Ac written nothing more. Mr. Roscoe some- be acknowledged, was at least not so soon what misstates the case when he asserts exhausted. Elsewhere Warton instances that "before he had arrived at the twenty-the reception given to Pope's Pastorals as fifth year of his age, he had written and contrasted with the little notice taken of published almost all the works on which, Gray's Ode on Eton College, on its first as pieces of originality, genius, and imagina- appearance, as showing how much more tion, his reputation and rank as a poet plentiful good compositions must have essentially depend." Surely the Essay on become when the later than they were when Man, the Moral Epistles, the Satires, and the earlier poet first came before the the Dunciad, are among the compositions public; and he adds, that he supposes no that sustain Pope's poetical reputation as critic can be found that will not place essentially and as much as anything else Gray's poem far above Pope's. Gray's that he has left us; and, however Warton Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, or Bowles might maintain the superiority written at twenty-six, and about as long as of his earlier productions in originality, one of Pope's four Pastorals, consists of genius, and imagination, such a doctrine is ten stanzas, of which the first four, and, in in direct opposition to every critical princi- a certain degree, the last, are natural, ple which Mr. Roscoe professes to hold. tender, and melodious, but the remaining Indeed, such is his inconsistency upon this five at once as overstrained and as commonpoint, that we find him in a subsequent place as any example that it would be easy page describing the Dunciad as a pro- to cite of posture-making in verse. duction which, beyond any other, displays cordingly, everybody has the former by the poetical powers of the author, the fer- heart, and they have supplied several extility of his invention, the variety of his pressions which have come to be among the illustrations, the unrivalled facility and proverbial phrases of literature; the latter force of his diction, and his perfect ac- are by universal tacit consent neglected quaintance with every excellence of his art." and forgotten. If Pope's Pastorals can But it is true, that, before he was four-and- boast of few great beauties, they are equaltwenty, Pope had given to the world, ly free from conspicuous blemishes. In the among other pieces, his Pastorals, his Tale style and upon the principles of execution of January and May, imitated from Chau- to which they belong they are faultless. cer, his Essay on Criticism, his Temple of No such uniform polish of versification Fame, his Messiah, his Windsor Forest, had been exhibited by any preceding his Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate English writer. No other four hundred Lady, and his Rape of the Lock. His continuous lines existed in the language, to Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard was not which, if you only admitted the principle of produced till some years later. Speaking poetical composition upon which they were of his Pastorals, which were written when constructed, so little exception could be he was sixteen, Warton, who was master of Winchester School, tells us, that it has been his fortune, from his way of life, to have seen many compositions of youths of sixteen years old far beyond these Pastorals in point of genius and imagination, though not, perhaps, of correctness. Their excellence, indeed," he adds, "might be owing to having had such a predecessor as Pope." One would have thought, if there was any respect in which these marvellous schoolboys were likely to write the better for having had a model to imitate, it would be correctness, which, however, was the only quality, it seems, in which their compositions were defective. We can only say that we wonder Warton did not preserve a few specimens of all this genius and imagination; and also, that nothing should have afterwards come of it of which the world has ever heard. Pope's precocity, it must taken either for the manner or for the matter. In the faculty, call it by what name we may, by which perfect workmanship, according to the standard adopted, is ensured, no previous English poet had equalled Pope. No other, at least, had ever applied the faculty in question so diligently and systematically. It has been commonly denominated judgment; but that term expresses too much in one direction, and too little in another. The highest judgment in a poet would include the adoption, in every case, of the right principle of poetical composition; on the other hand, judgment alone would not produce the faultless workmanship. There seems, however, to be no better name; taste is also at once too comprehensive and not specific enough; skill imports the mere talent of performing a required operation, without any invention at all, as we might 1847.] POPE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES. an talk of skill in versifying; correctness in- thus expressing himself:-"I confess it was want of consideration that made me dicates only one effect of the faculty so large an endowment of which Pope brought author; I writ because it amused me; I. to the elaboration of his poetry. One of corrected because it was as pleasant to me And again, after the respects in which his judgment, to to correct as to write." adopt the common term, was most won-accounting for the success of the ancients derful was its early maturity; it is, under- in their literary productions principally stood as we have defined it, as remarkably from the circumstance that they made displayed in his Pastorals written at sixteen it the business of their lives to correct as in what he wrote at fifty. He improved, and finish their works for posterity:of course, in skill