Here reason is represented as an apothecary compounding pills of “pleasure’s smiling train” and the “family of pain.” And in the Moral Essays,
“Know God and Nature only are the same;
In man the judgment shoots at flying game,
A bird of passage, gone as soon as found,
Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground.”
The “judgment shooting at flying game” is an odd image enough; but I think a bird of passage, now in the moon and now under ground, could be found nowhere—out of Goldsmith’s Natural History, perhaps. An epigrammatic expression will also tempt him into saying something without basis in truth, as where he ranks together “Macedonia’s madman and the Swede,” and says that neither of them “looked forward farther than his nose,” a slang phrase which may apply well enough to Charles XII., but certainly not to the pupil of Aristotle, who showed himself capable of a large political forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, is a sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, as where he makes “Socrates bleed.”
But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his Satires that Pope deserves the praise which he himself desired:—
“Happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe,
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please.”
Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style of his own, in which he is without a rival. One can open upon wit and epigram at any page.
“Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns,
Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns;
To ease the soul of one oppressive weight,
This quits an empire, that embroils a state;
The same adust complexion has impelled,
Charles to the convent, Philip to the field.”
Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the invariable this set off by the inevitable that, and wishes antithesis would let him have a little quiet now and then. In the first couplet, too, the conditional “frown” would have been more elegant. But taken as detached passages, how admirably the different characters are drawn, so admirably that half the verses have become proverbial. This of Addison will bear reading again:—
“Peace to all such: but were there one whose fires
True genius kindles and fair fame inspires;
Blest with each talent and each art to please,
And born to write, converse, and live with ease;
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone,
Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne,
View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes,
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise,
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike,
Alike reserved to blame or to commend,
A timorous foe and a suspicious friend;
Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging that he ne’er obliged;
Like Cato give his little Senate laws,
And sit attentive to his own applause,
While wits and templars every sentence raise,
And wonder with a foolish face of praise;—
Who but must laugh if such a man there be?
Who would not weep if Atticus were he?”
With the exception of the somewhat technical image in the second verse of Fame blowing the fire of genius, which too much puts us in mind of the frontispieces of the day, surely nothing better of its kind was ever written. How applicable it was to Addison I shall consider in another place. As an accurate intellectual observer and describer of personal weaknesses, Pope stands by himself in English verse.