From The Cornhill Magazine.
POPE AS A MORALIST.

descending, we may generally assume that the rat has still some life in him.

Pope, moreover, has received testimonies of a less equivocal kind. Byron called him, with characteristic vehemence, the "great moral poet of all

THE extraordinary vitality of Pope's writings is a remarkable phenomenon in its way. Few reputations have been exposed to such perils at the hands of open enemies or of imprudent friends. In times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of his lifetime "the wasp of Twickenham "all stages of existence;" though it is not could sting through a sevenfold covering less characteristic that Byron was at the of pride or stupidity. Lady Mary and same time helping to dethrone the idol Lord Hervey writhed and retaliated with before which he prostrated himself. Ste.little more success than the poor deni- Beuve, again, has thrown the shield of zens of Grub Street. But it is more re- his unrivalled critical authority over Pope markable that Pope seems to be stinging when attacked by M. Taine; and a critic, well into the second century after his who may sometimes be overstrained in death. His writings resemble those fire- his language, but who never speaks as a works which, after they have fallen to critic without showing the keenest inthe ground and been apparently quenched, sight, has more recently spoken of Pope suddenly break out again into sputtering in terms which recall Byron's enthusiexplosions. The waters of a literary asm. "Pope," says Mr. Ruskin, in one revolution have passed over him without of his Oxford lectures, "is the most putting him out. Though much of his perfect representative we have, since poetry has ceased to interest us, so many Chaucer, of the true English mind; " and of his brilliant couplets still survive that he adds that his hearers will find, as they probably no dead writer, with the solitary study Pope, that he has expressed for exception of Shakespeare, is more fre- them, "in the strictest language and quently quoted at the present day. It is within the briefest limits, every law of in vain that he is abused, ridiculed, and art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, even declared to be no poet at all. The and finally of a benevolence, humble, raschool of Wordsworth regarded him as tional, and resigned, contented with its the embodiment of the corrupting influ- allotted share of life, and trusting the ence in English poetry; more recently problem of its salvation to Him in whose M. Taine has attacked him, chiefly, as it hand lies that of the universe." These would seem, for daring to run counter to remarks are added by way of illustrating M. Taine's theories; and, hardest fate of the relation of art to morals, and enforall, the learned editor who is now bring- cing the great principle that a noble style ing out a conclusive edition of his writ- can only proceed from a sincere heart. ings has had his nerves so hardened by "You can only learn to speak as these familiarity with poor Pope's many in- men spoke by learning what these men iquities, that his notes are one prolonged were." When we ask impartially what attack on his author's morality, ortho- | Pope was, we may possibly be inclined doxy, and even poetical power. We seem to doubt the complete soundness of the to be listening to a Boswell animated by the soul of a Dennis. And yet Pope survives, as indeed the bitterness of his assailants testifies. When controversialists spend volumes in confuting an adversary who has been for centuries in his grave, their unconscious testimony to his vitality is generally of more significance than their demonstration that he ought to be insignificant. Drowning a dead rat is too dismal an occupation to be long pursued; and whilst we watch the stream

eulogy upon his teaching. Meanwhile, however, Byron and Mr. Ruskin agree in holding up Pope as an instance, almost as the typical instance, of that kind of poetry which is directly intended to enforce a lofty morality. To possess such a charm for two great writers, who, however different in all other respects, strikingly agree in this, that their opinions are singularly independent of conventional judgments, is some proof that Pope possessed great merits as a poetical in

terpreter of morals. Without venturing | cate fancy still, even when employed into the wider ocean of poetical criticism, about the paraphernalia of modern life;

I will endeavour in this article to inquire what was the specific element in Pope's poetry which explains, if it does not justify, this enthusiastic praise.

