BOILEAU [attacking Pope for wasting his poetic energies as a translator and editor]. I cannot but regret that your talents were thus employed. A great poet so tied down to a tedious translation is a Columbus chained to an oar. What new regions of fancy, full of treasures yet untouched, might you have explored if you had been at liberty boldly to expand your sails and steer your own course under the conduct and direction of your own genius!–But I am still more angry with you for your edition of Shakespeare. The office of an editor was below you, and your mind was unfit for the drudgery it requires. Would any body think of employing a Raphael to clean an old picture?

POPE. The principal cause of my undertaking that task was zeal for the honour of Shakespeare: and if you knew all his beauties as well as I you would not wonder at this zeal. No other author had ever so copious, so bold, so creative an imagination, with so perfect a knowledge of the passions, the humours, and sentiments of mankind. He painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. If human nature were destroyed, and no monument were left of it except his works, other beings might know what man was from those writings.

BOILEAU. You say he painted all characters, from kings down to peasants, with equal truth and equal force. I cannot deny that he did so: but I wish he had not jumbled those characters together in the composition of his pictures, as he has frequently done.

POPE. The strange mixture of tragedy, comedy, and farce in the same play, nay sometimes in the same scene, I acknowledge to be quite inexcusable. But this was the taste of the times when Shakespeare wrote.

BOILEAU. A great genius ought to guide, not servilely follow, the taste of his contemporaries.

POPE. Consider from how thick a darkness of barbarism the genius of Shakespeare broke forth! What were the English, and what (let me ask you) were the French dramatic performances in the age when he flourished? The advances he made towards the highest perfection both of tragedy and comedy are amazing! In the principal points, in the power of exciting terror and pity, or raising laughter in an audience none has yet excelled him, and very few have equalled.

BOILEAU. Do you think that he was equal in comedy to Molière?

POPE. In comick force I do: but in the fine and delicate strokes of satire, and what is called genteel comedy, he was greatly inferior to that admirable writer. There is nothing in him to compare with the Misanthrope, the Ecole des Femmes, or Tartuffe.

BOILEAU. This, Mr. Pope, is a great deal for an Englishman to acknowledge. A veneration for Shakespeare seems to be a part of your national religion, and the only part in which even your men of sense are fanaticks.

POPE. He who can read Shakespeare and be cool enough for all the accuracy of sober criticism has more of reason than taste.

BOILEAU. I join with you in admiring him as a prodigy of genius, though I find the most shocking absurdities in his plays; absurdities which no critick of my nation can pardon.

POPE. We will be satisfied with your feeling the excellence of his beauties. But you would admire him still more if you could see the chief characters in all his best tragedies represented by an actor who appeared on the stage a little before I left the world. He has shewn the English nation more excellences in Shakespeare than the quickest wits could discern, and has imprinted them on the heart with a livelier feeling than the most sensible natures had ever experienced without his help.

BOILEAU. The variety, spirit, and force, of Mr Garrick’s action have been much praised to me by many of his countrymen whose shades I converse with, and who agree in speaking of him as we do of Baron, our most natural and most admired actor. I have also heard of another who has now quitted the stage, but who had filled with great dignity, force, and elevation, some tragick parts; and excelled so much in the comick that none ever has deserved a higher applause.

POPE. Mr Quin was indeed a most perfect comedian. In the part of Falstaff particularly, wherein the utmost force of Shakespeare’s humour appears, he attained to such perfection that he was not an actor, he was the man described by Shakespeare, he was Falstaff himself! When I saw him do it the pleasantry of the fat knight appeared to me so bewitching, all his vices were so mirthful that I could not much wonder at his having seduced a young prince even to rob in his company.

BOILEAU. That character is not well understood by the French. They suppose it belongs not to comedy but to farce: whereas the English see in it the finest and highest strokes of wit and humour. Perhaps these different judgements may be accounted for in some measure by the diversity of manners in different countries. But don’t you allow, Mr Pope, that our writers, both of tragedy and comedy, are upon the whole more perfect masters of their art than yours? If you deny it I will appeal to the Athenians, the only judges qualified to decide the dispute. I will refer it to Euripides, Sophocles, and Menander.

POPE. I am afraid of those judges: for I see them continually walking hand in hand and engaged in the most friendly conversation with Corneille, Racine, and Molière. Our dramatick writers seem in general not so fond of their company: they sometimes shove rudely by them, and give themselves airs of superiority. They slight their reprimands and laugh at their precepts. In short, they will be tried by their country alone; and that judicature is partial.

BOILEAU. I will press the question no furthur.

¹ Originally published in the enlarged fourth edition of Dialogues of the Dead (1765).