The close of the seventeenth century for ever shut the eyes of John Dryden upon the clouded and fluctuating daylight of our sublunary world. It may have been, in the same year, that a solitary boy, then twelve years old, wrote five stanzas which any man might have been glad to have written—and which you have by heart—an "Ode to Solitude"—conspicuous in the annals of English poetry as the dawn-gleam of a new sun that was presently to arise, and to fill the region that Dryden had left.
A feeble frame has dedicated many a student. This, with other causes about this time, took the boy, Alexander Pope, from schools where he learned little, to commit him, under the guardian more than guiding love of indulgent parents, to his own management of his own studies. And study he did—instinctively, eagerly, ramblingly through books of sundry kinds—helping himself as he could to their languages—devouring more than he digested—wedding himself to the high and gracious muses—seeking for, and finding, his own extraordinary powers—and diminishing the small quantity of delicate health which nature had put in his keeping. He resigned himself to die, and was dying, when a strong interposition, among other sanatary measures, transferred him from the back of Pegasus to that of an earth-born horse.
Pope had a gentleness of spirit, which showed itself in his filial offices to his father and mother—to her the most, ill the prolonged wearing out of a beloved life. It appears in kindly relations to his friends, in charities, in the scheme of his life—contentedness in a bounded, quiet existence, a seclusion among books, and trees, and flowers. His life flowed on peaceably and gently, like the noble river upon which his modest dwelling looked. Ill health, as we said, often dedicates a student. The constitutional feebleness from which he suffered, might doubly favour his mind; as often the more delicate frame harbours the greater spirit; and as inaptitude for active and rough sports, throws the solitary boy upon the companionship of books, and upon the energies, avocations, and pleasures of his own intelligence and fancy. The little poem of his boyhood, and the first of his manhood, prophesy his tenor of life, and his literary career.
A commanding power, a predominant star in English literature—you might say that the last century belonged to him. Dryden reigned over his contemporaries. Pope, succeeding, took dominion over his own time and the following. The pupil of Dryden, and gratefully proud to proclaim the greatness of his master, and to own all obligations, he moulded himself nevertheless upon a type in his own mind. In the school of Dryden he is an original master. Dryden is, properly speaking, without imitators. His manner proceeds from his own genius, and baffles transcribers. But Pope completed an art which could be learned, and he left a world full of copyists.
A remarkable feature is the early acknowledgment of Pope by his contemporaries. At sixteen he is a poet for the world by his Pastorals, and at that age he has a literary adviser in Walsh and a literary patron in Trumbull. He does not seem to court. He is courted. He is the intimate friend, we do not know how soon, of scholars and polite writers, of men and women high in birth, in education, in station. Scarce twenty, by his "Essay on Criticism" he assumes a chair in the school of the Muses. At five-and-twenty, he is an acknowledged dictator of polite letters. So early, rapid, untroubled an ascension to fame, it would require some research to find a parallel to. Our literature has it not. And this acknowledgment, gratulation, triumph, which friends and circles, and the confined literary world of that day in this country could furnish, a whole age, and a whole country, and a whole world, the extended republic of letters, confirm.
In the judgment of England, in the eighteenth century, the reputation of Pope may be called the most dazzling in English literature. It was a nearer sun than Dryden, Milton, Shakspeare; as for Spenser and Chaucer, they were little better than fixed stars.
Great revolutions in the state of the heavens and of astronomical science have ensued. To say nothing of new luminaries that have come into birth, from the bosom of "chaos and unoriginal night," either we have wheeled round upon Shakspeare, or he upon us, in a surprising manner; the orb of Milton enlarges day by day; cheerily we draw large accessions of the gentlest light on Spenser; and old Father Geoffrey and we are sensibly approximating.
We have taken Pope's counsel. We have with some good-will reverted to Nature, and so we come nearer to the poets of Nature. There may have been other causes at work. The change has involved more than was just a depreciation of Pope himself: as if he were an accomplished artist in a limited sphere of art, and no poet. We dissent toto corde et toto cœlo. He was a spirit, muse-born, a hero of half celestial extraction, and so by all rule a demigod.
His age confined him. A poet is not independent of his age. He may ride on the van of the tide—no more. And we see that the greatest poets are but the most entire expression of the age, taken at the best. How shall it be otherwise? Their age is mother and nurse to them. And what air does a poet respire, but the circulating, fanning, living, breeze of sympathy? He more than all beings receives into his soul the souls of other men. So he thrives and grows; and shall he not be a partaker in his age?
In an age thus to be described, that it refines instead of creating, and that, in particular, it imposes the refinement elaborated by social, and indeed aristocratical manners, upon genius, which should only refine itself by tenderness and sanctity, and by love dwelling evermore in the inextinguishable paradise of the beautiful—he who was fitted to his age by much of his mind, by his wit, by fancy given more fully than imagination, by inclination to the limæ labor, by the susceptibility of polish, by a reasonableness of understanding, by his perception of manners, even by the delicacy of his habits—he, Alexander Pope, nevertheless, desired the greatnesses of poetry. At fourteen, he tries his hand in practice on the lofty Statius—at five-and-twenty, upon the sublime Homer. Judge of his poetical heart by his Preface to Shakspeare, by his translation of Homer, preface and all. What was the translation of Homer? Of all works, not creative, the one of most aspiring ambition, even more than that of Pindar or Æschylus. The young poet who has launched on the air the light self-buoyed, gracefully-floating Rape of the Lock, who has dipped his pen in the pathos of love and religion for Eloisa, longs to put in use the powers that kindle and struggle within him. He will do something of greater design in weightier literature; he will, so as a poet may, stir, melt, strengthen, instruct, exalt, and amplify the mind of his country; and he makes the greatest of poets, the father of all poetry—English. He pledges himself, before his country, to the task, and then trembles at the difficulties and magnitude of his undertaking, and then sits down to it, and then delivers it accomplished.