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11: PERSPECTIVES IN CRITICISM
PERSPECTIVES IN CRITICISM
i: Elements of Critical Theory
2: The Disinherited of Art
3: Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel
4; The Poet in the Poem
5: Arthurian Triptych
6: The Brazilian Othello of Machado de Assis
7: The World of Jean Anouilh
8: A New Approach to Joyce
9: The Idea of Coleridge's Criticism
10: Introduction to the Psychoanalysis of Malkrme
11: This Dark Estate; A Reading of Pope
11:
THOMAS R. EDWARDS, JR,
This Dark Estate:
A Reading of Pope
"Yet gave me, in this dark Estate,
To see the Good from 111;
And binding Nature fast in Fate,
Left free the Human Will."
POPE, The Universal Prayer
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley and Los Angeles
1963
1963 &y The Regents of the University of California
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
Cambridge University Press
London, England
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NO. 63-9067
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Ward Ritchie
To my parents
Qui semel aspexit, quantum dimissa petitis
praestent, mature redeat repetatque relicta.
Preface
YEATS ONCE defined art by saying that "imagination and
intellect are that which is eternal in man crying out
against that which is temporal and perishing." * This
study of Pope might be described as an attempt to sug-
gest that he would have understood and assented to
such a remark. To be sure, he would have preferred
other, more measured terms; as we well know, he was a
"neoclassical" writer, and by the standards of decorum
he recognized, Yeats's "crying out" could only have
seemed embarrassing. But we resist our worlds even as
we live in them; to recognize standards is not necessarily
to observe them. Pope's neoclassicism is important not
only because it explains why he did things in certain
ways but also because it defines the artistic limits which
he came increasingly to find intolerable.
Pope's poems show a strong sense of the "temporal
and perishing" nature of experience; in various ways
they explore the relations between the "dark estate" of
the actual world and the ideal visions of "imagination
and intellect." As I read them, the earlier poems express
a sense of balance, not conflict, between the two realms;
and this sense is conveyed by what I call an "Augustan"
style, in which technical and emotional poise disciplines
a subject matter that might otherwise make art, or any
other human creativity, seem pointless. But as his
career proceeds, I find an increasing strain between a
Vll
poetic manner that remains in many ways Augustan
and an intensity of feeling that more and more resists
containment within that manner. I call the poetic results
of this strain "grotesque," and my later chapters de-
scribe the emergence and the significance of this new
mode. It produces a great art, greater in many ways
than the art of the earlier poems; but I hope that my
treatment may suggest that the earlier poems are them-
selves more significantly serious than they are some-
times said to be.
To read Pope's poems as expressing various concep-
tions of and responses to what he called "the lurking
principle of death" is inevitably to minimize some other
aspects of his work. Although I have tried to stay on
the proper side of the line between seriousness and
solemnity, it may still seem that I have sometimes
ignored the delicacy, the humor, the sharpness of social
observation for which Pope is so famous. I can only
say that I see and value these qualities of his work,
but that I think they have for many readers obscured
other qualities, the gravity and breadth of vision that
underlie his poems even when they are ( as Jane Austen
said in another connection) most "light, and bright,
and sparkling." To the reader who finds the word
"moral" recurring with uncomfortable frequency in
this study, I must answer that Pope seems to me a moral
poet, just as he professed to be, and that his morality
provides one of the most impressive statements in liter-
ature of what it means to be human. Certainly he can
be tediously moralistic, but outside the Essay on Man
such moments are infrequent, and they seem a fair price
to pay for the poetically rendered moral intelligence
that is his great contribution to our experience. Ray-
mond Williams, defending eighteenth-century drama,
rather tartly diagnoses a confusion that some writers
on Pope too seem to have fallen into: "The identification
which some critics seem to make, in phantasy, between
themselves and the insouciance of Cavalier rakes and
whores, is usually ridiculous, if one goes on to ask to
vm
what moral tradition they themselves practically be-
long." 2 Whatever errors I commit in reading Pope, I
have tried to avoid this one.
As all students of Pope must be, I am grateful to the
editors of the Twickenham edition of the poems Emile
Audra, Norman Ault, F. W. Bateson, John Butt, May-
nard Mack, James Sutherland, Geoffrey Tillotson, and
Aubrey L. Williams and to George Sherburn, editor
of the letters, for making available Pope's texts, and
invaluable information about them, in such definitive
form. I have used the Twickenham texts ("TE" in my
notes ) for all quotations from Pope's poems; in quoting
from An Essay on Criticism, however, I have disre-
garded the italicizations (other than of proper nouns)
which Professors Audra and Williams have preserved
from the first edition. Although it may only demonstrate
how one is corrupted by familiarity with bad texts, I
find that I cannot read the poem as the editors print
it; they argue rightly that Pope's extensive italics "point
up elements in his couplet structures," but one can after
all hear the points as they are developed by rhythmic
stress and rhetorical pattern, and this seems preferable
to having them thrown in one's face by typography.
The older Pope was surer of himself and his readers.
My specific debts to other writers I have acknowl-
edged, as adequately as I could, in my notes; but I must
express a more general gratitude to the work of Kenneth
Burke, F. R. Leavis, and Geoffrey Tillotson, which no
mere notes could sufficiently indicate.
I owe thanks to the Committee on Research of the
University of California, Riverside, for grants that
assisted in the preparation of my manuscript.
The pleasant task of listing personal obligations
should begin with mention of my students at River-
side, who have taught me more than they perhaps
realize. I am grateful for the conversation and friendly
instruction of many people, of whom I should name
particularly Robert E. Garis, Richard Poirier, William
H. Pritchard, William T. H. Youngren, and my col-
ix
leagues Milton Miller, Douglass S. Parker, William L.
Sharp, and Philip Wheelwright. To Walter Jackson
Bate I owe special thanks for continued kindness and
enlightenment when both were badly needed. And my
intellectual debt to Theodore Baird is, he may be
amused to hear, so extensive as to be almost inexpres-
sible.
David R. Ferry and Marshall Van Deusen have read
and criticized the manuscript at different stages of its
composition; I am grateful for their beneficent effect
upon the book and, in much larger ways, upon me.
Above all, I owe thanks to Reuben A. Brower, for
the generosity of his friendship and the amiable stern-
ness of his instruction. There is scarcely a page of this
book that has not profited from his (sometimes ago-
nized ) comments and from my sense of the challenging
standard set by his own dealings with Pope and liter-
ature generally.
Finally, for nothing in particular but much in general,
I thank my wife.
* # * *
For permission to use material in chapters 3 and 5
which first appeared in somewhat different form in
Essays in Criticism and Philological Quarterly, I thank
the editors of those journals. I owe thanks also to E. P.
Dutton & Co., Inc., for permission to use portions of
chapter 4 which first were printed in In Defense of
Reading, edited by Reuben A. Brower and Richard
Poirier (1962).
Permission to quote from the following copyrighted
works is gratefully acknowledged: The Complete Poems
of Robert Frost (New York, Henry Holt and Company,
1949); James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, The Mod-
ern Library, 1934); The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Norfolk,
Conn., New Directions, 1948); The Collected Poems
ofW.B. Yeats (New York, The Macmillan Company,
1956).
THOMAS R. EDWARDS, JR,
Contents
1. The Augustan Mode i
The Theme of Time The Augustan Mediation
Heroic and Pastoral Myths The Limits of the Mode
2. The Mighty Maze 2,8
The Voice of God Human Limits and Natural Har-
mony The Power of Time Hierarchy and Experience
3. Nature as Moral Norm 46
Money and Madness Nature and Abstraction The
Triumph of Sense The Edge of Tragedy
4. Satire and the Grotesque 78
The Satirist as Clown The Satirist as Hero The Gro-
tesque Mode Persona and Personality
i
5. The Uncreating Word 112
The World Turned Upside Down The Orders of
Light One Dead Level
Conclusion 131
Notes 137
The Augustan Mode
POPE, WE like to say, is the poet of sanity and daylight.
Many modern readers come to him gratefully, seeing
him rather as they see Chaucer, as a writer whose
entrenchment in the actual world of intelligible human
activities and relations affords a healthy release from
the private intensities of romantic and modern litera-
ture. 1 There is much to be said for such a view, but it
makes Pope's poetic attitude seem far too simple. His
approach to experience is a comic one, in a broad sense;
but his comedy clearly is of a different sort from
Chaucer's. The Canterbury Tales, with their easy pace
and copious digressions, express a view of life in which
the exigencies of time have been understood and put
in their proper place. Comedy, if I understand it, cele-
brates our humanity as a persistence of the usual; it
persuades us that what has happened will happen
again, that no event is unique. As Leopold Bloom ob-
served upon going to bed, no man is ever the first or the
last. 2 The comic perspective, which Troilus achieved
when from the eighth sphere he 'lough right at the
wo / Of hem that wepten for his deth so faste," stands
behind Chaucer's great metaphor of leisure; you have
all the time in the world when you think time is only in
"the world," when you believe that from another per-
spective the events of time can be seen recurring eter-
nally.
The Theme of Time
For Chaucer and his readers, the eternal perspective
was a comfortable commonplace, a theological axiom
that had so thoroughly been transformed into a cultural
habit that the question of "believing" in it, in the mod-
ern sense, never needed raising; but for Pope, the un-
grateful heir of two centuries of skepticism, eternity
was no easy matter. The poems of his early career
(ending with the translations of Homer) can be read
as modest attempts to find a view of experience that
might have some of the Chaucerian amplitude and
equanimity, but which are complicated by the poet's
anxious, "modern" concern about the workings of muta-
bility. The Epistle to Mr. Jervas, With Drydens Trans-
lation of Fresnoifs Art of Painting (c. 1715) defines the
problem in terms of painting, which gives the imagina-
tion exercise in recreating what time has actually de-
stroyed:
With thee, on Raphael's Monument I mourn,
Or wait inspiring dreams at Mar as Urn:
With thee repose, where Tullt/ once was laid,
Or seek some ruin's formidable shade;
While fancy brings the vanished piles to view,
And builds imaginary Rome a-new. (27-32)
So far neither the expression nor the attitude behind it
much exceeds the commonplace archaeological nostalgia
of (for example) Addison's Letter from Italy (1703),
But Pope pursues a more complex theme than Addison's
complacent chauvinism. The artistic imagination can
subdue time, but this hopeful idea must be qualified
in the light of an earlier remark: "How oft* in pleasing
tasks we wear the day, / While summer suns roll un-
perceiv'd away" (17-18)* Time keeps passing, whether
the artist notices or not, "Summer suns" means "days/'
most simply, but the grandeur of the circumlocution is
ominously suggestive.
Such interplay of positive and negative views of art's
power over time provides the poem with its structure.
At one moment Pope praises Jervas' artistic invention
by comparing its products with the precepts of theo-
reticians like Dufresnoy, which only dimly express "the
living image" of the painter's vision:
Thence endless streams of fair ideas flow,
Strike in the sketch, or in the picture glow;
Thence beauty, waking all her forms, sup-
plies
An Angel's sweetness, or Bridgewaters eyes.
(43-46)
Living, flow, strike, glow: the illusion of life is a powerful
one. But the name of the dead Lady Bridgewater re-
minds Pope that actual beauty is mortal, and he urges
his muse to summon each living "object of desire" to
the Countess's tomb for a moral lesson:
Bid her be all that chears or softens life,
The tender sister, daughter, friend and wife;
Bid her be all that makes mankind adore;
Then view this marble, and be vain no more!
(5 1 -54)
Pope had already used the commonplace sentiment of
the last line in an Epitaph on John Lord Caryll ( 1711?),
but he does not allow so conventional a lesson to stand
unqualified in this new context. Lady Bridgewater's
beauty is not entirely dead:
Yet still her charms in breathing paint en-
gag 6 ;
Her modest cheek shall warm a future age.
Beauty, frail flow'r that ev'ry season fears,
Blooms in thy colours for a thousand years.
Thus Churchill's race shall other hearts sur-
prize,
And other Beauties envy Worsleys eyes,
Each pleasing Blount shall endless smiles
bestow,
And soft Belinda's blush for ever glow. (55-62)
Art preserves beauty by perpetually recreating the
feelings which that beauty aroused when alive. Pope's
poems and Jervas' paintings show that although indi-
vidual beauties die, beauty itself is immortal, for it
resides in the human capacity to respond to a pleasing
object, natural or artificial.
And yet even this compromise between realism and
idealism cannot fully pacify Pope's sense of mutability
and mortality. After expressing a hope that his poems
will live as long and please as much as Jervas* paintings,
he ends the epistle on a minor cadence:
Yet should the Graces all thy figures place,
And breathe an air divine on ev'ry face;
Yet should the Muses bid my numbers roll,
Strong as their charms, and gentle as their
soul;
With Zeuxis Helen thy Bridgewater vie,
And these be sung 'till Granvilles Myra die;
Alas! how little from the grave we claim?
Thou but preservst a Face and I a Name.
(71-78)
The last couplet emerges from the facile compliments
with the force of real emotion, especially when we con-
sider that Jervas was supposed to have been in love with
the noble lady he painted. Art's power over time and
death is finally not a perfect consolation; the artist's
human feelings have a way of challenging his sense
of the dignity and wonder of his craft. The final effect,
however, is a complex sadness. Pope asserts the magical
potency of art over time as strongly as he denies it; the
alternation of feelings is held together by the epistle
form, with its easy restraint of tone, and by our sense
that the rather slight occasion scarcely requires a full-
scale resolution. The poem is "comic" in the way it
opposes to the human dread of time a conception of
art as a continuing activity. To the artist himself, there
is a sad disparity between the living experience and
the diminished version of it preserved in the artifact;
but from the broader perspective which sees art as a
timeless link between the living and the dead, it seems
marvelous that art can preserve as much as it does, and
that there are always men willing to endure the per-
sonal pathos that is peculiarly the artist's.
The Augustan Mediation
The Epistle to Jervas provides a preliminary illustration
of what I want to call Pope's Augustan poetic manner,
which characterizes most of his poems until the time of
the Essay on Man. Its chief feature is a balance between
opposing feelings and points of view, a sustained media-
tion, in the case of Jervas, between the idea that art is
a consolation for time and the idea that art can preserve
painfully little when held up against our personal losses.
Neither idea subdues the other, any more than Chau-
cer's rich comic ironies deny the seriousness of the
human experiences they qualify. Stylistically too there
is balance:
Beauty, frail flow'r that ev'ry season fears,
Blooms in thy colours for a thousand years.
The ominous appositive "frail flow'r" is restrained by the
hopeful predicate; "ev'ry season" yields to "a thousand
years" and yet remains to qualify the latter phrase
ironically. Phrase against phrase, line against line,
couplet against couplet the poem typically develops
through statement and counter-statement, achieving a
final effect of poise. The tone mixes moral elevation
with the decorum of good manners, "seriousness" with
ft 9>
Wit.
The details of the manner vary from poem to poem,
as does the degree of seriousness with which Pope
approaches the theme of man in a world of change.
But the Augustan mode involves more than poetic de-
tail. Of the early poems, Windsor Forest perhaps best
shows the larger balancings of meaning through which
the mode is achieved. 3 In it Pope compares past and
present, playing off his sensuous apprehension of the
moment against his knowledge of history and legend.
The poem broadly expresses a search for some signifi-
cant relation between the "bright diversities of day"
and the larger temporal processes revealed by memory
and imagination. Windsor Forest is Augustan in that it
can be interpreted as at once asserting and criticizing
what might be called its "official" meaning: that the
poet's world, the bountiful age of Queen Anne, is an
earthly paradise, a living embodiment of the ideal
human society:
The Groves of Eden, vanished now so long,
Live in Description, and look green in Song:
These, were my Breast inspir'd with equal
Flame,
Like them in Beauty, should be like in Fame.
(7-10)
Like many passages in the poem, this both asserts the
genuine richness and beauty of Windsor, the symbolic
epitome of Augustan England, and questions its dura-
tion. Eden perished, surviving only in the imagination
and its artifacts, and this reminder of the power of time
casts its shadow over the poem.
The positive sense of the analogy with Eden develops
from Pope's descriptions of the landscape and its affini-
ties with art. Like Eden, Windsor Forest is neither a
wilderness nor a wholly cultivated garden; in it the rich
profusion of primal nature is modified, but not violated,
by the divine designing which distinguishes profusion
from chaos. "Order in Variety" is the key, and the char-
acterization of Windsor as a place "where, tho' all things
differ, all agree'' points to the latent political meaning:
England is an image of the perfect human society be-
cause in it parties and sects can keep their identities
within the embracing pattern of civil order and peace.
(The political turmoil of the seventeenth century stands
behind the poem Pope's readers knew all too well the
alternatives to Eden. ) But politics is only one aspect of
the disciplined individuality of the ideal society, as the
artfully "painted" landscape of Windsor shows (23-
6
28 ) . The nature of Eden is to be more than "natural"; in
it nature is transformed by a creative power that can
be represented only by analogy with the human making
of art from the materials of experience. We need not
suppose that Pope saw nature like this. Rather he is
recalling the artistry of Eden itself, where flowers
exhibited not only their natural beauties but also those
of "mosaic" and "rich inlay" (Paradise Lost, IV, 698-
703 ) . "Here blushing Flora paints th' enamel'd Ground"
(38) is Pope's version of this metaphor, condensing it
to a pun: "Ground" is both the earth and the prepared
surface upon which a painting is made. 4
Windsor's beauty is of course more than esthetic
veneer. The classical deities ai*e at home here (33-42),
but their new domestication reveals that they are not
only beautiful but useful. Windsor is more truly the
home of the gods than Olympus because at Windsor
the natural power that they personify reveals itself not
merely in mythological abstractions but in the sub-
stantial "blessings" of natural fruition. Even the ap-
parently mechanical invocation of the rural deities ex-
presses this idea; Pope draws upon their conventional
associations of nostalgic beauty by posing them as in
a frieze, but their identifying symbols (Pan's flocks,
Pomona's fruits) are also tokens of their connections
with a productive nature. The grain nods in Eden
natural things acquiesce in or even invite their own
destruction for man's uses.
The idealizing parallel of England and Eden reaches
a climax in the Thames's rhapsody on Peace and Com-
merce at the end of the poem. Through the figure the
official meaning of Windsor Forest the attitude that
emerges most clearly when Granville or Queen Anne
is in the picture gets into the poem, and the poem's
relation to Coopers Hill, Waller's On St. James's Park,
and the whole patriotic-topographical tradition comes
out. Augustan England represents the flowering of
human civilization, the triumph of the neoclassic virtues
of order and harmony over chaos and barbarism. And
the implication is that the new order will be eternal, a
permanent realization of cultural ideals.
At this level, Windsor Forest does not significantly
differ from the standard poetic praising of commerce
as a restorer of the Golden Age. And as Bonamy Dobree
has remarked, such celebrants of the theme as Tickell,
Fenton, Glover, and Dyer seem much too insistent, 5
as though they were inarticulately aware of the ironies
that a Swift or a Mandeville could detect in the ethics
of commercialism. Pope's later poems prove his own
understanding of these ironies, but this understanding
is present too in Windsor Forest, as part of a larger
qualification of the theme of the ideal made real; and it
is this qualification that makes Windsor Forest "Au-
gustan," in my present sense. Pope knew as well as we
do that no earthly state is eternal. He had to express
his very real pleasure in the peace and prosperity of
Anne's reign without utterly falsifying his understand-
ing of the hard facts of time, change, and death; he
solved the problem by confronting the "official" atti-
tudes in his poem with some very different feelings.
Windsor Forest is full of reminders that death and
decay are permanent conditions of human experience,
that even the original Eden perished. The glance into
history, at William I, reveals violence and death and
so indicates that history records drastic change rather
than permanence. The architectural details in lines
65-72 naked temples, broken columns, heaps of ruin
suggest more than the destruction of English culture
under Norman misrule; a classical civilization seems to
have succumbed to barbarism, and some disturbing
possibilities about the world Pope is celebrating sug-
gest themselves. Death persists even in the Augustan
present, as the lines on rural sports (93-158) quietly
indicate. The vignettes of hunting have, to be sure, a
static quality, like parts of a painting. And the present
tenses seem to minimize the deaths of the creatures
8
the pheasant mounts even as he flutters in blood (111-
114), the lapwings keep skimming as they feel death
(131-132), and the larks, while they lie dead on the
ground, have left their little lives in air (133-134) and
so are not exactly dead. 6 But we have been reminded,
however delicately, that death does not wholly vanish
in the ideal society, a point Pope also makes in his meta-
morphosis of Lodona:
The silver Stream her Virgin Coldness keeps,
For ever murmurs, and for ever weeps;
Still bears the Name the hapless Virgin bore,
And bathes the Forest where she rang'd be-
fore. (205-208)
Something of her persists in this artful landscape, where
past and present eternally coexist; but while death
mythologized is not exactly death, still the awful word
is not far from our minds.
The passage on the old poets (with which the first
version of the poem presumably reached its climax)
expresses a strong sense of time's hostility to human
effort Denham and Cowley are dead "Fate relentless
stop'd their Heav'nly Voice" (277) and while Gran-
ville is coming to restore music to the forest, this cheery
fact cannot quite make up for the pathetic loss. Windsor
was also the home of more "practical" glory that has
passed, although Granville is urged to resurrect the
warrior-kings who are buried there (299-310). In fact,
no human achievement is immortal, as Father Thames
remarks while celebrating his own superiority to the
river-cultures of antiquity: "These now no more shall be
the Muse's Themes, / Lost in my Fame, as in the Sea
their Streams" (361-362). History is an ebb and flow,
and despite Thames's smugness we may sense some
regret in the almost Arnoldian sea-image. Though the
official meaning of the passage is that modern England
eclipses all civilizations of the past, the metaphor implies
an ironic possibility about the new Eden. A similar pos-
sibility underlies the passage (235-258) comparing the
happiness of the successful courtier with that of "him
who to these Shades retires, / Whom Nature charms,
and whom the Muse inspires." The syntax of "Happy
next him" (237) is unclear: either the courtier is happi-
est and the next happiest is the rusticated philosopher-
poet, or the courtier's happiness seems imperfect only
when set next to the poet's, as in the stock pastoral idea
that you are really happy only when the artificialities
of the court have been left behind. Pope probably
meant to give the country poet second place, but the
courtier's joys are summarily dropped while rural re-
tirement gets 22 lines of praise. After celebrating the
value of "Study, Exercise and Ease," the passage ends
significantly as the country-man comes to "follow Na-
ture, and regard his End," or to contemplate the heavens
and discern his soul's "Home" there. Pope has moved
a long way from the glorious works of Anne; man's
need to understand his role in the natural scheme is not
met by living in an earthly paradise. Such reflection is
commonplace in the Georgic tradition, 7 and Pope was no
doubt mainly concerned with imitating Virgil; but
whatever his motive, the digression shows that the of-
ficial meaning does not wholly control the poem.
Despite such complication, Windsor Forest remains
a reasonably unified poem, and in my sense an Au-
gustan one. Pope was too intelligent to offer the
England-as-Eden analogy with full innocence, but he
nevertheless cared far too much about the positive con-
tent of the figure to propose any simple irony about
it. And understandably he had no desire to weaken
the compliments to Granville and the queen, especially
as such compliments expressed an honest feeling that
the new age really promised to be a splendid one. He
needed to show the very great value of the ideal in its
present embodiment, without insisting on its literal
permanence. The solution was ready at hand, in the
static, pictorial, "artificial" method of the poem that
generations of hostile readers have complained of. As
10
in the Epistle to Jervas, art rescues reality from time,
just as the groves of Eden have been rescued. Pope
urges Granville to sing of England's dead hero-kings
(305-310) in order to immortalize them. The decay
of Verrio's pictures recalls the ruined temples of the
Conqueror's times, but the melancholy is controlled
by the idea that the greatest art poetry neither dies
itself nor allows its subjects to die. The description of
Lodona transformed into the River Loddon makes the
same point:
Oft in her Glass the musing Shepherd spies
The headlong Mountains and the down-
ward Skies,
The watry Landskip of the pendant Woods,
And absent Trees that tremble in the
Floods;
In the clear azure Gleam the Flocks are
seen,
And floating Forests paint the Waves with
Green.
Thro' the fair Scene rowl slow the lingring
Streams,
Then foaming pour along, and rush into the
Thames. (211-218)
The paradoxes of reality that is both absent and ani-
matedly "there," of motion that yet sustains an eternal
presence have their counterpart in poetry as well as
in painting; the poem's temporal existence, and the
poet's, do not compromise the permanence of expres-
sion. "On Coopers Hill eternal Wreaths shall grow, /
While lasts the Mountain, or while Thames shall flow"
(265-266).
The conclusion of the poem is less "feeble and
flat" than Joseph Warton (like many later readers)
supposed. The retreat from grandiloquence ("The
Thoughts of Gods let Granville '$ Verse recite") to pas-
toral modesty ("My humble Muse, in unambitious
Strains, / Paints the green Forests and the flow'ry
11
Plains") completes the theme of artistic permanence.
Granville may continue the panegyric, but the epic
mood isn't quite appropriate. Pope's humility masks
the belief that the main job has been done the paint-
ing is finished, and as an image of glory it will outlast
its object. The anticlimax is a deliberate warning
against taking the literal sense of the poem too seri-
ously; it is only a way of speaking, but ways of speak-
ing may finally be our only defenses against time.
Thus the descriptive method of Windsor Forest
the treatment of scenic set-pieces in visual imagery
that recalls conventional seventeenth-century land-
scape painting, with its pastoral vignettes, ruins, and
glimpses of rural life more or less statically drawn
has close connections with its meaning. The original
Eden, the archetype of the ideal society, vanished long
ago but persists in description and song; England seems
in many ways a new Eden, but it too will pass away,
and so its present perfection must be captured and
eternalized in poems, Granville's and Pope's own.
Pope's attitude toward his subject thus strikes a deli-
cate poise between enthusiastic celebration of present
glory and sober awareness that such glory passes. The
emphasis on art, with its power to transcend time,
reconciles the opposite and leads to an over-all view
in which ideal values are strongly asserted even as they
are tested and qualified by the poet's realistic intelli-
gence. This expression of confidence in the power of
the imagination to mediate between the ideal and the
real is essentially Augustan.
