ABC of Reading Read online

  When they throw out and miss the matter.

  For his religion, it was fit

  To match his learning and his wit,

  ’Twas Presbyterian true blue

  For he was of that stubborn crew

  1 reference to Becanus’ theory of antiquity of Teutonic language

  2 Pythagoras hearing blacksmith

  Of errant saints whom all men grant

  To be the true church militant

  Such as do build their faith upon

  The holy text of pike and gun;

  Decide all controversy by

  Infallible artillery,

  And prove their doctrine orthodox

  By apostolic blows and knocks;

  Call fire sword and desolation

  A godly-thorough reformation

  Which always must be carried on,

  And still is doing but never done,

  As if Religion were intended

  For nothing else but being mended.

  A sect whose chief devotion lies

  In odd perverse antipathies,

  In falling out with that and this

  And finding somewhat still amiss,

  More peevish, cross and splenetic

  Than dog distract or monkey sick

  That with more care keep holy-day

  The wrong, than others the right way.1

  Compound for sins they are inclin’d to

  By damning those they have no mind to,

  Still so perverse and opposite

  As if they worshipp’d God for spite.

  1 Xmas fast ordered in 1645. Banquet to Cromwell on Ash Wednesday

  Technique of satiric burlesque already at its best, W. N.’s introductory note to the edition of 1835, remarks: ‘a mirrour in which an Englishman might have seen his face without becoming, Narcissus-like, enamoured of it’. Butler’s eight-syllable verse has been followed but never surpassed either by Pope’s ten-syllable couplet or by Byron’s strophe form in Don Juan. The fun of rhymes enjoyed by Butler, Dorset, and Rochester attains its known maximum unless it be for Tom Hood’s firecracker crackle in Kilmansegg. Gilbert and Sullivan invent nothing that isn’t already there (metrically) in a poem like Dorset’s

  To all you ladies now on land

  We men at sea indite.

  Butler was the son of a churchwarden. His best editor was the Rev. T. R. Nash, D.D. In what I take to be Nash’s note on Bk. I, l. 64, the reading of the first edition is added in italics with the remark: ‘Many vulgar, and some indecent phrases, were afterward corrected by Mr. Butler. And indeed, as Mr. Cowley observes

  ’tis just

  The author blush, there where his reader must.’

  The Rev. N. leaves us our choice.

  HUDIBRAS 1662

  Whate’er men speak by this new light,

  Still they are sure to be i’ th’ right,

  ’Tis a dark lanthorn of the spirit,

  Which none see by but those that hear it.

  * * *

  Puritan twang burlesqued. The American New England dialect and many other forms of so-called American accent, are accents of different English counties and districts. The i like a very short e ‘speret’.

  A light that falls down from on high

  For spiritual trades to cozen by,

  An ignis fatuus that bewitches

  And leads men into pools and ditches

  To make them dip themselves and sound

  For Christendom in dirty pond,

  To dive like wild-fowl for salvation

  And fish to catch regeneration.1

  1 Recent case of man selling old lottery tickets to African natives at five shillings each, assuring them they were railway tickets to heaven

  * * *

  The trouble with this kind of verse as reading matter comes from the fact that the fun of comic rhyming leads the author into repetitions and into introducing unnecessary matter. Then again, in the long run human intelligence is more interesting, and more mysterious than human stupidity, and stays new for longer.

  SAMUEL BUTLER 1612-80

  Synods are mystical bear-gardens

  Where elders, deputies, church-wardens

  And other members of the court

  Manage the Babylonish sport

  For prolocutor, scribe and bearward

  Do differ only in a mere word,

  Both are but several synagogues

  Of carnal men, and bears, and dogs,

  …..

  The one with men, the other beasts,

  The diff’rence is, the one fights with

  The tongue, the other with the teeth

  …..

  Expos’d to scribes and presbyters

  Instead of mastiff dogs and curs

  Than whom they’ve less humanity.

  …..

  What makes morality a crime,

  The most notorious of our time;

  Morality, which both the saints

  And wicked too, cry out against?

  …..

  ’Tis to restore, with more security,

  Rebellion to its ancient purity,

  And Christian liberty reduce

  To th’ elder practice of the Jews,

  For a large conscience is all one

  And signifies the same with none.

  * * *

  The unexpectedness of even a very good joke is bound to wear off on the fifth or sixth reading. The humour of Hermes’ remark to Calypso is always there, perfectly solid: ‘You a Goddess, ask of me who am a God, nevertheless I will tell you the truth.’

  The humour of Butler and of Pope wears off in just the measure that it is ‘abstract’, general statement or comment, and not particular presentation.

