he displays none of the irregular and unexpected gush of the songster. He has no variations. The tune is delicate, but not natural. It reminds us of a bird, all over brilliant, which pipes its one lay in a golden cage and has forgotten the green wood in the luxury of confinement. But Dryden's versification has the freedom and the freshness of the fields. Pope's modulation is of the ear; Dryden's of the subject.-WILLMOTT, ROBERT ARIS, 1851, Pleasures, Objects and Advantages of Literature, p. 79. I admire Pope in the very highest degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic artist for producing brilliant and evanescent effect out of elements that have hardly a moment's life within them. There is a flash and startling explosion, then there is a dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the suddenness of a display, that, springing like a burning arrow out of darkness, rushes back into darkness with arrowy speed, and in a moment all is over. -DE QUINCEY, THOMAS, 1851, Lord Carlisle on Pope, Tait, n. s. vol. 18, p. 311. No poet ever enjoyed greater popularity, or had more influence on the taste of his age. In versification this was immediate and direct. His style was copied. by innumerable imitators, until the public ear was cloyed with the everlasting echo of the heroic couplet. In his own didactic poems Pope was too uniform in his pauses and construction. The reader is apt to be The reader is apt to be fatigued with the regular recurrence of terse and pointed lines, the balanced verse and striking antithesis, unless attention be closely fixed on the weighty truths, the admirable sentiments, and marvellous felicity of diction which are compressed within these brilliant couplets. besides harmonious versification, Pope taught correctness and precision of thought, and brought slovenly execution into irredeemable disgrace. Thomson But, would not have thrice corrected, and almost rewritten his "Seasons," improving them on each revision, if Pope had not raised the standard of public taste with respect to poetical composition. It has been said by one who is himself a true poet, Professor Aytoun, that Pope founded no school of poetry, or if he did it was soon extinct, driven out by Percy's "Reliques," by Cowper, and Burns. The attempt to rival Pope on his own peculiar ground was hopeless. CARRUTHERS, ROBERT, 1853-57, The Life of Alexander Pope, p. 415. The taste and sensibilities of Pope, which led him to cultivate the society of persons of fine manners, or wit, or taste, or beauty, caused him to shrink equally from that shabby and boisterous crew which formed the rank and file of literature in his time: and he was as unjust to these men as they to him. The delicate little creature sickened at habits and company which were quite tolerable to robuster men: and in the famous feud between Pope and the Dunces, and without attributing any peculiar wrong to either, one can quite understand how the two parties should so hate each other. As I fancy, it was a sort of necessity that when Pope's triumph passed, Mr. Addison and his men. should look rather contemptuously down on it from their balcony; so it was natural for Dennis and Tibbald, and Webster and Cibber, and the worn and hungry pressmen in the crowd below, to howl at him and assail him. And Pope was more savage to Grub-street, than Grub-street was to Pope.-THACKERAY, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE, 1853, The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century. In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very excellencies after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded; naturalness produced by studious art; daring sublimity by strict self-restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than the one now in vogue among the poetasters, by honest faith in God. If he be shocked by certain peculiarities of diction, and by the fondness for perpetual antithesis, let him remember, that what seems strange to our day was natural and habitual in his; and that, in the eyes of our grandchildren, Keats's and Shelley's peculiarities will seem as monstrous as Pope's or Johnson's do in ours.-KINGSLEY, CHARLES, 1853, Alexander Smith and Alexander Pope, Fraser's Magazine, vol. 48, p. 455. great and fine intellects who have in various ages seized the very spirit of human society, and depicted it in their pages, or corrected its corruptions, by the force of their inspiration from the sources of moral truth. For the sake of the finished excellence which proves him to have been a great man and a great artist, we must make what allowances we can for drawbacks which it is impossible to hide and useless to ignore.-HANNAY, JAMES, 1854, Satire and Satirists, p. 154. Pope is once again in the ascendant. For a moment a thin filmy shadow passed over his name and fame; but time has restored "all its original brightness, "and Pope now stands, where he ever will stand, amongst the foremost men in the annals of his country's literature.