Heroic and Pastoral Myths
The landmarks of Pope's early career the Pastorals
(1709), An Essay on Criticism (1711), Windsor For-
est (1713), The Rape of the Lock (1714), and The
Temple of Fame (1715) can all be taken as Augustan
versions of experience. Each poem, that is, deals in
some way with an antagonism between an imaginative
12
ideal, or "myth/* and a set of "facts" that challenges or
contradicts the myth; and each attempts to express the
antagonism in a way that may reveal a basis for media-
tion. In Windsor Forest the antagonism is between a
present embodiment of a cultural ideal and a history
which demonstrates the impermanence of cultural
achievements. In the Essay on Criticism and The Tem-
ple of Fame the terms of the conflict are modified. As I
read them, both poems explore the contrasts between
an ideal past the "heroic" age of classical literary
greatness and a present in which literary heroism, if
it is possible at all, must be a sadly diminished thing.
And in both poems an Augustan reconciliation is
achieved or at least attempted, in the case of The
Temple of Fame through an appeal to paradoxes
about art similar to those developed in Windsor For-
est and the Epistle to Jervas.
In the Essay on Criticism and The Temple of Fame
the great writers of the past are accorded a veneration
that raises them above the mortal status they originally
shared with other men and in a sense rescues them
from death:
Still green with Bays each ancient Altar
stands,
Above the reach of Sacrilegious Hands,
Secure from Flames, from Envy's fiercer
Rage,
Destructive War, and all-involving Age.
(E. on C., 181-184)
But Pope's whole view of the classical past is not this
simple. The "happier days" in which the Ancients
lived may seem happy only to those who never lived
in them; happy or not, they have passed, and the mod-
ern artist finds no such consolation in his own activities:
Now Length of Fame (our second Life) is
lost,
And bare Threescore is all ev'n That can
boast:
13
Our Sons their Fathers' failing Language
see,
And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.
(E. on C. ? 480-483)
The contemporary fear of the disintegration of the lan-
guage an important factor in the rise of a stylized
"poetic diction" here expresses a larger fear, the un-
derstanding that history is largely a record of losses.
The losses are personal as well as communal, as The
Temple of Fame suggests. The temple itself is a marvel
of rich material and cunning workmanship, and its
"symbolic eternities" (in G. Wilson Knight's words)
testify to the power of imagination to overcome time
and its ravages. 8 But the inhabitants of the temple
are statues, not people: "Heroes in animated Marble
frown, / And Legislators seem to think in Stone" (73-
74). The illusion of life is powerful and miraculous,
and yet it is an illusion. The poem seeks to transform
death into "fame" or "eternity" or some such euphe-
mistic term, but here, as in the Essay, Pope cannot
avoid some troubling qualifications:
How vain that second Life in others'
Breath,
Th' Estate which Wits inherit after Death!
Ease, Health, and Life, for this they must
resign,
(Unsure the Tenure, but how vast the
Fine!) (T. of F., 505-508)
In Youth alone [Wit's] empty Praise we
boast,
But soon the Short-liv'd Vanity is lost!
Like some fair Flow'r the early Spring sup-
plies,
That gaily blooms, but ev'n in blooming
Dies. (E. on C., 49 6 "499)
A number of other passages in the Essay express similar
melancholy about the impermanence of the artist's
14
achievement (lines 484-493 and 500-507 are cases in
point); the idea is closer to the surface in The Temple
of Fame, in the very nature of the "imitation" of Chaucer
Pope is making. Chaucer is a great poet and so worth
imitating, great poets win immortality through their
works, and yet Chaucer needs to be rescued from obliv-
ion by rewriting his works in modern English. Greatness
alone evidently does not guarantee symbolic immortal-
ity.
Even apparently "decorative" details in The Temple
of Fame reveal the paradoxes of art. The temple itself,
for example, stands upon a cold, hard, immovable hill
of ice, for which Pope made a famous simile:
So Zemblas Rocks (the beauteous Work of
Frost)
Rise white in Air, and glitter o'er the Coast;
Pale Suns, unfelt, at distance roll away,
And on th* impassive Ice the Lightnings play.
(53-56)
This is the full neo-Longinean "sublime." The grand,
unearthly beauty evokes awe, and we are to evaluate
the temple and its marvelous contents by its qualitative
remoteness from the natural plasticity, animation, and
responsiveness of the vernal scene with which the poem
opens ( a significant change from the winter of Chaucer's
Hous of Fame) . But the overtones of fear that Edmund
Burke was to detect in the sublime seem oddly emphatic.
The glittering whiteness of the rocks suggests an almost
sinister lack of vitality, an utter monotony of shading. ( I
do not mean to suggest that Pope saw whiteness as the
authors of Arthur Gordon Pym or Moby Dick were to
see it, but only that its remoteness from the "bright
diversities of day'* may seem disquieting as well as awe-
some.) The punctuational emphasis on "unfelt" seems
to invite comparison with the opening lines of the poem,
where "Earth relenting feels the Genial Ray." In Zembla
the sun's rays are anything but "genial" they are
neither kindly nor generative and the "impassive" ice
15
contrasts sharply with the sensitivity of vernal nature.
There is no "soft Season" in Zembla, and while this
emphasizes the temple's wonderful immunity to tem-
poral process, we may wonder about the cost of such
permanence.
Both The Temple of Fame and An Essay on Criticism
are concerned with confirming and sustaining the dig-
nity of art. But in their expression, sometimes oblique
and sometimes direct, of the difficulties the artist must
face in an age that seems indifferent or even hostile to
imaginative creation, Pope emphasizes the price the
artist must pay for his timeless achievement. The artist
is a kind of hero in fact the only useful object of heroic
veneration. We cannot imitate Achilles, really, but we
can in a modest way imitate Homer, and by doing so we
assert our relation to cultural tradition, which is our
humble, "modern" version of the larger significances
the epic hero so directly and arrogantly expresses. The
writer is a warrior, as the Essay often implies, and Pope's
treatment of him in these poems shows indirectly the
same fascination with epic more obviously shown in
The Rape of the Lock and the translations of Homer.
Like Windsor Forest, the Essay on Criticism and The
Temple of Fame show Pope searching for large-scale
subjects and techniques that will not falsify his knowl-
edge of nature and contemporary society as they are
involved in time. In each poem, though in different
ways, he complicates his "official" attitudes by letting
in feelings that are not in themselves positive, feelings
(for the most part) that the symbolic eternities of art
do not wholly pacify the human apprehension of
"Death's inexorable Doom," as Sarpedon calls it in Pope's
Iliad (XII, 392). Such complexity plays an important
part in the Homeric epic, 9 and these poems, on a rel-
atively small scale, show the general Augustan nostalgia
for the "heroick," in literature and life. Dryden's heroic
plays show the nostalgia clearly, but they also show why
a full-blooded epic literature could not flourish in the
16
Augustan environment. Dryden cannot convincingly
postulate a viable relationship between his heroic super-
men-savages and the everyday realities with which the
cultivated Restoration audience was concerned. The
emphasis in a play such as The Conquest of Granada
falls upon the unreality of what is on the stage, with
spectacle and bombast providing the beholder with the
double pleasure of wonder and amusement. In Dry den's
and Pope's times both reader and writer knew too much
to feel that any simple, unqualified view of large-scale
human grandeur made comfortable sense in a contem-
porary context. Dryden may have learned his lesson
from Annus Mirabilis, where the shift from the heroic
manner to the actual matter generally entails bathos:
Th' Eternal heard, and from the Heav'nly
Quire
Chose out the Cherub with the flaming Sword:
And bad him swiftly drive th' approaching
Fire
From where our Naval Magazins were stor'd.
(Stanza 272)
The heroic play tries to avoid this kind of absurdity by
never coming down to earth, but Dryden found that a
happier way to deal with epic was to put it unashamedly
into modern contexts and use the inevitably comic re-
sults for deliberate satiric purposes. 10 It took him a fairly
long time to discover this, and his return late in life to
the serious epic in the role of translator suggests that his
nostalgia for the heroic ideal could not fully be purged
through satire.
We here can only speculate about the complex reasons
for such a situation. The usual explanation in terms of
the new science, and its relegation of human activity
to a very small corner of the cosmos, is perhaps no more
important than the breakdown of the public images of
heroism and piety in the politics of the seventeenth cen-
tury. The religio-political battles that culminated in the
Civil Wars introduced ambivalence into the cultivated
17
reader's view of the hierarchies of church and state, am-
bivalence that was not to be resolved by the moral and
intellectual pygmyism of the later Stuarts and the Han-
overians, or by the spiritual flaccidity of Anglican Indif-
f erentism or the spiritual flatulence ( as Swift diagnosed
it) of Enthusiastic Dissent. But whatever the reasons,
the heroic was in Pope's day a difficult mode to work
in, and his success in scaling it down to a size compatible
with experience as his readers knew it, though it owed
a great deal to Dryden's pioneering, nevertheless re-
mains a tribute to his own poetic skill and tact. The old
nostalgia lingered on, as the translation of Homer and
the projected original epic of his later years show, but
it did not keep him from trying out versions of the heroic
that would be immediately and seriously relevant to
his own world.
This adaptation of the heroic is another facet of
Pope's Augustanism. Like the pastoral, the epic pro-
poses an image of man that is simpler than the reality
as we know it. The epic hero exists to fight, and his
battles enact on a human scale larger conflicts between
deities and between natural forces. But despite his being
larger than life, the hero remains human, in part, and
for the reader he represents a possible link between
human experience and a higher kind of reality. In the
Essay on Criticism Pope alters these terms somewhat.
The writer is now the hero, and supernatural appeal is
minimized. But by his continuation of an "epic" literary
past, by his demonstration that the present need not be
wholly worthless when measured by classical standards,
the writer-hero in his own person reconciles the actual
and the ideal. His craft perpetuates values, and it proves
that time can be challenged, if not conquered.
In the Pastorals and The Rape of the Lock Pope's
myth is the familiar pastoral ideal of innocence. 11 The
pastoral shepherd, an image of man stripped of all his
"civilized" concerns so that he may contemplate the re-
18
lation between nature and his own capacities for pri-
mary emotion, is of course an object of complex interest
for the sophisticated city-man. The shepherds in Pope's
"Winter/' for example, associate their grief for the death
of Daphne with the "grief" of the natural world as it
moves toward winter; where the civilized man would
fall back on learned abstractions (when winter comes
spring is not far behind), the shepherd, for whom every
experience is wholly new, must invent myth by idealiz-
ing the details of his own rural world so as to project a
nature that is not subject to time: "Fields ever fresh, and
Groves for ever green!" And our response to such in-
nocence mixes amusement with yearning. It is good to
feel that we are like the shepherd, to rediscover some
of the unpracticed directness of feeling we thought
adult experience had destroyed; and yet it would be
bad to resemble him too closely, since adults can never
be sure that "innocence" is more than a pretty name for
crudeness or stupidity. Pastoral, as William Empson
says, juxtaposes the civilized man and the rustic not to
praise one at the expense of the other, but simply to see
whether an image of perfect humanity cannot be made
from the best elements of both. 12 Like the shepherd,
we invent myths (pastoral is one of them) to reconcile
what happens with what should happen but our myths
are more complicated and at their best more aware of
their mythic content, less innocently literal. ^
The Augustan antagonism in The Rape of the Lock
is essentially pastoral. The social microcosm that Belinda
and her friends inhabit is another simplified image of
the real world of man, and we contemplate it with a
similar mixture of yearning and amusement. The little
world of Hampton Court is "perfect," in that it has
created a system of manners and conventions that is
(ideally) adequate for the expression of any human
feeling or impulse. In this society a ritual activity like
playing cards (compare the singing contest in pastoral)
stands in its simplicity for the enormous, disorderly
19
body of sexual motives ranging from harmless flirta-
tion to seduction or even rape that we lump together
under the name of "courtship." We cannot entirely ap-
prove of such ritualizing, to be sure; the ceremonies of
society are tiny and to some extent mechanical, like
Belinda's watch, which "return'd a silver Sound" when
pressed, and Pope clearly shares our doubts about the
wisdom of so wholly regularizing passion which ceases
to be itself when purged of its recognizably human dis-
order. Yet he expresses real admiration for the beauty
and efficiency of manners, even if they are more theo-
retical than actual, for he knows how fearful experience
can be for people who are not (as he, the ironic nar-
rator, is not) wholly committed to such a system. 13
But for all Pope's amused delight in the little world
of society, he sees clearly that these ceremonies of man-
ners are fatally flawed. Belinda's world contains none
of Congreve's marvelous sophisticates, no one who un-
derstands that the elaborate games of courtship can, if
conducted with intelligent good nature, provide the
firmest assurances of mutual feeling and respect. Rather,
as Thalestris' rebuke to Belinda (IV, 95-120) shows, ex-
perience here can only harden manners into an ugly,
habitual literalism. By mistaking social forms for their
meanings, Thalestris not only distorts morals, she de-
stroys manners themselves the meaningful kind of
manners which may be the necessary preliminary to
having any morals at all. When the veneer of forms is
cracked, as it is in Cantos IV and V, we are confronted
by the meaningless malevolence of unredeemed human
nature.
The exception is Clarissa. Her movingly "moral" ap-
peal for good humor as the only possible constant in a
world in which "frail Beauty must decay" (V, 9-30)
opens up the poem, investing the little world with a
curious dignity even while revealing its insignificance
in the perspective of time. Clarissa's tone wavers touch-
ingly between rueful amusement and sadness, and al-
though she sees death only in a limited perspective, she
nevertheless sees it and responds to its power. 14 But so
somber a "moral" is too simple for Pope's design, and he
restores Augustan balance by returning to the pastoral
myth in his final declaration of love for his heroine.
Belinda has lost the lock, but the poet's fancy sees it
transformed to a "sudden Star" whose "radiant Trail of
Hair," like the lock of Berenice which became a constel-
lation, "bespangl[es]" the heavens with "dishevel'd
Light" (V, 127-130). This brilliant image marks a
heightening of tone that brings the poem (after satiric
side-glances at society lovers and the astrologer Part-
ridge) to a triumphant conclusion:
When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they
must,
And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust;
This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame,
And midst the Stars inscribe Belinda's Name!
(V, 147-150)
The imaginative inscription of her name among the stars
a cosmic version of pastoral confirms in an unex-
pected way the importance the poem has half -jokingly
ascribed to her ("Belinda smil'd, and all the World was
gay"). Clarissa's moralizing is not the last word; al-
though frivolous beauty does fade in the body, Belinda's
charm finally achieves an immortality that all the good
humor in the world could not have won for her. Pope
does not disagree with Clarissa, exactly; the way their
treatments of mortality focus on similar details of physi-
cal beauty shows that they share a saddening under-
standing of time and its ravages. But he rises above her
almost tragic view to a triumphant declaration of the
power that beauty, for all its moral flimsiness, brings to
the battle against mutability.
This declaration is, to be sure, underscored by sad-
ness. Belinda's apotheosis is more myth than fact, an
only relatively more sophisticated version of Daphne's
transformation in "Winter." But in The Rape of the Lock
Pope is much closer to his heroine than he was to the
shepherds of the Pastorals; from the clash between ex-
perience the knowledge of life Clarissa has sadly ac-
quired from living it and love, which is impatient with
experience, Pope creates a myth which resembles pas-
toral and yet surpasses it. In a sense Clarissa is right
about life, he admits, but to be right is not enough. The
conclusion, and the final readjustment of meaning it
makes possible, shows courage in the richest sense of
the word the fidelity with which the heart perseveres
in its affections without shrinking from the understand-
ing that experience may value affections less than facts.
The mythic synthesis of knowledge and feeling in the
conclusion of The Rape of the Lock is a great Augustan
achievement.
The Limits of the Mode
In 1717 Pope published two poems Eloisa to Abelard
and the Elegy w to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady
that have always been among his most popular works,
especially with readers who do not particularly like his
poetry as a whole. Their appeal as "romantic" poems is
in a way misleading, since in both Pope is experimenting
with Ovidian conventions of "heroic love"; 16 and yet
they do evoke feeling, so powerfully and directly as to
exceed the limits of Augustan poetic procedure.
The Elegy is built upon two contrasting views of
death. Either death is a "bright reversion in the sky, /
For those who greatly think, or bravely die" (9-10), or
it is a grimly final dissolution of all earthly distinction
"A heap of dust alone remains of thee; / 'Tis all thou
art, and all the proud shall be" (73-74)- Between these
extremes a number of mythic possibilities are tested:
death for the lady was almost a reward for her suffering,
since it led to the reunion of her soul with its divine
source (23-28); death for her oppressors is a punish-
ment, a gratifying moral event (35-46); death is a
beautiful change into the rhythms of natural process,
22
which can be celebrated in pastoral terms (55-68). To
this extent the poem is Augustan; the interplay of at-
titudes leads to the stoic elevation of " 'Tis all thou art,
and all the proud shall be," so that the element of per-
sonal mourning gives way to the detachment of the
philosophical moralist and yet remains to define the
painful effort required to assume so Roman a stance to-
ward the human subjection to mutability. But the final
lines of the Elegy involve the writer himself in the fate
of the lady. Poets must die too:
Ev'n he, whose soul now melts in mournful
lays,
Shall shortly want the generous tear he pays;
Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part,
And the last pang shall tear thee from his
heart,
Life's idle business at one gasp be o'er,
The Muse forgot, and thou belov'd no more!
(77-8^)
The power of this conclusion tends to stifle the other
views in the poem; "mythic" ideas of death cannot with-
stand so eloquent and personal a statement of death's
"factual" finality. The Augustan mediation between fact
and myth does not fully come into play, and the poem
achieves its (very real) success at the cost of something.
What the cost is may be more apparent in Eloisa to
Abelard. Here the tension between public ideals and
private feeling has slackened, at the expense of the
former. "Nature" in this poem stands not for external
reality or the generalized behavior of man, but for per-
sonal emotion, those underground impulses that often
contradict intellect and moral sense. Eloisa's nature is
a "rebel" to her moral sense (26), functioning fully
only when "conscience sleeps" (227). It leads her into
a position where her instincts as woman and human
being are hopelessly at war with religious and social
law. Her predicament is expressed as a painful disjunc-
tion between the "tumult" in her blood and the "deep
solitude and awful cells" in which she has been placed.
Her nature cannot adapt itself to the asceticism of the
cloistered life, whose emblems are darkness, hardness,
pallor, cold. Religiosity thus has marked affinities with
eternity as Pope describes it in The Temple of Fame
a peaceful condition that is yet disturbingly different
from anything we know in life. A live, passionate human
being has no place in such an environment, Eloisa finds;
real death can only come as a relief from such deathly
"living." But death is no simple solution. When Eloisa
and Abelard were lovers in the flesh, heaven seemed
"dim and remote" (69-72). Now, however, having re-
nounced human experience, Eloisa seeks consolation by
imagining her life as a prefiguration of heaven, where
erotic impulses will be purified and made holy in an
eternity of something like pastoral perfection (209-
222). Heaven is the place where "flames refin'd^in
breasts seraphic glow," in a setting of "roseate bow'rs,
/ Celestial palms, and ever-blooming flow'rs" (317-
320); the language leaves little doubt that Pope sees the
pitiful tenuousness of this fantasy.
Eloisa to Abelard thus expresses a conflict between
"life/ 7 which is warm, exciting, and unmoral, and the
escapes from life of asceticism and literal death. To
escape sin Eloisa must escape "nature," meaning both
her own passions and the world in which they are im-
moral. But divine love is less than an adequate substitute
for human passion; Eloisa's divided heart would like to
"lose the sin, yet keep the sense, / And love th ? offender,
yet detest th' offence" (191-192). The lower half of
man's mixed nature has claims that Pope neither under-
estimates nor undervalues; even when imagining her
own death Eloisa is tormented by erotic images ( 321-
325), and her final acceptance of her lot seems more an
exhausted toleration of what she has than a positive
spiritual achievement.
Pope's interest in his subject was no doubt originally
experimental. The Ovidian "heroic epistle" requires
24
little more than a dignified expression of amorous in-
tensity from a historical or mythical personage, on the
assumption that in such a person feeling has "public"
interest and power. In Pope's Sappho to Phaon ( 1707? ) ,
for example, the heroine's feelings are simplified and
enlarged in a pastoral way, and the tone emphasizes not
the complexity of her position but its urgency. Still,
enough readers have agreed with Dr. Johnson's admira-
tion of the "vigor and efficacy" of Eloisa's sentiments to
suggest that the poem has more than conventional ap-
peal. Eloisa is much more seriously presented than
Sappho; Pope's treatment of her invokes our sense of
psychological reality as well as our sense of Ovid. Her
specifically Christian and "modern" moral predicament
seems less remote from our own concerns than does the
heroic epistle normally. Indeed, Pope himself may be
too close to his heroine. We know that by his own stand-
ards, as moralist and at least nominal Catholic, Eloisa
is wrong; yet in the poem such standards lose most of
their relevance when opposed by the energy and rich
confusion of private passion. In Pope's satires unre-
strained passion will be equated with madness, the re-
duction of experience to simplistic compulsion, and we
will be required to mediate between the madness of
bad men and a moral madness in the poet's own voice.
But here, though we keep expecting qualification, we
are not made to feel more than pity for Eloisa's pas-
sionate confusion, and approval of the poetic rendering
of her plight. We miss the significant shifts of tone
made possible by the superimposition upon the event
of a detached speaking voice, the blending of humor
and moral concern that elsewhere marks Pope's sense
that existence has more than one interpretation. For all
its brilliance as drama and its attractive sympathy for
its heroine, Eloisa to Abelard lacks the Augustan medi-
ation between opposites that is the great achievement
of Pope's early career.
A much slighter poem, the Epistle to Miss Blount,
on her Leaving the Town, after the Coronation (1714),
though in some respects only a jeu d esprit, shows what
Eloisa to Abelard lacks. Like Eloisa, Miss Blount has
been separated from her pleasures; packed off to the
country against her will, she can only
Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire,
Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire;
Up to her godly garret after sev'n
There starve and pray, for that's the way to
heav'n. (19-22)
This seems a comic version of Eloisa's cloistered virtue,
with its boredom, mortification of the flesh, and reli-
ance upon fantasy for relief. Pope is rather cruel to
make fun of her for what is not her fault, but his mock-
ery is tinged with sympathetic affection:
In some fair evening, on your elbow laid,
You dream of triumphs in the rural shade;
In pensive thought recall the fancy'd scene,
See Coronations rise on ev'ry green. (3 1 -34)
But her fantasies are as unsubstantial as Eloisa's ("I
shriek, start up, the same sad prospect find, / And
wake to all the griefs I left behind" ) . By a flirt of her
fan, the gesture which amusingly reveals how real the
fantasy is to her, Miss Blount spoils her vision: "Thus
vanish sceptres, coronets, and balls, / And leave you
in lone woods, or empty halls" (39-40). She is of
course a much less powerful creation than Eloisa a
belle with the sulks cannot move us as does a victim
of tragic love but in her narrower way she is com-
plete, and the tender cruelty with which Pope ad-
dresses her works beautifully. He draws her in a per-
spective that Eloisa to Abelard cannot afford, and the
witty play of tones seems a relief after the "Gothick"
sobriety of the larger poem, and a more convincing ex-
pression of meaningful affection and concern.
Eloisa to Abelard and the Elegy show the alterna-
tives to the Augustan mode. Each is a masterful ge-
neric experiment, which nonetheless seems to demand
26
an oddly single-minded response to its treatment of
intense private feeling. It is as though Windsor For-
est simply stated that England is Eden, or The Rape
of the Lock ended with Clarissa's speech. The Au-
gustan poem finds its meaning in the contemplation of
alternatives, in a multiplicity of vision that seems a
more faithful rendering of experience than any single
vision can provide. Pope's later career, I shall argue,
shows him in conflict with his Augustan manner. Al-
though some of the stylistic features remain, the later
poems show a growing doubt in the viability of the
Augustan synthesis. Pope becomes increasingly con-
cerned with private feeling, increasingly suspicious of
the compromises of public belief; but the feelings the
great satires explore and celebrate are not those of
anonymous mourners or fictionalized love-heroines, but
the poet's own.
The Mighty Maze
POPE is shown confronting a difficult poetic problem
in An Essay on Man ( 1729-1734) . As an "official" argu-
ment for philosophical optimism the poem cannot avoid
simplification and direct statement; yet there are signs
in the verse that Pope was uncomfortable with didactic
strategies. 1 He was not a very gifted thinker, if by that
word we mean someone capable of clear and sound
consecutive reasoning; by accepting the didactic role,
he incurred an obligation to be rational that he could
not fulfill. Yet the Essay, even though it is unsound at
its avowed center, cannot be dismissed simply as a
failure. The poem is partly redeemed by just those
aspects of temperament and sensibility that made
Pope's didacticism unsuccessful. By this I mean that
the didactic impulse (whether it originated in Pope or
in Bolingbroke makes no difference ) is thwarted in the
poem partly by the views of experience and expression
that I have called Augustan. Though the Essay lacks
thoroughgoing doctrinal coherence, still in some im-
portant ways it succeeds as a poem, even at the ex-
pense of its philosophy. What we have, I think, is a
case of sensibility opposing and finally killing doctrine,
as Pope's grasp of real experience stubbornly resists
the use of such experience as a vehicle for rational ab-
straction. But sensibility kills doctrine only that it may
28
assert positive values of its own, values firmly rooted
in direct apprehension of the beautiful complexity of
actual things.
The Voice of God
In the opening address to Bolingbroke (I, 1-16) we
seem, as has often been remarked, to overhear one of
the participants in a conversation between well-bred
Augustans. 2 The contempt for the vulgarity of worldly
aspirations in "leave all meaner things / To low ambi-
tion and the pride of Kings"; the discreet parenthetical
admission that life is short and futile, followed by
urbanely stoic determination to make the most of it;
the action, an observant ramble through the woods
and gardens of the world; the Chesterfieldian resolu-
tion to restrain mirth but to be "candid" about human
folly whenever decorum permits every detail works
to define the speaker and his unheard companion as
eighteenth-century gentlemen of leisure and cultiva-
tion. The extended metaphor of the world as a "Wild"
or a "Garden" works nicely in its rich variety the
world exists to be explored by sophisticated men of
*sound judgment, who "expatiate" over it intellectually
just as they range .over their estates hunting beasts and
birds. "Nature's walks" will mean more as the poem
progresses; Pope has his eye on actual nature at the
same time that his inner eye contemplates a larger,
more abstract nature. But what is most significant here
as simply the decorum of tone with which the subject
is introduced.
