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Alexander Pope
The Poet in the Poems
By Dustin H. Griffin PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06371-3
CHAPTER 1
An Approach to Pope
Self-Revelation
Pope was plainly one of his own favorite subjects, and nowhere so obtrusively as in his letters. His disposition toward self-revelation can be observed in the Horatian poems of the 1730s, but we can study that disposition and the motives that prompted it more clearly in his correspondence dating from 1710 and even earlier, when he began to develop the habit of "pouring himself out on paper." The letters throughout his career are characterized by regular, self-disclosing, informal, but "sincere" (the word is a recurrent one) communication, couched not in wit but, to use one of Pope's favorite phrases, "the language of the heart." "All the pleasure or use of familiar letters is to give us the assurance of a friend's welfare, at least 'tis all I know, who am a mortal enemy and despiser of what they call fine letters." His subject is himself, in all his daily "motions" (both the movements of the body and the vicissitudes of the spirit). "You have often rebuked me for talking too much of myself & my own Motions," Pope writes to Martha Blount (Corr., III, 187), but he insists on passing on word of his most ephemeral moods and movements.
The style of a personal letter, in like manner, is designed to convey the "self" most effectively. Although he began his career as a correspondent by exchanging witty banter and pieces of "fine writing," sounding in many of the early letters like a latter-day Restoration wit, Pope seems shortly to have become dissatisfied with the inauthenticity of such a stance and began to ask instead for honest, natural communication. His familiar conception of a letter as "talking on paper" first appears as early as 1710: "You see, sir, with what freedom I write or rather talk upon paper to you." In the same year he first cites the commonplace — "They say a letter should be a natural image of the mind of the writer" (Corr., 1, 94) — that he would in later letters reanimate with personal conviction. He would speak, for example, of his letters as "these shadows of me," as "the most impartial Representations of a free heart, and the truest Copies you ever saw."
The desire to convey a "true picture" is sometimes supplanted in Pope's letters by the expressed desire to reveal the naked original itself, as if no use of language, even the most scrupulous, could fail somehow to distort. "You see my letters are scribbled with all the carelessness and inattention imaginable: my style, like my soul, appears in its natural undress before my friend" (Corr., I, 155-56). The wishful fantasy of unmediated communication even takes a mythic form: "The old project of a Window in the bosom, to render the soul of man visible, is what every honest friend has manifold reason to wish for" (Corr., n, 23). Pope's fanciful longing is given perhaps its most elaborate expression in a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:
If Momus his project had taken of having Windows in our breasts, I should be for carrying it further and making those windows Casements: that while a Man showd his Heart to all the world, he might do something more for his friends, e'en take it out, and trust it to their handling. ... But since Jupiter will not have it so, I must be content to show my taste in Life as I do my taste in Painting, by loving to have as little Drapery as possible.
In subsequent letters the baroque excess of the exposed or removed heart is tempered. Pope occasionally writes of "opening" himself or his heart: to the Blounts, "Let me open my whole heart to you"; to Caryll, "with what openness I unfold my whole heart in confidence of your friendship"; and later, to Bethel, "I am so awkward at writing letters, to such as expect me to write like a wit, that I take any course to avoid it. 'Tis to you only, and a few such plain honest men, I like to open myself with the same freedom, and as free from all disguises, not only of sentiment, but of style, as they themselves."
Just as the wish to convey a "true picture" leads Pope, in hyperbole, to speak of offering a sight or touch of the naked original, so his idea of talking on paper develops from the transcription of his words into the idea of "throwing" himself out on paper: "I resume my old liberty of throwing out my self upon paper to you, and making what thoughts float uppermost in my head, the subject of a letter." Dissatisfaction with the connotations of a strenuous and enforced effort in "throw" may have led Pope to another term, "flowing," suggesting a gentle spontaneity. This is especially apparent in letters to intimate friends: "The natural overflowing and Warmth of the ... Heart"; "In these Overflowings of my heart...."
From this perspective one can see that such phrases as "I love to pour out all myself, as plain / As downright Shippen, or as old Montagne" and "The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul" have a long prehistory in Pope's correspondence, and that the stance of honest self-revelation that "Pope" adopts quite consciously in the Horatian poems is a stance that had become "nature" to the Pope of the letters. Significantly, the "pour out" and "flow" of the poem to Fortescue have no equivalent in the Horatian original; indeed, Horace speaks not of "pouring out" but of "shutting up": "me pedibus delectat claudere verba" ("my own delight is to shut up words in feet"). Closer to the spirit of Pope's lines and his "open" temperament is the garrulous egotism of "old Montagne." He too professes "Freedom, Simplicity, and Plainness" in his manner, which makes him walk, he says, "with my Head erect, my Face and my Heart open"; "my natural way is proper for Communication, and apt to lay me open; I am all without and in sight, born for Society and Friendship." With openness, for Montaigne as for Pope, comes the desire to speak out candidly, scorning reserve: "I expose myself in my true Opinion." Like Aristippus, Montaigne will "abandon myself to Candor, always to speak as I think." He himself is the "matter" of his book, the "Argument and Subject" of his Essays: "I look into my self, I have no other business but my self, I am eternally meditating upon my self." To whatever degree self-revelation answered needs within Pope, it must have been encouraged from without by the example of Montaigne.
