[Many scholars consider Stephen the most important literary critic of the Victorian Age after Matthew Arnold. In the following excerpt, Stephen judges the moralistic quality of Pope's verse.]

The extraordinary vitality of Pope's writings is a remarkable phenomenon in its way. Few reputations have been exposed to such perils at the hands of open enemies or of imprudent friends. In his lifetime "the wasp of Twickenham" could sting through a sevenfold covering of pride or stupidity. Lady Mary and Lord Hervey writhed and retaliated with little more success than the poor denizens of Grub Street. But it is more remarkable that Pope seems to be stinging well into the second century after his death. His writings resemble those fireworks which, after they have fallen to the ground and been apparently quenched, suddenly break out again into sputtering explosions. The waters of a literary revolution have passed over him without putting him out. Though much of his poetry has ceased to interest us, so many of his brilliant couplets still survive that probably no dead writer, with the solitary exception of Shakspeare, is more frequently quoted at the present day. It is in vain that he is abused, ridiculed, and even declared to be no poet at all. The school of Wordsworth regarded him as the embodiment of the corrupting influence in English poetry; more recently M. Taine has attacked him, chiefly, as it would seem, for daring to run counter to M. Taine's theories; and, hardest fate of all, the learned editor [A. W. Ward] who is now bringing out a conclusive edition of his writings has had his nerves so hardened by familiarity with poor Pope's many iniquities, that his notes are one prolonged attack on his author's morality, orthodoxy, and even poetical power. We seem to be listening to a Boswell animated by the soul of a Dennis. And yet Pope survives, as indeed the bitterness of his assailants testifies. When controversialists spend volumes in confuting an adversary who has been for centuries in his grave, their unconscious testimony to his vitality is generally of more significance than their demonstration that he ought to be insignificant. Drowning a dead rat is too dismal an occupation to be long pursued; and whilst we watch the stream descending, we may generally assume that the rat has still some life in him.

Pope, moreover, has received testimonies of a less equivocal kind. Byron called him, with characteristic vehemence, the "great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence"; though it is not less characteristic that Byron was at the same time helping to dethrone the idol before which he prostrated himself. Ste.-Beuve, again, has thrown the shield of his unrivalled critical authority over Pope when attacked by M. Taine; and a critic, who may sometimes be overstrained in his language, but who never speaks as a critic without showing the keenest insight, has more recently spoken of Pope in terms which recall Byron's enthusiasm. "Pope," says Mr. Ruskin, in one of his Oxford lectures, "is the most perfect representative we have, since Chaucer, of the true English mind"; and he adds that his hearers will find, as they study Pope, that he has expressed for them, "in the strictest language and within the briefest limits, every law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, and finally of a benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned, contented with its allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation to Him in whose hand lies that of the universe." These remarks are added by way of illustrating the relation of art to morals, and enforcing the great principle that a noble style can only proceed from a sincere heart. "You can only learn to speak as these men spoke by learning what these men were." When we ask impartially what Pope was, we may possibly be inclined to doubt the complete soundness of the eulogy upon his teaching. Meanwhile, however, Byron and Mr. Ruskin agree in holding up Pope as an instance, almost as the typical instance, of that kind of poetry which is directly intended to enforce a lofty morality. To posses such a charm for two great writers, who, however different in all other respects, strikingly agree in this, that their opinions are singularly independent of conventional judgments, is some proof that Pope possessed great merits as a poetical interpreter of morals. Without venturing into the wider ocean of poetical criticism, I will endeavour in this article to inquire what was the specific element in Pope's poetry which explains, if it does not justify, this enthusiastic praise.

I shall venture to assume, indeed, that Pope was a genuine poet. Nor do I understand how any one who has really studied his writings can deny to him that title, unless by help of a singularly narrow definition of its meaning. It is sufficient to name the Rape of the Lock, which is allowed, even by his bitterest critics, to be a masterpiece of delicate fancy…. But a delicate fancy is a delicate fancy still, even when employed about the paraphernalia of modern life; a truth which Byron maintained, though not in an unimpeachable form, in his controversy with Bowles. We sometimes talk as if our ancestors were nothing but hoops and wigs; and forget that human passions exist even under the most complex structures of starch and buckram. And consequently we are very apt to make a false estimate of the precise nature of that change which fairly entitles us to call Pope's age prosaic. In showering down our epithets of artificial, sceptical, and utilitarian, we not seldom forget what kind of figure we are ourselves likely to make in the eyes of our own descendants.

Whatever be the position rightly to be assigned to Pope in the British Walhalla, his own theory has been unmistakably expressed. He boasts

That not in fancy's maze he wandered long,
But stooped to truth and moralised his song.

