Letter XXII

On Mr. Pope and Several Other Famous Poets

No one in France imagined that Prior, who came on Queen Anne's behalf to offer Louis XIV peace before Baron Bolingbroke came to sign it—no one guessed, I say, that this plenipotentiary was a poet. France later paid England back in kind, for Cardinal Dubois sent our Destouches to London, and the English no more took him for a poet than the French had taken Prior for one. The plenipotentiary Prior had originally been a tavern boy whom the Earl of Dorset, himself a good poet and something of a drunkard, once found reading Horace on a tavern bench, just as Lord Aila found his gardener's boy reading Newton. Aila made a fine geometer of the gardener, and Dorset made a most agreeable poet of the tavern boy.

Prior wrote the History of the Soul; this history is the most natural yet written of that being so keenly felt and so little understood. At first the soul is at the body's extremities, in children's feet and hands; from there it gradually moves to the middle of the body at puberty. Next it rises to the heart, and there produces feelings of love and heroism; in maturer years it rises to the head, where it reasons as best it can. In old age no one knows what becomes of it: it is the sap of an old tree, evaporating and never renewed. Perhaps this work is too long: every joke should be short, and even serious writing would do well to be short too.

The same Prior wrote a little poem on the famous battle of Hochstedt. It is not as good as his History of the Soul; the only good thing in it is this apostrophe to Boileau:

Flattering satirist, you who took such pains

To sing that Louis had not crossed the Rhine.

Our plenipotentiary ended by paraphrasing in fifteen hundred lines the words attributed to Solomon, that All is vanity. One could write fifteen thousand on the subject; but woe to the man who says all he could say.

At last, Queen Anne dead, the ministry changed, and the peace Prior had initiated abhorred, Prior had no recourse but an edition of his works funded by subscriptions from his party; after that he died a philosopher, as every respectable Englishman dies, or believes he dies.

I should also like to give some notion of the poems of Lord Roscommon and Lord Dorset; but I feel I would have to write a great book, and after much effort I would still give you only a very imperfect notion of all these works. Poetry is a kind of music: one must hear it to judge it. When I translate a few passages of this foreign poetry for you, I transcribe its music imperfectly; I cannot convey the quality of its song.

There is an English poem difficult to make known to foreigners; it is called Hudibras. It is an entirely comic work, and yet its subject is the civil war of Cromwell's day. What caused so much blood and so many tears has produced a poem that forces the gravest reader to laugh; an example of this contrast appears in our Satyre Ménippée. Certainly the Romans would not have written a burlesque poem on the wars of Caesar and Pompey and the proscriptions of Octave and Antony. Why, then, could the dreadful calamities caused by the League in France, and those displayed by the wars of king and Parliament in England, furnish material for jokes? Because at bottom a hidden absurdity lay in those disastrous quarrels. The burghers of Paris, at the head of the faction of the Sixteen, mingled insolence with the horrors of faction. The intrigues of women, legates, and monks had a comic side despite the calamities they brought. The theological disputes and the zeal of England's Puritans lent themselves readily to mockery; and this underlying absurdity, properly brought out, could become amusing once the tragic horrors covering it were set aside. If the bull Unigenitus caused blood to be shed, the little poem Philotaus would be no less suited to its subject; indeed, its only reproach would be that it was not as lively, as amusing, or as varied as it might have been, and that the body of the work did not fulfill the promise of its beginning.

The poem Hudibras, of which I speak, seems a compound of the Satyre Ménippée and Don Quixote; it has the advantage of verse over them. It has the advantage of wit: the Satyre Ménippée comes nowhere near it; that is a very mediocre work. Yet through an excess of wit, the author of Hudibras has discovered the secret of falling far below Don Quixote. Taste, naturalness, the art of storytelling, the art of interweaving adventures, and the art of never squandering anything are worth far more than wit: thus Don Quixote is read by every nation, and Hudibras only by the English.

The author of this extraordinary poem was called Butler: he was a contemporary of Milton and enjoyed infinitely more fame than he did, because Butler was funny and Milton's poem was very somber. Butler made the enemies of King Charles II ridiculous, and his only reward was that the king often quoted his verses. The battles of the knight Hudibras were better known than the battles of angels and devils in Paradise Lost; but the English court treated the humorous Butler no better than the heavenly court treated the serious Milton, and both died of hunger, or very nearly.

