William Minto and Margaret Bryant

“ The most prominent defects of the age-the lack of high and sustained imagination, the genteel liking for “ nature to advantage dressed, ” the incessant striving after wit-were fostered, if not generated, by the social atmosphere.
Pope's own ruling passion was the love of fame, and he had no scruples where this was concerned. His vanity and his childish love of intrigue are seen at their worst in his petty manoeuvres to secure the publication of his letters during his lifetime. ”

“ Having failed to write a suitable tragedy, he next turned his attention to comedy, although, as he admitted, he had little natural turn for it. “I confess,” he said, in a short essay in his own defence, printed before The Indian Emperor, “my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humour of this be for low comedy, small accidents and raillery, I will force my genius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in verse. I know I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy ”

“ If we rise from a comparison of the plays with an impression that the Elizabethan drama is a higher type of drama, taking Dryden’s own definition of the word as “a just and lively image of human nature,” we rise also with an impression of Dryden’s power such as we get from nothing else that he had written since his Heroic Stanzas, twenty years before. ”

“ The plot of Don Sebastian is more intricate than that of All for Love. It has also more of the characteristics of his heroic dramas; the extravagance of sentiment and the suddenness of impulse remind us occasionally of The Indian Emperor; but the characters are much more elaborately studied than in Dryden’s earlier plays, and the verse is sinewy and powerful. It would be difficult to say whether Don Sebastian or All for Love is his best play; they share the palm between them. Dryden’s subsequent plays are not remarkable. ”

“ If One compares Pope's “Messiah ” or “ Eloisa to Abelard, " or an impassioned passage from the Iliad, with the originals that he paraphrased, one gets a more vivid idea of the consistence of pseudo-poetic diction than could be furnished by pages of analysis. But Pope merely made masterly use of the established diction of his time, which he eventually forsook for a far more direct and vigorous style. A passage from the Guardian, in which Philips was commended as against him, runs: “It is a nice piece of art to raise a proverb above the vulgar style and still keep it easy and unaffected. ”

“ Sir Leslie Stephen objected on somewhat different grounds to the poet's tone towards women. His laughter at Pope's raillery was checked by the fact that women are spoken of in the poem as if they were all like Belinda. The poem shows the hand of the satirist who was later to assert that “ every woman is at heart a rake, ” in the epistle addressed to Martha Blount. Windsor Forest, modelled on Sir John Denham's Cooper's Hill, had been begun, according to Pope's account, when he was sixteen or seventeen. ”

“ In itself the poem is a magnificent tribute to the memory of Cromwell.
To those who regard the poet as a seer with a sacred mission, and refuse the name altogether to a literary manufacturer to order, it comes with a certain shock to find Dryden, the hereditary Puritan, the panegyrist of Cromwell, hailing the return of King Charles in Astraea Redux (1660) , deploring his long absence, and proclaiming the despair with which he had seen “the rebel thrive, the loyal crost.” ”

“ What Dryden had touched Pope did not presume to meddle with-Dryden was his hero and master; but there was much more of the same kind to be done. Dryden had rewritten three of the Canterbury tales; Pope tried his hand at the Merchant’s Tale, and the Prologue to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and produced also an imitation of the House of Fame. Dryden had translated Virgil; Pope experimented on the Thebais of Statius, Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses, and the Odyssey. He knew little Latin and less Greek, but there were older versions in English which helped him to the sense ”

“ They were historically unjust to Pope, who did not originate this diction, but only furnished the most finished examples of it. At the beginning of the 10th century Pope still had an ardent admirer in Byron, whose first satires are written in Pope's couplet. The much abused pseudo-poetic diction in substance consisted in an ambition to “rise above the vulgar style, ” to dress nature to advantage-a natural ambition when the arbiters of literature were people of fashion. ”

“ All for Love and Antony and Cleopatra are two excellent plays for the comparison of the two methods. Dryden gave all his strength to All for Love, writing the play for himself, as he said, and not for the public. Carrying out the idea expressed in the title, he represents the two lovers as being more entirely under the dominion of love than Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s Antony is moved by other impulses than the passion for Cleopatra ”

“ When Pope showed a leaning to the Tories in Windsor Forest, the members of Addison's coterie made insidious war on him. Within a few weeks of the publication of the poem, and when it was the talk of the town, there began to appear in the Guardian (Nos. 22, 23, 28, 30, 32) a series of articles on “ Pastorals." Not a word was said about Windsor Forest, but everybody knew to what the general principles referred. Modern pastoral poets were ridiculed for introducing Greek moral deities, Greek flowers and fruits, Greek names of shepherds, Greek sports and customs and religious rites. ”

“ There is always a certain coarseness in Dryden’s humour, apart from the coarseness of his age,—a certain forcible roughness of touch which belongs to the character of the man. His An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer, an adaptation from Le Feint Astrologue of the younger Corneille, produced at the King’s theatre in 1668, seemed to Pepys “very smutty, and nothing so good as The Maiden Queen or The Indian Emperor of Dryden’s making.” ”

“ See also George Paston, Mr Pope: His Life and Times (1909) . The first check to the admiration that prevailed during Pope’s lifetime was given by the publication of Joseph Warton’s Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (vol. i.. 1757; vol. ii., 1782) . Warton had a sincere appreciation of Pope’s work, but he began the reaction which culminated with the romantic writers of the beginning of the 19th century, and set the fashion of an undue disparagement of Pope’s genius as a poet with enduring effects on popular opinion. ”

