POPE

The question, whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled, and is

hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must have been a

great prose-writer, that is, he was a great writer of some sort. He was a

man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined taste; and as he chose

verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the vehicle to express

his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a good one. If, indeed,

by a great poet, we mean one who gives the utmost grandeur to our

conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart,

Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the bent, the characteristic

power of his mind, lay the clean contrary way; namely, in representing

things as they appear to the indifferent observer, stripped of prejudice

and passion, as in his Critical Essays; or in representing them in the

most contemptible and insignificant point of view, as in his Satires; or

in clothing the little with mock-dignity, as in his poems of Fancy; or in

adorning the trivial incidents and familiar relations of life with the

utmost elegance of expression, and all the flattering illusions of

friendship or self-love, as in his Epistles. He was not then distinguished

as a poet of lofty enthusiasm, of strong imagination, with a passionate

sense of the beauties of nature, or a deep insight into the workings of

the heart; but he was a wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation,

and the world, with a keen relish for the elegances of art, or of nature

when embellished by art, a quick tact for propriety of thought and

manners as established by the forms and customs of society, a refined

sympathy with the sentiments and habitudes of human life, as he felt them

within the little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the

poet, not of nature, but of art; and the distinction between the two, as

well as I can make it out, is this--The poet of nature is one who, from

the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast,

sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in

nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to

the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the

truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion

with the very soul of nature; to be identified with and to foreknow and to

record the feelings of all men at all times and places, as they are liable

to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his

readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he

sees them as they are; he feels them in their universal interest, for he

feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common

nature. Such was Homer, such was Shakspeare, whose works will last as long

as nature, because they are a copy of the indestructible forms and

everlasting impulses of nature, welling out from the bosom as from a

perennial spring, or stamped upon the senses by the hand of their maker.

The power of the imagination in them, is the representative power of all

nature. It has its centre in the human soul, and makes the circuit of the

universe.

Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of it.

He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he

sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings

of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakspeare had an intuitive

and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart of man in

all possible circumstances: Pope had an exact knowledge of all that he

himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his daring

flight from heaven to earth, through Chaos and old Night. Pope's Muse

never wandered with safety, but from his library to his grotto, or from

his grotto into his library back again. His mind dwelt with greater

pleasure on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could describe

the faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own person, better

than the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the face of heaven--a

piece of cut-glass or a pair of paste buckles with more brilliance and

effect, than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun. He would be more

delighted with a patent lamp, than with "the pale reflex of Cynthia's

brow," that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre, that trembles

through the cottage window, and cheers the watchful mariner on the lonely

wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished life. That

which was nearest to him, was the greatest; the fashion of the day bore

sway in his mind over the immutable laws of nature. He preferred the

artificial to the natural in external objects, because he had a stronger

fellow-feeling with the self-love of the maker or proprietor of a gewgaw,

than admiration of that which was interesting to all mankind. He preferred

the artificial to the natural in passion, because the involuntary and

uncalculating impulses of the one hurried him away with a force and

vehemence with which he could not grapple; while he could trifle with the

conventional and superficial modifications of mere sentiment at will,

laugh at or admire, put them on or off like a masquerade dress, make much

or little of them, indulge them for a longer or a shorter time, as he

pleased; and because while they amused his fancy and exercised his

ingenuity, they never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or

indifference. His mind was the antithesis of strength and grandeur; its

power was the power of indifference. He had none of the enthusiasm of

poetry: he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion.

It cannot be denied, that his chief excellence lay more in diminishing,

than in aggrandizing objects; in checking, not in encouraging our

enthusiasm; in sneering at the extravagances of fancy or passion, instead

of giving a loose to them; in describing a row of pins and needles, rather

than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans; in penning a lampoon or a

compliment, and in praising Martha Blount.

Shakspeare says,

"In Fortune's ray and brightness

The herd hath more annoyance by the brize

Than by the tyger: but when the splitting wind

Makes flexible the knees of knotted oaks,

And flies fled under shade, why then

The thing of courage,

As roused with rage, with rage doth sympathise;

And with an accent tuned in the self-same key,

Replies to chiding Fortune."