  The root weakness of eighteenth-century literature will I think be found in the failure to make this fundamental dissociation of ideas.

  ALEX. POPE 1688-1744

  ’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill

  Appear in writing or in judging ill,

  But of the two, less dangerous is the offence

  To tire the patience than mislead the sense.

  …..

  Let such teach others as themselves excell

  …..

  Nature affords at least a glimmering light

  …..

  So by false learning is good sense defaced

  Some are bewildered in a maze of schools

  And some made coxcombs nature meant but fools.

  Some have at first for wits, then poets passed,

  Turn’d critics next, and proved plain fools at last.

  …..

  Pride, malice, folly, against Dryden rose

  In various shapes of parsons, critics, beaux:

  …..

  To err is human, to forgive, divine.

  …..

  Jilts ruled the state and statesmen farces writ,

  Nay wits had pensions and young lords had wit.

  * * *

  Comment, abstract statement, the metre is really too easy. There is almost no particular statement. The texture of the lines is seen to be prose texture as soon as the rhyme dazzle is removed. It is called ‘Pope’s polished verse’, but compare it to the Donne already given.

  There are scores of lines in Pope that hundreds of people can quote, each person meaning thereby something different, or something so vague and general that it has almost no meaning whatever.

  The age of politics.

  In the lines cited Pope comes nearest to being admirable in his mention of Dryden, where his statement of the situation is correct, but when he says

  And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be

  the statement simply isn’t so,

  and the habitual expresser of opinion is seen to have opinion itself as his contents. I mean as distinct from Chaucerian knowledge of men or Donne’s knowledge of what had been at least thoroughly thought.

  Note that for all its ‘finish’ if you try to read a full page of the couplets, you will find many u
nnecessary words, and a continual tendency to repetition of statements already quite clear or obvious.

  His grip is firmer in the Dunciad.

  POPE: DUNCIAD

  The mighty mother, and her son who brings

  The Smithfield muses to the ear of kings,

  I sing. …..

  In eldest times e’er mortals writ or read,

  Ere Pallas issued from the Thunderer’s head,

  Dulness o’er all possessed her ancient right,

  Daughter of Chaos and eternal night,

  Fate in their dotage this fair idiot gave

  Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave,

  Laborious, heavy, busy, bold and blind,

  She ruled in native anarchy the mind.

  …..

  Great Cibber’s brazen brainless brothers stand

  …..

  Sepulchral lies our holy walls to grace

  * * *

  A great deal has been written about Pope’s bitterness in attack, by people who neglect to note, or at any rate neglect to mention, that these attacks coincided with expressions of respect to the better authors (as Dryden and Swift for example) whom he attempts to weed out from writers who were nuisances in his day and who are now so forgotten that his work needs footnotes longer than the text itself.

  DUNCIAD 1726

  How here he sipped, how here he plundered snug

  And sucked all o’er like an industrious bug.

  Here lay poor Fletcher’s half-eat scenes, and here

  The frippery of crucified Moliere.

  There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald1 sore

  Wish’d he had blotted for himself before.

  …..

  Prose swelled to verse, verse loitering into prose,

  How random thoughts now meaning chance to find,

  Now leave all memory of sense behind,

  How prologues into prefaces decay,

  And these to notes are frittered quite away,

  How index-learning turns no student pale,

  Yet holds the eel of science by the tail,

  How with less reading than makes felons ’scape,

  Less human genius than God gives an ape,

  Small thanks to France, and none to Rome or

  Greece …..

  A past, vamp’d, future, old, revived, new piece

  Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Shakespeare and Corneille

  Can make a Cibber, Tibbald or Ozell.

  1 an editor

  * * *

  Definite criticism, at least in Pope’s mind. The Dunciad in large chunks is very hard reading simply because we have the very greatest possible difficulty in beating up ANY interest whatever in the bores he is writing about. Even if one does remember a particularly lively crack it is almost too much trouble to find it again (confession of present author, looking for a few lines he would like to quote). Nevertheless, Pope should be given credit for his effort at drainage.

  He is constantly fishing out the better writers. Sic Dunciad II, 124: Congreve, Addison and Prior. 127: Gay, sieved out from seven authors now completely forgotten.

  DUNCIAD 1726

  A decent priest where monkeys were the gods.

  …..

  Gay dies unpensioned with a hundred friends.

  …..

  Book II, along about 1. 270, gets up a momentum and I find it possible to run on for a while without skipping. But I am a specialist getting on toward my fiftieth year, with a particular and matured interest in writing and even in literary criticism. I think it would be sheer idiocy to try to force this kind of reading on the general reader, and nothing could dry up the interest of a young student more quickly than telling him he must, should, or ought to BE INTERESTED in such pages. Such reading is not even training for writers. It is a specialized form of archaeology.

