A Gulliver Among Lilliputians

ALEXANDER POPE by Peter Quennell. 278 pages. Stein and Day. $7.95.

Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipp'd me in ink, my parents' or my own?

Alexander Pope left his own question unanswered, but a second look at his heroic couplet suggests that the Age of Reason, of which Pope was the prime English poetic voice, was not as innocent of depth psychology as a post-Freudian age might complacently assume. Pope's sin (in modern usage, his neurosis or maladjustment) is explored with devoted detachment by Peter Quennell in the first of a promised two-volume work on the little cripple whose verses fixed a thousand human insects in Formalin.

Quennell's powers were triumphantly evident in his two-volume study of Byron, the only English poet who could rival Pope as a satirist. In Alexander Pope, Quennell has found another genius for a subject, though with him the difficulties are greater. The poet who wrote "the proper study of mankind is man" made no great study of himself, whereas Byron was his own biographer and the actor-manager of his own theater in every line he wrote. The clues to Pope's nature are to be found in the quality of his age, with its political-theological drama. Quennell superbly evokes this quality in a biography that spans Pope's first 40 years, ending in 1728 with the appearance of The Dunciad. The bitter personal feuds spawned by that savage satire and the illness-bedeviled years before Pope died at 56 will be the subject of the second volume.

Venomous Toad. Pope lived in a violent age. The celebrated Augustan calm was genuine marble, but it was a pavement laid over cellars where every violence flourished. Voltaire was cudgeled for his sharp tongue. Dr. Johnson was threatened by an offended duelist. Pope himself had seen his coreligionists, the Roman Catholic gentlemen of northern England, led, bound by halters, through the violent Protestant mobs of London. Such circumstances must give an edge of sincerity to satire. Pope's verses, light as dragonflies yet possessed of tempered strength, were written under the shadow of heavy penalties.

On many counts, this Pope was fallible. He was often a deplorable character, a petulant, scheming, vainglorious seeker of fame with the divine arrogance of one who declares that "he who is not with me is against me." He was also a collector of injustices; anyone who offended him but once was sure to feel the whiplash of his five-foot line. Those were the days before words went soggy in a Sargasso Sea of print. Men wielded words as deadly weapons, names had magical significance, and a barbed line could not be lightly shaken off by the hooked fish.

When Pope jibed at an ailing enemy as "Sporus, that mere White curd of ass's milk," he was writing with a brutal bitterness that sprang from his own wretched health. He was a gay and high-spirited youth to his twelfth year, when he contracted Pott's Disease (tuberculosis of the spine) from infected milk. The affliction left him partly crippled and progressively deformed. It also arrested his growth; Pope never exceeded 4 ft. 6 in. (a "little Aesopic sort of an animal," a "venomous . . . hunchbacked toad," in the words of his tough contemporaries). Yet in the world of words of the Augustan Age, he was a Gulliver among Lilliputians.

Pope was a child of his times who believed in a divine order, which he frequently described as nature. In An Essay On Man he wrote: "All nature is but art, unknown to thee;/ All chance, direction, which thou canst not see." It was upon a generally held conception of divine and human order that Pope built his strict prosody.

Pope's genius is finally inexplicable. Quennell contents himself with saying that though the poet himself thought that he was possessed by a high moral passion, his ferocious energies sprang from psychological sources that were "dark and turbid" (even Freud conceded that genius contained mysteries inca pable of exploration). Pope's own great predecessor and model John Dryden (at the age of twelve, Pope visited Will's Coffee House to gaze at him) summed the matter up: "Great wits are sure to madness near allied/And thin partitions do their bounds divide." Pope was only 14 when an acquaintance forecast that he "will either be a madman or make a very great poet." He lived in what his own age called "a phrenzy."

The Age of Reason gave birth to England's two greatest satirists: Jonathan Swift in prose and Alexander Pope in poetry. On Quennell's showing, it is clear that Pope, who once spoke of "that long disease, my life," shared in some measure Swift's notorious horror of life itself. In Swift's case, this amounted to a pathological detestation of the bodily functions intense enough to disable the Dean from physical expression of the love he felt for women. In Pope's case, it did not prevent him from trying to play the rake at large in London, though with scant success. Quennell notes that his sexual adventures were "of a mercenary and transient kind," and that his platonic pursuit of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the one real love of his life, ended unhappily.

Metrical Carnage. Hurled from Pope's mouth, words were sticks and stones, and they hurt. In An Essay on Criticism, Pope skewered critics as those in whom "a little learning is a dangerous thing," and cautioned them in yet another unforgettable line: "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." In The Rape of the Lock, he betrayed a loving scorn of women--and their suitors, himself included:

"If to her share some female errors fall/ Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all." In the same work, he railed against man's injustice in a deceptively quiet couplet: "The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,/And wretches hang that jurymen may dine."

As a result of the metrical carnage he wrought in The Dunciad, it became the poet's habit never to venture out on one of his solitary walks without a brace of loaded pistols in his coat and the company of his Great Dane, Bounce. Though he never had occasion to fire the weapons in anger, and Bounce never got to take a piece out of an embittered literary footpad, Pope's anxiety was far from groundless.

The superb, ceremonious formality of Pope's verse is strange to modern ears. In Tocqueville's prophetic words: "Taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, regularity, science and art; its form will on the contrary ordinarily be slighted, sometimes despised, [and] the object of authors will be to astonish rather than please, and to stir the passions rather than charm the taste."

Only an eccentric poet like Roy Campbell, the clerical reactionary, has attempted satire in formal rhymed Popian couplets, and perhaps only W. H. Auden has succeeded in didactic eloquence within a variety of formal, traditional stanzas. Doubtless, the exact antipode of Pope's Augustan order would be the artless, extemporaneous effusions that issue from the flower children of the modern coffee house--quite a different breed from an 18th century coffee house. "A thousand years may elapse," Dr. Johnson said, "before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope." With a quarter-millennium nearly gone, a reading of Quennell's Pope, and of Pope himself, indicates that that forecast remains remarkably sturdy.

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