There is none of this rough work in Pope. His Muse was on a

peace-establishment, and grew somewhat effeminate by long ease and

indulgence. He lived in the smiles of fortune, and basked in the favour of

the great. In his smooth and polished verse we meet with no prodigies of

nature, but with miracles of wit; the thunders of his pen are whispered

flatteries; its forked lightnings pointed sarcasms; for "the gnarled oak,"

he gives us "the soft myrtle:" for rocks, and seas, and mountains,

artificial grass-plats, gravel-walks, and tinkling rills; for earthquakes

and tempests, the breaking of a flower-pot, or the fall of a china jar;

for the tug and war of the elements, or the deadly strife of the passions,

we have

"Calm contemplation and poetic ease."

Yet within this retired and narrow circle how much, and that how

exquisite, was contained! What discrimination, what wit, what delicacy,

what fancy, what lurking spleen, what elegance of thought, what pampered

refinement of sentiment! It is like looking at the world through a

microscope, where everything assumes a new character and a new

consequence, where things are seen in their minutest circumstances and

slightest shades of difference; where the little becomes gigantic, the

deformed beautiful, and the beautiful deformed. The wrong end of the

magnifier is, to be sure, held to every thing, but still the exhibition is

highly curious, and we know not whether to be most pleased or surprised.

Such, at least, is the best account I am able to give of this

extraordinary man, without doing injustice to him or others. It is time to

refer to particular instances in his works.--The Rape of the Lock is the

best or most ingenious of these. It is the most exquisite specimen of

_fillagree_ work ever invented. It is admirable in proportion as it is

made of nothing.

"More subtle web Arachne cannot spin,

Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see

Of scorched dew, do not in th' air more lightly flee."

It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance is

given to every thing, to paste, pomatum, billet-doux, and patches. Airs,

languid airs, breathe around;--the atmosphere is perfumed with

affectation. A toilette is described with the solemnity of an altar raised

to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with

all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament,

no splendour of poetic diction, to set off the meanest things. The balance

between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity, is as nicely trimmed

as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great, and the

great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph

of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the

perfection of the mock-heroic! I will give only the two following passages

in illustration of these remarks. Can anything be more elegant and

graceful than the description of Belinda, in the beginning of the second

canto?

"Not with more glories, in the ethereal plain,

The sun first rises o'er the purpled main,

Than, issuing forth, the rival of his beams

Launch'd on the bosom of the silver Thames.

Fair nymphs, and well-drest youths around her shone,

But ev'ry eye was fix'd on her alone.

On her white breast a sparkling cross she wore,

Which Jews might kiss, and infidels adore.

Her lively looks a sprightly mind disclose,

Quick as her eyes, and as unfix'd as those:

Favours to none, to all she smiles extends;

Oft she rejects, but never once offends.

Bright as the sun, her eyes the gazers strike;

And like the sun, they shine on all alike.

Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,

Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:

If to her share some female errors fall.

Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.

This nymph, to the destruction of mankind,

Nourish'd two locks, which graceful hung behind

In equal curls, and well conspir'd to deck

With shining ringlets the smooth iv'ry neck."

The following is the introduction to the account of Belinda's assault upon

the baron bold, who had dissevered one of these locks "from her fair head

for ever and for ever."

"Now meet thy fate, incens'd Belinda cry'd,

And drew a deadly bodkin from her side.

(The same his ancient personage to deck,

Her great, great grandsire wore about his neck,

In three seal-rings; which after, melted down,

Form'd a vast buckle for his widow's gown;

Her infant grandame's whistle next it grew,

The bells she jingled, and the whistle blew:

Then in a bodkin grac'd her mother's hairs,

Which long she wore, and now Belinda wears.)"

I do not know how far Pope was indebted for the original idea, or the

delightful execution of this poem, to the Lutrin of Boileau.

