And this unpolished rugged form I chose, As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose. In native vigour of thought, as well as in lucidity and purity of expression, Dryden, of the two poets, is greatly the superior. He was a practised dialectician, and the mastery of the familiar style, shown in his treatment of the couplet, both in his Religio Laici and his Hind and Panther, is admirable. On the other hand, it is to be remembered that his aim in each of these poems was far less elevated than that of Pope in the Essay on Man. Dryden's argument was concentrated on a single issue, which afforded little opening for illustration or imagery. The poet, in an easy conversational vein, contracted or expanded, as he chose, the few points which it was his object to labour. But in the Essay on Man the thought is so pregnant, so condensed, that almost every word is of importance, and Pope constantly encounters the difficulty which Horace notices as inherent in the philosophical style of verse: "brevis esse laboro; obscurus fio." The gravest defect in the diction of the Essay is incorrectness of grammar, caused by repeated ellipses. The following are examples of a fault, the more vexatious because it often occurs in the midst of passages which otherwise show an almost miraculous skill of expression : Of man what see we but his station here, From which to reason or to which refer? Then say not man's imperfect, heaven in fault; And oft so mix the difference is too nice, Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole; The good or bad the gifts of fortune gain, But these less taste them as they worse obtain. 1 Pope having omitted "the" before "greatest," Warburton pretended that he had meant that the greatness of God was most manifest in the least of His creatures. But grant him riches, your demand is o'er ? "No-shall the good want health, the good want power?" Add health, and power, and every earthly thing: "Why bounded power? why private? why no King?" Pope fell so much into the habit of contenting himself with elliptical forms of expression, that he sometimes adopted an imperfect construction easily capable of improvement, as in the lines: In human works, though laboured on with pain, where he might have written with perfect correctness "one singly." The second great blot on the diction of the Essay is the frequency of inversion which, if sometimes employed for the purpose of emphasis, seems to be more often the result of the difficulty of reasoning in rhyme. lines like And quitting sense call imitating God. Pleasures are ever in our hands or eyes, Nor virtue male or female can we name, We have But what will grow on pride, or grow on shame. When, however, all deductions are made, much remains. To rest as Byron did-Pope's chief claim to poetical greatness upon the Essay on Man because "the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth," is a fatal mistake in criticism. Many persons in the eighteenth century thought, with Marmontel, that "the end of the didactic poem is to instruct";1 whereas the true end of all poetry is to please. The rank of a poem depends on the kind of pleasure it produces, and no instructed judge would 1 See Pope's Works, vol. ii. p. 335. maintain, on reflection, that the imaginative pleasure produced by ethical compositions like Horace's Satires and Epistles can compare in quality with the pleasure arising out of simple narratives of action, such as Homer's Iliad. Hence the test of excellence applied by De Quincey is fallacious : If the question (he says) were asked, What ought to have been the best among Pope's poems? most people would answer, the Essay on Man. Why should they answer so? They could not tell a priori in what way the subject ought to be organically treated, or what kind of materials the poet should use for his architecture. He might conceive of his theme from the Christian's, the Deist's, or the Atheist's standing-ground : the merit of his performance depended entirely on the effect he was able to create in the imagination. And upon this point De Quincey decides dogmatically: If the question were asked, What is the worst? all people of judgment would say, the Essay on Man. While yet in its rudiments, this poem claimed the first place by the promise of its subject; when finished, by the utter failure of its execution, it fell into the last.1 This is sufficiently arrogant, for it not only implicitly sets down Voltaire, Dugald Stewart, Bowles, and Joseph Warton-all of them great admirers of the Essayas men of no judgment, but takes no account of the enduring popularity of the poem. As to Pope's execution of his design, I have shown that he acted on the excellent advice of Bolingbroke. His back-bone of thought was Bolingbroke's scheme of Deism, just as Epicurus' philosophy formed the main subject of the De Rerum Natura. But from his master's laboured system Pope selected only those leading points which gave him the fullest opportunities for the exposition of the illustrations and epigrams in which he himself excelled. The diamond-like brilliance of the successive passages in 1 Pope's Works, vol. ii. p. 333. which he describes the graduated order of Nature, or the evolution of Society; the loftiness of the rhetoric in which he exalts the infinite wisdom of God; and the moral energy with which he employs his satiric genius to expose the fatuity of the pride of man, are not mere "purple patches," but episodes skilfully evolved out of the subject matter of the Essay; and prejudice alone makes Hazlitt say that "the description of the poor Indian and the lamb doomed to death, are all the unsophisticated reader ever remembers of that muchtalked-of production." Joseph Warton was certainly no partisan of Pope, but in criticising the Essay on Man he judged his genius with more fairness : 1 The origin of the connections in social life, the account of the state of nature, the rise and effects of superstition and tyranny, and the restoration of true religion and just government, all these ought to be mentioned as passages that deserve high applause, nay, as some of the most exalted pieces of English poetry.2 And again : Pope has practised the great secret of Virgil's art, which was to discover the very single epithet that precisely suited each occasion. If Pope must yield to other poets in point of fertility of fancy, or harmony of numbers, yet in point of propriety, closeness, and elegance of diction he can yield to none.3 Let the two following passages which are only samples of the many excellences of the Essay on Man be taken as evidence of the justice of Warton's criticism: Far as creation's ample range extends, The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends: Of smell the headlong lioness between And hound sagacious on the tainted green : 1 Lectures on the English Poets, p. 378. 2 Cited in Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), vol. ii. p. 408-footnote 6. 3 Ibid. p. 365-foot-note 1. And Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood, What thin partitions sense from thought divide; Who taught the nations of the field and flood Sure as Demoivre, without rule or line? Heavens not his own, and worlds unknown before? Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way? 2 The social atmosphere which encouraged the Deistic movement was also, indirectly, the inspiring source of one who, as an original thinker, was much superior to Pope; who was not inferior to him in wit and satiric power; but who was far from being his equal in his mastery of the art of poetry. At the close of the first section of his Night Thoughts, Edward Young makes a clear reference to the Essay on Man: Dark, though not blind, like thee, Maeonides! Or Milton, thee! Ah could I reach your strain! Man too he sung: immortal man I sing: Oft bursts my song beyond the bounds of life; Essay on Man, Epistle i. 207-232. 2 Ibid. Epistle iii. 99-108. |