doubt whether much would be
left of Spenser, from whom both Keats and Pope, like so many other of
our poets, drew inspiration in their youth. Fairyland would be deserted,
and the poet condemned to working upon ordinary commonplaces in broad
daylight. The principle which Pope proclaimed is susceptible of the
inverse application. Poetry, as it proves, may rightly concern itself
with inanimate nature, with pure description, or with the presentation
of lovely symbols not definitely identified with any cut-and-dried saws
of moral wisdom; because there is no part of the visible universe to
which we have not some relation, and the most ethereal dreams that ever
visited a youthful poet 'on summer eve by haunted stream' are in some
sense reflections of the passions and interests that surround our daily
life. Pope, however, as the man more fitted than any other fully to
interpret the mind of his own age, inevitably gives a different
construction to a very sound maxim. He rightly assumes that man is his
proper study; but then by man he means not the genus, but a narrow
species of the human being. 'Man' means Bolingbroke, and Walpole, and
Swift, and Curll, and Theobald; it does not mean man as the product of a
long series of generations and part of the great universe of
inextricably involved forces. He cannot understand the man of distant
ages; Homer is to him not the spontaneous voice of the heroic age, but a
clever artist whose gods and heroes are consciously-constructed parts of
an artificial 'machinery.' Nature has, for him, ceased to be inhabited
by sylphs and fairies, except to amuse the fancies of fine ladies and
gentlemen, and has not yet received a new interest from the fairy tales
of science. The old ideal of chivalry merely suggests the sneers of
Cervantes, or even the buffoonery of Butler's wit, and has not undergone
restoration at the hands of modern romanticists. Politics are not
associated in his mind with any great social upheaval, but with a series
of petty squabbles for places and pensions, in which bribery is the
great moving force. What he means by religion is generally not so much
the existence of a divine element in the world as a series of bare
metaphysical demonstrations too frigid to produce enthusiasm or to
stimulate the imagination. And, therefore, he inevitably interests
himself chiefly in what is certainly a perennial source of interest--the
passions and thoughts of the men and women immediately related t