and force of execution," I believe no one qualification is so likely as his experience of life became enlarged, to make a good writer as the power and his powers of reflection grew stronger of rejecting his own thoughts; and it and were more exercised; his style may must be this (if anything) that can give Holding steadhave acquired much more both of compres-me a chance to be one." sion and of expression; both the form and the ily to the same principle, we have him, spirit, both the body and the soul, of his towards the end of his life, boldly proclaimpoetry may have attained more of com-ing, "the last and greatest art" to be pleteness and development; but, in respect of the success with which all its requisitions were met and satisfied, his earliest manner is not to be distinguished from his latest. "the art to blot." Nothing can go beyond "One simile that solitary shines, In the dry desert of a thousand lines," like the thunderbolts of Jove, were not to be forged even by the divine might of genius, except by hard hammering on the ringing anvil: "Antra Ætnæa tonant, validique incudibus ictus Auditi referunt gemitum, striduntque cavernis Stricturæ chalybum, et fornacibus ignis anhelat." Spence records Pope as saying :-" About fifteen I got acquainted with Mr. Walsh. He used to encourage me much, and used to tell me that there was one way left of excelling; for though we had several great and the common scribbler, "proud of a vast poets, we never had any one great poet extent of flimsy lines"-and the sneer at that was correct; and he desired me to Lord Hervey," Lord Fanny spins a thou"This, I sand such a day"-and other passages in make that my study and aim." suppose," adds Spence, "first led Mr. the same strain. Good poetry, or indeed. Pope to turn his lines over and over again good writing, whether in verse or in prose, so often, which he continued to do till the was in his notion only to be achieved by last; and did it with surprising facility."unsparing labor. The lightnings of song, But we have seen that he was also early exercised by his father in extreme rigor and precision of versification. As for his acquaintance with Walsh, he was certainly not fifteen but seventeen when it began; and it was the perusal of his Pastorals in manuscript, sent to him by Wycherley, which made Walsh desire to know the writer. But we do not know whether they may not have been still further polished afterwards by Walsh's advice. Wycherley, whose acquaintance with the young poet seems to have dated from about half a year earlier, was struck with his judgment from the first, and immediately availed himself of his assistance in the correction of some poems of his own which he was about to send to the press. From the beginning to the end of his career as a writer, it was a maxim or article of faith with Pope, which he never hesitated to avow, that half his strength lay in his talent for correcting. In the Preface to the first volume of his collected pieces, published in 1717, we find him! For, it is almost needless to say, correctness alone, or the mere obliteration of flaws and roughnesses, was not the object of all this toil and pains-taking. Nobody could have held the quality of simple faultlessness in poetry in lower estimation than it was held in by Pope. The getting rid of what was thrown out was nothing; the substitution of something else in its place, this was the part of the operation that alone tested the poet and tried his strength :— "Hoc opus, hic labor est. Pauci, quos æquus amavit. Let us hear his own description:→ But how severely with themselves proceed The aim and result of the whole process was to convert whatever there was of languor or weakness into life and force-whatever moved sluggishly or stiffly into ease, grace, and spirit to smoothe and rivet whatever was loose or disjointed-to enrich, illumine, raise, and refine, both the expression and the thought. It was a creative process throughout. idea or conception should uniformly be the best; let the conception be ever so distinctly present to the mind, it does not necessarily follow that the fittest verbal representation of it should occur to the mind in the same moment. But this is immensely to understate the case even of mere expression, which does not consist simply in finding the right words for thoughts and things, but involves the most effective presentment of each thought and portion of thought with reference to the rest, and also in all writing of any elevation, whether it be verse or prose, some conformity to the requisitions of the ear as well as to those of the intellect. In poetry, the musical or metrical necessities that are to be submitted to are paramount. Here it never has been pretended that much can be done upon the extemporaneous principle; all men have admitted the indispensableness of some elaboration, more or less, in the production of poetry. But such an admission concedes the entire question. If any elaboration, why not as much as possible? The theory of extemporaneous or purely natural expression being given up, there is no other for us to adept except that of expression elaborated to the utmost point to which anything can be gained by carrying the process. This was Pope's theory and practice. And upon such a principle alone, we apprehend, can any poetry be written, at least in a literary age, which shall long continue to be read. It is not easy to see how it can be disputed that this is the right way to attain the highest excellence in writing. The only possible danger is that of overdoing the work of correction and improvement-in which case it ceases to be improvement and becomes the reverse, becomes perversion or deterioration; but we must suppose The qualities, at any rate, which most enough of good taste and good sense in the eminently distinguish