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 I shall venture to assume, indeed, that hoops and wigs; and forget that human Pope was a genuine poet. Nor do I un- passions exist even under the most comderstand how any one who has really plex structures of starch and buckram. studied his writings can deny to him that And consequently we are very apt to title, unless by help of a singularly nar- make a false estimate of the precise row definition of its meaning. It is suf-nature of that change which fairly entitles ficient to name the Rape of the Lock, us to call Pope's age prosaic. In showerwhich is allowed, even by his bitterest critics, to be a masterpiece of delicate fancy. Pope's sylphs, as Mr. Elwin says, are legitimate descendants from Shake-ly to make in the eyes of our own descendspeare's fairies. True, they have entered ants. into rather humiliating bondage. Shakespeare's Ariel has to fetch the midnight dew from the still vexed Bermoothes; he delights to fly

To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds,

whereas the "humbler province"
Pope's Ariel is "to tend the fair"
To steal from rainbows, ere they drop

showers,

A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs,
Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs.
Nay, oft in dreams invention we bestow
To change a flounce or add a furbelow.

Prospero, threatening Ariel for muring, says, "I will

of

in

ing down our epithets of artificial, sceptical, and utilitarian, we not seldom forget what kind of figure we are ourselves like

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 moralized 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 about identical mur-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 was 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 sympathized with Pope's condemnation of the works in which

rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails, until Thou hast howled away twelve winters. The fate threatened to a disobedient sprite in his later poem is that he shall Be stuff'd in vials, or transfixed with pins, Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye. Scriblerus, were that excellent critic still alive, might convert the poem into an allegory. 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 deli

Pure description holds the place of sense. A large proportion 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

If

in their youth. Fairyland would be de- late the imagination. And, therefore, he serted, and the poet condemned to work- inevitably interests himself chiefly in what ing upon ordinary commonplaces in is certainly a perennial source of interest broad daylight. The principle which -the passions and thoughts of the men Pope proclaimed is susceptible of the and women immediately related to himinverse application. Poetry, it really self; and it may be remarked, in passing, proves, may rightly concern itself with that if this narrows the range of Pope's inanimate nature, with pure description, poetry, the error is not so vital as a modor with the presentation of lovely symbols ern delusion of the opposite kind. Benot definitely identified with any cut and cause poetry should not be brought into dried saws of moral wisdom; because too close a contact with the prose of daily there is no part of the visible universe to life, we sometimes seem to think that it which we have not some relation, and the must have no relation to daily life at all, most etherial dreams that ever visited a and consequently convert it into a mere youthful poet "on summer eve by haunt- luxurious dreaming, where the beautiful ed stream" are in some sense reflections very speedily degenerates into the pretty of the passions and interests that sur- or the picturesque. Because poetry need round our daily life. Pope, however, as not be always a pointblank fire of moral the man more fitted than any other fully platitudes, we occasionally declare that to interpret the mind of his own age, in- there is no connection at all between evitably gives a different construction to poetry and morality, and that all art is a very sound maxim. He rightly assumes good which is for the moment agreeable. that man is his proper study; but then Such theories must end in reducing all by man he means not the genus, but a poetry and art to be at best more or less narrow species of the human being. elegant trifling for the amusement of the "Man" means Bolingbroke, and Wal- indolent and to those who uphold them, pole, and Swift, and Curll, and Theobald; Pope's example may be of some use. it does not mean man as the product of a he went too far in the direction of idenlong series of generations and part of the tifying poetry with preaching, he was not great universe of inextricably involved wrong in assuming that poetry should inforces. He cannot understand the man volve preaching, though by an indirect of distant ages; Homer is to him not the method. Morality and art are not indespontaneous voice of a ruder age, but a pendent, though not identical; for both, clever artist, whose gods and heroes are as Mr. Ruskin shows in the passage just consciously-constructed parts of an arti- quoted, are only admirable when the exficial "machinery." Nature has, for him, pression of healthful and noble natures. ceased to be inhabited by sylphs and Taking Pope's view of his poetical offairies, except to amuse the fancies of fine fice, there remain considerable difficulties ladies and gentleman, and has not yet re- in estimating the value of the lesson which ceived a new interest from the fairy tales he taught with so much energy. The of science. The old ideal of chivalry difficulties result both from that element merely suggests the sneers of Cervantes, which was common to his contempora or even the buffoonery of Butler's wit, ries and from that which was supplied by and has not undergone restoration at the Pope's own idiosyncrasies. The comhands of modern romanticists. Politics monplaces in which Pope takes such inare not associated in his mind with any finite delight have become very stale for great social upheaval, but with a series us. Assuming their perfect sincerity, we of petty squabbles for places and pen- cannot understand how anybody should sions, in which bribery is the great mov- have thought of enforcing them with ing force. What he means by religion such amazing emphasis. We constantly often seems to be less the recognition of a feel a shock like that which surprises the divine element in the world than a series of reader of Young's Night Thoughts when bare metaphysical demonstrations too he finds it asserted, in all the pomp of frigid to produce enthusiasm or to stimu- blank verse, that

Procrastination is the thief of time.