This Joaa^flLlll&Me^ detachment is conversational,
but without any of the colloquial raciness of rhythm
and idiom so common in the satires. "Awake, my ST.
JOHN" is a rather lofty kind of informality, and in fact
the conversational element in the passage soon is
counterpointed by another sort of speech: "Say first, of
God above, or Man below, / What can we reason, but
from what we know?'* These lines may be addressed
29
to Bolingbroke, posing a rhetorical question as prelude
to discussing a topic on which they generally agree,
but it is hard not to feel that Bolingbroke has lost most
o his dramatic individuality and become something
like the epic muse. The dramatic situation changes and
Bolingbroke disappears for a time as Pope pays his
ironic respects to the astronautical fancies of John
Wilkins and the Royal Society and to the Lucre tian
image of the speculative philosopher as supernatural
voyager (23-34). It is obviously impossible for ordinary
human reason to achieve such clear perception of the
universe, and the consequent irony in "thy pervading
soul" indicates a shift of situation. The "thee" being
addressed is no longer Bolingbroke but "Presumptu-
ous Man/' Conversation becomes oratory, a change
predicted by the elevation of tone in the opening line;
and it is at the oratorical level that the poem will
mainly conduct its argument.
This shift of tone is of course not complete. The con-
versational beginning persists in the inner ear through-
out the poem, providing an implicit context for the
oratory. We are both Pope's equals, sharing Boling-
broke's gratification at having our own ideas expressed
so handsomely for us, and also his pupils, resisting in
our ignorant pride the messages of reason that are be-
ing delivered. The didactic poet runs the danger of not
being able to justify his knowledgeable tone. He must
sound fust a little like God, which is all right when the
subject is crop rotation or beekeeping, something in
which his expertise (or lack of it) can be assessed; but
if he ventures upon high speculation, where authority
is a more uncertain matter, his voice may grow uncom-
fortably pontifical. Pope often does talk like God in
the Essay. His subject commits him to saying that hu-
man consciousness cannot comprehend orders of being
higher than its own, and yet he must himself at times
speak as if the whole hierarchy were visible to him:
"All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; / All Chance,
30
Direction, which thou canst not see" (I, 289-290). The
frame of conversation eases some of this pontificality.
Our double identity in the poem as the speaker's
peers and as his congregation allows us to feel the
full weight of the sermon even as we participate in its
delivery. Although we take the preacher seriously, we
usually can remember that he is not a fanatic but a
gentleman like us.
Still, our suspicions are not wholly allayed by the
interplay of tones. When the voice becomes markedly
aloof and judicative we tend to distrust it, and it does
so too frequently to allow complete reconciliation.
Pope's decision to cast the Essay in the form of direct
and "sincere" moralizing involved a considerable prob-
lem of rhetoric. Disinterested sincerity in Swift, for ex-
ample, is almost always a sign of irony, as Martin Price
notes:
The mask of impartiality, if it were not qualified
by humor, was as much a questionable type as
were those of partisan zeal. Constant claims of
"modest proposals" to "universal benefit" were keys
to pretentious and specious disinterestedness. "I
burnt all my Lord 's letters," Swift wrote to
Betty Germain, "upon receiving one where he had
used these words to me, "all I pretend to is a great
deal of sincerity/ which indeed, was the chief
virtue he wanted." 3
Pope's later satires brilliantly demonstrate moral in-
volvement; we are persuaded that he has chosen the
right cause and that his vehemence marks a powerful
and admirable indignation. The mask of cool disen-
gagement, as worn by an Addison or a Chesterfield,
seems unpleasantly lifeless when set next to Swift's or
Pope's vigorous expressions of commitment. By choos-
ing the disengaged man for his persona in the Essay
Pope took on a difficult task, and the poem succeeds as
much in the breaking of this dramatic fiction as in the
observing of it.
Human Limits and Natural Harmony
The theme of the Essay on Man is the familiar one of
reconciling the apparent chaos of natural experience
with man's intimations of ultimate order. The tradi-
tional concept of the "correspondences," the analogies
that connect the human world with the natural below
and the divine above, operates in the poem as a^ dis-
tinctly uncertain possibility. 4 "Presumptuous Man" has
questions to put to nature (I, 39~42> 61-66), but na-
ture, while it seems in its variety to embody some prin-
ciple of significant order, cannot tell him precisely what
that order is. Both nature and man are ignorant, that
is, but only man is cursed by the yearning to know. His
"knowledge," as the passage (I, 99~ 112 ) on " tlie P oor
Indian" reveals, is essentially derived from myth-
making; the Indian simply projects, in all innocence, a
"heaven" that is an idealized version of his known
world. The results are not "true," but they serve the
purposes of consolation, and the Indian, for all his
pastoral naivete, is happier than civilized man. It is the
same predicament that so vexes Swift one scarcely
wants to be a fool, yet one suspects that ignorance and
delusion are the only sources of serenity in a world
which will not bear too much scrutiny.
Pope will not settle, however, for this view in its
purest, most desperate form. Analogy can give a gen-
eral sense of man's place in the scheme; man cannot
look directly upward to the ultimate source of order,
but he can look downward and make metaphors for his
own lot from the relationships he perceives in the lower
orders of the Scale of Being. But metaphor was not
knowledge to the post-Hobbesian mind, and a steady
skeptical undercurrent qualifies Pope's dogmatism. To
assume, as Whitehead did, that Pope "was untroubled
by the great perplexity which haunts the modern
world," that he was "confident that the enlightened
methods of modern science provided a plan adequate
3*
as a map of the 'mighty maze/ " 5 is to ignore the com-
plexity of Pope's view, as the lines on Newton (II, 31-
38) show. Newton could answer all questions except
the most important ones, those that concern the "move-
ment of his Mind/' "his own beginning, or his end." The
irony places science in the right human perspective
Newton's unfolding of natural law must be contem-
plated in relation to his inability even to "describe,'*
much less "explain," his own position in a universe of
time and change.
This criticism of "reason" becomes explicit in the
rest of Epistle II. It is a mistake to view the poem
through the Victorian lens of "an age of prose and
reason." As Professor Lovejoy observes, the most influ-
ential authors of the eighteenth century
made a great point of reducing man's claims to
"reason" to a minimum, and of belittling the im-
portance of the faculty in human existence; and
the vice of "pride" which they so delighted to
castigate was exemplified for them in any high
estimate of the capacity of the human species for
intellectual achievement, or in any of the more
ambitious enterprises of science and philosophy,
or in any moral idea which would make pure rea-
son (as distinguished from natural "passions") the
supreme power in human life. 6
One of the strongest forces drawing Pope away from a
simple confidence in reason is his understanding that
like any human faculty, it operates within the confines
of "the lurking principle of death" (II, 134). The phrase
appears only as a simile within a passage whose main
subject is the power of a "ruling passion" to undermine
mental health; but the idea of life being a gradual dying
reminds us of that area of the whole scheme which
reason cannot investigate. Reason has its value, but
Pope takes the Platonic view of it as "guard," not
"guide" (II, 162), in a world whose springs of action
are passionate.
33
In short, all that man can know about the processes
of time and change are their fragmentary effects on
nature and himself. His sense of his own identity,
which he yearns to define in relation to these processes,
must remain disconnected and dim. There is thus a
tragic paradox in Pope's use of the Scale of Being,
which has lost its former metaphoric potency as a true
ladder by which man might transcend his earthly con-
dition. 7 The concept suggests that man is a part of a
cosmic perfection, but he can never experience that
perfection while he remains man. The problem for the
moralist lay in man's discontent with his lot. If it is a
condition of his middle status, how can he be censured
for feeling discontent? And yet, the whole tenor of the
poem insists, it is disastrous to him to feel it! Analogy
is not a solution; to know something by analogy is
painfully unlike knowing it by experience, and it is for
experience of perfection that man yearns. 8 But Pope's
job in the Essay is to forbid despair; he evades this
impasse, not very consistently, by occasionally giving
ground before the theological pressure that bears on
his position: "Hope humbly then; with trembling pin-
ions soar; / Wait the great teacher Death, and God
adore!" (I, 91-92). While one may "adore" perfection
in this world, only in some world to come can one
know it if then.
Such difficulties in defining the ultimate reality lead
Pope's sermon to its essentially negative center. What-
ever man should be in this world, he should at least
not be proud. He is neither the center nor the master
of nature. The dangers of pride are clear in I, 131-140,
where the ironies rebuke the arrogant anthropocentrism
of supposing that the creation exists to serve man and
mirror his feelings; it is equally clear in this fine "anti-
pastoral" passage:
Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?
Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings:
Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?
34
Loves of his own and raptures swell the
note . . .
The hog, that plows not nor obeys thy call,
Lives on the labours of this lord of all,
(III, 31-42)
The couplets play off the imagined nature invented by
human pride against the real nature which exists as
much for its own purposes as for man's. The natural
world is full of life and feeling, but it is independent of
"this lord of all." But there are consolations in man's
position:
... he only knows,
And helps, another creature's wants and woes.
Say, will the falcon, stooping from above,
Smit with her varying plumage, spare the
dove?
Admires the jay the insect's gilded wings?
Or hears the hawk when Philomela sings?
(in, 51-56)
Nature is not responsive to man, but man is responsive
to nature in a way that no merely natural creature can
be. Through his unique gifts of compassion and esthetic
appreciation he can penetrate into nature and so in a
sense participate in it. He achieves a moral dignity that
no other creature can have, but by submitting to, not
dominating over, the rest of creation. He is in fact a
part of nature, though not in the way he would like to
be. He is "Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot, / To
draw nutrition, propagate, and rot" (II, 63-64). While
his place in the Scale involves painful complexities of
feeling from which the lower orders are free, he can
nonetheless relate his own life and death to the rhythms
of nature. The simile denies man's cherished illusions
of freedom, even as it offers compensation in vegetable
simplicity. Although reason distinguishes man from the
other creatures, the "fruits" of virtue grow from "savage
stocks" (II, 181-184) tita "wild Nature" working at
man's roots is ultimately the same nature that gives
35
productive life (and death) to the nonhuman creation.
The analogies of nature thus point down and not up.
Man will find his place in the scheme not by yearning
for higher status but by accepting his relationship with
the lower creatures. Still, to know that man and nature
are parts of a single order is not to resolve man's yearn-
ing for a direct, intimate bond with the things of this
world. In Epistle III Pope postulates such a bond, in
the pastoral innocence of Eden or the Golden Age from
which man fell. Despite Hobbes, "the state of Nature
was the reign of God" ( 148 ) . Human history has rep-
resented a decline from this primal perfection, as man
created the social arts, commerce, secular government,
and ultimately tyranny and superstition through the
exercise of reason. These inventions stemmed from nat-
ural promptings ( 171 ff. ) to imitate the lower creatures,
and thus were not originally wrong; the turning point,
the beginning of man's alienation from nature, came
when superstition replaced "charity" with "zeal" (261)
and secular power no longer had to reflect a spiritual
order that was fundamentally benevolent. Faced with
such chaos, man was "Forc'd into virtue thus by Self-
defence" (279); through the inspired examples of the
poet and the lawgiver the "shadow," if not the "image,"
of true divinity was rediscovered (288), and secular
organization again became a metaphor for the great
hierarchy of nature. The pyramids of "Beast, Man, or
Angel" and of "Servant, Lord, or King" (302) regained
their congruence, with each order topped by the single
point which is God.
Epistle III does not of course afford a very satisfying
account of moral history. Nor is it poetically the strong-
est section of the Essay. Some of Pope's metaphors ring
false; how true is it to say, for instance, that the "Ant's
republic" provided a model for human society, or even
(reading not historically but "mythically/' as we prob-
ably should) that it affords a very enlightening analogy?
Pope has^iis difficulties in leading the poem in a posi-
36
tive direction, for all the assurance of his tone. Yet in
the great passage (283-302) on social harmony he
comes as close as he can to solving the problem of the
whole poem, through an Augustan appeal to the tradi-
tional concept of the concordia discors. Harmony is
simply a special condition of discordance, and as May-
nard Mack observes, the metaphor's power in the Essay
stems from a doubleness associated with the figure
from earliest classical times: "the image brought to-,
gether in one perspective man's present suffering and
his faith, the partial and the whole views; [and sug^
gested] that in some higher dialectic than men could;,
grasp the thesis and antithesis of experienced evil
would be resolved." 9 One may wish that the image
were more solidly developed out of the argument of
Epistle III, but its power is undeniable. The stability
of even the best human society resides in a rather pre?
carious balance of stresses, but that even a limited
harmony is conceivable in the secular world consoles
us if we take that harmony as an echo, however faint, :
of the grand but unbearable cosmic composition. The
original intimacy of man and nature vanished when
man lost his innocence, but in a social order that is
properly attuned to the order of nature, a measure of
intimacy can be restored.
The Power of Time
This is as close as the Essay comes to expressing any-
thing like "optimism" in our ordinary sense of the word.
It is not very close, we see, when we ponder Pope's
implicit comparison of the poem with Paradise Lost.
The Fall of Man was marked by his subjugation to Sin
and Death, which is to say to time and its fundamental
enmity to human value. It is the fact of time, Professor
Lovejoy argues, that ultimately invalidates the concept
of the Scale of Being:
A world of time and change ... is a world
which can neither be deduced from nor recon-
37
ciled with the postulate that existence is the ex-
pression and consequence of a system of "eternal"
and "necessary" truths inherent in the very logic
of being. Since such a system could manifest itself
only in a static and constant world, and since em-
pirical reality is not static and constant, the "im-
age" (as Plato called it) does not correspond with
the supposed "model" and cannot be explained by
it. Any change whereby nature at one time con-
tains other things or more things than it contains
at another time is fatal to the principle of sufficient
reason. 10
Milton reconciles a temporal world to cosmic immuta-
bility by appealing to the orthodox concept of Redemp-
tion: because of the sacrifice of Christ, man can look
forward to an eventual translation out of time into a
realm of being which is perfectly changeless. The Essay
on Man seems at times to yield to theological pressure,
but Pope must generally exclude specific Christian
doctrine. Whether or not he believed in the redemp-
tion of souls, in the Essay his subject is not eternity,
which cannot be known, but this world and how to
endure it. And the possibilities of earthly experience
seem far from cheerful.
Epistle IV is especially rich in allusions to death,
which (93-130) strikes capriciously, without regard for
"justice." Even though by Pope's time the idea of an
impersonal, mechanistic universe must have seemed
considerably less terrible than it had to Shakespeare or
Donne, the concept still could not have been a very
comfortable one to entertain. Pope in fact does not en-
tertain it fully; his rhetoric is addressed to the enormous
task of making natural impersonality a source of com-
fort. Falkland, Turenne, and Sidney did not die because
they were virtuous; nature cannot recognize either
virtue or vice. But because the universe does not ob-
serve moral law, as men know it, does not mean that it
obeys no law: "Think we, like some weak Prince, th ?
38
Eternal Cause / Prone for his fav'rites to reverse his
laws?" The answer is "no" the analogy of earthly order
to supernal points out the weakness of the former only
to assert the consoling perfection of the latter.
But this appeal to the "externalist pathos/' the emo-
tional power of the idea of immutability upon man's
sense of his own involvement in time, 11 cannot fully
subdue the sobering fact of human mortality:
What's Fame? a fancy'd life in others breath,
A thing beyond us, ev'n before our death.
Just what you hear, you have, and what's un-
known
The same (my Lord) if Tully's or your own.
All that we feel of it begins and ends
In the small circle of our foes or friends.
(IV, 237-242)
In this paraphrase of The Temple of Fame ( 505-508 )
Pope again sees personal fame as sorry compensation
for the necessity of dying. The lines, to be sure, state a
positive view of personal relations, which Pope always
cherished: "The only pleasure which any one either of
high or low rank must depend upon receiving," he
wrote to Ralph Allen, "is in the Candour or Partiality of
Friends and that Smaller Circle we are conversant in." u
But this is tacit recognition that the pleasures of friend-
ship are fleeting; they are valuable, they are in fact all
that one has, but like everything else they will soon pass.
Nor is wisdom any more reliable. When Pope returns to
gentlemanly conversation (IV, 259-268) with Boling-
broke, it is only to place rueful emphasis on the futility
of "Parts superior." Wisdom leads finally to frustration
and loneliness:
Truths would you teach, or save a sinking
land?
All fear, none aid you, and few understand.
Painful preheminence! yourself to view
Above life's weakness, and its comforts too.
As wise man, Bolingbroke stands as symbol of man's
39
dissatisfaction with his mixed nature and his ambiguous
role in creation. The cost of intelligence is fearfully
high: " 'Tis but to know how little can be known."
Hierarchy and Experience
The description of Bolingbroke has implications for the
reader as well. Pope's rhetorical aim has been to put us
in Bolingbroke's position, to improve our understanding
so as to reveal how limited understanding must be. It
is flattering to be admitted to such company, but the
reader's new point of view is a difficult one the "opti-
mism" of the poem involves a serious recognition of its
own limitations and of the oppositions that are all too
likely to overcome it. But Pope's "official" theme will
not permit so complex a view to prevail, and this inhibi-
tion leads to a crucial poetic difficulty. In Section vi of
Epistle IV he undertakes to demolish "the false scale of
Happiness" that prevents most men from understanding
their roles in the true scale of Being. "External goods"
cannot prevent "human Infelicity" "the perfection of
Virtue and Happiness consists in a conformity to the
ORDER of PROVIDENCE here, and a resignation to it here
and hereafter." 13 The trouble is that the false scale,
since one knows it through immediate experience, lends
itself more readily to poetic particularization than does
the hypothetical, unexperienced "true" hierarchy.
The Essay both faces up to the difficult facts of hu-
man experience and attempts to make them bearable
by assigning them functions in a hierarchical order. An
appeal to hierarchy draws its rhetorical power from the
useful changes of name that are made possible, and we
note that Pope's arguments usually hinge on such re-
definition:
Respecting Man, whatever wrong we call,
May, must be right, as relative to all.
(i, 51-52)
Cease then, nor OEDER Imperfection name.
(I, a8i)
40
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee.
U 289)
Modes of Self-love the Passions we may call.
(11,93)
Know then this truth ( enough for Man to
know)
"Virtue alone is Happiness below/'
(iv, sog-sio)
Man, that is to say, tends to call things by their "wrong"
names, and in so doing he confirms his own unhappiness,
since he cannot make his vocabulary jibe with any con-
soling conceptual scheme of order. God, however, calls
things by their "right" names. If man can translate his
words for experiences into a vocabulary that fits an
imaginative hierarchy extending beyond the limits of
his knowledge, most of his anxiety about the human
condition will turn out to have been the result of termi-
nological muddles.
Like any example of sophisticated rhetoric, then, the
Essay draws much of its persuasive force from a view
of language that is fundamentally magical. The transla-
tion of our names for experiences into a new vocabulary
is a therapeutic act, for to change the name is to change
the "fact" or at least to make it bearable by provid-
ing a new context of ideas and feelings in which to con-
template it. Pope again is God, for he knows the right
names. At the same time, however, this transformation
of terms adds to our sense that the poem is "enclosed"
by the speaking voice of an individual human being
with whom we have a particular social relationship.
The semantic shifts appeal to common sense: we share
with Pope a firm identity within a community of intel-
ligence and taste, and so he can confidently invite us to
agree with him about names, since a defining character-
istic of a community is the mutual acceptance of
"proper" vocabularies. For example, we share his amuse-
ment at the Neo-Platonists who call "quitting sense"
41
"imitating God" (II, 26). Like "Eastern priests/' they
are somehow exotic, not a part of the community, and
his manner of addressing us defines us as persons who
share his belief that 4i sense" plays a vital part in any
activity, religion not excepted. Once we have agreed
about the right name for one kind of experience, we are
inclined to accept the speaker's judgment about names
in cases which are further from communal assumptions.
Although the tone of such transformations is usually
didactic, it is softened by our sense that we have come to
occupy much the same ground from which Pope speaks.
But Pope's appeal to an explicit hierarchy of values
involves him in poetic difficulties. In the Essay he ex-
presses the complexity of human experience in a world
that is at best indifferent to man; but he also attempts
to resolve complexity into simplicity by relating experi-
ence to a predefined system of absolute values. In pas-
sages lflc^Prf.dfi!s speech in Epistle I (131-164) there is
no poetic problem, since the "right" attitude is de-
veloped out of an initial "wrong" view which is never-
theless fairly (even beautifully) expressed. Both com-
plexity and simplicity are there, in the verse, and the
adjustment between them is dramatized as argument.
But as the poem draws to its close, Pope must increas-
ingly derogate the false scale in order to emphasize
the finality of the true one, as in the passage (IV,
361-372) on the need for human love to "rise from In-
dividual to the Whole":
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov'd, a circle strait succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race. . . .
Pope has no better luck than any other eighteenth-
century moralist in bridging the gap between self-love
and social. The metaphor seems arbitrary Addison
would have called the play on "wake" and "stir" an ex-
42
ample of false wit, dependent upon "resemblance of
words" rather than of ideas, 14 and there is nothing else
to persuade us that self-love and pebbles are analogous
and it seems positively muddled unless we exclude
the entire metaphorical vehicle from the "it" which em-
braces friends, parents, and the like. This passage is the
climax of Pope's final affirmation of the true scale, and
it simply does not work when we measure it against
the Johnsonian description of the fate of the worldly
(IV, 289-308), the great "glory, jest, and riddle" sec-
tion that begins Epistle II, or any of the other passages
in which Pope treats human experience with full respect
for its complexity. When he rises from the individual to
the whole something unfortunate happens to his verse.
The trouble seems due not only to Pope's weakness in
rational argument but also to the nature of his subject.
Whitehead said that both the Greek and medieval
Christian views of nature were essentially "dramatic,"
which is to say they supposed a nature that worked to-
ward purposes which could in some way be understood
by human beings and that included human experience
in its operation. 15 The nature Pope has to work with is
a very different one. He can deal dramatically with ex-
periential reality in all its complexity, but in the Essay
he must also transcend experience to knowledge of
permanence and order; and since his "climate of opin-
ion" presupposes a cosmos which is not dramatic but
mechanistic, and thus largely foreign to human experi-
ence, his invocations of supernatural order are seldom
fully convincing. When he can find in the natural world
some evidence of the Scale when he deals (as in I,
207-280 ) with the "esthetic" order his senses perceive
the Essay achieves its great poetic triumphs by fusing
rhetoric and imaginative particularity. At such moments
metaphor functions meaningfully, for the grand tenor is
elucidated by solidly realized vehicles. But when natural
experience is left behind in the attempt to prove that
one knows what one insists is beyond knowledge, an
43
attempt that must rely on rhetoric alone, the Essay loses
much of its power. Mechanism is not only unattractive
as an idea, it is also nearly impossible to dramatize in
experiential terms. It is immediate experience that sus-
tains Pope's Augustan mediations, and when doctrinal
considerations exert their thinning or confusing tend-
encies on the experiential vehicle, he shows his weak-
ness in the kind of poetic reasoning that a Dryden or a
Wordsworth might bring off. His tendency to resort to
conventional pietism illustrates this weakness, He tries
to soften the concept of mechanism by hinting that the
Christian God is at the controls, but this scrambles his
argument; for example, at the end of the poem, when he
declares that virtue is not only the sole source of earthly
happiness but also a way to ascend to God, we uneasily
feel that he has come close to contradicting his earlier
assertion that the quality of human life, as man knows
it, has no relevance to the ultimate reality. But the main
problem is a literary and not just a logical one. It is not
that Pope tries to make us know what he himself has
called unknowable, but that the quality of the knowl-
edge we receive is flawed by his inability to manage an
abstract poetic idiom. When he treats the "true Scale"
his language is less rich, less interesting, and above all
less intelligible than when he expresses the perplexing
imperfections of actual experience. His sensibility was
attuned to the concrete, the immediate, and the Essay
is not fully alive at the moments when its oratory loses
touch with natural particulars.
The poem finally seems most interesting when read
not as philosophy but as an expression of a conflict be-
tween views of reality as excitingly terrible and as ulti-
mately orderly and peaceful. In such a reading one sees
Pope as a man whose strong sense of the value of order
makes experienced disorder a dreadful thing to consider,
and who yearns for an imaginative myth of cosmic im-
mutability to sustain and console him. The myth does
not work perfectly, to be sure; when the poetic speaker
44
invokes a hierarchy that he has not fully grasped imagi-
natively, the poem falters, regaining its stride only when
he returns to the world he can experience directly. But
another kind of drama emerges from this conflict of
experience and speculation, a drama in which a human
being tries out ways of coming to terms with his situa-
tion and finds that though none are entirely adequate
some work better than others. A man who was wholly
convinced by his own vision of order would not need
to test it so often against actuality; Pope's poetic con-
cern for real things and real feelings (another way of
saying his humanity) refuses to surrender to his specu-
lations, and the result is poetry. The poetry is intermit-
tent, to be sure. When Mr. Mack calls the Essay on Man
the greatest speculative poem in English between Para-
dise Lost and The Prelude we think as much of the
decline such poetry suffered in the eighteenth century
as of Pope's achievement. No one could deny that the
poem would be better if its argument were more con-
sistently reasoned, if the didactic impulse were more
cogently realized. But such "intentional" success would
have taken the Essay even further from the Augustan
mode's complex adjustment of ideal and actual, and the
poem's poetic failure is the curious measure of its hu-
man success.
45
Nature as Moral Norm
THE Moral Essays show Pope adapting his Augustan
manner to the service of a broader variety of subjects
and attitudes. The change is first of all a change of
voice, from the God-like oratory of the Essay on Man
to the witty informality of (for example) the opening
of the Epistle to Bathurst: "Who shall decide, when
Doctors disagree, / And soundest Casuists doubt, like
you and me?" When, a few lines later, Pope adds to his
professed optimism about human nature the parentheti-
cal remark that "surely, Heav'n and I are of a mind/'
we see how far we have come. The speaker in the Essay
on Man was often "of a mind" with heaven, but he
never treated the analogy between himself and God
lightly. In Bathurst, however, the analogy becomes a
joke; we are to feel the presence not of God but of a witty
human intelligence that does not stand upon its own
dignity. The poet's "authority" is projected in social
terms, not as a demand for an act of faith. Each of the
four Moral Essays begins in this conversational way,
implying that something chats about books, women,
human nature has gone on before the poems start.
The opening of the Essay on Man seems by comparison
rather formal and hortatory. To be sure, the talk with
Bolingbroke prepares for the considerably more formal
modes of address Pope adopts in the main body of the
poem; the beginning cannot be so easy as to jar with the
later elevation, and Pope mixes the conversational and
the formal with some delicacy. But in the Moral Essays
one feels a surer intimacy with the poet's voice, a confi-
dence that his tone guarantees his serious engagement
with his subject.
Conversational ease is of course more than a matter
of beginnings. Throughout the four Epistles the speak-
ing voice moves swiftly and surely through all the
ranges of tone from high dignity to the racy indelicacy
of a gentleman at ease among gentlemen. 1 The famous
passage on the death of the Duke of Buckingham shows
this speaking art at work:
In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-
hung,
The floors of plaister, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-ty'd curtains, never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that
bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies alas! how chang'd from
him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
(Bathurst, 299-306)
The speaker is at first a kind of camera, ranging about
the room and registering visual details with (appar-
ently) a Defoe-like disregard for any principle of selec-
tion; when the scene is drawn, he drops his first pose to
become a classical elegist mourning the death of a hero.
Neither. pose, of course, is to be trusted. The descrip-
tion first of all establishes a visual irony, the comment
upon Buckingham's career implicit in the contrast be-
tween the Garter, the rich emblem of his former glory,
and the dinginess of the alehouse in which legend lo-
cated his death. This irony is echoed in the clash be-
tween the harsh consonants and abrupt rhythms of the
description and the elegiac dignity and ease of "alas!
how chang'd from him." And the apparently random
47
piling up of details builds suspense; we become more
and more impatient to find out who is in the room, and
the release in the last couplet intensifies the ironic effect
of the Virgilian and Miltonic echoes in "how chang'd
from him/* The variety of tones, the strain of the su-
spended syntax, the clash of associations evoked by
allusion, all these formal oppositions express a moral
meaning that is itself complex one who lives must die,
and a life of wealth and pleasure, however amiable, not
only cannot fend off death but may indeed make it seem
even more shocking than usual. As "moral meaning"
this seems flat, but the verse presents it as experience,
our experience of following the movement of poetic
speech.
The Moral Essays, when compared with the Essay
on Man, show Pope achieving a finer and firmer moral
authority in his verse. We trust this speaker not because
he tells us to but because we recognize in the easy culti-
vation of his manner an intelligence about the part dis-
course plays in human relations an intelligence we
admire and would like to think we share. He can range
from eloquence to something close to vulgarity with-
out compromising the Augustan urbanity of his manner.
But within that urbanity there are signs of some un-
certainty about the Augustan synthesis.
Money and Madness
Three of the Moral Essays, the epistles to Cobham,
Bathurst, and Burlington, fit conveniently together as
a connected exploration of human compulsions and
their relation to natural reality. The Epistle to Cobham
("Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men'*) was
placed first by Pope in his final arrangement of the
series; and its progression, from a rather labored, theo-
retical treatment of the difficulties of analyzing human
character to the wonderfully particular and moving
portraits of folly at the end, provides a bridge from the
Essay on Man to the richer poetic world of the Moral
Essays and the Horatian satires. We may pass over the
main body of Cobham, in which Pope develops the the-
ory of the "ruling passion" as a way of accounting for
the apparent chaosjrf human behavior, and consider the
last part of the poem. TheTKeynote is struck in the long
examination of Wharton, "the scorn and wonder of our
days/* whose ruling passion, "the Lust of Praise," de-
stroyed his human identity by destroying his ability to
discriminate between experiences:
Tho' wond'ring Senates hung on
all he spoke,
The Club must hail him master of
the joke. . . .
Then turns repentant, and his God
adores
With the same spirit that he drinks
and whores.
(Cobham, 184-189)
"Grown all to all," he has in effect become nothing, for
he has lost all connection with the world from which
he demanded admiration. This is the death of love
(201-202), the isolation of the ego in a world of its own
making; 2 in short, Wharton is mad in every way that
matters.
This alienation of the mind by an unhealthy ruling
passion, by a bitter joke of "honest Nature," is the only
fact of human life that does not weaken with age:
"Time, that on all things lays his lenient hand, / Yet
tames not this; it sticks to our last sand" (224-226).
The portraits that conclude the poem prove the dura-
bility of such madness. The first describes a "rev'rend
sire" whom senility and bodily indignity cannot keep
from crawling to his mistress; the rest are variations on
this same compulsive indifference to decay and immi-
nent death. Helluo the glutton is in love not with jowls
of salmon but with the idea of eating, just as Euclio
cares more about "ownership" than real estate: " 'The
Manor! hold/ he cry'd, / 'Not that, I cannot part with
49
that* and dy'd." Their common malady is that a pas-
sion for real experiences has degenerated into abstract
obsessions. As they withdraw from solid actuality into
the dream-world of their passionate fancies, life dwin-
dles into a fiction of images wholly divorced from the
reality they should represent.
This tragic alienation from things as they are is Pope's
major theme in the Moral Essays. The terms of this
theme, as they are to be worked out in the Epistle to
Bathurst, are outlined in a passage in Cobham which
Dr. Johnson cherished:
Court-virtues bear, like Gems, the highest
rate,
Born where Heav'n's influence scarce can
penetrate:
In life's low vale, the soil the virtues like,
They please as Beauties, here as Wonders
strike.
Tho* the same Sun with all-diffusive rays
Blush in the Rose, and in the Diamond blaze,
We prize the stronger effort of his pow'r,
And justly set the Gem above the Flow'r.
(93-100)
The ironic play is between the "pastoral" attitude that
flowers are better than the baubles of urban sophistica-
tion and the "commercial" attitude that gems are better
than flowers because they are rarer. The "vulgar error
that precious stones and metals are created by the sun's
rays" 3 allows Pope to say that gems and court-virtues
are remarkable things, in fact almost miraculous, at the
same time that he calls courts bad places where
"Heav'n's influence" (Christian virtues, the real ones)
has almost no power. In "life's low vale" the virtues
grow naturally, because they like the soil; we may pre-
tend to think that court-virtues, like gems, are produced
by Heaven's influence too, but we really know that they
are unnatural and less admirable than the real thing.
"Justly" appeals to a false standard of value, one which
measures moral worth by an amoral scale; the social
hierarchy, insofar as it is determined by accidents of
birth or economics, has no place in the estimation of
"character."
This opposition of pastoral and commercial values
foreshadows the Epistle to Bathurst, where Pope de-
velops his treatment of folly as an alienation from
reality into a myth of a pastoral-like harmony between
man and nature that rebukes the mores of a money cul-
ture. 4 As its alternative title, "Of the Use of Riches,"
indicates, Bathurst examines the effects of wealth upon
the society that possesses it, and in particular the rela-
tion between prosperity and moral worth. The problem
was of course an old one, which by Pope's time had
been firmly set in a Protestant context:
Both fairly owning, Riches in effect
No grace of Heav'n or Token of th' Elect;
Giv'n to the Fool, the Mad, the Vain, the Evil,
To Ward, to Waters, Chartres, and the Devil.
(17-20)
The names are significant: John Ward was a forger,
swindler, and financial manipulator, while both Chartres
the rake and Peter Walter the scrivener were notorious
usurers. Confronted by an infamous alliance of Whig-
gery, Enterprise Capitalism, and Puritan Dissent, Pope
indignantly rejects the Calvinist doctrine that worldly
success is a sign of Election, undercutting the sonorous
vocabulary of Protestant economic theory with the
blunt language of common moral sense, which calls a
fool a fool.
A major aim in Bathurst is to expose the growing con-
fusion between worldly wealth and moral value, a con-
fusion which R. H. Tawney has scathingly described as
it existed at the end of the seventeenth century:
Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limit-
less increase and expansion, became the goal of the
Christian's efforts. ,. . . Not an easygoing and
open-handed charity, but a systematic and me-
51
thodical accumulation, won the meed of praise
that belongs to the good and faithful servant. The
shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all
human relations by pecuniary standards . . . had
evoked from time immemorial the warnings and
denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the
cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities
which less enlightened ages had denounced as
social vices emerged as economic virtues. They
emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world
exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. 5
Though Tawney's ironies sound very much like parts of
Bathurst, Pope is no Fabian; his position is not radical
but ultraconservative, appealing to an aristocratic ethic,
firmly rooted in classical and medieval traditions of
conduct, which by the 1730*5 had become obsolete ex-
cept as a literary ideal. From the time of Horace the
"bourgeois" money-maker had been a stock target for
satire; Pope gives new edge to the commonplace satiric
complaints by relating them to positive assumptions
about real wealth and its intimate connections with
nature.
The difference between monetary and moral "value"
is developed from the opening conversation between
Pope and Lord Bathurst 6 Pope's point is that money
and the moral chaos it produces are unnatural, products
not of divine design (as Bathurst rather cynically sug-
gests) but of human audacity. Neither squandering nor
hoarding money is "right/" but "careful Heav n" had a
purpose in creating both misers and spendthrifts, whose
actions, in the larger view, ironically preserve the
natural balance they individually seem to disturb. But
this soothing economic platitude does not appease
Pope's sense of the appalling effects of money on indi-
vidual men. Gold is dangerous because it lacks moral
identity (29-34). It reflects perfectly the motives of
its users while remaining indifferent as to whether it
5*
serves life or death, crime or social good. Though riches
can contribute simple necessities "Meat, Fire, and
Cloaths" ( 82 ) even such modest benefits are more than
most rich people obtain from their wealth: neither
Wharton the prodigal nor Turner the miser received
even the simplest pleasures from their fortunes, so en-
grossed were they in adding to them or getting rid of
them (84-86). Like the sad lunatics pictured at the end
of Cobham, they have abdicated from life to pursue an
idee fixe with the fervor of the religious ascetic. And
beyond common necessities, riches are useless: "What
can they give? to dying Hopkins Heirs; / To Chartres,
Vigour; Japhet, Nose and Ears?" "Material" wealth is
an abstraction, with no power over physical experience.
Rich people, as Hemingway tried to tell Fitzgerald, can
be as miserable as anyone else. It would be sentimental
to suppose that riches themselves create unhappiness;
wealth obviously can command gratifications beyond
the dreams of the poor. But wealth comes from devot-
ing to monetary symbols the kind of loving attention
one might otherwise devote to people and things; and
symbols, Pope knows, have a way of overpowering im-
mediate human pleasures. Harpax could have bought
himself friendship of a sort, "were Harpax not too wise
to spend" (93) economic "wisdom" is only a neurotic
version of what common sense calls madness.
The destruction of pleasure, however, is less serious
than the destruction of charity and social love that
riches also cause. In lines 101-108 Pope runs through a
catalogue of attitudes toward the poor. There is Denis
Bond, the Charitable Corporation swindler, who is at
least honest about his brutality "Bond damns the Poor,
and hates them from his heart." Sir Gilbert Heathcote
simply abides by his business axiom that "every man in
want is knave or fool." Sir John Blunt, in the Calvinist
way, equals his success and other men's failures to God's
providence and "piously denies" charity. Only the "good
53
Bishop" admits that financial failure need not deprive
a man of Grace but since God may be trusted to love
the poor, he himself need not bother. ( Warburton's in-
sistence that this bishop is imaginary makes Pope's
swipe at Anglican Indifferentism even more damning
presumably many bishops would fit the case.) Moral
rectitude is no substitute for love, especially when it is
a rectitude founded upon economic success. Almost all
the people Pope attacks in Bathurst have roughly the
same relation to riches; few inherited their wealth, as
did Bathurst, the large majority being self-made suc-
cesses. And a catalogue of their activities is revealing:
Usurers: Chartres, Peter Walter, Turner, Hopkins,
Blunt; Swindlers: Ward, Chartres, Crook, Bond, Sutton,
Blunt; Projectors and Stock-Market Plungers: Bond,
Blunt, Gage, Sutton, Cutler; Misers: Selkirk, Hopkins,
Heathcote, Cutler, Wortley Montagu; Speculators and
Prodigals: Wharton, "Phryne," Villiers, Colepepper,
"Uxorio." Their common ground (except for the prod-
igals, who work in reverse) is the attempt to create
wealth out of nothing, to divorce riches by a kind of
economic alchemy from the nature that is the source of
all real value. Pope's poetic role in Bathurst is the seri-
ous critic of the moral disturbances that accompanied
finance capitalism's imposition of its values upon a
society that was, historically and imaginatively, agrarian
and Christian. English capitalism was well established
as early as the sixteenth century, and as L. C. Knights
has shown, one of the main concerns of the Jacobean
dramatists was the clash between traditional norms of
conduct and the new morality of self-aggrandizement
and impersonality that was felt to characterize the man
of business in his assault on the old social order. 7 By
Pope's time the battle was all but over; Bathurst was
written after the South-Sea bubble had burst and the
malpractices of the Charitable Corporation had become
common scandal. Pope himself suffered losses in the
South-Sea fiasco, and his bitterness is not wholly dis-
54
interested. But the poem takes a larger view of the
cycle of boom and bust it is only one symptom of an
appalling economic and moral revolution.
The instruments of this revolution, the usurers and
projectors, lack social love because of a misapprehen-
sion about nature. They imagine (113-124) a future of
dearth which blinds them to the importance of present
gratification, either for themselves or others. Their
knowledge of economic arcana blurs the fact that money
is humanly meaningful only when it purchases substan-
tial commodities. They seem to mistrust nature's ability
to reproduce goods, and in their anxiety to corner the
market in bread or men they forget that the supply ulti-
mately depends not on price indexes but on the perma-
nent rhythms of growth and death. Like religious fa-
natics they pursue "some Revelation hid from you and
me," an inner light that seems lunatic to common sense;
and they have the fanatic's indifference to the existence
of other people's views and feelings.
Nature and Abstraction
Pope can attack these delusions because he sees beyond
them to a vision of natural richness and regularity that
shows up the abstract meanness of commercial amo-
rality. 8 The vision is embodied in the verse itself, first of
all, in the way literary allusion figures as moral com-
mentary; classical and biblical echoes evoke a past
whose values were clearer and firmer. Buckingham's
deathbed, "where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,"
is measured against another occasion of death, the
funeral games for Anchises where Cloanthus' victory
was rewarded with a mantle "where gold and purple
strive in equal rows" (Dryden's Aeneid, V, 326). Allu-
sion underscores the vulgarity and abstractness of the
present with reminders that life was not always so. But
even in the present, nature is available as a measure of
goodness. Bribery, for example, is the product of money
and not of natural goods ( 35-78 ) , and it can be ridiculed
55
by imagining the embarrassments of bribing people
with substantial things. Even gold is awkward some-
times, since it has physical reality, but human ingenuity
has completed the process of abstraction by inventing
"blest paper-credit," which "lends Corruption lighter
wings to fly." Bathurst chronicles the perversion of na-
ture by wealth, but nature remains imaginatively avail-
able as a measure of that perversion,
This measure is fully revealed in the great passage
about extremes working toward an ultimate synthesis
in goodness:
"Extremes in Nature equal good produce,
"Extremes in Man concur to gen'ral use/*
Ask we what makes one keep, and one be-
stow?
That POW'R who bids the Ocean ebb and flow,
Bids seed-time, harvest, equal course main-
tain,
Thro' reconciTd extremes of drought and rain,
Builds Life on Death, on Change Duration
founds,
And gives th' eternal wheels to know their
rounds. (163-170)
The lines evoke the great rhythms of nature that a con-
cern merely for artificial wealth may obscure, and they
reassure us that nature is finally too powerful to be over-
come by human abstractions. As usual, the reassurance
is far from naive; the great natural fact is change, and
the power of false wealth to destroy man's awareness of
change cannot be taken lightly. Like all madmen, the
financiers are in some ways happier than the rest of us,
for their lives are abstract and simple, relieved of
physical labor and the painful sense of complexity that
characterizes sane intelligence. Finally, however, Pope
chooses sanity, for though the sane man who consoles
himself with the imaginative vision of permanence in
change may be no more "happy" than the madman who
56
consoles himself with his own fantasies, still sanity is at
least not lonely its activities take place in a community
of understanding and agreement formed of all right-
thinking men, living and dead. The financiers must
dwell alone in private worlds of their own hallucina-
tions, and their tragic rejection of community predicts
an ominous future.
In the "reconciled extremes" passage Pope brings to
imaginative life one of the key doctrines of the Essay
on Man (see Epistle II, 203-216), giving it a solidity
of meaning that the more theoretical context of the
Essay cannot fully provide. This passage is the axis, so
to speak, of Bathurst, the moral center about which the
details of the poem are organized. 9 Its implications sum
up and judge the lack of faith in nature that marks the
folly and wickedness of the financiers. Its high Biblical
tone, for example, contrasts sharply with the ironic
interplay of verbal elevation and meanness in the proph-
ecy that accounts for Blunt's avarice (137-140). Blunt,
not understanding that nature is regular and immutable,
believes that money is the only firm agency of order.
But Pope sees further; his view takes in the natural
rhythms that can usefully assimilate even folly, and the
vision of "reconcil'd extremes" emphasizes the positive
attitudes toward wealth that have begun to control the
poem. Even misers and money-grubbers, considered in
this broad perspective, turn out to be contributors to
order, "backward steward[s] for the poor":
This year a Reservoir, to keep and spare,
The next a Fountain, spouting thro' his Heir,
In lavish streams to quench a Country's thirst,
And men and dogs shall drink him 'till they
burst. (175-178)
The images are significant: the financier does not be-
come good until he can be seen not as a human being
but as a natural force, or the conduit through which
such force can run. Nature can adapt into its own
57
scheme even money and the wretched social indiffer-
ence it breeds; the wealth that "pale Mammon" amassed
so scrupulously is sardonically revealed as the fountain-
head from which pours an indiscriminate flood of re-
freshment, for beasts as well as men.
But the reconciliation of extremes is no placid meta-
phor for perfection of economic process. Line 178 cou-
ples "men and dogs" a fairly blunt indication of the
unreasoning, self-destructive greed through which the
righting of the balance operates. Pope takes long views
and short ones at the same time here he is both pleased
by the way redistribution completes a natural cycle
and regretful about the human frailty that starts the
next cycle even as it completes the last one. This double
view figures also in the treatment of Gotta the miser
and his prodigal son. Cotta's mania for accumulation
destroyed the proper intimacy and geniality of the
agrarian life "No rafter'd roofs with dance and tabor
sound, / No noontide-bell invites the country round"
(191-192) but he is no worse than his son, who mis-
takes "reverse of wrong for right" and dispenses "slaugh-
ter'd hecatombs" and "floods of wine" to all and sundry.
The father ruined the traditional tone of the natural
life, but the son goes so far in the opposite direction as
to destroy its tangible being, selling his forests, his live-
stock, and finally the land itself "for his Country's love"
which may mean that he loves his country but more
likely that he wants it to love him. Balance is tempo-
rarily restored, but only through a sad revelation of
vanity.
Scrutiny of economic process thus reveals the oper-
ation of a cycle, one comfortingly analogous to natural
rhythms and yet disturbingly dependent upon human
folly. Mandeville, a less humane commentator on the
process, could merely observe the facts and laugh in the
faces of his self-righteous readers. But Pope character-
istically seeks a way of reconciling the cycle with the
human potential for goodness. He does so by resorting
58
to the myth of pastoral a myth that, as we shall see,
he raises to its highest possible pitch of affirmation at
the end of the Epistle to Burlington.
In Bathurst, as shown in the story of Cotta's son
(213-218), the pastoral motive centers around the fall
from grace, the loss of a golden age of country inno-
cence. The Man of Ross, Pope's exemplar of the proper
use of riches, shows how pastoral feelings are enlisted
in the service of the social thesis. He is a kind of super-
man of the Christian virtues, who feeds the poor and
aged, portions maidens and apprentices orphans, heals
the sick and administers justice. But his achievements
are not wholly in the realm of "fact":
Who hung with woods yon mountain's sultry
brow?
From the dry rock who bid the waters
flow? . . .
Who taught that heav'n-directed spire to rise?
The MAN of Ross, each lisping babe replies.
(253-262)
The details are drawn from the real John Kyrle's pa-
tronage of landscape gardening and civil engineering,
but the effect is more than factual. He is projected al-
most as a pastoral magician, whose intentions are real-
ized by nature without the intervention of physical
agency. The "invocation" is pastoral commonplace:
Rise, honest Muse! and sing the MAN of Ross:
Pleas'd Vaga echoes thro' her winding bounds,
And rapid Severn hoarse applause resounds.
(250-252)
This nature reflects country realities the muse is "hon-
est" and the applause "hoarse." Pope's enthusiasm is far
from innocent. But the pastoral framing of the Man of
Ross, for all its qualifications, points to a natural rein-
forcement of human motives that we are to take very
seriously. He exemplifies the conscious use of riches to
sustain and enrich nature and the society based on
nature. He re-enacts, with his dependents and with the
59
landscape, the loving dealings of God with nature and
of Christ with man. His exercise of love strips away
superfluous social abstractions "Despairing Quacks
with curses fled the place, / And vile Attornies, now an
useless race" and restores to human relations their
"original" simplicity and warmth, (We are to recall
who it was that drove the money-changers from the
temple. ) He thus stands as a living rebuke to a loveless
financier like Cutler, who "saw tenants break, and houses
fair and "his only daughter in a stranger's pow'r" (323-
326) because his mania had persuaded him that he
could not afford to build a wall or pay a dower, thus
sacrificing relations with people for an empty symbol.
But the Man of Ross does not conclude Bathurst.
Pope reserves that place for the tale of Sir Balaam the
natural measure gets no triumphant realization, but
rather it remains as a potent but distant possibility. Un-
like the Man of Ross, Sir Balaam lives in the city in
fact in the City, the inner stronghold of urban commer-
cial attitudes and his "sober fame" is the fagade of
bourgeois respectability. His are the Puritan virtues in
apotheosis, compounded of self-denial, mechanical pi-
ety, and economic solidity. This is moral vacuity and
not vice, Pope sees, but nature abhors a vacuum;
Balaam's career is the saga of the creation of evil ex
nihilo. If "virtue" is only a restraint and not a positive
impulse, it is helpless in the face of worldly temptation,
and Balaam's financial success brings disaster: "What
late he calTd a Blessing, now was Wit, / And God's good
Providence, a lucky Hit." Pope has his eye on the tran-
sition from bourgeois entrepreneur to would-be aristo-
crat, the peculiar twilight zone in which things (and
men) indeed "change their titles, as our manners turn."
This out-of-focus Rake's Progress moves swiftly to its
conclusion as Balaam remarries a "Nymph of Quality,"
bows at court, endures the moral and physical destruc-
tion of his family, and is finally himself executed for
financially motivated treason:
60
Wife, son, and daughter, Satan, are thy own,
His wealth, yet dearer, forfeit to the Crown,
The Devil and the King divide the prize,
And sad Sir Balaam curses God and dies.
This modern Job, tempted, as Pope says, by a Satan who
has learned that wealth is a more efficient corrupter than
poverty, perishes in desolation of both spirit and sub-
stance, the spirit and substance he has so hopelessly
confounded.
The simple manner of narration does not obscure the
tale's masterful relevance to the poem's major theme.
Pope makes no sentimental claim that this is a good
man gone wrong, but there still is a certain pathos in
seeing a not particularly bad man destroyed because
he is too stupid to resist or even recognize money's
power to excite all his worst impulses. Taken as a sum-
mary of all the usurers' and projectors' maladies, Balaam
shows that Pope's ideas about the abuse of riches are
not the moral cliches we are so accustomed to hear.
Balaam is not exactly "selfish," for example, since noth-
ing suggests that he pursues money to gratify any sub-
stantial desires of his own. The extra pudding he eats
is not an object of his activity but a sign of its success
his wife thinks conspicuous consumption is appropriate
to their new dignity, and so they consume. He remarries
not because he desires the Nymph of Quality but be-
cause she desires him (or more probably his money),
and he becomes a courtier not to satisfy his own vanity
but "to please the fair." In fact, there is no object to his
pursuit of wealth save the pursuit itself; and his amiable
mindlessness may be even more contemptible than
honest greed. The other financiers in one way or another
show this same lack of concern for self, as it is ordinarily
thought of. Shylock starves himself, Mammon "pine[s]
amidst his store," Gotta Tiv'd on pulse," Cutler banishes
the doctor from his deathbed. Most of the others deny
themselves pleasure or even comfort for the sake of
61
their obsessions; though some are selfish in motive, none
draw from their activities any substantial benefit to the
self. As Max Weber observed:
The ideal type of the capitalistic entrepreneur . . .
avoids ostentation and unnecessary expenditure, as
well as conscious enjoyment of his power. . . . His
manner of life is, in other words, often . . . dis-
tinguished by a certain ascetic tendency. ... He
gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except
the irrational sense of having done his job well. 10
"Materialism," too, is an inadequate label for the state
of mind Pope attacks in Bathurst. As such satirists as
Veblen and Kenneth Burke have mordantly demon-
strated, whatever a capitalistic society is interested in,
it is not much interested in material things. Mr. Burke's
description of the finance capitalist is remarkably close
to Pope's:
No poet was ever so delicate and fanciful in his
conception of the realities as those dreamers, those
men of vision. . . . Here the superstructure of
credit and interest is considered basic, quite as
though one were to think of a transfer of goods as
incidental and were to find soundness only in the
paper on which the transaction was recorded. . . .
A railroad is approached, not in terms of tracks,
engines, roundhouses, repair plants, and working
force, but through data as to its capital structure! n
This is not materialism, as Pope sees, but a kind of mad
spirituality. He is in fact an advocate for a traditional
materialism of a limited sort. In Bathurst he expresses
a view of secular wealth that is precisely that of St.
Thomas: "It is lawful to desire temporal blessings, not
putting them in the first place, as though setting up our
rest in them, but regarding them as aids to blessedness,
inasmuch as they support our corporal life and serve as
instruments for acts of virtue/' 12 The realms of matter
and spirit, though related, are to be kept distinct, and
62
each has rights of its own; when this distinction breaks
down and the material is spiritualized, the sin of Avarice
results.
The Epistle itself is of course not so openly doctrinal.
Pope's feelings are "rendered" in a swift progression of
scenes and portraits of folly and misconduct the moral
commentary emerges from particular details of drama-
tized human behavior. But behind the drama we recog-
nize a firmly defined moral vocabulary, one that incor-
porates both classical and Christian ethical terms. The
imagery often suggests that the financiers are sinning
not against dogma but against nature itself; their ab-
stract approach to experience is wrong because it in
effect denies the potent myth of a beautiful and harmo-
nious relationship between man and his environment
the relationship, between a fruitful, regular nature and
the human creatures who assist and use it, so movingly
reasserted in Pound's Canto LI:
With usury has no man a good house
made of stone, no paradise on his church wall
With usury the stone cutter is kept from his
stone
the weaver is kept from his loom by usura
Wool does not come into market
the peasant does not eat his own grain
Usury kills the child in the womb
And breaks short the young man's courting
Usury brings age into youth; it lies between
the bride
and the bridegroom
Usury is against Nature's increase.
The Triumph of Sense
The Epistle to Burlington, though the first of the Moral
Essays in date of composition, was placed by Pope last
in his roughly thematic rearrangement of the four poems,
and it brilliantly defines the end toward which the
poems are pointed. It is in effect the major chord upon
which the Moral Essays end, as a satiric attack on taste-
less prodigality leads to an Augustan vision of man and
nature in harmonious agreement.
As a counterpart to Bathurst, Burlington examines not
the accumulation of riches but the squandering of them;
but Pope finds a psychological affinity between the two
activities. Where the miser endeavors "to gain those
Riches he can ne'er enjoy/' the prodigal labors "to pur-
chase what he ne'er can taste" (1-4). Neither, in short,
is in substantial contact with his wealth, and both vio-
late natural order. Still Timon, Pope's exemplar of prod-
igality, calls for somewhat different treatment from that
accorded the villains in Bathurst:
Who but must laugh, the Master when he sees,
A puny insect, shiv'ring at a breeze!
(Burlington, 107-108)
My Lord advances with majestic mien,
Smit with the mighty pleasure, to be seen.
( 127-128 )
Treated, caress'd, and tir'd, I take my leave,
Sick of his civil Pride from Morn to Eve.
(165-166)
The effect is a general diminishment of the object, and
while the feeling ranges from irritation to contempt, a
certain amusement replaces the moral outrage so com-
mon in Bathurst:
When Hopkins dies, a thousand lights attend
The wretch, who living sav'd a candle's end:
Should'ring God's altar a vile image stands,
Belies his features, nay extends his hands.
(Bathurst, 291-294)
This magnification is hardly amusing; we may smile
sympathetically at Pope's fretful rejection of Timon's
civil pride, but we must be indignant about Hopkins,
64
who is evil in the sacrilegious vulgarity of his funeral
service and monument. One may pity Timon, who after
all suffers from his own lack of taste almost as much as
do his guests, even though he does not understand that
it is suffering; but in Bathurst we are not often asked to
pity anyone.
This is not to say that Pope treats bad taste lightly.
Timon, li^e the financiers, violates natural principles
which we are to take very seriously indeed. Still, Timon's
folly is not in reducing natural substance to items on
business indexes and deposit slips, but rather in con-
triving particular, substantial things that unfortunately
distort the ideals of reality. He half-recognizes nature,
as the financiers do not, but his understanding is too
feeble for him to imitate nature in a meaningful creative
act. Creative participation in reality is finally futile un-
less conducted with intelligent care for the forms and
procedures that nature seems to prescribe. Timon is
especially irritating because he comes close to doing
the right thing; only one ingredient, "taste," is lacking,
and the poem describes the effects of this lack and
criticizes them by a .comparison to the achievements of
true taste, past and present.
The opening lines, with their comment on the prod-
igal's extravagant pursuit of "what he ne'er can taste,"
introduce a major theme. The prodigal creates discom-
fort for himself and others by his inhuman carelessness
about pleasure. He "sees, or hears, or eats" on the advice
of experts (5-12), and his purchased experiences really
gratify him "no more / Than his fine Wife, alas! or finer
Whore." The ambiguity of "taste" is important; "phys-
ical" and "esthetic" are the same to the prodigal, because
he has no firsthand experience of either. This blurring
of distinctions culminates in the play on "fine." Pretend-
ing to adopt the prodigal's own point of view, Pope calls
the wife "fine," apparently in the sense of "good, well
bred, personally admirable in various ways." "Alas" thus
65
seems at first a sign of sincere regret ("the fool doesn't
appreciate such a fine woman") , but "finer Whore" gives
the joke away: the wife is a "fine lady," stylish and well
kept, but she's eclipsed by the more stylish and even
better-kept mistress, and "alas" becomes a mocking com-
ment on the fact that this man's women have been
purchased for the esthetic or physical enjoyment of
others, like the statues and "dirty Gods."
The prodigal, by buying more than he can under-
stand or enjoy, becomes a connoisseur of discomfort. He
and his kind are "Conscious they act a true Palladian
part, / And, if they starve, they starve by rules of art"
(37-38). The cultivated life becomes a kind of play-
acting as they^ dramatize themselves and their deeds
with ludicrous self-importance, without reflecting that
the finest art has roots in life. Behind the poem lies a
pun on "imitation" that contrasts the true classical mi-
mesis with the slavish copying," not of nature, but of
other works of art. Timon and his friends imitate Burl-
ington's imitation of Palladio's imitation of classical
architecture; but where Burlington understands the
reasons behind the designs, their combination of beauty
and use, his imitators are concerned only with forms
abstracted from practical considerations. The perverse
asceticism of discomfort as a way of life is fully revealed
at Timon's villa. Timon is surrounded by gargantuan
magnificence "his building is a Town, / His pond an
Ocean" and the effect is to dwarf the owner himself,
who in this monstrous perspective ceases to seem hu-
man: "A puny insect, shiv'ring at a breeze!" His decora-
tive lake serves only to accentuate "the keenness of the
Northern wind"; his summerhouse "knows no shade";
one must "thro* the length of yon hot Terrace sweat" and
climb "ten steep slopes" to approach his villa; and at
his dinner table the pleasures of the board are nullified
by the mechanical regularity of the service "In plenty
starving, tantalized in state." The only comfort to be
found in this establishment, ironically, is in the sybaritic
66
chapel: "To rest, the Cushion and soft Dean invite, /
Who never mentions Hell to ears polite/* In contrast,
the dining room, which ought to be devoted to ease and
pleasure, is the scene of something very like a religious
ceremony:
Is this a dinner? this a Genial room?
No, 'tis a Temple, and a Hecatomb.
A solemn Sacrifice, perform'd in state.
(155-157)
Experience is all out of kilter in this grotesque temple of
bad taste, where even the dinners taste bad. Feelings get
divorced from their proper objects and attached to new
ones with startling incongruity.
Prodigality, through its violation of proper principles
of behavior, is an offense against man and society, but
it is also an offense against nature, from which standards
of propriety are derived; and it is this second aspect of
prodigality that directs the development of Burlington
into the powerful climax of the Moral Essays. The devel-
opment runs from a description of violation, through a
consideration of what has been violated, to a positive
definition of a noble role for man to play in the life of
nature.
The strongest counteragent to prodigality is a quality
of mind Pope calls "sense":
Good Sense, which only is the gift of Heav'n,
And tho* no science, fairly worth the seven:
A Light, which in yourself you must perceive,
Jones and Le Notre have it not to give. (43-46)
"Sense" is inherent, an instinct that cannot be cultivated
but that is the equal of all the cultivated arts and sci-
ences. Though Pope's use of the term includes our "com-
mon sense," practical, pragmatic intelligence, he suggests
a further dimension of meaning by comparing it to the
religious "inner light." The light of sense, however, is
not merely subjective and personal, for it has the power
to illuminate and glorify human works: " TTis Use alone
that sanctifies Expence, / And Splendor borrows all
her rays from Sense" (179-180). "Sense" and "Use" are
practically synonymous; the personal resource is meas-
ured by the social product, and the optimum result is
a translation of the economic ("Expence") into the
spiritual ("sanctifies"), under the auspices, as we shall
see, of a nature that is essentially benevolent. Pope
draws also on associations with "sensation" and "sensi-
bility." "Good sense" can mean something like "a clear
and sensitive response to natural reality." The good
builder or planter must follow nature ( "In all, let Nature
never be forgot"), and to do so he must apprehend
nature sensuously by consulting "the Genius of the
Place" (57-64), the real agent of beauty that "paints as
you plant, and, as you work, designs." Sense is an inner
light, but it alone makes possible the fullest community
with external nature; it is a private possession, but Pope
could assume that it was the mutual property of the
best men in a given culture. We may define it, crudely
enough, as the esthetic intelligence of a cultivated
society.
By the exercise of sense one becomes an instrument or
even a colleague of nature. If you work with an eye to
the original harmony of natural things, the Genius of
the Place, your own productions will seem a part of
nature itself:
Still follow Sense, of ev'ry Art the Soul,
Parts answ'ring parts shall slide into a whole,
Spontaneous beauties all around advance,
Start ev'n from Difficulty, strike from Chance;
Nature shall join you, Time shall make it grow
A Work to wonder at perhaps a STOW. (65-70)
Here is a practical version of the mythic union of nature
and human experience Pope considered in the Pastorals.
Nature is alive, in a way, but its vitality now seems
drawn not from an obedient reflection of human feelings
but from some inner principle of organization. Man finds
a relation with the natural world not by ascribing his
own emotions to it but by "sensing" the designs and
68
poises already there and making his own activities con-
sonant with them. This new vision of order defines a
poetic speaker who sees time not as an enemy ( as in the
Pastorals) but as a friend. The pastoral shepherd has no
society and so must gauge every event in terms of his
own limited experience; but when you are in a society,
and can see that events may have more significance than
your personal experience can unfold if, in short, you
can apprehend nature's designs and cooperate with them
then "Nature shall join you."
But time seems friendly only to the man of sense:
"Without it, proud Versailles! thy glory falls; / And
Nero's Terraces desert their walls" (71-72). Pope has a
double sense of the mutability that pervades the poem.
Time, as usual, figures as the relentless enemy of human
works Villario's "ten-years toil" at landscaping ends
with his realization that nature can do the job better,
and the woods that Sabinus loved are cut down to satisfy
his son's "fine Taste" for "an op'ner Vista." This pessimis-
tic view of time is, however, balanced by an emphasis
on nature's ability to renew itself ceaselessly. Time may
be hostile to human works, but it is the necessary con-
dition of natural growth and fruition "Time shall make
it grow."
Another age shall see the golden Ear
Imbrown the Slope, and nod on the Parterre,
Deep Harvests bury all his pride has planned,
And laughing Ceres re-assume the land.
(173-176;
The "inverted Nature" of Timon's barren estate will
eventually be righted through nature's insistence on
growth and utility.
In its emphasis on the fertility and permanence of
nature, Burlington clarifies Pope's attitude toward the
criminality of the financiers and the stupidity of Timon.
The Earl of Burlington himself appears in the poem as
the symbol of intelligence, which understands and re-
spects traditional values and can translate the lessons
69
of the past into meaningful present activity: "You show
us, Rome was glorious, not profuse, / And pompous
buildings once were things of Use" (23-24). "Glory"
and "glorious" are nearly always ironic words in Pope's
later poems, and the serious use of "glorious" here is
especially powerful. "Glory" combines tangible splendor
with utility; the external lineaments of the building
express the practical function it exists to serve. This
early couplet prepares for the key generalization that
" 'Tis Use alone that sanctifies Expence," and architec-
ture becomes a metaphor for the sensible creativity
through which man can cooperate with natural process.
The metaphor gains force from its conjunction with an-
other kind of human creativity: "Who then shall grace,
or who improve the Soil? / Who plants like BATHURST,
or who builds like BOYLE" (177-178). Landscape gar-
dening represents creative activity in direct contact with
nature, the planned improvement of the world upon the
model of natural growth. Timon's garden was a ghastly
inversion of nature "Trees cut to Statues, Statues thick
as Trees" but the finest gardening differs only subtly
from nature itself, as Pope had argued in The Guardian
(No. 173, September 29, 1713) some twenty years ear-
lier. The trick is "decently to hide" the evidences of the
gardener's calculation: "He gains all points, who pleas-
ingly confounds, / Surprizes, varies, and conceals the
Bounds" (55-56). The bounds exist, for this is a finite
imitation of nature rather than the real thing, but the
edges of the composition are carefully minimized, un-
like Timon's garden, where "On ev'ry side you look,
behold the Wall!"
Proper gardening, with its emphasis on natural ar-
rangement and growth, is a kind of farming, or at least
it shares with farming the moral dignity Pope associates
with the productive cultivation of the soil. The irre-
pressible natural vigor that will submerge Timon's
monstrous creations presents no threat to the "sensible"
planter, whose domain appears at the end of Burlington
70
as almost an Eden, where traditional possession, ami-
cable relations with neighbors and tenants, and natural
richness are sustained by modesty and hard work (181-
190). The life of nature and the life of man come to-
gether in a harmonious whole as the speaking tone
shifts from informal conversation to the balanced ca-
dences of high oratory, which seem almost to reflect the
recurrent rhythms of life and growth with which the
lines deal. The poem draws to a lofty close with a pas-
sage exhorting Burlington to new efforts, so that kings
will emulate him in public works that may maintain
peace between man and nature:
Bid the broad Arch the dangerous Flood
contain,
The Mole projected break the roaring Main;
Back to his bounds their subject Sea com-
mand,
And roll obedient Rivers thro* the Land;
These Honours, Peace to happy Britain brings,
These are Imperial Works, and worthy Kings.
(199-204)
The pastoral "magic" that controls nature becomes lit-
eral fact through the sensible creativity of the Augustan
genius.
This vision of useful art is perhaps the most "Augus-
tan" passage Pope ever wrote. Our full appreciation of
what it positively asserts depends on our recollection
of the alternatives, the kinds of fruitless activity de-
scribed in the other Moral Essays. Pope, that is to say,
offers his vision of peaceful order not as cheerful pre-
diction but as intellectual possibility, asserted in defi-
ance of a powerfully realized understanding that the
tendency of history was toward quite another state of
affairs. For one Bathurst there were twenty Shylocks;
Burlington was a remarkable individual, but "A hundred
smart in Timon and in Balaam 9 ' (Sat. II I 42). What
would seem, out of context, an expression of simple con-
fidence in the power of "good Sense" becomes, through
71
its placement at the end of a series, a courageous refusal
to forsake an ideal simply because fact seemed hostile
to its fulfillment.
The vision is in fact another of Pope's imaginative
visions, firmly based upon the Augustan idea of the
Roman tradition, in which art and ordinary experience
were fused. It would be wrong to say that the vision was
empty because in the eighteenth century England was
actually moving toward the opposite of pastoral per-
fection. Pope knew this as well as we do. The passage
expresses the kind of truth that any operative myth will
express; we respond not to "fact" but to the intelligent
courage that rises above the merely factual to assert
imaginatively the permanent possibility of goodness in
the human condition. This is one of jhe greatest mo-
ments of jEn^j^neodasS^mV^e sa^ and intellec-
tual contraction 'bfTEe opening of CobJiam, where the
"man to Books confin'd" railed at humanity from his
study, has developed into a broad generalization about
man and nature that is wholly convincing convincing
because Pope has earned our respect and belief through
the honest clarity with which he faces all the difficulties
his argument raises.
The Edge of Tragedy
Pope never entirely regained the daylight mood of the
Epistle to Burlington. The Imitations of Horace and the
revised Dunciad reveal a declension into darker areas of
experience as the poise between the actual and the ideal
grows harder to sustain. In the i/so's Pope moved from
high Augustanism toward a new kind of art, whose
structural and expressive principle is not so much bal-
ance as exaggeration. Though this new art is visible in
the first versions of the Dunciad (1728, 1729), I think
its relation to the Augustan mode emerges more clearly
if one first considers Of the Characters of Women: an
Epistle to a Lady (1735). Pope placed this magnificent
poem second in his final arrangement of the Moral Es-
72
says, but it was written last, and it differs from its com-
panions in important ways. It is built in the Augustan
way, by playing off two very dissimilar kinds of feeling:
on the surface it is a traditional satiric attack on feminine
folly, yet at its climax, the great section on the death
of dowagers (219-248), satire yields to something like
a tragic view of the effects of time and change that
everyone women and men alike must someday con-
front and yield to. The change is marked in the tone:
the easy informality of the satiric epistle gives way to
the lofty resonances of the orator-preacher as the poem
moves out of the limited world of personal abnormality
into a realm where "normal" and "abnormal" have no
meaning. Pope returns to the social world at the end, to
be sure, and brings back with him a new perspective on
what a woman should be; but the process of transcend-
ence and return produces an irony that delicately qual-
ifies the beautiful tribute to Martha Blount. The element
of "tragedy" must not be overstressed; its power stems
from the contrast with the satiric parts, and our sense
of the poem as dramatic interplay and redefinition would
vanish if either element were to crowd out the other.
Such "tragic" feelings, however, become increasingly
strong in Pope's later works. Although To a Lady keeps
the opposing elements positive social perspective and
sorrowful understanding of time's indifference in equi-
librium, the equilibrium becomes more and more diffi-
cult to sustain.
The opening address to his dedicatee sets a tone of
teasing mock-wonder at female inconsistency that per-
sists in the earlier satiric portraits judicious Silia flies
into a tantrum over a pimple on her nose, while Papillia
yearns for a park only to find she can't endure trees.
But as the poem proceeds, inconsistency seems more dis-
turbing. Narcissa, Philomede, Flavia, and Atossa are all
in some way actresses, compulsively theatricalizing life
instead of living it. Like the tragic fools at the end of
Cobham, they enact their inner fantasies as though they
73
were experiences. Whether they feel too little, like Chloe,
or too much, like Atossa, they are isolated from every
reality except death. Death in fact hovers around them;
it has in store for these changeable creatures the great-
est change of all, and it dominates the climax of the
poem, the passage on "the fate of a whole Sex of Queens/'
The teasing satirist assumes a graver voice ("Yet mark
the fate") which is not just addressing Martha Blount
as it traces the restless progress of aging charmers:
Beauties, like Tyrants, old and friendless
grown,
Yet hate Repose, and dread to be alone,
Worn out in public, weary ev'ry eye,
Nor leave one sigh behind them when they
die. ( To a Lady, 227-230 )
The view is a mixed one. Pope finds them foolish, but
there is something heroic in their hopeless battle and
something callous in the world's indifference.
At the climax of the poem Pope squarely confronts
both the moral childishness and the pathos of these
women:
At last, to follies Youth could scarce defend,
It grows their Age's prudence to pretend;
Asham'd to own they gave delight before,
Reduc'd to feign it, when they give no more:
As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy then
spight,
So these their merry, miserable Night;
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty
glide,
And haunt the places where their Honour
dy'd. (235-242)
Mr, Empson remarks on the passage:
What is so compelling is the combination within it
of two sharply distinguished states of mind; the
finicking precision with which the subject-matter
is handled; the pity, bitterness, and terror with
which the subject-matter must be conceived. . . .
74
Pope finds himself indeed hag-ridden by these
poor creatures; they excite in him feelings irrele-
vantly powerful, of waste, of unavoidable futility,
which no bullying of [the] object can satisfy. 13
This emphasis on doubleness is important. Pope is ex-
posing the spiritual hollowness that lurks behind vanity,
the shocking self-mystification of defining "prudence"
as a deliberate pretense of wickedness, and the abysmal
emotional emptiness that conceals love when it exists
and feigns it when it doesn't. As women, they are be-
neath contempt. But as human beings, these ghosts of
beauty have a more complex claim upon our feelings;
for all their folly, they show the operation of a funda-
mental human impulse.
This impulse is the human need to resist change.
Women are inconstant and unprincipled, Pope has said,
but at the climax of To a Lady he comes to see them in
a new light. They have a kind of character, in their
pathetically stubborn "rage to live," to maintain per-
sonality with all its defects against the attack of time.
Their resistance of course fails
See how the World its Veterans rewards!
A Youth of frolicks, an old Age of Cards,
Fair to no purpose, artful to no end,
Young without Lovers, old without a Friend,
A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot,
Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot! (243-248)
but a pitiful dignity invests their feeble efforts to keep
their identities. They remain women, but they have
come to represent a predicament all human beings
share. And although their way of coping with their pre-
dicament is badly flawed there are better ways to die
still the ways that good, sensible people choose are in
the long run no more effective, in the light of cold fact.
As usual, however, Pope will not settle for cold fact.
Having brought the poem close to tragedy, he retreats
into Augustan common sense. Death is inevitable, but
some kinds of aging and dying are more admirable than
75
others. This shift is marked by the return of the personal
tone:
Ah Friend! to dazzle let the Vain design,
To raise the Thought and touch the Heart, be
thine!
That Charm shall grow, while what fatigues
the Ring
Flaunts and goes down, an unregarded thing.
So when the Sun's broad beam has tir'd the
sight,
All mild ascends the Moon's more sober light,
Serene in Virgin Modesty she shines,
And unobserved the glaring Orb declines.
(249-256)
This lovely compliment carries an unobtrusive irony:
"Your inner beauty is more lasting and pleasing than
the outer beauty of foolish women, and it will eventu-
ally outshine theirs, but you won't triumph until you,
like them, are old," But the image of the moon, even
though it may faintly echo Pope's earlier resolution to
"Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute" (20)
and so qualify delicately the compliment, mainly asserts
his admiration for Miss Blount's spiritual beauty.
The end of To a Lady distances, though it does not
dismiss, the tragic problem of death. Pope has faced it
squarely at the climax, the most impressive and memor-
able part of the poem, and the end represents the kind
of withdrawal from tragic fact that is necessary for the
maintenance of life, or at least of sanity. Again the
recourse is to myth, in this case a myth that opposes to
time and death a loving personal relationship. But in
comparison to the Epistle to Burlington, whose conclu-
sion constructed myth from the materials of some two
thousand years of ethical and esthetic tradition, the
withdrawal into personal relations at the end of To a
Lady seems tenuously private. The power with which
the vision of human futility has been stated brings the
poem closer to tragedy than any of the other Moral
76
Essays; To a Lady seems on the verge of breaking the
pattern of meaning Pope develops in Cobham, Bathurst,
and Burlington the affirmation that a loving natural
relationship can exist between man and his world. It
lingers ominously on the possibility that the positive
potential of experience is gravely limited. Pope ends by
minimizing this possibility, and the interaction between
satiric and tragic feeling leads to a poetic triumph that
remains Augustan; but as the gap between moments of
tragic perception and positive general attitudes widens,
it seems as though Pope is moving toward a new kind of
poetic structure and subject matter.
Still, To a Lady has its place in the Moral Essays,
which (it should be insisted) need to be read as a whole.
The set of poems stands with Songs of Experience, Mid*
dlemarch, and the novels of D. H. Lawrence as one of
the most profound expressions in English literature of
how the psychic disorders of the inner life subvert our
relations with people and things, with that world of
"substance" that is the primary condition of our hu-
manity. As George Eliot puts it in Middlemarch: "There
is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out
our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of
direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men/' The
Moral Essays, to be sure, show something less than
George Eliot's all-embracing pity for men and women
who unknowingly try to adjust reality to suit their faulty
imaginations, just as Pope's tone expresses something
less than Blake's or Lawrence's vatic indignation about
doctrinal violations of substance. His Augustan poise
combines pity and indignation; in his ironic concern for
the characters in his moral drama, his insistence on the
precise pathology of their maladies and the sad uncer-
tainty of our own health, he demonstrates both the
clarity of his "general doctrine" of morality and the
persistence of "direct fellow-feeling" that alone can
keep the moralist's voice a human voice as well.
77
Satire and the Grotesque
THE Imitations of Horace, which date from the decade
between 1730 and 1740, show remarkable things hap-
pening to Pope's poetic manner. In some ways the as-
sociation of these satires with the example of Horace is
misleading. A remark of John Dennis in To Matthew
Prior, Esq; Upon the Roman Satirists ( 1721 ) pinpoints
the difficulty:
Horace argues, insinuates, engages, rallies, smiles;
Juvenal exclaims, apostrophizes, exaggerates,
lashes, stabbs. There is in Horace almost every-
where an agreeable Mixture of good Sense, and
of true Pleasantry, so that he has every where the
principle Qualities of an excellent Comick Poet.
And there is almost every where in Juvenal, Anger,
Indignation, Rage, Disdain, and the violent Emo-
tions and vehement Style of Tragedy. 1
By this definition, Pope's "Horatian" poems are often
decidedly un-Horatian in manner. He found in Horace
a wealth of satiric subjects and devices, but his "imita-
tion* is essentially a remaking of his models along lines
that are often as Juvenalian as they are Horatian. 2
It is clear that Pope and his readers immensely en-
joyed the resemblances between the social problems of
Augustan Rome and those of Augustan England. If the
faults were the same, the virtues might also correspond,
78
and such a correspondence was the primary assumption
of the neoclassic posture, the eighteenth-century man's
cherished picture of himself in the toga virilis. To
afford such pleasure, however, the literary imitation had
to succeed imaginatively; the proof of the parallel is in
the poetic life of the English version. We are, no doubt,
finally more interested in the Epistle to Arbuthnot and
the Epilogue to the Satires than in the satires that have
direct sources in Horace. But even the latter have been
remade, and they are best approached as poems in their
own right. Though the structure of topics and events
follows Horace closely, the details have usually been
so transformed and pointed as to be Pope's own, as in
this passage on the punishment of adulterers from Sober
Advice from Horace ( Sat. I ii ) :
See good Sir George of ragged Livery stript,
By worthier Footmen pist upon and whipt!
Plundered by Thieves, or Lawyers which is
worse,
One bleeds in Person, and one bleeds in
Purse;
This meets a Blanket, and that meets a
Cudgel
And all applaud the Justice All, but Budgel.
The first couplet stems from Horace's blunt hunc
perminxerunt calones, but "Sir George" belongs as
firmly to the contemporary English scene as does the
cacophony of "Cudgel-Budgel." The significant detail
of his being disguised as a footman to pursue his amours
in secret is new: he pretends to change his status when
he stoops to actions unworthy of it, but hisfpretense
becomes his real condition; and he is punished by liis
inferiors, who could not have touched him had he
kept to his proper role. The corrupt "high" suffers almost
ritualistic befouling from the more virtuous "low," and
th6 hierarchial disorder Pope's main theme in the
Imitations is symbolically put right.
79
The Satirist as Clown
The Imitations of Horace show Pope engaged in a diffi-
cult task of poetic self-definition. Given a society that
desperately needs satiric correction, who is the satirist
to be? How should he talk? What personal attitudes and
public stances are appropriate to his task? The first im-
itation, Satire II i ( 1733), addressed to William Fortes-
que, begins to suggest a solution in its use. of the
Horatian dialogue form. In the Moral Essays, despite
Warburton's editing, the suggestions of dialogue play
a minor part, because the conversations bring together
views that essentially agree; but in the Imitations dia-
logue plays off attitudes that are in serious conflict.
Although the opposing views usually reach some sort of
equilibrium, the final agreement is ironic, and the grow-
ing distance between the dramatized "Pope" and his
interlocutors indicates a significant change of method.
In Satire II i Fortesque is the sympathetic but discreet
adviser, counseling Pope to stop writing or at least
switch over to the normal, safe mode of literary flattery
that will pay off in "a Knighthood, or the Bays' (22).
But Pope is helpless "Fools rush into my Head, and so
I write" (14). Like Shippen or Montaigne he cannot
withhold his thoughts even to conceal his own flaws:
"In me what Spots (for Spots I have) 'appear, / Will
prove at least the Medium must be clear" (55~5 6 )-
Satire is a lens between the poet and his world, and it
reveals faithfully the defect^ on either side, As Pope
himself once put it: "The best way to prove the clear-
ness of our mind is by shewing its faults; as when a
stream discovers the dirt at the bottom, it convinces us
of the transparency and purity of the water/' 3 The
satirist's honesty about himself measures his compulsive
devotion to truth: "In Durance, Exile, Bedlam, or the
Mint, / Like Lee or Budgell, I will Rhyme and Print"
(99-100). His morality is virtually a natural force, and
so he may seem foolish or even mad to his prudent
80
friends. He lacks a firm social status; like the Shakespear-
ean clown, he can afford to blurt out things that more
respectable people may find disconcertingly true.
His enemies include the same corruptors of nature en-
countered in Bathurst "Thieves, Supercargoes, Sharp-
ers, and Directors'* (72). And Fortesque's strongest
warning presents a dire picture of the financial world
pooling its resources against this irritating foe: "Plums
and Directors, Shylock and his Wife, / Will club their
Testers, now, to take your Life!" (103-104). Despite
the joke about avarice "testers" are either very old
coins or relatively valueless ones the main point is
still the abstractness of their lives; the "club" they may
use on Pope is not a cudgel but a financial pool. Still,
such thematic connections with the Moral Essays are
combinedTwith a new and radical view of the poet and
his social role. He is "un-plac'd, un-pension'd, no Man's
Heir, or Slave/' and this independence allows him to
"brand the bold Front of shameless, guilty Men" and
"bare the mean Heart that lurks beneath a Star" ( 100-
115) without troubling to be cautious or discreet. He
does not pretend to the courage of Dryden or Boileau,
who had a great deal to lose, but even a simple man
like himself can criticize a social order he himself has
so little part in. (The pose of humility of course ex-
presses the most powerful sort of pride who would
want a part in such a world? ) This is more than simple
rejection of society. Pope's satire begins with the Au-
gustan double vision, which combines belief that the
ideals of his culture are true and good with a recogni-
tion that many of the forms of that culture have been
drained of their ideal vitality. The satirist stands just
outside the actual society, but he stands squarely within
another order, composed of good men from every class,
in which the ideal values are preserved and toward
which the satiric rhetoric urges society itself to move.
The poet's ideal society is closely associated with
rural nature:
81
Know, all the distant Din that World can keep
Rolls o'er my Grotto, and but sooths my Sleep.
There, my Retreat the best Companions
grace,
Chiefs, out of War, and Statesmen, out of
Place. (Sat. Hi, 123-126)
This of course derives from the Horatian theme of with-
drawal from the confusion and corruption of urban life
to the peaceful sanity of the Sabine farm; but Pope's
imitation draws authority from the withdrawal that was
a real part of his own life. The villa at Twickenham was
itself an imitation of Horace. What may have begun as
mere obedience to the laws barring Catholics from
permanent residence in London ended as a self-con-
scious but meaningful effort to live in the old Augustan
manner. Friends like Bolingbroke and Peterborough
were great men, and Pope's easy association with them
proved that the official distinctions of birth and rank
did not define the most important kinds of human rela-
tions. The truly great man remains great even when
"out of place" like the satirist, and the man who has no
"place" the Catholic son of a linen merchant, who
makes his living solely by writing can, if his talents
and personal qualities are sufficient, mingle with the
great on equal terms. The ideal society is "natural" in
two senses? its setting is country retirement, and its
relationships ignore artificial distinctions. Pope asserts
his place in an order that nnllifi.es ordinary social cat-
egories with understandable pride:
Envy must own, I live among the Great,
No Pimp of Pleasure, and no Spy of State . . .
To help who want, to forward who excel;
This, all who know me, know; who love me,
tell;
And who unknown defame me, let them be
Scriblers or Peers, alike are Mob to me.
(133-140)
82
The conclusion of Satire II i, however, shows the diffi-
culty of maintaining this position. Fortesque admits the
persuasiveness of Pope's plea, but he reminds him that
"Laws are explained by Men" and that his writings will
be judged by their effect on the existing social order
there are statutes against Libels and Satires, Pope has a
cunning answer:
Libels and Satires! lawless Things indeed!
But grave Epistles, bringing Vice to light,
Such as a King might read, a Bishop write,
Such as Sir Robert would approve
F. Indeed?
The Case is alter'd you may then proceed.
In such a Cause the Plaintiff will be hiss'd,
My Lords the Judges laugh, and you're dis-
miss'd. (150-156)
This wry joke returns the poem to reality. For all Pope's
fine talk about the private society to which alone he
admits obligations, only the powers that be can save
him from prosecution. The official scale still prevails in
matters of public concern. The pastoral society of merit
has not yet displaced the city- world of established social
formalism; the law depends not on justice but on the
attitude of George II or Walpole or whoever stands at
the top of the ladder. The rural moralist remains a
rustic clown in the eyes of the worldly, and the irony of
the satirist's role cannot be resolved. Country nature in
the Imitations, however, does more than locate the
satirist's perspective of innocent shrewdness and asso-
ciate it with an aristocracy of merit. Immediately after
a passage in the "Murray" satire (Epistle I vi, 63-109)
that shows wealth and innovation to be corruptors of
virtue, we find this:
Up, up! cries Gluttony, 'tis break of day,
Go drive the Deer, and drag the finny-prey;
With hounds and horns go hunt an Appetite
So Russel did, but could not eat at night,
83
CalFd happy Dog! the Beggar at his door,
And env/d Thirst and Hunger to the Poor.
(112-117)
This is a 'Version of pastoral/' but with an ironic twist
to the Empsonian sense. Russel can't feel hunger and
thirst, and he supposes the poor must be happy because
they can. The simple life is best, after all. But Pope sees
that thirst and hunger are good only when they can be
satisfied the poor are as miserable in their way as Rus-
sel is in his. "Happy Dog" both sentimentalizes the
beggar and reveals the frivolous snobbery of RusseFs
vocabulary. Empson's formula "from seeing the two
sorts of people combined like this you thought better
of both; the best parts of both were used" 4 gets re-
versed: the worst parts of both define a social crisis]
The toughness of Pope's irony can be measured by com[
paring Edward Young's treatment of the same problem:
"High stations tumult, but not bliss, create: / None
think the great unhappy, but the great" ( The Universal
Passion, I, 237-238). That is, they think they're un-
happy, and they are, which is simpleminded and smug
by Pope's standard.
The isolation from substantial experience, as in the
Moral Essays, provides the Imitations with a moral
norm. Pope's treatment of the theme ranges -from thS
frivolous to the serious. The racy Sober Advice from
Horace (Sat. I ii) explores the perversity of cultivated
lust, which transforms sex from healthy pleasure into
an imaginative disease whose only substantial result is
pain or financial ruin for the lover who will "run to
Perils, Sword, and Law, / All for a Thing [he] ne're so
much as saw" ( 135-136 ) . But while Sober Advice need
not be taken very solemnly, the appeal to nature is else-
where serious enough. There is the merchant whom "the
spectre of pale Poverty" drives to "burn through the
Tropic, freeze beneath the Pole'* (Ep. I i, 69-72); and
the misers;
, . . some farm the Poor-box., some the Pews;
Some keep Assemblies, and wou'd keep the
Stews . . .
While with the silent gowth of ten per Cent,
In Dirt and darkness hundreds stink content.
(Ep. I i, 128-133)
The "agricultural" language recalls the alternative to
such squalor, the simple productive life on some Sabine
farm. Nature harbored the perfect society before "Times
corrupt" perverted social harmony and made satire nec-
essary (To Augustus, 241-248), and it remains avail-
able as sustenance to simple, immediate wants:
From yon old wallnuMree a show'r shall fall;
And grapes, long-lingring on my only wall,
And figs, from standard and Espalier join:
The devl is in you if you cannot dine.
(Sa*. II ii 9 145-148)
Give me, I cry'd (enough for me)
My Bread, and Independency!
So bought an Annual Rent or two,
And liv'd just as you see I do. ...
A little House, with Trees a-row,
And like its Master, very low.
(Ep. I oft, 69-78)
This last may seem to hedge a little as he cannot very-
well till the soil himself, a gentleman needs a rent or
two to live on. But this is just the point. Pope's rural
nostalgia is not sentimental primitivism but a sophisti-
cated impulse to recreate the original goodness of soci-
ety. The scornful passage (Sat. II ii, 49-60) about the
Wortley Montagus shows that meanness remains itself
regardless of place; the country has no therapeutic
power. It is simply the place where virtue can be sure
of itself,
The natural life thus is chiefly a metaphor, a role that
the poet would assume, compounded of the Horatian
85
poet-in-retirement and the rural aristocrat of the native
English tradition. Some posing in all this cannot be
denied, but though the role is far from unflattering to
Pope, it expresses more than personal vanity. The satirist
can get no leverage from within the decadent society he
attacks. He must achieve outside society an identity that
embodies the values society lacks. The satiric identity of
natural aristocrat is partly fact and partly a deliberate
and necessay fiction; and Pope accepts and uses the
lingering possibility that the natural man may be a
clown as well as an aristocrat. He expresses a dream that
is no less his own for having also been the dream of
Horace. Parts of the dream are real, but another, less
tractable reality opposes and mocks it at every turn;
the alienation of the moral norm from the existing social
"average" produces an increasing strain in the poet's
voice.
The Satirist as Hero
The poet's conflict with his world gives unity to the
Imitations of Horace. Seen from outside, society has
crudely dissociated "distinction" from moral worth:
There, London's voice: "Get Mony, Mony
still!
"And then let Virtue follow, if she will."
This, this the saving doctrine, preach'd to all
From low St. James's up to high St. Paul.
(Ep. 1 i, 79-82)
An accurate moral language would keep clear the dis-
tinction between "salvation" and "savings." But one need
not measure this society from outside to see the blur-
ring of judgment that characterizes it. Even money is
not a firm source of effective status, since "the Poor have
the same itch" as the wealthy for constant changes of
style and environment (Ep. I i, 152-160), Upper and
lower become indistinguishably silly, or worse:
But if to Pow'r and Place your Passion lye,
If in the Pomp of Life consist the Joy;
86
Then hire a Slave, (or if you will, a Lord)
To do the Honours, and to give the Word . . .
"This may be troublesome, is near the Chair;
"That makes three Members, this can chuse a
May'r."
Instructed thus, you bow, embrace, protest,
Adopt him Son, or Cozen at the least,
Then turn about, and laugh at your own Jest.
(Ep. I vi, 97-109)
"Or if you will, a Lord" identifies the confusion: "if you
prefer, hire a Lord instead of a slave"; or, "if you choose
to call him that." In this crumbling order slaves are hard
to tell from lords, and flunkeys (titled or otherwise)
govern the conduct of their nominal betters. The solid
familial relationships of a stable society dissolve when
one invents parodies of them as a joke or a political strat-
agem. We foresee the dreadful Triumph of Vice in the
Epilogue to the Satires (I, 157-158), where "thronging
Millions to the Pagod run, / And offer Country, Parent,
Wife, or Son."
As the "Fortesque" satire shows, Pope opposes to this
corrupt reality his moral ideal of the private society of
true merit. But the ideal seems tenuous when translated
into practical possibility the effective social reform that
satire theoretically aims at and increasingly we hear
that the satirist is losing his Augustan poise. The drama,
of the magnificent Epilogue to the Satires ( 1738 ) in fact
relies on the collision of blunt moral speech with a more
equivocal, temporizing utterance that recalls Pope's ear-
lier Augustan voice. "Fr." (the anonymous friend who
serves as adversarius 5 in the two dialogues ) complains
about Pope's directness, and his own talk nicely demon-
strates the "sly, polite, insinuating stile" of the "artful
Manager" Horace which he recommends to the poet
(I, 19-22):
To Vice and Folly to confine the jest,
Sets half the world, God knows, against the
rest;
Did not the Sneer of more impartial men
At Sense and Virtue, balance all agen. (I, 57-60 )
The metaphor of balance, which in the Essay on Man
and the Moral Essays expressed positive alternatives to
the apparent chaos of immediate experience, now figures
as an argument against the poet's position. Fr. is not im-
perceptive, but it is enough for him to relish in private
the amusing discrepancies between "official" and real
virtue. He seems a virtual caricature of the Dryden of
Religio Laid, preferring common quiet to dangerous
controversy over unreal issues. In him Pope gives his
mature assessment of the cool, disengaged urbanity of
an Addison or a Shaftesbury, which had been an ideal
of his own earlier days: " 'Tis not enough your Counsel
still be true, / Blunt Truths more Mischief than nice
Falshoods do" (Essay on Criticism, 572-573). Fr. pre-
sents himself as a realist. His theme, like the (at least
professed) theme of Mandeville, is the inevitable and
useful imperfection of things as they are. His voice, at
times indulgent and avuncular, at times maliciously fe-
line, at times shrill with shock at Pope's plain speaking,
is the familiar voice of intelligence debilitated by too
much knowledge, sophistication that marks not moral
subtlety but Gerontion-like moral paralysis.
This speaker is more than a convenient straw man.
Both Fr. and P. are versions of Pope himself, or of any
man aware of the conflict between his social identity and
his secret image of himself as autonomous moral hero.
The dialogue form articulates the inner debate between
that part of us which "knows better" and that other part
which will brook no compromises of its passionate com-
mitment to truth. Pope controls both voices, of course,
but the Epilogue moves not toward an Augustan recon-
ciliation but toward acceptance of P/s view, in all its
extravagant exaggeration.
The two dialogues of the Epilogue develop various
responses to the politic voice of Fr. Until late in the
poem the mode of Dialogue I is ironic in the textbook
88
sense: P. pretends to defend "the dignity of Vice," and
the terms of the defense reveal the speciousness of jus-
tifying things as they are. If, as Fr. insists, the crimes of
the wellborn are not to be dwelt upon by the satirist,
the job still remains of keeping distinct the separation
between classes. The vulgar are imitating the sins
of their betters with intolerable cheek: Gibber's son
"swear[s] like a Lord/' Ward "draw[s] Contracts with a
Statesman's skill," Bond and Peter Walter "pay their
Debts [and] keep their Faith like Kings" (that is, not at
all). The joke is clear enough. We condemn them, but
not because we snobbishly think that they may become
better than they should be. In this topsy-turvy society
the highest are the worst; plebeians have quite as much
inclination to vice, but they are normally saved by a
lack of style; criminal know-how ought to be confined
to the upper classes, where one expects it and is pre-
pared to cope with it.
But the indirections of irony fail to undermine Fr/s
complacence, and toward the end of the dialogue P. is
driven to a more open kind of speaking. Virtue is class-
less, he remarks, and need not concern him "She's still
the same, belov'd, contented thing" whether she "dwell
in a Monk, or light upon a King." (We note the barbed
difference between dwelling and lighting upon.) But
Vice is "undone, if she forgets her Birth, / And stoops
from Angels to the Dregs of Earth." The bitterness of
"Angels" marks a change of tone; conversational give-
and-take fades away in the concluding lines (145-172)
of the first dialogue, the chilling vision of the Triumph
of Vice. The everyday world is revealed as an Inferno;
every human activity blurs into an ugly parody of itself
as cultivated irony is abandoned and P/s voice trembles
with shock and rage. Fr.'s "political" view of a reality
sustained and ordered by opposing evils has been a
delusion. The oxymorons of Vice innocence is shame
and villainy sacred are only blunter versions of the
moral evasions and mystifications that Fr. has more ele-
89
gantly advocated. In the final couplet the debate be-
tween Fr. and P., the political man and the moral hero,
has in fact been transcended: "Yet may this Verse (if
such a Verse remain ) / Show there was one who held it
in disdain." The dramatic fiction of "dialogue" is delib-
erately broken this has been a poem, "verse" and not
life. Anger and disgust shatter artistic illusion, feeling
takes precedence over mere form, and we see Pope
finally not as poetic maker but as passionate human
being. By asserting his independence of a corrupt social
reality he defines his own isolation; his lonely voice re-
jects the world in order to maintain his moral integrity.
Pope's satiric protagonist is essentially an heroic fig-
ure, and he has to endure the ironies of his situation that
Shakespeare explores so uncompromisingly in Corio-
lanus. Both Coriolanus and P. confront a disparity be-
tween the moral ego and the demands made upon it by
political and social facts. Each experiences these de-
mands impatiently, in the arrogant assurance that his
personal "nature" affords a surer measure of truth and
right than does the politic compromising of Menenius
or Fr. And at the moment of crisis, each turns upon the
political world and banishes it, in a gesture of superb
integrity and equally of supreme absurdity. We are
made to feel the virtue of single-mindedness even as we
yearn for signs of ambivalence, for the discovery of the
middle ground where education takes place in the rec-
ognition and pondering of both the reality and the in-
compatibility of conflicting motives. In the Epilogue
Pope dramatizes himself as heroic clown, but in a more
knowing way than does Coriolanus. Pope's satirist is
both Coriolanus and Shakespeare, in effect, understand-
ing the comic possibilities of moral heroism even as he
insists on being a moral hero.
The conclusion of Dialogue I is equivalent to Corio-
lanus' insistence that "there is a world elsewhere"; Dia-
logue II recalls his awful discovery that there is no such
thing. Again Pope begins in the mode of ironic indirec-
90
tion, as if to make one last try at preserving his balance.
The satirist would be a hunter of vice, but in the face of
the adversarius knowledgeable explanation of the game
laws the dignity of this role evaporates, and he is left
as a kind of frustrated poacher, ruefully asking if there
isn't some prey he may legally take. Again, however,
such irony is inadequate to the gravity of the problem,
and P.'s voice again takes on the inflections of the serio-
comic moral hero who doggedly follows virtue whether
she points "to Priest or Elder, Whig or Tory, / Or round
a Quaker's Beaver cast a Glory" (96-97). The absurdity
of the image is not to be minimized; by urbane, "culti-
vated" standards this involuntary morality is amusingly
close to madness, and Pope knows it. But to express such
intense conviction one can only shrug off laughter and
keep on talking:
Enough for half the Greatest of these days
To 'scape my Censure, not expect my Praise:
Are they not rich? what more can they pre-
tend?
Dare they to hope a Poet for their Friend?
(112-115)
This is more than personal egotism. The "I" of the poem
is not simply the man but the man as poet, with the
poet's claim to dignity and virtue that are qualities of
his craft and not just of his personality. But there is
anxiety in the pride. Compared with the immediacy of
heroic action, poetry is a pretty unsubstantial weapon
and vice a Protean object, and Pope's arrogance seems
partly defensive, an exorcising of Vice by a willful affir-
mation of faith in Virtue:
Ask you what Provocation I have had?
The strong Antipathy of Good to Bad.
When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
Th' Affront is mine, my Friend, and should be
yours.
Mine, as a Foe profess'd to false Pretence,
Who think a Coxcomb's Honour like his Sense;
91
Mine, as a Friend to ev'ry worthy mind;
And mine as Man, who feel for all mankind.
(197-204)
P. stubbornly resists complication and moral subtlety.
There is Good and there is Bad the capitalizing of ab-
stract nouns never did stronger service and their an-
tipathy has the natural inevitability of magnetism. But
antipathy is a defensive feeling, and P/s image of himself
as some almost Promethean sufferer for "all mankind"
shows how far he has been driven from the confident,
ironic modesty that is the Horatian satirist's normal air:
Fr. You're strangely proud.
P. So proud, I am no Slave:
So impudent, I own myself no Knave:
So odd, my Country's Ruin makes me grave.
Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
Men not afraid of God, afraid of me:
Safe from the Bar, the Pulpit, and the Throne,
Yet touched and sham'd by Ridicule alone.
(205-211)
Like Coriolanus he seems "a thing / Made by some
other deity than Nature, / That shapes man better";
yet for all its loftiness this is an oddly minimal statement.
Even the slightest distaste for servility is pride by the
standards of this world, and the tone is rueful in its
arrogance.
Still, the positive aspects of this pride are impressive.
If he has been driven into this ultimate position, the
ground he now occupies is the center of his case, which
no longer needs to be qualified and compromised. The
satirist, no longer able to speak simply as a man among
men, projects himself as God's deputy, trying not by
persuasion but by sheer intensity of will to make an
impious society right the imbalance between its values
and divine ones. His "sacred Weapon" finds its "Heav'n-
directed" target in the blasphemy of official distinctions,
"all that makes Saints of Queens, and Gods of Kings/'
And his heroic intensity nullifies the earlier Triumph of
Vice with a vision of Virtue:
. . . diadem'd with Rays divine,
Touch'd with the Flame that breaks from
Virtue's Shrine,
Her Priestless Muse forbids the Good to dye,
And opes the Temple of Eternity. (232-235)
The permanence of art, treated with some unsureness in
The Temple of Fame, now gets eloquent assertion.
Immortality rewards artistic virtue, and while it is
figurative immortality rather than literal, the petty
achievements of the worldly cannot earn it. The true
moral scale transcends time and death, and the poet
speaks for a power that is ideal and eternal:
Let Envy howl while Heav'n's whole Chorus
sings,
And bark at Honour not confer'd by Kings;
Let Flatt'ry sickening see the Incense rise,
Sweet to the World, and grateful to the Skies:
Truth guards the Poet, sanctifies the line,
And makes Immortal, Verse as mean as mine.
(242-247)
But Pope recognizes, quite as clearly as Shakespeare,
the ironies that adhere to the heroic identification of
self with natural virtue. The grand assurance of tone can-
not disguise the fact that this assertion of the artist's
unique moral dignity is a virtual confession of defeat.
Heroism is a function of alienation. Like any hero,
Coriolanus grows more awesome and mysterious as his
loyalties to other people or extrapersonal causes drop
away; he is most himself (most unlike us) at the moment
of his death, when he has finally detached himself from
every external limit to his freedom. (His death is in
effect a metaphor for the moral suicide his attempts to
preserve his moral identity have caused. ) Pope's satirist
would not need to glorify his role so insistently if every
O J J J
other kind of virtue had not disappeared from his world.
93
He simply has no one to talk to. The select, understand-
ing interlocutors to whom the Moral Essays and the
Imitations of Horace were largely addressed have been
replaced by the anonymous and hopelessly cynical
^Friend," who in the ways that count is no friend at all.
The dialogue has become an oration, in fact a harangue,
addressed to anyone who will listen, and this provides a
final twist of bitter comedy:
Yes, the last Pen for Freedom let me draw,
When Truth stands trembling on the edge of
Law:
Here, Last of Britons! let your Names be read;
Are none, none living? let me praise the Dead,
And for that Cause which made your Fathers
shine,
Fall, by the Votes of their degen'rate Line!
Fr. Alas! alas! pray end what you began,
And write next winter more Essays on Man.
(248-255)
The grand tone has grown almost too grand. ( "Pen" and
"Votes" in this context are perilously close to bathos. )
And the discovery that the good men are all dead
that the celebration of virtue must be an elegy pro-
duces a faltering of the voice that is close to the double-
take of farce. Yet even this approach to absurdity can-
not stop the last furious assertion of integrity.
Truth and Law, the two vocabularies with which the
Imitations of Horace have dealt, come into open con-
flict, and it may be Truth that is the weaker. "Pope is
thinking once more of the threatened censorship of the
press," Mr. Butt says, 6 but that particular legal hazard
reflects a broader and more shocking suppression of
personal virtue by an entrenched and corrupt public
order. There is honest feeling in Pope's final note to the
poem:
This was the last poem of the kind printed by our
author, with a resolution to publish no more; but
to enter thus, in the most plain and solemn manner
94
he could, a sort of PROTEST against that insuperable
corruption and depravity of manners, which he had
been so unhappy as to live to see. Could he have
hoped to have amended any, he had continued
those attacks; but bad men were grown so shame-
less and so powerful, that Ridicule was become as
unsafe as it was ineffectual.