The hero of Butler's poem was not a fictional character like the Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes; he was a very real knight and baronet, one of Cromwell's enthusiasts and one of his colonels. His name was Sir Samuel Luke. To show the spirit of this poem, unique of its kind, one must cut three quarters from any passage one wishes to translate: this Butler never ends. I have therefore reduced the first four hundred lines of Hudibras to about eighty, to avoid prolixity.

When the profane and the saints

Were locked in combat in England,

And fought over churches

As fiercely as over whores;

When Anglicans and Puritans

Waged such a bitter war,

And fresh from the tavern

The orators of Nazareth

Beat the drum from the pulpit;

When everywhere, without knowing why,

In heaven's name, in the king's name,

Men at arms covered the earth,

Then our good knight,

Long idle, like Achilles,

Full of holy bile,

Followed by his great squire,

Escaped from his chicken coop

With his saber and the Gospel,

And took it into his head to wage war.

Sir Hudibras, this rare man,

Was said to be full of honor.

He had wit and courage;

But he was very sparing with them.

Besides, by some novel talent,

He was perfectly suited to the bar

As well as to cruel war;

Great on the bench, great in the saddle,

In camp and at a desk;

Like those amphibious rats

That, seeming to have two lives,

Are field rats and water rats.

But despite his great eloquence,

His merit and his prudence,

Some learned men took him

For one of those instruments

Which rogues know how to wield

With skill and without a word,

And turn about with ease:

That instrument is called a fool.

Not that in theology,

In logic, or astrology,

He was not a subtle doctor;

He could split a hair in four,

Arguing without ever yielding,

Changing his thesis all at once,

Always ready to talk at length

When the point was not to understand one another.

Hudibras's religion

Was, just like his reason,

Empty of sense and very profound:

Divine Puritanism,

The finest sect in the world,

And certainly nothing human;

The true church militant,

Which preaches with a pistol in hand,

And to convert its neighbor better

Argues with mighty strokes of the saber;

Which promises heavenly blessings

By the gallows and the rope,

And damns without mercy

The sins of other Christians

So as better to pardon its own;

A sect that, forever destroying,

Finally destroys itself:

So Samson, with his mighty hand,

Shattered the Philistine temple;

But he died by his own revenge,

And buried himself as well,

Crushed beneath the immense fall

Of the temple he demolished.

From the old knight's nose

Hung two enormous mustaches

To which the Fates had fastened

The republic's destiny.

He guards them carefully,

And if ever they are torn away,

The Parliament will fall:

The whole State, that very instant,

Must fall along with his mustache.

Thus Taliacotius,

Great Aesculapius of Etruria,

Repaired every lost nose

By a new art of surgery:

He deftly took for you

A piece of a poor man's ass,

Fixed it neatly on a nose;

Until it happened that, in short,

At the precise moment the lender died,

The borrower's nose fell off:

And often in the very same coffin,

In justice and by common consent,

They put back, as the dead man wished,

The nose beside his backside.

Our great hero of Albion,

Mounted on his old nag,

To avenge religion,

Had at his saddle bow

Two pistols and some ham;

But he had just one spur.

That had always been his way;

He knew that if its rowel

Pricked one half of the horse,

The animal's other half

Would not lag behind.

So there goes Hudibras;

May God bless his journey,

His arguments and his party,

His red beard and his courage!

A man with a tenth of the comic wit, good or bad, that reigns throughout this work in his imagination would still be very amusing; but he would take great care not to translate Hudibras. How can foreign readers be made to laugh at absurdities already forgotten even by the nation in which they were once famous? Dante is no longer read in Europe because everything in him alludes to events now unknown; Hudibras is the same. Most of its mockery falls on the theology and theologians of the time. It would require commentary at every turn. An explained joke ceases to be a joke, and a commentator on witticisms is scarcely likely to make any himself.

