ALEXANDER POPE
1688–1744
Selected Works
Alexander Pope, another Catholic in an age of Protestants, was born in London in 1688. When he was twelve years old his health was ruined and his growth stunted by a tubercular affliction of the spine. That he lived at all is remarkable; that he became one of the greatest poets in the English language is almost a miracle.
Deciding at the age of sixteen that his only chance for happiness was to be a poet, he began to write and also publish before he was twenty. His “Essay on Criticism,” based on Horace’s Art of Poetry, was published in 1711 and is a wonderful work by a very young man. The next year, when he was twenty-four, “The Rape of the Lock,” a mock epic, was published; it is a delightful romp. It tells the story of a pretty young woman who loses a lock of her hair to an equally young swain and of her efforts to regain the lock without losing any other part of her. She does so and of course he has to marry her.
Despite his infirmities Pope was in love with at least two women, one of whom remained his friend for life and the other must have been very unkind to him because he attacked her in several satirical pieces. He was a master of satire, taking his cue from Horace and the Roman satirist Juvenal, and it was never wise to criticize or disappoint him because of his sharp, barbed satirical tongue. In one of his best and most amusing works, “An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” he attempted to defend himself against the charge of being “malignant,” but the piece contains several brilliant and devastating descriptions of various enemies (who are not named but of course everybody at the time knew who was meant).
I like almost all of Pope’s poems but I think my favorite is the four part Essay on Man. It is absolutely superb, particularly at the beginning of the Second Epistle, which describes its subject (i.e., man) in these famous lines:
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl’d: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
These are not Pope’s only famous lines. Look him up in Bartlett’s or The Oxford Book of Quotations, where you will find that, after Shakespeare, he is probably the most quoted of all authors. Actually, that’s not a bad way to begin reading Pope.
DANIEL DEFOE
1660–1731
Robinson Crusoe
There are not many “world-books,” as a German critic has called them: books that are known everywhere, that are translated into every literary language, that are read by almost all children, that strike a chord in the breast of almost every man or woman of every culture and clime. Perhaps there are no more than a dozen such books. Robinson Crusoe is one of them.
It would have been a good bet that Daniel Defoe would never write such a book. Born in London in 1660, his life was a race, run at breakneck speed, against disaster. He wrote, usually in desperate haste, to stave off the creditors who never ceased to pursue him and who are said to have hounded him to his death in 1731. He spent various periods in jail and was exposed three times in the London pillory, a punishment he had dreaded; but with characteristic courage he wrote a dashing “Hymn to the Pillory” and the common people of London, who loved him, draped the stocks with flowers and came not to jeer but to drink to his health. A political moderate, he was as a result in constant difficulties with both Tories and Whigs, who in an age of violent partisanship were often unable to abide a fair-minded man who did not care so much who was right just so long as there could be peace. Attacked by both sides, Defoe also worked for both sides as pamphleteer, publicist, and propagandist, in his constant effort to help the people of England steer a middle course.
Almost everything he wrote was written too fast and on merely ephemeral subjects, but starting in 1719, and for five years thereafter, there flowed from his pen a nearly miraculous series of books. These included Moll Flanders (1722), A Journal of the Plague Year (also 1722), The History and Remarkable Life of Col. Jack (also 1722!), and Roxana, or The Fortunate Mistress (1724). They are all fine in their way, but the first and best of all was The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner. Written by Himself (1719).
Robinson Crusoe was not “written by himself,” of course, even though like all of Defoe’s novels it was in the first person singular. This was a bit puzzling to readers at the beginning of the eighteenth century, who had practically no other novels to compare it to; their natural reaction was to believe there was such a man as Crusoe and that this was his story. So much the better for it, Defoe felt; at least the book was based on the more or less true accounts of such shipwrecked mariners and castaways as Alexander Selkirk. The question is not, however, whether Robinson Crusoe is a “true story.” Its truth is more than ordinary truth; it is the truth of every man and woman’s hopes, fears, and dreams.
Crusoe is shipwrecked, and all the rest of the ship’s company are lost. Crusoe manages to swim to an island nearby; his ship remains snagged on a reef for several weeks and he is able to obtain a good deal of useful material from it before the hull finally breaks up and is swept to sea. He uses this material to create a new life for himself. But he is desperately lonely in his isolated grandeur, though “the monarch,” as a poet put it, “of all he surveyed.” The first half of the book is taken up with the careful and wonderfully detailed account of what Crusoe did to survive. Every choice he made, every success and every failure, is described with patient carefulness. We read, fascinated by this question: Would we have been able to do as well?
Then, with startling suddenness, a great change occurs. A footprint is seen in the sand—Crusoe is not, after all, alone on his island. He retires to his house, now nearly a fortress, and contemplates all the possible consequences of company. None of them are very good; the maker of that footprint is almost certainly an enemy. He turns out not to be, everyone knows; he is a poor benighted black man, as lost as Crusoe himself, Crusoe names him Friday because that is the day on which he finds him. Friday becomes Crusoe’s man Friday, a collocation of ideas and words so powerful that even girls can be Fridays now, and on any day of the week.
The last third of the book deteriorates, to our modern eyes, as Crusoe spends more and more time trying to convert Friday to the true faith. But this hardly matters. The first four hundred pages of Robinson Crusoe are one of the treasures of mankind. And, for a final accolade, if you had but ten books to take with you to a desert island, what single title would you place before Robinson Crusoe? It is not written as well as Hamlet, its story is not as tragically great as The Iliad, and it is not as deeply humorous as Don Quixote. But it, and not they, would help you to survive.