  THE most epigrammatic, and one of the most elegant, of poets. He was also one of the most precocious. His first production of importance was his Essay on Criticism, written at the age of twenty-one, although not published until two years later. But he had composed, we are assured, several verses of an Epic at the age of twelve; and his Pastorals was given to the world by a youth of sixteen. Its division into the Four Seasons is said to have suggested to Thomson the title of his great poem. The MS. passed through the hands of some distinguished persons, who loudly proclaimed the merits of the boy-poet. In the same year with his fine mock-heroic Rape of the Lock (1712) appeared The Messiah, in imitation of Isaiah and of Virgil (in his well-known Eclogue IV.), both of whom celebrate, in similar strains, the advent of a “golden age” to be. The “Sybilline” prophecy, which Pope supposes the Latin poet to have read, existed, it need scarcely be added, only in the imagination of himself and of the authorities on whom he relied. Windsor Forest (1713) deserves special notice as one of the earliest of that class of poems which derive their inspiration directly from Nature. It was the precursor of The Seasons, although the anti-barbarous feeling is less pronounced in the former. We find, however, the germs of that higher feeling which appears more developed in “See! from the brake the whirring Pheasant springs, And mounts exulting on triumphant wings: Short is his joy; he feels the fiery wound, Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground. Ah, what avail his glossy, varying dyes, His purple crest and scarlet-circled eyes— The vivid green his shining plumes unfold, His painted wings, and breast that flames with gold? * * * * * * * * To plains with well-breathed beagles they repair, And trace the mazes of the circling Hare. Beasts, urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue, And learn of man each other to undo. With slaughtering guns the unwearied fowler roves, When frosts have whitened all the naked groves, Where Doves, in flocks, the leafless trees o’ershade, And lonely Woodcocks haunt the watery glade— He lifts the tube, and level with his eye, Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky. Oft, as in airy rings they skim the heath, The clamorous Lapwings feel the leaden death: Oft, as the mounting Larks their notes prepare, They fall and leave their little lives in air.” His Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard (a romantic version of a very realistic story), Temple of Fame, Imitations of Chaucer, translation of the Iliad (1713–1720)—characterised by Gibbon as having “every merit but that of likeness to its original”—an edition of Shakspere, The Dunciad (1728), translation of the Odyssey, are some of the works which attest his genius and industry. But it is with his Moral Essays—and in particular the Essay on Man (1732–1735), the most important of his productions—that we are especially concerned. As is pretty well known, these Essays owe their conception, in great part, to his intimate friend St. John Bolingbroke. Although the author by birth and, perhaps, still more from a feeling of pride which might make him reluctant to abandon an unfashionable sect (such it was at that time), belonged nominally to the Old Church, the theology and metaphysics of the work display little of ecclesiastical orthodoxy. The pervading principles of the Essay on Man are natural theology or, as Warburton styles it, “Naturalism” (i.e., the putting aside human assertion for the study of the attributes of Deity through its visible manifestations) and Optimism. The merits of the Essay, it must be added, consist not so much in the philosophy of the poem as a whole as in the many fine and true thoughts scattered throughout it, which the author’s epigrammatic terseness indelibly fixes in the mind. Of the whole poem the most valuable part, undoubtedly, is its ridicule of the common arrogant (pretended) belief that all other species on the earth have been brought into being for the benefit of the human race—an egregious fallacy, by the way, which, ably exposed as it has been over and over again, still frequently reappears in our popular theology and morals. To the writers and talkers of this too numerous class may be commended the rebukes of Pope:— “Nothing is foreign—parts relate to whole: One all-extending, all-preserving soul Connects each being, greatest with the least— Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast: All served, all serving—nothing stands alone. * * * * * * * Has God, thou fool, worked solely for thy good, Thy joy, thy pastime, thy attire, thy food? * * * * * * * Is it for thee the Lark ascends and sings? Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings. Is it for thee the Linnet pours his throat? Loves of his own and raptures swell the note. The bounding Steed you pompously bestride Shares with his lord the pleasure and the pride. * * * * * * * Know Nature’s children all divide her care, The fur that warms a monarch warmed a Bear. While Man exclaims, ‘See all things for my use!’ ‘See Man for mine!’ replies a pampered Goose. And just as short of reason he must fall, Who thinks all made for one, not one for all.” He then paints the picture of the “Times of Innocence” of the Past, or rather (as we must take it) of the Future:— “No murder clothed him, and no murder fed. In the same temple—the resounding wood— All vocal beings hymned their equal God. The shrine, with gore unstained, with gold undrest, Unbribed, unbloody, stood the blameless priest. Heaven’s attribute was universal care, And man’s prerogative to rule but spare. Ah, how unlike the man of times to come— Of half that live the butcher and the tomb! Who, foe to Nature, hears the general groan, Murders their species, and betrays his own. But just disease to luxury succeeds, And every death its own avenger breeds: The fury-passions from that blood began, And turned on man a fiercer savage, man.” Again, depicting the growth of despotism and superstition, and speculating as to— “Who