LIFE OF POPE. CHAPTER I. PARENTAGE AND EDUCATION. 1688-1700. ALEXANDER POPE was born on the 21st of May, 1688, a year which, in its relation to the character of his genius, and to the direction which under his influence English literature took during the eighteenth century, is full of interest and significance. Seven months later in the same year James II., by his flight from England, left vacant the throne of his ancestors, and severed the links which had hitherto bound the crown to the people. Up to this date the caprice or discretion of the reigning Monarch had been among the most powerful factors in the formation of English taste. Elizabeth and the first three Stuarts had all possessed enough of literary instinct to leave an impress of their character on contemporary poetry, while the Court, as the central institution of English social life, had exercised a controlling influence over every art that addressed itself to the imagination. The painter, the musician, the player (the King's peculiar servant) the University student, made it the object of their respective ambitions to paint the Sovereign's portrait, to solemnise the services in his Chapel, to relieve the tedium of his leisure moments, and to separate his language in as marked a manner as possible from the idiom of the vulgar. Hence, when the legitimate branch of the House of Stuart was excluded from the succession, the hereditary throne exchanged for one resting on a Parliamentary title, native sovereigns succeeded by kings who neither understood the language nor shared the sympathies of the people, the same causes which had effected a breach in the continuity of political order, produced also a revolution in the form of literary expression. With the hereditary Monarchy, declined, if it did not immediately disappear, the spiritual influence which had hitherto moulded the taste and imagination of Society. Though the Reformation had vitally affected the national spirit, the mediæval system of theology, retaining its hold on the institutions of the country, had preserved the old forms of expression with but slight external modifications. Elizabeth and her two immediate successors, strongly Anglican in their principles, leant to the ceremonial of the ancient Church: Charles II. and James II. were secret or avowed Roman Catholics: the Universities kept up in their lectures and disputations all the framework of the scholastic logic. In a thousand subtle ways the education of the country was affected by modes and methods of thought having their roots in the old forms of religion. A Revolution, which had for its main object the establishment of a Protestant dynasty, necessarily produced a corresponding effect on the hitherto unbroken tradition of Catholic scholasticism. This scholasticism had been faithfully reflected in the poetry of the seventeenth century. It had mixed itself even with the Puritanism of Milton, who, in his 'Paradise Lost,' as Pope afterwards said with justice, often makes 'God the Father turn a school divine.' The controversy between the Churches had formed the argument of Dryden's Hind and Panther,' as the general religious uncertainty of the times had found expression in his 'Religio Laici.' Most of all had the spirit of the schools influenced that remarkable series of poets from Donne to Cowley, generally known by the title of 'metaphysical,' in whose works, as in a mirror, may be seen, at their last ebb, the play of the time-honoured ideas which had once inspired the fancy of medieval Europe. On the other hand, the forms and forces, out of which was to spring the new social fabric, were at the date of Pope's birth already manifesting themselves. While the philosophy of Bacon had not yet superseded that of Aristotle in the studies of the Universities, the inductive methods of science were always winning in society at large an increasing number of adherents. Locke's 'Essay on the Understanding' was completed the year before the Revolution; and the same year had seen the publication of a book which was itself to revolutionise the world of physical sciencethe 'Principia' of Newton. The Deists also, who, since the days of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, had been a growing sect. in England, now began to exercise a perceptible influence on the course of religious thought. Similar tendencies were visible in the sphere of written. language. The place of the accent on words was indeed almost. settled, and for nearly a century the poets had contracted the final syllable 'ed' in the past participle, an important step towards the definite determination of the standard; but traces of the old fashion still remained in some of the inflexions of verbs, and in the use of the expletives 'do' and 'did.' A certain conscious archaism of thought, encouraged by the example of Spenser, had been cultivated late in the seventeenth century by the metaphysical' school of poets, while affectations in language of an exactly opposite kind were practised by the imitators of classical antiquity, either, as in the case of the Euphuists, by the excessive use of antithesis, or by the lavish coinage of words derived from the Latin. Between these two extreme tendencies the new school of poetry, founded by Waller, was gradually forming a poetical diction on social idioms, refined by the style of the best classical authors, with whose works the general reader was becoming familiar through the medium of frequent translations. Thus in all directions, amid the clash of opposing forces, Catholic and Protestant, Whig and Tory, Aristotelian and Baconian, Mediævalist and Classicist, the year 1688 found society in England in a state of unsettlement and confusion. The poet who learned to harmonise all these conflicting principles in a form of versification so clear and precise that for fully a hundred years after he began to write it was accepted as the established standard of metrical music, occupied politically and socially a position of remarkable isolation. His parents were, both of them, Roman Catholics. Of his father's family very little is certainly known. When Pope was engaged in his war with the Dunces, the latter sought to mortify him by taunting him with the obscurity of his birth, pretending in various pamphlets that he was the son of a bankrupt, a hatter, or a farmer.' By way of reply to these false reports the poet credited himself with a lineage much. more splendid but no less fabulous. In his Epistle to Arbuthnot' he asserted "Of gentle blood (part shed in honour's cause and in a note on another verse in the poem he said: "Mr. Pope's father was of a gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the heir of Lindsay." The Earl of Guildford, however, who inherited the estates of the Earls of Downe, and had examined their descent, could find in it nothing to confirm. this claim, and a cousin of Pope's, Richard Potinger, said that he had himself never heard of this fine pedigree,' and "what is more, he had an old maiden aunt equally related, a great genealogist, who was always talking of her family, but never mentioned this circumstance,-on which she certainly would not have been silent had she known anything of it. Mr. Pope's grandfather was a clergyman of the Church of England in Hampshire. He placed his son, Mr. Pope's father, with a merchant at Lisbon, where he became a convert to See note to 'Epistle to Arbuthnot,' v. 381. He was called the son of a farmer in 'Farmer Pope and his Son,' published in 1728. |