The study of Chloe, who "wants a heart," is equally delicate and witty:
Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour,
Content to dwell in decencies for ever—
So very reasonable, so unmoved,
As never yet to love, or to be loved.
She, while her lover pants upon her breast,
Can mark the figures on an Indian chest;
And when she sees her friend in deep despair,
Observes how much a chintz exceeds mohair!...
Would Chloe know if you're alive or dead?
She bids her footman put it in her head.
Chloe is prudent—would you too be wise?
Then never break your heart when Chloe dies.
The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is still more dazzling. The venom is passionate without ever ceasing to be witty. Pope has composed a masterpiece of his vanities and hatreds. The characterizations of Addison as Atticus, and of Lord Hervey as Sporus:
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk—
Sporus, "the bug with gilded wings"—are portraits one may almost call beautiful in their bitter phrasing. There is nothing make-believe here as there is in the virtue of the letters. This is Pope's confession, the image of his soul. Elsewhere in Pope the accomplishment is too often rhetorical, though The Rape of the Lock is as delicate in artifice as a French fairy-tale, the Dunciad an amusing assault of a major Lilliputian on minor Lilliputians, and the Essay on Criticism—what a regiment of witty lines to be written by a youth of twenty or twenty-one!—much nearer being a great essay in verse than is generally admitted nowadays. As for the Essay on Man, one can read! it more than once only out of a sense of duty. Pope has nothing to tell us that we want to know about man except in so far as he dislikes him. We praise him as the poet who makes remarks—as the poet, one might almost say, who makes faces. It is when he sits in the scorner's chair, whether in good humour or in bad, that he is the little lord of versifiers.
XI
JAMES ELROY FLECKER
James Elroy Flecker died in January 1915, having added at least one poem to the perfect anthology of English verse. Probably his work contains a good deal that is permanent besides this. But one is confident at least of the permanence of The Old Ships. Readers coming a thousand years hence upon the beauty, the romance and the colour of this poem will turn eagerly, one imagines, in search of other work from the same pen. This was the flower of the poet's genius. It was the exultant and original speech of one who was in a great measure the seer of other men's visions. Flecker was much given to the translation of other poets, and he did not stop at translating their words. He translated their imagination also into careful verse. He was one of those poets whose genius is founded in the love of literature more than in the love of life. He seems less an interpreter of the earth than one who sought after a fantastic world which had been created by Swinburne and the Parnassians and the old painters and the tellers of the Arabian Nights.