The Age of Pope Part 15

In addition to this circ.u.mstantial statement, the veritable appearance of the ghostly lady is confirmed by the fact that she wore a scoured silk gown, newly made up, which, as Mrs. Bargrave told a friend, she felt and commended. 'Then Mrs. Watson cried out, "you have seen her indeed, for none knew but Mrs. Veal and myself that the gown was scoured."' The ghost came chiefly for the purpose of recommending Drelincourt's volume, _A Christian's Defence Against the Fear of Death_, then in its third edition. The fourth edition contained Mrs. Bargrave's story. 'I am unable to say,' Mr. Lee writes, 'when Defoe's "Apparition"

became a necessary appendage to the book; but think, that since the eleventh edition, to the present time, Drelincourt has never been published without it.'

When in 1719, at the age of fifty-nine, he produced his first and greatest work of fiction, _Robinson Crusoe_, he aimed by the constant reiteration of commonplace details to give a matter-of-fact aspect to the narrative, and in most of his later novels, with the exception of _Colonel Jack_ (1722), which he allows to be in part a 'moral romance,'

Defoe boldly maintains that his relations are in every respect true to biography and to history. To make this more probable he overloads his pages with a number of business-like statements, and with affairs so insignificant and sordid that only his genius can save the narrative from being wearisome. To inculcate morality he carries his readers into the worst dens of vice--his heroes being pickpockets, pirates, and convicts, and his heroines depraved women of the lowest order. The interest felt in _Captain Singleton_ (1720), in _Moll Flanders_ (1722), in _Colonel Jack_ (1722), and in _Roxana_ (1724), is to be found in the minute record of their shameless adventures, their miseries and vices.

When the characters reform, Defoe's occupation is gone. The atmosphere the reader is forced to breathe in these tales is indeed so oppressive that he will be glad to escape from it into the pure and exhilarating air of a Shakespeare or a Scott.

A critic has a.s.serted that as models of fict.i.tious narrative these tales are supreme, but it is impossible to agree with this judgment. The highest imaginative art is not deceptive art. The fact that Lord Chatham thought the _Memoirs of a Cavalier_[53] (1720) a true history, is not to the credit of the work as fiction. As well, it has been said, might you claim the highest genius for the painter, whose fruit and flowers were so deceptively painted as to tempt birds to peck at the canvas.

Whatever interest the reader feels in Defoe's 'secondary novels,' of which _Roxana_ is the most powerful, is due to scenes which disgust as much as they impress. The vividness with which they are depicted is undeniable, but one does not desire to inspect filth with a microscope.

Happily _Robinson Crusoe_, on which the author's fame rests, is a thoroughly healthy book that still holds its place as the best, or one of the best, volumes ever written for boys. There is genius as well as extraordinary skill in the way this admirable story is told, but it is not among the fictions which are read with as much pleasure in old age as in youth. Defoe's amazing gift of invention does not compensate for the want of a creative and elevating imagination.

_The History of the Plague in London_ (1722) stands next to _Robinson Crusoe_ in literary merit. Had Defoe been a witness, as he pretends to have been, of the scenes which he describes, the record could not be more vivid. It professes to have been 'written by a citizen who continued all the while in London,' and 'lived without Aldgate Church and Whitechapel Bars, on the left hand or north side of the street.' In this case, as in others, the circ.u.mstantial character of the narrative led readers to regard it as a true history, and Dr. Mead, in his _Discourse on the Plague_ (1744), quotes the book as an authority.

Highly characteristic of Defoe's style, and of his art as a moralist is the _Religious Courtship_, also published in 1722. It is the fict.i.tious history of a family told partly in dialogue, and so written as to attract the reader in spite of repet.i.tions and of reflections as praiseworthy as they are commonplace. It appeals to a cla.s.s whose attention would not be won by fine literature, and has not appealed in vain, for the book, after pa.s.sing through a large number of editions, has not yet lost its popularity. Morally the work is un.o.bjectionable, though not a little narrow, and it is strange that it should have appeared about the same time as a story so offensively coa.r.s.e as _Moll Flanders_.

