An Essay on Criticism by Alexander Pope (best ereader for pdf txt) 📕

in the practice of mistaken rules

Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.

Some on the leaves of ancient authors prey,

Nor time nor moths e’er spoil so much as they.

Some dryly plain, without invention’s aid,

Write dull receipts how poems may be made

These leave the sense their learning to display,

And those explain the meaning quite away.

 

You then, whose judgment the right course would steer,

Know well each ancient’s proper character,

His fable subject scope in every page,

Religion, country, genius of his age

Without all these at once before your eyes,

Cavil you may, but never criticise.

Be Homers works your study and delight,

Read them by day and meditate by night,

Thence form your judgment thence your maxims bring

And trace the muses upward to their spring.

Still with itself compared, his text peruse,

And let your comment be the Mantuan Muse. [129]

 

When first young Maro in his boundless mind, [130]

A work to outlast immortal Rome designed,

Perhaps he seemed above the critic’s law

And but from nature’s fountain scorned to draw

But when to examine every part he came

Nature and Homer were he found the same

Convinced, amazed, he checks the bold design

And rules as strict his labored work confine

As if the Stagirite o’erlooked each line [138]

Learn hence for ancient rules a just esteem,

To copy nature is to copy them.

 

Some beauties yet no precepts can declare,

For there’s a happiness as well as care.

Music resembles poetry—in each

Are nameless graces which no methods teach,

And which a master hand alone can reach

If, where the rules not far enough extend

(Since rules were made but to promote their end),

Some lucky license answer to the full

The intent proposed that license is a rule.

Thus Pegasus a nearer way to take

May boldly deviate from the common track

Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend,

And rise to faults true critics dare not mend,

From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part,

And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art,

Which without passing through the judgment gains

The heart and all its end at once attains.

In prospects, thus, some objects please our eyes,

Which out of nature’s common order rise,

The shapeless rock or hanging precipice.

But though the ancients thus their rules invade

(As kings dispense with laws themselves have made),

Moderns beware! or if you must offend

Against the precept, ne’er transgress its end,

Let it be seldom, and compelled by need,

And have, at least, their precedent to plead.

The critic else proceeds without remorse,

Seizes your fame, and puts his laws in force.

 

I know there are, to whose presumptuous thoughts

Those freer beauties, even in them, seem faults

Some figures monstrous and misshaped appear,

Considered singly, or beheld too near,

Which, but proportioned to their light, or place,

Due distance reconciles to form and grace.

A prudent chief not always must display

His powers in equal ranks and fair array,

But with the occasion and the place comply.

Conceal his force, nay, seem sometimes to fly.

Those oft are stratagems which errors seem,

Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream. [180]

 

Still green with bays each ancient altar stands,

Above the reach of sacrilegious hands,

Secure from flames, from envy’s fiercer rage, [183]

Destructive war, and all-involving age.

See, from each clime the learned their incense bring;

Hear, in all tongues consenting Paeans ring!

In praise so just let every voice be joined,

And fill the general chorus of mankind.

Hail! bards triumphant! born in happier days;

Immortal heirs of universal praise!

Whose honors with increase of ages grow,

As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow;

Nations unborn your mighty names shall sound, [193]

And worlds applaud that must not yet be found!

Oh may some spark of your celestial fire,

The last, the meanest of your sons inspire,

(That, on weak wings, from far pursues your flights,

Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes),

To teach vain wits a science little known,

To admire superior sense, and doubt their own!

 

*

 

PART II.

 

Of all the causes which conspire to blind

Man’s erring judgment and misguide the mind,

What the weak head with strongest bias rules,

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

Whatever nature has in worth denied,

She gives in large recruits of needful pride;

For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find

What wants in blood and spirits, swelled with wind:

Pride where wit fails steps in to our defense,

And fills up all the mighty void of sense.

If once right reason drives that cloud away,

Truth breaks upon us with resistless day

Trust not yourself, but your defects to know,

Make use of every friend—and every foe.

 

A little learning is a dangerous thing

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring [216]

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Tired at first sight with what the muse imparts,

In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts

While from the bounded level of our mind

Short views we take nor see the lengths behind

But more advanced behold with strange surprise,

New distant scenes of endless science rise!

So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,

Mount o’er the vales and seem to tread the sky,

The eternal snows appear already passed

And the first clouds and mountains seem the last.

But those attained we tremble to survey

The growing labors of the lengthened way

The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,

Hills peep o’er hills and Alps on Alps arise!

 

A perfect judge will read each work of wit

With the same spirit that its author writ

Survey the whole nor seek slight faults to find

Where nature moves and rapture warms the mind,

Nor lose for that malignant dull delight

The generous pleasure to be charmed with wit

But in such lays as neither ebb nor flow,

Correctly cold and regularly low

That, shunning faults, one quiet tenor keep;

We cannot blame indeed—but we may sleep.