Pope's poetry, and writer to prevent that. The humble opera- which have chiefly contributed to its popu tion of washing foul linen might be pushed larity and preservation, are evidently the so far as to ruin what it is desired to clean; produce of this his manner of working. but such a result, we presume, will happen Hence his concentration, which always comonly in the hands of the simplest washer-presses the largest quantity of meaning into women. Of course, if any writer finds that the first words that suggest themselves to him are in all cases the best, and that his most extemporaneous expression never admits of any alteration except for the worse, he will do wisely to write on as fast as his pen will run, and never to think twice either for phrase or matter. But even with writers in prose we must take leave to doubt if this is often the case. It is well known that some of the styles which have most the appearance of being what is called natural have been really the produce of the most anxious elaboration. If we confine ourselves to the consideration of expression alone, there is no reason why the first word that presents itself to embody any particular the fewest words, yet without any undue elliptical license or injury to the completeness of the expression. Hence the perfectly satisfying effect, in general, of his writing, arising from its precision and clearness, the absence of all unnecessary words, and the aptness of those that have been selected to convey the thought. Hence the frequent occurrence of those mucrones verborum, as they were called by the ancients, those pointed and edged sentences, which in their compactness and polish, as well as their sharpness, resemble daggers, and may be carried about one and used in discourse much in the same way as those are in fight. No other English poet, with the exception of Shakspeare alone, has struck out so many lines and phrases as Pope which have had the luck to be adopted, as it were, into the common speech," virum volitare per ora,"-to become, in a peculiar sense, Èлεα лтegоεντα. Open which of his poems we may, and we can hardly read ten lines anywhere without encountering one or more which everybody has by heart. Surely this, if anything be so, is for a writer to have taken root in his land's language, and to live on the lips and in the minds of men. Still the question remains, what is Pope's rank as a poet? or to what degree are his writings endowed with distinctly poetical qualities? It does not follow that his writings are highly poetical because they are highly popular. They may be popular notwithstanding a deficiency of the poetical element, or even in consequence of that deficiency. Their attraction may lie in qualities other than those of a poetical character. There may be qualities in writing that are more generally attractive than poetical ones. There is every reason à priori for supposing that there are. The appreciation of the highest things, at least in the region of the intellectual, belongs, from the nature of the case, to the few, not to the many. The question of Pope's poetical rank has been commonly discussed with an almost exclusive reference to the class of subjects to which he has, for the most part, confined himself,-the principles of morals and metaphysics, and the manners and characters of artificial life and of the society of the day. But, properly speaking, his preference for that range of subjects is rather an indication of what we may call the disposition or temper of his genius than any evidence of the extent of his poetical powers. We are not prepared to affirm that any great aspect of life or of human affairs is essentially unsusceptible of the highest poetical illumination. The amount of the poet's endowment of "the vision and the faculty divine" must be determined, not by his choice of his subject, but by what he has made of it, or by his manner of treating it. There are only three poetical compositions of Pope's in which he can be said to have shown any invention, commonly so called:-the Temple of Fame," the "Rape of the Lock," and the "Dunciad." In no one of the three cases can the inventive power displayed be held to be of the highest or even of a very high order. In the first he had Chaucer, not indeed for his guide or original throughout, but yet for his example and model; in both the other cases, his region was the lawless borderland of the mock-heroic, and his task the comparatively easy one of producing merely a brilliant extravaganza, in which it was his privilege to run riot among all sorts of licenses and eccentricities, and in the construction of which fancy and wit were much more needed than creative imagination. Pope is recorded to have said of himself that he had very little invention as compared with many other poets. Probably he did not consider the defect to be one of much importance; nor was it, for the manner of writing which he usually followed. But we suppose there is no person competent to express or to have an opinion upon such subjects who will seriously maintain that in any other kind of imaginative power, any more than in this, he is to be compared with either Spenser, or Shakspeare, or Milton. It may be argued, indeed, that these poets are too imaginative, and that Pope, in virtue of being less so, is a better writer than any of them. That is another affair. The fact will nevertheless remain undisputed, and, as we conceive, indisputable, that their poetry is of a much more highly imaginative character than his. And can it be doubted that their minds were so too? All things were evidently seen by them colored with another light than what they wore to him. This is attested by the whole strain, and we might almost say by every word, of his poetry and of theirs. Picture, metaphor, passion, music, are the characteristics