POPE. 349 



It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, 

 great on the moral and emotional as well as the intel 

 lectual side, should be produced by such a generation. 

 But something intellectually great could be and was. 

 The French rnind, always stronger in perceptive and 

 analytic than in imaginative qualities, loving precision, 

 grace, and finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical 

 power to the scientific regulation whether of politics or 

 religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts 

 of society to as great perfection as was possible by the ct, 

 priori method. Its ideal in literature was to conjure pas 

 sion within the magic circle of courtliness, or to combine 

 the appearance of careless ease and gaiety of thought with 

 intellectual exactness of statement. The eternal watchful 

 ness of a wit that never slept had made it distrustful of the 

 natural emotions and the unconventional expression of them, 

 and its first question about a sentiment was, Will it be safe? 

 about a phrase, Will it pass with the Academy 1 The effect 

 of its example on English literature would appear chiefly in 

 neatness and facility of turn, in point and epigrammatic 

 compactness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional 

 sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society rather 

 than to human nature. Its influence would be greatest 

 where its success had been most marked, in what was called 

 moral poetry, whose chosen province was manners, and in 

 which satire, with its avenging scourge, took the place of 

 that profounder art whose office it was to purify, not the 

 manners, but the source of them in the soul, by pity and 

 terror. The mistake of the whole school of French criticism, 

 it seems to me, Jay in its tendency to confound what was 

 common with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive deference 

 to authority at the expense of all free movement of the 

 mind. 



There are certain defects of taste which correct themselves 

 by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, is more 

 apt to be reformed by the charm of some master of it, like 

 Milton, than by any amount of precept. The influence of 

 second-rate writers for evil is at best ephemeral, for true 