Both the defiance and the frustration of this note are
clear in the poem's last lines. Like the Friend, we rec-
ognize that P. has gone too far; such extravagance is
probably as futile as it is uncivilized. But unlike Fr.,
we know that what has happened in these dialogues is
worth any number of cautiously generalized essays in
moral definition. It is true that Pope's presentation of P.
recognizes and explores the comic aspects of the Corio-
lanus-like moral hero, the man who will not compromise
his vision of experience even though the world leaves
him no positive alternative to bitterness. Yet we surely
respond to P. with a warm approval that Shakespeare
forbids us to feel about Coriolanus. Although we rec-
ognize that heroism may be as absurd as it is venerable,
and as dangerous, the recognition tellingly defines the
price of perfect virtue. The price is painfully high; to
pay it one may have to abandon the ironic defenses of
urbane civility and expose oneself to ridicule. But
though it is one thing to be a fool because you are one,
in all innocence, it is quite another to decide that seem-
ing a fool is preferable to the moral evasions into which
urbanity can lead. Readers of Blake and the "mad"
poems of Yeats should have no trouble in recognizing
Pope's satiric identity, or in understanding that, for all
its eccentricity and exaggeration, it expresses a moral
intelligence that is complex and final.
The Grotesque Mode
The new poetic mode of the Horatian satires is in part
determined by generic considerations; satire tradition-
ally allows a less decorous and impersonal speech than
95
do the "higher" genres. But Pope's decision to stoop to
truth and moralize his song must have been impelled
by a genuine need to represent experience in a different,
more violent way. Suprisingly often he turns his com-
paratively urbane Horatian models into "paraphrases"
that are, in detail and over-all effect, anything but
urbane:
Slander or Poyson, dread from Delias Rage,
Hard Words or Hanging, if your Judge be
Page;
From furious Sappho scarce a milder Fate,
p_x'd by her Love, or libelTd by her Hate:
Its proper Pow'r to hurt, each Creature feels,
Bulls aim their horns, and Asses lift their
heels,
'Tis a Bear's Talent not to kick, but hug,
And no man wonders he's not stung by Pug:
So drink with Waters, or with Chartres eat,
They'll never poison you, they'll only cheat.
(Sat. Ill, 81-90)
Except for the couplet on Sappho, the cues for every-
thing in this passage are in the Horatian source, yet
Pope's version seems intense, harsh in tone, compared
with the cool, explanatory amusement of the original.
It is partly the difference between Horace's relatively
relaxed hexameters and pope's tensely antithetical cou-
plets, but Pope spent the last fifteen years of his life
perfecting the couplet's resources for expressing just
this kind of feeling.
The animal imagery is adapted from Horace, but it
points to a kind of language that dominates the Epistle
to Arbuthnot and the Epilogue, where Pope has a free
hand. Animals in the Pastorals and Windsor Forest
were idealized exemplifications of natural innocence, as
they are in the Essay on Man and Bathurst, where they
indicate the dignity of nature as against the depravity of
bad men. But in the Imitations Pope picks up the view
advanced in the first Dunciad, that bad men are not
96
different from animals but like them: Avidien and his
wife are dog and bitch (Sat. II ii, 49); both "Lord Fanny"
(Sat. Hi, 6) and the Grub Street hack (Ep. to Arbuth.,
89) are spiders; profligates return from their orgies
"transformed to Beasts" (Ep. I ui, 122); bishops and
peers are steers and packhorses (1740, 69); Sporus is
butterfly, wasp, spaniel, toad, and snake all in one (Ep.
to Arbuth., 308-333). Such comparisons are of course
traditional in satire; the images point scornfully at devi-
ations from the best human possibilities, and the irony
remains positively "operative/' in the Jamesian sense it
"implies and projects the possible other case, the case
rich and edifying where the actuality is pretentious and
vain." 7 To this extent we are still in the realm of Augus-
tan technique.
But the gusto with which Pope frequently explores
the distasteful details of such comparisons suggest that a
view of nature as moral chaos is impinging upon the
view of it as moral norm, as in this passage from the
Epilogue (II), in which Pope defends his taunting of
Lord Hervey about the dubious authorship of his Latin
epitaph on Queen Caroline:
P. Faith it imports not much from whom it
came,
Whoever borrow'd, could not be to blame,
Since the whole House did afterwards the
same:
Let Courtly Wits to Wits afford supply,
As Hog to Hog in Huts of Westphaly;
If one, thro' Nature's Bounty or his Lord's,
Has what the frugal, dirty soil affords,
From him the next receives it, thick or thin,
As pure a Mess almost as it came in;
The blessed Benefit, not there confined,
Drops to the third who nuzzles close behind;
From tail to mouth, they feed, and they
carouse;
The last, full fairly gives it to the House.
97
Fr. This filthy Simile, this beastly Line,
Quite turns my Stomach P. So does Flatt ry
mine;
And all your Courtly Civet-Cats can vent,
Perfume to you, to me is Excrement, ( 168-184)
F.'s offhand indifference vanishes in the fierce obscenity,
and by Augustan standards of social and poetic decorum
the adversarius' objection seems fair. The analogy would
cut more insolently if it were merely suggested, and
Pope's delight in the details of the figure magnifies the
petty occasion out of all reasonable proportion; it is a
filthy simile, and P/s final rejoinder seems petulant and
lame. Yet the passage is alive in a way that Augustan
verse can hardly be. There comes a time when urbanity
cannot cope with evil, and it may be dangerous to dis-
criminate between minor evil and major. The satirist
can express his shock at such deviation from the norm
only by himself departing from it in the other direction.
Cultivated discourse cannot do full justice to vileness
like the stable boys who befouled "good Sir George,"
Pope's obscenity objectifies the spiritual filth behind the
disguises of evil.
The art of such a passage is above all "dramatic"; we
follow the voice of a "Pope" who is a creation of literary
resources and not simply the poet himself. But it seems
clear that the materials from which the dramatized
"Pope" is made are more than fictive. "Incongruity" is
the key to these satires; I have shown some of the ways
Pope pairs unlike things within the large opposition of
nature and society; and his characteristic rhetorical
device, the antithesis, is obviously a perfect instrument
for expressing the incongruous. The incongruity of The
Rape of the Lock is essentially comic: social frivolity is
projected against pastoral and heroic backgrounds to
make it ridiculous. We can laugh at Belinda without
ceasing to love her because she is smaller than she might
be. "Humor," as Kenneth Burke says, "specializes in in-
congruities; but by its trick of 'conversion downwards/
by its stylistic ways for assuring us in dwarfing thef
magnitude of obstacles or threats, it provides us relief
in laughter." As we move through the Moral Essays ancj
the Imitations of Horace, however, our laughter be-
comes more and more uneasy as Pope's tone grows
increasingly sardonic and his imagery less and less dec-
orous. As a convenient name for such a change, Mr.
Burke proposes "grotesque/' which he defines as "incor^
gruity without the laughter":
The grotesque comes to the fore when confusion in
the forensic pattern gives more prominence to the
subjective elements of imagery than to the objec-
tive, or public, elements. One could probably ana-
lyze any art, even the most classically clear, and
find there such motives as the pit, symbolic castra-
tion, rebirth, the mystic awe of light. But when the
public frame erected above these primitive re-
sponses is broken, the essence stands more clearly
revealed. The symbolic quality is revealed more
clearly, precisely because the forensic superstruc-
ture erected above it is less firm. 8
To apply this definition to Pope of course require^
some adjusting. Although there is something like the
"mystic awe of light" in the Dunciad, it is not necessary
in Pope's case to pursue very far Mr. Burke's connection
of the grotesque with mysticism, and such Ur-motives
as castration and rebirth may be left to the consideration
of some future psychiatric interpreter. Yet the general
idea of the "grotesque" may help to explain certain
qualities of Pope's later poetic manner. In the passage
about the Hogs of Westphaly, for example, his sub-
jective interest in his imagery does seem to overcomd
his sense of the public decorum his audience was ac-
customed to find even in so impure a genre as satire.
His increasing willingness to disturb the dramatic pro-
priety of his poems suggests that such propriety, as con-
ventionally defined, could not adequately contain the
feelings he wanted to incorporate. Arid it is tempting to
99
speculate that this kind of disturbance indicates a grow-
ing doubt in the ability of "public" intellectual structures
all the content and overtones of such words as "deco-
rum," "society," "reason," and "order" to control the
tendency of men and nature to become disorganized and
mad. ( By an amusing etymological accident, the Italian
grottesco is derived from the word for "grotto," that
symbol of Pope's personal withdrawal from the public
world. )
Certainly the Horatian poems are grotesque in some
common senses of the term. They show Pope increas-
ingly willing to deal with certain unpleasant physical
realities that would have represented dangerous breaches
of decorum in most of his earlier poems:
And Peers give way, exalted as they are,
Ev'n to their own S-r-v nee in a Carr.
(Ep.IIU, 106-107)
Oldfield, with more than Harpy throat en-
du'd,
Cries, "Send me, Gods! a whole Hog bar-
becud!"
Oh blast it, South-winds! till a stench exhale,
Rank as the ripeness of a Rabbit's tail.
( Sa*. II , 35-28)
While with the silent growth of ten per Cent,
In Dirt and darkness hundreds stink content.
(Ep. I i, 13^-133)
The stomach ( cram'd from ev'ry dish,
A Tomb of boil'd, and roast, and flesh, and
fish,
Where Bile, and wind, and phlegm, and acid
jar,
And all the Man is one intestine war) .
( Sat II , 69-72)
100
Rufas at either end a Common-Shoar,
Sweet Moll and Jack are Civet-Cat and
Boar. . . .
While bashful Jenny, ev'n at Morning-Prayer,
Spreads her Fore-Buttocks to the Navel bare.
( Sober Advice, 29-34 )
The first of these passages is wholly Pope's invention,
and the others stem from comparatively discreet sug-
gestions in Horace. It is not a matter simply of referring
to such details, but of pointing to them with such de-
scriptive gusto. To be sure, the contrast with the
decorum of Pope's earlier poems is in part deceptive,
since they observe the more restricted proprieties of
genres other than satire; Pope may not outdo some of
the English satirists (Donne and Marston, for example)
in grotesquerie, but he does seem to strain even the
loose standards of decorum of Horatian satire, the tra-
dition that he was most consciously following and to
which his readers were attuned.
A less obvious kind of grotesquerie seems to be
emerging in the treatment of death as it affects man and
nature:
Let rising Granaries and Temples here,
There mingled Farms and Pyramids appear,
Link Towns to Towns with Avenues of Oak,
Enclose whole Downs in Walls, 'tis all a joke!
Inexorable Death shall level all,
And Trees, and Stones, and Farms, and
Farmer fall. (Ep. II ii, 258-263)
"This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time" (Ep. II ii,
76) is seen as the inescapable enemy of man and his
whole existence in nature, and the classical confidence
in natural morality, which eased the terror of such
knowledge in the Moral Essays, has weakened. The
bitterness of " 'tis all a joke" and the almost surrealistic
grimness of the last line are not in Horace Pope's own
feelings are wholly engaged in this "imitation."
101
"Grotesque" thus names any indication, in image,
tone, or theme, that the poetic speaker finds the Augus-
tan tension between the ideal and the actual hard to
sustain. Another way of putting it is to say that Pope
exercises his public role as poet less confidently. He,
must increasingly remind us, through direct reference
to his own life or through eccentric quirks of speech,
that he is a "real person" as well as a poet, and that the
demands of personality are often more powerful than
professional decorum. In The Rape of the Lock and the
Epistle to Burlington, the great masterpieces of his
Augustan manner, the conventional medium is wholly
adequate to express the range of feeling the poet brings
to it. He can say all he has to say within the limits of his
chosen manner. In the later poems, however, the trend
is away from this union of convention and feeling, and
toward an art in which personal experience, violent and
idiosyncratic, tends to be too powerful for the "forensic
superstructure" of the poem's avowed form to bear. This
trend is clearest in the satires that have no direct source
in Horace. In the Epilogue the satirist's feelings con-
stantly threaten to break out of the poem, as his voice
falls into ironic despair and rises to furious honesty
in an almost helpless rhythm. In Dialogue II, especially,
these shifts of tone make up the real poetic structure.
But the Epistle to Arbuthnot may best reveal the full
significance of Pope's grotesque satiric mode.
Persona and Personality
The Epistle to Arbuthnot is a pastiche, incorporating
fragments written at various times for various occa-
sions, such as the portrait of Atticus and the lines on
Pope's mother. Though as a consequence it lacks the
most obvious kinds of formal order, 9 Pope is able to
give it unity by his careful management of tone. We
are as much interested in Pope, or the speaker who
bears his name, as we are in the people he talks about;
and the epistle achieves its form in our fascinated obser-
stance and disgusting insects, and it deliberately dis-
torts the "poetic" feeling one expects to be evoked by a
natural mystery.
The physical and moral grotesquerie of the world
Pope describes in Arbuthnot justifies the role he plays in
the poem. His persona is the "plain good man driven to
write satire," 11 but the effectiveness of the mask de-
pends upon our sense of what he is driven by a de-
formity of values that pervades the whole literary
world, from rhyming Peers like Sporus on down to
Ambrose Philips, who "turns a Persian Tale for half a
crown" (the normal wage for prostitution) and the
poor compulsive scribbler "who lock'd from Ink and
Paper, scrawls / With desp'rate Charcoal round his
darken'd walls." And the epistle deals with more than
literary folly. The sin of the scribblers is not just that
they write badly: they are bad (stupid, sick, dishonest,
insane) men. Pope attacks Grub Street and the Court
on more than personal grounds; the literary war stands
for the whole death struggle between natural moral
intelligence and the unnatural mindlessness that seeks
to reduce intelligence to the chaos of stupidity. But
the violence of the poem casts some doubt on the as-
sumption that moral intelligence is natural could na-
ture be on the side of the scribblers?
Such an uncertainty seems to underlie the epistle's
over-all rhythm of emotion, in which passages asserting
and praising the satirist's own dignity and control alter-
nate with passages where this cultivated discipline of
self gives way to violent expressions of anger and out-
rage, The passage beginning "Friend to my life" (27)
shows this rhythm nicely. Pope starts with conversation,
modestly minimizing his own achievements ("many an
idle Song") and ruefully complaining of a disease
Arbuthnot may not be able to cure:
What Drop or Nostrum can this Plague re-
move?
104
Or which must end me, a Fool's Wrath or
Love?
A dire Dilemma! either way I'm sped,
If Foes, they write, if Friends, they read me
dead.
The touch is light, and the dire dilemma is too neatly
defined syntactically to be entirely credible; the aloof,
mock-analytical manner only asserts his superiority.
Yet he can't speak falsely, for all his cool good will
he "can't be silent, and [he] will not lye. ?? This tension
between well-mannered benevolence, on the one hand,
and dogged devotion to principle on the other, leads to
some agony: he sits "with sad Civility," with "honest
anguish, and an aking head." Yet the discomfort scarcely
seems very urgent. It is another way of showing his
superiority to his thick-skinned tormentors. Nothing dis-
turbs this equanimity until Arbuthnot warns him that
his simile about asses' ears may be dangerous (75-78),
whereupon some of his composure deserts him:
" 'Tis nothing" Nothing? if they bite and
kick?
Out with it, Dunciad! let the secret pass,
That secret to each Fool, that he's an Ass.
This new tone of genuine irritation and contempt con-
tinues through the passages on Codrus and the spider-
scribblers, before it gradually subsides after line 95 into
the old mode of controlled scorn. It is significant that
after the initial address to Arbuthnot the discourse
moves from social speech into a kind of simple narrative,
and only when the disturbance begins in the "Midas'
ears" section does the speaker return to his dramatic
situation: "And is not mine, my Friend, a sorer case, /
When ev'ry Coxcomb perks them in my face?" He be-
gins to feel a real grievance, and he couches it as an
appeal* for personal sympathy, an appeal that, when
the sympathy is not forthcoming, yields to anger.
This rising and falling of emotion, from equanimity to
105
violence and back again, characterizes the movement
of the whole poem. The passages on Pope's childhood
and literary debut (125-156) show a serene conscious-
ness of being in the right, with infrequent disturbances
being confined to the individual couplet and resolved
within it:
Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill;
I wish'd the man a dinner, and sate still:
Yet then did Dennis rave in furious fret;
I never answer'd, I was not in debt.
The rhetorical syntax of the parallel "Yet then" clauses
is soothed by the simple declarative order of the re-
sponses. But the thought of the critics who have at-
tacked him brings an outburst of emotion, climaxing in
the scathing denunciation of "Each Wight who reads
not, and but scans and spells, / Each Word-catcher that
lives on syllables," and the worms-in-amber passage,
before it relapses into the old urbanity: "Were others
angry? I excus'd them too; / Well might they rage; I
gave them but their due" (173-174). There follows
the portrait of Atticus, the finest example in the poem
of Pope's use of the controlled, man-of-good-will role,
but its judicious coolness soon gives way to a bitter at-
tack on "Wits and Witlings" ( "Nor like a Puppy daggled
thro' the Town, / To fetch and carry Sing-song up and
down"), which in turn yields to controlled contempt in
the portrait of Bufo.
After a return to complete restraint and dignity in
the lament for Gay and the modest self-congratulation
of "I was not born for Courts or great Affairs," the voice
slowly rises (283-304) through contempt ("That Fop
whose pride affects a Patron's name") and indignation
("And sees at Cannons what was never there") to the
introduction of Sporus:
A Lash like mine no honest man shall dread,
But all such babling blockheads in his stead,
Let Sporus tremble . . . (33~3 5)
The lofty assertion of the satirist's respect for genuine
106
virtue breaks up in the angry alliteration of "babling
blockheads" and the ominous rise of the voice at the
start of the new couplet.
The portrait of Sporus is the peak in this series of
emotive curves that gives the poem its structure. It
begins within the framework of dialogue:
Let Sporus tremble "What? that Thing of
silk,
"Sporus, that mere white Curd of Ass's milk?
"Satire or Sense alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?"
Yet let me flap this Bug . . .
Arbuthnot tries to forestall the explosion his cool
contempt indicates an imperturbably Augustan confi-
dence in standards of judgment and a gentlemanly
sureness of superiority to those who do not measure up.
But the "Pope" of this poem, like the P. of the Epilogue.,
will not be restrained. Sporus is immune to satire or
sense, but Pope, gripped by the strong antipathy of
good to bad, must flap him anyway. No real good can
come of it, but the inner pressure of moral horror defies
containment.
Virtually all the qualities of the grotesque mode
figure in this astonishing passage of vituperative in-
vention. Sporus is a "bug" who "stinks and stings," a
"well-bred Spaniel," a "familiar Toad" who "spits him-
self abroad," an "Amphibious Thing" who, though he
shows a "Cherub's face," is "a Reptile all the rest." These
images of physical and moral distortion, with their
formulation in paradox and oxymoron, sum up the "vile
Antithesis" that is Sporus, whose elusive essence cannot
be fixed by the public, judicial operations of logic.
Pope's anger explodes into metaphor, as in the daring
identification of Sporus-Hervey with the original of all
evil "at the ear of Eve, familiar Toad." "Familiar"
focuses the ironic richness of Pope's disgust: Sporus
is intolerably cheeky in his hobnobbing with royalty;
he is a toady not only by profession but by family; like
107
a "familiar spirit" lie comes to serve but may stay to
corrupt; he is seen there with tiresome regularity; he
is that well-known toad who whispered into the ear
of the sleeping Eve. This disgust permeates even the
sound of the verse; Mr. Mack notes the "concentration
of sibilants and labials" in a general spitting sound, 12
and one notes too the frequency of hard monosyllabic
words: flap, bug, dirt, stinks, stings, buzz, spits, spite,
smut, etc. The abrupt, ejaculatory rhythms that result
create a tone far removed from the easy fluency of
Augustan style. The fertility of poetic invention proves
the intensity of the feelings that are being dramatized.
The structure of emotive curves encourages belief in
the reality of the dramatic personality that addresses
Arbuthnot and ourselves; the inability of the urbanely
superior speaking manner to suppress strong emotion
adds to the sense that a human being is talking. The
deliberate shattering of one persona the self-con-
tained, confidently contemptuous man of the world
makes possible the creation of another, more important
identity, that of a recognizably human speaker, to
whom vice is unbearably repugnant and whose response
to wickedness is reassuringly violent and intense. Such
humanity of reaction makes a striking contrast to the
scribblers and patrons, who are incapable of honest
emotion. Atticus lives his life on one colorless level he
is a "tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend/' which is to
say that his feelings are so uniform as not to be feelings
at all, Sporus is empty; his reactions are wholly formed
by his surroundings as he squeaks, like a proper courtier,
in obedience to the ventriloquist Expediency; he could
never be guilty of the honest indiscretion of his enemy.
The scribblers themselves are mechanical men the
Drury Lane bard "rhymes ere he wakes/' and his clock-
like fellows find their "secret standard" in "that Casting-
weight Pride adds to Emptiness." Being half -dead al-
ready, they are happily insensitive to any external
stimulus:
108
Let Peals of Laughter, Codrus! round thee
break,
Thou unconcern'd canst hear the mighty
Crack.
Pit, Box, and GalTry in convulsions hurl'd,
Thou standst unshook amidst a bursting
World. (85-88)
Pope has in mind Addison's translation of Horace's
Ode III iii (7-8), and the heroic endurance there de-
scribed does find a perverse kind of likeness in Codrus'
amiable stupidity, his indifference to any standards but
his own. But the situation is wrong; the vast epic arena
has become opening-night at Drury Lane, the "con-
vulsions" the hero-author faces are convulsions of jeer-
ing laughter, and Codrus' defiance of the audience
demonstrates only his conceited insensitivity. Like the
spider, who "spins the slight, self-pleasing thread anew"
whenever his web is broken (89-92), the scribbler is
guided in his "dirty work" not by feeling but by mind-
less, subhuman instinct. The contrast between such
automatons and Pope's poetic speaker, who can dis-
criminate intelligently and rise to overwhelming moral
emotions, needs no comment.
The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, then, achieves unity
through Pope's ability to invent and control a voice that
moves convincingly through all the ranges of tone be-
tween cool urbanity and violent moral indignation. This
voice has its comic aspects like Blake, Pope knows the
potency of the old image of the truth-teller as fool
but the end effect is not comedy but grotesquerie. The
satirist can lose his temper, and though this marks his
superiority both to impervious coxcombs like Sporus
and bland "administrators" like Fr., we know that he
can never see in himself the gratifying mastery of
reality that they see in themselves all die time. And
despite the now common idea that Pope creates in his
verse a persona, a mask of rhetoric that is not the "real"
personality of the writer, 13 the "Pope" of these poems is
109
much more than a fiction by which the real Pope ma-
nipulates his materials and his readers. Manipulation
(by any name) suggests evasiveness or as often in
Swift uncertainty about where one really is. As a
critical metaphor, for all its value in discrediting naively
"biographical" interpretation, the mask emphasizes con-
cealment and subterfuge rather more than it suggests
the creation of imaginative roles for the artist himself.
At its noble best rhetoric is an agent of responsibility,
a means of clarifying the issues at stake. To move us,
the poet or the orator should be moved himself, and his
rhetoric should reveal his feelings as hesitant, tangled
ordinary speech so seldom can. The "mask" in Pope's
satires is not a false face but an identity quite as real
as any of the poet's other identities; it is fashioned not
so that critics may admire its workmanship but so that
readers may better understand the motives that made
the poems necessary. The "Pope" of Arbuthnot, the
Epilogue, and the other Horatian satires is Pope Pope
provisionally freed from the irksome restraints of social
and political moderation so that his deepest commit-
ments may get something like pure expression. The ad-
uersarii are Pope too, but in them are combined and
punished just those elements of civilized Augustan
personality that necessarily yet tragically thwart that
best self we can never quite become. Pope the man
could never quite live up to the passionate morality of
his satiric self his biography is full of the troubles he
got into by trying but the persona of the Imitations
remains as a moving imaginative version of the troubled
human presence within it.
By straining the framework of social and poetic pro-
priety Pope left behind him a great art, the Augustan
balance achieved so splendidly in Windsor Forest, The
Rape of the Lock, and the Epistle to Burlington. But
by doing so he created another kind of art, less pure
and structurally less "perfect/' which stands in relation
to the Augustan poems much as The Winter's Tale
no
stands to, say, Twelfth Night. The great Augustan myth
of the union of ideal and actual is increasingly strained
in the late poems; James's "rich and edifying" other case
never disappears entirely from the verse, but the gap
between it and the "pretentious and vain" actuality be-
comes steadily wider. (There is little obvious grotes-
querie in To Augustus, for example; but when the
poem is read in the context of the other Imitations of
Horace, its ironic surface urbanity may be seen as an
earned alternative to a more violent kind of expression,
and the dignity and seriousness of Pope's criticisms of
contemporary politics and letters can better be appre-
ciated.) Pope avoids the breakdown that Dr. Leavis
has diagnosed in the irony of Swift, "the spectacle of
creative powers . . . exhibited consistently in nega-
tion and rejection/' 14 but the dramatic emphasis in the
later verse centers around the enormous personal effort
that must be made to bridge the gap between things
as they are and the (hopefully) possible other case
revealed by moral vision. Pope's poetic solution for the
problem is what I have called the grotesque mode, but
its very nature emphasizes the terrible slimness of the
hope.
ill
The Uncreating Word
THE END and the climax of Pope's poetic career is the
Dunciad of 1743. The complex history of the poem is
outlined in the Twickenham edition and interpreted in
Aubrey L. Williams' useful study; * I shall largely ig-
nore this history, in an attempt to see how the Dunciad
that most people read fits into the account I am making
of Pope's poetic development. My view is that the
earlier versions in three books, though showing many
of the features of theme and manner that I discuss, do
not wholly put them to use. The poem needs the Fourth
Book, and especially the fuller dimension it gives to
the famous conclusion, which in the 1729 version seems
oddly out of place at the end of Book III. Apart from
its obvious use as a personal weapon, the three-book
version seems to me largely an experiment in develop-
ing the mock epic's resources for grotesquerie; its
poetic details express little more than local satiric mean-
ings, but in the 1743 version these details fall into place
in a larger and far more serious imaginative pattern.
