The Common Pursuit (13 page)

A great writer—yes; that account still imposes itself as fitting though his greatness is no matter of moral grandeur or huma centrality; our sense of it is merely a sense of great force. And th force, as we feel it, is conditioned by frustration and constriction the channels of life have been blocked and perverted. That w should be so often invitdd to regard him as a moralist and a idealist would seem to be mainly a witness to the power of vanit] and the part that vanity can play in literary appreciation: saei indignatio is an indulgence that solicits us all, and the use of litei ature by readers and critics for the projection of nobly sufferin selves is familiar. No doubt, too, it is pleasant to believe that ur usual capacity for egotistic animus means unusual distinction c intellect; but, as we have seen, there is no reason to lay stress o intellect in Swift. His work does indeed exhibit an extraordinai play of mind; but it is not great intellectual force that is exhibite in his indifference to the problems raised—in, for instance, tt Voyage to the Houyhnhnms —by his use of the concept, or the wor

'Nature*. It is not merely that he had an Augustan contempt for metaphysics; he shared the shallowest complacencies of Augustan common sense: his irony might destroy these, but there is no conscious criticism.

He was, in various ways, curiously unaware—the reverse of clairvoyant. He is distinguished by the intensity of his feelings, not by insight into them, and he certainly does not impress us as a mind in possession of its experience.

We shall not find Swift remarkable for intelligence if we think ofBlake.

'THE DUNCIAD'

YES, one concedes grudgingly, overcoming the inevitable re* vulsion, as one turns the pages of this new edition (The 'Twickenham'), in which the poem trickles thinly through a desert of apparatus, to disappear time and again from sight—yes, there has to be a Dunciad annotated, garnished and be-prosed in this way. A very large proportion of the apparatus, after all, comes down from the eighteenth century with die poem, and the whole, though to read it all through will be worth no one's while, is enlightening documentation of the age that produced Pope and of which Pope made poetry. Yet, as the editor in his Introduction insists—'It has never sufficiently been recognized that in the Dunciad one of the greatest artists in English poetry found the perfect material for his art', he did make poetry, and it is the poetry that matters; so that one has to follow up one's concession with the remark that, though this new monument of scholarship will have to go into all the libraries for reference, it is not the edition in which the Dunciad should be read. The material is one thing, the poetry another. In fact, the sufficient recognition won't come except in company with the recognition that notes are not necessary: the poetry doesn't depend upon them in any essential respect.

'The art', says Professor Sutherland, * which Pope lavished upon this poem has too often been obscured by an unnecessary concern for his victims'. Yes; and more generally, by an unnecessary concern with his victims—a concern of a kind that notes, especially obtrusive ones, inevitably encourage. The 'fading of its personalities', remarked by Professor Sutherland as something that appreciation of the Dunciad suffers from, is really an advantage, and one we ought not to refuse. For eighteenth-century readers it must have been hard not to start away continually from the poetry to thinking about the particular historical victim and the grounds of Pope's animus against him; for modern readers it should be much easier to appreciate the poetry as poetry—to realize that Pope has created something the essential interest of

which, lies within itself, in what it is. Yet where satire is concerned there appear to be peculiar difficulties in the way of recognizing the nature of art and of the approach to it, as Professor Sutherland bears inadvertent witness in the last sentence of his Introduction:

the criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been far too much concerned with the moral issues raised by Pope's satire, and too little interested in its purely aesthetic values.

'Aesthetic* is a term the literary critic would do well to deny himself. Opposed to 'moral', as it is in this sentence, it certainly doesn't generate light. Moral values enter inevitably into the appreciation of the Dunciad, if it is judged to be a considerable work; the problem is to bring them in with due relevance, and the bringing of them in is the appreciation of Pope's art. How are malice, resentment, spite, contempt, and the other negative attitudes and feelings that we can't doubt to have played a large part in the genesis of his poetry, turned in that poetry into something that affects us as being so very different ?

