ception which then prevailed of the nature and function of poetry. But though certain qualities which we expect to find in poetry are necessarily absent in Pope, these were replaced, at least for his contemporaries, by others. First of all, he owed his success to his marvellous skill in managing the heroic couplet. He declared that as a child he "lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." But he was not satisfied with mere facility. One of his earliest friends and critics, William Walsh, pointed out to him that "though we had had several great poets we never had any one great poet that was correct." Correctness, accordingly, Pope made his aim from the first. Nor did he sacrifice to mere exactness of metre and rhyme the other virtues of couplet verse, compression, epigrammatic force, and brilliancy of phrase. In his Essay on Criticism, he sets forth the artistic principles of the time with special reference to poetry. In this discussion he bids the poet follow Nature, but Nature methodized by rules, for "to copy Nature is to copy them." The substance of the poem is made up of commonplaces, for Pope and his readers believed that there was nothing new under the sun; but these commonplaces are given the most apt, the most chiselled form, a form in which they are fitted to survive as part of the common wisdom of the race. Pope's Homer.-Pope's comprehension of the artistic demands of his time, and his rhetorical skill, fitted him admirably for his work of translating Homer. His own knowledge of Homer was, it is true, second-hand and inaccurate; but the impossibility of making a literally faithful rendering left him the freer to turn the material of the Greek poems into the form in which it was most fitted to become a part of the culture of his own time. Not only does Homer, in Pope's hands, become an eighteenth century poet, by virtue of his submission to the literary fashions of the day-the heroic couplet, and conventional poetic diction--but even the characters, the manners, the ethical ideals of primitive Greece are run over into eighteenth century moulds. Just as to the cloudy mediæval imagination the heroes of Troy became knights, so in Pope's conception they are statesmen and party leaders, treating each other with parliamentary courtesy, and talking of virtue, patriotism, and fame, as glibly and eloquently as Bolingbroke himself. "The Rape of the Lock."-The works of Pope thus far mentioned are chiefly remarkable for their literary qualities. But even more important is the group of poems in which, with no loss of artistic finish, he dealt directly with the life of his time. Of these The Rape of the Lock stands first. The poem was suggested by a trivial occurrence, the rude behavior of Lord Petre in cutting a lock from the head of Miss Fermor. Only the excessive interest of the age in social matters, combined with the sympathetic genius of a poet, could have made such gossip as this outlast the centuries. Pope wrote first a rapid account of the card-party at Hampton at which the theft took place. Later he expanded the poem by introducing the sylphs, who guard the lady's bed, make her toilet, and attend her in public-admirable suggestions of the artifice which directed each act, however trivial, of a belle of Queen Anne's day. The Rape of the Lock is not only a satire on society; it is a witty parody of the heroic style in poetry. Even the verse form is treated humorously, especially through its tendency toward anti-climax, as in the lines, 66 Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, Pope's Satires. In The Rape of the Lock the satire is general, and, on the whole, good-natured. Pope's later poems, however, are intensely personal, and grew out of the circumstances of his life. As has been said already, his character was not a great one. We listen in vain in his poetry for the deeper notes of individual human experience. But his lack of absorption in his inner life made him morbidly sensitive in his external contact with the world. No man ever had more elaborate relations with people than Pope, or got more out of his friends, or changed more often from friendship to enmity, or pursued his enemies with more unwearied spite. The Moral Epistles and Imitations of Horace are crowded with satiric allusions to contemporaries. The Epistle to Dr. Arbuth not contains the savage sketch of Addison under the name Atticus. Countless personal grudges were paid off by the several editions of The Dunciad, an elaborate satire in which, after the fashion of Dryden in MacFlecknoe, the dullards, pedants, and bad poets are presented in ridiculous surroundings and attitudes. All this morbid following of "miserable aims that end with self" seems remote enough from the dignity of a great poet. Yet it must not be forgotten that the age itself was largely preoccupied with small things. Pope's satiric genius came to him as of right, at a time when the eyes of men were turned away from the wonders of nature and of the human heart, and were fixed on themselves and their worldly con cerns. The Essay on Man."-One of Pope's last friendships, that with Bolingbroke, proved the inspiration of the best remembered of his poems, the Essay on Man. Bolingbroke was the representative of eighteenth-century scepticism in its effort to substitute a religion of reason for one of revelation. Pope's poem is in reality an application of common-sense to the problems of the universe and to the life of man; and where common-sense refuses to carry us, "beyond the flaming ramparts of the world," there Pope closes his inquiry. "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The first epistle is concerned with man's place in nature; the second with individual ethics; the third with the origin of society and politics; the fourth with the question of man's happiness. In all four appear the satisfaction of the century with things as they are, its dislike of those speculative differences which lead to fanaticism, its trust in downright utility. "For forms of government let fools contest; In short, the Essay on Man is a marvellous collection of happily phrased couplets, pointing neatly and exactly the beliefs of the age of which Pope was so eminently the voice. V. DR. JOHNSON, AND HIS CIRCLE Social Position of Writers in the Later Eighteenth Century. The social conditions under which literature was ordinarily practised in the second period of the century, were very different from those of Queen Anne's day. By this time, owing to the decisive victory of the Whigs, literature had lost in large part its value as a political weapon in party strife, and authors were obliged to rely entirely upon the public. And the reading public was of slow growth. The writers who depended upon it were compelled to live in a squalid Bohemia-not unlike that inhabited by the popular group of authors in the age of Elizabeth-and to put forth a mass of bad poetry, criticism, and journalism merely for bread. The name of the street where many of them lived, Grub Street, became a synonym for hack writing and poverty. The aristocratic traditions of the profession were supported by men of the highest reputation, like Pope, who could approach the public directly through the subscription list; but for the ordinary writer there was no resource except servitude to the literary broker or bookseller. Under these hard conditions Samuel Johnson and his friends slowly made their way to distinction; from that Grub Street which Pope and Swift had scornfully lampooned, came their successors in power and reputation. Johnson's Life.-Samuel Johnson was born in 1709, the son of a Lichfield bookseller. He was at Oxford for a time, but his father's failure in business obliged him to leave the University. After vainly trying to win his bread as a teacher, he tramped to London. Here he lived in a state of wretchedness which is reflected in his Life of Savage, a poet who was his companion in Grub Street misery. Often the friends. walked the streets from dusk to dawn for want of mere shelter. One resource was, indeed, open to them. Following the success of The Tatler and The Spectator, had come the periodical magazines of miscellaneous literature, for one of which Johnson wrote reports of the debates in Parliament. His first poem, London (1738), gave him some reputation, which was increased by The Vanity of Human Wishes |