As soon as
Pope has a chance of expressing his personal antipathies or (to do him
bare justice) his personal attachments, his lines begin to glow. When he
is trying to preach, to be ethical and philosophical, he is apt to fall
into mouthing and to lose his place; but when he can forget his stilts,
or point his morality by some concrete and personal 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.
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