ersonal instance, every word
is alive. And it is this which makes the epilogues, and more especially
the prologue to the satires, his most impressive performances. The unity
which is very ill-supplied by some ostensible philosophical thesis, or
even by the leading strings of Horace, is given by his own intense
interest in himself. The best way of learning to enjoy Pope is to get by
heart the epistle to Arbuthnot. That epistle is, as I have said, his
Apologia. In its some 400 lines, he has managed to compress more of his
feelings and thoughts than would fill an ordinary autobiography. It is
true that the epistle requires a commentator. It wants some familiarity
with the events of Pope's life, and many lines convey only a part of
their meaning unless we are familiar not only with the events, but with
the characters of the persons mentioned. Passages over which we pass
carelessly at the first reading then come out with wonderful freshness,
and single phrases throw a sudden light upon hidden depths of feeling.
It is also true, unluckily, that parts of it must be read by the rule of
contraries. They tell us not what Pope really was, but what he wished
others to think him, and what he probably endeavoured to persuade
himself that he was. How far he succeeded in imposing upon himself is
indeed a very curious question which can never be fully answered. There
is the strangest mixture of honesty and hypocrisy. Let me, he says, live
my own and die so too--

(To live and die is all I have to do)
Maintain a poet's dignity and ease,
And see what friends and read what books I please!

Well, he was independent in his fashion, and we can at least believe
that he so far believed in himself. But when he goes on to say that he
"can sleep without a poem in his head,

Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead,"

we remember his calling up the maid four times a night in the dreadful
winter of 1740 to save a thought, and the features writhing in anguish
as he read a hostile pamphlet. Presently he informs us that "he thinks a
lie in prose or verse the same"--only too much the same! and that "if he
pleased, he pleased by manly ways." Alas! for the manliness. And yet
again when he speaks of his parents,

Unspotted names and venerable long
If there be force in virtue or in song,

can we doubt that he is speaking from the heart? We should perhaps like
to forget that the really exquisite and touching lines in which he