AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM

INTRODUCTION

The 'Essay on Criticism' was the first really important work that Pope gave to the world. He had been composing verses from early boyhood, and had actually published a set of 'Pastorals' which had attracted some attention. He was already known to the literary set of London coffeehouses as a young man of keen wit and high promise, but to the reading public at large he was as yet an unknown quant.i.ty. With the appearance of the 'Essay', Pope not only sprang at once into the full light of publicity, but seized almost undisputed that position as the first of living English poets which he was to retain unchallenged till his death. Even after his death down to the Romantic revival, in fact, Pope's supremacy was an article of critical faith, and this supremacy was in no small measure founded upon the acknowledged merits of the 'Essay on Criticism.' Johnson, the last great representative of Pope's own school of thought in matters literary, held that the poet had never excelled this early work and gave it as his deliberate opinion that if Pope had written nothing else, the 'Essay' would have placed him among the first poets and the first critics. The 'Essay on Criticism' is hardly an epoch-making poem, but it certainly "made" Alexander Pope.

The poem was published anonymously in the spring of 1711, when Pope was twenty-three years old. There has been considerable dispute as to the date of its composition; but the facts seem to be that it was begun in 1707 and finished in 1709 when Pope had it printed, not for publication, but for purposes of further correction. As it stands, therefore, it represents a work planned at the close of Pope's precocious youth, and executed and polished in the first flush of his manhood. And it is quite fair to say that considering the age of its author the 'Essay on Criticism' is one of the most remarkable works in English.

Not that there is anything particularly original about the 'Essay.' On the contrary, it is one of the most conventional of all Pope's works. It has nothing of the lively fancy of 'The Rape of the Lock', little or nothing of the personal note which stamps the later satires and epistles as so peculiarly Pope's own. Apart from its brilliant epigrammatic expression the 'Essay on Criticism' might have been written by almost any man of letters in Queen Anne's day who took the trouble to think a little about the laws of literature, and who thought about those laws strictly in accordance with the accepted conventions of his time. Pope is not in the least to be blamed for this lack of originality. Profound original criticism is perhaps the very last thing to be expected of a brilliant boy, and Pope was little more when he planned this work. But boy as he was, he had already accomplished an immense amount of desultory reading, not only in literature proper, but in literary criticism as well. He told Spence in later years that in his youth he had gone through all the best critics, naming especially Quintilian, Rapin, and Bossu. A mere cursory reading of the Essay shows that he had also studied Horace, Vida, and Boileau. Before he began to write he had, so he told Spence, "digested all the matter of the poem into prose." In other words, then, the 'Essay on Criticism' is at once the result of Pope's early studies, the embodiment of the received literary doctrines of his age, and, as a consecutive study of his poems shows, the programme in accordance with which, making due allowance for certain exceptions and inconsistencies, he evolved the main body of his work.

It would, however, be a mistake to treat, as did Pope's first editor, the 'Essay on Criticism' as a methodical, elaborate, and systematic treatise. Pope, indeed, was flattered to have a scholar of such recognized authority as Warburton to interpret his works, and permitted him to print a commentary upon the 'Essay', which is quite as long and infinitely duller than the original. But the true nature of the poem is indicated by its t.i.tle. It is not an 'Art of Poetry' such as Boileau composed, but an 'Essay'. And by the word "essay," Pope meant exactly what Bacon did,--a tentative sketch, a series of detached thoughts upon a subject, not a complete study or a methodical treatise. All that we know of Pope's method of study, habit of thought, and practice of composition goes to support this opinion. He read widely but desultorily; thought swiftly and brilliantly, but illogically and inconsistently; and composed in minute sections, on the backs of letters and sc.r.a.ps of waste paper, fragments which he afterward united, rather than blended, to make a complete poem, a mosaic, rather than a picture.

Yet the 'Essay' is by no means the "collection of independent maxims tied together by the printer, but having no natural order," which De Quincey p.r.o.nounced it to be. It falls naturally into three parts. The first deals with the rules derived by cla.s.sic critics from the practice of great poets, and ever since of binding force both in the composition and in the criticism of poetry. The second a.n.a.lyzes with admirable sagacity the causes of faulty criticism as pride, imperfect learning, prejudice, and so on. The third part discusses the qualities which a true critic should possess, good taste, learning, modesty, frankness, and tact, and concludes with a brief sketch of the history of criticism from Aristotle to Walsh. This is the general outline of the poem, sufficient, I think, to show that it is not a mere bundle of poetic formulae. But within these broad limits the thought of the poem wanders freely, and is quite rambling, inconsistent, and illogical enough to show that Pope is not formulating an exact and definitely determined system of thought.

Such indeed was, I fancy, hardly his purpose. It was rather to give clear, vivid, and convincing expression to certain ideas which were at that time generally accepted as orthodox in the realm of literary criticism. No better expression of these ideas can be found anywhere than in the 'Essay' itself, but a brief statement in simple prose of some of the most important may serve as a guide to the young student of the essay.

In the first place, the ultimate source alike of poetry and criticism is a certain intuitive faculty, common to all men, though more highly developed in some than others, called Reason, or, sometimes, Good Sense.

The first rule for the budding poet or critic is "Follow Nature." This, by the way, sounds rather modern, and might be accepted by any romantic poet. But by "Nature" was meant not at all the natural impulses of the individual, but those rules founded upon the natural and common reason of mankind which the ancient critics had extracted and codified from the practice of the ancient poets. Pope says explicitly "to follow nature is to follow them;" and he praises Virgil for turning aside from his own original conceptions to imitate Homer, for:

Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.

Certain exceptions to these rules were, indeed, allowable,--severer critics than Pope, by the way, absolutely denied this,--but only to the ancient poets. The moderns must not dare to make use of them, or at the very best moderns must only venture upon such exceptions to the rules as cla.s.sic precedents would justify. Inasmuch as all these rules were discovered and ill.u.s.trated in ancient times, it followed logically that the great breach with antiquity, which is called the Middle Ages, was a period of hopeless and unredeemed barbarism, incapable of bringing forth any good thing. The light of literature began to dawn again with the revival of learning at the Renaissance, but the great poets of the Renaissance, Spenser and Shakespeare, for example, were "irregular,"

that is, they trusted too much to their individual powers and did not accept with sufficient humility the orthodox rules of poetry. This dogma, by the way, is hardly touched upon in the 'Essay', but is elaborated with great emphasis in Pope's later utterance on the principles of literature, the well-known 'Epistle to Augustus'. Finally with the establishment of the reign of Reason in France under Louis XIV, and in England a little later, the full day had come, and literary sins of omission and commission that might be winked at in such an untutored genius as Shakespeare were now unpardonable. This last dogma explains the fact that in the brief sketch of the history of criticism which concludes the 'Essay', Pope does not condescend to name an English poet or critic prior to the reign of Charles II.

It would be beside the purpose to discuss these ideas to-day or to attempt an elaborate refutation of their claims to acceptance. Time has done its work upon them, and the literary creed of the wits of Queen Anne's day is as antiquated as their periwigs and knee-breeches. Except for purposes of historical investigation it is quite absurd to take the 'Essay on Criticism' seriously.

And yet it has even for us of to-day a real value. Our age absolutely lacks a standard of literary criticism; and of all standards the one least likely to be accepted is that of Pope and his fellow-believers.

Individual taste reigns supreme in this democratic age, and one man's judgment is as good as, perhaps a little better than, another's. But even this democratic and individual age may profit by turning back for a time to consider some of the general truths, as valid to-day as ever, to which Pope gave such inimitable expression, or to study the outlines of that n.o.ble picture of the true critic which St. Beuve declared every professed critic should frame and hang up in his study. An age which seems at times upon the point of throwing cla.s.sical studies overboard as useless lumber might do far worse than listen to the eloquent tribute which the poet pays to the great writers of antiquity. And finally nothing could be more salutary for an age in which literature itself has caught something of the taint of the prevailing commercialism than to bathe itself again in that spirit of sincere and disinterested love of letters which breathes throughout the 'Essay' and which, in spite of all his errors, and jealousies, and petty vices, was the master-pa.s.sion of Alexander Pope.

'6 censure:'

the word has here its original meaning of "judge," not its modern "judge severely" or "blame."

'8'

Because each foolish poem provokes a host of foolish commentators and critics.

'15-16'

This a.s.sertion that only a good writer can be a fair critic is not to be accepted without reservation.

'17'

The word "wit" has a number of different meanings in this poem, and the student should be careful to discriminate between them. It means

1) mind, intellect, l. 61; 2) learning, culture, l 727; 3) imagination, genius, l. 82; 4) the power to discover amusing a.n.a.logies, or the apt expression of such an a.n.a.logy, ll. 449, 297; 5) a man possessed of wit in its various significations, l. 45; this last form usually occurs in the plural, ll. 104, 539.

'26 the maze of schools:'

the labyrinth of conflicting systems of thought, especially of criticism.

'21 c.o.xcombs ... fools:'

what is the difference in meaning between these words in this pa.s.sage?

'30-31'

In this couplet Pope hits off the spiteful envy of conceited critics toward successful writers. If the critic can write himself, he hates the author as a rival; if he cannot, he entertains against him the deep grudge an incapable man so often cherishes toward an effective worker.

'34 Maevius:'

a poetaster whose name has been handed down by Virgil and Horace. His name, like that of his a.s.sociate, Bavius, has become a by-word for a wretched scribbler.

'Apollo':

here thought of as the G.o.d of poetry. The true poet was inspired by Apollo; but a poetaster like Maevius wrote without inspiration, as it were, in spite of the G.o.d.

'40-43'

Pope here compares "half-learned" critics to the animals which old writers reported were bred from the Nile mud. In 'Antony and Cleopatra', for example, Lepidus says, "Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun; so is your crocodile." Pope thinks of these animals as in the unformed stage, part "kindled into life, part a lump of mud." So these critics are unfinished things for which no proper name can be found. "Equivocal generation" is the old term used to denote spontaneous generation of this sort. Pope applies it here to critics without proper training who spring spontaneously from the mire of ignorance.

'44 tell:'

count.

'45'

The idea is that a vain wit's tongue could out-talk a hundred ordinary men's.

'53 pretending wit:'

presuming, or ambitious mind.

'56-58 memory ... understanding imagination.'