We don't feel die personalities as personal. More than that, we don't, for the most part, even in places where animus is very apparent, feel the total effect to be negative, expressing a hostile and destructive will. The force of this judgment comes out when we look by way of comparison at Swift. The final impression that Swift, in any representative place, leaves us with is one of having been exposed to an intense, unremitting and endlessly resourceful play of contempt, disgust, hatred and the will to spoil and destroy. The contrast brings home to us the sense in which Pope, in practising his art of verse, is engaged, whatever his materials, in positive creation. It is Swift's prose I am thinking of in the first place, but the contrast is no less striking and significant when made between verse and verse. In verse, in fact, Swift is more barely and aridly negative (the air is 'thoroughly small and dry'), and more summarily destructive, than in prose; he never achieves anything approaching the complexity characteristic of the Digression Concerning the Use of Madness in a Commonwealth. In the following we have the richest, in the way of organization, that his verse yields:

When Celia in her glory shews,

If Strephon would but stop his nose,

(Who now so impiously blasphemes

Her ointments, daubs, and paints, and creams,

Her washes, slops, and every clout,

With which he makes so foul a rout;)

He soon would learn to think like me,

And bless his ravish'd sight to see

Such order from confusion sprung,

Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.

Effects like that of the closing couplets are not common in Swift's verse, but the sourly nagging meanness, the sawing meagreness, of the movement in general is representative. No one, of course, would carry out a solemn comparison of Swift and Pope as poets. My point is simply, by the contrast with Swift, who is not positively an Augustan—though he is nothing else positive —to bring out what is meant by saying that Pope, in practising his art of verse, is being an Augustan of a most positive kind. Against any of Swift's verse (if you want decasyllabics take the close of A City Shower) set this:

This labour past, by Bridewell all descend,

(As morning-pray'r and flagellation end)

To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams

Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,

The King of Dykes! than whom, no sluice of mud

With deeper sable blots the silver flood.

It is not enough to talk in the usual way (I have just seen a Sunday review that quotes the passage, which I had already marked) about the beauty of that last couplet. That beauty is inseparable from the whole habit of the versification. And in saying this one recognizes that Versification' here involves more than the term is generally felt to convey. When Pope is preoccupied with the metrical structure, the weight, and die pattern of his couplets, he is bringing to bear on his 'materials' habits of thought and feeling, and habits of ordering thought and feeling. The habits are those of a great and ardent representative of Augustan civilization. The result is that even when he is closest to Swift he remains very un-Swiftian in effect: what we note at once as the charac-

terisric movement (no simple metrical matter, of course) makes a radical difference:

Like the vile straw that's blown about the streets The needy Poet sticks to all he meets, Coach'd, carted, trod upon, now loose, now fast, In the Dog's tail his progress ends at last.

The part of Augustan civilization in Pope's creative triumph is peculiarly apparent in the Fourth Book of the Dunciad. The preeminence of this book doesn't seem to be at all generally recognized. There is no sign, for instance, that the present editor recognizes it any more than Leslie Stephen did, writing his 'English Men of Letters' Pope before 1880. There can, then, be no harm in reiterating that the Fourth Book stands, not only (so much later in date as it is) apart from the other books, but much above them: it is a self-sufficient poem. The opening has an obvious relevance to my immediate argument:

Yet, yet a moment one dim Ray of Light Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night! Of darkness visible so much be lent, As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent. Ye Pow'rs! whose Mysteries restor'd I sing, To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing, Suspend a while your Force inertly strong, Then take at once the Poet and the Song.

This astonishing poetry ought to be famous and current for the unique thing it is. Consider how trumphandy it enlists Milton into an Augustan sublime. Faced with this passage as a detached fragment, and forgetting (if that can be granted as credible) where one had read it, what would one make of it ? It could have been written, one would have to conclude, only by Pope, but one would hardly guess that it belonged to a satire. Yet within ten lines the poem breaks out into a most lively play of imaginative wit, overtly satirical, and the transition is irresistibly sure:

Now flam'd the Dog-star's unpropitious ray, Smote ev'ry Brain, and wither d ev'ry Bay; Sick was the Sun, the Owl forsook his bow'r, The moon-struck Prophet felt the madding hour:

Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light, Of dull and venal a new World to mold, And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold.

