king, and to celebrate his accession she | friends; pamphleteers ike Tutchin, institutes public games in imitation of who was soundly whipped; plagiarist the ancients; first a race of booksel-like Ward, exposed in the pillory and lers, trying to seize a poet; then the pelted with rotten eggs and apples; struggle of the authors, who first vie courtesans like Eliza Heywood, notowith each other in braying, and then rious by the shamelessness of their dash into the Fleet-ditch filth; then the public confessions; bought journalists, strife of critics, who have to under- hired slanderers, vendors of scandal go the reading of two voluminous au- and insults, half rogues, complete ro thors, without falling asleep.* Strange sterers, and all the literary verinin parodies, to be sure, and in truth not which haunted the gambling-houses, the very striking. Who is not deafened by stews, the gin-cellars, and at a signal these hackneyed and bald allegories, from a bookseller stung honest folk for a Dulness, poppies, mists, and Sleep! crownpiece. These villanies, this foul What if I entered into details, and de- linen, the greasy coat six years old, the scribed the poetess offered for a prize, musty pudding, and the rest, are to be "with cow-like udders, and with ox-like found in Pope as in Hogarth, with Engeyes; " if I related the plunges of the lish coarseness and precision. This is authors, floundering in the Fleet-ditch, their error, they are realists, even under the vilest sewer in the town; if I tran- the classical wig; they do not disguise scribed all the extraordinary verses in what is ugly and mean; they describe which that ugliness and meanness with their exact outlines and distinguishing marks; they do not clothe them in a fine cloak of general ideas; they do not cover them with the pretty innuendoes of society. This is the reason why their satires are so harsh. Pope does not flog the dunces, he knocks them down; his poem is hard and malicious; it is so much so, that it becomes clumsy : to add to the punishment of dunces, he begins at the deluge, writes historical passages, represents at length the past, present, and future empire of Dulness, the library of Alexandria burned by Omar, learning extinguished by the inva sion of the barbarians and by the su perstition of the middle-age, the empire of stupidity which extends over Eng land and will swallow it up. What paving-stones to crush flies! "First he relates, how sinking to the chin, Smit with his mien, the mud-nymphs suck'd him in: How young Lutetia, softer than the down, I must stop. Swift alone might have "See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse di Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; fall; And universal darkness buries all." • * The Dunciad, the end. The last scene ends with noise, cymbals and trombones, crackers and fireworks. As for me, I carry away from this celebrated entertainment only the remembrance of a hubbub. Unwittingly I have counted the lights, I know the machinery, I have touched the toilsome stage-property of apparitions and allegories. I bid farewell to the scenepainter, the machinist, the manager of literary effects, and go elsewhere to and the poet. IV. He possesses the richest store words to depict the sylphs which flutter round his heroine, Belinda ⚫ "But now secure the painted vessel glides, The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides, While melting music steals upon the sky, And softened sounds along the waters die; Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,. The lucid squadrons round the sails repair: Soft o'er the shrouds the aerial whispers breathe, That seemed but zephyrs to the train be Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold, Colours that change whene'er they wave their However, a poet exists in Pope, and to discover him we have only to read him by fragments; if the whole is, as a rule, wearisome or shocking, the details are admirable. It is so at the close of every literary age. Pliny the younger, and Seneca, so affected and so stiff, are charming in small bits; each of Doubtless these are not Shakspeare's their phrases, taken by itself, is a mas-sylphs; but side by side with a natural terpiece; each verse in Pope is a mas- and living rose, we may still look with terpiece when taken alone. At this pleasure on a flower of diamonds, as time, and after a hundred years of cul- they come from the hand of the jewelture, there is no movement, no object, ler, a masterpiece of art and patience, no action, which poets cannot describe. whose facets make the light glitter, and Every aspect of nature was observed; cast a shower of sparkles over the filia sunrise, a landscape reflected in the gree foliage in which they are embedwater, a breeze amid the foliage, and ded. A score of times in a poem of so forth. Ask Pope to paint in verse Pope's we stop to look with wonder on an eel, a perch, or a trout; he has the some of these literary adornments. exact phrase ready; we might glean He feels so well in what the strong from him the contents of a "Gradus." point of his talent lies, that he abuses He gives the features so exactly, that it; he delights to show his skill. What at once we think we see the thing; he can be staler than a card party, or more gives the expression so copiously, that repellant to poetry than the queen of our imagination, however obtuse, will spades or the king of hearts? Yet, end by seeing it. He marks every doubtless for a wager, he has recorded thing in the flight of a pheasant: in the Rape of the Lock a game of ombre; we follow it, hear it, recognize the dresses: * "See! from the brake the whirring pheasant And mounts exulting on triumphant wings... "Behold four kings in majesty revered, Th' expressive emblem of their softer powe; And parti-coloured troops, a shining train, * Ibid. ii. 154; The Rape of ve Lock, e. s 1. 