It is therefore necessary to say explicitly that the poem where they occur, the fourth epistle of the 'Essay on Man,' not only contains half-a-dozen other phrases equally familiar—e.g., 'An honest man's the noblest work of God;'[3] 'Looks through nature up to nature's God;' 'From grave to gay, from lively to severe'—but breathes throughout sentiments which it would be credulous to believe that any man could express so vigorously without feeling profoundly. Mr. Ruskin has quoted one couplet as giving 'the most complete, the most concise, and the most lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words'—
Never elated, while one man's oppressed;
Never dejected, whilst another's blessed.
The passage in which they occur is worthy of this (let us admit, just a little over-praised) sentiment; and leads not unfitly to the conclusion and summary of the whole, that he who can recognise the beauty of virtue knows that
Where Faith, Law, Morals, all began,
All end—in love of God and love of man.
I know but too well all that may be said against this view of Pope's morality. He is, as Ste.-Beuve says, the easiest of all men to caricature; and it is equally easy to throw cold water upon his morality. We may count up his affectations, ridicule his platitudes, make heavy deductions for his insincerity, denounce his too frequent indulgence in a certain love of dirt, which he shares with, and in which indeed he is distanced by, Swift; and decline to believe in the virtue, or even in the love of virtue, of a man stained by so many vices and weaknesses. Yet I must decline to believe that men can gather grapes off thorns, or figs off thistles, or noble expressions of moral truth from a corrupt heart thinly varnished by a coating of affectation. Turn it how we may, the thing is impossible. Pope was more than a mere literary artist, though he was an artist of unparalleled excellence in his own department. He was a man in whom there was the seed of many good thoughts, though choked in their development by the growth of innumerable weeds. And I will venture, in conclusion, to adduce one more proof of the justice of a lenient verdict. I have had already to quote many phrases familiar to everyone who is tinctured in the slightest degree with a knowledge of English literature; and yet have been haunted by a dim suspicion that some of my readers may have been surprised to recognise their author. Pope, we have seen, is recognised even by judges of the land only through the medium of Byron; and therefore the 'Universal Prayer' may possibly be unfamiliar to some readers. If so, it will do them no harm to read over again a few of its verses. Perhaps, after that experience, they will admit that the little cripple of Twickenham, distorted as were his instincts after he had been stretched on the rack of this rough world, and grievous as were his offences against the laws of decency and morality, had yet in him a noble strain of eloquence significant of deep religious sentiment. A phrase in the first stanza may shock us as bordering too closely on the epigrammatic; but the whole poem from which I take these stanzas must, I think, be recognised as the utterance of a tolerant, reverent, and kindly heart:
Father of all! in every age,
In every clime adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage—
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!
Thou great First Cause, least understood,
Who all my sense confined
To know but this, that thou art good,
And that myself am blind.
...
What conscience dictates to be done,
Or warns me not to do,
This, teach me more than hell to shun;
That, more than heaven pursue.
What blessings thy free bounty gives
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives—
To enjoy is to obey.