to the end of the century proved that, in some sense, he is a most characteristic product. Nor is it hard to see the main sources of his power. Pope had at least two great poetical qualities. He was amongst the most keenly sensitive of men, and he had an almost unique felicity of expression, which has enabled him to coin more proverbs than any writer since Shakespeare. Sensitive, it may be said, is a polite word for morbid, and his felicity of phrase was more adapted to coin epigrams than poetry. The controversy is here irrelevant. Pope, whether, as I should say, a true poet, or, as some have said, only the most sparkling of rhymesters, reflects the thoughts of his day with a curious completeness. Some of his thoughts are, of course, the outgrowth of his own special idiosyncrasies; others are common to the poet of all ages; but Pope also resembles a plastic material, which has taken the impress of the main peculiarities of the time with singular 1 sharpness and fidelity. The works which are specially instructive are, in the first place, the Essay on Man,' which is a poetical version of the religious creed of the age; secondly, the translation of Homer, which exemplifies some of its chief poetical theories; and, thirdly, the various satires, which are significant of its social structure. He has numerous followers and rivals in each of these capacities. Yet, as a translator and a satirist, and even as a didactic poet, he was scarcely approached by any writer of his own school, and will, perhaps, survive some writers who have been exalted above him by modern taste. The satires are on the borderland between prose and poetry. The characteristics of the loftier species of contemporary poetry must be sought chiefly in the other writings.

25. The Essay on Man' is Pope's most ambitious, though not his most successful, work. One great, and indeed insuperable, difficulty which made it unsatisfactory from the first, shows the radical unfitness of the philosophy of the time for poetical, and therefore for religious purposes. The Essay on Man' aspires to be, like Leibnitz's celebrated work, a Theodicæa.' The first paragraph ends, like the first paragraph of 'Paradise Lost,' with the statement that the poet hopes to vindicate1 the ways of God to man.' Elsewhere,"

1

In Milton the word is 'justify.' 2 Epistle to Arbuthnot,' 1. 341.

Pope boasts, in a phrase adopted from the first stanza of the 'Faerie Queen,' that

Not in Fancy's maze he wandered long,

But stoop'd to truth and moralised his song.

The relation between the three poems is, indeed, characteristic. Milton and Spenser could utter their deepest thoughts about man's position in the universe and his moral nature by aid of a symbolism intelligible to themselves and their readers. But where was Pope to turn for concrete symbols sufficiently expressive of his thought? The legends of the Bible claimed too little reverence. Even in the majestic poetry of Milton we are unpleasantly reminded of the fact that the mighty expounder of Puritan thought is consciously devising a conventional imagery. The old romance which had fed Spenser's imagination was too hopelessly dead to serve the purpose. It had left behind a wearisome spawn of so-called romances; it had been turned into mere ribaldry by Butler; and Pope wisely abandoned his cherished project of an epic poem, though feebler hands attempted the task. The Essay on Man' is substantially a versification of the most genuine creed of the time; of that Deism which took various shapes with Clarke, Tindal, and Shaftesbury, and which Bolingbroke seems to have more or less put into shape to be elaborated into poetry by his friends. But the thought had generated no concrete imagery. It remained of necessity what it was at first-a mere bare skeleton of logic, never clothed upon by imaginative flesh and blood. As in Clarke's sermons, we have diagrams instead of pictures; a system of axioms, deductions, and corollaries instead of a rich mythology; a barren metaphysico-mathematical theory of the universe, which might satisfy the intellect, but remained hopelessly frigid for the emotional nature.

26. Pope's poetry is thus forced to become didactic, and not only didactic, but ratiocinative. It consists of a series of arguments, and, what is worse, of incoherent argument hitched into rhyme. The emotion is always checked by the sense that the Deity, whose ways are indicated, is after all but a barren abstraction in no particular relation to our race or its history. He never touches the circle of human interests.

1

We believe in a mathematical proposition without caring whether it was known to Archimedes or to Newton; and the God whose existence is proved like a proposition in Euclid brings us into no sympathy with the saints and heroes of old. Primitive imaginings as to the nature of God had become for Pope a meaningless jargon like the speculations of Ptolemaic astronomers. Theology divorced from history does not take us back to the Garden of Eden, but to some conventional age of which we know, and the poet knows, that it never existed except as a metaphysical hypothesis. We have no visions of heaven and hell, regions which obviously lie beyond the range of philosophy; and though Pope was of course attacked for omitting them, their appearance in his poem would have been æsthetically discordant as well as logically absurd. He deals with demonstration, not with tradition. History is a miscellaneous collection of precedents more or less applicable to modern times, but not the record of earlier stages of processes still at work. The new enlightenment had made men more conscious than their ancestors of the difference between the thoughts of succeeding ages, and made them incapable of the old naïve identification of classical, medieval, and modern types; it had not yet revealed the identities which produce a new interest in the ancient forms as containing the germs of the new. Thus limited to the sphere of abstract logic, only one practical conclusion emerges in the doctrine to which the essay finally leads us, 'that whatever is is right.' Nothing is less poetical than optimism; for the essence of a poet's function is to harmonise the sadness of the universe.

