Life OF POPE
Unit-25 Pope: A Background to An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot http://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/22187/1/Unit-25.pdf
WHAT IS AN EPISTLE?
Epistle, in its original sense, means simply a letter. Over the ages the term has come to denote only formal letters which, though addressed to a particular person, are concerned with public rather than personal matters and express a universal feeling on a particular occasion. The epistle is written for an audience with a conscious artistry, in an elaborate style, to develop an argument or theme. In the classical times the word epistle acquired the additional significance of an imperial decree.
There are broadly two types of literary epistles :
(1) on moral and philosophical themes, e.g. Horace's Epistles and
(2) on romantic and sentimental themes, e:g. Ovid's Heroides.
In the Middle Ages the Ovidian type was more popular and influenced the theories of courtly love. During the Renaissance and thereafter, it was the Horatian kind which exercised greater influence.
DR. ARBUTHNOT - A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Scientist, antiquary and an admirable writer, Arbuthnot (1667-1735) created the nickname, John Bull, for the patriotic Englishman and in The History of John Bull (1712) wittily attacked the war policy of the Whigs. He was a member of the: Scriblers Club and one of the chief contributors to The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblers, first published in 1741. He took part with Pope and Gay in writing Three Hours after Marriage, a farce satirizing the antiquarian Woodward, pradueed in - 1717. In 1700 he published an Essay on the Uses of Mathematical Learning, won high reputation as a man of science and was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, His genius and generosity were acknowledged by almost all his contemporaries.
A very distinguished doctor of medicine as well, he was made Physician Extraordinary to Queen Anne and was Pope's personal physician and close friend.
Arbuthnot died on 27 February 1735, two months after the Epistle was published. Arbuthnot is given the persona of a patient listener and prudent adviser in the Epistle:
Good friend forbearl you deal in dangerous things, I'd never name queens, ministers, or kings (lines 75-76)
He again advises Pope not to name his mighty adversaries for fear of prosecution for libel:
Hold; for God-sake - you'll offend, No names - be calm - learn prudence of a Friend : (lines 10 1-102)
AN EPISTLE TO DR. ARBUTHNOT : A BACKGROUND NOTE
An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was published on 2 January, 1735. Pope did not so much compose it as compile it. It consists of a series of fragments composed and published over a period of twenty years by snatches (Pope's Advertisement). Pope rearranges events of his life for the purpose of presenting a public view of his best self.
For example, in lines 406-13 Pope dedicates himself, in moving terms, to the care of his ageing mother, The poem came out in 1735 while Mrs. Editha Pope had died in 1733. The passage was obviously written before her death and its inclusion in the Epistle may seem a deception. Dates are, however, irrelevant to the persona Pope is adopting. What is relevant is the disposition he expresses towards his mother. Known later as The Prologue to the Satires, the Epistle was addressed to Pope's old friend when in 1735 he was dying.
The immediate provocation for the Epistle was the composition jointly by Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu of Verses Addressed to the Imitator of Horace wherein Pope was told that he was dull. John, Lord Hervey, son of the Earl of Bristol, was attached to the Court of George 11, - in the capacity of Vice-Chamberlain. He was a Whig and a favourite at Court. His loyalty towards his patron, Queen Caroline was well-known. He was emotionally attracted towards his own sex but normal enough to marry the beauty of the Court, Molly Lepell and have 8 children by her, and also seduce the mistress of the Prince of Wales, Miss Wade. Though permanently invalid, he was brave enough to risk his life in a duel forced on him by an insult. A nhiny-piminy official at Court, he was all airs and graces and intrigue but very intelligent.
elegant and beautiful Lady Mary, his one-time friend, had become estranged from Pope, her neighbour at Twickenham, in about 1725, possibly because he had made her a declaration of love which she had met with a fit of immoderate laughter, a cruelty she was capable of. Earlier she had responded civilly but coolly to Pope's heated epistolary passion. Pope had met her in 171 5 and formed an instant infatuation for her. The ending of their relationship is marked by his repeated characterisation of her as Sappho (line 369). Sappho was a Greek lyric poetess who is believed to have thrown herself into the sea in despair at her unrequited love for Phaon.
His Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717) are also about a lady who has taken her life to escape the torture of hopeless love. A noted child-prodigy and a proficient reader like Pope, Mary Montagu responds to Pope's unflattering portrait of herself as Sappho in the First Satire of the Second Book. She charges that Pope's imitation distorts Horace beyond recognition, that Pope's text is a monstrous distortion and Pope himself a monster and that Pope's body explicates the evil within. Till Pope's death the two remained ardent enemies.
SCRIBLERUS CLUB - A BRIEF OUTLINE
Pope floated the idea by suggesting in The Spectator of August 17 12 that as a balance to the monthly abstract The History of the Works of the Learned, he would issue every month An Account of the Works of the Unlearned, especially the English 'who many of them make a very Eminent Figure in the Illiterate World'. It was not however, till the spring of 17 14 that the Club was actually formed and it decided to produce the work as The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus which would spoof all pedantry and bad writing. Pope .Swift, Rior, Arbuthnot Parnell and Harley, Lord Oxford, Tories all, were the founding members of the Club.
The collapse of the Tories in the summer and the death of the Queen on August 1, 1714 broke the Club up. Arbuthnot was replaced as court physician, Swift left for his voluntary exile in Ireland, Parnell also returned to Ireland (and died in 1718), Oxford was impeached and put in the Tower and Atterbury was charged in 1722 with complicity in a plot to reinstate the Pretender, found guilty of Jacobitism and exiled (line 355). Pope survived the change of government by retiring to the country
POPE'S LIFE AND WORKS
Pope was born on 21 May, 1688 in London of elderly parents. He was the only son of his father, a linen-merchant or tradesman and a Roman Catholic.
He was physically deformed and extremely stunted in growth. Tubercular disease of the bone later known as Pott's disease at the age of 12 had caused a curvature in his spine so that he measured a mere 4 feet 6 inches in height. Humpbacked, he became almost a cripple and suffered from severe bodily weakness in need, as Dr. Johnson tells us, of wearing stays in order to be able to stand. He later called it 'a long disease): conscious throughout of his misshapen and grotesque body, Pope was so hurt by the caricature of his figure, 'the picture shape' that he ranked it among the most atrocious injuries he received from his enemies.
After the death of his father in 17 19, Pope and his mother moved in March 171 9 into a villa which he leased on the bank of the Thames at Twickenham. The 5 acre grounds here were divided by the main road from London to Hampton Court. To avoid crossing it, Pope built an underground passage ('my grot' in line 8) which also led to a stone arbour or temple, adorned with a large number of rare stones given to him by his friends. Pope's garden was an imitation of the landed aristocrat's estate, with its statuary, quotes from the classics, famous grotto and carefully designated wilderness area. Pope had also employed a waterman to convey him between London and Twickenham.
Lady Mary Montagu and Martha Blount were the two women who meant most to Pope. He only acknowledged friendship with Martha for fear of provoking mirth even though rumours alleging a much deeper relationship were constantly afloat, His deformity also got connected with his sexual indeterminacy, Consciousness of his physical disability perhaps made him assert his 'manly ways' (line 337) in his depiction of Sporus.
As a Papist Pope was excluded from the Universities and from every public career. ' He gained some instruction from the family priest and also went to school for a short time but for the most part he was a self-educated man and studied so severely that at Dr. Radcliffe had to advise him to read less and ride on horseback everyday.
Pope's portrait of his father in the Epistle (lines 392-403) shows him a harmless, natural man who was untouched by the political and religious currents of the age. But Lady Mary wrote that Pope's verse was 'Hard as thy Heart, and as thy Birth obscure'. This gibe at his parentage hurt him more than anything else. John Dennis had connected his physical deformity with a diabolical ancestry.
His mother was the daughter of William Turner, a Roman Catholic gentleman of Yorkshire. One of the Turners was killed and another died in the service of Charles I. Hence Pope talks of his 'gentle blood' (line 387) on his mother's side. the Epistle he avoids any talk about his father's lineage.
