A few have gone into the opposite extreme, and placed Pope on a level with Shakespeare and Milton themselves. His strongest claim to the distinction is the Rape of the Lock, but wide is the interval, whether the test is character, passions, manners, descriptions, or machinery. The characters in Pope's poem are slight and superficial. There is a miniature sketch of an empty-headed fop, and an outside view of a beautiful young lady fond of dress, amusements, and admiration; the rest of the human personages are shadows. Passions, says Bowles, are the soul of poetry, and in poetry of the highest order they are grand, terrible, pathetic, or lovely; the grovelling, ludicrous, and trivial passions are of a less poetical species. The passions of Belinda belong to this lower class. Her grief and anger at the loss of her curl are professedly mock-heroic. They are disproportioned to the frivolous cause, and neither kindle, nor are meant to kindle, sympathy. The manners are not the index to inner depths,--the outward expression of the noble, the awful, or the tender. They are an exterior varnish, the mere formalities of fashion. The descriptions, apart from the sylphs, are chiefly of the toilet, the card-table, and such-like things, which have no kin-ship with the strong, abiding emotions. The very sylphs, by their employments, are, poetically, of an inferior race to the fairies who met
on hill, in dale, forest, or mead, By paved fountain, or by rushy brook, Or on the beached margin of the sea, To dance their ringlets to the whistling wind.[338]
The beings who luxuriate in the everlasting beauties of nature have a deeper charm for us than creatures whose chief delight is in the little artifices of a woman's toilet. The skill is exquisite by which the ephemeral nothings of gay fashion are coloured with the hues of poetic fancy, but in spite of the brilliancy they remain nothings still, and cannot compete with strains which are struck from the profoundest chords in the heart and mind of man. Lord Byron, to save the supremacy of Pope, asserted that "the poet is always ranked according to his execution."[339] Bowles maintained that the test of poetical excellence was the subject and execution combined.[340] He admitted that the loftiest theme in feeble hands would be eclipsed by insignificant topics when treated by a master, but he said that no genius could render subordinate topics equal in poetry to the highest where the execution, as in Shakespeare and Milton, was worthy of the subject. Lord Byron stultified himself. He had no sooner completed his proof that execution was the sole criterion of poetry, than he went on to argue that "the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth."[341] His paradox did not deserve a reply, even if he had not contradicted it the moment it was uttered. Hume wisely recommended that words should not be wasted upon theories which it is inconceivable that any human being could believe.