POPE. 315 



is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone saw clearly that here 

 was the true knot of the question, though, as his object was 

 mainly mischief, he was not careful to loosen it. The sincerity 

 of Byron s admiration of Pope has been, it seems to me, too 

 hastily doubted. What he admired in him was that patience in 

 careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself and in most 

 of his contemporaries. Pope s assailants went so far as to make 

 a defect of what, rightly considered, was a distinguished merit, 

 though the amount of it was exaggerated. The weak point in 

 the case was that his nicety concerned itself wholly about the 

 phrase, leaving the thought to be as faulty, as it would, and that 

 it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often not beyond a 

 single verse. His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, is a suc 

 cession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet more often than 

 he makes the second line of the couplet a mere trainbearer to 

 the first. His more ambitious works may be defined as careless 

 thinking carefully versified. Lessing was one of the first to see 

 this, and accordingly he tells us that his great, I will not say 

 greatest, merit lay in what we call the mechanic of poetry.&quot;* 

 Lessing, with his usual insight, parenthetically qualifies his 

 statement -, for where Pope, as in the Rape of the Lock, found 

 a subject exactly level with his genius, he was able to make what, 

 taken for all in all, is the most perfect poem in the language. 



It will hardly be questioned that the man who writes what is 

 still piquant and rememberable, a century and a quarter after 

 his death, was a man of genius. But there are two modes of 

 uttering such things as cleave to the memory of mankind. They 

 may be said or sung. I do not think that Pope s verse anywhere 

 sings, but it should seem that the abiding presence of fancy in 

 his best work forbids his exclusion from the rank of poet. The 

 atmosphere in which he habitually dwelt was an essentially 

 prosaic one, the language habitual to him was that of conversa 

 tion and society, so that he lacked the help of that fresher dialect 

 which seems like inspiration in the elder poets. His range of 

 associations was of that narrow kind which is always vulgar, 

 whether it be found in the village or the court. Certainly he 

 has not the force and majesty of Dryden in his better moods, 

 but he has a grace, a finesse, an art of being pungent, a sensi 

 tiveness to impressions, that would incline us to rank him with 

 Voltaire (whom in many ways he so much resembles), as an 

 author with whom the gift of writing was primary, and that of 



* Briefe die neueste Litteratur betreffend, 1759, ii. Brief. See also his more elabo 

 rate criticism of the Essay on Man (Popeein Metaphysiker), 1755. 