47-68. + Ibid. ii. 160; The Rape of the Lock, c. 3 160, /. 37-44. china, the spoons, the fiery spirits (to | poems are those made up of precepts wit, spirits of wine); we have here in and arguments. Artifice in these is less advance the modes and periphrases of shocking than elsewhere. A poem-I Delille. The celebrated verses in am wrong,essays like his upon Criticism, which Delille at once employs and de- on Man and the Government of Provi scribes imitative harmony, are transla- dence, on the Knowledge and Character ted from Pope.* It is an expiring po- of Men, deserve to be written after re etry, but poetry still: an ornament to flection; they are a study, and almost put on a mantel-piece is an inferior a scientific monograph. We may, we work of art, but still it is a work of art. even ought, to weigh all the words, and To descriptive talent Pope unites ora- verify all the connections: art and at torical talent. This art, proper to the tention are not superfluous, but ncces classical age, is the art of expressing sary; the question concerns exact pre ordinary general ideas. For a hundred cepts and close arguments. In this and fifty years men of both the think- Pope is incomparable. I do not think ing countries, England and France, em- that there is in the world a versifiployed herein all their study. They ed prose like his; that of Boileau is seized those universal and limited not to be compared to it. Not that its truths, which, being situated between ideas are very worthy of attention; we lofty philosophical abstractions and have worn them out, they interest us petty sensible details, are the subject- no longer. The Essay on Criticism rematter of eloquence and rhetoric, and sembles Boileau's Epitres L'Art Poéform what we now-a-days call common- tique, excellent works, no longer read places. They arranged them in com- but in classes at school. It is a collecpartments; methodically developed tion of very wise precepts, whose only them; made them obvious by grouping fault is their being too true. To say and symmetry; disposed them in regu- that good taste is rare; that we ought lar processions, which with dignity and to reflect and learn before deciding; majesty advance well disciplined, and that the rules of art are drawn from in a body. The influence of this ora- nature; that pride, ignorance, prejutorical reason became so great, that it dice, partiality, envy, pervert our judgwas imposed on poetry itself. Buffon ment; that a critic should be sincere, ends by saying, in praise of certain modest, polished, kindly,-all these verses, that they are as fine as fine truths might then be discoveries, but prose. In fact, poetry at this time be- they are so no longer. I suppose that same a more affected prose subjected in the time of Pope, Dryden, and Boio rhyme. It was only a higher kind leau, men had special need of setting of conversation and more select dis- their ideas in order, and of seeing them course. It is powerless when it is ne- very distinctly in very clear phrases. cessary to paint or represent an action, Now that this need is satisfied, it has when the need is to see and make visi- disappeared: we demand ideas, not arble living passions, large genuine emo- rangement of ideas; the pigeon-holes tions, men of flesh and blood; it re- are manufactured, fill them. Pope was ults only in college epics like the Hen- obliged to do it once in the Essay m riade, freezing odes and tragedies like Man, which is a sort of Vicaire Savoy those of Voltaire and Jean-Baptiste ard, less original than the other. He Rousseau, or those of Addison, Thom- shows that God made all for the best, son, Dr. Johnson, and the rest. It that man is limited in his capacity and makes them up of dissertations, because ought not to judge God, that our pas it is capable of nothing else but disser- sions and imperfections serve for the tations. Here henceforth is its domain; general good and for the ends of Provi and its final task is the didactic poem, dence, that happiness lies in virtue and which is a dissertation in verse. Pope submission to the divine will. We excelled in it, and his most perfect recognize here a sort of deism and optimism, of which there was much at that time, borrowed, like those of Rous Peins-moi légèrement l'amant léger de Qu'un doux ruisseau murmure en vers plus * A taie of J. J. Rousseau, in which he tries to depict a philosophical clergyman.-TR. "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is man. With too much weakness for the stoic's seau, from the Théodicée of Leibnitz, *| I could express them (ideas) more but tempered, toned down and arranged shortly this way than in prose itself." for the use of respectable people. The In fact, every word is effective: every conception is not very lofty: this cur- passage must be read slowly; every tailed deity, making his appearance at epithet is an epitome; a more conthe beginning of the eighteenth century, densed style was never written; and, is but a residuum: religion having dis- on the other hand, no one labored more appeared, he remained at the bottom skilfully in introducing philosophical of the crucible; and the reasoners of formulas into the current conversation the time, having no metaphysical in- of society. His maxims have become ventiveness, kept him in their system proverbs. I open his Essay on Man at to stop a gap. In this state and at random, and fall upon the beginning of this place this deity resembles classic his second book. An orator, an author verse. He has an imposing appearance, of the school of Buffon, would be trans. is comprehended easily, is stripped of ported with admiration to see so many power, is the product of cold argu- literary treasures collected in so small mentative reason, and leaves the peo- a space : ple who attend to him, very much at ease; on all these accounts he is akin to an Alexandrine. This poor