That is why the books of the ingenious Dr. Swift, called the Rabelais of England, will never be properly understood in France. He has the honor of being a priest and of mocking everything, as Rabelais did; but Rabelais did not rise above his age, while Swift rises far above Rabelais. Our curate of Meudon scattered immense gaiety and even greater impertinence through his extravagant and unintelligible book; he lavished learning, filth, and tedium on it. A good two-page tale is purchased at the price of volumes of nonsense: only a few people of eccentric taste pride themselves on understanding and esteeming the whole work. The rest of the nation laughs at Rabelais's jokes and despises the book. He is considered the foremost of buffoons; people regret that a man of so much wit put it to such miserable use: he is a drunken philosopher who wrote only during his bouts of drunkenness.

Mr. Swift is Rabelais in his right mind and moving in good society. He does not, to be sure, have the other's gaiety; but he has all the subtlety, reason, discrimination, and good taste that our curate of Meudon lacks. His verses have a singular and almost inimitable quality; fine humor is his province in verse and prose alike, but to understand him properly one must pay a little visit to his country.

In that country, which seems so strange to part of Europe, people did not find it too strange that the Reverend Swift, dean of a cathedral, should mock Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism in his Tale of a Tub: he says in his defense that he did not touch Christianity. He claims to have respected the father by giving the three children a hundred lashes each; discerning people have thought the rods were so long that they reached the father.

This famous Tale of a Tub imitates the old tale of the three indistinguishable rings a father bequeathed to his three children. These three rings were the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions. It also imitates Fontenelle's History of Méro and Énegu. Méro was an anagram of Rome, and Énegu of Geneva. They are two sisters who lay claim to the inheritance of their father's kingdom. Méro reigns first. Fontenelle portrays her as a witch who made bread disappear by sleight of hand and worked spells with corpses. This is precisely Swift's Lord Peter, who offers his two brothers a piece of bread and tells them, “Here is excellent Burgundy wine, my friends; here are partridges of an exquisite aroma.” The same Lord Peter in Swift plays in every respect the part Méro plays in Fontenelle.

Thus nearly everything is imitation. The idea of the Persian Letters is taken from that of the Turkish Spy. Boiardo imitated Pulci; Ariosto imitated Boiardo. The most original minds borrow from one another. Miguel de Cervantes makes his Don Quixote a madman; but is Roland anything else? It would be hard to decide whether knight-errantry is mocked more thoroughly by the grotesque pictures of Cervantes or by Ariosto's fertile imagination. Metastasio took most of his operas from our French tragedies. Several English authors have copied us and said nothing of it. Books are like the fire in our hearths: we fetch that fire from a neighbor, light it in our own homes, pass it on to others, and it belongs to everyone.

You can more easily form some notion of Mr. Pope: he is, I believe, the most elegant, the most precise, and—no small thing—the most harmonious poet England has had. He has brought the harsh whistle of the English trumpet down to the gentle tones of the flute. He can be translated because he is exceedingly clear, and because his subjects are, for the most part, universal and the concern of every nation.

His Essay on Criticism will soon be known in France through the verse translation being made by the Abbé du Resnel.

Here is a passage from his poem The Rape of the Lock, which I have just translated with my usual freedom: for, once again, I know nothing worse than translating a poet word for word.

Umbriel at once, a surly old gnome,

On heavy wing and with a scowling face,

Goes, muttering, to seek the deep cavern

Where, far from the gentle rays the world's eye sheds,

The goddess of vapors has chosen to dwell.

Sad north winds whistle all around,

And the sickly breath of their parched mouths

Carries fever and migraine through the air.

On a rich sofa, behind a screen,

Far from lights, noise, talkers, and the wind,

The capricious goddess lies continually at rest,

Her heart burdened with sorrows she cannot explain,

Having never thought, her mind forever disturbed,

Her eyes heavy, her face pale, her spleen swollen.

Slanderous Envy sits beside her,

An old female specter, a decrepit maiden,

With a pious air she tears her neighbor to shreds,

And, Gospel in hand, makes songs about the senses.

Reclining carelessly on a bed full of flowers,

A young beauty lies not far away:

It is Affectation, who speaks with a lisp,

Listens without hearing, and casts sidelong looks,

Blushes without shame, and laughs at everything without joy,

Claims to suffer a hundred different ailments,

And, healthy beneath her rouge and powder,

Complains languidly and swoons with art.

