On the Question whether Pope was a Poet

The question whether Pope was a poet, has hardly yet been settled, and is hardly worth settling; for if he was not a great poet, he must have been a great prose writer, that is, he was a great writer of some sort. He was a man of exquisite faculties, and of the most refined taste; and as he chose verse (the most obvious distinction of poetry) as the vehicle to express his ideas, he has generally passed for a poet, and a good one. If, indeed, by a great poet we mean one who gives the utmost grandeur to our conceptions of nature, or the utmost force to the passions of the heart, Pope was not in this sense a great poet; for the bent, the characteristic power of his mind, lay the contrary way; namely, in representing things as they appear to the indifferent observer, stripped of prejudice and passion, as in his critical essays; or in representing them in the most contemptible and insignificant point of view, as in his satires; or in clothing the little with mock-dignity, as in his poems of fancy; or in adorning the trivial incidents and familiar relations of life with the utmost elegance of expression, and all the flattering illusions of friendship or self-love, as in his epistles. He was not then distinguished as a poet of lofty enthusiasm, of strong imagination, with a passionate sense of the beauties of nature, or a deep insight into the workings of the heart; but he was a wit, and a critic, a man of sense, of observation, and the world; with a keen relish for the elegancies of art, or of nature when embellished by art, a quick tact for propriety of thought and manners, as established by the forms and customs of society, a refined sympathy with the sentiments and habitudes of human life, as he felt them, within the little circle of his family and friends. He was, in a word, the poet not of nature but of art: and the distinction between the two is this. The poet of nature is one who, from the elements of beauty, of power, and of passion in his own breast, sympathises with whatever is beautiful, and grand, and impassioned in nature, in its simple majesty, in its immediate appeal to the senses, to the thoughts and hearts of all men; so that the poet of nature, by the truth, and depth, and harmony of his mind, may be said to hold communion with the very soul of nature; to be identified with, and to foreknow, and to record the feelings of all men, at all times and places, as they are liable to the same impressions; and to exert the same power over the minds of his readers, that nature does. He sees things in their eternal beauty, for he sees them as 28they are; he feels them in their universal interest; for he feels them as they affect the first principles of his and our common nature. Pope was not assuredly a poet of this class, or in the first rank of it. He saw nature only dressed by art; he judged of beauty by fashion; he sought for truth in the opinions of the world; he judged of the feelings of others by his own. The capacious soul of Shakespeare had an intuitive and mighty sympathy with whatever could enter into the heart of man in all possible circumstances; Pope had an exact knowledge of all that he himself loved or hated, wished or wanted. Milton has winged his daring flight from heaven to earth through chaos and old night. Pope’s muse never wandered with safety but from his library to his grotto, or from his grotto into his library back again. His mind dwelt with greater pleasure on his own garden, than on the garden of Eden; he could describe the faultless whole-length mirror that reflected his own person better than the smooth surface of the lake that reflects the face of heaven; a piece of cut-glass, or a pair of paste buckles with more brilliance and effect than a thousand dew-drops glittering in the sun. He would be more delighted with a patent lamp than with ‘the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow,’¹ that fills the skies with its soft silent lustre, trembles through the cottage casement, and cheers the watchful mariner on the lonely wave. In short, he was the poet of personality and of polished life. That which was nearest to him was the greatest: the fashion of the day bore sway in his mind over the immutable laws of nature. He preferred the artificial to the natural in external objects, because he had a stronger fellow-feeling with the self-love of the maker or proprietor of a gew-gaw than admiration of that which was interesting to all mankind alike. He preferred the artificial to the natural in passion, because the involuntary and uncalculating impulses of the one hurried him away with a force and vehemence with which he could not grapple, while he could trifle with the conventional and superficial modifications of mere sentiment at will, laugh at or admire, put them on or offlike a masquerade dress; make much or little of them, indulge them for a longer or a shorter time as he pleased, and because, while they amused his fancy and exercised his ingenuity, they never once disturbed his vanity, his levity, or indifference. His mind was the antithesis of strength and grandeur: its power was the power of indifference. He had none of the inspired raptures of poetry: he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion. It cannot be denied that his chief excellence lay more in diminishing than in aggrandizing objectives, – in checking than in encouraging our enthusiasm, – in sneering at the extravagances of fancy, or passion, instead of giving a loose to them, – in describing a row of pins and needles rather than the embattled spears of Greeks and Trojans, – in penning a lampoon or a compliment, – and in praising Martha Blount!