“All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same,
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame,
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees.”
So that we are no better off than the untutored Indian, after the poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburton makes a rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism from this last passage. He would have found it harder to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revelation would not overturn the greater part of its teachings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him what is usually claimed as his first merit,—clearness. If he did not, we grant him clearness as a writer at the expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charitable solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope’s precision of thought was no match for the fluency of his verse.
Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, that he who executes the best, no matter what his department, will rank the highest. I think there are enough indications in these letters of Byron’s, however, that they were written rather more against Wordsworth than for Pope. The rule he lays down would make Voltaire a greater poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. Byron cites Petrarch as an example; yet if Petrarch had put nothing more into his sonnets than execution, there are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. But, in point of fact, the department chooses the man and not the man the department, and it has a great deal to do with our estimate of him. Is the department of Milton no higher than that of Butler? Byron took especial care not to write in the style he commended. But I think Pope has received quite as much credit in respect even of execution as he deserves. Surely execution is not confined to versification alone. What can be worse than this?
“At length Erasmus, that great, injured name,
(The glory of the priesthood and the shame,)
Stemmed the wild torrent of a barbarous age,
And drove those holy vandals off the stage.”
It would have been hard for Pope to have found a prettier piece of confusion in any of the small authors he laughed at than this image of a great, injured name stemming a torrent and driving vandals off the stage. And in the following verses the image is helplessly confused:—
“Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies,
Which no one looks in with another’s eyes,
But, as the flatterer or dependant paint,
Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint.”
The use of the word “applies” is perfectly un-English; and it seems that people who look in this remarkable glass see their pictures and not their reflections. Often, also, when Pope attempts the sublime, his epithets become curiously unpoetical, as where he says, in the Dunciad,
“As, one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,
The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain.”
And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of the verse without much regard to fitness of imagery; in the “Essay on Man,” for example:—
“Passions, like elements, though born to fight,
Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite;
These ’tis enough to temper and employ;
But what composes man can man destroy?
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature’s road,
Subject, compound them, follow her and God.
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure’s smiling train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain,
These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined,
Make and maintain the balance of the mind.”