Alexander pope (1688-1744)

To the body of critical principles which underline Pope’s poetry - the principles that are formulated in his Essay on Criticism and in the Art Poetique of the French poet-critic Boileau – literary historians have given the name of “neo-classicism”. The chief qualities implied by this term are good sense, reasonableness, scrupulous fidelity to the normal and constant sentiments of human nature, adherence to the form and spirit of the great writers of classical antiquity who seemed to exemplify most completely the principles of reasonableness and truth to nature.

Pope is the only important writer of his generation who was solely a man of letters. He was born into a Catholic family at a time when there were legal restrictions on land-owning and residence (in theory Catholics could not live within ten miles of London). He suffered prejudice all his life: he could not attend university or hold public office and the sense of being an “outsider” was enhanced by his physical defects: he was practically a dwarf and a tubercular disease during adolescence left him deformed. In the light of these severe disadvantages it is remarkable that his literary career, walking a political tightrope all the while, was crowned with success.

He showed precocious talent in his early poetry: Pastorals (1709), An Essay on Criticism (1711) and The Rape of the Lock (1714), carving a niche for himself at the forefront of eighteenth-century poetry and associating with the Tory wits of the Scriblerus Club (which included Jonathan Swift and John Gay, the author of The Beggar's Opera). Together they produced a series of papers supposedly written by Martin Scriblerus, but which were, in reality, a harsh satire on false learning and pedantry. Pope’s early masterpiece, The Rape of the Lock, was called by a critic “the triumph of insignificance”. Its subject is insignificant enough. Among the circle of Pope’s acquaintances a young nobleman in a spirit of frolic snipped off a lock of hair from the head of a young lady; the escapade led to a quarrel between the families of the two young people. This trifling episode Pope elaborated by bringing in all the insignificances of the fashionable world – the lady’s toilet-table, the processes of making coffee and playing cards. The whole is treated with a mock solemnity of a heroic epic. The moral is pointed out in Canto V, where the author insists on the virtues of good sense and good humour

Before he was twenty-five, Pope was clearly recognized as the greatest living poet. He was also one of the few writers to achieve financial success: in particular his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey made him a rich man and he settled in a villa in Twickenham, outside London. In his translation Pope took many liberties with the original. But if it is not properly Homer, it is at least a brilliant retelling of Homer’s tale of Troy, rapid in movement, full of life and fire, still the most readable rendering of Homer into English verse.

When the laborious task of translating Homer was brought to an end, Pope turned to satiric and didactic or reflective poetry in which he is the acknowledged master. First came the mock-heroic epic The Dunciad, (1728) which holds up to ridicule pedantic learning and false pretensions to literary art and where Pope settles his scores with critics and other figures who had ill-treated him (the literary milieu at the time was extremely competitive, attacks on one's rivals were the order of the day). Then, from 1731 to 1738, appeared in rapid succession a series of satires and “moral epistles”, of which the most brilliant are Epistle I of the Essay on Man and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Their manner is familiar rather than elevated, but the abstract ideas of Pope’s philosophizing and moralizing are made vivid by concrete images of high poetic quality, and are made musical by his mastery of English verse.

In later years Pope became increasingly dissatisfied with the political climate; in particular the abuses of patronage and bribery during Walpole's term as prime minister, and his biting satire made him a feared man in government circles. In his Imitations of Horace he drew striking parallels between the decline of morality and literature in Horace's Rome and that occurring in eighteenth-century England. Late in his career he was able to say: “I must be proud to see/Men not afraid of God, afraid of me”.

As regards technique, Pope inherited and polished Dryden's poetic legacy, and the heroic couplet reached its apotheosis in his hands. Although to modern ears it can perhaps seem a little forced and monotonous, Pope’s elegance and wit shine through; in the poet's own words: “Wit is Nature to advantage dressed/ What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed” (Essay on Criticism). Within the limits of the heroic couplet he showed a marvelous range of metric power – from the music of the more elevated poems to the easy colloquial flow of “the moral essays” and the satires. He was also a master of terse, epigrammatic diction; his sense for the right word and the right phrase is so sure that he has given to the English language more familiar quotations than any other poet save Shakespeare.

JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719) and SIR RICHARD STEELE (1672-1729)

One of the literary forms which the 18^th century brought to supreme perfection is the blending of literature and journalism which is called the periodical essay. It was a short essay on some topic of general interest, published as the principal material for a four-page periodical appearing several times a week. Though the idea of such a publication was not original with Addison and Steele, it was they who first fully realized its possibilities. In the atler and the Spectator they set a model that was imitated throughout the century by many similar, though less famous, periodicals.

The friendship of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele began when they were schoolboys together in London. Both men attended Oxford, where Addison took his degree and earned a reputation for Latin verse; the less scholarly Steele, however, did not stay for a degree but left the university to take a commission in the army. Steele became editor of the London Gazette, an official newspaper that appeared twice a week during the greater part of his editorship, listing government appointments and reporting domestic and foreign news – the first newspaper in the modern sense. Later, Steele became manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Meanwhile Addison had served in Parliament and been knighted by George I. Addison was secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland; finally, toward the end of his life, he became secretary of state. Both men wrote plays that contributed to establishing the popularity of sentimental comedy throughout the 18th century.

Steele's debts and Addison's loss of office in 1710 were the causes of their journalistic enterprises, through which they developed one of the most characteristic types of eighteenth-century literature, the periodical essay. In 1709 Steele launched the Tatler under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff. The mixture of news with personal reflections soon became popular in coffeehouses and at breakfast tables. Steele wrote by far the greater number of Tatlers, but Addison contributed, as did other friends. The Spectator, which appeared daily except Sunday in 1711-12 was the joint undertaking of the two friends. The papers had many imitators in their own day and throughout the rest of the century.

Both Steele and Addison were conscious moralists and did not disguise their intention of improving the minds, morals, and manners of their readers. The new social ideal, which the two essayists fostered, stressed moderation, reasonableness, self-control, urbanity, and good taste. Steele's Tatler essays applied this ideal to any topic that appeared pleasing or useful: the theatre, true breeding as opposed to vulgar manners, education, simplicity in dress, the proper use of Sunday, and so on, and he lightly ridiculed common social types such as the prude, the coquette, the "pretty fellow," and the rake. Addison's best Tatler essays initiated his study of eccentric or affected characters described with agreeable humour. The Tatler papers quickly won an audience, and when published in a book form, they continued to sell throughout the century.

The Spectator began to appear two months after the last Tatler. In the second number, Steele introduces the readers to the members of Mr. Spectator's Club: a man about town, a student of law and literature, a churchman, a soldier, a Tory country squire, and a London merchant. As a Whig, Steele was ardently sympathetic with the new moneyed class in London, and it was evidently his intention to contrast the merchant Sir Andrew Freeport, the representative of the new order, to the Tory Sir Roger de Coverley, who is presented as belonging to the vanishing aristocratic class. Addison, however, presented Sir Roger in episodes set in town and in the country as an endearing, eccentric character, often absurd but always amiable and innocent. He is a prominent ancestor of a long line of similar characters in fiction during the next two centuries. Addison's scholarly interests broadened the material to include not only social criticism but the popularization of current philosophical and scientific notions, and he wrote important critical papers distinguishing true and false wit, an extended series of essays evaluating Paradise Lost, and an influential series on “the pleasures of the imagination,” which treated the aesthetics of visual beauty in nature and art. Altogether, the Spectator fulfilled his ambition to be considered an agreeable modern Socrates.

The best description of Addison's prose is Samuel Johnson's in his Life of Addison: “His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not formal, on light occasions not grovelling; pure without scrupulosity, and exact without apparent elaboration”.