The Book of Lost Books (26 page)

With his universal language,
Universal Encyclopedia,
and occasional recourse to the infallible machines, Leibniz believed that humanity might evolve to the extent that “correct reasoning, given time for thought, will be no more praiseworthy than calculating large numbers without any error.”

Leibniz lived on the cusp when the dream that everything might be known was fading; yet the thought that everything might be amicably and incontrovertibly resolved still seemed feasible. His optimism, caricatured as the willful negligence of Dr. Pangloss, now seems almost touching.

Alexander Pope

{1688–1744}

ALEXANDER POPE DIED in 1682, at the age of three. His mother had died in childbirth and his father, unable or unwilling to take on a nurse, had sent him to stay with his late wife's sister in Pangbourne, Berkshire, safely away—or so he surmised—from the pestilential and unwholesome air of London. His father remarried and, in 1688, named his new son after the lost half-brother. It was a common enough practice (indeed, Pope Senior was named Alexander as well). Although it would be rash to impute any lingering psychological shadow on the young poet from his literal and nominal predecessor, it would be fair to say that his birth was attended with a little more unspoken hopefulness than was usually the case.

The child seemed to be of a hale and sound constitution. The earliest portrait, painted when he was seven, shows a suave, poised boy. He had a “sweetness of disposition” and a voice so melodious he was nicknamed “the Little Nightingale.” He was, admittedly, slightly frail, but, one supposes, his parents may have been particularly sensitive to any signs of illness.

Even during these tender years, the young Alexander Pope displayed an astonishing felicity in composing verses, a remarkable fluency he described in retrospect, saying, “I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”

Then the beautiful, precocious child hit puberty.

The best contemporary diagnosis is that Pope suffered from Pott's disease, a tubercular infection of the bones. It may have been transmitted through his wet nurse's milk, or through unpasteurized cow's milk (cows appear to have had a malign effect on the young Pope's health in general: at the dangerous age of three, his elder half-sister recollected, he had been trampled by a wild cow).

The effect, as he began to grow, was immediate. His spine twisted like a question mark, his legs were bandied like a pair of brackets. The pain of his grinding vertebrae contorted his features into an ampersand. He was stunted, never to grow much higher than four and a half feet, constantly afflicted with cramps and seizures. As his literary star rose, his detractors took every opportunity to belittle him further: he was a hunch-backed toad, a poisonous spider, an incontinent ape.

The “mildness of mind” was gone. Wrung out by his own body, exacerbated by the unashamed cruelty of his invidious opponents, Pope became the stiletto-sharp satirist of his age. The child that had lisped quickly learned to hiss.

Any writer as formidably gifted as Pope will probably produce a great deal of juvenilia; the truly great will have the sense to destroy it. According to a later letter, Pope was expelled from Twyford School after only a year, on account of a satire he had written on one of the teachers. Alongside this propensity for mischievous, or even malicious, lampooning, the young Pope showed a deep fascination with the works of Homer. He recast scenes from
The Iliad
as a play, co-opting his schoolfellows and the master's gardener to play roles.

By the age of fourteen, Pope's poetic enthusiasm was in full flood. Samuel Johnson's
Life of Pope
records that he had already written panegyrics on all the crowned heads of Europe, as well as a comedy, a tragedy, and an epic poem.

“Of the comedy there is no account,” says Johnson.

The tragedy was based on the life of St. Genevieve. The more famous saint who bears that name, St. Genevieve of Paris, whose prayers saved the city from Attila the Hun, hardly seems a model for that kind of play: indeed, she died at the ripe old age of ninety-five, much loved and already venerated. A more likely candidate is St. Genevieve of Brabant, who was accused of infidelity by her husband and executed. Unbeknownst to him, she in fact escaped to the forest, where, with the assistance of a kindly disposed deer, she lived on fruits and shoots. The couple were reconciled just in time to die, thus offering a suitably tear-jerking tragic denouement. Why she was canonized as a saint is much less clear.

The epic was called
Alcander.
Pope, so he says, “endeavoured . . . to collect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece. There was Milton's style in one part and Cowley's in another, here the style of Spenser imitated and there Statius, here Homer and Virgil, and there Ovid and Claudius.”

The name “Alcander” crops up occasionally in Greek mythology. Homer and Ovid give the name to a Lycian whom Odysseus kills at Troy, and Virgil adopts the name for one of Aeneas' companions: again, he is slain in battle, but this time by Turnus. If Pope had read the
Metamorphoses
of Antoninus Liberalis as well as Ovid's better-known poem of that name, he would have known that Alcander was also a seer from Molossus, turned into a bird by Zeus, who was upset that some bandits had torched the prophet's house. None of these seems particularly rich material for a budding epic writer.

Pope may have come across the name in a historical text, Plutarch's
Life of Lycurgus.
Lycurgus, the Spartan founder of democracy, was assaulted by a gang of aristocratic thugs, one of whom was called Alcander. Alcander, who blinded Lycurgus in one eye during the attack, was also the only assailant brought to account for it. Rather than demanding retribution, the noble and ascetic Lycurgus took on the wayward youth as a companion and taught him the meaning of virtue, and Alcander became one of his strongest supporters.

This tale seems to fit with Pope's description of one of the “incidents” in
Alcander,
a side-plot about a Scythian prince who thought even a pillow made of snow was excessively luxurious. On the other hand, Pope may have just liked the name and invented his own story, as fourteen-year-olds are wont to do.

