A concluding note: then and now

Summary

A hazard of literary scholarship to which eighteenth-century specialists may be especially liable is a tendency toward selective identifications with some of the authors we study, identifications that are selective in two senses. One imagines a special kinship with only some authors – Swift, say, rather than Johnson, or vice versa – and with only some features of those authors. So, I align myself with Swift’s views on imperialism but not on the deference due to a national church. When I think, “If Swift were alive today he would satirize ——,”the blank fills in with the current object of my own indignation. This ethical idealization has a formal equivalent, usually a kind of aesthetic nostalgia: “If Pope were alive today, he’d be writing real poetry, not the kind of obscure mush published by ——.” Here one may fill in the name of a least favorite contemporary magazine or poet, while imagining Pope (or Johnson, or Cowper) valiantly holding up formalist standards against an amorphous twenty-first century. Arguably, however, if Pope were alive today “he” would be writing free verse.

This view may be wrong, as well as ill-advised. As George Eliot remarks in Middlemarch, “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous” (chapter 10, opening). But it seems a more convincing image than one of Pope clinging to the heroic couplet three centuries after he began refining it. Of course, this whole mode of supposition begins quickly to unravel, there being no “Pope” abstracted from the historical particularity that produced him. But just before we abandon it entirely, we might recall that Pope was always an experimental modernist. Whatever his reverence for the Ancients, he believed that the poetry of his day could and should progress, and he never tried to revive an antiquated style. Edward Young wrote in 1759 that the way to imitate Homer is not to imitate Homer (a view Johnson considered uncontroversial), and the same might be said of imitating Pope or of imagining eighteenth-century poetry more broadly.