486 POPE to use Wordsworth s phrase, " when the heights were within his reach " ? His choice was determined partly by character and partly by circumstances. It may be doubted whether Pope had the staying power necessary for the composition of a great imaginative work, whether his crazy constitution would have held together through the strain. He toyed with the idea of writing a grand epic. He told Spence that he had it all in his head, and gave him a vague (and it must be admitted not very promising) sketch of the subject and plan of it. But he never put any of it on paper. He shrank as with instinctive repul sion from the stress and strain of complicated designs. Even his prolonged task of translating weighed heavily on his spirits, and this was a much less formidable effort than creating an epic. He turned rather to designs that could be accomplished in detail, works of which the parts could be separately laboured at and put together with patient care, into which happy thoughts could be fitted that had been struck out at odd moments and in ordinary levels of feeling. The Dunciad (1728) was the first work of the new period. Circumstances turned him to satire when he was free from the Odyssey, and from his edition of Shake speare, a bookseller s commission completed in the same year. Young s satire, The Universal Passion, had just appeared and been received with more enthusiasm than anything published since Pope s own early successes. This alone would have been powerful inducement to Pope s emulous temper. Swift was finishing Gulliver s Travels, and came over to England in 1726. The survivors of the Scriblerus Club Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, and Gay resumed their old amusement of parodying and otherwise ridiculing bad writers, especially bad writers in the Whig interest. A volume of their jeujc d esprit was published in 1727. According to Pope s own history of the Dunciad, the idea of it grew out of this. Among the miscellanies was a " Treatise on the Art of Sinking," in which poets were classified, with illustrations, according to their emin ence in the various arts of debasing instead of elevating their subject. No names were mentioned, but the speci mens of bathos were assigned to various letters of the alphabet, most of them taken at random. But no sooner was the treatise published than the infatuated scribblers proceeded to take the letters to themselves, and in revenge to fill the newspapers with the most abusive falsehoods and scurrilities they could possibly devise. " This gave Mr Pope the thought that he had now some opportunity of doing good, by detecting and dragging into light these common enemies of mankind," who for years had been anonymously aspersing almost all the great characters of the age. The truth probably lies between this account and that adopted by those who take the worst view of Pope s character. This is that he was essentially vindictive and malignant, and that, as soon as his hands were free from Homer, he proceeded to settle old scores with all who had not spoken as favourably as he liked about himself and his works. The most prominent objects of his satire can be shown to have given him personal offence Theobald, Gibber, Dennis, Lintot, and others. This indeed was avowed by Pope, who claimed that it was their attacks on himself that had given him a right to their names. We may admit that personal spite influenced Pope at least as much as disinterested zeal for the honour of literature, but in the dispute as to the comparative strength of these motives, a third is apt to be overlooked that was probably stronger than either. This was an unscrupulous elfish love of fun, and delight in the creations of a humorous imagination. Certainly to represent the Dunciad as the outcome of mere personal spite is to give an exaggerated idea of the malignity of Pope s disposition, and an utterly wrong impression of the character of his satire. He was not a morose, savage, indignant satirist, but airy and graceful in his malice, writing more in fun than in anger, revengeful perhaps and excessively sensitive, but restored to good-humour as he thought over his wrongs by the ludicrous conceptions with which he invested his adver saries. We do not feel the bitterness of wounded pride in his writings, but the laughter with which that pride was consoled. He loved his own comic fancies more than he hated his enemies. His fun at the expense of his victims Avas so far cruel that he was quite regardless of their sufferings, probably enjoyed them ; but it was an impish and sprite-like cruelty, against which we cannot feel any real indignation because it is substantially harm less, while its ingenious antics never fail to amuse. Even when he exults in the poverty and material distresses of his victims, the coarseness of the matter is redeemed by the irresponsible gaiety of the manner. Such things should not be taken too seriously, if a Scotsman may say so. Further, even if Pope is regarded as a bitter malignant, it must be with two important qualifications. His plea that he was never the aggressor in a quarrel, in spite of all Mr Elwin s special pleadings to the contrary, was a truthful plea, though his sensitiveness to criticism was such as to make him fancy slights, and the with holding of praise where praise was due would have been construed by him as a positive offence. And his literary conscience was so strong that not one of his attacks on literary grounds was unjust. Pope was a most generous critic of real merit. The only doubtful exception is the case of Bentley, whom he satirized in the reconstruction and enlargement of the Dunciad made in the last years of his life at the instigation, it is said, of Warburton. Looked at apart from personal questions, the Dunciad is the greatest feat of the humorous imagination in English poetry. There was much more of unjust judgment in Pope s Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated, published at intervals between 1733 and 1738, because in them he oftener wrote of what he did not personally know, and was the mouthpiece of the animus of his political friends. These friends were all in opposition to Walpole, who was then at the height of his power, and the shafts of Pope s satire were directed at the adherents of the great minister. Pope s satires give the concentrated essence of the bitter ness of the opposition. We see gathered up in them the worst that was thought and said about the court party when men s minds were heated almost to the point of civil war. To appreciate fully the point of his allusions requires of course an intimate acquaintance with the political and social gossip of the time. But apart from their value as a brilliant strongly-coloured picture of the time Pope s satires have a permanent value as literature. It is justly remarked by Pattison x that " these Imita tions are among the most original of his writings." The felicity of the versification and the diction is universally admired. The Essay on Man (1732-34) was also intimately con nected with passing controversies. 2 It belongs to the same intellectual movement with Butler s Analogy the effort of the 18th century to put religion on a rational basis. But Pope was not a thinker like Butler. The subject was suggested to him by Bolingbroke, who is said also and the statement is supported by the contents of his posthumous works to have furnished most of the arguments. Pope s contribution to the controversy con sisted in brilliant epigram and illustration. T " ^ : ~ A In this di- 1 In his incomparable edition of the Satires and Epistles.
See Pattisou s edition of the Essay on Man.