When Pope came to publish an official edition of his letters in 1737, he described them in the Preface in terms that had become familiar to him: except for the early effusions of wit, the letters are "by no means Efforts of the Genius but Emanations of the Heart. ... Many of them having been written on the most trying occurrences, and all in the openness of friendship, are a proof what were his real Sentiments, as they flow'd warm from the heart, and fresh from the occasion" (Corr., I, xxxvii, xxxviii-ix). But elsewhere in the Preface and in letters from this period, though he continued to conceive of his letters as self-revelation, Pope began to see self-revelation in a new light.
Pope's official reason for the publication of his letters was of course the usual subterfuge of authors: Curll's unauthorized edition of 1735 — which we now know Pope instigated — required Pope to publish a "correct" version. Doubtless Pope shared with every author the hope of glory; even his friend Swift suspected that Pope had long nurtured "Schemes" of "Epistolary fame" (Corr., III, 92). But fame in the ordinary sense seems not to have been Pope's sole motive. He was aware that a published letter has a new audience, the reading public, who were likely to be familiar with Pope through his published poems. Many of them would have formed what in Pope's mind was a mistaken picture of him — as a malicious, ill-natured, envious wasp, the image publicized by his enemies. Publication of the letters gave Pope an opportunity to defend his character by proving the charges wrong, by proving himself a virtuous man and, especially, a faithful friend of Virtue and her friends. In 1726, more than ten years before the letters were published in his own edition, Pope wrote to Caryll, as he did to other friends, asking for the return of his letters, especially any "as would serve to bear testimony of my own love for good men, or theirs for me."
But Pope's contemporaries were not his only imagined audience, or even his most important one. The letters began as the warm overflow of the heart, the outpourings of his soul to private friends, and served next as a "proof" of his nature and "testimony" to his love of virtue. (Pope was fond of legal metaphors in his self-disclosures: the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was announced as a "Bill of Complaint" in the court of his contemporaries.) They would stand finally, so Pope came to think, as an enduring "monument" for posterity. He hopes
to erect such a Particular & so Minute a Monument of his & my Friendship, as shall put to shame any of those Casual & cold Memorandums we see given by most ancient & Modern Authors, of their Regard for each other, & which yet Posterity have thought exemplary. I love him beyond all Forms of Wit & Art, & would show how much more the Heart of a sincere Esteemer & Honourer of Worth & Sense can do, than the Tongue or Pen of a ready writer, in representing him to the world. (Corr., IV, 64)
So Pope wrote in 1740 in preparing for publication his letters to and from Swift. The term "monument," which occurs more than once in Pope's discussions of his published letters and poems, suggests not only "reminder" or "memorial," but may also imply the qualities of art: an enduring structure, composed, like a poem, of words, intended not only for its own day, but for all time.18 When Pope rejoiced with Swift that "the strict Friendship we have borne each other so long, is thus made known to all mankind" (Corr., IV, 337), he was perhaps thinking not just of the men of their own day. As early as December 1726, when he was calling in verses and letters in the possession of his friends, Pope gave as his reason that he wished "to settle my whole accounts with posterity" (Corr., II, 418-19). A year later the concern for posterity emerges strongly but indirectly in a letter to Samuel Buckley in praise of the latter's forthcoming edition of the historian Thuanus. He imagines the comfort men like Thuanus must feel "to see so much worthy Pains taken, to right them after their Deaths, & set their Labours in the fullest and fairest light: And I believe, the Care of such an Editor as yourself, is All the Reward an honest & faithful Historian ever did, or could, hope to receive for his integrity." He goes on to contrast such men who "wrote for Posterity, and are of use to all Ages" with others like himself, who "write only for the present Ear" (Corr., II, 471-72). It is plain of course that Pope is affecting the amateur's carelessness. He too wrote for posterity and hoped to be of use to all ages. Does he not here long for the same kind of editorial care that Buckley accorded Thuanus? Was he not himself planning, in effect, to be his own editor?
