Crying for a New Pope

...Reid: "Looking at Pope from our own days, one thinks how nice it would be to have him back...

...Critics like me shall make it prose again...

...therefore, this is a cry for a new Pope to twit our foibles, rescue us from dullness, and restore the complicity between thoughtful poets and alert readers...

...Indeed, he castigated Dryden for "improving" Homer by introducing misogyny into The Iliad, and by making the gods laugh at the crippled Hephaestus...

...In fact, his birth in 1688 came toward the end of the brief reign of James II, the first Catholic monarch in Great Britain since Mary Tudor's death in 1558...

...His poetry is the Book of Life...

...He remained loyal to Martha Blount—a neighbor he loved much of his life—and devoted to his mother and nurse until their deaths (not long before his own...

...Others, though, had a very different view...

...our times could use him...

...A century later, John Ruskin created one of the nastiest, most damaging caricatures: "the cold hearted Pope," passionless, hypocritical, mechanistic, the incarnation of the Industrial Age...

...Scornful of the baroque pettiness of much Restoration writing, Pope dreamed of establishing a rapport with his audience akin to that enjoyed by the ancient poets, who lived simply yet thought sublimely...

...writers, scraping the barrel for original expressions, grew obscure, pretentious, dull...

...No wonder Pope grew up skeptical of courts, politics and newspapers, and developed a deep compassion for underdogs...

...his mouth had those peculiar marks which are always found in the mouths of crooked persons...

...To his enemies, Pope seemed a twisted monster...

...His targets, however, were usually sycophantic courtiers, literary climbers, and particularly those who had attacked anyone dear to him...

...To correspondents arguing that writers whose works will ensure immortality need not worry about their behavior (a not uncommon premise today), Pope insisted, "I am very sensible that my Poetical talent is all that may make me remembered: But it is my Morality only that must make me Beloved or Happy...

...His country retreat at Twickenham became a temple to friendship, "hung with portraits of those he loved and admired...

...Lawrence once called it in an inspired moment) just below nuclear war and overpopulation among the afflictions most likely to destroy the West...

...On several occasions she called on the young bluestocking to reprove her...

...Many famous and humble contemporaries considered Pope not merely a sage but a saint...

...In his own age, Pope's gargantuan talent surpassed any classification...

...this was the poet's task as Pope understood it...

...One pushes himself upon the attention of the Goddess of Dullness as Thy mighty scholiast, whose unweary'dpains Made Horace dull, and humbled Milton's strains...

...Colley Cibber, the poet laureate crowned "King of Dullness" in TheDunciad, in turn ridiculed Pope as "ater-rible Tom Tit" and spread stories about supposed sexual humiliations...

...The urbane flow of Pope's verse hardly communicates the spirit of his times (mostly turbulent and vulgar, as Mack demonstrates...

...Pope suffered a second social stigma that was at least as embarrassing as his deformity in an age of handsome fops: His family stayed loyal to Rome during the Protestant Reformation in England, and he himself lived through several extreme spasms of antipapist sentiment (where his name, naturally, proved a boon to his enemies...

...So long as a Catholic Stuart survived to lay claim to the throne, the prevailing English culture fanned hysteria...

...Mack has turned up some poems and letters from "Arnica," an anonymous young woman whose "encounters with Pope and what she felt for him are here revealed for the first time...

...Three weeks after Pope was born, James II's second wife bore a son who, according to the laws of succession, had precedence over his adult, Protestant half-sisters, Mary and Anne...

...Understandably, Martha Blount was less patient...

...His translations of the Classics made them accessible to the less educated, and surpassed earlier efforts inaccuracy...

...He acknowledges that the poet could be a bitter opponent, cruelly witty, even mendacious when inflicting injuries...

...Mack tells us: "To write in a public idiom and always within a program of reference calculated to draw poet and reader into a community of experience, first with each other and then with other poets and readers of a valued past...

...Mack's biography, the most lovable portrait of Pope we have yet seen, aims at much more than comprehensi ve scholarship...

...Mack vividly portrays a society driven by the sort of sectarian bigotry we associate with Northern Ireland—except that in 18th-century London the Protestant majority had everything their own way...

...Maynard Mack leans toward this view in his new, exhaustive biography, Alexander Pope: A Life (Norton, 975 pp., $22.50...

...Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain...

...He eventually drifted away from religion into a kind of ethical humanism, but his sympathies remained allied with his Catholic neighbors, among whom were the Blounts...

...Although Arnica has provided Mack with some details unmentioned in loftier memoirs, what most impresses the biographer—and may touch the reader as well—is Pope's great kindness...

...BeforePopewasayearold, James and his infant (the future "Old Pretender") had fled to France...

...The biographer approvingly quotes another modern commentator, B.L...

...Garrick recalled his reaction upon noticing Pope in the audience while playing the humpbacked Richard III: "His look shot, and thrilled, like lightning, through my frame, and I had some hesitation in proceeding, from anxiety, and from joy...

...and the muscles that run across the cheek were so strongly marked as to appear like small cords...

...Ethics mattered...

...In ours, we call him a classicist when we are reading "An Essay on Man," a pastoralist in "Windsor Forest," an ur-romanticin"Eloisato Abelard," thesupreme comic social critic in "The Rape of the Lock...

...Pope would write indignantly, "Where London's column, pointing at the skies/Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lies...

...Pope's image of a "great Sleep of Dullness" stupefying the tiny souls who populate The Dunciad moves Mack to remind us "that some of the best minds of the last two decades have placed boredom, apathy, the shrinking threshold of individual attention (and 'the great goose-cackle of mob-acquiescence,' as D.H...

...Pope strongly despised the sensation-mongering of his period...

...His boyhood home was soon uprooted by a decree the new co-regents issued f orbidding Romanists to live within 10 miles of the Royal residence...

...He rightly predicted that this trend would destroy any popular audience for poetry, and would breed artists so out of touch that one would listen to another only to secure himself a hearing...

...The even keener Dunciad broadens the satire to include "heavy Lords" who acted as patrons, as well as Oxford and Cambridge—"the black blockade" of willful ignorance and mediocrity, where Aristotelian science was still being taught almost a century after Newton's discoveries...

...At the center of the capital, where the Great Fire had broken out, a monument towered to recall "The Popish Faction" popularly believed to have setitaspartofa"horridPlotforextirpatingthe Protestant Religion and Old English Liberty, and introducing Popery and Slavery...

...Guy Fawkes Day kept memories of Jesuit treason alive...

...Critics come in for special drubbings...

...Mack notes that Pope had "an extraordinary success in making and keeping friends...

...But, Mack concludes sadly, today "poems whether long or short are not particularly our thing," and The Dunciad's prophecies about literary societies of toadies have come to pass...

...The painter was most struck by the face: "Hehada large and very fine eye and a long handsome nose...

...In "Peri Bathous: or the Art of Sinking in Poetry," choice metaphors culled from notorious 18th-century poetasters are so ludicrous that they make the reader laugh out loud...

...Beyond her crush, the one thing known about her is that she was married to an indulgent husband who allowed her to fill every room in their house with books, marble busts and pictures of her idol...

...As a Catholic, Pope was debarred from a university education...

...Anglicans called upon Mary and her husband, William ofOrange, to save England...

...To them, his physical sufferings demonstrated how a noble soul could rise above handicaps to sympathize all the more deeply with the human condition...

...He neither took advantage of the woman nor brushed her off, but instead seems to have taken pains not to hurt her feelings...

...Unlike poets who surround themselves with inferiors because they can brook no competition, he preferred the company of his peers, and counted Jonathan Swift and John Gay especially close...

...Pope's graciousness remained undimmed even when she bombarded him with atrocious little odes on what he ate, or where he rambled on his morning walks (like a modem groupie, she sometimes spied on him...

...Nevertheless, throughout Pope's life, Jacobite uprisings, or rumors of them, continued to frighten Protestants, so families like his often fell under suspicionas rebels...

...U Itimately...

...Byron (Ruskin's demigod), in crediting Pope with being his mentor as a satirist, wrote: "Neither time, nor distance, nor grief, nor age can ever diminish my veneration for him who is the greatest moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all states of existence...

...His satires were homages to Roman forebears like Horace, but his pastorals looked back even further to the Greeks...

...Victims of his satires were apt to think his character as warped as his tubercular spine...

...Boredom led the upper class to chase after the tawdriest novelties...