Pattison reinforces the criticism by quoting Voltaire's feeble
imitation:--
Quand des vents du midi les funestes haleines
De semence de mort ont inonde nos plaines,
Direz-vous que jamais le ciel en son courroux
Ne laissa la sante sejourner parmi nous?
It is true that in the effort to be compressed, Pope has here and there
cut to the quick and suppressed essential parts of speech, till the
lines can only be construed by our independent knowledge of their
meaning. The famous line--
Man never is but always to be blest,
is an example of defective construction, though his language is often
tortured by more elliptical phrases.[22] This power of charging lines
with great fulness of meaning enables Pope to soar for brief periods
into genuine and impressive poetry. Whatever his philosophical weakness
and his moral obliquity, he is often moved by genuine emotion. He has a
vein of generous sympathy for human sufferings and of righteous
indignation against bigots, and if he only half understands his own
optimism, that "whatever is is right," the vision, rather poetical than
philosophical, of a harmonious universe lifts him at times into a region
loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude. The most popular
passages were certain purple patches, not arising very spontaneously or
with much relevance, but also showing something more than the practised
rhetorician. The "poor Indian" in one of the most highly-polished
paragraphs--
Who thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company,
intrudes rather at the expense of logic, and is a decidedly conventional
person.
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