HIS DESULTORY EDUCATION 23 His father, who was a London merchant, retired from business in that year, and went to live at Binfield in Windsor Forest. The most influential fact in Pope's family circumstances was the religion of his father, who was a Roman Catholic. This probably influenced the father in retiring from business when the Catholic James II. was driven from the throne and the Protestant William took his place. Farther, it influenced the education of Pope in two ways. The public schools were closed to him, and he received very little regular education. He was taught to read by an aunt, the widow of the portrait-painter Cooper, who left him at her death, when he was five years old, all her "bookes, pictures, and medalls sett in gold or otherwise." At the age of eight he was taught the rudiments of Latin and Greek by the family priest; then he was sent for a time to a little school at Twyford, near Winchester, in Hampshire, then for a time to another in Marylebone, then to a third at Hyde Park Corner in London; then he read for a time under the care of another priest; but at the age of twelve he was left entirely to his own resources. This desultory education, leaving him to read at will, was probably an advantage for a studious boy, who could not remember when he began to make verses of his own invention, who compiled a play for his schoolfellows before he was twelve, and had such a veneration for poets and poetry that as a small school-boy he ventured into Will's Coffee-house that he might have the pleasure of seeing and hearing Dryden, the greatest English poet then living. These little facts show how precocious Pope was both in poetic sensibility and in ambition. When his father, who was probably anxious for his health, took him from school in London to live at home in the Forest, he plunged with delight into a miscellaneous course of reading in poetry, and he not only read, but imitated. His school education had been too scrappy to make him expert in construing foreign languages; he could barely construe Tully's Offices, he says, when he left school; but in the course of the previous century all poets of note,—Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, had been translated into English verse, and with the help of these translations the ardent student had no difficulty in mastering the sense. "Mr. Pope," Spence says, "thought himself the better in some. respects for not having had a regular education. He (as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense, whereas we are taught for so many years to read only for words." Nor, although the boy was left entirely free to read what he pleased, was he left altogether without friendly guidance. Here, again, the family Catholicism was serviceable to him; it was an advantage to belong to a proscribed sect. The members of such a sect always hold much more closely together without distinctions of rank; distinctions of rank and station are levelled by their common political disabilities. Hence it happened that Catholic families in the neighborhood, of good position and literary culture, who would probably not have visited the retired linendraper if he had belonged to the established religion, made the acquaintance of him and of his precocious son, and helped the latter with encouragement and advice in his reading and in the first flights of his genius. In particular, Sir W. Trumbull, a retired diplomatist, living at Easthampstead, within a few miles of Binfield, made a companion of the boy, and directed him to the study of the French critics. Through another Catholic family, the Blounts of Mapledurham, one of whom, Mrs. Martha Blount, was his attached friend in his last years, Pope made the acquaintance of Wycherley and Henry Cromwell, and through them of Walsh and Granville, all poets and keen critics of literature. Thus, while Pope's sensibilities were still fresh, and his whole nature docile and pliable, he was guided into the very middle of the literary current of his time, and left to paddle at his own sweet will in backwaters and eddies. The eager and ambitious boy was, in fact, stimulated to the very utmost of his powers, and directed to strive with all his energies after what was then considered literary excellence by the highest authorities. We can see in his early efforts traces of a clear-sighted purpose, while trying to do what was then certain of winning applause, to choose subjects that had not been already appropriated by great poets, and in which success was still open to all comers. It was then a critical maxim that the highest work of which the human mind was capable was a great epic, and many treatises had been written in French and in English, in prose and in verse, on the principles of epic poetry. Sir Richard Blackmore, while Pope was at school, had attempted an epic on the subject of Arthur. It was a ponderous failure. Pope began an epic about the age of twelve. The subject was mythological, the hero being Alcander, a prince of Rhodes. It was, he told Spence, "about two years in hand." In later life he considered that it was better planned than Blackmore's, though equally slavish an imitation of the ancients; but he never published it, and it was finally burned by the advice of Atterbury. Even in his boyhood Pope had judgment enough to understand that his powers were not yet sufficiently mature for original composition, and he resolved to perfect them in the first place by imitations of his predecessors. Walsh advised him that there was one praise yet open to English poets, the praise of correctness. In Pope's boyhood the most successful poetical publication had been Dryden's translation of Virgil. What Dryden had translated, Pope did not presume to meddle with. Dryden was his hero, his model, his great exemplar. But he proceeded to take translations of classics by less eminent poets, and try to improve upon them. With this ambition he translated the first book of the "Thebaid " of Statius, whom he considered the most eminent Latin epic poet next to Virgil, several of Ovid's "Heroic Epistles," and a considerable part of the "Metamorphoses," besides passages from Homer. It was one of Pope's vanities to try to give the impression that his metrical skill was even more precocious than it was; and we cannot accept his published versions of Statius and Ovid as evidence of his proficiency at the age of fifteen or sixteen, the date, according to his own assertion, of their composition, though they were not published for several years afterward. But it is ascertained matter of fact that, by the time he was sixteen, his skill in verse was such as to astonish veteran critics like Wycherley and Walsh, and that his verses were handed about in manuscript, and admired by men who were then in the foremost walks of letters. Pope spent eight or nine years in this arduous and enthusiastic discipline, reading, studying, experimenting, poetry his only business and idleness his only pleasure, before any thing of his appeared in print. In these preliminary studies he seems to have guided himself by the maxim, formulated in a letter to Walsh, July 2, 1706, that "it seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest.” * His first publication was his "Pastorals."Jacob Tonson, the bookseller, had heard these pastorals highly spoken of, and he sent a polite note to Pope asking that he might have them for one of his miscellanies. They appeared accordingly in May, 1709, at the end of a volume containing contributions from Philips, Sheffield, Garth, and Rowe. We can see how Pope was induced to make his first essay in pastorals. Dryden's translation of Virgil's "Eclogues" had drawn attention to this species of composition. Walsh had written a critical preface to * "True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." THE AIMS OF THE PASTORAL POET 27 Dryden's translation, in which he laid down the rules of pastoral poetry, and severely trounced M. Fontenelle, a fashionable French writer of pastorals, for his violation of the rules. This artificial species of poetry has been almost universally ridiculed as tedious and insipid from the time of Pope to the present day. It is not worth while to waste much time over it; but as it is often condemned hastily, and in ignorance of what it proposed to attempt, it is only justice to Pope, and it may be of some interest, to consider what were the aims of the pastoral poet as conceived by Pope and Walsh. They did not pretend to imitate any incidents in the lives of actual shepherds. Theocritus did this, and Allan Ramsay. But the shepherds of Pope and Walsh were avowedly the shepherds of the golden age, when the best of men were employed in shepherding-men, as Walsh says, "of learning and good breeding." These shepherds were assumed to be men of the most delicate and gentle feelings, living a life of simplicity and calm tranquillity, never agitated by harsh and violent passions. Any tender feeling that ruffled their lives was softened and subdued by the steady repose and quiet, placid beauty of their surroundings, and the mute sympathy of nature with their woes. Realize the still and tranquil beauty of this ancient pastoral world, and you will admit that it was a fine conception. The poets of this world did not trouble themselves to argue that such a world ever really existed; they admitted that it never existed except as a beautiful fiction. Such was the conception of this species of poetry held by a school of critics among whom Pope had personal friends. You will find it set forth at length in Walsh's preface to Dryden's translation of Virgil, in which minute rules are deduced for bringing details into harmony with this general design. Now, this being the aim of the ideal pastoral, to give lyric expression to the joys and the sorrows, the |