[Saintsbury has been called the most influential literary historian and critic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His studies of French literature have established him as a leading authority on such writers as Guy de Maupassant and Honoré de Balzac. In the following excerpt, Saintsbury praises the superior phrasing and wit in Pope's verse, despite the many faults he perceives in the poet's work.]

There is a tendency which, being human, is like most human things not unpardonable, but like many human things rather irritating—to try to make out that everything is something else. In illustration of this a rather well-known Frenchman once wrote a book, not without merit, on Le Romantisme des classiques; and, to append small things to great in the old manner, a distinguished American once endeavoured, good-humouredly enough, to prove "Rymerism" in the present humble writer, who had declared his adhesion to Macaulay's dictum that Rymer was the worst critic who ever lived. To rise again to the great, it is notorious that the character of Pope—not so much his personal character, for that is now pretty well beyond dispute, as the character of his poetry—has always been a favourite subject for wrangling and paradox and self-contradictions. In his own day his superiors, such as Swift, and his equals, whether jealous or not, such as Addison, had no doubt about his greatness, while the very "Grub Street" vermin, whom he foolishly provoked and persecuted, evidently regarded him with almost as much envy and secret admiration as hatred. The long and fitful battle on the "Is Pope a poet?" question was at nearly all its revivals a battle of feints, paradoxes, and topsy-turvifications; not a few of his assailants or "discounters," such as Warton, make observations and reservations which would rather astonish those who take them, unread, as wholly on the Romantic side; more than one of his defenders, such as Byron, adopt lines of defence which admit of dangerous flank attack; and as has been already indicated, his latest partisans have continued the process by ringing changes on the ambiguities of words like "nature," "wit," and the like. In such a case it is perhaps best to state frankly the views of the present writer. It seems to him:

I. That to deny poetry to Pope is absurd.

II. That any one who denies him something like a chief if not the chief place in his own division of poets, unquestionable as such, will have his work cut out to make the denial good.

III. That Joseph Warton was perfectly right in his main position—that Pope was not transcendently a poet: though Warton frequently blundered and faltered in maintaining this.

Those who simpliciter deny poetry to Pope must needs deny, as a major, the definition or description of poetry elsewhere given; and it is a fallacy to reply that this position ought to be generally established first. For, as Dante says, startlingly to some but with incontestable truth, "the business of science is not to prove but to explain its subject"; or, in other words, the axioms and postulates with which we start it are not its problems or theorems. Now that Pope displayed at least two of the qualifications to be laid down as necessary for the poet—vivid expression of his actual subjects and artistic use of such metre as he actually employed—is simply undeniable. To urge that there are large ranges of subject which he perhaps could not, and certainly did not treat; and that there was only a limited region of metre in which he was at home, would at best be legitimate in reference to the third position—his claim to poetical transcendency. It is practically "out of order" and irrelevant as regards the first and second. Moreover, his extraordinary felicity of expression, and his wonderful command of such metre as was congenial to him, appear to have been, according to the hackneyed phrase of poets, not merely congenial but congenital. Since he was not "the least liar" (as all poets are, according to the other tag) but the most lying of all poets and persons, we cannot accept absolutely the dates which he gives us of his precocities. But we certainly have no remains of what the elder Mr. Pope may have censured as "bad rhymes," and there is no doubt that some which must have been early are astonishingly good. It was as if Pope had been served heir by Providence to Dryden; and had entered upon his inheritance and begun to improve it in certain directions almost before Dryden died.

