4.3. Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
The age Pope writes in already accepts wholeheartedly the neoclassical principles which Dryden was still at pains to diffuse. Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711) is the English equivalent of Boileau's Art poétique in France: a re-statement of the neo-Classical principles when they already are generally known. It was his first important work (after the Pastorals and Windsor Forest ; just before The Rape of the Lock) and it is a perfect example of the kind of poetry Pope mastered: pointed, epigrammatic, aphoristic and not at all lyrical.
Pope's essay is modelled after the verse epistle of Horace and Boileau's Art poétique : it also follows a long line of imitations of these in Britain (Rochester, Mulgrave, Roscommon, Granville, Wesley). But, unlike them, it does not purport to deal with literature; Pope's aim is to give advice to critics on evaluation, and not to writers on composition. "Nevertheless he must establish the principles of sound artistic practice" (Adams 277) according to which poetry is to be judged; so, he will also focus on poetry. And, as a matter of fact, he thinks that only writers qualify for the role of critics:
1.
Let such teach others who themselves excel
And censure freely, who have written well.
He defines the intellectual and moral characteristics of the good critic. For instance, the critic must not pay excessive attention to small faults; he must appreciate what is good, irrespective of its being old or new , foreign or national. He must control his obsessions and not sacrifice his judgement "to one loved folly "; he will seek to appreciate, rather than to find fault; he will avoid the extremities of novelty and tradition, etc. "Certainly what Pope recommends to the critic is superior to the varieties of critical narrowness that he draws up for censure" (Adams 237).
In the third part of the essay, Pope points out the moral virtues required in the critic. Knowledge is not sufficient: honesty is needed, too, and humility in putting forward his judgement, taking care not to offend: "Without good breeding truth is disapproved." A good critic must have a sense of proportion, and know when to forbear criticising a great writer, while foolish critics will assail him with importunities:
2.
Nay, fly to the altars, there they'll talk you dead
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Earlier on in the essay, the main advice given to the critic is not to set his pride against the author; to try to understand first the author's spirit and then judge accordingly. We must know a poet's culture, religion, etc. before we attempt to judge him. The Augustan age was scarcely a historically conscious period. It was given to the admiration of neoclassical models as eternal standards, instead of seeing aesthetic conventions as historically relative. Pope's observations in the Essay on Criticism and in his "Preface to Shakespeare", although they do not amount to a historicist perspective, show some degree of historical consciousness.
Finally, to understand an author we need to understand his intentions. Few would disagree with that now, but in Pope this hides a further assumption: that the author cannot accomplish more than he intends. That is, that art is conscious and wilful; all must "stoop to what they understand." This is again the old Horatian idea that writing well comes from thinking well, and that writers must measure their strength before attempting certain subjects. But Hobbes's empiricist principle that "only that must be written which is perfectly understood" is not far away. And with this we can no longer agree in this age of Marxist, Structuralist and Freudian thought, where much of our behavior, even in writing literature, is accounted for by means of unconscious ideologies and hidden drives.
Like Hobbes and Dryden, Pope mistrusts imagination: it misleads understanding, and only understanding, judgement, can make a successful work of art for him. Judgement makes a writer follow nature, which is always the same for Pope. Following nature means understanding the rules and writing according to them. This is because Pope sees the rules as a product of Nature; they are a self-imposed restraint:
3.
Those rules of old discovered, not devised,
Are nature still, but nature methodized:
Nature, like liberty, is but restrained
By the same laws which first herself ordained.
And, as the Ancients were the ones who followed the rules best, "To copy nature is to copy them." For Pope, there is no possible difference between experience and imitation; here he is thoroughly neoclassical in the narrowest sense. He sees culture (the rules) as a part of nature, while the pre-Romantic writers of the XVIIIth century have a primitivistic tendency; they see nature as something which man has alienated himself from through culture. Nature and rule, nature and culture, nature and manners, become then opposite terms. For Pope, nature and manners are nearly synonymous.
However, Pope is not only inspired by Horace, but by Longinus as well, the "critic with a poet's fire," the most romantic of classical critics. He recognises that there are beauties which cannot be reduced to rule:
4.
Some beauties yet no precept can declare
For there is a happiness as well as care
5.
Music resembles poetry; in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach.
Sometimes, "license is a rule." And it is true that Pope comes close at times to the Longinian admiration of sublimity which can jump over the rules guided by genius alone. The rules must be respected, but they can be occasionnally broken:
6.
Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend
And rise to faults true critics dare not mend.
But this is a risky thing to attempt, and Pope seems to be trying to justify the ancients everywhere while keeping the moderns withing the boundary of rule.
Another piece of advice is to learn to judge the work as a whole, and not its isolated parts; to appreciate the true merits of a work, and not the superficial ornaments like good sound or a good style with no content. The harmony between sound and sense finds in Pope's view its most finished instance in the figure of imitative harmony :
7.
'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense;
The sound must seem an echo to the sense .
Soft is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar:
Whe Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labours, and the words move slow.
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Here Pope takes care to exemplify in his own poem the effects or defects he wants to point out, in bad poets, with examples of imitative verse on monosyllabic lines, hiatus or bad rhyme:
8.
These equal syllables alone require,
Though oft' the ear the open vowels tire;
While expletives their feeble aid do join
And ten low words oft' creep in one dull line:
While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With sure returns of still expected lines
Where'er you find "the cooling western breeze"
In the next line, it "whispers through the trees"
If crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep"
The reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep"
These lines seem to imply that poetry must avoid clichés and that one of the worst enemies of poetry is bad poetry, or even predictable poetry. Poetry should surprise with its wit and its innovative use of words and images.
Pope tries to practice what he preaches. Every principle and commonplace of criticism is given a witty and catchy formulation, and we may feel that Pope's own Essay on Criticism follows his requirement for "true wit":
9.
True wit is nature to advantage dressed
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
. . . something. . . .
That gives us back the image of our mind.
Wit, then, is the crown of nature, and not something alien to it. This definition of wit, with its peculiar setting of familiarity against novelty, can be traced to a Horatian source, but it was criticised by Samuel Johnson, who believed that Pope has reduced "wit" from strength of thought to happiness of language. But this is not Pope's doing: the term was already evolving from its original meaning towards a lighter and more frivolous one.
Nevertheless, Pope's neoclassical concepts are too limited to allow a real analysis of poetic effect. Form is not important in itself, Pope says, but only with respect to subject matter: "Expression is the dress of thought" and so it must be suitable, not uniformly bright,
10.
For diff'rent styles with diff'rent subjects sort
As several garbs with country, town, and court.
Pope's sartorial metaphors have often been criticised, because they betray him into denying what he is trying to assert: that there is an organic relationship between style and content. Defining style as a dress, as something which exists apart from the thing it covers, is not the best way to do it, but we must note that Pope is very careful in not using too much the word "ornamental" (cf. Dryden, Sprat and the decay of rhetoric), and he takes care in his poetry not to be too much "ornamental." Anyway, the definition of language as a kind of dress for thought is not Pope's own: it is commonplace until the Romantic age, when it will be severely criticised.