No wit to flatter left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
Thus, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, the lord of useless thousands ends.
It is as graphic as a page of Dickens, and has the advantage of being
less grotesque, if the sentiment is equally obvious. When Pope has made
his hit, he does not blur the effect by trying to repeat it.
In these epistles, it must be owned that the sentiment is not only
obvious but prosaic. The moral maxims are delivered like advice offered
by one sensible man to another, not with the impassioned fervour of a
prophet. Nor can Pope often rise to that level at which alone satire is
transmuted into the higher class of poetry. To accomplish that feat, if,
indeed, it be possible, the poet must not simply ridicule the fantastic
tricks of poor mortals, but show how they appear to the angels who weep
over them. The petty figures must be projected against a background of
the infinite, and we must feel the relations of our tiny eddies of life
to the oceanic currents of human history. Pope can never rise above the
crowd. He is looking at his equals, not contemplating them from the
height which reveals their insignificance. The element, which may fairly
be called poetical, is derived from an inferior source; but sometimes
has passion enough in it to lift him above mere prose.
In one of his most animated passages, Pope relates his desire to--
Brand the bold front of shameless guilty men,
Dash the proud gamester in his gilded car,
Bare the mean heart that lurks beneath a star.
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