Johnson informs us that
Alcander
was burned at the suggestion of Francis Atterbury, the dean of Westminster and bishop of Rochester, who was later arrested and exiled for treason in supporting the deposed Stuart monarchy. Pope had become close to Atterbury sometime before 1718. That Atterbury had read
Alcander
at all means that Pope had kept the manuscript for sixteen years after its creation. This retention argues that its author had some attachment to the work greater than his later wry recollection might otherwise suggest.

Atterbury's negative advice is typically regarded as an aesthetic verdict, but in the fractious theater of eighteenth-century politics, this may be an underestimation. Although it is highly improbable that
Alcander
was openly seditious, the concentration of plot and character on an earlier, less corrupted version of government could be read as a rebuke, at the very least, to the ruling administration. Pope was already well known for his friendship with Bolingbroke, who had fled to the Continent to support the Stuart pretender James III, and who had been vocal about the dishonest electioneering tactics of the Walpole government.
Alcander
might have furnished his detractors with copious examples of Pope's party loyalties, dangerous political principles, and juvenile verse, had the manuscript become publicly available.

The idea of creating the Great English Epic was to haunt Pope's career. Five years later, age nineteen, he planned another long poem, on the immediately inspiring topic of Gaius Gracchus' agrarian reforms. Timoleon, the Corinthian prince who assassinated his brother rather than let him turn the state into a tyranny, was another potential subject, which withered to a passing mention in his poem
The Temple of Fame.

The Dunciad
(1728, expanded 1729 and revised 1742) united Pope's neoclassical urge to write an epic with his talent for excoriation. He bolstered the authority of his mock-epic by referring to Homer's lost comedy the
Margites
and by comparing his position to that of the satyr play which came after the classical dramatic trilogy. After the epic triumvirate of Homer's
Iliad,
Virgil's
Aeneid,
and Milton's
Paradise Lost:
the sneering farce of Pope's
Dunciad.
Despite his ingenious attempts to intellectually justify the mammoth satire, and to place it in a tradition of epic poetry, Pope seems to have had qualms about it. We have Jonathan Swift to thank that
The Dunciad
exists: he snatched the first draft from the fire and persuaded Pope to continue.

Instead of the heroic protagonists of Homer and Virgil, Pope's epic is peopled by every hack, scribbler, poetaster, and publisher that ever attacked him. It was not Troy, but Grub Street that would burn. Pope had assiduously kept copies of all the pamphlets and broadsheets that mocked him, the endless vituperative polemics by Cibber and Theobald;
The Dunciad
would become a mausoleum in which Pope would inter his enemies. The perfectly modulated rhyming couplets belie the furious seething of this apocalyptic vision.

The apotheosis of Dullness at the end of book IV describes a universe where every book is a lost book: the utter extinction of all culture.

She comes! She comes! The sable throne behold
Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!
Before her, fancy's gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying rainbows die away . . .
Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,
Art after art goes out, and all is night . . .
Lo! Thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,
And universal darkness buries all.

The Dunciad
was as much a personal revenge against innumerable acts of ad hominem animus as it was a global castigation of his contemporary culture, which Pope believed could no longer either inspire or appreciate the epic.

And yet, despite his pessimism, illness, and thwarted political hopes, at the end of his life Pope once again attempted an epic. It would form part of his Opus Magnum, along with his philosophical
Essay on Man
and the studies of character he had been assembling as moral and satirical epistles. The epic would recast his ideas about personal and state morality as a narrative. In 1738, Pope told the poet and editor Joseph Spence that it would be “wholly on civil and ecclesiastical government.” It was to be called
Brutus.

Among his manuscripts, Pope left detailed notes on the substance of the poem. Set sixty-six years after the fall of Troy, the epic's eponymous hero was either the grandson or great-grandson of Aeneas. “Benevolence ye first Principle & Predominant in Brutus,” he wrote. “Then a strong Desire to redeem ye Remains of his Countrymen (ye descendts fr
Troy) now captives in Greece: & to establish their freedom and felicity in a Just Form of Governmt.”

The Trojans, vanquished in Homer's
Iliad
and refugees in Virgil's
Aeneid,
were to become the moral victors of Pope's epic. The enslaved Trojans, scattered through Greece and Italy, would also have valuable experience of the different forms of government. Dismayed that there was nowhere in the known world that had implemented his utopian vision, Brutus consults an Egyptian oracle. He is told that there is a “Savage people yet uncorrupted in their manners, and only wanting Arts and Government, worthy to be made happy,” and that their land lies in the Atlantic. This place, “mark'd out by some circumstances to be Britain,” has “a climate equally free from ye Effeminacy & Softness of ye Southern Clymes & ye Ferocity & Savageness of ye North.”

Book I of the poem opens with Brutus and his entourage approaching the Straits of Calpe (modern Gibraltar, and known as the Pillars of Hercules). In a scene derived from the debate of the fallen angels in Milton's
Paradise Lost,
there is dissension among his Trojan followers about how to proceed. Brutus knows he must cross through the Pillars into the Unknown Ocean; however, some of his lieutenants demur, saying that not even the divine Hercules had dared go so far. Brutus counters their charges of presumption, saying that superior Virtue means they “w
^d
be as much as Gods.” Leaving any cowards behind, he presses onward. His choice is sanctioned by the appearance in a dream of Hercules, who recounts his own decision to follow the hard road of Virtue rather than the easy path to Vice.