Alexander Pope hasn’t been a popular poet for decades now. In the early 1980s, as part of the English course at Oxford University, you had to spend a term reading one or two canonic poets – Chaucer, Langland, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats and Eliot. (It was a source of disquiet, even in 1984 in Oxford, that no woman was included in the list). Most people did Wordsworth or Milton. I was in a tiny minority, having opted to spend eight weeks studying Pope, and was assigned to one of the stars of the faculty. Roger Lonsdale had just published his New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse. It was that rare thing, an anthology that turned the study of an entire century’s literary output on its head. Roger had followed the simple policy of simply reading every piece of poetry published in Britain in the eighteenth century, and deciding what was good or not. Thirty years on, it remains an astounding feat of navigation and human and literary interest. Before the anthology, it was still easy to think of Pope and his friends as at the centre of the literary universe, surrounded by a few interesting minor writers, and then a vast mob of talentless scribblers. Did he still exist at the centre, or was that his particular triumph of marketing, to sell his writing and the standards of judgment by which all literature should be improved at the same time?
For eight weeks, I climbed the stairs in Balliol College, and we talked about one piece of Pope’s career after another. Pope is not, on the surface, a particularly varied writer. Almost all his work is in the same metrical form: rhyming couplets in iambic pentameters. Most of it is in the same genre: formal satire. But going through his work inch by inch, you don’t feel yourself limited by the constraints; the possibilities are transformative, and the way he looks at the world is immensely generous. We kept talking, I remember, about the rival poets and the poor victims of The Dunciad, Pope’s epic assault on the bad writers of the day. (You can’t study Pope as a special author at Oxford these days, but you can, interestingly, study one of the victims of The Dunciad, Eliza Haywood). Did he remain at the centre of things? He put himself there, and defined what “the centre” was, but he went on seeming bigger than almost anyone else. Reading Pope like this was one of the most important experiences of my life.
Pope’s version of himself, and how he wanted to be seen, is currently being revived in an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, originating in Yale, of his works and the portrait bust, especially those by the French émigré sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac. Can it really be done any more? Or is the 18th century entirely beyond our appreciation?
Someone told me recently that there are currently more English literature PhDs being written on Angela Carter than on the whole of the 18th century. We seem to have lost interest in the age in which Pope lived, and, specifically, in Pope himself. Why is this? Perhaps we are horrified by how insulting Pope can be. Sometimes the insult is towards a much less successful writer, such as poor Leonard Welsted – “Flow, Welsted, flow! Like thine inspirer, Beer/Tho’ stale, not ripe, tho’ thin, yet never clear”. Sometimes it is towards a fashionable figure, such as Lord Hervey – “This painted child of dirt, who stinks and stings”. Sometimes, bravely, it is towards someone with power, such as George II himself in the devastating “Epistle to Augustus” or in The Dunciad, where “Dunce the Second rules like Dunce the First”. A writer should be allowed “his plaything of a Pen”, Pope says, but should he really be allowed to be so openly rude about people? In an age where Twitter erupts in outrage when a critic calls on his stock of euphemism to call a singer fat, Pope may sometimes seem unacceptable.
There is, too, the intricacy of his best jokes, which need a good deal of explaining. The exquisite machinery of The Rape of the Lock only works if you know that epic verse conventionally works in different worlds – the earthly and the divine – and there are appropriate and inappropriate ways of talking about the everyday world. The Dunciad rests on another piece of epic convention. In many epics, such as The Aeneid, the hero travels from east to west, bringing heroic values with him. In The Dunciad, another journey is undertaken in the same direction, bringing the values of the City (drunkenness, filth, money‑ grubbing, semi-literacy) westwards to the court in Westminster where, under George II, they seem thoroughly at home.
Pope’s relationship to the classical heritage was at the heart of what he thought he had achieved, and also the reason we find him so difficult. The project that made him independent and wealthy was a translation of Homer. Some of his greatest and most entertaining poems are offputtingly published as “Imitations of Horace” – the rumbustious “Epistle to Augustus” and the outrageously funny “Sober Advice from Horace” appear here. Our dislike of Pope’s satire derives, I think, from a loss of a sense of classical form. For us, satire is merely being rude about people, in the manner of Private Eye or Spitting Image. For Pope, satire meant not only denigrating some values, but suggesting what other values might stand in their place: George II is an idiot, but a good monarch would support the arts and literature as the emperor Augustus did.
