No More Learning

The first rule for the budding poet or critic is "Follow Nature. " This,
by the way, sounds rather modern, and might be accepted by any romantic
poet. But by "Nature" was meant not at all the natural impulses of the
individual, but those rules founded upon the natural and common reason
of mankind which the ancient critics had extracted and codified from the
practice of the ancient poets. Pope says explicitly "to follow nature is
to follow them;" and he praises Virgil for turning aside from his own
original conceptions to imitate Homer, for:

Nature and Homer were, he found, the same.

Certain exceptions to these rules were, indeed, allowable,--severer
critics than Pope, by the way, absolutely denied this,--but only to the
ancient poets. The moderns must not dare to make use of them, or at the
very best moderns must only venture upon such exceptions to the rules as
classic precedents would justify. Inasmuch as all these rules were
discovered and illustrated in ancient times, it followed logically that
the great breach with antiquity, which is called the Middle Ages, was a
period of hopeless and unredeemed barbarism, incapable of bringing forth
any good thing. The light of literature began to dawn again with the
revival of learning at the Renaissance, but the great poets of the
Renaissance, Spenser and Shakespeare, for example, were "irregular,"
that is, they trusted too much to their individual powers and did not
accept with sufficient humility the orthodox rules of poetry. This
dogma, by the way, is hardly touched upon in the 'Essay', but is
elaborated with great emphasis in Pope's later utterance on the
principles of literature, the well-known 'Epistle to Augustus'. Finally
with the establishment of the reign of Reason in France under Louis XIV,
and in England a little later, the full day had come, and literary sins
of omission and commission that might be winked at in such an untutored
genius as Shakespeare were now unpardonable. This last dogma explains
the fact that in the brief sketch of the history of criticism which
concludes the 'Essay', Pope does not condescend to name an English poet
or critic prior to the reign of Charles II.

It would be beside the purpose to discuss these ideas to-day or to
attempt an elaborate refutation of their claims to acceptance. Time has
done its work upon them, and the literary creed of the wits of Queen
Anne's day is as antiquated as their periwigs and knee-breeches. Except
for purposes of historical investigation it is quite absurd to take the
'Essay on Criticism' seriously.

And yet it has even for us of to-day a real value.
Our age absolutely
lacks a standard of literary criticism; and of all standards the one
least likely to be accepted is that of Pope and his fellow-believers.
Individual taste reigns supreme in this democratic age, and one man's
judgment is as good as, perhaps a little better than, another's. But
even this democratic and individual age may profit by turning back for a
time to consider some of the general truths, as valid to-day as ever, to
which Pope gave such inimitable expression, or to study the outlines of
that noble picture of the true critic which St. Beuve declared every
professed critic should frame and hang up in his study. An age which
seems at times upon the point of throwing classical studies overboard as
useless lumber might do far worse than listen to the eloquent tribute
which the poet pays to the great writers of antiquity. And finally
nothing could be more salutary for an age in which literature itself has
caught something of the taint of the prevailing commercialism than to
bathe itself again in that spirit of sincere and disinterested love of
letters which breathes throughout the 'Essay' and which, in spite of all
his errors, and jealousies, and petty vices, was the master-passion of
Alexander Pope.



'6 censure:'

the word has here its original meaning of "judge," not its modern "judge
severely" or "blame. "


'8'

Because each foolish poem provokes a host of foolish commentators and
critics.


'15-16'

This assertion that only a good writer can be a fair critic is not to be
accepted without reservation.


'17'

The word "wit" has a number of different meanings in this poem, and the
student should be careful to discriminate between them. It means

1) mind, intellect, l. 61;
2) learning, culture, l 727;
3) imagination, genius, l. 82;
4) the power to discover amusing analogies, or the apt expression of
such an analogy, ll. 449, 297;
5) a man possessed of wit in its various significations, l. 45;
this last form usually occurs in the plural, ll. 104, 539.