The Rape of the Lock is a double-refined essence of wit and fancy, as the

Essay on Criticism is of wit and sense. The quantity of thought and

observation in this work, for so young a man as Pope was when he wrote it,

is wonderful: unless we adopt the supposition, that most men of genius

spend the rest of their lives in teaching others what they themselves have

learned under twenty. The conciseness and felicity of the expression is

equally remarkable. Thus in reasoning on the variety of men's opinions, he

says--

"'Tis with our judgments, as our watches; none

Go just alike, yet each believes his own."

Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and

illustrations in the Essay: the critical rules laid down are too much

those of a school, and of a confined one. There is one passage in the

Essay on Criticism in which the author speaks with that eloquent

enthusiasm of the fame of ancient writers, which those will always feel

who have themselves any hope or chance of immortality. I have quoted the

passage elsewhere, but I will repeat it here.

"Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,

Above the reach of sacrilegious hands;

Secure from flames, from envy's fiercer rage,

Destructive war, and all-involving age.

Hail, bards triumphant, born in happier days,

Immortal heirs of universal praise!

Whose honours with increase of ages grow,

As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow."

These lines come with double force and beauty on the reader as they were

dictated by the writer's despair of ever attaining that lasting glory

which he celebrates with such disinterested enthusiasm in others, from the

lateness of the age in which he lived, and from his writing in a tongue,

not understood by other nations, and that grows obsolete and

unintelligible to ourselves at the end of every second century. But he

needed not have thus antedated his own poetical doom--the loss and entire

oblivion of that which can never die. If he had known, he might have

boasted that his "little bark" wafted down the stream of time,

"With _theirs_ should sail,

Pursue the triumph and partake the gale"--

if those who know how to set a due value on the blessing, were not the

last to decide confidently on their own pretensions to it.

There is a cant in the present day about genius, as every thing in poetry:

there was a cant in the time of Pope about sense, as performing all sorts

of wonders. It was a kind of watchword, the shibboleth of a critical party

of the day. As a proof of the exclusive attention which it occupied in

their minds, it is remarkable that in the Essay on Criticism (not a very

long poem) there are no less than half a score successive couplets rhyming

to the word _sense_. This appears almost incredible without giving the

instances, and no less so when they are given.

"But of the two, less dangerous is the offence,

To tire our patience than mislead our sense." _lines_ 3, 4.

"In search of wit these lose their common sense,

And then turn critics in their own defence." _l._ 28, 29.

"Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,

And fills up all the mighty void of sense." _l._ 209, 10.

"Some by old words to fame have made pretence,

Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense." _l._ 324, 5.

"Tis not enough no harshness gives offence;

The sound must seem an echo to the sense." _l._ 364, 5.

"At every trifle scorn to take offence;

That always shews great pride, or little sense." _l._ 386, 7.

"Be silent always, when you doubt your sense,

And speak, though sure, with seeming diffidence." _l._ 366, 7.

"Be niggards of advice on no pretence,

For the worst avarice is that of sense." _l._ 578, 9.

"Strain out the last dull dropping of their sense,

And rhyme with all the rage of impotence." _l._ 608, 9.

"Horace still charms with graceful negligence,

And without method talks us into sense." _l._ 653, 4.

I have mentioned this the more for the sake of those critics who are

bigotted idolisers of our author, chiefly on the score of his correctness.

These persons seem to be of opinion that "there is but one perfect writer,

even Pope." This is, however, a mistake: his excellence is by no means

faultlessness. If he had no great faults, he is full of little errors. His

grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect. In the Abelard and

Eloise, he says--

"There died the best of passions, Love and Fame."

This is not a legitimate ellipsis. Fame is not a passion, though love is:

but his ear was evidently confused by the meeting of the sounds "love and

fame," as if they of themselves immediately implied "love, and love of

fame." Pope's rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to the eye

instead of the ear; and this to a greater degree, not only than in later,

but than in preceding writers. The praise of his versification must be

confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony. In the translation of the

Iliad, which has been considered as his masterpiece in style and

execution, he continually changes the tenses in the same sentence for the

purpose of the rhyme, which shews either a want of technical resources, or

great inattention to punctilious exactness. But to have done with this.

