No More Learning

147 What are the "fair suns"?





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AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM


INTRODUCTION

The 'Essay on Criticism' was the first really important work that Pope
gave to the world. He had been composing verses from early boyhood, and
had actually published a set of 'Pastorals' which had attracted some
attention. He was already known to the literary set of London
coffeehouses as a young man of keen wit and high promise, but to the
reading public at large he was as yet an unknown quantity. With the
appearance of the 'Essay', Pope not only sprang at once into the full
light of publicity, but seized almost undisputed that position as the
first of living English poets which he was to retain unchallenged till
his death. Even after his death down to the Romantic revival, in fact,
Pope's supremacy was an article of critical faith, and this supremacy
was in no small measure founded upon the acknowledged merits of the
'Essay on Criticism. ' Johnson, the last great representative of Pope's
own school of thought in matters literary, held that the poet had never
excelled this early work and gave it as his deliberate opinion that if
Pope had written nothing else, the 'Essay' would have placed him among
the first poets and the first critics. The 'Essay on Criticism' is
hardly an epoch-making poem, but it certainly "made" Alexander Pope.

The poem was published anonymously in the spring of 1711, when Pope was
twenty-three years old. There has been considerable dispute as to the
date of its composition; but the facts seem to be that it was begun in
1707 and finished in 1709 when Pope had it printed, not for publication,
but for purposes of further correction. As it stands, therefore, it
represents a work planned at the close of Pope's precocious youth, and
executed and polished in the first flush of his manhood. And it is quite
fair to say that considering the age of its author the 'Essay on
Criticism' is one of the most remarkable works in English.

Not that there is anything particularly original about the 'Essay. ' On
the contrary, it is one of the most conventional of all Pope's works. It
has nothing of the lively fancy of 'The Rape of the Lock', little or
nothing of the personal note which stamps the later satires and epistles
as so peculiarly Pope's own.
Apart from its brilliant epigrammatic
expression the 'Essay on Criticism' might have been written by almost
any man of letters in Queen Anne's day who took the trouble to think a
little about the laws of literature, and who thought about those laws
strictly in accordance with the accepted conventions of his time. Pope
is not in the least to be blamed for this lack of originality. Profound
original criticism is perhaps the very last thing to be expected of a
brilliant boy, and Pope was little more when he planned this work. But
boy as he was, he had already accomplished an immense amount of
desultory reading, not only in literature proper, but in literary
criticism as well. He told Spence in later years that in his youth he
had gone through all the best critics, naming especially Quintilian,
Rapin, and Bossu. A mere cursory reading of the Essay shows that he had
also studied Horace, Vida, and Boileau. Before he began to write he had,
so he told Spence, "digested all the matter of the poem into prose. " In
other words, then, the 'Essay on Criticism' is at once the result of
Pope's early studies, the embodiment of the received literary doctrines
of his age, and, as a consecutive study of his poems shows, the
programme in accordance with which, making due allowance for certain
exceptions and inconsistencies, he evolved the main body of his work.

It would, however, be a mistake to treat, as did Pope's first editor,
the 'Essay on Criticism' as a methodical, elaborate, and systematic
treatise. Pope, indeed, was flattered to have a scholar of such
recognized authority as Warburton to interpret his works, and permitted
him to print a commentary upon the 'Essay', which is quite as long and
infinitely duller than the original. But the true nature of the poem is
indicated by its title. It is not an 'Art of Poetry' such as Boileau
composed, but an 'Essay'. And by the word "essay," Pope meant exactly
what Bacon did,--a tentative sketch, a series of detached thoughts upon
a subject, not a complete study or a methodical treatise. All that we
know of Pope's method of study, habit of thought, and practice of
composition goes to support this opinion. He read widely but
desultorily; thought swiftly and brilliantly, but illogically and
inconsistently; and composed in minute sections, on the backs of letters
and scraps of waste paper, fragments which he afterward united, rather
than blended, to make a complete poem, a mosaic, rather than a picture.

Yet the 'Essay' is by no means the "collection of independent maxims
tied together by the printer, but having no natural order," which De
Quincey pronounced it to be.