are they common puns, but words used at once in their literal and metaphorical sense : Or stain her honour or her new brocade. Or lose her heart or necklace at a ball. He first the snuff-box opened then the case. Johnson has pointed out that Denham's verses on the Thames, "O! could I flow like thee," are marked by the same property, and no one would call them punning lines.1 66 were the The enlarged edition of the Rape of the Lock had a rapid popularity. "It has in four days' time," wrote Pope to Caryll, March 12, 1714, "sold to the number of three thousand, and is already reprinted." "The sylphs and the gnomes," says Tyers, deities of the day." Much of the relish, with the herd of readers, has passed away with the novelty. "Of the Rape of the Lock," says Professor Reed, "I acknowledge my inability of admiration," 3 and numbers who admire would qualify the superlative language of De Quincey, Hazlitt and Bowles. The conventional elegancies of a particular class do not appeal to universal sympathy. Many persons can enter no better into the fanciful beauty which is thrown around routine trivialities. The facts with them are too strong to admit of fiction. To these inaptitudes it must be added that the subtle delicacies of humour, satire, language, and invention, which mingle largely with the obvious beauties of the Rape of the Lock, can only be perceived when the taste has been quickened by the early culture of letters. De Quincey remarks that, with all orders of men, the elementary passions and principles are easiest understood, for the seeds of them are sown in every mind, and Milton and Shakespeare speak to understandings which are impervious to the refined and airy graces of Pope's artificial world.1 A few have gone into the opposite extreme, and placed Pope on a level with Shakespeare and Milton themselves. His strongest claim to the distinction is the Rape of the Lock, but wide is the interval, whether the test is character, passions, manners, descriptions, or machinery. The characters in Pope's poem are slight and superficial. There is a miniature sketch of an empty-headed fop, and an outside view of a beautiful young lady fond of dress, amusements, and admiration; the rest of the human personages are shadows. Passions, says Bowles, are the soul of poetry, and in poetry of the highest order they are grand, terrible, pathetic, or lovely; the grovel 1 Lives of the Poets, vol. i. p. 74. Historical Rhapsody on Mr. Pope, 2nd ed., p. 89. 3 Lectures on the British Poets, by Henry Reed. Philadelphia, 1857, vol. i. p. 314. 4 De Quincey's Works, vol. xii. p. 17. f ling, ludicrous, and trivial passions are of a less poetical species. The passions of Belinda belong to this lower class. Her grief and anger at the loss of her curl are professedly mock-heroic. They are disproportioned to the frivolous cause, and neither kindle, nor are meant to kindle, sympathy. The manners are not the index to inner depths,--the outward expression of the noble, the awful, or the tender. They are an exterior varnish, the mere formalities of fashion. The descriptions, apart from the sylphs, are chiefly of the toilet, the card-table, and such-like things, which have no kin-ship with the strong, abiding emotions. The very sylphs, by their employments, are, poetically, of an inferior race to the fairies who met on bill, in dale, forest, or mead, By paved fountain, or by rushy brook, To dance their ringlets to the whistling wind.1 The beings who luxuriate in the everlasting beauties of nature have a deeper charm for us than creatures whose chief delight is in the little artifices of a woman's toilet. The skill is exquisite by which the ephemeral nothings of gay fashion are coloured with the hues of poetic fancy, but in spite of the brilliancy they remain nothings still, and cannot compete with strains which are struck from the profoundest chords in the heart and mind of man. Lord Byron, to save the supremacy of Pope, asserted that "the poet is always ranked according to his execution." 2 Bowles maintained that the test of poetical excellence was the subject and execution combined." He admitted that the loftiest theme in feeble hands would be eclipsed by insignificant topics when treated by a master, but he said that no genius could render subordinate topics equal in poetry to the highest where the execution, as in Shakespeare and Milton, was worthy of the subject. Lord Byron stultified himself. He had no sooner completed his proof that execution was the sole criterion of poetry, than he went on to argue that "the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth." His paradox did not deserve a reply, even if he had not contradicted it the moment it was uttered. Hume wisely recommended that words should not be wasted upon theories which it is inconceivable that any human being could believe. In his Observations on the Poetry of Pope, Bowles put the modes and incidents of artificial life the secondary passions, and descrip 1 Midsummer Night's Dream, Act ii. sc. 1. 4 Moore's Life of Byron, p. 696. tions of outward objects in a lower gale than the development of the impressive passions.1 What he said of manners and passions was suppressed by Campbell, who based his reply upon his own misstatements, and proceeded to protest against "trying Pope exclusively by his powers of describing inanimate phenomena." 2 No one could be more emphatic than Bowles in placing souls before things. Of "inanimate phenomena," he had said that "all images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature, are more beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art." Again, his antagonists misrepresented him, an arguing as though he had asserted that all images drawn from nature were beautiful, and that there was no beauty in any image drawn from art, they imagined they refuted him by adducing natural objects which were unsightly, and artificial objects which were the reverse. The canal at Venice, without the buildings and gondolas "would be nothing," said Lord Byron, "but a clay-coloured ditch. The illustration did not touch the position of Bowles, who had never pretended that the ugly in nature eclipsed the beautiful in art. His principle was that, beauty for beauty, Solomon in the richest products of the loom was not arrayed like the flowers of the field. Campbell did not reason better than Byron. He selected the launching of a ship of the line for an instance of the sublime. Admitting, what nobody could deny, that hs ship was poetical, it did not follow that the wooden structure had the grandeur of the ocean. His language was a virtual confession that it was inferior. He endowed his "vast bulwark" with attributes borrowed from nature, human and inanimate. He thought "of the stormy element on which the vessel was soon