FullReads

The answer to this lies in the second of the errors which I have imputed to Lord Carlisle. The first error was, perhaps, no more than an undervaluation of the truth. The second, if I divine it rightly, rests upon a total misconception, viz., the attribution to Pope of some special authority as a moral teacher. And this, if it were really so, would go far to justify Lord Carlisle in his attempt to fix the attention of literary students amongst the working-classes upon the writings of Pope. Rightly he would judge, that some leading classic must furnish the central object for the general studies. Each man would have his own separate favorites; but it would be well that the whole community of students should also have some common point of interest and discussion. Pope, for such a purpose, has some real advantages. He is far enough from our own times to stand aloof from the corroding controversies of the age–he is near enough to speak in a diction but slightly differing from our own. He is sparkling with wit and brilliant good sense, and his poems are all separately short. But if Lord Carlisle count it for his main advantage that he is by distinction a moral poet, and this I must suppose in order to find any solution whatever for the eagerness to press him upon the attention of our most numerous classes, when is it that this idea has originated? I suspect that it is derived originally from a distinguished man of genius in the last generation, viz., Lord Byron. Amongst the guardians of Lord Byron, one was the late Lord Carlisle; and Lord Byron was, besides, connected by blood with the House of Howard: so that there were natural reasons why a man of such extraordinary intellectual power should early obtain a profound influence over the present Earl of Carlisle. And the prejudice, which I suppose to have been first planted by Lord Byron, would very easily strengthen itself by the general cast of Pope’s topics and pretensions. He writes with a showy air of disparaging riches, of doing homage to private worth, of honoring patriotism, and so on, through all the commonplaces of creditable morality. But in the midst of this surface display, and in defiance of his ostentatious pretensions, Pope is not in any deep or sincere sense a moral thinker; and in his own heart there was a misgiving, not to be silenced, that he was not. Yet this is strange. Surely, Lord Carlisle, a man of ability and experience, might have credit given him for power to form a right judgment on such a question as that–power undoubtedly, if he had ever been led to use his power, that is, to make up his opinion in resistance to the popular impression. But to this very probably he never had any motive; and the reason why I presume to set up my individual opinion in this case against that of the multitude is, because I know experimentally that, until a man has a sincere interest in such a question, and sets himself diligently to examine and collate the facts, he will pretty certainly have no title to give any verdict on the case.

What made Lord Byron undertake the patronage of Pope? It was, as usually happened with him, a motive of hostility to some contemporaries. He wished to write up Pope by way of writing down others. But, whatever were the motive, we may judge of the style in which he carried out his intentions by the following well-known mot. Having mentioned the poets, he compares them with the moralists–‘the moralists,’ these are his words, ‘the moralists, their betters.’ How, or in what sense that would satisfy even a lampooner, are moralists as a class the ‘betters’ in a collation with poets as a class? It is pretty clear at starting that, in order to be a moralist of the first rank, that is, to carry a great moral truth with heart-shaking force into the mind, a moralist must begin by becoming a poet. For instance, ‘to justify the ways of God to man.’ That is a grand moral doctrine; but to utter the doctrine authentically a man must write a ‘Paradise Lost.’ The order of precedency, therefore, between poets and moralists, as laid down by Lord Byron, is very soon inverted by a slight effort of reflection.