30 May: Boreham on Alexander Pope

Lord of the Grotto
We come today to the anniversary of the death of Alexander Pope. The outstanding thing about Pope is that he is a litterateur to the fingertips. It never seriously occurred to him to be anything but an author. As a little child—round, plump, pretty but terribly frail—he dreamed of becoming a celebrated poet. As a small boy he would creep into the London coffee-houses that he might gaze in adoring silence upon the most eminent figures in the literary life of his day. He cherished no prouder ambition than the hope that he might, one great day, gather such an illustrious company round him, and, although he died comparatively young, he lived to see his fond wish gloriously fulfilled.

It was Pope who demonstrated for the first time that it is possible for a poor man to make literature an honourable and remunerative profession. He owed nothing to wire-pulling and nothing to patronage. Macaulay points out that, in an age in which it was customary to place a literary enterprise beyond the peril of financial disaster by dedicating it to some person of wealth and title, Pope insisted on compelling his productions to win their own way and fight their own battles. He was almost quixotic in his stubborn refusal to ride to success on any other man's shoulders.

A Singer To Whom Nature Proved Unkind
Yet nobody ever fell in love with Pope; certainly no woman ever did. It may be that, had he succeeded in winning the confidence of one good woman, his life would have been purged of those sinister and repulsive traits by which it was so terribly disfigured. But nothing of the kind ever happened, and, indeed it is difficult to see how it could. Pope treated womanhood with a set sneer. His attitude towards the women was frankly contemptuous and almost brutal. He believed every woman to be a rake at heart. It may be that a deeper sentiment—a sentiment of self pity accounted in some degree for this ugly mentality. Pope was intensely conscious of his own deformities. From his father he inherited a figure that was not only stunted but crooked, disproportionate, and unsightly. He felt himself to be physically contemptible and he would mutter sardonic curses on his crazy carcase. A bundle of aches and pains, he expressed his gratitude to his poetry for helping him through that long disease, his life.

He was a pitiful figure. Trussed up in heavy corsets to support his rickety frame, and wearing several pairs of stockings to make his spindly legs presentable, he was so dwarfish that he had to sit on a high chair at his own table, and to be mounted on cushions at the tables of his friends.

He fancied that because of all this, women scorned him, and he secretly loathed them for it. Such feelings soured his spirit and betrayed him into an attitude towards womanhood that stands as one of the most painful defects in his work. With men he was little better. His deformity rendered him extremely sensitive. If anybody tittered, he thought instantly of the hump on his back and assumed that his ugliness was the theme of the jest. He felt, and felt acutely, that his malformation had excluded him from the fuller life that other men led, and, to save his face, he boasted loudly of imaginary amours and exploits of gallantry like those of which he so often heard. According to his own preposterous story, he was a perfect Lothario, one of the gayest young dogs about town!

Creator Of Liltinq Lines And Pearl-like Phrases
Cultivating this unhappy outlook upon life, Pope became a notorious fop, absurdly self-conscious, absurdly vain, and absurdly insincere. His mind was full of suspicion, his manner full of affectation, his voice a perpetual falsetto. Every movement was stilted, every attitude a pose. Lady Bolingbroke said that he hardly drank tea without a stratagem, and that, in discussing cabbages and turnips, he aped the style of statesmen who debated the fate of empires. His famous grotto, in which he sat with Bathurst and Peterborough, was an expression of his shallow showmanship. It was a weird cavern, so constructed that, when the doors were shut, the mirrors round the walls converted it into a camera obscura, reflecting hills, rivers and boats. When lighted up at night, it glittered with rays produced by the fragments of looking-glass that twinkled everywhere.

Yet, in spite of all this grotesque grimacing, and of all these unlikeable idiosyncrasies, Alexander Pope did work that set him among the immortals. The "Essay on Man" can never die. In conception he was sometimes commonplace, but in execution he was almost sublime. He was a pastmaster in the art of throwing a very ordinary idea into a most elegant and exquisite couplet. Dr. Johnson and Lord Balfour regarded as the most perfect phrase in English poesy, the line in which Pope describes the way in which life's difficulties multiply as we progress—"hills peep o'er hills and steps on steps arise!" Dr. Compton Ricket declares that no poet, not even Shakespeare, has enriched our language with so many succinct and beautiful phrases. Byron gave him a foremost place among our greatest writers and sternly refused to recognise either Shakespeare or Milton as his superior. Few of our present-day critics will be prepared to accord to Pope so exalted a pedestal, but everybody will agree that in view of the frightful handicaps under which he laboured, he has established a phenomenal record and has earned lasting admiration, gratitude, and esteem.

F W Boreham

Image: Alexander Pope