To part, and what some may think (to use an everlastingly treacherous word) the "greatest" part, of the inheritance he did not indeed succeed. He could not forge and wield the Olympian thunderbolt of Dryden's couplet; even had he been able to do so he could not have charged it with the massive strength of Dryden's sense. But he might possibly claim the Apollonian darts, though it is to be feared that they could deserve the epithet of "mild" only in the hypereuphemistic sense of the Greek itself; for they were never very kindly, and were frequently poisoned. His processes of refinement of form are extremely simple, though idle partisanship, or the mere desire to be different, has sometimes denied this. In practice he never quite abandoned the license of Alexandrine and triplet, but he reduced it more and more; he emphasised, to the point of making a sort of continuous crease down the page, the importance of the central pause; he redoubled the antithesis between verbs, adjectives, substantives in the two halves of the same line; he increased the separation of the couplets; he toned off the final rhymes to as light a character as possible; and indulged very seldom in "wrenched accent" (trochees for iambs) or in trisyllabic feet. These are the simple, almost the sole rules for the construction of the "fiddle." That the "rosin"—the application of which allows the thing in all but a few cases to escape the monotony whereunto in other hands it usually fell—is more of a secret is true; but it also is not quite undiscoverable or unanalysable.

This secret is, indeed, a sort of secret de Polichinelle—a position which hardly anybody has denied, though it cannot be said that everybody has exactly apprehended it. It lies in the fact that Pope, with a consummate command of one form of poetical, that is to say metrical, expression, had an even more consummate command of the manners of diction and phrase which are suited to that form; and a third faculty—less real but almost more specious than either of the others—of presenting thought—or the appearance of thought—which was once more exactly suitable to the words, and the verse, and the actual material subject. In this last point his extreme superficiality has long been more or less admitted, except by an Old Guard of partisans whose small stronghold of prejudice is perhaps impregnable, but can be simply left alone, as it has "no military importance." He practically never thinks for himself or sees for himself, while, except in some touches of personal affection and many more of personal resentment and spite, he scarcely ever feels for himself. It is always what somebody else has thought, the communis sensus of some particular nation, ancient or modern, or it may be both, that Pope expresses so well, with such admirable "wit" in the various meanings which he himself attaches to the word. It has been recognised a hundred times that the famous couplet, the component parts of which have just been woven into prose, exactly describes him on the best side of his stuff. There is of course a side not so good. Lady Mary was perfectly right as to fact when she told how her original admiration of the Essay on Criticism ceased when she found it was all stolen from the ancients; except that, if she had herself known a little more, she might have perceived that most of it was stolen or borrowed at second-hand. Warburton knew perfectly well what he was doing when he plastered and varnished and buttressed with comment and exposition Pope's well meant, admirably expressed, but sometimes almost nonsensical and still more often platitudinous attempts to build a mansion of Bolingbroke's half-baked bricks and his own untempered mortar in the Essay on Man. The amiable endeavours to discover in The Dunciad a generous defence of good literature against those who disgraced it become distressingly inapposite, when one remembers that there is practically in the whole book, whether as originally constructed or as recast later, nothing, till you come to the fine but utterly disconnected close, except personal and sometimes far from honest caricatures of individual writers obnoxious to the poet, some of them quite harmless, most quite insignificant, and hardly any, except Curll, in any way a "disgrace to literature." There is something first-hand in that strange "Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady," which is the one mystery still remaining after generations of unremitting and generally damaging investigations. But elsewhere, with the possible exception of The Rape of the Lock, in the comic, to serve as pendant to the Elegy in the tragic vein, the whole of Pope's work may be called translation, and not merely the Statius, the Homer, and the other confessed instances. It is always, and not merely when he has a book before him, that he seems to be working from some brief, carefully and extensively drawn up for him by a clever "devil," chipping into final form a statue blocked out by an intelligent, but himself not very original "ghost." Carlyle, harshly but not perhaps unjustly, declared that there was not one great thought in all the hundred volumes of Voltaire. It would be scarcely rash to say that there is not an original thought, sentiment, image, or example of any of the other categories of poetic substance to be found in the half a hundred thousand verses of Pope. But even here the triumphant sense of the century saved him from mere silliness always, and nearly (not quite) always from mere galimatias; while his quintessential possession of its own peculiar form of wit infused something into the very matter of the thought or subject which, till you examine it rather carefully, may look like originality.

