He selected for distinction several other remarks which were not more exquisite in their form, or recondite in their substance. Hazlitt took up the strain of Johnson and Warton. "The Rape of the Lock," he says, "is a double-refined essence of wit and fancy, as the Essay on Criticism is of wit and sense. The quantity of thought and observation in this work, for so young a man as Pope was when he wrote it, is wonderful; unless we adopt the supposition that most men of genius spend the rest of their lives in teaching others what they themselves have learned under twenty. The conciseness and felicity of the expression are equally remarkable. Thus, in reasoning on the variety of men's opinions, he says,

Nothing can be more original and happy than the general remarks and illustrations in the Essay: the critical rules laid down are too much those of a school, and of a confined one."[23] De Quincey, a subtler and sounder critic than Hazlitt, boldly challenged decisions which had passed, but little questioned, from mouth to mouth. "The Essay on Criticism," he says, "is the feeblest and least interesting of Pope's writings, being substantially a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of common-places the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps. The maxims have no natural order or logical dependency, are generally so vague as to mean nothing, and what is remarkable, many of the rules are violated by no man as often as by Pope, and by Pope nowhere so often as in this very poem."[24] The matter of the Essay is not rated, in this passage, below its value.

"I admired," said Lady Mary W. Montagu, "Mr. Pope's Essay on Criticism at first very much, because I had not then read any of the ancient critics, and did not know that it was all stolen."[25] Pope had found the bulk of his materials nearer home. He told Spence that in his youth "he went through all the best critics," and specified Quintilian, Rapin, and Bossu.[26] He states in his Essay, ver. 712, that "critic-learning," in modern times, "flourished most in France," and in fact the Rapins and Bossus were his principal masters. They had been brought into credit with our countrymen by Dryden. "Impartially speaking," he said, in his Dedication to the Æneis, "the French are as much better critics than the English as they are worse poets." He had a wonderful faith in the virtue of their precepts. "Spenser," he said, "wanted only to have read the rules of Bossu; for no man was ever born with a greater genius, or had more knowledge to support it." He compared the French critics to generals, and our celebrated poets to common soldiers; the poet executed what the commanding mind of the critic planned.[27] The treatises which would have perfected the genius of Spenser were shallow drowsy productions, compounded of truisms, pedantic fallacies, and doctrines borrowed from antiquity. Pope culled most of his maxims from these, and other modern works. Many of his remarks were the common property of the civilised world. A slight acquaintance with books and men is sufficient to teach us that people are partial to their own judgment, that some authors are not qualified to be poets, wits, or critics, and that critics should not launch beyond their depth. Such profound reflections, kept up throughout the Essay, owed their credit to the disguising properties of verse. Along with the singular nicety of distinction, and knowledge of mankind, Johnson detected a no less surprising range of ancient and modern learning. Pope mentions Homer, Virgil, and half a dozen Greek and Latin critics. He has characterised some of these critics in a manner which betrays that he had never looked into their works, and what he says of the rest only required that he should know their writings by repute. All, and more than all, the classical information embodied in the Essay, might have been picked up from his French manuals in a single morning.

A didactic poet who draws his precepts from the truisms and current publications of his day, could not at twenty-three deserve credit for precocity of learning or thought. He might still manifest an early maturity of judgment in sifting the insignificant from the important, the true from the false. Pope did not avoid the trite, but he is said to have evinced a rare capacity for discriminating the true. Bowles agrees with Johnson and Warton that "the good sense in the Essay is extraordinary considering the age of the author," and it is pronounced "an uncommon effort of critical good sense" by Hallam, conspicuous himself for sense and sobriety.[28] Whoever looks through the speciousness of rhyme, and views the ideas in their naked meaning, will be much more struck by the want of good sense in the principal critical canons. They are not even "extraordinary for the age of the author;" versed as he was in English literature they are below his years. They are the narrow, erroneous dogmas of a youth fresh from school-boy studies, who imagined that the Greeks and Romans had ransacked the illimitable realms of genius and taste, and swept off the whole of the spoils. He broadly asserted this doctrine in the poetical creed which he prefixed to his works.[29] He was at least old enough then to know better, from whence it is clear that the common statements respecting him are the opposite of the truth. He did not display the ripe judgment of manhood in his juvenile criticism; he remained a boy in criticism when he was a man.