-DILKE, CHARLES WENTWORTH, 1854-75, Pope's Writings, The Papers of a Critic, vol. 1, p. 94. He was, some one we think has said, the sort of a person we cannot even conceive existing in a barbarous age. His subject was not life at large, but fashionable life. He described the society in which he was thrown, the people among whom he lived; his mind was a hoard of small maxims, a quintessence of petty observations. When he described character, he described it, not dramatically nor as it is in itself, but observantly and from without; calling up in the mind not so much a vivid conception of the man of the real, corporeal, substantial being-as an idea of the idea which a metaphysical bystander might refine and excruciate concerning him. Society in Pope is scarcely a society of people, but of pretty little atoms, colored and painted with hoops or in coats,miniature of metaphysics, a puppet-show of sylphs. He elucidates the doctrine that the tendency of civilized poetry is towards an analytic sketch of the existing civilization.-BAGEHOT, WALTER, 1855, William Cowper, Works, ed. Morgan, vol. I, p. 424. a Whatever was his power of imagination, of fancy, his command of language, or flow of verse, his genius had not that spiritual healthfulness which is a characteristic of our greatest English poets. There is, running through all the writings of Pope, a large vein of misanthropy. It was his habit to proclaim contempt of the world, antipathy to his fellow-beings, except a few choice friends, whom he clung to most faithfully.-REED, HENRY, 1855, Lectures on English Literature, From Chaucer to Tennyson, p. 234. Thus poetry is degraded and made ornamental. Pope and his school wrote poetry fit to put round frosted cake.-EMERSON, RALPH WALDO, 1856-84, English Traits, p. 242. Of all English authors he [Porson] seems to have had the greatest liking for Pope. He admired, with all the world, Pope's vigour of thought and accuracy and beauty of language. Mr. Maltby has seen the tears roll down his cheeks while he was repeating Pope's "Epistle to the Earl of Oxford," prefixed to Parnell's Poems. Walking with Maltby and Rogers over Pope's Villa at Twickenham, he exclaimed, "Oh, how I should like to pass the remainder of my days in a house which was the abode of a man so deservedly celebrated!"' -WATSON, JOHN SELBY, 1861, The Life of Richard Porson, p. 350. If he be not a universal poet in the most striking sense now, none the less is he really a poet, though belonging to a less vehement, less passionate, less startling class, in an embellished, correct and pure fashion. He is far superior to Boileau in extent of ideas and also in taste for the picturesque.-SAINTE-BEUVE, C. A., 186475, Pope as a Poet, English Portraits, p. 298. The time has gone by for Pope to be ranked among the master-geniuses of our literature.-WARD, ADOLPHUS WILLIAM, 1869, ed. Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, Iniroductory Memoir, p. xlvii. Sententious, acute, brilliant, and felicitous, the servant of an age which he was content to flatter and to please, but never attempted to elevate, who fixed for English poetry that factitious and stilted poetic diction which echoed and re-echoed by imitators till it became ashamed and vexed at its own empty reiterations.PORTER, NOAH, 1870, Books and Reading, p. 262. The serene and just benevolence which placed Pope, in his theology, two centuries in advance of his time, and enabled him to sum the law of noble life in two lines which, so far as I know, are the most complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words: Never elated, while one man's oppress'd; I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, and to make yourselves entirely masters of his system of ethics; because, putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world's than ours, I hold Pope to be the most perfect representative we have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind; and I think the "Dunciad" is the most absolutely chiselled and monumental work "exacted" in our country. You will find, as you study Pope, that he has expressed for you, in the strictest language and within the briefest limits, every law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, and, finally, of a benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned, contented with its allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation to Him in whose hands lies that of the universe.-RUSKIN, JOHN, 1870, Lectures on Art, Lecture iii. Whatever may be said in his dispraise, he is likely to be quoted as long as the English is a living language.-BRYANT, WILLIAM CULLEN, 1870, A New Library of Poetry and Song, Introduction. He was like those little musicians, infant prodigies, who, brought up at the piano, suddenly acquire a marvellous touch, roll out scales, brilliant shakes, makes the octavos vault with an agility and justice which drive off the stage the most famous artists. In fine, his great cause for writing was literary vanity; he wished to be admired, and nothing more, his life was that of a coquette studying herself in a glass, bedecking herself, smirking, paying compliments to herself, yet declaring that compliments weary her, that painting the face makes her dirty, and that she has a horror of affectation. Pope has no dash, no naturalness or manliness; no more ideas than passions; at least such ideas as a man feels it necessary to write, and in connection with which we lose thought of words. Religious controversy and party quarrels resound about him; he studiously avoids them; amidst all these shocks his chief care is to preserve his writing desk; he is a very lukewarm Catholic, all but a deist, not well aware of what deism means; and on this point he borrows from Bolingbroke ideas whose scope he cannot see, but which he thinks suitable to be put into verse. . . . I wish I could admire Pope's works of imagination, but I cannot. In vain I read the testimony of his contemporaries, and even that of the moderns, and repeat to myself that in his time he was the prince of poets.-TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. 11, bk. iii, ch. vii, pp. 196, 198, 199. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be called acquired, whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin.-LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1871-90, Pope, Prose Works, Riverside ed., vol. IV, p. 31. He is in a peculiar degree the mirror of the social passions and sentiments, the modes and tone of his day. To comprehend how much this is so, we have only to suppose the ten volumes of Pope's works annihilated. What chasm would be created by the act of destruction! But in what? Not a single discovery, or truth, or thought, or idea, or character, or image, which counts among the treasured possessions of human intelligence, would be thereby lost. But in the history of English literature and life what a gap would be occasioned! There is no other book in the language, the loss of which would obliterate so much personal anecdote, so much scandal, if you will, but also so much true and firm drawing of character and personal relations, such felicitous touches of manners and contemporary tone.-PATTISON, MARK, 1872-89, Pope and his Editors, Essays, ed. Nettleship, vol. II, p. 351 Dryden was his great model. Perhaps his highest excellence lies in the same direction as that of Dryden lay,—in the power of sketching characters. He, too, was a skillful portrait-painter; but his style is very different from Dryden's. instance he has ventured to challenge comparison with his master, in his picture of Villiers of Zimri, forlorn and dying. A careful juxtaposition of the two masterpieces will well illustrate the affinities and the differences of their authors.—HALES, JOHN W., 1872, Longer English Poems, p. 289. Pope said that the proper study of mankind was Man. But he approached that study from the side of the intellect alone. It was by the criticism of the understanding, not by the emotion of the heart that he worked on his subject. The result was cold speculation and brilliant satire, and in neither of those tempers is any one fit to write fairly or nobly about the whole. of Human Nature; though he is fitted to write about that which Man does, or Man has, up to a certain point. The surface of the "study of mankind" is touched it may be in all its points, but the writer does not penetrate into its depths. It is just the difference between Ben Jonson and Shakespeare: the one not seriously caring for his characters, but only how he may develop them; the other loving, pitying, being personally indignant with his characters: so that in the one we study not men, but the humours of men; in the other we study men, nay mankind. The one creates images of men and dresses them and makes them play their part by strings upon his stage: the other creates living men, and bids them act, and sits by watching them with passion. There is the same kind of difference between Pope's study of man and that study of him to which Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron have accustomed us.-BROOKE, STOPFORD A,, 1874, Theology in the English Poets, p. 20. His writings resemble those fireworks which, after they have fallen to the ground and been apparently quenched, suddenly break out again into sputtering explosions. The waters of a literary revolution have passed over him without putting him out. Though much of his poetry has ceased to interest us, so many of his brilliant couplets still survive that probably no dead writer, with the solitary exception of Shakespeare, is more frequently quoted at the present day. It is in vain that he is abused, ridiculed, and often declared to be no poet at all. STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1874, Hours in a Library, vol. I, p. 90. Pope's English is not only correct, it is also, as Dryden's is, modern. There is no substantial difference between it and the English of the present day, except that Pope is more exact than most modern authors in the use of words. . . It is Pope's modernness as well as correctness, that makes him so valuable a model for the student of modern English. I know few better or more valuable lessons in the choice of English words than, after reading a passage of Pope, to shut the book and to have the verses repeated with blanks here and there for the students to fill up. By comparing one's failures with the original, one learns to appreciate the unerring exactitude with which Pope elaborated every couplet till it reached absolute perfection. Pope is one of the few poets whose lines cannot be misquoted with impunity.-ABBOTT, EDWIN A., 1875, A Concordance to the Works of Alexander Pope, Introduction, pp. iv, v. The Poet of the Understanding.-RosSETTI, WILLIAM MICHAEL, 1878, Lives of Famous Poets, p. 132. Loyal as he was to his friends, he was yet more loyal to his verse. His vanity never led him to literary self-sufficiency; no artist ever showed a truer lowliness before the ideal of his art; no poet ever corrected so much, or so invariably bettered his work by each correction. One of his finest characteristics, indeed, was his high sense of literary dignity. From the first he carried on the work of Dryden by claiming a worth and independence for literature; and he broke with disdain through the traditions of patronage which had degraded men of letters into hangerson of the great.