27. Pope, it must be added, might have been more successful even under these conditions if he had been more consistent. Unfortunately, his logic is spoilt by his timidity or his real absence of speculative power. A consistent pantheism or a consistent scepticism may be made the sources of profoundly impressive poetry. Each of them generates a deep and homogeneous sentiment which may utter itself in song. Pope, as the mouthpiece of Spinoza or of Hobbes, might have written an impressive poem, if he had not attained to the level of Lucretius. But the age was not favourable to consistency and thoroughness. The 'Essay on Man' remains radically unsatisfactory, considered as a whole, though there are many brief

passages marked by Pope's special felicity of touch; many in which the moral sentiment is true and tender; and many in which he forgets for a moment the danger of open heterodoxy, and utters with genuine force some of the deeper sentiments which haunt us in this mysterious universe.

28. Another side of Pope's genius is illustrated chiefly by the translation of Homer. That translation undoubtedly produced a more powerful influence upon the age than any other which has ever been executed. Bentley, doubtless, expressed the opinion of all qualified readers, even at that time, when he said that it was a pretty poem, but not Homer. And yet, if the authority of competent critics may be trusted, it enjoys, in virtue of a certain width and vigour of style, a stronger vitality than that of recent performances of incomparably better scholars. The artistic theory, however, which is assumed throughout the work, is all that need attract our attention. Pope's view of Homer illustrates the peculiar classicism of the time. The merit at which Pope specially aimed-according to the often-repeated anecdote was that described by the technical phrase 'correctness,' and to be correct was the same thing as to be classical. Warton, like Macaulay long afterwards, ridiculed the artificial code of criticism in which this formed the universal term of commendation. It is, however, worth while to endeavour to perceive its meaning a little more distinctly.

29. In religion, or morality, and in politics, the thought of the age recognised a system of abstract rules, mathematically precise and coherent, which, as regarded from various aspects, gave rise to the conceptions of the religion of nature, the law of nature, the social contract, and other allied hypo-| theses. A similar code was supposed to exist in the sphere of imagination. Obedience to that code constituted correctness, though deviations might sometimes be excused under the name of irregular greatness. The political creed was then, as afterwards, a 'religion of nature,' taking that phrase in the sense of Clarke, rather than the sense of modern pantheistic or poetic mysticism. The imagination was to work within the limits prescribed for it by the cool and impartial reason. Superstition and enthusiasm-the dreaded diseases in the religious world-were equally abhorrent in the sphere of

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poetry. The poet was never to throw the reins upon the neck of his passion, or to abandon himself to a fine frenzy in defiance of mechanical laws. No sane critic will deny that there was a core of truth in these assumptions. The desire for correctness, so far as correctness implies symmetry, a continuous reference to the general effect in working out subordinate details, temperance in expression, and careful polish: of style, is a sentiment indispensable to the creation of great and permanent work. The weakness of the Pope school consisted chiefly in the assumption that such a code of laws could be laid down in a series of mathematical propositions. The essence of poetry is to be spontaneous, and the laws obeyed by the imagination must, so to speak, be imbedded in its structure, not imposed from without. In the great ages of art the creative imagination is instinctively shocked by defeets of harmony. In the more conscious and less passionate periods the instinct disappears, and the place is ill supplied by rules which can never be adequate, and which, therefore, appear to be artificial. The fine sense which enables a painter to draw an exquisite curve cannot be compensated by a pair of compasses, which enables a mechanic to draw a perfectly accurate and perfectly monotonous circle. The rules of Pope's period sanctioned the attempt to do by rule and compass what ought to be done by the eye. That is the natural result of reason intruding into the place of imagination, which makes poetry prosaic, as it lowers morality to a set of prudential maxims, and forces the religious instinct to abandon ideal symbols for a system of abstract laws.

30. But how were these rules to be framed? Where were men to look for that poetical code which was to take a place analogous to that of the law of nature'? The classical models, as interpreted by French critics, had the appearance of giving just the system of abstract rules founded on common sense which was required by the artist. There were difficulties, indeed, in accepting the French empire. The old English tradition remained throughout the century. Hume and Gibbon might prefer Racine to Shakespeare; but English writers in a blind way continued to protest against the chains imposed upon them. The rules of epic poetry and the law of dramatic unities never fairly established themselves. Addison, indeed,