to ride, of the days of battle and nights of danger she had to encounter, of the ends of the earth which she had to visit, of all that she had to do and suffer for her country." He found the sublimity, not in the ship, but in the associations,-in the stormy waves of the mighty deep which was to be her home; in the terrors of darkness when she was tempest-driven; in the vast distances she had to traverse; in the perils and patriotism of the crew; in the fierce heroic contention of the battle. Campbell was self-refuted. He fell into the same error with respect to some fragments he quoted from the poets. Images derived from nature and art were mixed together, and he did not perceive that the passages owed their principal beauty to the nature. The fallacies of disputants who wrote without thinking were easily exposed, and Bowles got a signal victory over the whole of his numerous opponents. Many a work of man, like the ship, impresses us less by its intrinsic 1 Bowles's Pope, vol. x. p. 363; Bowles's Letters to Campbell, 2nd ed., p. 22 2 Campbell's Specimens of British Poets, 1 vol. ed., p. lxxxvii. Moore's Life of Byron, p. 693. qualities than by the train of ideas it suggests. Until the errors of controversialists called for fuller explanations Bowles did not draw the distinction, and Lord Byron was misled by overlooking it. “The Parthenon," he said, "is more poetical than the rock on which it stands." 1 "Not,” replied Hazlitt, "because it is a work of art, but because it is a work of art o'erthrown." 2 Prostrate and broken columns, rent walls, and mouldering stone, exercise a more potent sway over the feelings than temples in the freshness of their artistic beauty. Hazlitt tells the obvious cause. Relics of departed glory, dilapidated monuments of intellectual splendour, are mementos of the fate which awaits the proudest works of man. With the thoughts of mighty reverses mingle the reflections which are always engendered by antiquity. The imagination reverts to shadowy, remote generations, to a people and power long ago laid in dust, and the ruins have a pathos which is the result of the centuries that have swept over them,—of the mysteries, vicissitudes, and havoc of time. When Lord Byron asked if there was an image in Gray's Elegy more striking than his "shapeless sculptures," his own question might have revealed the truth to him.3 Whatever poetry may be embodied in the matchless art of Greece, there can be none in the "shapeless sculptures" of country tomb-stones; but they are memorials set up by poor cottagers to protect the bones of kindred from insult, and the whole force of the phrase in the Elegy arises from the prominence given to the tenderness and affection of which "the shapeless sculptures" are the symbols. The emotion is extrinsic to the rude, prosaic, and often ludicrous art. The same image becomes poetical or unpoetical according to the associations with which it is linked. The rusting, disused needles of Cowper's Mary, stricken by paralysis, are associated, Byron says, "with the darning of stockings, the hemming of shirts, and the mending of breeches." This is the ordinary, mechanic association, and had it been the association called up by Cowper's lines they would not have been, what Byron pronounced them, "eminently poetical and pathetic." The associations are of another kind. The thousands who have shed tears over the lines to Mary did not pay a tribute to the needles, or the uses to which the needles were applied. They were melted by the representation-true and strong as the living facts-of love, of decay, of desolation, and of anguish. The different aspect of the same incident through the influence of association is exemplified in the description of the tea in the Rape of the Lock, and in the Task. The passage of Pope is not united to any sentiment, and only pleases 1 Moore's Life of Byron, p. 693. 2 Lectures on the English Poets, p. 389. * Moore's Life of Byron, p. 694. 4 Moore's Life of Byron, p. 697. from the elegance of the verse and language. Cowper sets the heart in a glow with the delicious picture he presents of "fire-side enjoyments, and home-born happiness." Out-door nature, and the imposing or beautiful passions, were not "the haunt and main region of Pope's song," and Bowles, after saying that the representation of nature demanded a susceptible heart, and an observing eye, goes on to state that "the weak eyes and tottering strength" of Pope were the reason that he seldom excelled in depicting natural appearances. His legs would not serve him to walk nor his eyes to see, and he was limited to the particulars which could be gained by books, or suggested by imagination." "From his infirmities," Bowles continues, "he must have been chiefly conversant with artificial life, but if he had been gifted with the same powers of observing outward nature, I have no doubt he would have evinced as much accuracy in describing the appropriate and peculiar beauties such as nature exhibits in the Forest where he lived, as he was able to describe in a manner so novel, aud with colours so vivid, a game of cards."1 The premises are erroneous. Pope's vision was not bad; his eyes, says Warburton, were fine, sharp, and piercing; "2 and though he was too feeble for long walks, he could, and did, ramble through woods and meadows, and along the banks of streams. Nine-tenths of the finest descriptions from nature in the poets are of sights and sounds which were within the range of his common experience. The decision of Bowles must be reversed, and we must ascribe the little nature in Pope's works to his want of mental susceptibility," and not to physical infirmity. His love of the country was the cursory admiration which is seldom wanting. He had none of the exceptional enthusiasm which could lead him to revel in nature, to scrutinise it, and enrich his mind with its memories. His strongest sympathies and antipathies were directed to the society of his day,—to the men who praised or abused, caressed or defied him. The object of Bowles in setting forth his critical principles, was not to condemn descriptions of artificial life or images taken from art, but to single out the circumstances which render one class of poetry more exalted than another. The bulk of Pope's works were satirical and didactic; and the affinity to the highest species of poetry in the Rape of the Lock, and the Epistle of Eloisa, was not so complete as to place him on a level with the mightiest masters Warton and Bowles united in ranking him before Dryden and next to Milton. Johnson doubtfully, and Cowper unhesitatingly, put 1 Bowles's Pope, vol. x. p. 371. 2 Warburton's Pope, vol. iv. p. 16. 3 Warton's Essay on the Genius of Pope, 5th ed., vol. ii. p. 404; Bowles's Letters to T. Campbell, 2nd ed., p. 28. |