“ While Dryden met with such indifferent success in his willing efforts to supply the demand of the age for low comedy, he struck upon a really popular and profitable vein in heroic tragedy. Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr, a Roman play dealing with the persecution of the Christians by Maximin, in which St Catherine is introduced, and with her some supernatural machinery, was produced in 1669. It is in rhymed couplets, but the author again did not trust solely for success to them ”

“ There were, among the Roman Catholic families near Binfield, men capable of giving a direction to his eager ambition, men of literary tastes, and connexions with the literary world. These held together as members of persecuted communities always do, and were kept in touch with one another by the family priests. Pope was thus brought under the notice of Sir William Trumbull, a retired diplomatist living at Easthampstead, within a few miles of Binfield. ”

“ In favour of rhyme he has to say that it at once stimulates the imagination, and prevents it from being too discursive in its flights.
During the Great Plague, when the theatres were closed, and Dryden was living at Charlton, Wiltshire, at the seat of his father-in-law, the earl of Berkshire, he occupied a considerable part of his time in thinking over the principles of dramatic composition, and threw his conclusions into the form of a dialogue, which he called an Essay of Dramatick Poesie and published in 1668. ”

“ Pope himself had not comprehended the drift of the arguments he had adopted from Bolingbroke, and was alarmed when he found that his poem was generally interpreted as an apology for the free-thinkers. Warburton is said to have qualified its doctrines as “ rank atheism, ” and asserted that it was put together from the “ worst passages of the worst authors.” The essay was soon translated into the chief European languages, and in 1737 its orthodoxy was assailed by a Swiss professor, jean Pierre de Crousaz, in an Examen de Vessay de M. Pope sur Vhamme. ”

“ The estrangement from Addison was completed in connexion with Pope's translation of Homer. This enterprise was definitely undertaken in 1713. The work was to be published by subscription, as Dryden's Virgil had been. Men of all parties subscribed, their unanimity being a striking proof of the position Pope had attained at the age of twenty-five. It was as if he had received a national commission as by general consent the first poet of his time. But the unanimity was broken by a discordant note. A member of the Addison clique, Tickell, attempted to run a rival version. ”

“ He then goes on to defend the use of rhyme in serious drama. Howard had argued against the use of rhyme in a “preface” to Four New Plays (1665) , which had furnished the excuse for Dryden’s essay. Howard replied to Dryden’s essay in a preface to The Duke of Lerma (1668) . Dryden at once replied in a masterpiece of sarcastic retort and vigorous reasoning, A Defence of an Essay of Dramatique Poesie, prefixed to the second edition (1668) of The Indian Emperor. It is the ablest and most complete statement of his views about the employment of rhymed couplets in tragedy. ”

“ He left the income from his property to Martha Blount till her death, after which it was to go to his half-sister Magdalen Rackett and her children. His unpublished MSS. were left at the discretion of Lord Bolingbroke, and his copyrights to Warburton.
If we are to judge Pope, whether as a man or as a poet, with human fairness, and not merely by comparison with standards of abstract perfection, there are two features of his times that must be kept steadily in view-the character of political strife in those days and the political relations of men of letters. ”

“ Dryden’s education was such as became a scion of these respectable families of squires and rectors, among whom the chance contact with Erasmus had left a certain tradition of scholarship. His father, whose own fortune, added to his wife’s, was not large, procured for the poet, who was the eldest of fourteen children, admission to Westminster school as a king’s scholar, under the famous Dr Busby. ”

“ The publication by Wycherley's executors of a posthumous volume of the dramatist's prose and verse furnished Pope with an excuse for the appearance of his own correspondence with Wycherley, which was accompanied by a series of unnecessary deceptions. After manipulating his correspondence so as to place his own character in the best light, he deposited a copy in the library of Edward, second earl of Oxford, and then he had it printed. The sheets were offered to Curll by a person calling himself P.T., who professed a desire to injure Pope, but was no other than Pope himself. ”

“ Bustle, intrigue and coarsely humorous dialogue seemed to him to be part of the popular demand; and, looking about for a plot, he found something to suit him in a Spanish source, and wrote The Wild Gallant. The play was acted in February 1663, by Thomas Killigrew’s company in Vere Street. It was not a success, and Pepys showed good judgment in pronouncing the play “so poor a thing as ever I saw in my life.” Dryden never learned moderation in his humour; there is a student’s clumsiness and extravagance in his indecency ”

“ Epistle III., “ Of the Use of Riches, ” addressed to Allen Bathurst, Lord Bathurst, in 1732, is a direct attack on Walpole's methods of corruption, and on his financial policy in general; and the two dialogues (1738) known as the “ Epilogue to the Satires, ” professedly a defence of satire, form an eloquent attack on the court. Pope was attached to the prince of Wales's party, and he did not forget to insinuate, what was indeed the truth, that the queen had refused the prince her pardon on her deathbed. ”

“ Dryden’s form is of course borrowed from the ancients, and his main source is the critical work of Corneille in the prefaces and discourses contained in the edition of 1660, but he was well acquainted with the whole body of contemporary French and Spanish criticism. Crites maintains the superiority of the classical drama; Lisideius supports the exacting rules of French dramatic writing; Neander defends the English drama of the preceding generations, including, in a long speech, an examination of Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman. ”

“ Wycherley introduced him to William Walsh, then of great renown as a critic. [1] Before the poet was seventeen he was admitted in this way to the society of London “wits” and men of fashion, and was cordially encouraged as a prodigy. Wycherley’s correspondence with Pope was skilfully manipulated by the younger man to represent Wycherley as submitting, at first humbly and then with an ill-grace, to Pope’s criticisms. The publication (Elwin and Courthope, vol. v.) of the originals of Wycherley’s letters from MSS ”