Lectures on English poets

by James Russell Lowell

It was impossible that anything truly great—great, I mean, on the moral and emotional as well as on the intellectual sides—could be produced in such a generation. But something intellectually great could be, and was. The French mind, always stronger in the perceptive and analytic than in the imaginative faculty, loving precision, grace, and fineness, had brought wit and fancy, and the elegant arts of society, to the perfection, almost, of science. Its ideal in literature was to combine the appearance of carelessness and gayety of thought with intellectual exactness of statement. Its influence, then, in English literature will appear chiefly in neatness and facility of expression, in point of epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional rather than universal experiences; in speaking for good society rather than for man.

Thus far in English poetry we have found life represented by Chaucer, the real life of men and women; the ideal or interior life as it relates to this world, by Spenser; what may be called imaginative life, by Shakspeare; the religious sentiment, or interior life as it relates to the other world, by Milton. But everything aspires toward a rhythmical utterance of itself, and accordingly the intellect and life, as it relates to what may be called the world, were waiting for their poet. They found or made a most apt one in Alexander Pope.

He stands for perfectness of intellectual expression, and it is a striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend upon conscientious and laborious finish as well as upon natural endowments.

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived, and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope was a master of style? I felt, as Addison says in his “Freeholder” in answering an argument in favor of the Pretender because he could speak English and George I could not, “that I did not wish to be tyrannized over in the best English that was ever spoken.” There was a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked him by instinct, as old Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy when he says: “I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days.”

But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry, and must be studied by every one who would come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since read every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe I am at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of expression; but, as a fact, he represents something more—nothing less, namely, than one of those external controversies of taste which will last as long as the Imagination and Understanding divide men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or demonstration. Men are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists; and there is nothing more to be said of the matter. We do not hear that the green spectacles persuaded the horse into thinking that shavings were grass.

That reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow that a man who can produce one perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one. As far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And Pope has done this in the “Rape of the Lock.” For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say that there is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet call; but for pure entertainment it is unmatched.

The very earliest of Pope’s productions gives indications of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, which afterwards so eminently distinguished him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect balance of metre which he afterwards carried so far as to be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and their publication immediately brought him into notice. The following four verses from the first Pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic balance:

You that, too wise for pride, too good for power,

Enjoy the glory to be great no more,

And carrying with you all the world can boast,