POPE. 353 



poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented 

 by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by 

 Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as every 

 thing aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so 

 conventional 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 instance how much success and permanence of 

 reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as on 

 native endowment. Butler asks 



&quot; 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 ? &quot; 



Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as 

 an artist is this power of finding out what is &quot; the best of 

 all the best.&quot; 



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 instincts 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 1 

 I felt, as Addison says in his Freeholder when answering an 

 argument in favour of the Pretender because he could speak 

 English and George I. could not, &quot; that I did not wish to be 

 tyrannised over in the best English that ever was spoken.&quot; 

 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 