The most veracious book written by Defoe is _A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, By a Gentleman_, 1724, in three volumes. The full t.i.tle of the work is too long to quote, but it may be observed that the promises it holds out under five headings are satisfactorily fulfilled. The _Tour_ bears the marks of having been written with great care and from personal observation throughout. Defoe states that before publishing the book he had made seventeen large circuits or separate journeys, and three general tours through the whole island. It contains curious information as to the state of England and Scotland one hundred and seventy years ago, and readers interested in our social progress and the industrial life of the country will find much to interest them in the traveller's shrewd observations and careful details. The love of mountain and lake scenery felt by Gray more than forty years later was a pa.s.sion unknown to Defoe and to most of his contemporaries. In the _Tour_ Westmoreland is described as the wildest, most barbarous and frightful country of any which the author had pa.s.sed over. He observes that it is 'of no advantage to represent horror,' and the impa.s.sable hills with their snow-covered tops 'seemed,' he says, 'to tell us all the pleasant part of England was at an end.' The _Tour_ exhibits Defoe's literary gift of expressing what he has to say in the clearest language.

A homely style which fulfils its purpose has a merit deserving of recognition. For steady work upon the road the sober hackney is of more service than the race-horse.

Defoe was a husband and father and a man of affairs, yet, like his own Crusoe, he lived a lonely life, and in 1731, owing to some strange circ.u.mstance of which there is no record, died a lonely death at a lodging-house at Moorfields. He has been called the father of the English novel, and deserves the t.i.tle, although on a slighter scale Steele and Addison preceded him as writers of fiction. As a novelist he is without refinement, without ideality, without pa.s.sion; he looks at life from a low level, but in the narrow territory of which he is master--the art of realistic invention--his power of insight is incontestible. Defoe adopted a method dear in our day to some of the least worthy of French novelists, who while aiming to copy Nature debase her. For Nature must be interpreted by Art, since only thus can we obtain a likeness that shall be both beautiful and true. Defoe, nevertheless, has contributed one book of lasting value to the literature of his country, and such a gift, in the eyes of the literary chronicler, hides a mult.i.tude of faults.

[Sidenote: John Dennis (1657-1733-4).]

John Dennis was born in London and educated at Harrow and Caius College, Cambridge. His relations with Pope give him a more prominent position among men of letters than he would otherwise deserve, and mark with unpleasing distinctness the coa.r.s.e methods of literary warfare adopted in Pope's day. The poet began the attack in his _Essay on Criticism_.

Dennis had written a tragedy called _Appius and Virginia_, and Pope, who had a grudge against him for not admiring his _Pastorals_, showed his spite in the following lines:

'But Appius reddens at each word you speak, And stares tremendous, with a threatening eye, Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry.'

It was perilous in Pope to allude to the personal defects of an antagonist, and Dennis attacked him coa.r.s.ely in return as a 'young, squab, short gentleman, an eternal writer of amorous pastoral madrigals, and the very bow of the G.o.d of Love.' 'He has reason,' he adds, 'to thank the good G.o.ds that he was born a modern; for had he been born of Grecian parents, and his father by consequence had by law the absolute disposal of him, his life had been no longer than one of his poems--the life of half a day.'

Dennis's pamphlet on the _Essay_ caused Pope some pain when he heard of it, 'But it was quite over,' he told Spence, 'as soon as I came to look into his book and found he was in such a pa.s.sion.'

The critic, however, was a thorn in Pope's flesh for many a year, and the poet showed his irritation by a.s.saulting him in prose and verse.

Dennis was equally ready, although not equally capable of returning the poet's blows, and when free from the impotence of anger, made several shrewd critical thrusts which his antagonist felt keenly.

Dennis aspired to be a poet and dramatist. He wrote a bombastic poem in blank verse called _The Monument_, sacred to the immortal memory of 'the good, the great, the G.o.d-like, William III.'; a poem, also in blank verse, and still more 'tremendous,' to quote his favourite word, on the _Battle of Blenheim_, in which he frequently invokes his soul to say and sing a thousand things far beyond his soul's reach--and a poem equally laboured and grandiloquent, on the Battle of Ramillies, in which there are pa.s.sages that read like a burlesque of Milton. Dennis observes in his _Grounds of Criticism in Poetry_ (1704) that 'poetry unless it pleases, nay, and pleases to a height, is the most contemptible thing in the world.' This is just criticism, but the writer did not recognize that his own verse was contemptible. In this essay, which contains many sound critical remarks and an appreciation of Milton seldom felt at that time, he has the bad taste to quote as an ill.u.s.tration of the sublime, a pa.s.sage from his own paraphrase of the Te Deum:

'Where'er at utmost stretch we cast our eyes Through the vast frightful s.p.a.ces of the skies, Ev'n there we find Thy glory, there we gaze On Thy bright Majesty's unbounded blaze; Ten thousand suns prodigious globes of light At once in broad dimensions strike our sight; Millions behind, in the remoter skies, Appear but spangles to our wearied eyes; And when our wearied eyes want farther strength To pierce the void's immeasurable length Our vigorous towering thoughts still further fly, And still remoter flaming worlds descry; But even an Angel's comprehensive thought Cannot extend so far as Thou hast wrought; Our vast conceptions are by swelling, brought, Swallowed and lost in Infinite, to nought.'

