POPE, LORD BYRON, AND MR. BOWLES1 The London Magazine.] [June 1821. THIS is a very proper letter for a lord to write to his bookseller, and for Mr. Murray to show about among his friends, as it contains some dry rubs at Mr. Bowles, and some good hits at Mr. Southey and his 'invariable principles.' There is some good bating, and some good writing in it, some coarse jests, and some dogmatical assertions; but that it is by any means a settler of the question, is what we are in all due form inclined to doubt. His Lordship, as a poet, is a little headstrong and self-willed, a spoiled child of nature and fortune: his philosophy and criticism have a tincture of the same spirit: he doles out his opinions with a great deal of frankness and spleen, saying, 'this I like, that I loathe;' but he does not trouble himself, or the reader, with his reasons, any more than he accounts to his servants for the directions he gives them. This might seem too great a compliment in his Lordship to the public.

All this pribble-prabble about Pope, and Milton, and Shakspeare, and what foreigners say of us, and the Venus, and Antinõus, and the Acropolis, and the Grand Canal at Venice, and the Turkish fleet, and Falconer's Shipwreck, and ethics, and ethical poetry (with the single exception of some bold picturesque sketches in the poet's best prose-style) is what might be talked by any Bond-street lounger of them all, after a last night's debauch, in the intervals between the splashings of the soda-water and the acid taste of the port wine rising in the mouth. It is no better than that. If his Lordship had sent it in from Long's, or the Albany, to be handed about in Albemarlestreet, in slips as he wrote it, it would have been very well. But all the way from Ravenna, cannot he contrive to send us something better than his own ill-humour and our own common-places-than the discovery that Pope was a poet, and that Cowper was none; and the old story that Canova, in forming a statue, takes a hand from one, a foot from another, and a nose from a third, and so makes out the idea of perfect beauty! (We would advise his Lordship to say less about this subject of virtù, for he knows little about it: and besides, his perceptions are at variance with his theories.) In truth, his Lordship has the worst of this controversy, though he throws out a number of pert, smart, flashy things, with the air of a man who sees company on subjects of taste, while his reverend antagonist, who is the better critic and logician of the two, goes prosing on in a tone

1 Letter to **** ****** on the Rev. W. L. Bowles's Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope. By the Right Hon. Lord Byron. Third Edition. Murray.

of obsequious pertinacity and sore pleasantry, as if he were sitting (an unwelcome guest) at his Lordship's table, and were awed, yet galled, by the cavalier assumption of patrician manners. We cannot understand these startling voluntaries, played off before the public on the ground of personal rank, nor the controversial under-song, like the drone of a bagpipe that forms a tedious accompaniment to them. As Jem Belcher, when asked if he did not feel a little awkward at facing Gamble the tall Irishman, made answer, 'An please ye, sir, when I am stript to my shirt, I am afraid of no man;'-so we would advise Mr. Bowles, in a question of naked argument, to fear no man, and to let no man bite his thumb at him. If his Lordship were to invite his brother-poet to his house, and to eke out a sour jest by the flavour of Monte-Pulciano or Frontiniac,-if in the dearth of argument he were to ply his friend's weak side with rich sauces and well seasoned hospitality, Ah! ça est bon, ah! goutez ça!' -if he were to point, in illustration of Pope's style, to the marble pillars, the virandas, the pier glasses, the classic busts, the flowering dessert, and were to exclaim, 'You see, my dear Bowles, the superiority of art over nature, the triumph of polished life over Gothic barbarism: we have here neither the ghosts nor fairies of Shakspeare, nor Milton's Heaven, nor his Hell, yet we contrive to do without them;'-it might require Parson Supple's command of countenance to smile off this uncourteous address; but the divine would not have to digest such awkward raillery on an empty stomach-he would have his quid pro quo: his Lordship would have paid for the liberty of using his privilege of peerage. But why any man should carry the role of his Lordship's chaplain out of his Lordship's house, is what we see no reason for.-Lord Byron, in the Preface to his Tragedy, complains that Horace Walpole has had hard measure dealt him by the critics, firstly, because he was a lord, and secondly, because he was a gentleman.' We do not know how the case may stand between the public and a dead nobleman: but a living lord has every reasonable allowance made him, and can do what no one else If Lord Byron chooses to make a bad joke, by means of an ill-spelt pun, it is a condescension in his Lordship:-if he puts off a set of smart assertions and school-boy instances for pithy proofs, it is not because he is not able, but because he cannot be at the pains of going deeper into the question :-if he is rude to an antagonist, it is construed into agreeable familiarity; any notice from so great a man appears like a favour :-if he tells or recommends a tale of bawdry,' he is not to be tied down by the petty rules which restrict common men:-if he publishes a work, which is thought of too equivocal a description for the delicate air of Albemarle-street, his Lordship's

can.