If you read this passage in the original instead of reading it in this feeble translation, you would compare it to the description of Indolence in Le Lutrin.

Pope's Essay on Man seems to me the finest didactic poem, the most useful and the most sublime, ever composed in any language. It is true that its substance is found in its entirety in Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics; and I do not know why Mr. Pope gives the credit solely to Mr. de Bolingbroke, without a word about the celebrated Shaftesbury, Locke's pupil.

Since everything concerning metaphysics has been thought through in every age and among every people who cultivate their minds, this system has much in common with Leibniz's, which holds that of all possible worlds God must have chosen the best, and that in this best world the irregularities of our globe and the follies of its inhabitants had to have their place. It also resembles Plato's notion that in the infinite chain of beings our earth, our body, and our soul are among the necessary links. But neither Leibniz nor Pope accepts the changes Plato imagines have occurred in those links, in our souls and our bodies. Plato spoke as a poet in his barely intelligible prose; Pope speaks as a philosopher in his admirable verse. He says that from the beginning everything has been as it had to be and as it is.

I was flattered, I admit, to see that he agreed with something I had said several years before. “You are astonished that God made man so limited, so ignorant, so little happy. Why are you not astonished that he did not make him more limited, more ignorant, and more unhappy?” When a Frenchman and an Englishman think alike, surely they must be right.

The son of the celebrated Racine has published a letter from Pope, addressed to him, in which Pope recants. The letter is written in Mr. de Fénelon's manner and style; it was delivered to him, he says, by Ramsay, the editor of Télémaque; Ramsay, the imitator of Télémaque as Boyer imitated Corneille; Ramsay the Scot, who wanted to belong to the French Academy; Ramsay, who regretted not being a doctor of the Sorbonne. What I know, as do all the literary people of England, is that Pope, with whom I spent much time, could scarcely read French, that he did not speak a word of our language, that he never wrote a letter in French, that he was incapable of it, and that if he wrote this letter to the son of our Racine, God must have suddenly given him the gift of tongues at the end of his life, to punish him for having written so admirable a work as his Essay on Man.

On Mr. Pope and Some Other Famous Poets

People in France did not imagine that Prior was a poet. He came on Queen Anne's behalf to offer peace to Louis XIV before Baron Bolingbroke came to sign it. No one guessed, I say, that this envoy was a poet. France later paid England back in kind. Cardinal Dubois sent our Destouches to London, and the English thought him no more of a poet than the French thought Prior. Prior the envoy had originally been a tavern boy. The Count of Dorset, himself a good poet and something of a drunk, once found him reading Horace on a tavern bench. In the same way, Lord Aila found his gardener's boy reading Newton. Aila made the gardener a good mathematician, and Dorset made the tavern boy a very agreeable poet.

Prior wrote the History of the Soul. It is the most natural account written so far of this being that we feel so clearly and know so poorly. At first the soul is at the ends of the body, in children's feet and hands. From there it gradually moves to the middle of the body at puberty. Next it rises to the heart, where it produces feelings of love and heroism. At a more mature age it rises to the head. There it reasons as best it can. In old age, no one knows what becomes of it. It is like the sap of an old tree, evaporating and no longer renewed. Perhaps this work is too long. Every joke should be short, and even serious writing would do well to be short too.

The same Prior wrote a short poem about the famous battle of Hochstedt. It is not as good as his History of the Soul. Its only good part is this address to Boileau:

Flattering satirist, you who worked so hard

To sing that Louis did not cross the Rhine.

Our envoy ended by expanding into fifteen hundred lines these words attributed to Solomon: All is vanity. One could write fifteen thousand on the subject. But pity the person who says everything he can say.

At last Queen Anne died, the government changed, and the peace Prior had begun became hated. His only recourse was to publish an edition of his works by subscription among members of his party. After that he died like a philosopher, as every respectable Englishman dies or thinks he dies.