Follow nature, said Pope, in his Essay, but beware of taking nature at first hand. Homer and nature are the same, and to copy nature is to copy the rules deduced from his works. The ancients sometimes deviated into excellence by throwing off their self-imposed shackles. The moderns must not presume to be irregularly great. They must keep to the precepts, and if they ever break a rule they must at least be able to quote a case precisely parallel from a classical author.[30] The English had not submitted to the wholesome restraint. They had been "fierce for the liberties of wit," and Pope avows his conviction that the entire race of English writers were therefore "uncivilised," with the exception of a few who had "restored among us wit's fundamental laws." He names the most illustrious of these reformers. They were three in number,—the Duke of Buckingham, Lord Roscommon, and Walsh.[31] The absurdity could not be exceeded. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton were "uncivilised" writers; they not only fell into minor errors, but set at nought the "fundamental laws" of poetry, while the persons who taught how English poetry was to be raised from its rude condition were a trio of prosy mediocrities, whose works might have been annihilated without leaving the smallest vacuum in literature. "The Duke of Buckingham," said Pope later, "was superficial in everything; even in poetry, which was his forte."[32]

Pope seems to have been unconscious of the vast metamorphose which the world had undergone since the close of the Greek and Roman eras. Religion, institutions, usages, opinions, all had changed. Society was in a ferment with new ideas; nations had been gathered out of new elements; characters were moulded under new influences, and the play of passions, interests, convictions, and policy had assumed new forms. This altered order of things was reflected in our poetry. The mighty men of genius who led the way could not have put aside their genuine thoughts to mimic works which, noble in themselves, were musty and obsolete in modern imitations. The vigorous races which had sprung up drew living pictures from their own minds; they were inspired by national and present sentiments; they stamped upon their verse the feelings, humours, and beliefs of their age. They borrowed from the classics, and sometimes with bad taste; but the extrinsic details they appropriated were not permitted to cramp the masculine elasticity of their native fancy and experience. The materials of the edifice, in the main, were no longer the same, and neither was the shape they assumed. The difference was as great as between a Grecian temple and a Gothic cathedral. The principles which governed the ancients in their compositions were confined, and did not give verge enough for that variety and picturesqueness among ourselves which demanded to be embodied in written words. The originality, which was our glory, appeared a vice to Pope. The adaptation of the structure to its complex purposes he believed to be a declension towards barbarism. He would have preferred that our magnificent English literature, instinct with the freshness of nature, and gathering into its huge circumference the growth of centuries, should have been reduced to a stale and meagre counterfeit. The ancients had the prerogative to make and break critical laws; the moderns must not dare to think for themselves. Genius had been free in Greece, and was to be altogether a slave in England. It cannot be urged in excuse for this protest against the independence of our literature that Pope had imbibed the prejudices of his generation. His doctrine was hacknied, but not allowed. He admits that it had few disciples,[33] and one of the three adherents he claimed did not belong to him. "Not only all present poets," wrote Dryden to Walsh, in 1693, "but all who are to come in England will thank you for freeing them from the too servile imitation of the ancients."[34] The rules of Pope could never have prevailed, for they were intrinsically false, and would have emasculated every national literature. The thoughts, words, and deeds of the actual world would not have been impressed upon its books; a gulf would have separated the sympathies of the reader from the feeble, monotonous unrealities of the author, and both author and reader would soon have grown sick of this unnatural effort to be artificial and dull.

An exclusive partisan of classical poetry, Pope did not the less denounce sectarians in wit, the contracted spirits "who the ancients only or the moderns prize," and he exhorted critics "to regard not if wit be old or new."[35] The contradiction in his principles was not accompanied by a corresponding contradiction in his practice, for in no part of his Essay did he rectify his injustice towards his countrymen. He had not one word of commendation for any great English poet, with the exception of Dryden, and him he chiefly extolled, in company with Denham and Waller, for his metrical euphony. Nay, Pope limited the fame of our most illustrious writers to barely threescore years, on the pretence that their language became partially obsolete, which would yet leave them an enormous advantage over dead tongues. Because "length of fame (our second life) is lost," he exhorted the public in common fairness to recognise merit betimes.[36] There was not a semblance of truth in his premise, nor was the plea which he grounded upon it admissible in his mouth. "How vain," he exclaimed, "that second life in other's breath,"[37] and if posthumous fame was worthless there was no claim for compensation. In reality the value is not in the posthumous fame, but in the anticipation which converts it into an immediate possession, the mind feasting in imagination upon plaudits to come. The successful author adds them to the chorus of present praise, and the unsuccessful creates for himself the fame he lacks. The parental partiality which appeals from contemporaries to posterity may deceive, but it soothes and sustains. "A reputation after death," said Jortin, "is like a favourable wind after a shipwreck."[38] Rather the faith in a future reputation is the preservative against shipwreck, unless when men are indifferent to literary immortality.

