‘Of his personal character’ (Swinburne, A Century of English Poetry) ‘it is nothing to say that he had the courage of a lion: for a beast’s or an athlete’s courage must have something of physical force to back it: something of a body to base itself upon: and the spirit which was in Pope, we might say, was almost as good as bodiless. And what a spirit it was! How fiery bright and dauntless!
‘We are invited, and not always unreasonably, to condone or palliate much that was unworthy of manhood in Byron, on just and compassionate consideration of the bitter burden attached to his bodily and daily life; but what was his trial and what was his courage to Pope’s? how less than little the one, how less than nothing the other! For Byron we should have charity and sympathy: but it rouses the blood, it kindles the heart, to remember what an indomitable force of heroic spirit, and sleepless always as fire, was enclosed in the pitiful body of the misshapen weakling whose whole life was spent in fighting the good fight of sense against folly, of light against darkness, of human speech against brute silence, of truth and reason and manhood against all the banded bestialities….’
‘Whatever Pope has left us is as round and smooth as Giotto’s “O”, whatever Dryden has left us is liable to come short of this empirical and precious praise. The strength of Dryden never wholly fails him, but the skill of Pope never fails him at all.’—SWINBURNE, ibid.
Wagner, on the subject of Mozart (Prose Works), wrote ‘with him grey was always grey and red red; only that this grey and this red were equally bathed with the freshening dew of his music, were resolved into all the nuances of the primordial colour, and thus appeared as many-tinted grey, as many-tinted red’.
Actually melody was absent from the poems of Pope, in spite of their technical splendour and unsurpassed flawlessness, — and this lack is due to their unvaried outward structure. For to produce melody, in spite of the variations caused by texture, those variations are not alone sufficient. We must also have variations in the outward structure; and it was to this that we were restored by Shelley, Blake, and Coleridge.
It must be remembered, however, that melody is not the only technical or oral joy to be gained from poetry.—E. S.
‘The heroic couplet, which is kept strictly within the limits of its outward structure, is yet as variable within those limits as waves, as the air with its light variations of wind, indeed, as variable as the earth itself with its mountains and plains. The reason why, to an insensitive ear, the heroic couplet seems monotonous, is because structure alone, and not texture, has been regarded as the maker of rhythm.’—E. S., Alexander Pope.
‘He stated repeatedly that everything he knew about versification he learned from Dryden, and that even at the age of twelve he could distinguish the difference between softness and sweetness in the texture of the several poets; for his feeling for this most important matter of texture was so phenomenally sensitive that had the verses been transformed into flowers, he could have told lily from rose, buttercup from cowslip, in no matter how starless and moonless the night, merely by touching one petal. In these matters, he found Dryden to be softer, Waller sweeter; and that the same difference, the same subtle distinction, separated Ovid from Vergil.’—E. S., Alexander Pope.
I presume he was referring to such poems of Dryden’s as ‘Annus Mirabilis’ and ‘Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew’. He could not, of course, have referred to the satires.