powerful mind, subtly appreciative of the finest beauties of form, was lodged in a sickly and misshapen body. Romantic sensibility and a large benevolence accompanied a satiric temper and a deadly vindictiveness against those who crossed his interests or mortified his vanity. These elementary tendencies received an impulse and direction from a peculiarly secluded education, which accustomed his mind to the use of equivocation, as the legitimate weapon of the weak against the powerful. Insatiable desire of praise or vengeance drove him into many actions of the paltriest dishonesty. Nevertheless, while he was pursuing his own ends by illegitimate means, it often happened that a certain warmth and largeness of heart engaged him in deeds of the most genuine benevolence. Hence, as Lord Chesterfield says: Pope was as great an instance as any he quotes of the contrarieties and inconsistencies of human nature; for notwithstanding the malignancy of his satires and some blamable passages of his life, he was charitable to his power, active to do good offices, and piously attentive to an old bed-ridden mother who died but a little time before him." It is not wonderful that, of those who attempt to find the key to such a character in a single principle, some should seek to paint him as the honest man he professed, and probably believed, himself to be, while others should depict him, in the style of his enemies, as an unmitigated hypocrite.

Much of the same atmosphere of debate hangs round his reputation as a poet. The dispute on this point between himself and the Dunces, renewed in the following generation between Johnson and Warton, and in the succeeding age between Bowles on the one side, and Byron, Campbell, Roscoe, and Disraeli on the other, has hardly been ended in our own time. It remains for me in this chapter to place before the reader the main outlines of the controversy, and to examine, with such impartiality as may be, the issues which are at stake.

The poetry of Pope occupies a central position between two fluctuating movements of English taste. The classical

VOL. V.

A A

school of the eighteenth century, of which he was the pioneer, was a protest against what has been rightly called the metaphysical school of the seventeenth century, just as the romantic school which arose in the early part of the present century was a reacting movement in art against the critical principles of the classical school. We ought not to regard the differing characteristics of these poetical groups as so many isolated phænomena: each is bound to the other by a historical connection, the full significance of which must be determined by reference to the course of English poetry as a whole. In other words, to appreciate the true meaning of the conflicts respecting the principles of poetry that have divided, and still divide, rival schools of criticism in this country, it is necessary to investigate the origin of the idea of Nature which each party holds to be the foundation of Art. To do this with completeness would require a volume, but the following outlines may serve as a supplement to what I have already said on the subject in the chapter on the Essay on Criticism.'

Greek poetry, both in its practice and its theory, was based on the direct imitation of nature; that is to say, its subjectmatter was, for the most part, derived from its own mythology, and was presented in forms which, to a great extent, arose out of the popular and religious institutions underlying all Greek social life. From these purely natural forms Aristotle reasoned to general principles which, according to him, were the laws of the Art of Poetry. The Roman poets and critics, adopting Greek models, carried them into all countries in which Latin culture predominated, so that before the fall of the Roman Empire what may be called a common sense of Nature, and common rules of rhetoric, prevailed wherever the art of poetry was practised in Europe.

The irruption of the barbarians obliterated like a deluge the landmarks of ancient criticism; the Latin language itself was only saved from destruction in the ark of the Christian Church. All the reasoning of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian seemed, like the Roman empire itself, to have completely

perished: for whole centuries the voice of poetry was silent in the Western World. In course of time new languages began to spring out of the decomposition of Latin, and, as was natural, their infancy was cradled in new forms of the poetic art. But the idea of Nature reflected in these forms was no longer one derived from direct imitation. A fresh conception of Man's relation to God, of the life beyond the grave, and consequently of the material universe, had come into being with the Christian Religion. And not only had Christianity supervened, but upon Christianity had been grafted Theology, and on Theology the Scholastic Philosophy. When we consider that the reappearance of Poetry is almost contemporaneous with the appearance of the Schoolmen, we can hardly doubt that much of the intellectual subtlety distinguishing the art of the Provençals was derived from the same atmosphere which inspired the five great doctors of the Medieval Church. Other influences, no doubt, contributed largely to the creation of the new Idea of Nature. The prevalence of feudal institutions, the enthusiasm of the Crusades, the neighbourhood of Oriental thought, represented by the Arabs in Spain, and by the philosophy of Averroes and Avicenna incorporated in Christian theology; all this, operating on minds learning to express themselves in novel forms of language, and unfettered by the critical principles of the ancient world, encouraged a new and vigorous growth of poetical conception. Hence the multitude of forms in which the poets of that early age manipulate what to us appears an extraordinary triviality of matter. Sirvente, Sonnet, Ballad, Virelay, Tenson, with all their subtle and scientific combinations of harmony, convey to us ideas of nature far more shadowy than do the odes of Horace; nevertheless it is evident that for the audiences of the Middle Ages they possessed not only music but warmth and meaning.