In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts

Is not the exactness of peculiar parts,

‘Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,

But the joint force and full result of all.

Thus, when we view some well proportioned dome

(The worlds just wonder, and even thine, O Rome!), [248]

No single parts unequally surprise,

All comes united to the admiring eyes;

No monstrous height or breadth, or length, appear;

The whole at once is bold, and regular.

 

Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see.

Thinks what ne’er was, nor is, nor e’er shall be.

In every work regard the writer’s end,

Since none can compass more than they intend;

And if the means be just, the conduct true,

Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due.

As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit,

To avoid great errors, must the less commit:

Neglect the rules each verbal critic lays,

For not to know some trifles is a praise.

Most critics, fond of some subservient art,

Still make the whole depend upon a part:

They talk of principles, but notions prize,

And all to one loved folly sacrifice.

 

Once on a time La Mancha’s knight, they say, [267]

A certain bard encountering on the way,

Discoursed in terms as just, with looks as sage,

As e’er could Dennis, of the Grecian stage; [270]

Concluding all were desperate sots and fools,

Who durst depart from Aristotle’s rules

Our author, happy in a judge so nice,

Produced his play, and begged the knight’s advice;

Made him observe the subject, and the plot,

The manners, passions, unities, what not?

All which, exact to rule, were brought about,

Were but a combat in the lists left out

“What! leave the combat out?” exclaims the knight.

“Yes, or we must renounce the Stagirite.”

“Not so, by heaven!” (he answers in a rage)

“Knights, squires, and steeds must enter on the stage.”

“So vast a throng the stage can ne’er contain.”

“Then build a new, or act it in a plain.”

 

Thus critics of less judgment than caprice,

Curious, not knowing, not exact, but nice,

Form short ideas, and offend in arts

(As most in manners) by a love to parts.

 

Some to conceit alone their taste confine,

And glittering thoughts struck out at every line;

Pleased with a work where nothing’s just or fit;

One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit.

Poets, like painters, thus, unskilled to trace

The naked nature and the living grace,

With gold and jewels cover every part,

And hide with ornaments their want of art.

True wit is nature to advantage dressed;

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed;

Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find

That gives us back the image of our mind.

As shades more sweetly recommend the light,

So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit

For works may have more wit than does them good,

As bodies perish through excess of blood.

 

Others for language all their care express,

And value books, as women men, for dress.

Their praise is still—“the style is excellent,”

The sense they humbly take upon content [308]

Words are like leaves, and where they most abound

Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

False eloquence, like the prismatic glass. [311]

Its gaudy colors spreads on every place,

The face of nature we no more survey.

All glares alike without distinction gay:

But true expression, like the unchanging sun,

Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon;

It gilds all objects, but it alters none.

Expression is the dress of thought, and still

Appears more decent, as more suitable,

A vile conceit in pompous words expressed,

Is like a clown in regal purple dressed

For different styles with different subjects sort,

As several garbs with country town and court

Some by old words to fame have made pretense,

Ancients in phrase, mere moderns in their sense;

Such labored nothings, in so strange a style,

Amaze the unlearned, and make the learned smile.

Unlucky, as Fungoso in the play, [328]

These sparks with awkward vanity display

What the fine gentleman wore yesterday;

And but so mimic ancient wits at best,

As apes our grandsires in their doublets dressed.

In words as fashions the same rule will hold,

Alike fantastic if too new or old.

Be not the first by whom the new are tried,

Nor yet the last to lay the old aside

 

But most by numbers judge a poet’s song

And smooth or rough, with them is right or wrong.

In the bright muse though thousand charms conspire,

Her voice is all these tuneful fools admire,

Who haunt Parnassus but to please their ear,

Not mend their minds, as some to church repair,

Not for the doctrine but the music there

These equal syllables alone require,

Though oft the ear the open vowels tire;

While expletives their feeble aid do join;

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line,

While they ring round the same unvaried chimes,

With sure returns of still expected rhymes,

Where’er you find “the cooling western breeze,”

In the next line it “whispers through the trees”

If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep”

The reader’s threatened (not in vain) with “sleep”

Then, at the last and only couplet fraught

With some unmeaning thing they call a thought,

A needless Alexandrine ends the song [356]

That, like a wounded snake drags its slow length along.

 

Leave such to tune their own dull rhymes, and know

What’s roundly smooth or languishingly slow;

And praise the easy vigor of a line,

Where Denham’s strength, and Waller’s sweetness join. [361]

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,

As those move easiest who have learned to dance

‘Tis not enough no harshness gives