  The root of the dullness is in the fact that a good deal of Pope isn’t informative! We don’t really know anything more about his gilded bug that stinks and stings after reading of him, than we did before. We do get a few points on the state of scholarship, journalism, etc….

  ‘Give up Cicero to C or K’

  …..

  Hibernian politics, O Swift, thy fate!

  And Pope’s, ten years to comment and translate.

  …..

  Perfectly lucid estimate but almost prophetic anticipation in:

  Proceed, great days, till learning fly the shore,

  Till birch shall blush with noble blood no more,

  Till Thames see Eton’s sons for ever play

  EXHIBIT Out of chronological sequence

  When my young Master’s Worship comes to Town,

  From Pedagogue, and Mother, just set free;

  The Heir and Hopes of a great Family:

  Who with strong Beer, and Beef, the Country rules;

  And ever since the Conquest, have been Fools:

  And now, with careful prospect to maintain

  This Character, lest crossing of the Strain

  Shou’d mend the Booby-breed; his Friends provide

  A Cousin of his own to be his Bride:

  * * *

  By Rochester. From ‘A Letter from Artemisa in the Town to Chloe in the Country’. Rochester 1638-1680

  Pope 1688-1744

  Rochester’s poem contains also the lines:

  Dear Artemisa! Poetry’s a Snare

  Bedlam has many Mansions: have a care:

  Your Muse diverts you, makes the Reader sad:

  Observe that Hudibras, Pope, even Crabbe all take us to a DATED world, to a past state of England. Rochester is London, 1914. Not only by the modernity of his language but by his whole disposition (Anschauung) or ‘point of view’.

  Pope’s heaviness may quite well be due to his desire for uplift, due ultimately to economic strain, or say that under the Dunciad is his desire for a specific improvement of a condition, a dissociation of two grades of writing, whereas Rochester is free of specific social urge, and his eye lights on the eternal silliness, persisting after the problem of leisure has been solved.

  Sequence of authors through whom the metamorphosis of English verse writing may be traced.

  Chaucer

  Villon

  Gavin Douglas

  Golding

  Marlowe

  Shakespeare

  Mark Alex. Boyd

  John Donne

  Thos. Campion

  Robt. Herrick

  Waller

  Sam. Butler

  Earl of Dorset

  Rochester

  Pope

  Crabbe

  Landor

  Browning

  FitzGerald

  Walt Whitman

  Théo. Gautier

  Corbière

  Rimbaud

  Laforgue

  1340-1400

  1431-sometime after 1465

  1474-1522

  1536-1605

  1564-93

  1564-1616

  1563-1601

  1573-1631

  1567?-1619

  1591-1674

  1606-87

  1612-80

  1638-1706

  1647-80

  1688-1744

  1754-1832

  1775-1864

  1812-89

  1809-83

  1819-92

  1811-72

  1840-75

  1854-91

  1860-87

  It is not the teacher’s place to enforce an opinion. The best he can do for himself or his pupil is to take certain simple precautions or to put the pupil in position to take them. For example, it is unwise to estimate a given author or period without looking at, at least, some work of the period just precedent; thus before coming to an absolute fixation about ‘the eighteen nineties’, look at a little Rossetti, before deciding about Rossetti, read a few pages of Browning, and thence in like manner.

  The good writers suffer nothing whatever from such comparisons. A critic’s ignorance is apt to lie cruelly open if he refus
e to make such experiments, or neglect to make fair inspection.

  Distinguish clearly between the two sorts of reagent

  A. Work of the period or decade just precedent.

  B. Work of a remote period, so different that it may show up none of the faults very clearly.

  Bad poetry is the same in all languages. What the Chinese call rice-powder poetry differs very little from what was called in Europe ‘l’art de Pétrarquiser’.

  The nearer you approach the amoeba the less difference in organization.

  EXHIBIT GEO. CRABBE 1754-1832

  To what famed college we our vicar owe,

  To what fair county, let historians show:

  Few now remember when the mild young man,

  Ruddy and fair, his Sunday task began;

  Few live to speak of that soft soothing look

  He cast around, as he prepared his book;

  It was a kind of supplicating smile,

  But nothing hopeless of applause, the while;

  And when he finished, his corrected pride

  Felt the desert, and yet the praise denied.

  Thus he his race began, and to the end

  His constant care was, no man to offend;

  No haughty virtues stirr’d his peaceful mind,

  Nor urged the priest to leave the flock behind;

  He was his Master’s soldier, but not one

  To lead an army of his martyrs on: