Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/503

POPE 483 fairly be claimed the credit of having been Pope s school master in poetry. It was he who turned Pope s attention to the French critics, out of the study of whom grew the Essay on Criticism ; he suggested the subject of Windsor Forest, and he started the idea of translating Homer. When Trumbull first saw the precocious boy, he was hard at work on his great epic. He had probably chosen his subject on the first impulses of his crude ambition, because it was an established maxim at the time that a great epic is the greatest work of which the human mind is capable. It says something for Pope s docility at this stage that he recognized so soon that a long course of preparation was needed for such a magnum oj)us, and began steadily and patiently to discipline himself. The epic was put aside and afterwards burnt ; versification was industriously practised in shorter " essays " ; and an elaborate study was made of accepted critics and models. When we look at the subjects of Pope s juvenile attempts, we cannot fail to be struck by a singular clearness of purpose in his poetic ambition, such as might have come from the judgment of the accomplished man of the world who was his adviser. He not only chose kinds of poetry in which there was an interest at the time, and a consequent like lihood of gaining attention and winning applause, but he had an eye to subjects that had not already been appro priated by great English poets, and in which success Avas still open to all comers. At the beginning of the 18th century Dry den s success had given great vogue to trans lations and modernizations. The air was full of theories as to the best way of doing such things. What Dryden had touched Pope did not presume to meddle with, Dryden was his hero and master ; but there was much more of the same kind to be done. Dryden had rewritten three of the Canterbury tales ; Pope tried his hand at the Merchant s Tale, and the Prologue to the Wife of Bath s Tale, and produced also an imitation of the House of Fame. Dryden had translated Virgil ; Pope experimented on the Thebais of Statius, Ovid s lleroides and Metamor phoses, and the Odyssey. He knew little Latin and less Greek, but there were older versions in English whose metre he could improve upon and from which he could get a clue to the sense ; and, when the correspondents to whom he submitted his versions pointed out mistransla tions, he could answer that he had always agreed with them, but that he had deferred to the older translators against his own judgment. It was one of Pope s little vanities very venial in a nature requiring such support to try to give the impression that his metrical skill was more precocious even than it was, and we cannot accept his published versions of Statius and Chaucer (published in "miscellanies" at intervals between 1709 and 1714) as indisputable evidence of his proficiency at the age of fifteen or sixteen, the date, according to his own assertion, of their composition. But it is indisputable that at the age of sixteen his skill in verse was such as to astonish a veteran critic like Walsh, and that his verses were handed about in manuscript and admired by men then in the foremost rank in literature. There is no better proof of his dexterity than his imitations, or rather parodies, of Chaucer, Spencer, Kochester, and Dorset, though dexterity is their only merit. His metrical letter to Cromwell, which Mr Elwin dates in 1707, when Pope was nineteen, is also a brilliant feat of versification, and has turns of wit in it as easy and spirited as any to be found in his mature satires. Pope was twenty-one when he sent the " Ode to Solitude" to Cromwell, and said it was written before he was twelve years old. He may have retouched this ; in all probability he did ; perhaps every line of it was written when he was twenty-one ; but there is abund ance of external evidence of his extraordinary precocity as a metrician. He was vain enough to try to make it appear still more extraordinary than it was ; but the attempt was hardly more puerile and comically superfluous than the solemn efforts of criticism to reduce his preten sions. They are too solidly founded to be shaken either by his own vain superstructure or by the outraged critic s vindictive undermining. Precocious Pope was, but he was also industrious ; and he spent some eight or nine years in arduous and enthusi astic discipline, reading, studying, experimenting, taking the advice of some and laughing in his sleeve at the advice of others, "poetry his only business," he said, "and idleness his only pleasure," before anything of his appeared in print. In these preliminary studies he seems to have guided himself by the maxim formulated (after a French model) in a letter to Walsh (written at the date he gives, or later) that " it seems not so much the perfection of sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest." His first publication was his " Pastorals." Tonson the bookseller had heard these pastorals highly spoken of, and he sent a polite note to Pope asking that he might have them for one of his miscellanies. They appeared accordingly in [May 1709 at the end of a volume containing contributions from Philips, Sheffield, Garth, and Howe, besides Pope s version of Chaucer s Merchant s Tale. We have not space to show what can be said on both sides about these artificial compositions, avowedly designed to represent the manners of an imaginary golden age, when men of " wit and refinement " were shepherds. The worst that can be said of them was said by implication in the Guardian in 1713, when a case, which was afterwards justified by Allan Ramsay, Avas made out for the representation of real English country life. Johnson, though he did not approve of pastorals in the abstract, said a Avord of common sense against exaggerated depreciation of Pope s attempt. Few persons are likely nowadays to put them selves in a position for making a fair historical estimate of Pope s pastorals. There was a passing fashion for the kind of thing at the time, and possibly he Avrote them under the impression that they offered a neAv field for poetic ambition in English, not knowing or forgetting Avhat had been done by Giles Fletcher and Milton. Or he may have thought that a great poet should begin as Virgil began Avith pastorals. At any rate his pastorals, though Johnson Avas right in remarking the " closeness of thought " shoAvn in their composition, cannot be ranked high as poetry, however much superior to everything else Avritten in a passing fashion. Pope s next publication Avas the Essay on Criticism. " In every Avork regard the Avriter s end, J is one of its sen sible precepts, and one that is often neglected by critics of the essay, Avho comment upon it as if Pope s end had been to produce an original and profound treatise on first principles. His aim was much less lofty being simply to condense, methodize, and give as perfect and novel ex pression as he could to floating opinions about the poet s aims and methods, and the critic s duties, to " what oft Avas thought but ne er so Avell expressed." "The toAvn " Avas interested in belles lettres, and given to conversing on the subject ; Pope s essay Avas simply a brilliant contribu tion to the fashionable conversation. The youthful author said with delicious loftiness that he did not expect the sale to be quick because "not one gentleman in sixty, even of liberal education, could understand it." But he misjudged his audience. The town Avas fairly dazzled by it- such learning, such comprehensiveness of judgment, such felicity of expression, Avas indeed a marvel in one so young. Many of its admirers, doubtless, like Lady Mary

Montague, Avculd have thought less of it if they had not