first taught souls enslaved and realms undone The enormous faith of Many made for One?” he traces the gradual horrors of sacrifice beginning with other, and culminating in that of the human, species:— “She [Superstition] from the rending earth and bursting skies Saw gods descend, and fiends infernal rise: Here fixed the dreadful, there the blest, abodes— Fear made her devils and weak Hope her gods— Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust— Such as the souls of cowards might conceive, And, formed like tyrants, tyrants would believe. * * * * * * * * Altars grew marble then, and reeked with gore; Then first the Flamen tasted living food, Next his grim idol smeared with human blood. With Heaven’s own thunders shook the earth below, And played the God an engine on his foe.” Whenever occasion arises, Pope fails not to stigmatise the barbarity of slaughtering for food; and the sÆva indignatio urges him to upbraid his fellows with the slaughter of— “The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed, * * * * * * * Who licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.” And, again, he expresses his detestation of the selfishness of our species who— “Destroy all creatures for their sport or gust.” That all this was no mere affectation of feeling appears from his correspondence and contributions to the periodicals of the time:— “I cannot think it extravagant,” he writes, “to imagine that mankind are no less, in proportion, accountable for the ill use of their dominion over the lower ranks of beings, than for the exercise of tyranny over their own species. The more entirely the inferior creation is submitted to our power, the more answerable we must be for our mismanagement of them; and the rather, as the very condition of Nature renders them incapable of receiving any recompense in another life for ill-treatment in this.” Consistently with the expression of this true philosophy, he declares elsewhere that— “Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring victims, or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there. It gives one the image of a giant’s den in romance, bestrewed with scattered heads and mangled limbs.” The personal character of Pope, we may add, has of late been subjected to minute and searching criticism. Some meannesses, springing from an extreme anxiety for fame with after ages, have undoubtedly tarnished his reputation for candour. His excessive animosity towards his public or private enemies may be palliated in part, if not excused, by his well-known feebleness of health and consequent mental irritability. For the rest, he was capable of the most sincere and disinterested attachments; and not his least merit, in literature, is that in an age of servile authorship he cultivated literature not for place or pay, but for its own sake. Amongst Pope’s intimate friends were Dr. Arbuthnot, Dean Swift, and Gay. The first of these, best known as the joint author with Pope and Swift of Martinus Scriblerus, a satire on the useless pedantry prevalent in education and letters, and especially as the author of the History of John Bull (the original of that immortal personification of beef, beer, and prejudice), published his Essay Concerning Aliments, in which the vegetable diet is commended as a preventive or cure of certain diseases, about the year 1730. Not the least meritorious of his works was an epitaph on the notorious Colonel Chartres—one of In the Travels of Lemuel Gulliver the reader will find the sÆva indignatio of Swift—or, at all events, of the Houyhnhnms—amongst other things, launched against the indiscriminating diet of his countrymen:— “I told him” [the Master-Horse], says Gulliver, “we fed on a thousand things which operated contrary to each other—that we eat when we are not hungry, and drink without the provocation of thirst ... that it would be endless to give him a catalogue of all diseases incident to human bodies, for they could not be fewer than five or six hundred, spread over every limb and joint—in short, every part, external and intestine, having diseases appropriated to itself—to remedy which there was a sort of people bred up among us in the profession or pretence of curing the sick.” Among the infinite variety of remedies and prescriptions, in the human Materia Medica, the astounded Houyhnhnm learns, are reckoned “serpents, toads, frogs, spiders, dead men’s flesh and bones, birds, beasts, fishes”—no mere travellers’ tales (it is perhaps necessary to explain), but sober fact, as any one may discover for himself by an examination of some of the received and popular medical treatises of the seventeenth century, in which the most absurd “prescriptions,” involving the most frightful cruelty, are recorded with all seriousness:— “My master, continuing his discourse, said there was nothing that rendered the Yahoos more odious than their undistinguishing appetite to devour everything that came in their way, whether herbs, roots, berries, the corrupted flesh of animals, or all mingled together; and that it was peculiar in their temper that they were fonder of what they could get by rapine or stealth at a greater distance than much better food provided for them at home. If their prey held out, they would eat till they were ready to burst.” Although unaccustomed to the better living, and finding it “insipid at first,” the human slave of the Houyhnhnm (a word which, by the way, in that language, means “the perfection of nature”) records as the result of his experience, in the first place, how little will sustain human life; and, in the second place, the fact of the superior healthfulness of the vegetable food. About this period or a little earlier, Philippe Hecquet, a French physician, published his TraitÉ des Dispenses du CarÊme (“Treatise on Dispensations in Lent”), 1709, in which he gave in his adhesion to the principles of Vegetarianism—at all events, so far as health is concerned. He is mentioned by Voltaire, and is supposed to be the original of the doctor Sangrado of Le Sage. |
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