It is significant of Dennis's judgment of his own verse that these inflated lines follow one of the loveliest pa.s.sages contained in _Paradise Lost_. Milton describes the moon unveiling her peerless light; and the poet-critic exhibits in juxtaposition his 'vigorous towering thoughts' about the stars. The comparison forced upon the reader is unfortunate.

His tragedies, _Iphigenia_ (1704), _Liberty a.s.serted_ (1704), _Appius and Virginia_ (1709), and a comedy called _A Plot and No Plot_ (1697) were brought upon the stage. _Liberty a.s.serted_, which was received with applause due to the violence of its attacks upon the French, although called a tragedy, does not end tragically. The heroine's patriotism is so fervid that she professes herself willing, while loving one man, to marry another whom she does not love, if her country deems him the more worthy.

Among other poetical attempts, Dennis addressed a Pindaric Ode to Dryden, and the great poet, with the flattery which he was always ready to lavish on his well-wishers, called him 'one of the greatest masters'

in that kind of verse. 'You have the sublimity of sense as well as sound,' he wrote, 'and know how far the boldness of a poet may lawfully extend.'

It may be added that Dennis on one occasion successfully opposed one of the ablest controversialists of the age. In _The Absolute Unlawfulness of Stage Entertainments fully demonstrated_, William Law attacked dramatic representations, not on account of the evils at that time a.s.sociated with them, but as 'in their own nature grossly sinful.' 'To suppose an innocent play,' Law says, 'is like supposing innocent l.u.s.t, sober rant, or harmless profaneness,' and throughout the pamphlet this strain of fierce hostility is maintained.

'Law,' says his biographer,'measured his strength with some of the very ablest men of his day, with men like Hoadly and Warburton, and Tindal and Wesley; and it may safely be said that he never came forth from the contest defeated. But, absurd as it may sound, it is perfectly true that what neither Hoadly nor Warburton, nor Tindal, nor Wesley could do, was done by John Dennis.... "Plays," wrote Law, "are contrary to Scripture as the devil is to G.o.d, as the worship of images is to the second commandment." To this Dennis gave the obvious and unanswerable retort that "when St. Paul was at Athens, the very source of dramatic poetry, he said a great deal publicly against the idolatry of the Athenians, but not one word against their stage. At Corinth he said as little against theirs. He quoted on one occasion an Athenian dramatic poet, and on others Aratus and Epimenides. He was educated in all the learning of the Grecians, and could not but have read their dramatic poems; and yet, so far from speaking a word against them, he makes use of them for the instruction and conversion of mankind."'

Dennis's pamphlet, _The Stage defended from Scripture, Reason, Experience, and the Common Sense of Mankind for Two Thousand Years_, was published in 1726. In his latter days he suffered from two grievous calamities, poverty and blindness. In 1733 Vanbrugh's play, _The Provoked Husband_, was acted for his benefit, and his old enemy Pope wrote the prologue, of which the sarcasm is more conspicuous than the kindness. There is a story, to which allusion is made in the _Dunciad_, that Dennis had invented some kind of theatrical thunder, and how, being once present at a tragedy, he fell into a great pa.s.sion because his art had been appropriated, and cried out ''Sdeath! that is _my_ thunder.'

The critic was also known to have an intense hatred of the French and of the Pope, and these peculiarities are not forgotten in the prologue.

After saying that Dennis lay pressed by want and weakness, his doubtful friend adds:

'How changed from him who made the boxes groan, And shook the stage with thunders all his own!

Stood up to dash each vain Pretender's hope, Maul the French tyrant, or pull down the Pope!

If there's a Briton then, true bred and born, Who holds Dragoons and wooden shoes in scorn; If there's a critic of distinguished rage; If there's a senior who contemns this age; Let him to-night his just a.s.sistance lend, And be the Critic's, Briton's, Old Man's friend.'

Dennis got 100 by this benefit, but had little time in which to spend it, for he died about a fortnight afterwards at the age of seventy-seven. Upon his death Aaron Hill wrote some memorial verses, in which he prophesies that, while the critic's frailties will be no longer remembered,

'The rising ages shall redeem his name, And nations read him into lasting fame.'

