomplished this alone would have sufficed to perpetuate his name; but Pope has lived and will live in English literature, not only as the virtual inventor of a new poetic form, but as an artist without a rival in any age or language in the adaptation of speech to thought. No one who brings a fairly sympathetic mind to the perusal of the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard will deny to Pope a measure of the lyrical gift and no mean power over the softer emotions. But one must admit that to the taste of the present age there occurs a certain coldness and artificiality in his portrayals alike of the face of nature and of the passions of man. He appeals rather to the brain than to the heart. Ideas and not emotions are his province; but to the metric presentation of ideas he imparts a charm of musical utterance unachieved before his time, and a lucidity of illustration, a brilliancy of wit, a command of apt and terse expression, and a combined ease and dignity of manner which have never been equalled since. To have done this is to have well deserved immortality as a man of letters; whether it is also to have established a title to the name of 'poet,' as understood in these days, every man who frames his own definition of poetry must decide for himself.
The editions of Pope have been fairly numerous. The first, by his friend Bishop Warburton, was an answer to Bolingbroke's attack on Pope's memory, and appeared within a few years of his death. Dr Joseph Warton's was virtually a reply to Warburton's; and the controversy on the power of the poet was revived in the 19th century by Bowles and Roscoe, who each published an edition of his works, and in whose polemics Byron took a memorable part. All other editions, however, have been superseded by that of the Rev. Whitwell Elwin and Mr W. J. Courthope, which was founded on a mass of documentary material collected by the late J. W. Croker; the concluding volume, containing Mr Courthope's biography of the author, was published in 1889. The annotations of the poems are rich and valuable, and the Life disposes finally of many questions concerning Pope's character and career which all his earlier biographers had lacked the material and some the critical impartiality to determine.