The Epistle of Eloise to Abelard is the only exception I can think of, to

the general spirit of the foregoing remarks; and I should be disingenuous

not to acknowledge that it is an exception. The foundation is in the

letters themselves of Abelard and Eloise, which are quite as impressive,

but still in a different way. It is fine as a poem: it is finer as a piece

of high-wrought eloquence. No woman could be supposed to write a finer

love-letter in verse. Besides the richness of the historical materials,

the high _gusto_ of the original sentiments which Pope had to work upon,

there were perhaps circumstances in his own situation which made him enter

into the subject with even more than a poet's feeling. The tears shed are

drops gushing from the heart: the words are burning sighs breathed from

the soul of love. Perhaps the poem to which it bears the greatest

similarity in our language, is Dryden's Tancred and Sigismunda, taken from

Boccaccio. Pope's Eloise will bear this comparison; and after such a test,

with Boccaccio for the original author, and Dryden for the translator, it

need shrink from no other. There is something exceedingly tender and

beautiful in the sound of the concluding lines:

"If ever chance two wandering lovers brings

To Paraclete's white walls and silver springs," etc.

The Essay on Man is not Pope's best work. It is a theory which Bolingbroke

is supposed to have given him, and which he expanded into verse. But "he

spins the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument."

All that he says, "the very words, and to the self-same tune," would prove

just as well that whatever is, is _wrong_, as that whatever is, is

_right_. The Dunciad has splendid passages, but in general it is dull,

heavy, and mechanical. The sarcasm already quoted on Settle, the Lord

Mayor's poet, (for at that time there was a city as well as a court poet)

"Now night descending, the proud scene is o'er,

But lives in Settle's numbers one day more"--

is the finest inversion of immortality conceivable. It is even better than

his serious apostrophe to the great heirs of glory, the triumphant bards

of antiquity!

The finest burst of severe moral invective in all Pope, is the prophetical

conclusion of the epilogue to the Satires:

"Virtue may chuse the high or low degree,

'Tis just alike to virtue, and to me;

Dwell in a monk, or light upon a king,

She's still the same belov'd, contented thing.

Vice is undone if she forgets her birth,

And stoops from angels to the dregs of earth.

But 'tis the Fall degrades her to a whore:

Let Greatness own her, and she's mean no more.

Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess,

Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless;

In golden chains the willing world she draws,

And hers the gospel is, and hers the laws;

Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,

And sees pale Virtue carted in her stead.

Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,

Old England's Genius, rough with many a scar,

Dragged in the dust! his arms hang idly round,

His flag inverted trails along the ground!

Our youth, all livery'd o'er with foreign gold,

Before her dance; behind her, crawl the old!

See thronging millions to the Pagod run,

And offer country, parent, wife, or son!

Hear her black trumpet through the land proclaim,

That _not to be corrupted is the shame_.

In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow'r,

'Tis av'rice all, ambition is no more!

See all our nobles begging to be slaves!

See all our fools aspiring to be knaves!

The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,

Are what ten thousand envy and adore:

All, all look up with reverential awe,

At crimes that 'scape or triumph o'er the law;

While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry:

Nothing is sacred now but villainy.

Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)

Show there was one who held it in disdain."

His Satires are not in general so good as his Epistles. His enmity is

effeminate and petulant from a sense of weakness, as his friendship was

tender from a sense of gratitude. I do not like, for instance, his

character of Chartres, or his characters of women. His delicacy often

borders upon sickliness; his fastidiousness makes others fastidious. But

his compliments are divine; they are equal in value to a house or an

estate. Take the following. In addressing Lord Mansfield, he speaks of the

grave as a scene,

"Where Murray, long enough his country's pride,

Shall be no more than Tully, or than Hyde."