In poets as true genius is but rare.[22]
He selected for distinction several other remarks which were not more exquisite in their form, or recondite in their substance. Hazlitt took up the strain of Johnson and Warton. "The Rape of the Lock," he says, "is a double-refined essence of wit and fancy, as the Essay on Criticism is of wit and sense. The quantity of thought and observation in this work, for so young a man as Pope was when he wrote it, is wonderful; unless we adopt the supposition that most men of genius spend the rest of their lives in teaching others what they themselves have learned under twenty. The conciseness and felicity of the expression are equally remarkable. Thus, in reasoning on the variety of men's opinions, he says,
'Tis with our judgments, as our watches; none
Go just alike, yet each believes his own.
Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and illustrations in the Essay: the critical rules laid down are too much those of a school, and of a confined one."[23] De Quincey, a subtler and sounder critic than Hazlitt, boldly challenged decisions which had passed, but little questioned, from mouth to mouth. "The Essay on Criticism," he says, "is the feeblest and least interesting of Pope's writings, being substantially a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps. The maxims have no natural order or logical dependency, are generally so vague as to mean nothing, and what is remarkable, many of the rules are violated by no man as often as by Pope, and by Pope nowhere so often as in this very poem."[24] The matter of the Essay is not rated, in this passage, below its value.
"I admired," said Lady Mary W. Montagu, "Mr. Pope's Essay on Criticism at first very much, because I had not then read any of the ancient critics, and did not know that it was all stolen."[25] Pope had found the bulk of his materials nearer home. He told Spence that in his youth "he went through all the best critics," and specified Quintilian, Rapin, and Bossu.[26] He states in his Essay, ver. 712, that "critic-learning," in modern times, "flourished most in France," and in fact the Rapins and Bossus were his principal masters. They had been brought into credit with our countrymen by Dryden. "Impartially speaking," he said, in his Dedication to the Æneis, "the French are as much better critics than the English as they are worse poets." He had a wonderful faith in the virtue of their precepts. "Spenser," he said, "wanted only to have read the rules of Bossu; for no man was ever born with a greater genius, or had more knowledge to support it." He compared the French critics to generals, and our celebrated poets to common soldiers; the poet executed what the commanding mind of the critic planned.[27] The treatises which would have perfected the genius of Spenser were shallow drowsy productions, compounded of truisms, pedantic fallacies, and doctrines borrowed from antiquity. Pope culled most of his maxims from these, and other modern works. Many of his remarks were the common property of the civilised world. A slight acquaintance with books and men is sufficient to teach us that people are partial to their own judgment, that some authors are not qualified to be poets, wits, or critics, and that critics should not launch beyond their depth. Such profound reflections, kept up throughout the Essay, owed their credit to the disguising properties of verse. Along with the singular nicety of distinction, and knowledge of mankind, Johnson detected a no less surprising range of ancient and modern learning. Pope mentions Homer, Virgil, and half a dozen Greek and Latin critics. He has characterised some of these critics in a manner which betrays that he had never looked into their works, and what he says of the rest only required that he should know their writings by repute. All, and more than all, the classical information embodied in the Essay, might have been picked up from his French manuals in a single morning.
A didactic poet who draws his precepts from the truisms and current publications of his day, could not at twenty-three deserve credit for precocity of learning or thought. He might still manifest an early maturity of judgment in sifting the insignificant from the important, the true from the false. Pope did not avoid the trite, but he is said to have evinced a rare capacity for discriminating the true. Bowles agrees with Johnson and Warton that "the good sense in the Essay is extraordinary considering the age of the author," and it is pronounced "an uncommon effort of critical good sense" by Hallam, conspicuous himself for sense and sobriety.[28] Whoever looks through the speciousness of rhyme, and views the ideas in their naked meaning, will be much more struck by the want of good sense in the principal critical canons. They are not even "extraordinary for the age of the author;" versed as he was in English literature they are below his years. They are the narrow, erroneous dogmas of a youth fresh from school-boy studies, who imagined that the Greeks and Romans had ransacked the illimitable realms of genius and taste, and swept off the whole of the spoils. He broadly asserted this doctrine in the poetical creed which he prefixed to his works.[29] He was at least old enough then to know better, from whence it is clear that the common statements respecting him are the opposite of the truth. He did not display the ripe judgment of manhood in his juvenile criticism; he remained a boy in criticism when he was a man.