His theory is compressed into one of the innumerable aphorisms which have to some degree lost their original sharpness of definition, because they have passed, as current coinage, through so many hands.

The proper study of mankind is man.

The saying is in form about identical with Goethe's remark that man is properly the only object which interests man. The two poets, indeed, understood the doctrine in a very different way. Pope's interpretation was narrow and mechanical. He would place such limitations upon the sphere of human interest as to exclude, perhaps, the greatest part of what we generally mean by poetry. How much, for example, would have to be suppressed if we sympathised with Pope's condemnation of the works in which

Pure description holds the place of sense.

A large proportion of such poets as Thomson and Cowper would disappear, Wordsworth's pages would show fearful gaps, and Keats would be in risk of summary suppression. We may doubt whether much would be left of Spenser, from whom both Keats and Pope, like so many other of our poets, drew inspiration in their youth. Fairyland would be deserted, and the poet condemned to working upon ordinary commonplaces in broad daylight: The principle which Pope proclaimed is susceptible of the inverse application. Poetry, it really proves, may rightly concern itself with inanimate nature, with pure description, or with the presentation of lovely symbols not definitely identified with any cut and dried saws of moral wisdom; because there is no part of the visible universe to which we have not some relation, and the most ethereal dreams that ever visited a youthful poet "on summer eve by haunted stream" are in some sense reflections of the passions and interests that surround our daily life. Pope, however, as the man more fitted than any other fully to interpret the mind of his own age, inevitably gives a different construction to a very sound maxim. He rightly assumes that man is his proper study; but then by man he means not the genus, but a narrow species of the human being. "Man" means Bolingbroke, and Walpole, and Swift, and Curll, and Theobald; it does not mean man as the product of a long series of generations and part of the great universe of inextricably involved forces. He cannot understand the man of distant ages; Homer is to him not the spontaneous voice of a ruder age, but a clever artist, whose gods and heroes are consciously-constructed parts of an artificial "machinery." Nature has, for him, ceased to be inhabited by sylphs and fairies, except to amuse the fancies of fine ladies and gentlemen, and has not yet received a new interest from the fairy tales of science. The old ideal of chivalry merely suggests the sneers of Cervantes, or even the buffoonery of Butler's wit, and has not undergone restoration at the hands of modern romanticists. Politics are not associated in his mind with any great social upheaval, but with a series of petty squabbles for places and pensions, in which bribery is the great moving force. What he means by religion often seems to be less the recognition of a divine element in the world than a series of bare metaphysical demonstrations too frigid to produce enthusiasm or to stimulate the imagination. And, therefore, he inevitably interests himself chiefly in what is certainly a perennial source of interest—the passions and thoughts of the men and women immediately related to himself; and it may be remarked, in passing, that if this narrows the range of Pope's poetry, the error is not so vital as a modern delusion of the opposite kind. Because poetry should not be brought into too close a contact with the prose of daily life, we sometimes seem to think that it must have no relation to daily life at all, and consequently convert it into a mere luxurious dreaming, where the beautiful very speedily degenerates into the pretty or the picturesque. Because poetry need not be always a pointblank fire of moral platitudes, we occasionally declare that there is no connection at all between poetry and morality, and that all art is good which is for the moment agreeable. Such theories must end in reducing all poetry and art to be at best more or less elegant trifling for the amusement of the indolent: and to those who uphold them, Pope's example may be of some use. If he went too far in the direction of identifying poetry with preaching, he was not wrong in assuming that poetry should involve preaching, though by an indirect method. Morality and art are not independent, though not identical; for both, as Mr. Ruskin shows in the passage just quoted, are only admirable when the expression of healthful and noble natures.

Taking Pope's view of his poetical office, there remain considerable difficulties in estimating the value of the lesson which he taught with so much energy. The difficulties result both from that element which was common to his contemporaries and from that which was supplied by Pope's own idiosyncrasies. The commonplaces in which Pope takes such infinite delight have become very stale for us. Assuming their perfect sincerity, we cannot understand how anybody should have thought of enforcing them with such amazing emphasis. We constantly feel a shock like that which surprises the reader of Young's Night Thoughts when he finds it asserted, in all the pomp of blank verse, that

Procrastination is the thief of time.

The maxim has rightly been consigned to copybooks. And a great deal of Pope's moralising is of the same order. We do not want denunciations of misers. Nobody at the present day keeps gold in an old stocking. When we read the observation,

'Tis strange the miser should his cares employ
To gain the riches he can ne'er enjoy,

we can only reply in the familiar French, connu! We knew that when we were in petticoats….