The key to Pope’s art is the ideal of balance, and it is a mistake to isolate one moment without seeing how he brings a counterelement into play. The metrical form lends itself to this, with its characteristic antitheses. In a single couplet, multiple alternatives may be floated. From The Rape of the Lock:
Oh! If to dance all night, and dress all day
Charm’d the smallpox, or chased old age away
The antitheses are between the lines (festivities and their inevitable consequences), between the half-lines (night/day, charm’d/chased) and within the half-lines (to dance, rather than sleep at night, charm and smallpox, old age and the athletic chase). On a larger scale, Pope often uses an alternative way of thinking to create what later thinkers would call an epiphany. In the great “Epistle to Burlington”, a monstrously lavish and uncomfortable country estate is described in all its massive symmetry. A waste of money, you might think, before Pope brings in an early version of the “trickle-down” theory of economics – “What his hard heart denies/His charitable vanity supplies”. What follows, balancing the arid marble wastes of Timon’s extravagant villa, is a rapturous glimpse of future possibilities.
Another age shall see the golden ear
Imbrown the slope, and nod on the parterre,
Deep harvests bury all his pride has plann’d
And laughing Ceres reassume the land.
Pope’s ideals of balance were, at root, classical, but a central part of his endeavour could not be more modern. We ought to be reminded that, in reality, he ought to be counted with those, such as the Dunces, who were rooted in the City and brought tough commercial realities to the fashionable world. Pope grew up in Lombard Street. He was pretty hardheaded, and showed a lot of ingenuity in raising money and selling himself. At the centre of his endeavour was something new: to sell the author as a private individual to a wide public. The Waddesdon Manor exhibition focuses on this enterprise in the field of statuary.
Roubiliac had made his reputation with a magnificent statue of the composer Handel for the fashionable Vauxhall Gardens (hence seen by everyone in London). It was both informal and classical, showing a remarkably lifelike Handel in modern dress, holding a lyre. Roubiliac continued to make portrait busts, and plays an important role in what was fast becoming an elaborate iconography around Pope. Pope was repeatedly painted, by Jonathan Richardson and other portraitists – there are more than 60 distinct portraits from his lifetime – but the busts by Roubiliac are particularly interesting. It is worth pointing out that Pope had many dealings with visual artists, but not with great visual satirists; Hogarth’s only dealings with poets of his time were in the form of vicious attacks, such as his late assaults on Charles Churchill. Roubiliac’s busts are not only how Pope wanted to be seen, but, given that they were in marble, how he wanted to be seen for posterity.
The serious effects of a childhood infection meant that Pope was only 1.4m (4ft 6in) tall, hunchbacked and in constant pain. He was unable to dress or undress himself, and, at the end of his life, could only stand upright with the aid of a rigid set of stays. The portrait iconography minimises this, giving little idea of his height or his hunchback, yet conveys a sense of the physical pain he constantly endured. Joshua Reynolds, a generation later, said that “Roubiliac … reported that his countenance was that of a person who had been much afflicted with headache, and he should have known the fact from the contracted appearance of the skin between his eyebrows.”
The self-presentation was run by Pope himself, who, in a long autobiographical poem, referred to “this long disease, my life”. There are beautiful little poems that seem to invite the reader into his most private affections. Pope went to considerable lengths, in the 1730s, to have his correspondence published without appearing to be doing it himself. He actually hired an actor at one point to pretend to have letters to sell to a villainous bookseller.
Pope’s image, through all of this, was classical, reasonable, balanced; we are probably supposed to bear his suffering in mind when we read An Essay on Man‘s otherwise fatuous proposition: “Whatever is, is right.” But his sense of balance unforgettably brings into his world a great muddle of things, too. What keeps him vital, and ought in time to restore him to our sense of things, is not just the purity of line, but the cords of pain across his marble face; the immense riot that brings the “Sober Advice from Horace” to a close; the exquisitely phrased description of the poets’ competition, diving into shit in The Dunciad; the wildness in the invisible worlds of the sprites and gnomes in The Rape of the Lock, “the Light Militia of the lower sky”; and the beautiful image, like a foreshadowing of Dickens’s London of chaos and waste, of the papers fluttering on the rails of Bedlam and Soho that ends the Augustus epistle.
It has often been remarked that the most poetically compelling passages of The Dunciad are those that enter into the Dunces’ imaginative world of incompetence and incongruity, crawling with rhyming maggots, giving the Arctic fruits and the desert fruitful showers. How Pope wanted us to see him is an interesting matter. At a time that has largely stopped seeing him at all, the sight of this face in pain might lead us back to the wildness never far from this great writer.
• Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac and the Portrait Bust is at Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, until 26 October.