I would also like to give some idea of the poems of Lord Roscommon and Lord Dorset. But I can see that I would have to write a large book. Even after much work, I would give you only a very incomplete idea of all these works. Poetry is a kind of music: you have to hear it to judge it. When I translate some passages from these foreign poems for you, I make an imperfect notation of their music. But I cannot convey the quality of their song.

There is an English poem that is hard to explain to foreigners. It is called Hudibras. It is entirely comic, yet its subject is the civil war in Cromwell's time. What caused so much bloodshed and so many tears has produced a poem that forces even the most serious reader to laugh. There is an example of this contrast in our Satyre Ménippée. The Romans certainly would not have written a burlesque poem about the wars of Caesar and Pompey or the proscriptions of Octave and Antony. Why, then, could the terrible disasters caused by the League in France, and by the wars between king and Parliament in England, become material for jokes? Because these deadly conflicts had something ridiculous hidden underneath them. The citizens of Paris who led the faction of the Sixteen mixed absurdity with the horrors of factional fighting. The plots of women, papal envoys, and monks had a comic side despite the disasters they brought about. The theological arguments and the puritans' zeal in England were easy to mock. Once brought out and separated from the tragic horrors that covered it, this underlying absurdity could become funny. If the bull Unigenitus caused blood to be shed, the little poem Philotaus would still suit the subject. The only criticism one could make is that it is not as lively, funny, or varied as it could be. The body of the work fails to deliver what its beginning promises.

The poem Hudibras, which I have been telling you about, seems to combine the Satyre Ménippée and Don Quixote. It has the advantage over them of being in verse. It also has wit. The Satyre Ménippée comes nowhere near it on that score; it is a very mediocre work. But the author of Hudibras has managed, through an excess of wit, to fall far below Don Quixote. Taste, naturalness, the art of storytelling, skill at weaving adventures together, and knowing when not to overdo things are worth much more than wit. That is why people of every nation read Don Quixote, while only the English read Hudibras.

The author of this very unusual poem was named Butler. He lived at the same time as Milton and had a far greater reputation, because he was funny and Milton's poem was very gloomy. Butler made the enemies of King Charles II look ridiculous. His only reward was that the king often quoted his verses. The battles of the knight Hudibras were better known than the battles of the angels and devils in Paradise Lost. But the English court treated the funny Butler no better than the heavenly court treated the serious Milton. Both nearly starved to death.

The hero of Butler's poem was not an invented character like Michel Cervantes's Don Quixote. He was a real knight and baronet who had been one of Cromwell's zealots and one of his colonels. His name was Sir Samuel Luke. To give an idea of the spirit of this one-of-a-kind poem, one must cut three-quarters of any passage one wants to translate, because Butler never stops. So I have reduced the first four hundred lines of Hudibras to about eighty, to avoid going on too long.

When the profane and the holy

Were fighting each other in England,

When they fought over churches

As fiercely as over prostitutes,

When Anglicans and puritans

Were waging such a bitter war,

And, straight out of the tavern,

The orators of Nazareth

Went to beat the drum in the pulpit,

When everywhere, without knowing why,

In heaven's name, in the king's name,

Armed men covered the land,

Then the noble knight,

Long idle, like Achilles,

Full of holy anger,

Followed by his great squire,

Escaped from his chicken coop

With his saber and the Gospel

And decided to go to war.

Sir Hudibras, that remarkable man,

Was, they say, full of honor.

He had brains and courage,

But was very stingy with both.

Besides, he had a rare talent:

He was as fit for the law courts

As for cruel warfare.

Great on the bench, great in the saddle,

In camp and at a desk alike,

Like those amphibious rats

Which seem to have two lives,

Being field rats and water rats.

But despite his great eloquence,

His ability, and his good sense,

Some learned people took him

For one of those tools

That crooks cleverly use

Without saying a word

And turn any way they please:

The tool is called a fool.

Not that he was not an expert

In theology, logic, and astrology.

He could split one hair into four,

Argue without ever giving in,

Suddenly change the question,

And always speak at length

When no one was meant to understand.

Hudibras's religion

Was just like his reason:

Meaningless and very deep.

It was divine puritanism,

The finest sect in the world,

And certainly not human at all.