We cannot give him credit for being really moved by such platitudes. We have the same feeling as when a modern preacher employs twenty minutes in proving that it is wrong to worship idols of wood and stone. But, unfortunately, there is a reason more peculiar to Pope which damps our sympathy still more decidedly. It cannot be fairly denied that all recent inquiries have gone to strengthen those suspicions of his honesty which were common even amongst his contemporaries. Mr. Elwin has been disgusted by the revelations of his hero's baseness, till his indignation has become a painful burden to himself and his readers. Speaking bluntly, indeed, we admit that lying is a vice, and that Pope was in a small way one of the most consummate liars that ever lived. He speaks, himself, of "equivocating pretty genteelly" in regard to one of his peccadilloes. But Pope's equivocation is, to the equivocation of ordinary men, what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches. His disposition, in short, amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life might, without exaggeration, be called a "long disease," should defend himself by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation and subterfuge, when exposed to the brutal horseplay common in that day, is indeed not surprising. But Pope's delight in artifice was something phenomenal. He could hardly "drink tea without a stratagem," or, as Lady Bolingbroke put it, was a politician about cabbages and turnips; and certainly he did not despise the arts known to politicians on a larger stage….

The insincerity which degraded Pope's life detracts from our pleasure in his poetry. Take, for example, the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, which is amongst his most perfect works. Some of the boasts in it, as we shall presently remark, are apparently quite justified by the facts. But what are we to say to such a passage as this?—

I was not born for courts or great affairs;
I pay my debts, believe, and say my prayers;
Can sleep without a poem in my head,
Nor know if Dennis be alive or dead.

Admitting his independence, and not inquiring too closely into his prayers, can we forget that the gentleman who could sleep without a poem in his head called up a servant four times in one night of "the dreadful winter of Forty" to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a thought? Or what is the value of a professed indifference to Dennis from the man distinguished beyond all other writers for the bitterness of his resentment against all small critics; who disfigured his best poems by his petty vengeance for old attacks; and who could not refrain from sneering at poor Dennis, even in the Prologue which he condescended to write for the benefit of his dying antagonist?

Thus we are always pursued, in reading Pope, by disagreeable misgivings. We don't know what comes from the heart, and what from the lips; when the real man is speaking, and when we are only listening to old commonplaces skilfully vamped. There is always, if we please, a bad interpretation to be placed upon his finest sentiments. His indignation against the vicious is confused with his hatred of personal enemies; he protests most loudly that he is honest when he is "equivocating most genteelly;" his independence may be called selfishness or avarice; his toleration simple indifference; and even his affection for his friends a decorous picture which will never lead him to the slightest sacrifice of his own vanity or comfort. A critic of the highest order is provided with an Ithuriel spear, which discriminates the sham sentiments from the true. As a banker's clerk can tell a bad coin by its ring on the counter, without need of a testing apparatus, the true critic can instinctively estimate the amount of bullion in Pope's epigrammatic tinsel. But criticism of this kind, as Pope truly says, is as rare as poetical genius. Humbler writers must be content to take their weights and measures, or, in other words, to test their first impressions, by such external evidence as is available. They must proceed cautiously in these delicate matters, and instead of leaping to the truth by a rapid intuition, patiently inquire what light is thrown upon Pope's sincerity by the recorded events of his life, and a careful cross-examination of the various witnesses to his character. They must, indeed, keep in mind Mr. Ruskin' excellent canon,—that good fruit, even in moralizing, can only be borne by a good tree. Where Pope has succeeded in casting into enduring form some valuable moral sentiment, we may therefore give him credit for having at least felt it sincerely. If he did not always act upon it, the weakness is not peculiar to Pope. Time, indeed, has partly done the work for us. In Pope, more than in almost any other writer, the grain has sifted itself from the chaff. The jewels have remained after the flimsy embroidery in which they were fixed has fallen into decay. Such a result was natural from his mode of composition. He caught at some inspiration of the moment; he cast it roughly into form; brooded over it; retouched it again and again; and when he had brought it to the very highest polish of which his art was capable, placed it in a pigeonhole to be fitted, when the opportunity offered, into an appropriate corner of his mosaic-work….

Pope was more than a mere literary artist, though he was an artist of unparalleled excellence in his own department. He was a man in whom there was the seed of many good thoughts, though choked in their development by the growth of innumerable weeds. And I will venture, in conclusion, to adduce one more proof of the justice of a lenient verdict…. Pope, we have seen, is recognised even by judges of the land only through the medium of Byron; and therefore the Universal Prayer may possibly be unfamiliar to some readers. If so, it will do them no harm to read over again a few of its verses. Perhaps, after that experience, they will admit that the little cripple of Twickenham, distorted as were his instincts after he had been stretched on the rack of this rough world, and grievous as were his offences against the laws of decency and morality, had yet in him a noble strain of eloquence significant of deep religious sentiment.