296 POPE. 



more than for the wearisome thrumming-over of his tune by 

 those who came after him and who had caught his technical skill 

 without his genius. The question properly stated is, How much 

 was it possible to make of the material supplied by the age in 

 which he lived ? and how much did he make of it? Thus far, 

 among the great English poets who preceded him, we have seen 

 actual life represented by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, 

 ideal life by Shakspeare, the interior life by Milton. But as 

 everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so con 

 ventional life, a new phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. 

 It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands 

 for exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect propriety 

 of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a striking in 

 stance how much success and permanence of reputation depend 

 on conscientious finish as well as on native endowment. Butler 

 asks 



Then why should those who pick and choose 



The best of all the best compose, 



And join it by Mosaic art, 



In graceful order, part to part, 



To make the whole in beauty suit, 



Not merit as complete repute 



As those who, with less art and pain, 



Can do it with their native brain ? 



Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as 

 an artist is this power of finding out what is ( the best of all 

 the best. 



I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. 

 I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest 

 poet that ever lived ; and when I came to find that I had in 

 stincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with 

 the apostles of a more esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that 

 ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to 

 worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which 

 characterises youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope was 

 called a master of style ? I felt, as Addison says in his Free 

 holder when answering an argument in favour of the Pretender 

 because he could speak English and George I. could not, that 

 I did not wish to be tyrannised over in the best English that 

 ever was spoken/ The young demand thoughts that find an 

 echo in their real and not their acquired nature, and care very 

 little about the dress they are put in. It is later that we learn 

 to like the conventional, as we do olives. There was a time 

 when I could not read Pope, but disliked him on principle as 

 Old Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy when he says 



