In his essay on Pope Natsume Soseki repeatedly indicts him for his pride, irritability, dishonesty, parsimony and chicanery. Soseki derives such a hostile and sarcastically fault-finding image of Pope from his distorted reading of Dr. Johnson’s Life of Pope，which is evidenced by marginal notes written in the pages of Soseki’s own copy. Although Soseki is decidedly repulsed by Pope’s personal qualities, he none the less applies this somewhat biased image of Pope to the interpretation of the so-called Popean lyrics like Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. In Soseki’s opinion, Pope was by nature a poet of romantic sensibility，as shown for example in his feminine and nervous character，but the cold intellectual climate of the eighteenth century had so great an influence on Pope as to freeze his natural propensity to romantic expression of emotion.
This method of biographical inquiry also leads Soseki to a quite erroneous conclusion that An Essay on Man reflects not his own personality but the spirit of the age of reason. Soseki unwarily falls into what modern critics call the intentional fallacy.