In 1708 his early friend, Sir William had advised him to translate the Iliad and five years later the poet, following the custom of the age, invited subscriptions to the work which was to appear in six volumes at the price of six guineas. Around this time Swift came to how Pope, zealously promoted his scheme telling people at the coffee-houses that 'the best poet in England Mr. Pope a Papist' had begun a translation of Homer which he should not print till he had a thousand guineas for him. Swift also introduced Pope to St. John, Atlerbury and Harley. The first volume of Pope's Homer appeared in 1 7 1 5.
His business instinct made him market his translation of the Iliad and Odyssey by seeking patronage of all his aristocratic friends, putting pressure on them to buy sets and persuade their friends to do likewise. The commercial success of the Homer translation guaranteed his independence from professional writing. It is said that the entire payment for his version of the Iliad and Odyssey spread over eleven years, yielded Pope a clear gain of about 9,000 pounds besides making the fortune of his publisher. By 1725 he had enough money to indulge in the aristocratic tastes.
In 1733-34 Pope published a series of moral and philosophical poems, An Essay on Man, and Moral Essays. In 1733 he published the first of his miscellaneous satires, Imitations of Horace, entitled Satire, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight, two satirical dialogues. These satires, and the Satires of Dr. Donne versified(1 735) and the New Dunciad (1743)
Pope was a Roman Catholic mainly because his father was a Catholic. .He could not renounce Catholicism fearing the pain his apostasy would cause his devout parents. After the 1689 Bill of Rights and the 1701 Act of Settlement, the Catholics were being excluded from positions of high office and subjected to repressive legislation. A bill that passed the Lords in 1723 levied additional taxes on Catholics. The law forbade the Catholics from living within 10 miles of London.
Pope was a tory. He was consequently excluded from the lucrative patronage that writers who supported the Walpole Whigs could obtain. He was a Jacobite sympathiser.
The heavy blows delivered to-the tories by the Hanoverian Succession in 1714 and the disaster of the Jacobite rebellion in 1715 appear to have convinced Pope of the wisdom of retreating from politics for the time being. In the early 1730s however, he became actively involved in politics for the first time as an alliance of Tories and anti-government. Whigs strove to build up a Country Programme which denounced the political corruption and the moral degeneration of the Walpolean regime. Pope became the poet-laureate of the Opposition. In the last few years of his life he again retreated to a more private life, safe from political strife and the clash of political personalities.
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGE -
The infliction of personal injury was not confined to the desperadoes of the streets. Men of letters were in danger of revenge from the poets and politicians whom they I satirized or vilified. Pope was threatened with a rod by Ambrose Philips, which was hung up for his chastisement in Button's coffee-house.
When his satires had generated passionate heat, Pope used to car pistols and have a large dog for his companion when walking out at Twickenham.
Drunkenness was very common among the fine gentlemen of the town and men occupying the high position in the State. Bolingbroke is said to be a 'four-bottle man'. Harley went more than once into the Queen's presence in a half-intoxicated condition. Fenton died of 'two bottles of port a day'. Parnell, a man of high character, is said to have shortened his life by intemperance. Gay died from indolence. Pope's frail body could not withstand excess and he is said to have hastened his end by good living.
Marriages were negotiated on business principles, to gain a good settlement. Only by the end of the eighteenth century negotiating a marriage solely on financial considerations was explicitly denounced.
Telling lies and spreading rumours were also very common. Welsted, it seems, had told two lies (line 375) - that Pope had occasioned a lady's death and had also libelled Mr. Brydges by implying that Timon's Villa meant the Duke of Chandos' seat at Cannons (line 300). Welsted had also said that Pope had received from the Duke a present of E 500. Pope vehemently denied it and admitted to receiving only the subscription for Homer from him, Welsted's lies remained in circulation for over ten years 'three thousand suns' (line 374). During this period Pope never wrote a word in answer to these falsehoods and scurrilities.
Byron and Ruskin called him "the moral poet of all civilization" for dealing with the moral problems of an artificial and complex society.
Booksellers like Edmund Curll specialized in publishing scandalous biographies and unauthorized private papers not meant for public consumption (line 53). In some of The Curll's pamphlets, Pope's father was said to be a mechanic, a hatter,, a farmer, even a Poets bankrupt
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