It will be seen that the poets did not all treat Dennis unkindly. If praise were substantial food, he would have had enough to sustain him from 'glorious John' alone.

[Sidenote: Colley Cibber (1671-1757).]

Colley Cibber holds a more prominent place than Dennis in the list of men whom Pope selected for attack. He could not have chosen one more impervious to a.s.sault. The poet's anger excited Cibber's mirth, his satire contributed to his content. The comedian's unbounded self-satisfaction and good humour, his vivacity and spirits, were proof against Pope's malice. Graceless he may have been, but a dullard the mercurial 'King Colley' was not.

Born in 1671, he disappointed the hopes of his father, the famous sculptor, and at the age of eighteen made his first appearance on the stage. As actor and as dramatist, the theatre throughout his life was Cibber's all-absorbing interest. His first play, _Love's Last Shift_ (1696), kept possession of the stage for forty years, and his best play, _The Careless Husband_ (1704), received a like welcome. As an actor he was also successful, and played for 50 a night, the highest sum ever given at that time to any English player. His career was as long as it was prosperous. 'Old Cibber plays to-night,' Horace Walpole wrote in 1741, 'and all the world will be there.'

It was only as Poet Laureate, for he could not write poetry, that Cibber displayed his inferiority. The honour was conferred in 1730, two years after Gay had produced the _Beggar's Opera_, when Pope was in the height of his fame, when Thomson had published his _Seasons_ and Young _The Universal Pa.s.sion_. Pope, as a Roman Catholic, was out of the running, but there were poets living who would have saved the office from the disgrace brought upon it by Cibber. 'As to Cibber,' Swift wrote to Pope, 'if I had any inclination to excuse the Court, I would allege that the Laureate's place is entirely in the Lord Chamberlain's gift; but who makes Lord Chamberlains is another question.' The sole result of the appointment that deserves to be recorded is an epigram by Johnson, as just as it is severe:

'Augustus still survives in Maro's strain, And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign; Great George's acts let tuneful Cibber sing, For Nature formed the Poet for the King!'

Of poetry there is no trace in the five volumes of his dramatic works; there are few touches of nature, and little genuine wit, but these defects are to some extent supplied by sparkling dialogue and lively badinage. Cibber is often sentimental, and when he is sentimental he is odious. His attempts to express strong emotion and honourable feeling excite laughter instead of sympathy, and on this account it is difficult to accept without some deduction Mr. Ward's favourable judgment of _The Careless Husband_,[54] which, if it be one of the cleverest of Cibber's dramas, is also one of the most conspicuous for this defect. Here, as elsewhere, Cibber should have left sentiment alone. Imagine a lover exclaiming to a relenting mistress, 'Oh, let my soul thus bending to your power, adore this soft descending goodness!' or a man conversing in the following strain with a wife who has discovered and forgiven his infidelities:

'_Sir Charles._ Come, I will not shock your softness by any untimely blush for what is past, but rather soothe you to a pleasure at my sense of joy for my recovered happiness to come.

Give then to my new-born love what name you please, it cannot, shall not be too kind. Oh! it cannot be too soft for what my soul swells up with emulation to deserve. Receive me then entire at last, and take what yet no woman ever truly had, my conquered heart.

'_Lady Easy._ Oh, the soft treasure! Oh, the dear reward of long-desiring love--thus, thus to have you mine is something more than happiness, 'tis double life and madness of abounding joy....

'_Sir Charles._ Oh, thou engaging virtue! But I'm too slow in doing justice to thy love. I know thy softness will refuse me; but remember, I insist upon it--let thy woman be discharged this minute.'

It has been said that Cibber wrote genteel comedy because he lived in the best society. If this a.s.sertion be true, the reader of his plays will decide that the best society of those days was unrefined and immoral, and that genteel comedy can be extremely vulgar. Cibber's dramas are coa.r.s.e in incident, and often offensive in suggestion. The language is frequently gross, and even when he writes, or professes to write, with a moral purpose, his method may justly offend a rigid moralist. Moreover his comedy, like that of the dramatists of the Restoration, is of a wholly artificial type. Human nature has comparatively little place in it, and the fine ladies and gentlemen, the fops and fools who play their parts in his scenes, belong to a world which has no existence off the boards of the theatre.

His one work which is still read by all students of the drama, and by many who are not students, is the _Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber_ (1740), which Dr. Johnson, who sneered at actors, allowed to be very entertaining. It is that, and something more, for it contains much just and generous criticism. Cibber was the author or adapter of about thirty plays, and in the latter vocation did not spare Shakespeare.

[Sidenote: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762).]

Letter writing, a delightful branch of literature, attained its highest excellence in the eighteenth century. It is an art which gains most, if the paradox may be allowed, by being artless. The carefully studied epistle, written with a view to publication, may have its value, but it cannot have the charm of a letter written in the familiar intercourse of friendship. It is the correspondence prompted by the heart which reaches the heart of the reader. The humour, the gaiety, the tenderness, and the chatty details that make a letter attractive, should be prompted by the feelings and events of the hour. Carefully constructed sentences and rhetorical flourishes ring hollow; to write for effect is to write badly, and to make a display of knowledge is to reveal an ignorance of the art.

For letter writing, although the most natural of literary gifts, is not wholly due to nature. It is the outcome of many qualities which need cultivation; the soil that produces such fruit must have been carefully tilled. In our day epistolary correspondence has been in great measure destroyed by the penny post and by rapidity of communication. In the last century postage was costly: and although the burden was frequently and unjustly lightened by franks, the transmission of letters was slow and uncertain. Letters, therefore, were seldom written unless the writer had something definite to say, and had leisure in which to say it. Much time was spent in the occupation, letters were carefully preserved as family heirlooms, and thus it has come to pa.s.s that much of our knowledge of the age, and very much of the pleasure to be gained from a study of the period, is due to its letter writers. The list of them is a striking one, for it includes the names of Swift and Steele, of Pope and Gay, of Bolingbroke and Chesterfield, of Mrs. Delany and Mrs. Thrale, and of the three gifted rivals in the art, Gray, Horace Walpole, and Cowper.

In the band of authors famous for their correspondence, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu holds a conspicuous place. Reference has been already made to the Pope correspondence, large in bulk and large too in interest. To this Lady Mary contributed slightly, and the greater portion of her letters were addressed to her husband, to her sister, Lady Mar, and to her daughter, the Countess of Bute. She was shrewd enough to know their value: 'Keep my letters,' she wrote, 'they will be as good as Madame de Sevigne's forty years hence;' and they are, perhaps, as good as letters can be which are written with a sense of their value, which Madame de Sevigne's were not. Lady Mary, who may be said to have belonged to the wits from her infancy, for in her eighth year she was made the toast of the Kit Kat Club, was not only a beauty, but a woman of some learning and of the keenest intelligence. At twenty she translated the _Encheiridion_ of Epictetus. She was a great reader and a good critic, unless, which often happened, political prejudices warped her judgment. She had considerable facility in rhyming, and both with tongue and pen cultivated many enmities, the deadliest of her foes being the poet who was at one time her most ardent admirer. The story of Lady Mary's career, with its vicissitudes and singularities, may be read in Lord Wharncliffe's edition of her _Life and Letters_. She is a prominent figure in the literature of the period, and made several pa.s.sing contributions to it, but apart from a few facile and far from decent verses her letters are the sole legacy she has left behind her for the literary student. Some of them, and especially those addressed to her sister the Countess of Mar, are often coa.r.s.e; those to her daughter the Countess of Bute exhibit good sense, and all abound in lively sallies, interesting anecdotes, and the personal allusions which give a charm to correspondence. The section containing the letters written during her husband's emba.s.sy to Constantinople (1716-1718) is perhaps the best known.

Among the strangest of Lady Mary's letters are those addressed to her future husband, whom she requests to settle an annuity upon her in order to propitiate her friends. In one of them she describes her father's purpose to marry her as he thought fit without regarding her inclinations, and observes that having declined to marry 'where it is impossible to love,' she is bidden to consult her relatives: 'I told my intention to all my nearest relations. I was surprised at their blaming it to the greatest degree. I was told they were sorry I would ruin myself; but if I was so unreasonable they could not blame my F. [father]

whatever he inflicted on me. I objected I did not love him. They made answer they found no necessity of loving; if I lived well with him that was all was required of me; and that if I considered this town I should find very few women in love with their husbands and yet a many happy. It was in vain to dispute with such prudent people.'

This incident is characteristic of the period, but Lady Mary's letters to Wortley Montagu are more characteristic of the woman who had her own views of female propriety, and of the right method of love-making. To escape from the man she hated, she eloped with Wortley, and if, in story-book phrase, the curiously-matched couple 'lived happily ever afterwards,' it was probably because for more than twenty years they lived apart.