Pope's muse—one may use the old-fashioned word in such a connection—had left the free forest for Will's Coffee-house, and haunted ladies' boudoirs instead of the brakes of the enchanted island. Her wings were clogged with 'gums and pomatums,' and her 'thin essence' had shrunk 'like a rivel'd flower.' But a delicate fancy is a delicate fancy still, even when employed about the paraphernalia of modern life; a truth which Byron maintained, though not in an unimpeachable form, in his controversy with Bowles. We sometimes talk as if our ancestors were nothing but hoops and wigs; and forget that they had a fair allowance of human passions. And consequently we are very apt to make a false estimate of the precise nature of that change which fairly entitles us to call Pope's age prosaic. In showering down our epithets of artificial, sceptical, and utilitarian, we not seldom forget what kind of figure we are ourselves likely to make in the eyes of our own descendants.
Whatever be the position rightly to be assigned to Pope in the British Walhalla, his own theory has been unmistakably expressed. He boasts
That not in fancy's maze he wandered long,
But stooped to truth and moralised his song.
His theory is compressed into one of the innumerable aphorisms which have to some degree lost their original sharpness of definition, because they have passed, as current coinage, through so many hands.
The proper study of mankind is man.
The saying is in form nearly identical with Goethe's remark that man is properly the only object which interests man. The two poets, indeed, understood the doctrine in a very different way. Pope's interpretation strikes the present generation as narrow and mechanical. He would place such limitations upon the sphere of human interest as to exclude, perhaps, the greatest part of what we generally mean by poetry. How much, for example, would have to be suppressed if we sympathised with Pope's condemnation of the works in which
Pure description holds the place of sense.
Nearly all the works of such poets as Thomson and Cowper would disappear, Wordsworth's pages would show fearful gaps, and Keats would be in risk of summary suppression. We may doubt whether much would be left of Spenser, from whom both Keats and Pope, like so many other of our poets, drew inspiration in their youth. Fairyland would be deserted, and the poet condemned to working upon ordinary commonplaces in broad daylight. The principle which Pope proclaimed is susceptible of the inverse application. Poetry, as it proves, may rightly concern itself with inanimate nature, with pure description, or with the presentation of lovely symbols not definitely identified with any cut-and-dried saws of moral wisdom; because there is no part of the visible universe to which we have not some relation, and the most ethereal dreams that ever visited a youthful poet 'on summer eve by haunted stream' are in some sense reflections of the passions and interests that surround our daily life. Pope, however, as the man more fitted than any other fully to interpret the mind of his own age, inevitably gives a different construction to a very sound maxim. He rightly assumes that man is his proper study; but then by man he means not the genus, but a narrow species of the human being. 'Man' means Bolingbroke, and Walpole, and Swift, and Curll, and Theobald; it does not mean man as the product of a long series of generations and part of the great universe of inextricably involved forces. He cannot understand the man of distant ages; Homer is to him not the spontaneous voice of the heroic age, but a clever artist whose gods and heroes are consciously-constructed parts of an artificial 'machinery.' Nature has, for him, ceased to be inhabited by sylphs and fairies, except to amuse the fancies of fine ladies and gentlemen, and has not yet received a new interest from the fairy tales of science. The old ideal of chivalry merely suggests the sneers of Cervantes, or even the buffoonery of Butler's wit, and has not undergone restoration at the hands of modern romanticists. Politics are not associated in his mind with any great social upheaval, but with a series of petty squabbles for places and pensions, in which bribery is the great moving force. What he means by religion is generally not so much the existence of a divine element in the world as a series of bare metaphysical demonstrations too frigid to produce enthusiasm or to stimulate the imagination. And, therefore, he inevitably interests himself chiefly in what is certainly a perennial source of interest—the passions and thoughts of the men and women immediately related to himself; and it may be remarked, in passing, that if this narrows the range of Pope's poetry, the error is not so vital as a modern delusion of the opposite kind. Because poetry should not be brought into too close a contact with the prose of daily life, we sometimes seem to think that it must have no relation to daily life at all, and consequently convert it into a mere luxurious dreaming, where the beautiful very speedily degenerates into the pretty or the picturesque. Because poetry need not be always a point-blank fire of moral platitudes, we occasionally declare that there is no connection at all between poetry and morality, and that all art is good which is for the moment agreeable. Such theories must end in reducing all poetry and art to be at best more or less elegant trifling for the amusement of the indolent; and to those who uphold them Pope's example may be of some use. If he went too far in the direction of identifying poetry with preaching, he was not wrong in assuming that poetry should involve preaching, though by an indirect method. Morality and art are not independent, though not identical. Both, as Mr. Ruskin urges in the passage just quoted, are only admirable when the expression of healthful and noble natures. But, without discussing that thorny problem and certainly without committing myself to an approval of Mr. Ruskin's solution, I am content to look at it for the time from Pope's stand-point.
Taking Pope's view of his poetical office, there remain considerable difficulties in estimating the value of the lesson which he taught with so much energy. The difficulties result both from that element which was common to his contemporaries and from that which was supplied by Pope's own idiosyncrasies. The commonplaces in which Pope takes such infinite delight have become very stale for us. Assuming their perfect sincerity, we cannot understand how anybody should have thought of enforcing them with such amazing emphasis. We constantly feel a shock like that which surprises the reader of Young's 'Night Thoughts' when he finds it asserted, in all the pomp of blank verse, that
Procrastination is the thief of time.