“We conquered France, but felt our captive’s charms,”[[595]]
is like nothing on earth but the history-poetry of the despised monkish ages, in which Alexander has twelve peers, and Arthur, early in the sixth century, overruns Europe with a British force, and fights with a Roman Emperor named Lucius. And the sketch of European literature in the Essay, if it contains no single statement so glaringly absurd, is as much a “tissue of gaps” as the Irishman’s coat.
Attempts have been made (including some by persons deserving all respect, and thoroughly acquainted with the subject) to give Pope a high place, on the score of his charges to “follow nature.” Unfortunately this is mere translation of Boileau, of Vida, and of Horace, in the first place: and, still more unfortunately, the poet’s own arguments on his doctrine show that what he meant by “following nature,” and what we mean by it, are two quite different things. He, usually at least, means “stick to the usual, the ordinary, the commonplace.” Just so the legendary King of Siam, had he written an Art of Poetry, would have said “Follow nature, and do not talk about such unnatural things as ice and snow.”
Regarded merely as a manual of the art of Pope’s own poetry, without prejudice to any other, and as a satire on the faults of other kinds, without prejudice to the weaknesses of his own, the Essay is not merely an interesting document, but a really valuable one. Its cautions against desertion of nature in the directions of excess, of the unduly fantastic, are sound to this day: and its eulogies of ancient writers, though perhaps neither based on very extensive and accurate first-hand knowledge, nor specially appropriate to the matter in hand, contain much that is just in itself. One of the weakest parts, as might have been expected, is the treatment of rules, licences, and faults. The poet-critic practically confesses the otiosity of the whole system by admitting that a lucky licence is a rule, and that it is possible, as one of his own most famous and happiest lines says,
“To snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.”
And when he paraphrases Quintilian to the effect that you must criticise
“With the same spirit that the author writ,”
and judge the whole, not the parts, he again goes perilously near to jettison his whole system.
In the same way consistency is the last thing that can be claimed for his chapters, as they may be called, on conceit, on language, “numbers” (the most famous and the most ingenious passage of the Essay), extremes, “turns,” the Ancient and Modern quarrel, &c. The passage on Critics is among the best—for here sheer good sense (even in the temporary, much more in the universal, meaning) tells—and the historical sketch of them, though not too accurate, is vigorous.
The much later Epistle is far more desultory, and inevitably tinged by those personal feelings which many years of literary squabble had helped ill-health and natural disposition to arouse in Pope. The Epistle to Augustus. But its general critical attitude is not different. He is angry with the revival of old literature which Watson and Allan Ramsay in Scotland, Oldys and others in England, were beginning, hints sneers even at Milton and the “weeds on Avon’s bank,” is at least as hackneyed as he is neat in his individual criticisms on poets nearer his own day, and defends poetry and literature generally in a patronising and half-apologetic strain. In fact, what he has really at heart is to be politely rude to George II.; not to give any critical account of English literature.