Pope Today
THE difficulty with Pope is that he was so tremendously, so rigorously of his own age. If we read him today with pleasure, it is chiefly because, in this period of distracted searching, his definiteness is so refreshing, his modulations so exquisite. We welcome him also because with our own poets tending so much to personal i.ssociation, all his allusions are public, or discover- able. But still he remains enclosed in his own age; he does not overlap as Swift does. It is his great demerit that in summing up, an age with unsurpassable brilliance, he never looks forward. Even his romanticism, that of Eloisa to Abelard or of The- Unfortunate Lady (both in this volume) is a romanticism already.
lived. • Yet there is a genuineness in Pope, which must be sought in, , the undertones. There is a meaning in the delicious fooling of The Rape of the Lock, industriously scholarly as it is. But wo- have to work to get at it, to soak ourselves so deeply in all that words meant to Pope, that even such a line as " The dying gales that pant upon the breeze " does not strike us as ridiculous. We have to learn a vocabulary so refined that every word, almost, contains a library of associ. ation, a variety of meaning. Pope pleases the " pure " poetiC sense better, perhaps, than any poet: it is what one needs to see through poetry that is so difficult to get at. To some the labour is worth while, as to Mr. Tillotson, who has done his work admirably, though we would expect no less front so delightful a writer upon Pope who is also a scholar.
BONAMY DOBREE.
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