Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/56

 It is seldom, however, that Pope can be excelled in condensation and the happy turn of a phrase. His workmanship everywhere approaches perfection. The inherent weakness of his poetry is, as Mark Pattison has pointed out, that the workmanship often outvalues the matter; that our admiration is compelled for the expression of a mean sentiment, a half-truth, or an ignorant fallacy. To his mastery of style Pope united no store of knowledge, no wide and lofty range of feeling. When his matter is intrinsically valuable apart from expression it consists in reflections upon the human life with which he was in contact socially. He is the poet of Society, and his observation, if acute, is often petty and malicious to a degree that spoils our pleasure in his triumphant mastery of language.

Yet if ever a man had a right to clement consideration, Pope was he. Externally, circumstances were kind to him. Born in 1688, the son of rich and kindly parents, he was stinted for nothing; his amazing precocity was in all ways encouraged. The Pastorals, which he published at the age of twenty-one (though much of them was written in boyhood), earned applause, and two years later his Essay on Criticism fixed his fame, and brought him into close personal relations with the leaders of taste. But to offset all this was the abiding misery of his physical disabilities. Dwarfish and deformed, he went through life in "one long disease." The stigma which deformity sets on a face in hard drawn lines of pain is often an evidence of tense intellectual power and resolute will; but it