The true church militant,

Which preaches with a pistol in hand,

Uses heavy saber blows as arguments

To convert its neighbors more effectively,

And promises heavenly rewards

Through the gallows and the rope.

It damns other Christians' sins

Without a trace of mercy,

So it can pardon its own more easily.

Always bent on destruction,

The sect finally destroys itself.

So Samson, with his mighty hand,

Broke the Philistine temple,

But died in taking his revenge.

He himself was buried,

Crushed in the great collapse

Of the temple he tore down.

From the old knight's nose

Hung two large mustaches,

To which the Fates had tied

The fate of the republic.

He guarded them carefully.

If ever they were torn away,

Parliament would fall.

The entire State, at that moment,

Would fall with his mustache.

So Taliacotius,

The great doctor of Etruria,

Restored every lost nose

By a new technique:

He would skillfully take

A piece of a poor man's backside

And neatly fit it to the nose.

At last it turned out that

The borrower's nose fell off

Just when the lender died.

Often, in the same coffin,

By justice and mutual agreement,

They put the nose, as the dead man wished,

Back beside his backside.

Our great hero of Albion,

Mounted on his broken-down horse

To avenge religion,

Had fastened to his saddle bow

Two pistols and some ham.

But he had only one spur.

That had always been his way.

He knew that if the heel spur

Prodded one half of the horse,

The animal's other half

Would not stay behind.

So Hudibras set off.

May God bless his journey,

His arguments and his party,

His red beard and his courage!

Anyone with a tenth of the comic imagination, good or bad, that runs through this work would still be very funny. But he would take care not to translate Hudibras. How could you make foreign readers laugh at absurdities already forgotten even by the nation where they were once famous? Dante is no longer read across Europe because everything in him alludes to events people do not know. The same goes for Hudibras. Most of this book's jokes target the theology and theologians of its day. You would need a commentary at every turn. Once a joke is explained, it stops being funny. And a commentator on jokes is hardly likely to make any of his own.

That is why people in France will never fully understand the books of the clever Dr. Swift, whom they call the Rabelais of England. Like Rabelais, he has the honor of being a priest and making fun of everything. But Rabelais did not rise above his century, whereas Swift stands far above Rabelais. Our priest of Meudon filled his wild, unintelligible book with great high spirits and still greater foolishness. He piled on learning, filth, and boredom. To get one good two-page story you have to buy volumes of nonsense. Only a few people with odd tastes pride themselves on understanding and admiring the whole work. The rest of the nation laughs at Rabelais's jokes and despises the book. People see him as the leading clown. They regret that a man with so much talent made such poor use of it. He is a drunken philosopher who wrote only while drunk.

Mr. Swift is Rabelais in his right mind and at ease in good company. He does not, it is true, have the same high spirits. But he has all the subtlety, reason, judgment, and good taste that our priest of Meudon lacks. His verse has a distinctive style that is almost impossible to imitate. He excels at good jokes in both verse and prose. But to understand him properly, you must take a little trip to his country.

In that country, which seems so strange to part of Europe, people have not found it too strange that the Reverend Swift, dean of a cathedral, mocked Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism in his Tale of a Tub. His defense is that he did not touch Christianity. He claims to have respected the father while giving his three children a hundred lashes each. Some hard-to-please people thought the switches were so long they reached the father too.

The famous Tale of a Tub imitates the old story of the three indistinguishable rings a father left to his three children. Those three rings were the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions. It also imitates Fontenelle's History of Mero and Enegu. Mero was an anagram of Rome, and Enegu of Geneva. They are two sisters who claim to inherit their father's kingdom. Mero rules first. Fontenelle portrays her as a witch who made bread disappear and cast spells with corpses. That is exactly Swift's Lord Peter. He shows a piece of bread to his two brothers and says, “Here is excellent Burgundy wine, my friends. Here are partridges with a wonderful smell.” Swift's Lord Peter plays the same part throughout as Mero does in Fontenelle.