The ancients, according to Pope, had a moral as well as an intellectual superiority. Of old the poets "who but endeavoured well," were praised by their brethren. Now those who reached the heights of Parnassus "employed their pains in spurning down others." Of old again the professional critic was "generous and fanned the poet's fire." Now critics hated the poet, and all the more that they had learned from him the art of criticism.[39] A freedom from jealousy, a liberality of eulogy were universal with pagans; malice and envy reigned supreme in Christendom. Upon this false pretext Pope had the luxury of indulging in the vice he reprobated. He preached up "good-nature," he would suffer no leaven of "spleen and sour disdain,"[40] and his Essay throughout is a diatribe against English critics. The entire crew were spiteful blockheads without sense or principle. The excessive rancour points to some personal offence, and it is probable that his estimate of critics was regulated by their low opinion of his Pastorals, which was the chief work he had hitherto published. When he speaks of poets he keeps no better to the leniency he advocates. He would "sometimes have censure restrained, and would charitably let the dull be vain," upon the uncharitable allegation that the more they were corrected the worse they grew. He engrafts upon his recommendation of a "charitable silence," an invective against the inferior versifiers who, in their old age, have not discovered that they are superannuated. For this inability to detect the decay of their faculties he calls them "shameless bards, impenitently bold."[41] No error of judgment had a stronger claim to be treated with tenderness, and the bitterness of the passage was the less excusable that it was certainly directed against his former friend Wycherley.

There are other contradictions in the Essay, and several of the minor positions are glaringly erroneous. Dennis was within the truth when he said of the whole that it was "very superficial." There remains the question whether the poem is remarkable for the beauty of expression signalised by Addison and Hazlitt. Pope intended his work to be a combination of highly wrought passages, and of that more easy style described by Dryden, when he says—

The parts of the Essay which are pitched in the highest key, are far the best, and where Pope borrowed the imagery, as in the simile of the traveller ascending the Alps, the lines owe their splendour to his improvements. The similes designed to be witty are less happy. One or two only are good; the rest have little point or appropriateness. Anxious to string together as many smart comparisons as possible, Pope was careless of consistency. Speaking of the futility of abusing paltry versifiers, he says,

The meaning of the first couplet seems to be that bad poets become callous by castigation, and indifferent to censure; the meaning of the second that failure stimulated them to improvement. In the first couplet they proceed from drowsiness to slumber; in the second their false steps stir them up to mend their pace. They are first represented as proceeding from bad to worse, and then from bad to better. The attempt in the Essay to turn common prose into rhyme is only partially successful. Dryden and Byron, the greatest masters in different ways of the familiar style, pour out words in their natural order with a marvellous vigour and facility. The merit is in this unforced idiomatic flow of the language, unimpeded by the shackles of rhymes. Almost anybody may convert ordinary prose into defective verse, and much of the verse in the Essay on Criticism is of a low order. The phraseology is frequently mean and slovenly, the construction inverted and ungrammatical, the ellipses harsh, the expletives feeble, the metre inharmonious, the rhymes imperfect. Striving to be poetical, Pope fell below bald and slip-shod prose. Examples lie thick, and a couple of specimens will be enough:

The transposition of the verb for the sake of the rhyme was the rule with Pope. He habitually succumbed to the difficulty of preserving the legitimate arrangement of words; yet it is an anomaly in literature that with his powers and patient industry he could tolerate such despicable examples of the licence, and this in enunciating hacknied precepts, only to be raised above insipidity by the perfection with which they were moulded into verse. Where the plain portions of the poem are not positively bad, they are seldom of any peculiar excellence. Mediocrity, relieved by occasional well-wrought passages, forms the staple of the work, and Hazlitt must surely have given loose to one of his wilful paradoxes when he contended that the general characteristics of the Essay were originality, thought, strength, terseness, wit, felicitous expression, and brilliant illustration.