But if not wholly, yet still to some extent to be separated from this "stuff and substance" of wit, as well as (with the same proviso) from the, in its own way, unrivalled supremacy of versification above admitted, there remains—and for our purpose remains as of supreme importance—that wonderful faculty of mere expression, of command over diction and phrase, which has been all but universally allowed him. His limits, even in this way, may not be very wide; he never delves beneath the surface for hidden wealth of suggestion or soars into the ether for unexpected flights of it. But, in his own way and under his own conditions, it is almost impossible for him to make a mistake, or if he has made one at first (the "Atticus" is a specimen) not to correct it. The thought may be trifling, obvious, at times rather base; the sentiment may be plainly insincere; the very wit, when you roll it over a little on your mind's tongue, may be slightly vapid; the very verse, if you go on too long with it, may impress you with a sense of monotonous mannerism. There are often bad rhymes (not including those affected by change of pronunciation) to disgust one sort of taste; there is only too frequently bad blood to disgust another. But, with the rarest exception, the phrasing is triumphant, and those who can once perceive and submit themselves to its supremacy never rebel….

[Though] it may be a sad fact to the moralist, it is a certain one for the student of life and literature that, even with the power of enjoying both, you may tire of far "greater" poets than Pope before you tire of him, and that you may revisit him more frequently and with far more confidence than you can revisit them.

Even yet enough may not have been said on him. Hackneyed as "The Messiah" is, and obvious as it is at once that without Isaiah and Virgil Pope's page would be simply a blank, it is a not easily tiring or tired-of diversion to see with what gusto he sets about the work of refashioning his borrowed matter, clothing it with his own version of his greater and lesser originals' thoughts, and displaying throughout a perfect triumph of technique. Johnson was not merely, as he often was, prejudiced but definitely unjust (which he was seldom) and ungrateful (which he was more rarely still) in belittling the poem. For even while putting it above the Pollio, he ascribed all the merit of the improvement to the borrowings from a poet so incomparably greater than either Virgil or Pope himself as Isaiah. Pope's manner is only like that of the Roman with a very considerable difference, but it is poles asunder from that of the Hebrew. His own style of diction might easily be expected to seem hard and cold beside the delicate and almost effeminate art of Virgil, tawdry and frigid beside the splendour, the magnificence, the actually divine sublimity of Isaiah. But experience and practice tell us that though difference may sometimes imply inferiority, it never necessarily implies badness; and then we perceive what a triumph in its own line and way "The Messiah" is—in the skilful motion of its climax, the just selection and keeping, the completeness and adequacy of the whole thing. If, once more, you confine yourself to the feeble and puerile, "I don't like this: I want something else," the piece may rank low with you; if you ask the one question of criticism, "Has the man done what he wanted to do, and done it well?" you cannot refuse the answer, "Optime!" On the other hand there are some who—despite Wordsworth's vouchsafing an, it is true, not very cordial exception from condemnation—do not find much refreshment in Windsor Forest; and the "St. Cecilia" piece affords others or the same an interesting critical lemma in the question, "Why does Pope, who had succeeded not ill in competition with men so different from himself as Virgil and Isaiah, fail so grossly in one with a prophet and master of his own?" But there is no need of more detailed criticism. A delightful writer and true poet of our own day, himself the modern laureate of the eighteenth century, has, adopting the lesser Alexander's own phrase, declared that—

[He] throw[s] for wit, and poetry, and Pope.

For Pope, as an exponent of wit in poetry, we all may throw caps and money, votes and voices. Nor is that wit of the noisy or flashy order which sooner or later tires. The salt of mere wit is resalted with common sense; and that again with a certain purely intellectual quality difficult positively to define, for, as granted above, it is lacking in depth, in height, in originality, in several other good things, but easy to perceive and not evanescent. And so, though he enjoyed little rest or refreshment himself, he has provided much for others.