As with Pope's letters, so with his poems. Pope liked to think of them too as speaking out about himself and his opinions, as defending his own character, as addressing posterity. Upon the publication of the Pope-Swift Miscellany in 1727, he wrote to his joint-author:
I am prodigiously pleas'd with this joint-volume, in which methinks we look like friends, side by side, serious and merry by turns, conversing interchangeably, and walking down hand in hand to posterity; not in the stiff forms of learned Authors, flattering each other, and setting the rest of mankind at nought: but in a free, un-important, natural, easy manner; diverting others just as we diverted ourselves. (Corr., II, 426)
A month later Pope wrote to Swift that their names "shall stand linked as friends to posterity," both in the verse DunciadVariorum and in the prose Miscellanies, "and (as Tully calls it) in consuetudine studiorum" (Corr., II, 480).
As Pope grew older, as that "long disease" his life brought him closer to death, he thought more and more often about leaving an image of himself for posterity. Such thoughts were apparently prompted by the illness and death of friends, who fell one by one before him — Gay, the poet's own mother, Arbuthnot. After the death of their mutual friend Gay, Pope wrote to Swift with memorials and monuments in mind:
There is nothing of late which I think of more than mortality, and what you mention of collecting the best monuments we can of our friends, their own images in their writings: (for those are the best, when their minds are such as Mr. Gay's was, and as yours is). I am preparing also for my own; and have nothing so much at heart, as to shew the silly world that men of Wit, or even Poets, may be the most moral of mankind. (Corr., 347)
Some two years later the deaths of Gay and of old Mrs. Pope, and the impending death of Arbuthnot, all contributed to the sober and melancholy tone of Pope's most comprehensive image of himself, the Epistle to Arbuthnot.
In the Preface to his Works (1735), in which the epistle was included, Pope wrote that "All I have to say of my Writings is contained in my Preface to the first of these volumes," that is, in the 1717 Preface. "And all I have to say of Myself," he continued, "will be found in my last Epistle," the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. More privately, he wrote to Arbuthnot in terms that accord to the poetic epistle the same status he accorded to his own published letters. He refers to "the Poem I told you of, which I hope may be the best Memorial I can leave, both of my Friendship to you, & of my own Character being such as you need not be ashamd of that Friendship. The apology is a bold one, but True: and it is Truth and a clear Conscience that I think will set me above all my Enemies, and make no Honest man repent of having been my Friend" (Corr., III, 431).
A few years later, in 1739, when Pope, then past fifty, was seriously ill, he wrote to his friend Fortescue, who was also ailing. Though dying, Pope still worries about the imperiled "Publick Weal." And though "no Child of mine (but a Poem or two) is to live after me," he still thinks of the name he leaves: "I never had any ambition, but this one, that what I left behind me (if it chanced to survive me) should shew its parent was no Dishonest, or Partial, Man, who owed not a Sixpence to any Party, nor any sort of advantage to any Mean or mercenary Methods" (Corr., IV, 169). Not unlike a dying man who looks on his children as a way of gaining some power over death (images of the parent, they "extend his breath," as Pope himself extended the breath or life of his mother), Pope, whose spouse, so he liked to think, was his muse, and whose children were his poems, holds some hope that those children will survive to give a good report of him. Near the end of his life, indeed, he takes comfort that "my Works have not dy'd before me" (Corr., IV, 364). They lived to testify to contemporaries and to posterity that Pope-the-poet was a good man.
The metaphor of testimony — a recurrent one in his letters — serves best to characterize Pope's autobiographical impulse. Self-revelation in his poems and letters is almost always a carefully calculated performance, acted out in a public arena and designed to persuade an audience. Pope's particular kind of rhetoric, especially in the later poems, is defensive: apology for his works and person. Even when he claims to write only to please himself and his conscience, he implicitly appeals for the approval of his readers. Gray makes an illustrative contrast. He too speaks in propria persona and in accents, though still and small, that are no less calculated. But Gray speaks as a little-known poet with very little sense of or confidence in a public audience, addressing chiefly himself and a few friends, and with ambivalence about publishing or even being understood. A private poet, Gray more nearly inclines toward self-expression for its own sake. As autobiographer he approaches confession: "this is who I am, how I see the world." Pope, though always personal, is never private. He writes apology: "this proves my integrity." Not surprisingly, Gray imagines no social function for himself as poet. The Elegist and Bard bear no relation to society; they withdraw into themselves or feel actively alienated. Pope, by contrast, even when alienated, acts as social-moral-political critic or constructs in virtuous retirement an alternate society from which he keeps the world in view. Likewise, self-revelation for Pope always means keeping an audience in view, even in his most apparently self-absorbed moments.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Alexander Pope by Dustin H. Griffin. Copyright © 1978 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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