of theirs; precision, polish, point, and propriety, of his. The characteristics, we say, or distinguishing and predominating attributes; not, of course, that either passion or "the shaping spirit of imagination" is altogether wanting in Pope. But both come only upon special occasions, and when they are sent for; he may be said to keep them, like a pair of spectacles, in his pocket, or corked up in bottles, as magicians are said to keep their subject demons, ready to be let out when they are wanted to conjure with; in his ordinary poetical operations their assistance is dispensed with. With Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton, they are ever present; These great poets can do nothing without imagination and passion. Many readers may prefer Pope's correctness and clearness to their imaginativeness; or they may set up prose as a higher thing than poetry at once; it must at least be admitted that his poetry is something of a kind essentially different from theirs. He may be classed as having been himself a convert, may be supposed to have regarded Dryden and his writings with especial interest. At any rate, it is remarkable that Dryden and Pope, indisputably at the head of our poetry in two successive eras of its history, and bearing so much of a general resemblance to one another, should both have belonged to the same discountenanced and comparatively small religious community. Another thing worthy of being noticed is, that both Dryden and Pope may be considered to have formed themselves, in part, upon Chaucer. Dryden's modernized versions from the father of our poetry, indeed, were executed in his old age; but it is not to be supposed that he had then taken to studying Chaucer for the first time. In this, however, as in other things, Pope had the advantage of having Dryden for his example and instructor; he accordingly began where Dryden ended. Pope's imitations or paraphrases of Chaucer, especially considering the early age at which they were produced, are among the most wonderful of his compositions; but it may be questioned whether we are not in the greater part in below them, or above them; he cannot be classed with them. Pope's proper predecessors must be considered to have been Dryden and Chaucer; it is only with these two, or with one of them, that he can be reasonably ranked or compared. But surely, whatever advantage he may have derived from writing in an era when the language had become more matured and fixed, no one will for a moment place him on the same level with Chaucer, either as a narrative poet or as a satirist. He has produced no work that can be brought into comparison with the Canterbury Tales, any more than with Paradise Lost, or with Hamlet, Othello, or Macbeth. In invention, in richness and delicacy of imagination, in picturesqueness, in pathos, the poetry of Chaucer stands, it might be said, in violent contrast to that of Pope; it belongs not to the same school at all, but to the opposite -to that of Spenser, Shakspeare, and Milton. But even in nearly all the qualities which they may be said to have in common -in wit and humor, in pungency and sarcasm, in the graphic delineation of character, in force, directness, and cordiality of style, and the art of narration generally-debted for them to his having had Dryden the elder writer is far the greater of the two. Even for compactness and finish of expression, making allowance for the less regulated state of the language in Chaucer's day, we should not say that the modern poet has any pretensions to the preference. Chaucer's expression, considered as expression simply, or without reference to the thought of which it is the vehicle, is as clear and precise as Pope's, and for the most part much more natural. The only preceding poet with whom Pope can be properly held to come into competition is Dryden. There were some respects in which they resembled one another, which have not been generally noticed. It seems rather an odd circumstance that Pope's father, a retired hatter or haberdasher, should have taken so much interest, or possessed such a critical taste, in poetry as is implied in the account we have of the manner in which he disciplined his son in verse-making. May not the English Roman Catholics of that day have had their attention turned to such studies by the chief poet of the time being of their faith, and having dedicated one of his greatest works to its defence? We may be sure that every Roman Catholic who read anything read the "Hind and Panther," when it first came out. Pope's father, too, as well as Chaucer to imitate. It may be observed, too, that the chief kind of writing, besides narrative and satire, in which Pope has distinguished himself, reasoning in verse, while it is almost the only kind in which he can be supposed to have learned little or nothing from Chaucer, is that in which he may be said to have learned everything from Dryden. It is a kind of writing in which Dryden so far excels every preceding English poet who has attempted it, that he may be styled its inventor. And the work in which he has made the greatest display of his skill in it, his Hind and Panther," is the one which, as we have just observed, is likely to have been the first that was put into Pope's hands, or the most strongly recommended to his attention, when he began to take to the study of poetry. It is needless to occupy our space with a repetition in other words of the generally unexceptionable comparison which has been drawn between Dryden and Pope by Johnson. It is a curious coincidence, that, while both have given us avowed imitations or modernized versions of several portions of Chaucer's great narrative work, each should also have paraphrased one other of his poems of a different character-Dryden, his Flower and Leaf; Pope, his House of Fame. | |