tion of some
profound principle or complex mood of sentiment, he becomes incoherent
and perplexed. But on the other hand he can perceive admirably all that
can be seen at a glance from a single point of view. Though he could not
be continuous, he could return again and again to the same point; he
could polish, correct, eliminate superfluities, and compress his meaning
more and more closely, till he has constructed short passages of
imperishable excellence. This microscopic attention to fragments
sometimes injures the connexion, and often involves a mutilation of
construction. He corrects and prunes too closely. He could, he says, in
reference to the Essay on Man, put things more briefly in verse than in
prose; one reason being that he could take liberties of this kind not
permitted in prose writing. But the injury is compensated by the
singular terseness and vivacity of his best style. Scarcely any one, as
is often remarked, has left so large a proportion of quotable
phrases,[25] and, indeed, to the present he survives chiefly by the
current coinage of that kind which bears his image and superscription.

This familiar remark may help us to solve the old problem whether Pope
was, or rather in what sense he was, a poet. Much of his work may be
fairly described as rhymed prose, differing from prose not in substance
or tone of feeling, but only in the form of expression. Every poet has
an invisible audience, as an orator has a visible one, who deserve a
great part of the merit of his works. Some men may write for the
religious or philosophic recluse, and therefore utter the emotions which
come to ordinary mortals in the rare moments when the music of the
spheres, generally drowned by the din of the commonplace world, becomes
audible to their dull senses. Pope, on the other hand, writes for the
wits who never listen to such strains, and moreover writes for their
ordinary moods. He aims at giving us the refined and doubly distilled
essence of the conversation of the statesmen and courtiers of his time.
The standard of good writing always implicitly present to his mind is
the fitness of his poetry to pass muster when shown by Gay to his
duchess, or read after dinner to a party composed of Swift, Bolingbroke,
and Congreve. That imaginary audience is always looking over his
shoulder, applauding a good hit, chuckling over allusions to the last
bit of scandal, and ridiculing any extravagance tending to romance or
sentimentalism.