Alexander Pope | Page 4

training.
Pope seems to have made some hasty raids into philosophy and
theology; he dipped into Locke, and found him "insipid;" he went
through a collection of the controversial literature of the reign of James
II., which seems to have constituted the paternal library, and was
alternately Protestant and Catholic, according to the last book which he
had read. But it was upon poetry and pure literature that he flung
himself with a genuine appetite. He learnt languages to get at the story,
unless a translation offered an easier path, and followed wherever fancy
led "like a boy gathering flowers in the fields and woods."
It is needless to say that he never became a scholar in the strict sense of
the term. Voltaire declared that he could hardly read or speak a word of
French; and his knowledge of Greek would have satisfied Bentley as
little as his French satisfied Voltaire. Yet he must have been fairly
conversant with the best known French literature of the time, and he
could probably stumble through Homer with the help of a crib and a
guess at the general meaning. He says himself that at this early period,
he went through all the best critics; all the French, English and Latin
poems of any name; "Homer and some of the greater Greek poets in the
original," and Tasso and Ariosto in translations.
Pope at any rate acquired a wide knowledge of English poetry. Waller,
Spenser, and Dryden were, he says, his great favourites in the order
named, till he was twelve. Like so many other poets, he took infinite
delight in the Faery Queen; but Dryden, the great poetical luminary of
his own day, naturally exercised a predominant influence upon his

mind. He declared that he had learnt versification wholly from
Dryden's works, and always mentioned his name with reverence. Many
scattered remarks reported by Spence, and the still more conclusive
evidence of frequent appropriation, show him to have been familiar
with the poetry of the preceding century, and with much that had gone
out of fashion in his time, to a degree in which he was probably
excelled by none of his successors, with the exception of Gray. Like
Gray he contemplated at one time the history of English poetry which
was in some sense executed by Warton. It is characteristic, too, that he
early showed a critical spirit. From a boy, he says, he could distinguish
between sweetness and softness of numbers, Dryden exemplifying
softness and Waller sweetness; and the remark, whatever its value,
shows that he had been analysing his impressions and reflecting upon
the technical secrets of his art.
Such study naturally suggests the trembling aspiration, "I, too, am a
poet." Pope adopts with apparent sincerity the Ovidian phrase,
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame I lisp'd in numbers, for the
numbers came.
His father corrected his early performances and when not satisfied, sent
him back with the phrase, "These are not good rhymes." He translated
any passages that struck him in his reading, excited by the examples of
Ogilby's Homer and Sandys' Ovid. His boyish ambition prompted him
before he was fifteen to attempt an epic poem; the subject was
Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, driven from his home by Deucalion, father
of Minos; and the work was modestly intended to emulate in different
passages the beauties of Milton, Cowley, Spenser, Statius, Homer,
Virgil, Ovid, and Claudian. Four books of this poem survived for a
long time, for Pope had a more than parental fondness for all the
children of his brain, and always had an eye to possible reproduction.
Scraps from this early epic were worked into the Essay on Criticism
and the Dunciad. This couplet, for example, from the last work comes
straight, we are told, from Alcander,--
As man's Mæanders to the vital spring Roll all their tides, then back
their circles bring.

Another couplet, preserved by Spence, will give a sufficient taste of its
quality:--
Shields, helms, and swords all jangle as they hang, And sound
formidinous with angry clang.
After this we shall hardly censure Atterbury for approving (perhaps
suggesting) its destruction in later years. Pope long meditated another
epic, relating the foundation of the English government by Brutus of
Troy, with a superabundant display of didactic morality and religion.
Happily this dreary conception, though it occupied much thought,
never came to the birth.
The time soon came when these tentative flights were to be superseded
by more serious efforts. Pope's ambition was directed into the same
channel by his innate propensities and by the accidents of his position.
No man ever displayed a more exclusive devotion to literature, or was
more tremblingly sensitive to the charm of literary glory. His zeal was
never distracted by any rival emotion. Almost from