She mounts the Throne: her head a Cloud conceal'd, In broad Effulgence all below reveaTd, ('Tis thus aspiring Dullness ever shines) Soft on her lap her Laureat son reclines.

Beneath her foot-stool, Science groans in Chains, And Wit dreads Exile, Penalties and Pains. There foam'd rebellious Logic, gagg'd and bound, There, stript, fair Rhet'ric languished on the ground; His blunted Arms by Sophistry are born, And shameless Billingsgate her Robes adorn. Morality, by her false Guardians drawn, Chicane in Furs, and Casuistry in Lawn, Gasps as they straiten at each end the cord, And dies, when Dullness gives her Page the word. Mad Mathesis alone was unconfin'd, Too mad for mere material chains to bind, Now to pure Space lifts her extatic stare, Now running round the Circle, finds it square.

The key to Pope's command of the sublime, and to his mastery of transition, presents itself in the couplet:

Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light. . ..

Order* for Pope is no mere word, but a rich concept imaginatively realized: ideal Augustan civilization. It is his greatness as a poet that he can relate the polite Augustan social culture always present in Augustan idiom and movement with something more profound than a code of manners: a code adequate to being thought of as the basis and structure of a great civilization. We have him doing it in this book of the Dunciad. * Order* (associated with 'Light') imparts its grandeur to the opening, and it is the comprehensive positive from which the satire works (in ways I discuss in Revaluation, c. III). It is everywhere implicitly there, or within easy recall, and it explains the mastery of transition that goes with Pope's astonishing variety. As the antithesis of triumph-

ant Chaos it informs the prophetic vision of the close with that tremendously imaginative and moving grandeur. 1

That close, of course, with its reminders of the century of Marvell and Donne, gives us a Pope who is more than Augustan. And in so doing it serves as an admonition against leaving an oversimplifying account of him uncorrected. Though it is his creative-ness—for all his satiric bent, he is an essentially creative spirit—that puts Pope in so different a relation to Augustan culture from Swift's, his creativeness is not merely a matter of his being able to realize an ideal Augustan order. The contrast with Swift comes out in another way. The respect in which the two writers (who were closely associated in the brewing of the Dundad) have most affinity is represented by the characteristic piece of Swift's prose which I quote at the foot of p. 79. Nowhere does the habit of mind and expression illustrated here come nearer, in Swift, to producing an effect in which the satisfaction of the creative impulse plainly predominates. Very often the negative and destructive functions of the play of images and analogies are much more insistent: the strangeness—'the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together*—is intensely malevolent, and the surprise is brutally shocking. How essentially negative, in this sense, the passage just quoted is comes out when we set it by any of Pope's in which his kindred habit asserts itself. Take this, for instance:

And now had Fame's posterior Trumpet blown, And all the Nations summon'd to the Throne. The young, the old, who feel her inward sway, One instinct seizes, and transports away. None need a guide, by sure Attraction led, And strong impulsive gravity of Head:

1 Cf. Leslie Stephen (Pope, p. 132): 'There are some passages marked by Pope's usual dexterity, but the whole is awkwardly constructed, and has no very intelligible connexion with the first part. It was highly admired at the time, and, amongst others, by Gray. He specially praises a passage which has often been quoted as representing Pope*s highest achievement in his arc At the conclusion the goddess Dulness yawns, and a blight falls upon art, science and philosophy. I quote the lines, which Pope himself could not repeat without emotion, and which have received the highest eulogies from Johnson and Thackeray.'

None want a place, for all their Centre found, Hung to die Goddess, and coher'd around. Not closer, orb in orb, conglob'd are seen The buzzing Bees about their dusky Queen.