therefore surprising to find that Pope in the Essay avoids
extremes and is neither ancient nor modern. The
comprehensiveness of his mind precluded allegiance to the
narrower dogmas of his day:
Some foreign writers, some our own despise;
The ancients only, or the moderns prize.
Thus wit, like faith, by each man is applied
To one small sect, and all are damned beside....
Regard not then if wit be old or new,
But blame the false, and value still the true.
(ll. 394–7, 406–7)These lines are eloquent testimony to his catholic taste and to
the searching independent spirit that informs the Essay and
the literary career to which it is a prelude.
If we are to judge the spirit of the work, then we must have
a sympathetic understanding of the terms in which Pope
discusses literature, both in the more general sense and also
literally in giving back to words like ‘wit’ and ‘judgement’
(which may roughly be translated as the creative and the
critical faculty respectively) the richer meaning they had in his
time. In passing it may be noted that Pope allows no simple
distinction between them for judgement is necessary to the
poet just as true taste in the critic is an inner light derived
from heaven. But even when it is acknowledged that Pope’s
terms have a wider range than the same words today, there
remains a further stumbling block in the way of sympathetic
appreciation of the account of poetry contained in the Essay.
Pope followed Aristotle and Horace in maintaining the clear
distinction of the ancient rhetorical tradition between sense,
res (matter), and style, verba (words), using the old metaphor
in which language is the dress of thought. In pre-Romantic
criticism sense and style, or content and form, are brought
together in the central concept of decorum or propriety:
For different styles with different subjects sort,
As several garbs, with country, town, and court.
(ll. 322–3)As imitation of the ancients can be either servile or creative so
the concept of decorum can be mechanically or imaginatively