conception is all the more wretched in Pope because it does not belong to him, for he is only accidentally a philosopher; and to find matter for his poem, three or four systems, deformed and attenuated, are amalgamated in his work. He boasts of having tempered them one with the other, and having "steered between the extremes. "+ The truth is, that he did not understand them, and that he jumbles incongruous ideas at every step. There is a passage in which, to obtain an effect of style, he becomes a pantheist ; moreover, he is bombastic, and assumes the superciliDus, imperious tone of a young doctor of theology. I find no individual invention except in his Moral Essays; in them is a theory of dominant passion which is worth reading. After all, he went farther than Boileau, for instance, in the knowledge of man. Psychology is indigenous in England; we meet it there throughout, even in the least creative minds. It gives rise to the novel, disposesses philosophy, produces the essay, appears in the newspapers, fills current literature, like those indigenous plants which multiply on every soil. But if the ideas are mediocre, the art of expressing them is truly marvellous: marvellous is the word. "I chose verse," says Pope in his Design of an Essay on Man, "because I found *The Theodiate was written in French, and published in 1710.-TR. These words are taken from the Design of an Essay on Man. He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; The first verse epitomizes the whole of * Pope's Works, ii.; An Bay on Man Ep. ii. 375, 7. 1-18. creat This is the proper oratorical | having passions, ki ows his dictionary exordium, like those which Bossuet and grammar; Pop: thoroughly knew places at the beginning of his funeral his dictionary and his grammar, but orations; a sort of elaborate portico to stopped there. receive the audience on their entrance, and prepare them for the magnificence of the temple. The antitheses follow each other in couples like a succession of columns; thirteen couples form a suite; and the last is raised above the rest by a word, which concentrates and combines all. In other hands this prolongation of the same form would become tedious; in Pope's it interests us, so much variety is there in the arrangement and the adornments. In one place the antithesis is comprised in a single line, in another it occupies two: now it is in the substantives, now in the adjectives and verbs; now only in the ideas, now it penetrates the sound and position of the words. In vain we see it reappear; we are not wearied, because each time it adds somewhat to our idea, and shows us the object in a new light. This object itself may be abstract, obscure, unpleasant, opposed to poetry; the style spreads over it its own light; noble images borrowed from the grand and simple spectacles of nature, illustrate and adorn it. For there is a classical architecture of ideas as well as of stones: the first, like the second, is a friend to clearness and regularity, majesty and calm; like the second, it was invented in Greece, transmitted through Rome to France, through France to England, and slightly altered in its passage. Of all the masters who have practised it in England, Pope is the most skilled. After all is there any thing in the lines just quoted but decoration? Translate them literally into prose, and of all those beauties there remains no one. If the reader dissects Pope's arguments, he will hardly be moved by them; he would instinctively think of Pascal's Pensées, and remark upon the astonishing difference between a versifier and a man. A good epitome, a good bit of style, well worked out, well written, he would say, and nothing further. Clearly the beauty of the verses arose from the difficulty overcome, the well-chosen sounds, the symmetrical rhythms; this was all, and it was not much. A great writer is a man who, People will say that this merit is small, and that I do not inspire them with a desire to read Pope's verses. True; at least I do not counsel them to read many. I would add, however, by way of excuse, that there is a kin in which he succeeds, that his descrip tive and oratorical talents find in por traiture matter which suits them, and that in this he frequently approaches La Bruyère; that several of his portraits, those of Addison, Lord Hervey, Lord Wharton, the Duchess of Marlborough, are medals worthy of finding a place in the cabinets of the curious, and of remaining in the archives of the human race; that when he chisels one of these heads, the comprehensive images, the unlooked-for connections of words, the sustained and multiplied contrasts, the perpetual and extraordinary conciseness, the incessant and increasing impulse of all the strokes of eloquence brought to bear upon the same spot, stamp upon the memory an impress which we never forget. It is better to repudiate these partial apologies, and frankly to avow that, on the whole, this great poet, the glory of his age, is wearisome-wearisome to us. "A woman of forty," says Stendhal, "is only beautiful to those who have loved her in their youth." The poor muse in question is not forty years old for us ; she is a hundred and forty. Let us remember, when we wish to judge her fairly, the time when we made French verses like our Latin verse. Taste be came transformed an age ago, for the hu man mind has wheeled round; with the prospect the perspective has changed; we must take this change of place into account. Now-a-days we demand new ideas and bare sentiments; we care no longer for the clothing, we want the thing. Exordium, transitions, peculiarities of style, elegances of expression, the whole literary wardrobe, is sent to the old cloines shop; we only keep what is indispensable; we trouble ourselves no more about adorn ment but about truth. The men of the preceding century were quite different. This was seen when Pope translated |