POPE.

ONCE again the old controversy, Is Pope a poet P has burst upon us with full fury. The celebration of the bicentenary of Pope's birth which took place at Twickenham on Tuesday last, and the exhibition of memorials and curiosities, have filled the air with the name of Pope, and on every side champions have appeared ready to break a lance in defence or defiance of the poet. For ourselves, we cannot help feeling that Pope is as often wrongly praised and defended as he is mistakenly abused. Poet he was, there is no doubt; but not poet in the sense some of his most ardent admirers would have us believe. When, for instance, Byron tells us that he is " the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, of all stages of existence," declares that " his poetry is the book of life," and asks us to believe that "he has assembled all that good and great men can gather together of moral wisdom clothed in consummate beauty," we feel that the cult of Pope is in danger of a reductio ad absurdum. Byron's view is obviously as misleading as the opposing notion that Pope was nothing but the most perfect and most elegant of verbal handicraftsmen, whose verses, though exquisitely polished, never succeed in rising above an essentially prosaic level. Not only, however, in the ques- tion of degree do Pope's ordinary admirers—as it seems to us —fail to appreciate correctly the object of their commenda- tion. Those who do not over-praise too often praise him for the wrong things, and try to restrict his claims to limits far too narrow. They speak of him as if he were merely the poet of a glittering town life, of elegance and polish, and above all of satire and its co-ordinate forms of verse. The restriction appears to us a false one. No doubt Pope shines most conspicuously in these branches of his art, and is, as a writer of satire, of vers de sociite, and of lighter didactic verse, especially noteworthy. It seems to us, however, to put the case far more truly if we say of Pope that he was in the absolute sense a poet—not merely a poet under this or that head—but that he wrote comparatively very little great poetry. The poet's gift—that gift which in its highest sense is the rarest and most precious of spiritual possessions— belonged to Pope unconditionally. It is true he was not, like Shakespeare or like Milton, given the power to show it in almost every word and line he wrote. Instead of, as with them, per- vading the whole work, it runs but in a very thin and narrow vein through the verse of Pope. Still, it is there ; and we find it just as genuine and just as unchallengable in his attempts in heroic, idyllic, or elegiac writing, as in the " Satires " or the " Moral Essays." Doubtless we notice the thinness and smallness of the vein least in these last, for they deal with subjects where the poetic faculty has often little play, and where the atmosphere is necessarily prosaic. We fancy them the occasions where he has displayed his poetic powers most, only because they are just those where least demand was made upon him for true poetry. In pointing this out, however, we must guard against appearing to look upon satire as not poetry. No such restricted definition can possibly be allowed. Satire is most assuredly a branch of poetry, though the branch in which the man with a narrow gift of poetry can show to the best advantage.

Until readers of Pope have been put upon the track of searching for the grains of the true gold of poetry in his work outside the " Dunciad," the " Satires," the " Moral Essays," and " The Essay on Man," they are apt entirely to ignore his more consciously poetic verse. Yet these grains—the presence of which show Pope to have been a poet in a sense far wider than that claimed for the mere writer of satiric and didactic poems -are well worth the gathering. How exquisite, for instance, are the verses, in the " Lines to Windsor Forest, sent in a letter to Martha Blount," where Pope speaks of the woods as the spot

" Where the kind Muses met me as I strayed, And gently pressed my hand, and said : Be ours. "

The lines are simple enough, but it is the true poet's touch.

Again, in some verses addressed to a very indifferent portrait- painter named Jervas, we get a very striking instance of that heavenly alchemy with which the poet touches clay and makes gold. He has got to make the trite remark that the painter

confers immortality on his sitter's cliarms ; but as Pope speaks, the commonplace is made poetry:— "Beauty, frail flower that every season fears, Blooms in thy colours for a thousand years. Thus Churchill's race shall other hearts surprise, And other beauties envy Worsley's eyes."

It seems little short of miraculous that such dulcet verse should have been squandered on the little Irish painter of whom only one fact remains. After executing a copy of a Titian, he exclaimed, with irrepressible satisfaction, " Poor

little Tit, how he would stare !" It is, no doubt, needless to remind our readers that the " Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady," though so unsatisfactory as a poem, abounds with lines of pure gold, for it is perhaps the best known of all Pope's more serious work. The beauty of cadence in the verse which describes the souls that " peep out once an age" as " Useless, unseen, as lamps in sepulchres,"

is, however, particularly worthy of notice. Never were liquids and sibilants more artfully alliterated than they are here. If we pass to the " Dunciad " and to the " Satires " and " Moral Essays," not to applaud the invective or the satire, though they are admirable and beautiful enough, but to find more of this gold of true poetry, we shall be quickly rewarded. Let

any reader who wishes to play a literary practical joke upon

any friend sufficiently well read to give point to the fun, ask that friend to tell him who wrote the line,— "From happy convents bosomed deep in vines."

Unless the friend is a Pope-worshipper, he is most likely, while admitting the beauty of the line, and delighting in the charm of the picture it calls up, to make a dozen wrong guesses, and quite certain not to hit upon Pope by the light of internal criticism. So unjust to Pope's powers as a poet; indeed, are men ordinarily, that the very poetic charm of the line will at once banish all thought of Pope from his mind: The more he admires, the less he will think of the real author. Yet for all that, the line is in the fourth book of the " Dunciad," where our readers will no doubt enjoy the amusement of finding it for themselves. The end of the " Dunciad," well known as it is, is too magnificent not to be quoted in this context, for it displays Pope's powers as a poet well-nigh at their best :—

" In vain, in vain,—the all-confusing hour Resistless falls : the Muse obeys the power. She comes ! she comes ! the sable throne behold Of Night primeval, and of Chaos old !

........ • • See skulking Truth to her old cavern fled, Mountains of casuistry heaped o'er her head ! Philosophy that leaned on Heaven before, Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more. Physic of Metaphysic begs defence, And Metaphysic calls for aid on Sense ! See Mystery to Mathematics fly !

In vain ! They gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. Religion, blushing, veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires.

For public flame, nor private dares to shine, Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine ! Lo ! thy dread empire, Chaos ! is restored. Light dies before thy uncreating word ; Thy hand, great Anarch ! lets the curtain fall, And universal darkness buries all."

Perhaps the passage which, next to this one, is the nearest per- fection in all Pope, is that in the "Epistle to Martha Blount," lately so judiciously praised by Mr. Courthope, which begins:— "So when the sun's broad beam has tired the sight."

Instead, however, let us quote the wonderful lines in which, while describing the great conquerors of his age, Pope sought to strike at Marlborough :— " Now Europe's laurels on their brows behold, But stained with blood or ill exchanged for gold . Then see them broke with toils or sunk in ease, Or infamous for plundered provinces."

None but a true poet could have written the last line. Massive and sonorous as are the words, the verse yet rings hollow and ominous with the horror of the deeds on which

the conqueror's glory is based. Such an effect as this is not produced by any mere technical skill ; it is the direct result of the poetic instinct. Of this power of 'flaking words by their place and consonance in a line carry an emotional force, and bear a meaning which is not to be sought in merely parsing

the sentences they contain, Pope was indeed a master. Here is another instance of the employment of this power. The courage, the daring, the meteoric splendour of Peterborough, the great knight-errant of the War of the Spanish Succes- sion, are brought home to us in the sound of a single line. When Pope speaks of him as,— "— he whose lightning pierced the Iberian lines," we seem to feel by some process of direct intuition the glory of these chivalrous exploits which made Peterborough the true hero of the age of Anne. Yet another instance of this supreme faculty—on this occasion employed to brand an enemy—may be quoted. Who can forget the effect of the phrase in which he turned Lord Hervey's very good looks against him, and made them the keenest weapon of attack ?—

" Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust."

" Beauty that shocks you " is indeed a rare inspiration.

We cannot leave the question of Pope's right to be called a poet without saying something of the " Satires,"—not looking merely at their indirect merits, but viewed in a larger aspect. Their strength is undoubtedly in the poetic touches they con- tain; their weakness is the tendency they display to become mere rhetorical invective. It is this fact which makes Pope's satires—the " Dunciad" in particular—dull reading. Except for the occasional flashes of poetry, there is often nothing but a dreary desert of prose in rhyme. Yet when the flashes come, how brilliant they are 1 They are often to be found in the least-

expected places, and among the most unpromising surround- ings. Dreary to distraction are the first seventy lines of the first epistle in the " Moral Essays," and then suddenly we are in the middle of a passage which, though the subject is pure prose, is nevertheless shot through and through by the gleam of the true gold of poetry:— "See the same man in vigour, in the gout ; Alone, in company ; in. place or out ; Early at business, or at hazard late; Mad at a fox-chase, wise at a debate; Drunk at a Borough, civil at a ball ; Friendly at Hackney, faithless at Whitehall. Catius is ever moral, ever grave, Thinks who endures a knave is next a knave, Save just at dinner, then prefers, no doubt, A rogue with venison to a saint without. Who would not praise Patricio's high desert, His hand unstained, his uncorrupted heart, His comprehensive head ! all interests weighed, All Europe saved, yet Britain not betrayed. He thanks you not his pride is in piquet, Newmarket fame, and judgment at a bet."

Without a doubt these lines have the poetic feeling in them, however hard it may be to get them under any definition of poetry.

But, after all, is it possible to give any sufficient and exhaustive definition of poetry at all P We may say such-and- such things are poetry, but if we attempt to add "and only these," we are certain to go wrong. Indeed, we cannot help wondering whether, in truth, poetry is not best known by the human emotions it produces. Just as music is said to awaken emo- tions which are stirred by and find expression only in music, so does not poetry appeal to a special and distinct set of emotions ?—and if this be so, may not it be possible to gauge what is poetry and what is not by the test of whether or not any response is given by those emotions P Of course, such a test is open to the objection that it is, in truth, merely an appeal to personal experience, and therefore does not advance the question. The value of the objection, however, depends upon the fact whether when poetry is felt, it is felt in the same way by different people. If it is, then clearly to test what is poetry and what not by this means is no more ridiculous than to test sweetness, bitterness, heat, or cold, by individual taste. Finally, it may be said in support of this contention, that in practice every one uses the test we have suggested. If a man wants to judge whether something is poetry or not, he does not seek to apply a definition, but reads the poetry to be tested, and according .as it affects him, pronounces for or against its claim to be considered a true poem. By tasting alone, can we tell whether what we

are drinking is wine P By tasting alone, can we say whether what we read is really poetry?—though, of course, in either case some men have more sensitive palates than their fellows.