-GREEN, JOHN RICHARD, 1880, History of the English People, vol. IV, p. 208. And not only is Pope's style still popular in the truest sense of the word, but it forms the foundation on which have been built many of the most popular poems in the language. the language. There is scarcely a distinguished poet in the eighteenth century who does not owe something of his style to Pope. However much they may differ from him and from each other, Gray, Collins, Johnson, Goldsmith, and Crabbe all do silent homage to his genius; and if it had not been for the exactness and propriety of metrical expression which Pope erected as a standard, it may well be doubted whether we should have enjoyed the beauty of form which we find in the "Elegy in the Country Churchyard" or the "Ode to Evening;" the striking moral manner that arrests the imagination in the "Vanity of Human Wishes" or the "Deserted Village;" or the dramatic force of the character painting in the "Borough." Added to which, the author of "Childe Harold," the greatest master of idiomatic poetical English that this century has seen, was never wearied in proclaiming his admiration for the genius of Pope, and the extent of his own obligations to him.—COURTHOPE, WILLIAM JOHN, 1881, ed. The Works of Alexander Pope, Introduction to the Moral Essays and Satires, vol, III, p. xxxvi. He felt what Cowper calls the "musical finesse" of Pope, and admired single lines and couplets very much; but he found the "regular da da, da da" of his heroic metre monotonous. He quoted What dire offense from amorous causes springs." I "Amrus causiz springs," horrible! would sooner die than write such a line!! -TENNYSON, ALFRED LORD, 1883, Some Criticisms on Poets, Memoir by his Son, vol. II, p. 286. When he arrived at the age of discretion, which was at an early period, for he was alert and precocious, he made Dryden his master. He was thought to have bettered the music of Dryden in his more polished numbers, and he certainly carried the art of writing the heroic couplet (as he and his contemporaries understood it) to the highest perfection. The bent of his mind was not poetical, but reflective and didactic. He was witty, sarcastic, merciless,-qualities that are inconsistent with a great genius, or a good heart. It was his misfortune to have a crooked mind in a crooked body, and to learn from woman nothing but the exercise of her foibles. -STODDARD, RICHARD HENRY, 1883, ed. English Verse, Translations, Introduction, p. xxx. It rouses the blood, it kindles the heart, to remember what an indomitable force of heroic spirit, and sleepless always as fire, was inclosed in the pitiful body of the misshapen weakling whose whole life was spent in fighting the good fight of sense against folly, of light against darkness, of human speech against brute silence, of truth and reason and manhood against all the banded bestialities of all dunces and all dastards, all blackguardly blockheads and all blockheaded blackguards, who then as now were misbegotten by malignity on dullness. We are easily tempted and naturally apt to set against the high qualities of such warriors on the side of all men worthy of their help, by way of counterpoise to their glory and subtraction from our own debt of gratitude and esteem, the fierceness of their habitual mood and the foulness of their occasional missiles. We are less apt, possibly, to remember the conditions of their life-long fight.SWINBURNE, ALGERNON SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1886, Miscellanies, p. 34. "But Pope, poor D-1, lied from Hand to Mouth; Affected, hypocritical, and vain, A Book in Breeches, and a Fop in Grain; "Mean, morbid, vain, he yet possessed a Heart! And still we marvel at the Man, and still Admire his Finish, and applaud his Skill: Though, as that fabled Barque, a phantom Form, Eternal strains, nor rounds the Cape of Storm, Even so Pope strove, nor ever crossed the Line That from the Noble separates the Fine!" -LANG, ANDREW, 1886, Letters to Dead Authors. I do not know, after all, that Pope is greatly esteemed in the present day. He was, like many poets, vain and ill-tempered. Moreover, he had the fault common to so many of his day he did not know when to leave off. If Pope had not sung to such interminable length he would be more tolerable.-STERRY, J., Ashby-, 1888, London Letter, The Book Buyer, vol. 5, p. 338. Satirist after satirist has chirped like a wren from the head of Pope; where are they now? Where is the great, the terrific, the cloud-compelling Churchill? Meanwhile, in the midst of a generation persistently turned away from all his ideas. and all his models, the clear voice of Pope still rings from the arena of Queen Anne. -GOSSE, EDMUND, 1889, What is a Great Poet? Questions at Issue, p. 105. Everyone knows that Byron loved and defended Pope, and looked upon Pope as an impeccable master; and Pope deserved the recognition of Byron. For lucidity, for sharpness and brilliance of phrase, for delicate force and effect, it is hard to surpass the finest work of Pope. But gradually men came to see that Pope's "Essay on Man" was not the last possibility of English poetry.-DAWSON, W. J., 1890, The Makers of Modern English, Introduction, p. 2. |