The maxim has rightly been consigned to copybooks. And a great deal of Pope's moralizing is of the same order. We do not want denunciation of misers. Nobody of the present day keeps gold in an old stocking. When we read the observation,

'Tis strange the miser should his cares employ To gain the riches he can ne'er enjoy,

mere elements to plunge at once into essayist starts where Addison or Johnmore refined speculations. A modern

son left off. He assumes that his readand tries to gain a little piquancy by ers know procrastination to be an evil, paradoxically pointing out the objections to punctuality. Character, of course, becomes more complex, and requires more delicate modes of analysis. Compare, for example, the most delicate of we can only reply in the familiar French, Pope's delineations with one of Mr. connu ! We knew that when we were in Browning's elaborate psychological studpetticoats. In fact, we cannot place our-ies. Remember how many pages of selves in the position of men at the time when modern society was definitely emerging from the feudal state, and every body was sufficiently employed in gossiping about his neighbours. We are perplexed by the extreme interest with which they dwell upon the little series of obvious remarks which have been worked to death by later writers. Pope, for example, is still wondering over the first appearance of one of the most fa

Blest paper credit! last and best supply! That lends corruption lighter wings to fly! He points out with an odd superfluity of illustration, that bank-notes enable a man to be bribed much more easily than of old. There is no danger, he says, that a patriot will be exposed by a guinea dropping out of his pocket at the end of an interview with the minister; and he shows how awkward it would be if a

statesman had to take his bribes in coin,
and his servants should proclaim,

Sir, Spain has sent a thousand jars of oil;
Huge bales of British cloth blockade the door;
A hundred oxen at your levees roar.
This, however, was natural enough when
the South Sea scheme was for the first
time illustrating the powers and the dan-
gers of extended credit. To us, who are
Beginning to fit our experience of com-
mercial panics into a scientific theory,
the wonder expressed by Pope sounds
like the exclamations of a savage over a
Tower musket. And in the sphere of
morals it is pretty much the same. All
those reflections about the little obvious
vanities and frivolities of social science
which supplied two generations of British
essayists, from the Tatler to the Lounger,
with an inexhaustible fund of mild satire,
have lost their freshness. Our own
modes of life have become so complex
by comparison, that we pass over these

Addison-as

acute observation are required to set
forth Bishop Blougram's peculiar phase
of worldliness, and then turn to Pope's
descriptions of Addison, or Wharton.
Each of these descriptions is, indeed, a
masterpiece in its way; the language is
inimitably clear and pointed: but the
leading thought is obvious, and leads to
no intricate problems.
suming Pope's Addison to be the real
Addison-might be cold-blooded and
jealous; but he had not worked out that
elaborate machinery for imposing upon
himself and others which is required in
a more critical age. He wore a mask,
but a mask of simple construction; not
one of those complex contrivances of

modern invention which are so like the

real skin that it requires the acuteness and patience of a scientific observer to detect the difference and point out the nature of the deception. The moral difference between such an Addison and a Blougram is as great as the difference between an old stage-coach and a steamengine, or between the bulls and bears which first received the name in Law's time and their descendants on the New York Stock Exchange.

If, therefore, Pope gains something in clearness and brilliancy by the compara tive simplicity of his art, he loses by the extreme obviousness of its results. We cannot give him credit for being really moved by such platitudes. We have the same feeling as when a modern preacher employs twenty minutes in proving that it is wrong to worship idols of wood and stone. But, unfortunately, there is a reason more peculiar to Pope which damps our sympathy still more decidedly. It cannot be fairly denied that all recent inquiries have gone to strengthen those suspicions of his honesty which were common even amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Elwin has been disgusted by the revelations of his hero's baseness. till his indignation has become a painful