In its metrical qualities the Essay on Criticism is the worst of Pope's poems. One blemish is a want of variety in his final words. "There are," says Hazlitt, "no less than half a score couplets rhyming to sense. This appears almost incredible without giving the instances, and no less so when they are given."

The corresponding word which forms the rhyme is not always varied. "Offence" is used three times, and "defence" and "pretence" are each employed twice.

Hazlitt might have remarked, that wit was even more favoured than sense, and was used with greater laxity. A wit, in the reign of Queen Anne was not only a jester, but any author of distinction; and wit, besides its special signification, was still sometimes employed as synonymous with mind. The ordinary generic and specific meanings, already confusing and fruitful in ambiguities, were not sufficient for Pope. A wit with him was now a jester, now an author, now a poet, and now, again, was contradistinguished from poets. Wit was the intellect, the judgment, the antithesis to judgment, a joke, and poetry. The word does duty, with a perplexing want of precision, throughout the essay, and furnishes a dozen rhymes alone:

In these twelve instances "wit" rhymes five times to "fit," and three times to "writ." The monotony extends much farther. "Art," in the singular or plural, terminates eight lines, and in every case rhymes to "part," "parts," or "imparts."

Imperfect rhymes abound. The examples which follow occur in the order in which they are set down. "None, own—showed, trod—proved, beloved—steer, character—esteem, them—full, rule—take, track—rise, precipice—thoughts, faults—joined, mankind—delight, wit—appear, regular—caprice, nice—light, wit—good, blood—glass, place—sun, upon—still, suitable—ear, repair—join, line—line, join—Jove, love—own, town—fault, thought—worn, turn—safe, laugh—lost, boast—boast, lost (bis)—join, divine—prove, love—ease, increase—care, war—join, shine—disapproved, beloved—take, speak—fool, dull—satires, dedicators—read, head—speaks, makes—extreme, phlegm—find, joined—joined, mind—revive, live—chased, passed—good, blood—desert, heart—receive, give." In numerous instances, "the weight of the rhyme," as Johnson expresses it, when speaking of Denham, "is laid upon a word too feeble to sustain it."

Several lines are not metrical unless pronounced with a wrong emphasis, as

which only ceases to be prose when "the," and the last syllable of "eloquence," are accentuated, and it is then no longer English. Examples like

are not much better. Many of the verses, and this last is a specimen, offend the ear by the succession of "low" and "creeping words." Pope belonged to the class of kings he mentions in his poem, who freely dispensed with the laws they had made.

Johnson, commenting on Pope's attempt to adapt the sound to the sense, thinks it a contradiction, that he employed an Alexandrine to describe the swiftness of Camilla, and thirty years afterwards used the same measure to denote "the march of slow-paced majesty." There was no need to look for an instance at the interval of thirty years. It would have been found at an interval of half thirty lines in the Essay on Criticism, where an Alexandrine is introduced to portray the dragging progress of the wounded snake. The juxtaposition was doubtless deliberate for the purpose of illustrating the opposite movements of sluggishness and celerity. Johnson misunderstood the theory. The Alexandrine was not supposed to represent speed, but space. Thus when Pope describes the wound of Menelaus, in his translation of the Iliad, he says in a note, "Homer is very particular here in giving the picture of the blood running in a long trace, lower and lower. The author's design being only to image the streaming of the blood, it seemed equivalent to make it trickle through the length of an Alexandrine line."

A long line being presumed to suggest the motion of a long distance, the retarded or accelerated motion was intended to be expressed by the slow or rapid syllables of which the line was composed. The end was not answered, because, as Johnson remarks, the break in the middle of the Alexandrine is antagonistic to haste, and he has equally shown that Pope was not happy in the application of his mistaken rule. The slow march outstrips the swift Camilla, who is even left behind by the wounded snake in the first half of the line. Had the examples been a complete illustration of the theory, the gain would have been nothing. Representative metre, in the strict sense of the term, though sanctioned by eminent names, would degrade poetry. There cannot be a paltrier poetic effect than to mimic the roll of stones, the trickling of blood, and the dragging motion of wounded snakes.