In time the medieval idea of Nature ceased to commend itself to the general sense of Europe. The wars between Christian and Paynim ceased; the wide-spread system of Feu

dalism waned before the advance of centralising Monarchy; the Reformation divided the Western World into two opposing camps; and, with the Balance of Power that began to emerge from the chaos, appeared the first rudiments of International Law. Yet so vigorous and trenchant were the forms of Mediæval Art, that they long survived the dissolution of the social conditions out of which they originally sprang. Dryden has well said that all poets have their family descents. And if anything is plain, it is that the poets of the seventeenth century in the various countries of Europe are directly and lineally descended from medieval masters of the art. In Italy the long-lived family of the Petrarchists echoed faithfully, if monotonously, the music of their first ancestor; in Spain Cultorists and Conceptualists aimed at the same subtleties of thought and language that may be found in the original manner of the Troubadours; Voiture in France amused the society of the Hôtel Rambouillet with rondeau, ballad, and sonnet, the prototypes of which had helped to dispel the ennui of the feudal castle in the intervals of the Crusades; Saccharissas and Castaras in England emulated the fame of Beatrice and Laura; Quarles meditated his Emblems,' and Phineas Fletcher his Purple Island,' just as if the allegorical interpretation of Nature still held the field, and Bacon had not succeeded to the throne of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Meantime, however, the foundations of a new critical tradition were being silently laid. The old classical principle of the direct imitation of Nature, rising from its ashes, was everywhere reasserting its authority. We may fairly boast that the honour of having first revived the practice of this great principle belongs to an Englishman. Dante and Petrarch indeed show the influence of classical forms in their language, but the cast of their thought is purely mediæval: the earliest poem which embodies the genuine classical spirit is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.' Afterwards Ariosto applied the imitative principle with the perfection of taste in the Orlando Furioso,' and Cervantes in Don Quixote:' it found among the French

a dramatic exponent in Molière and a poetical critic in Boileau. In this country Shakespeare made his Hamlet commend the principle to the players; and Dryden gave it a new application in the historical portrait-painting of his 'Absalom and Achitophel.' But the English poet who first consciously recognised the value of the truth as a canon of criticism, and upheld it by a regular system of reasoning, was undoubtedly Pope.

It was natural that it should be so. Pope was the poet of the Revolution of 1688. Up to that date the Court, still the most powerful factor in the formation of English taste, had been under the influence of medieval ideas in all matters of Church or State: the opinion of the body of the nation weighed little with the artist. Mediæval traditions in art were therefore still recent, and had to be reckoned with. On the other hand the removal of the predominant influence of the Court, and the consequent appearance in society of all kinds of new tastes and instincts requiring satisfaction, produced a condition of things perplexing to the judgment. Pope describes the change in some memorable lines:

"Time was, a sober Englishman would knock
His servants up, and rise by five o'clock;
Instruct his family in every rule,

And send his wife to church, his son to school.
To worship like his fathers was his care,
To teach their frugal virtues to his heir:
Το prove that luxury could never hold;
And place on good security his gold.

Now times are changed, and one poetic itch
Has seized the Court and city, poor and rich :
Sons, sires, and grandsires, all will wear the bays,
Our wives read Milton, and our daughters plays,
To theatres and to rehearsals throng,

And all our grace at table is a song."

For a society still in a state of revolution, and distracted by so many conflicting opinions and interests, the first necessity, as far as art was concerned, was to form a clear, positive, and