own name in the title-page is sufficient to back it without the formality of a book-seller's; if a wire-drawn tragedy of his is acted, in spite of his protestations against such an appeal to the taste of a vulgar audience, the storm of pitiless damnation is not let loose upon it, because it is felt that it would fall harmless on so high and proud a head; the gilded coronet serves as a conductor to carry off the lightning of popular criticism, which might blast the merely laurelled bard; the blame, the disappointment, the flat effect, is thrown upon the manager, upon the actors-upon any body but the Noble Poet! This sounding title swells the mouth of Fame, and lends her voice a thousand circling echoes: the rank of the Author, and the public charity extended to him, as he does not want it, cover a multitude of sins. What does his Lordship mean, then by this whining over the neglect of Horace Walpole, this uncalled-for sympathy with the faded lustre of patrician and gentlemanly pretensions? Has he had only half his fame? Or, does he already feel, with morbid anticipation, the retiring ebb of that over-whelming tide of popularity, which having been raised too high by adventitious circumstances, is lost in flats and shallows, as soon as their influence is withdrawn? Lord Byron has been twice as much talked of as he would have been, had he not been Lord Byron. His rank and genius have been happily placed each other's beams to share,' and both together, by their mutually reflected splendour, may be said to have melted the public coldness into the very wantonness of praise: the faults of the man (real or supposed) have only given a dramatic interest to his works. Whence, then, this repining, this ungracious cavilling, this got-up illhumour? We load his Lordship with ecstatic admiration, with unqualified ostentatious eulogies; and he throws them stifling back in our face he thanks us with cool, cutting contempt: he asks us for our voices, 'our sweet voices,' like Coriolanus; and, like Coriolanus, disdains us for the unwholesome gift. Why, then does he ask for it? If, as a lord, he holds in contempt and abhorrence the willing, delighted homage, which the public pay to the poet, let him retire and feed the pride of birth in stately solitude, or take his place among his equals but if he does not find this enough, and wants our wondering tribute of applause to satisfy his craving vanity, and make him something more than a mere vulgar lord among hundreds of other lords, why dash the cup of delicious poison, which, at his uneasy request, we tender him, to the ground, with indignant reckless hands, and tell us he scorns equally our censure or our praise? If he looks upon both as equal impertinence, he can easily escape out of the reach of both by ceasing to write; we shall in that case soon cease to think of his Lordship: but if he cannot do without our good opinion,

why affect all this coyness, coldness, and contempt? If he says he writes not to please us, but to live by us, that only alters the nature of the obligation, and he might still be civil to Mr. Murray's customers. Whether he is independent of public opinion, or dependent on it, he need not be always sending his readers to Coventry. When we come to offer him our demonstrations of good will, he should not kick us down stairs. If he persists in this humour, the distaste may in time become mutual.'

Before we proceed, there is one thing in which we must say we heartily agree with Lord Byron; and that is the ridicule with which he treats Mr. Bowles's editorial inquisition into the moral character of Pope. It is a pure piece of clerical priggism. If Pope was not free from vice, we should like to know who is. He was one of the most faultless of poets, both in his life and in his writings. We should not care to throw the first stone at him. We do not wonder at Lord Byron's laughing outright at Mr. Bowles's hysterical horrors at poor Pope's platonic peccadillos, nor at his being a little impatient of the other's attempt to make himself a make-believe character of perfection out of the most small faults' he could rake up against the reputation of an author, whom he was bound either not to edite or not to injure. But we think his Lordship turns the tables upon the divine, and gets up into the reading desk himself, without the proper canonical credentials, when he makes such a fuss as he does about didactic or moral poetry as the highest of all others, because moral truth and moral conduct are of such vast and paramount concernment in human life. But because they are such good things in themselves, does it follow that they are the better for being put into rhyme? We see no connection between ends of verse, and sayings of philosophers.' This reasoning reminds us of the critic who said, that the only poetry he knew of, good for any thing, was the four lines, beginning Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November,' for that these were really of some use in finding out the number of days in the different months of the year. The rules of arithmetic are important in many respects, but we do not know that they are the fittest subjects of poetry. Besides, Pope was not the only moral poet, nor are we sure that we understand his moral system, or that Lord Byron understands it, or that he understood it himself. Addison paraphrased the Psalms, and Blackmore sung the Creation: yet Pope has written a lampoon upon the one, and put the other in his Dunciad. Mr. Bowles has numbers of manuscript sermons by him, the morality of which, we will venture to say, is quite as pure, as orthodox, as that of the unpublished cantos of Don Juan; yet we doubt whether Mr. Murray, the Mecenas of poetry and orthodoxy, would give as

much for the one as for the other. We do not look for the flowers of fancy in moral treatises, nor for a homily in his Lordship's irregular stanzas. The Decalogue, as a practical prose composition, or as a body of moral laws and precepts, is of sufficient weight and authority; but we should not regard the putting this into heroic verse, as an effort of the highest poetry. That Sternhold and Hopkins had great qualm's' is no imputation on the pious raptures of the Hebrew bard: and we suspect his Lordship himself would object to the allegory in Spenser, as a drawback on the poetry, if it is in other respects to his Lordship's taste, which is more than we can pretend to determine. The Noble Letter-writer thus moralizes on this subject and transposes the ordinary critical canons somewhat arbitrarily and sophistically.

The depreciation of Pope is partly founded upon a false idea of the dignity of his order of poetry, to which he has partly contributed by the ingenuous boast,

"That not in Fancy's maze he wander'd long,

But stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song."

'He should have written " rose to truth." In my mind the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth. Religion does not make a part of my subject; it is something beyond human hands except Milton's and Dante's, and even Dante's powers are involved in his delineation of human passions, though in supernatural circumstances. What made Socrates the greatest of men? His moral truth-his ethics. What proved Jesus Christ the Son of God hardly less than his miracles? His moral precepts. And if ethics have made a philosopher the first of men, and have not been disdained as an adjunct to his Gospel by the Deity himself, are we to be told that ethical poetry, or didactic poetry, or by whatever name you term it, whose object is to make men better and wiser, is not the very first order of poetry; and are we to be told this too by one of the priesthood? It requires more mind, more wisdom, more power, than all the "forests" that ever were "walked" for their "description," and all the epics that ever were founded upon fields of battle. The Georgics are indisputably, and, I believe, undisputedly, even a finer poem than the Æneid. Virgil knew this: he did not order them to be burnt.

"The proper study of mankind is man."

It is the fashion of the day to lay great stress upon what they call "imagination" and "invention," the two commonest of qualities: an Irish peasant, with a little whiskey in his head, will imagine and