The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, vol 2 | Page 2

deploring
the fact, that Pope had sunk in estimation. And yet, a few sentences
after, he told us that the "Commissioners of the Fine Arts" selected

Pope, along with Chaucer, Shakspeare, Spenser, Milton, and Dryden, to
fill the six vacant places in the New Palace of Westminster. This does
not substantiate the assertion, that Pope has sunk in estimation. Had he
sunk to any great extent, the Commissioners would not have dared to
put his name and statue beside those of the acknowledged masters of
English poetry. But apart from this, we do think that Lord Carlisle has
exaggerated the "Decline and Fall" of the empire of Pope. He is still,
with the exception, perhaps, of Cowper, the most popular poet of the
eighteenth century. His "Essay on Man," and his "Eloisa and Abelard,"
are probably in every good library, public and private, in Great Britain.
Can we say as much of Chaucer and Spenser? Passages and lines of his
poetry are stamped on the memory of all well-educated men. More
pointed sayings of Pope are afloat than of any English poet, except
Shakspeare and Young. Indeed, if frequency of quotation be the
principal proof of popularity, Pope, with Shakspeare, Young, and
Spenser, is one of the four most popular of English poets. In America,
too, Lord Carlisle found, he tells us, the most cultivated and literary
portion of that great community warmly imbued with an admiration of
Pope.
What more would, or at least should, his lordship desire? Pope is, by
his own showing, a great favourite with many wherever the English
language is spoken, and that, too, a century after his death. And there
are few critics who would refuse to subscribe, on the whole, Lord
Carlisle's enumeration of the Poet's qualities; his terse and motto-like
lines--the elaborate gloss of his mock-heroic vein--the tenderness of his
pathos--the point and polished strength of his satire--the force and
vraisemblance of his descriptions of character--the delicacy and
refinement of his compliments, "each of which," says Hazlitt, "is as
good as an house or estate"--and the heights of moral grandeur into
which he can at times soar, whenever he has manly indignation, or
warm-hearted patriotism, or high-minded scorn to express. If Lord
Carlisle's object, then, was to elevate Pope to the rank of a classic, it
was a superfluous task; if it was to justify the Commissioners in placing
him on a level with Chaucer, Shakspeare, Spenser, and Milton, our
remarks will show that we think it as vain as superfluous.

In endeavouring to fix the rank of a poet, there are, we think, the
following elements to be analysed:--His original genius--his kind and
degree of culture--his purpose--his special faculties--the works he has
written--and the amount of impression he has made on, and impulse he
has given to, his own age and the world. In other words, what were his
native powers, and what has he done, for_, _by_, and _with them?
Now, that Pope possessed genius, and genius of a high order, we
strenuously maintain. But whether this amounted to creative power, the
highest quality of the poet, is a very different question. In native
imagination, that eyesight of the soul, which sees in the rose a richer
red, in the sky a deeper azure, in the sea a more dazzling foam, in the
stars a softer and more spiritual gold, and in the sky a more dread
magnificence than nature ever gave them, that beholds the Ideal always
shining through and above the Real, and that lights the poet on to form
within a new and more gorgeous nature, the fresh creation of his own
inspired mind, Pope was not only inferior to Chaucer, Shakspeare,
Spenser, and Milton, but to Young, Thomson, Collins, Burns,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and many other poets.
His native faculty, indeed, seems rather fine than powerful--rather timid
than daring, and resembles rather the petal of a rose peeping out into
the summer air, which seems scarce warm enough for its shrinking
loveliness, than the feather of the wing of a great eagle, dipping into the
night tempest, which raves around the inaccessible rock of his
birthplace. He was not eminently original in his thinking. In proof of
this, many of those fine sentiments which Pope has thrown into such
perfect shape, and to which he has given such dazzling burnish, are
found by Watson (see the "Adventurer") in Pascal and others.
Shakspeare's wisdom, on the other hand, can be traced to Shakspeare's
brain, and no further, although he has borrowed the plots of his plays.
Who lent Chaucer his pictures, fresh as dewdrops from the womb of the
morning? Spenser's Allegories are as native to him as his dreams; and if
Milton has now and then carried off a load which belonged to another,
it was