POPE. 303 



agency is wholly of his own contrivance, and nothing is allowed 

 to overstep the limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as 

 one of the purest works of human fancy ; whether that fancy be 

 strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we compare it 

 with the Midsummer Night s Dream, an uncomfortable doubt 

 is suggested. The perfection of form in the Rape of the Lock 

 is to me conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope 

 found fuller and freer expression than in any other of his poems. 

 The others are aggregates of brilliant passages rather than 

 harmonious wholes. 



It is a droll illustration of the incojisj^tengies^pjf human-natur^ 

 a more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, that his 

 fame should chiefly rest upon the * Essay on Man. It has been 

 praised and admired by men of the most opposite beliefs, and 

 men of no belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met 

 here on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, 

 indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll medley of 

 inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a 

 question that Pope was_not__a^rea.t thinker ; and that wherever 

 he found a thought, no matter what, he could express it so 

 tersely, so clearly, and with such smoothness of versification as 

 to give it an eiidasling_curreJicy. Hobbes s unwieldy Leviathan, 

 left strandecf there on the shore of the last age, and nauseous 

 with the stench of its selfishness from this Pope distilled a 

 fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant lamps of his philosophy 

 lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists, that go out the 

 moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive 

 doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to 

 music, and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from 

 mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than 

 many of the dogmas taught in this * Essay on Man. For ex 

 ample, Pope affirms explicitly that instinct is something better 

 than reason ; 



See him from Nature rising slow to art, 



To f-npy .jnstUl c t tbe.n_was reason s part ; 



Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake ; 



Go, from the creatures thy instructions take ; 



Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield? 



Learn from the birds the physic of the field ; 



The arts of building from&quot; the bee receive ; 



Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave ; 



Learn of the little nautilus to sail; 



Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale. 



I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term 

 nature is substituted for God, but how unutterably void of 



