Part 61 (1/2)

Alexander was an only son. He had one step-sister, but she was a good many years older than he, and he seems never to have had any child companions or real childhood. He must always have been delicate, yet as a child his face was ”round, plump, pretty, and of a fresh complexion.”* He is said, too, to have been very sweet tempered, but his father and mother spoilt him not a little, and when he grew up he lost that sweetness of temper.

Yet, unlike many spoilt children, Pope never forgot the reverence due to father and mother. He repaid their love with love as warm, and in their old age he tended and cared for them fondly.

*Spence, Anecdotes.

As Pope was a delicate boy he got little regular schooling. He learned to write by copying the printed letters in books, and was first taught to read by an aunt, and later by a priest, but still at home. After a time he was at school for a few years, but he went from one school to another, never staying long at any, and so never learning much. He says indeed that he unlearned at two of his schools all that he had learned at another. By the time he was twelve he was once more at home reading what he liked and learning what he liked, and he read and studied so greedily that he made himself ill.

Pope loved the stories of the Greek and Roman heroes, but he did not care for the hard work needed to learn to read them in the original with ease, and contented himself with translations. He was so fond of these stories that while still a little boy he made a play from the Iliad which was acted by the boys of one of his schools.

Very early Pope began to write poetry. He read a great deal, and two of his favorite poets were Spenser and Dryden. His great idea was to become a poet also, and in this his father encouraged him. Although no poet himself he would set his little son to make verses upon different subjects. ”He was pretty difficult in being pleased,” says Pope's mother, ”and used often to send him back to new turn them; 'These are not good rhymes,' he would say.”

There is a story told that Pope admired Dryden's poetry so much that he persuaded a friend to take him one day to London, to the coffee-house where Dryden used to hold his little court. There he saw the great man, who spoke to him and gave him a s.h.i.+lling for some verses he wrote. But the story is a very doubtful one, as Dryden died when Pope was twelve years old, and for some time before that he had been too ill to go to coffee-houses. But that Pope's admiration for Dryden was very sincere and very great we know, for he chose him as his model. Like Dryden, Pope wrote in the heroic couplet, and in his hands it became much more neat and polished than ever it did in the hands of the older poet.

Pope saw Dryden only once, even if the story is true; but with another old poet, a dramatist, he struck up a great friends.h.i.+p.

This poet was named Wycherley, but by the time that Pope came to know him Wycherley had grown old and feeble, all his best work was done, and people were perhaps beginning to forget him. So he was pleased with the admiration of the boy poet fifty years younger than himself, and glad to accept his help. At first this flattered Pope's vanity, but after a little he quarreled with his old friend and left him. This was the first of Pope's literary quarrels, of which he had many.

Already, as a boy, Pope was becoming known. He had published a few short poems, and others were handed about in ma.n.u.script among his friends. ”That young fellow will either be a madman or make a very great poet,”* said one man after meeting him when he was about fourteen. All the praise and attention which Pope received pleased him much. But he took it only as his due, and his great ambition was to make people believe that he had been a wonderfully clever child, and that he had begun to write when he was very young. He says of himself with something of pompousness, ”I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came.”

*Edmund Smith.

Pope's keenest desire was to be a poet, and few poets have rushed so quickly into fame. He received few of the buffets which young authors have as a rule to bear. Instead, many a kindly helping hand was stretched out to him by the great men of the day, for there was much in this young genius to draw out the pity of others. He was fragile and sickly. As a full grown man he stood only four feet six inches high. His body was bent and deformed, and so frail that he had to be strapped in canvas to give him some support. His fine face was lined by pain, for he suffered from racking headaches, and indeed his life was one long disease.

Yet in spite of constant pain this little crooked boy, with his ”little, tender, crazy carca.s.s,” as Wycherley called it, wrote the most astonis.h.i.+ng poetry in a style which in his own day was considered the finest that could be written.

It is not surprising then that his poems were greeted with kindly wonder, mixed it may be with a little envy. Unhappily Pope saw only the envy and overlooked the kindliness. Perhaps it was that his crooked little body had warped the great mind it held, but certain it is, as Pope grew to manhood his thirst for praise and glory increased, and with it his distrust and envy of others.

And many of the ways he took to add to his own fame, and take away from that of others, were mean and tortuous to the last degree. Deceit and crooked ways seemed necessary to him. It has been said that he hardly drank tea without a stratagem, and that he played the politician about cabbages and turnips.*

*Lady Bolingbroke.

He begged his own letters back from the friends to whom they were written. He altered them, changed the dates, and published them.

Then he raised a great outcry pretending that they had been stolen from him and published without his knowledge. Such ways led to quarrels and strife while he was alive, and since his death they have puzzled every one who has tried to write about him. All his life through he was hardly ever without a literary quarrel of some sort, some of his poems indeed being called forth merely by these quarrels.

But though many of Pope's poems led to quarrels, and some were written with the desire to provoke them, one of his most famous poems was, on the other hand, written to bring peace between two angry families. This poem is called the Rape of the Lock--rape meaning theft, and the lock not the lock of a door, but a lock of hair.

A gay young lord had stolen a lock of a beautiful young lady's hair, and she was so angry about it that there was a coolness between the two families. A friend then came to Pope to ask him if he could not do something to appease the angry lady. So Pope took up his pen and wrote a mock-heroic poem making friendly fun of the whole matter. But although Pope's intention was kindly his success was not complete. The families did not entirely see the joke, and Pope writes to a friend, ”The celebrated lady herself is offended, and, what is stranger, not at herself, but me.”

But the poem remains one of the most delightful of airy trifles in our language. And that it should be so airy is a triumph of Pope's genius, for it is written in the heroic couplet, one of the most mechanical forms of English verse.

Addison called it ”a delicious little thing” and the very salt of wit.

Another and later writer says of it--”It is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work ever invented. It is made of gauze and silver spangles. . . . Airs, languid airs, breathe around, the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the G.o.ddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. . . .

It is the perfection of the mock-heroic.”*

*Hazlitt.

Pope begins the poem by describing Belinda, the heroine, awaking from sleep. He tells how her guardian sylph brings a morning dream to warn her of coming danger. In the dream she is told that all around her unnumbered fairy spirits fly guarding her from evil--

”Of these am I, who thy protection claim, A watchful sprite, and Ariel is my name.

Late, as I ranged the crystal wilds of air, In the clear mirror of thy ruling star I saw, alas! some dread event impend, Ere to the main this morning sun descend.

But heaven reveals not what, or how, or where: Warned by the sylph, oh pious maid, beware!

This to disclose is all thy guardian can: Beware of all, but most beware of Man!”