The bridal of the earth and sky—
The dew shall weep thy fall to-night
For thou must die....
and Crashaw with—
Since ’tis not to be had at home
She’ll travel for a martyrdom....
follow the same poetic instinct precisely.
When we pass into a world of new artistic aim, the world of which Alexander Pope is president, we find the same thing happening. The worldly pilgrims of Chaucer’s book, Elizabeth’s intrepid adventures, the saintly learning and gestured gallantry that fought it out in Puritan England, have in turn passed from the centre of the stage of articulate national life, to make way for the man about town, the philanderer, the coquette, and the sententious moralist. The innuendo and the moral precept are together on every man’s lips, not wholly insincere in their partnership. And the idiom of this witty, argumentative, intriguing and rather self-righteous society is perfectly turned to the use of genius in the Popean poetry. When The Dunciad and The Essay on Man and the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot were first read, the coffee-houses and boudoirs may have been moved by every varying degree of delight and resentment, but nobody questioned that here was the common language and that at the same time it was being used above the common pitch. Pastoral, invective, worldly-wisdom, religious philosophising, the same instrument was there exactly tempered for each alike, thus—
Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire;