THE HOT ADVOCATE

Southland Times, Issue 22293, 7 April 1934, Page 11

THE HOT ADVOCATE

EDITH SITWELL AND POPE

A VINDICTIVE VINDICATION.

(By

Criticus.)

Running through Edith Sitwell’s feminine study and defence of Alexander Pope are some pieces of telling vituperation, and it is surprising how satisfying they are. One of the peculiarities of the written word is that the majority of the world's readers are happy to be spectators at someone elses flagellation. If the whipped is a close friend, loyal indignation may spoil the show, and the scorpions are not always pleasing if they attack some of our cherished beliefs, but set them about the hides of people we do not know or with whom we have no special sympathy, and we find ourselves enjoying the spectacle. That is why denunciations meet so much applause. When a great man or a good man falls, the discovery of the weakness is not the occasion for regret, for tears. No; it is greeted with applause, or at least knowing smiles as the accuser’s finger points its revelations. I suppose the little boy who was cruel to flies does not die out of all of us.

Edith Sitwell as a maker of vituperative phrases certainly was superior to Pope, who flattered himself—Pope seemed to flatter himself most of the time—that he could say unkind things in a hurtful way, and in any anthology of slanging phrases she would be represented. Of course, Edith Sitwell is a passionate advocate. She took up the brief over a hundred years after Byron had laid it down, and, like the attacker of Scotch reviewers, she plunged into the fray with a fire that promised a fight to the death for anyone who challenged her faith that Pope was not only one of the great English poets, in the first flight, but that he was also one of the noblest of Englishmen, much maligned and much misunderstood. Pope deserved a defender. For some years it has been the fashion to discuss him as a technician. People who shouted that if you wrote in rhyme or in patterned metre you shackled verse and flopped about in free verse, handcuffing themselves with the rule that rhyme and pattern were verboten, could not be expected to accept the master of the heroic couplet, and Edith Sitwell’s charge into their ranks, carrying the banner of her adored one, had the effect of bringing Pope back to the first flight. Edith Sitwell is a poet of the modernist type and she belongs to the school which believes that Poetry exists in itself, that there is a pure aesthetic essence which is Poetry, something with all philosophy, all didactics all earthiness extracted—Poetry is a distillate of a distillation. She has spoken of the Jaeger School of Poetry, the school advocating health at all costs. For these hygienic poets she has some fulsome snorts: it has become the fashion for a poet not to be regarded as a poet unless he attempts to cure human ills, to comfort the dying world, unless he preaches sermons, or becomes a photographer, telling human nature to look pleasant ... In short, the poet must not be a poet, he must be some sort of a moral quack doctor.

Read that over, and then marvel that Edith Sitwell can make her book a passionate adoration, a passionate defence of Pope, probably one of the greatest, if not “the” greatest didactic rhymer of the language, a sententious “moral quack doctor,” a preacher, a man attempting to cure human ills. She cannot see that of Pope, because she beholds one who is

the purest of our artists, the man who. in his two greatest poems at least, would not be decoyed from his path by any will-o’-the-wisp of Science, interest in human nature, the wish to reform or other poetry-wrecking influences And what are “his two greatest poems”? There is no positive naming of them in that category, but from the pages of this work one arrives at the decision that they are “The Rape of the Lock” and “The Dunciad.” There is only small mention of “An Essay on Man,” and the “Moral Essays In Four Epistles To Several Persons” is not included in any reference. This only makes the mystery of her adoration of Pope the deeper, though it does not lessen the quantum of regard. She sees few faults in Pope the man, and those she admits are condoned, transmuted into artistic or aesthetic virtues. Certainly it is fair to Pope to show that he was not all meanness and spite; but the emphatic shattering of that libel is weakened by the triumphant advocate’s determination to make him a saint. Pope, a good son, grew to be a man who had to combat a twisted, suffering body. He was vain of his intellectual powers, and proud of his artistic powers, of that superiority over his contemporaries which could not be seriously challenged; but all the same he could stoop to conquer, stoop to win applause or advantage. Pope was not straightforward always, he could be false and circuitous. Edith Sitwell admits this, and then in a remarkable paragraph explains it all:

His principal fault was that he suffered from a constitutional inhibition against speaking the truth, save on those occasions when, if we except the esthetic point of view, the truth would have been better left unspoken. But I have so often found both these faults in myself, that I do not dare to blame them. ... I do not deny that he was occasionally tortuous in his dealings, nor can it be denied that he was capable of suppressing or altering passages in his letters which might not exhibit him in the light in which he wished to appear. The truth is that Pope had a longing to be regarded not only as a great poet, but as a great and good man, and really I do not know that it is a very unworthy wish.

This discovery of common attributes is one of the most joyous achievements of the adorer. And that reminds me that I set out on this rambling statement with the idea of drawing attention to Edith Sitwell's vituperative style. Well, the fact that the foes of Pope are the foes of Edith Sitwell should prepare one for a bomb for John Dennis, the critic, who assailed the sensitive Pope:

the vile and unspeakably disgraced Dennis, who lives, now, only in tire poetry of the man to whose mind and heart he did so appalling and irrevocable an injury.

The female of the species spreads her claws on one of her own sex, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who is despatched with the statement that she is

a dilapidated macaw, with a hard piercing laugh, mirthless and joyless, with a few undescriptive, unimaginative phrases, with a parrot’s powers of observation and a parrot's hard and poisonous bite.

And yet this dilapidated macaw gave Pope awkward moments! But Edith Sitwell, the adorer, will see no one who mentions even a scratch on the idol. Matthew Arnold did. “Such Aberdeengranite tombs and monuments as Matthew Arnold,” is Edith’s rejoinder—vivacious and clawing. Yes, if she can admire passionately, Edith Sitwell can defend with the effective passion of a tigress, and even if you don’t agree with her creed, you can enjoy the propaganda.