George, Lord Lyttelton, 1765 (1709-1773)
“Boileau—Pope.”
BOILEAU
... The office of an editor was below you, and your mind was unfit for the drudgery it requires. Would anybody 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 yet has excelled him, and very few have equalled.
BOILEAU
Do you think he was equal in comedy to Moliere?
POPE
In comic 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 fanatics.
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 critic of my nation can pardon.
POPE
We will be satisfied with your feeling the excellence of his beauties.
Dialogues of the Dead, xiv., 4th edition, 1765. XIV. Boileau—Pope, pp. 125-128.
Three editions of Dialogues of the Dead were published in 1760. Practically the whole of the passage quoted above appeared for the first time in the fourth edition in 1765.