So almost everything is imitation. The idea for the Persian Letters comes from the Turkish Spy. Boiardo imitated Pulci; Ariosto imitated Boiardo. The most original minds borrow from one another. Michel Cervantes makes Don Quixote a madman. But what is Roland if not a madman? It would be hard to decide whether Cervantes's grotesque pictures or Ariosto's fertile imagination make more fun of wandering knights. Metastasio took most of his operas from our French tragedies. Several English writers have copied us without saying so. Books are like the fire in our hearths. We fetch fire from a neighbor, light our own hearth, pass it on to others, and then it belongs to everyone.

You can more easily get some idea of Mr. Pope. I think he is the most elegant, most precise, and, just as importantly, most musical poet England has had. He has turned the harsh blasts of the English trumpet into the gentle sounds of a flute. He can be translated because he is extremely clear and because most of his subjects are general ones that concern every nation.

People in France will soon know his Essay on Criticism through the verse translation Mr. Abbé du Resnel is making.

Here is a passage from his poem The Lock of Hair, which I have just translated with my usual freedom. For I repeat, I know nothing worse than translating a poet word for word.

Umbriel, an old, sour-tempered gnome, at once

Flies heavily, wearing a scowl,

Muttering as he seeks the deep cave

Where, far from the sweet rays shed by the world's eye,

The goddess of the vapors has made her home.

Sad north winds whistle all around it,

And their unhealthy, dry breath

Brings fever and migraines nearby.

On a fine sofa, behind a screen,

Away from lights, noise, talkers, and wind,

The moody goddess lies resting without end,

Her heart weighed down by troubles whose cause she does not know.

She has never had a thought, her mind is always troubled,

Her eyes are heavy, her face pale, her lower belly swollen.

Slanderous Envy sits beside her,

An old female specter, a worn-out maiden,

Piously tearing her neighbors apart

And mocking the senses with the Gospel in her hand.

Reclining carelessly on a flower-covered bed

Not far away lies a young beauty:

It is Affectation, who speaks in a drawl,

Listens without hearing and gives flirtatious looks,

Blushes without shame and laughs without joy at everything,

Claims to suffer from a hundred different ailments,

And, perfectly healthy under her rouge and makeup,

Complains languidly and faints with practiced skill.

If you read this passage in the original instead of in this weak translation, you would compare it with the description of Softness in Le Lutrin.

Pope's Essay on Man seems to me the finest, most useful, most lofty teaching poem ever written in any language. It is true that all its main ideas can be found in Lord Shaftesbury's Characteristics. I do not know why Mr. Pope gives Mr. de Bolingbroke all the credit for them and does not say a word about the famous Shaftesbury, who was Locke's student.

Everything connected with metaphysics has been thought about in every age and among every people that cultivates its mind. So this system has much in common with Leibnitz's. He claims that God must have chosen the best of all possible worlds, and that in this best world the irregularities of our globe and the foolishness of its inhabitants had to have their place. It also resembles Plato's idea that our earth, our bodies, and our souls are necessary links in an infinite chain of beings. But neither Leibnitz nor Pope accepts the changes Plato imagines have happened to these links, to our souls and our bodies. Plato spoke as a poet in his hard-to-understand prose. Pope speaks as a philosopher in his wonderful verse. He says everything has been from the beginning as it had to be, and as it is now.

I admit I was pleased to see that he agreed with something I had said several years ago. “You are surprised that God made man so limited, so ignorant, so little happy. Why are you not surprised that he did not make him still more limited, more ignorant, and more unhappy?” When a Frenchman and an Englishman think alike, surely they must be right.

The son of the famous Racine has published a letter addressed to him by Pope in which Pope takes back what he said. This letter is written in Mr. de Fénelon's style and manner. Racine's son says Ramsay brought it to him—Ramsay, the editor of Télémaque; Ramsay, the imitator of Télémaque, as Boyer imitated Corneille; Ramsay the Scot, who wanted to join the French Academy; Ramsay, who regretted not being a doctor of the Sorbonne. What I know, as everyone in England's literary world knows, is that Pope, with whom I spent a great deal of time, could barely read French. He did not speak a word of our language, never wrote a letter in French, and was incapable of doing so. If he wrote this letter to our Racine's son, God must suddenly have given him the gift of languages at the end of his life, to punish him for writing such an admirable work as his Essay on Man.