Follow nature, said Pope, in his Essay, but beware of taking nature at first hand. Homer and nature are the same, and to copy nature is to copy the rules deduced from his works. The ancients sometimes deviated into excellence by throwing off their self-imposed shackles. The moderns must not presume to be irregularly great. They must keep to the precepts, and if they ever break a rule they must at least be able to quote a case precisely parallel from a classical author.[30] The English had not submitted to the wholesome restraint. They had been "fierce for the liberties of wit," and Pope avows his conviction that the entire race of English writers were therefore "uncivilised," with the exception of a few who had "restored among us wit's fundamental laws." He names the most illustrious of these reformers. They were three in number,—the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Roscommon, and Walsh.[31] The absurdity could not be exceeded. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton were "uncivilised" writers; they not only fell into minor errors, but set at nought the "fundamental laws" of poetry, while the persons who taught how English poetry was to be raised from its rude condition were a trio of prosy mediocrities, whose works might have been annihilated without leaving the smallest vacuum in literature. "The Duke of Buckingham," said Pope later, "was superficial in everything; even in poetry, which was his forte."[32]
Pope seems to have been unconscious of the vast metamorphose which the world had undergone since the close of the Greek and Roman eras. Religion, institutions, usages, opinions, all had changed. Society was in a ferment with new ideas; nations had been gathered out of new elements; characters were moulded under new influences, and the play of passions, interests, convictions, and policy had assumed new forms. This altered order of things was reflected in our poetry. The mighty men of genius who led the way could not have put aside their genuine thoughts to mimic works which, noble in themselves, were musty and obsolete in modern imitations. The vigorous races which had sprung up drew living pictures from their own minds; they were inspired by national and present sentiments; they stamped upon their verse the feelings, humours, and beliefs of their age. They borrowed from the classics, and sometimes with bad taste; but the extrinsic details they appropriated were not permitted to cramp the masculine elasticity of their native fancy and experience. The materials of the edifice, in the main, were no longer the same, and neither was the shape they assumed. The difference was as great as between a Grecian temple and a Gothic cathedral. The principles which governed the ancients in their compositions were confined, and did not give verge enough for that variety and picturesqueness among ourselves which demanded to be embodied in written words. The originality, which was our glory, appeared a vice to Pope. The adaptation of the structure to its complex purposes he believed to be a declension towards barbarism. He would have preferred that our magnificent English literature, instinct with the freshness of nature, and gathering into its huge circumference the growth of centuries, should have been reduced to a stale and meagre counterfeit. The ancients had the prerogative to make and break critical laws; the moderns must not dare to think for themselves. Genius had been free in Greece, and was to be altogether a slave in England. It cannot be urged in excuse for this protest against the independence of our literature that Pope had imbibed the prejudices of his generation. His doctrine was hacknied, but not allowed. He admits that it had few disciples,[33] and one of the three adherents he claimed did not belong to him. "Not only all present poets," wrote Dryden to Walsh, in 1693, "but all who are to come in England will thank you for freeing them from the too servile imitation of the ancients."[34] The rules of Pope could never have prevailed, for they were intrinsically false, and would have emasculated every national literature. The thoughts, words, and deeds of the actual world would not have been impressed upon its books; a gulf would have separated the sympathies of the reader from the feeble, monotonous unrealities of the author, and both author and reader would soon have grown sick of this unnatural effort to be artificial and dull.
An exclusive partisan of classical poetry, Pope did not the less denounce sectarians in wit, the contracted spirits "who the ancients only or the moderns prize," and he exhorted critics "to regard not if wit be old or new."[35] The contradiction in his principles was not accompanied by a corresponding contradiction in his practice, for in no part of his Essay did he rectify his injustice towards his countrymen. He had not one word of commendation for any great English poet, with the exception of Dryden, and him he chiefly extolled, in company with Denham and Waller, for his metrical euphony. Nay, Pope limited the fame of our most illustrious writers to barely threescore years, on the pretence that their language became partially obsolete, which would yet leave them an enormous advantage over dead tongues. Because "length of fame (our second life) is lost," he exhorted the public in common fairness to recognise merit betimes.[36] There was not a semblance of truth in his premise, nor was the plea which he grounded upon it admissible in his mouth. "How vain," he exclaimed, "that second life in other's breath,"[37] and if posthumous fame was worthless there was no claim for compensation. In reality the value is not in the posthumous fame, but in the anticipation which converts it into an immediate possession, the mind feasting in imagination upon plaudits to come. The successful author adds them to the chorus of present praise, and the unsuccessful creates for himself the fame he lacks. The parental partiality which appeals from contemporaries to posterity may deceive, but it soothes and sustains. "A reputation after death," said Jortin, "is like a favourable wind after a shipwreck."[38] Rather the faith in a future reputation is the preservative against shipwreck, unless when men are indifferent to literary immortality.