[Born in London, 1688. Died at Twickenham, 1744. Aged 56.]
Alexander Pope, the son of a linendraper, and a Roman Catholic, was his
own instructor. He was sent home from school in his twelfth year for
lampooning his tutor, and from that time he gave his teachers no further
trouble. Already, as a boy, a happy versifier--twice happy, for an
indulgent father smiled on his dawning skill--he was, in his maturer
day, and for the remainder of his own century, the leading star in the
sky of our English poetry. He received at the hands of his master,
Dryden, the rhymed ten-syllable couplet. This couplet was not first by
Dryden used harmoniously, forcibly, eloquently--for Hall in his Satires
had done this--but by Dryden it was first raised into the reigning
measure of English song. He sustained in it a free flow and bold sweep,
suitable to his genius. Pope rather chained the movement, stamping even
on his verse the peculiarity of his fine intellectual powers. When we
search for Pope’s characteristic amongst poets, we find that he had
reasoning--which is the earnest,--and wit--which is the sporting--of the
logical faculty, both intimately blending themselves with the poetic
vein. It was, accordingly, to a bright and sharp intellectual action
that he fitted the couplet, apt by its nature for the service. Uniting
to a lively, quick and keen intellect, so much of poetic passion as, in
fact, secured the dedication of a life, he produced works which, by
their mastery, must command admiration whilst the language is read,
although in them, the deliberate skill predominates over the passionate
expression. Viewed from the highest point, he was imitative, not
original. His spirit active and perceptive in the study of his greater
and less predecessors, not self-infused into the contemplation of Man
and Nature. What is most felt as a fire in his verse is the ardency of
writing, the zeal of an artist enamoured of his task: or he accepts and
translates the passion of others, which, not having its home in its own
bosom, does not receive justice there. Our grandfathers and our
grandmothers knew by heart the “Essay on Man,” the “Essay on Criticism,”
the “Moral Essays,” the “Characters of Women” (sparkling with wit and
malice, but adding nothing to the observation and true ideal delineation
of woman), and the “Rape of the Lock,” in which the playfulness, lying
in the verse, exquisitely comes out, and a graceful half-ironical fancy
amuses and captivates, but no steeping imagination subdues or transforms
to its likeness. He introduces us again to Ariel, whom we have known
before, but how different his Ariel and Shakspeare’s. Pope brought
intellective precision into poetry, which should feed on the indefinite
and the vague, and should flower out into the softened and the flowing.
Hence, often when he is the most admirable, he is the most artificial.