"Mr. Walsh used to tell me," says Pope, "that there was one way left of excelling; for though we had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct, and he desired me to make that my study and aim."[44] Warton calls this "very important advice,"[45] and both he and Pope seem to assume that it had been effectual. The notion has been generally accepted. "To distinguish this triumvirate from each other," says Young, "Swift is a singular wit, Pope a correct poet, Addison a great author."[46] "He is the most perfect of our poets," said Byron; "the only poet whose faultlessness has been made his reproach."[47] Hazlitt took the opposite side. "Those critics who are bigoted idolisers of our author, chiefly on the score of his correctness, seem to be of opinion that there is but one perfect writer, even Pope. This is, however, a mistake; his excellence is by no means faultlessness. If he had no great faults, he is full of little errors. His grammatical construction is often lame and imperfect. His rhymes are constantly defective, being rhymes to the eye instead of the ear; and this to a greater degree, not only than in later, but than in preceding, writers. The praise of his versification must be confined to its uniform smoothness and harmony. In the translation of the Iliad, which has been considered as his masterpiece in style and execution, he continually changes the tenses in the same sentence for the purposes of the rhyme, which shows either a want of technical resources, or great inattention to punctilious exactness."[48] De Quincey confirms Hazlitt; but, with his profounder knowledge of the characteristics of Pope's poetry, he saw that the incorrectness was spread wider, and went deeper. "Let us ask," he says, "what is meant by correctness? Correctness in developing the thought? In connecting it, or effecting the transitions? In the use of words? In the grammar? In the metre?" In all these points he maintains that Pope, "by comparison with other great poets, was conspicuously deficient."[49] For an example of incorrectness in developing the thought De Quincey refers to the character of Addison:

"Why must we laugh? Because we find a grotesque assembly of noble and ignoble qualities. Very well; but why, then, must we weep? Because this assemblage is found actually existing in an eminent man of genius. Well, that is a good reason for weeping; we weep for the degradation of human nature. But then revolves the question, Why must we laugh? Because, if the belonging to a man of genius were a sufficient reason for weeping, so much we know from the very first. The very first line says,

Thus falls to the ground the whole antithesis of this famous character. We are to change our mood from laughter to tears upon a sudden discovery that the character belonged to a man of genius; and this we had already known from the beginning. Match us this prodigious oversight in Shakspeare."[50] Pope was still more deficient in logical correctness, in the power of preserving consistency, and coherency between congregated ideas. "Of all poets," says De Quincey, "that have practised reasoning in verse he is the one most inconsequential in the deduction of his thoughts, and the most severely distressed in any effort to effect or to explain the dependency of their parts. There are not ten consecutive lines in Pope unaffected by this infirmity. All his thinking proceeded by insulated and discontinuous jets, and the only resource for him, or chance of even seeming correctness, lay in the liberty of stringing his aphoristic thoughts, like pearls, having no relation to each other but that of contiguity."[51] Many of his arguments are capable of a double construction; absolute contradictions are not uncommon; and when we try to get a connected view of his principles we are irritated by their discordance, indefiniteness, and obscurity. As little will his grammar bear the test of correctness. "His syntax," says De Quincey, "is so bad as to darken his meaning at times, and at other times to defeat it. Preterites and participles he constantly confounds, and registers this class of blunders for ever by the cast-iron index of rhymes that never can mend." Another defect of language was, in De Quincey's opinion, "almost peculiar to Pope." "The language does not realise the idea: it simply suggests or hints it. Thus, to give a single illustration:

The first line one would naturally construe into this: that God and Nature were in harmony, whilst all other objects were scattered into incoherency by difference and disunion. Not at all; it means nothing of the kind; but that God and Nature only are exempted from the infirmities of change. This might mislead many readers; but the second line must do so: for who would not understand the syntax to be, that the judgment, as it exists in man, shoots at flying game? But, in fact, the meaning is, that the judgment in aiming its calculations at man, aims at an object that is still on the wing, and never for a moment stationary."[52] This, De Quincey contends, is the worst of all possible faults in diction, since perspicuity, ungrammatical and inelegant, is preferable to conundrums of which the solution is difficult, and often doubtful. He says that there are endless varieties of the vice in Pope, and that "he sought relief for himself from half an hour's labour at the price of utter darkness to his reader." De Quincey was in error when he imputed the imperfections to indolence. There never was a more painstaking poet than Pope. His works were slowly elaborated, and diligently revised. "I corrected," he says, "because it was as pleasant to me to correct as to write,"[53] and his manuscripts attest his untiring efforts to mend his composition. Language and not industry failed him. Happy in a multitude of phrases, lines, couplets, and passages, his vocabulary and turns of expression were often unequal to the exactions of verse. Not even rhymes, dearly purchased by violations of grammar and a false order of words, nor the imperfection of the rhymes themselves, could always enable him to satisfy the double requirement of metre and clearness. Most of his usual deviations from correctness are especially prominent in the Essay on Criticism, and any one who reads it with common attention might be tempted to think that the claim which Warton and others set up for Pope, was an insidious device to injure his reputation by diverting attention from his merits, and basing his fame upon a foundation too unstable to support it. The advice of Walsh was foolish. A poet who believed originality to be exhausted, and who merely aspired to echo his predecessors, with no distinguishing quality of his own beyond some additional correctness, might have spared his pains. The correct imitator would be intolerable by the side of the fresh and vigorous genius he copied. The assumption that the domain of poetic thought had been traversed in every direction, and that no untrodden paths were left for future explorers, was itself a delusion, soon to be refuted by Pope's own Rape of the Lock. Many immortal works have since belied the shallow doctrine of Walsh, who made his dim perceptions the measure of intellectual possibilities. The aspects under which the world, animate and inanimate, may be regarded by the poet are practically endless. The latent truths of science do not offer to the philosopher a more unbounded field of novelty.

CONTENTS.

PART I.

Introduction: That it is as great a fault to judge ill, as to write ill, and a more dangerous one to the public, ver. 1—That a true taste is as rare to be found as a true genius, ver. 9 to 18—That most men are born with some taste, but spoiled by false education, ver. 19 to 25—The multitude of critics, and causes of them, ver. 26 to 45—That we are to study our own taste, and know the limits of it, ver. 46 to 67—Nature the best guide of judgment, ver. 68 to 87—Improved by art and rules, which are but methodised nature, ver. 88—Rules derived from the practice of the ancient poets, ver. 88 to 110—That therefore the ancients are necessary to be studied by a critic, particularly Homer and Virgil, ver. 120 to 138—Of licenses, and the use of them by the ancients, ver. 142 to 180—Reverence due to the ancients, and praise of them, ver. 181, &c.

PART II. Ver. 201, &c.

Causes hindering a true judgment—1. Pride, ver. 208—2. Imperfect learning, ver. 215—3. Judging by parts, and not by the whole, ver. 233 to 288—Critics in wit, language, versification, only, ver. 288, 305, 339, &c.—4. Being too hard to please, or too apt to admire, ver. 384—5. Partiality, too much love to a sect, to the ancients or moderns, ver. 394—6. Prejudice or prevention, ver. 408—7. Singularity, ver. 424—8. Inconstancy, ver. 430—9. Party spirit, ver. 452, &c.—10. Envy, ver. 466—Against envy and in praise of good nature, ver. 508, &c.—When severity is chiefly to be used by critics, ver. 526, &c.

PART III. Ver. 560, &c.

Rules for the conduct of manners in a critic—1. Candour, ver. 563—Modesty, ver. 566—Good breeding, ver. 572—Sincerity and freedom of advice, ver. 578—2. When one's counsel is to be restrained, ver. 584—Character of an incorrigible poet, ver. 600—And of an impertinent critic, ver. 610—Character of a good critic, ver. 629—The history of criticism, and characters of the best critics, Aristotle, ver. 645—Horace, ver. 653—Dionysius, ver. 665—Petronius, ver. 667—Quintilian, ver. 670—Longinus, ver. 675—Of the decay of criticism, and its revival. Erasmus, ver. 693—Vida, ver. 705—Boileau, ver. 714—Lord Roscommon, &c. ver. 725—Conclusion.

AN

ESSAY ON CRITICISM.

II.