The World Turned Upside Down
Although the simple joke at the heart of the Dunciad is
the same joke Pope used in The Rape of the Lock the
language you ordinarily use to describe the largest and
best people you can conceive of is disastrously inap-
propriate for describing small, bad people still in the
112
Dunciad the effect of the joke has obviously changed.
A characteristic passage startlingly reverses the normal
process of purity yielding to decay:
Thro' Lud's f am'd gates, along the well-known
Fleet
Rolls the black troop, and overshades the
street,
Till show'rs of Sermons, Characters, Essays,
In circling fleeces whiten all the ways:
So clouds replenished from some bog below,
Mount in dark volumes, and descend in snow.
(II, 359-364)
The simile invites a complex response, combining re-
vulsion from the Dunces' swampy corruption, wonder
at their stupid but stubborn perseverance (it must be
hard to make even fake snow from such dirty material),
pleasure in the poetic power that can bring a kind of
beauty out of such ugliness, and amusement that the
comparison is used at all. This last feeling, however,
differs from the amusement evoked by epic parody in
The Rape of the Lock; while the Dunciad has a beauty
of its own, it is far from the beauty of small, glittering
things found in Belinda's world. Laughter at clouds
being replenished from bogs will be just a little nervous
this incongruity is not "comic" but "grotesque."
Such uncomfortable juxtapositions of the pleasant
and the ugly run through the poem. The remarkably
profuse animal imagery elaborately relates the world
of the Dunces to the lower orders of creation; and al-
though in part we feel superior because we are human,
reasonable ? and so forth, we must at the same time con-
cede the Dunces a certain brainless but disturbingly
potent vitality. Pope in other ways suggests that they
have lost any meaningful relation to ordinary human
nature. The world of Dulness is full of monstrous dis-
tortion. In Book I (81-84) the goddess proudly reviews
her "wild creation" of "momentary monsters/' who are
elsewhere compared to statues and machines. If they
retain a semblance of humanity, some flaw will mark
them as Dulness* own, as in the case of the "meagre,
muse-rid mope, adust and thin" (II, 37), Defoe earless
in the pillory (II, 147), or the Virtuoso who is "canker'd
as his Coins" (IV, 349); if, despite all their efforts, they
still look human, they are much embarrassed ( IV, 525-
528 ) . The richest vein of distortion runs in the allusions
to monstrous births and perverse familial relationships,
for Dubess is the "Mighty Mother," and her maternity
implies a ghastly subversion of the normal processes of
conception and growth: "Here she beholds the Chaos
dark and deep, / Where nameless Somethings in their
causes sleep" (I, 55-56). The reference is to literary
deformity, but the imagery invites a response that seems
too strong for the reference. We are to shrink from bad
writing as urgently as from unnatural birth and growth.
The most famous ( and most often deplored ) kind of
ugliness in the Dunciad is the obscenity, the way in
which Pope dwells upon the excretory processes and
debased sexuality. The delicate sexual innuendoes of
The Rape of the Lock give way to vigorous expressions
of interest in the obscene and all its details:
Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force,
As oil'd with magic juices for the course,
Vigorous he rises; from th' effluvia strong
Imbides new life, and scours and stinks along;
Re-passes Lintot, vindicates the race,
Nor heeds the brown dishonours of his face.
(II, 103-108)
The elegant irony of "sympathetic," the mouth-filling
Latinate diction, and the neat epic parody in "brown
dishonours" 2 combine in a deceptive sonority of move-
ment that makes the bite of "scours and stinks" and
"brown" especially impolite. Pope's artistry struggles
with our revulsion and subdues it, and the result is
richly poetic; but though we may laugh at Curll to avoid
some more painful response, the idea of a human being
drawing sustenance from filth is scarcely "comic." The
114
struggle between tonal dignity and conceptual ugliness
produces a grotesque imaginative violence that would
have torn The Rape of the Lock to pieces. As in the
Imitations of Horace, personal feeling interferes with
decorous public speech.
Despite such interference, of course, the Dunciad is
more than a study in ugliness. The poem is poised be-
tween alternatives. On the one hand, the deformed,
depraved world of Grub Street may stand as an image
of the actual world we ourselves inhabit, or of what it
will become if dullness prevails. At the same time,
however, Pope leaves open the possibility that Grub
Street may be a special case, a limited world surrounded
by pleasanter realms of order. It is the verse, especially,
that provides this positive assertion:
So (fam'd like thee for turbulence and
horns )
Eridanus his humble fountain scorns;
Thro* half the heav'ns he pours th' exalted
urn;
His rapid waters in their passage burn.
(II, 181-184)
The beautiful elevation and movement of the last line
modulates the indecency of the action and the further
obscene suggestion in "burn ?> (which "Scriblerus" care-
fully underlines in a note ) . It is as though Pope could
not help but write beautifully, whatever the occasion. As
Dr. Leavis says, the beauty of such a passage
is inseparable from the whole habit of versification.
. . . When Pope is preoccupied with the metrical
structure, the weight, and the pattern of his coup-
lets, he is bringing to bear on his "materials" habits
of thought and feeling, and habits of ordering
thought and feeling. The habits are those of a great
and ardent representative of Augustan civiliza-
tion, 3
One might add that these 'liabits" serve a pertinent
dramatic purpose. The ability to find beauty in ugli-
ness, without obscuring the fact that it is ugly, demon-
strates the highest sort of intelligent civilization, and
it triumphantly asserts Pope's superiority to his victims.
Dunces make ugliness from beauty, and the difference
between their activity and the contrary activity em-
bodied in the verse itself marks the distinction between
anarchy and order.
The positive undercurrent finds expression in a num-
ber of ways. Pope plays off Grub Street ugliness against
the heroic dignity of classical epic, the artfully beauti-
ful innocence of pastoral, the rich fertility of actual
nature, and the moral seriousness of the classical and
Christian intellectual traditions. Such contrasts both
underline the squalor of the Dunces' habits and enhance
the gravity of their offense, which is in effect an attempt
to subvert cultural and natural order.
The Orders of Light
The contrast between the ugliness of Dulness and the
beauty of moral intelligence may be taken as the main
theme of the Dunciad. It figures, as I have suggested,
aTa stylistic principle operating in individual passages
for example, when an obscene image is balanced by
a "classical" tone or rhythm. But the contrast, in one
form or another, plays a larger part than this in the
poem. One of its embodiments, in the recurrent imagery
of light and darkness, may suggest that the final four-
book version of the Dunciad has a kind of wholeness
that so many readers have denied to it. 4
The key to this pattern is of course the famous con-
clusion, in which Pope suddenly abandons the elaborate
fictions of mock epic and the detachment of the im-
personal narrator. At line 627 of Book IV the Dunces
vanish as the poet shifts his attention from the puny
creatures of Dulness to the larger philosophical impli-
cations of intelleciaiajj^nd The domi-
nant tone has been vituperative mockery; but every
reader senses in the conclusion a deepening and dark-
116
ening of mood, a retreat from irony in the face of the
^timate destruction of reason and humanistic value.
TThe reader no longer enjoys the security of merely ob-
serving; Pope adopts direct address and the present
tense to emphasize our involvement in what nonsense
finally means. He loses a certain dramatic neatness by
transferring this prophetic speech from Settle, who
spoke it at the end of the three-book versions, to the
of the poem, but there is a height-
ening of seriousness that is well worth the sacrifice.
When Settle says it you tend not to believe him it all
seems a slopping over of a Dunce's deranged imagina-
tion; but when it is spoken by the narrator himself, and
so backed by all the resources of feeling that have gen-
erated the poem, it cannot be so easily dismissed.
Although the word itself is mentioned only once,
"light" is obviously the metaphor upon which the con-
clusion (627-656) is based. The advancing power of
Dulness puts out the lights of art and science. First
"fancy," to the Augustans a lower faculty but ( as even
Hobbes admitted) an essential one, is blotted out:
"Before her, Fancy's gilded clouds decay, / And all its
varying Rain-bows die away." 5 "Wit" too "shoots in
vain its momentary fires" before "the meteor drops, and
in a flash expires." 6 In each case Pope emphasizes both
the ephemeral quality of the phenomena and their
naturalness; clouds and meteors can't really be expected
to last, and yet somehow they should. One by one all
the arts by which man illuminates his existence are ex-
tinguished, and the end is utter blackness. "Light dies
before thy uncreating word" the light of Genesis and
the Logos of St. John are obliterated by this new and
blasphemous un-Creation. Dulness destroys all order,
until, in the brilliant theatrical analogy with which the
poem ends, the curtain falls on the universal drama, and
both audience and players are buried in darkness.
"Drama," the transformation of otherwise random oc-
curences into "history" or "theology" or any other un-
117
derstood pattern of physical or spiritual relations, is the
ultimate achievement of human culture, and this final
darkness quite literally buries "AU."
The emphasis on darkness in this conclusion can be
elated to the rest of the poem through an interesting
xmplet When Dulness reigns supreme, "Nor Jgu^tic
Flame, nor pj3&&ie, dares to shine; / Nor h&jnan Spark
LS left, nor Glimpse djyj$0r (IV, 651-652). The italics
are Pope's, and as these are the only adjectives so em-
phasized in the poem, we should take them seriously. A
hierarchy of terms is suggested. The light of "private"
intellectual activity, the fleeting illumination cast by
the powers of the individual mind, did not stand
particularly high in the Augustan scale of values, as a
glance at Religio Laid (1-22) or Swift's annihilation
of both reason and imagination in A Tale of a Tub^
(Section IX) will show. The extinguishing of "public"
flame is more serious; the Augustan concern for main-
taining an intelligible community of ideas and beliefs
is well known, and the arts, which link the present with
the traditions of the past, were of vital importance in
fixing private perceptions in a public form. But Duhiess
goes even further. The encroaching darkness that oblit-
erates every <c human Spark/' public and private, also
obscures the "Glimpse divine," the imperfect but en-
riching vision of a higher light of which any human
spark is only a reflection. 7 Light, in short, has various
significances, but in whatever form it appears it ex-
presses something about the fundamental structure of
values in reality.
Dulness herself, the chief figure in the 1743 version, is
characteristically enveloped in mists or clouds, and
Gibber's prayer to her "And lest we err by Wit's wild
dancing light, / Secure us kindly in our native night"
(I, 175-176) shows why: wit and light are the same,
and so the true Dunce prefers his native night and the
uterine security it affords/Intelligence is painful, and
from his point of view the Best alternative to the danc-
118
ing, dazzling illumination of wit is not steady light but
total darkness. Dulness represents the power of passive
mindlessness, the emblems of which are darkness and
sleep.
Her aura of mist and vapor in part magnifies the god-
dess; "A veil of fogs dilates her awful face" (I, 262)
she is majestic and terrifying because one can't see her
true size and shape clearly. 8 But her obscurity also
ridicules her, for she herself cannot see through the
veil, which isolates her from reality and understanding.
A series of "massing" and "blotting out" images show
how she and her children seek to extend the blessings
of darkness to others:
Thro' Lud's fam'd gates, along the well-known
Fleet
Rolls the black troop, and overshades the
street (11,359-360)
As thick as bees o'er vernal blossoms fly,
As thick as eggs at Ward in Pillory.
(Ill, 33-34)
Prompt at the call, around the Goddess roll
Broad hats, and hoods, and caps, a sable shoal:
Thick and more thick the black blockade ex-
tends. (IV, 189-191)
Then thick as Locusts black'ning all the
ground. (IV, 397)
Each passage (and there are others) makes its satiric
comment on the developing action, but each also con-
tributes to a larger meaning: Dunces obscure light,
even without trying, and their most trivial actions may
demonstrate this symbolic characteristic.
The light imagery relates the "ugliness" of the Dun-
dad to its positive content. Much of the obscenity, for
instance, associates the Dunces' love of filth with a love
of darkness and concealment, as in the cloacal revelry
of the diving contest in Book II. If light is an enemy,
then darkness and dirt are friends, and all sorts of filth
will seem congenial to a Dunce. The frequent references
to animals commonly associated with darkness, dirt,
submersion, or burrowing work to a similar effect. The
vituperation takes on a certain rhetorical dignity from
such imagery: it is easy enough to call your enemies
animals or filth-lovers, but when the aspersions fit into
a larger, almost philosophical pattern, the sense of per-
sonal malice lessens.
Though the Dunces themselves cast light of a sort,
their illumination differs significantly from the radiances
of intelligible order:
His Peers shine round him with reflected
grace,
New edge their dulness, and new bronze then-
face.
So from the Sun's broad beam, in shallow urns
Heav'ns twinkling Sparks draw light, and
point their horns. (II, 9-12)
The clue is "shine." Their light is harsh and glaring; and
they gleam not with their own brilliance but with re-
flected light that illuminates nothing, Like mirrors, they
remain cold even while they seem bright and warm by
stealing light from other sources and they deceive
themselves as well as others:
Kind Self-conceit to some her glass applies,
Which no one looks in with another's eyes;
But as the Flatt'rer or Dependant paint,
Beholds himself a Patriot, Chief, or Saint.
On others Int'rest her gay liv'ry flings,
Interest, that waves on Party-colour'd wings:
Turn'd to the Sun, she casts a thousand dyes,
And, as she turns, the colours fall or rise.
(iv ? 533-540)
Pope here recalls Belinda's sylphs with exquisite effect,
but behind the effect stands the sharp criticism carried
by the whole light and dark pattern.
120
False seeing is in fact one of Dulness' most powerful
weapons, as she demonstrates in the "heroic" games.
She forms a poet out of air for whom her publisher-
children compete, but when the victorious Curll tries to
claim his prize, "it melted from his sight, / Like forms
in clouds, or visions of the night" (II, 111-112). The
effect is comic, but the prediction of the poem's con-
clusion, where "Fancy's gilded clouds decay," carries
ominous overtones. Dulness' power to make something
of nothing foreshadows her final making nothing of
everything. It is only a short imaginative step to the
"re-creation" of the universe into garish parodies of its
proper form:
She, tinsel'd o'er in robes of varying hues,
With self -applause her wild creation views;
Sees momentary monsters rise and fall,
And with her own fools-colours gilds them all.
(I, 81-84)
The cosmic grotesquerie of Gibber's vision (III, 231-
272) and the final extinction of order fulfill this pattern,
as Dulness becomes a blaspheming disrupter of the
divinely wrought structure of reality. Out of local jokes
emerges the completion of the "private-public-divine"
hierarchy.
Light, which I have treated as "imagery," comes in
the Dunciad to carry the consistency and intensity of
meaning ordinarily called "symbolic." Pope evokes re-
sponses to the dualism of light and darkness that are
instinctive "archetypal" and not just socially and
satirically useful. Light is the means by which we locate
ourselves and direct our actions, in contrast to dark-
ness, in which we know neither what we are doing nor
where we are. Pope's imagery brings various common
metaphors to mind "see the light," "bright as day,"
and so forth and the feeling involved in such compari-
sons of mystery to understanding enlarges the poem's
scope. It is no coincidence that the Augustans generally
seem to have agreed that sight, though in some ways the
121
most abstract of the senses and the least understood,
was nevertheless the most immediate in its psychologi-
cal effect and the most costly to lose an agreement in
which we probably concur. 9
Such general symbolic values stand behind the light
imagery in the Dunciad, and the feelings they evoke
support Pope's special attitudes throughout. There are
all kinds of light, and the "private-public-divine" hier-
archy provides a paradigm of the poem's whole rhe-
torical structure.Jlt can be read as a personal attack on
the poet's enemies, as a defense of an ethical ideal
against wholesale stupidity, or as a warning that a threat
exists to the divine architecture of the universe. Human
order, Pope argues, with a famous tradition behind him,
is an image of a more exalted order, and an attack on
one menaces the other. We proceed up the ladder ana-
logically. Behind the topical, satiric exterior lies symbol,
and behind symbol the great myth of the uncreating
word the cosmic over-meaning, almost incredible out
of context, expressed so powerfully by the conclusion.
But the myth is not "asserted" it develops implicitly
from satiric details that have the charms of insolent
immediacy. If he full richness of Pope's technique will
escape a reader who cannot respond simultaneously to
comedy and seriousness !l
One Dead Level
The organizing image of light thus expresses Pope's
Augustan grasp of a positive moral order that stands
behind and criticizes the "darkness" of human folly.
Light is of course only one of a number of metaphors
for this order that appear in the Dunciad (rising and
falling, waking and sleeping, organic growth and decay
are other important ones), but they all reveal a natural
moral ideal that sustains the poet in an actuality almost
wholly deformed. The ideal is, to be sure, more private
than in a poem like the Essay on Criticism, and the ap-
peal in the Dunciad to fantasy and grotesque symbol-
ism foreshadows Blake's visionary poetic. But Pope re-
tains his sense of a public, a class (however small) of
readers who share his vision of order. What this means
can be appreciated by thinking of The Vanity of Human
Wishes, the greatest English neoclassic poem after
Pope, where Johnson's apparent expectation of an au-
dience that would question his point of view leads him
to a rhetoric that for all its dignity and power seems at
times uncomfortably hortatory. The creation of beauty
and coherence out of ugly confusion is one of the great
Augustan achievements, and the Dunciad is the last
great English poem to have such a shared vision of
order as its main expressive principle?)
Yet there is an attitude in the poenfmat works against
this Augustan quality. De Quincey nearly put his finger
on the problem when he said that the last lines confused
him:
Do [present times] and their pursuits lead to [the
victory of anarchy] as a possibility, or as a con-
tingency upon certain habits which we have it in
our power to erase (in which case this vision of
dulness has a practical warning), or is it a mere
necessity, one amongst the many changes attached
to the cycle of human destiny, or which chance
brings round with the revolutions of its wheel? All
this Pope could not determine. 10
Is the vision a prophecy, or a warning of state that could
come about if the world failed to grow more reason-
able? There can be no simple answer, but Pope's final
position shows a certain pessimism pulling against the
positive meanings.
Pope seems to have had two ideas about the relation
of anarchy to order, two opposing myths about man's
role in nature. The first, supporting the positive atti-
tudes expressed in his poems, is essentially the classical
concept of a Golden Age: that in the beginning the
state of nature was perfect and peaceful, an Edenic
time when man lived in harmony with nature and his
123
fellow creatures in Arcadian tranquillity. This pastoral
myth, upon which depend the "official" meanings of
Windsor Forest, the Essay on Man, and the Epistle to
Burlington, dramatizes the human desire to believe that
experience is ultimately orderly, that the nature of
reality is hierarchical design, and that sin is corrigible.
It makes satire possible, for it justifies the belief that
folly and wickedness are unnatural and that norms exist
toward which moral education can work. In terms of
our key image, it asserts that natural reality is "light,"
and that darkness represents a dangerous aberration
from natural perfection. The opposing view was in
Pope's day usually blamed on Hobbes: psychologically
if not historically, the state of nature is a state of dis-
order and conflict; human beings attain the light of
dignity and reason only with difficulty, and they are in
constant danger of lapsing into darkness. (Hobbes, in-
terestingly, was said to have been afraid of the dark. ) u
No direct influence need be postulated about all we
know of Pope's opinions about Hobbes is that he
thought him a good reasoner and a bad translator of
Homer; 12 but it seems clear that the hypothesis of
man's essential goodness and nature's inherent con-
gruence to human ideas did not fully satisfy Pope. A
convenient modern name (which he would doubtless
have hooted at) for this second view is "entropy," for
it implies that nature, even when strenuously opposed
by creative human intelligence, steadily tends to seek
lower and lower levels of organization. We find in
the Dunciad suggestions that nature is not entirely
hostile to Dulness, that light may not be the ultimate
reality, that the public structure of values Pope appeals
to with such seeming confidence is in danger of col-
lapsing.
We find, for one thing, that Dulness* "ancient right"
dates from "eldest time," and that she is the daughter
of "eternal Night" (I, 9-12); the germ of this idea can
be found in the last of the lines Pope added to Wycher-
124
ley's Panegijrick on Dulness in 1707: "So Wit, which
most to scorn it does pretend, / With Dulness first be-
gan, in Dulness last must end." Much is made of the
long tradition that stands behind ffie Dunces ( I, 95 &. ) ;
and while Pope is poking fun at them by comparing
them with the bad writers of the past, they nevertheless
assume a disturbing dignity from being part of a long
historical series| In Gibber's vision (Book III), the por-
tion of the globe under the influence of reason is said
to be pitifully small, and the language expresses more
feeling than we would expect from Settle, the fictitious
narrator. The claims of Dulness to universal domina-
tion, are not easy to refute.
I The pervasive physical movement in the Dunciad is
dpwnwards. There are numerous references to diving
id sinking of various sorts, as when Gibber, in the
roes of composition,
gnaw'd his pen, then dashed it on the
ground,
Sinking from thought to thought, a vast pro-
found!
Plung'd for his sense, but found no bottom
there. (I, 117-119)
His nonsense resembles "running Lead" that slips down
through the cracks in his head (I, 123-124), and his
wits, like lead bullets, manage to fly briefly but soon
fall to earth (I, 181). The great diving contest forms
the climax of the heroic games (II, 269-346), recalling
Gibber's earlier pondering of a nobly selfless gesture:
"Shall I, like Curtius, desperate in my zeal, / O'er head
and ears plunge for the Commonweal? 7 ' (I, 209-210).
Even the smallest kind of detail shows Pope's delight
in this idea:
As to soft gales top-heavy pines bow low
Their heads, and lift them as they cease to
blow:
Thus oft they rear, and oft the head decline.
(11,391-393)
Happier thy fortunes! like a rolling stone,
Thy giddy dulness still shall lumber on.
The gath'ring number, as it moves along,
Involves a vast involuntary throng,
Who gently drawn, and struggling less and
less,
Roll in her Vortex, and her pov/r confess.
(IV, 81-84)
Dulness works like a natural force, exerting an all-en-
gulfing gravitational pull that cannot be resisted. Every-
thing declines into inertia, a curve completed by the
falling curtain and universal burial of the final couplet.
Mr. Empson says that "the idea behind MacFlecknoe
and the Dunciad [is] that there is an ominous mystery
in the way the lowest and most absurd things make an
exact parallel with the highest," 13 This ominous quality
is enhanced by the tendency of high things to slide
downward and become their low counterparts, despite
all the efforts of moral intelligence to keep them sepa-
rated into their proper levels. Hierarchy collapses into
sameness, light yields to darkness, as entropy contin-
ues.
In satiric terms, the downward movement attacks the
"sinking" Pope had ridiculed in the Peri "Bathous, but
in the Dunciad he has more on his mind than bad
writers' love for the bathetic. The sinking of the Dunces
leads to repose and sleep, a kind of peace that Pope
does not simply despise:
""*-- Know, Eusden thirsts no more for sack or
praise;
He sleeps among the dull of ancient days;
Safe, where no Critics damn, no duns molest,
Where wretched Withers, Ward, and Gildon
rest. (I, 293-296)
No noise, no stir, no motion can'st thou make,
Th* unconscious stream sleeps o'er thee like a
lake. (11,303-304)
126
But in her Temple's last recess inclosM,
On Dulness* lap th' Anointed head repos'd.
Him close she curtains round with Vapours
blue,
And soft besprinkles with Cimmerian dew.
(Ill, 1-4)
The satiric edge never withdraws, but there is also a
tenderness in the tone and even a kind of yearning.
Darkness may bring a welcome end to the complexities
of day; sleep and intelligence are in a sense antitheses,
and yet the latter may often long for the former. As
Pope remarked early in his career (again in the addi-
tions to Wycherley's Panegyrick on Dulness}, dullness
is "the safe Opiate of the Mind, / The last kind Refuge
weary Wit can find."
1 The Dunces are thus to be envied, in a way. Untrou-
bled by the cares and responsibilities of the reasonable
man, they can yield happily to the tendency of life
to run downhill toward darkness, sameness, and sleep.
Pope puts into Bentley's mouth a couplet that suc-
cinctly describes the pedagogical aim of Dulness; "With
the same Cement, ever sure to bind, / We bring to one
dead level evYy mind" (IV, 267-268); and he later
makes Thomas Gordon, a Whig journalist, redefine the
process: "Now to thy gentle shadow all are shrunk, /
All melted down, in Pension, or in Punk" (IV, 509-
510 ) . The aim of Dulness is sameness, the utter absence
of the differentiation that makes order possible, as
though the maternal Anarch were a ghastly literaliza-
tion of the metaphor ascribed to Spinoza "The pur-
pose of Nature is to make men uniform, as children of
a common mother." 14 In such a state intelligence has no
place, for there are no qualitative differences to be dis-
criminated. Dulness melts down and levels off the
structural order of "degree" that had been the imagina-
tion's dream since the beginnings of thought.
Even the poet himself, the contemptuously detached
speaker who records the saga of Dulness, cannot feel
wholly secure. Among the chimeras with which the
127
goddess fills Gibber's head at the beginning of Book
III, along with "the Statesman's Scheme, / The air-
built Castle, and the golden Dream/' we find the "Poet's
vision of eternal Fame," The irony may include Pope
himself, it seems, and this supposition is confirmed at
the start of Book IV:
Yet, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light
Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night!
Of darkness visible so much be lent,
As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent.
Ye Pow'rs! whose Mysteries restor'd I sing,
To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing,
Suspend a while your Force inertly strong,
Then take at once the Poet and the Song.
"This astonishing poetry/' which "triumphantly . . .
enlists Milton into an Augustan sublime/' 15 daringly
introduces the poet into his mock poem, demanding a
response that a casual reading of the Dunciad might
not have anticipated. The speaker's comfortable superi-
ority to his subject vanishes for a moment as he recog-
nizes his own subjection to time's destructive power.
Such recognition lends serious overtones to the theme
of literary entropy, "Prose swell'd to verse, verse
loit'ring into prose" ( I, 274 ) :
How Prologues into Prefaces decay,
And these to Notes are fritter'd quite away,
(1,277-278)
"Leave not a foot of verse, a foot of stone,
A Page, a Grave, that they can call their
own." (IV, 127-128)
"Turn what they will to Verse, their toil is
vain,
Critics like me shall make it Prose again."
(IV, 213-214)
The ring of sadness is more than a satiric device. The
decay of literature mirrors the decay of nature: verse
128
loiters into prose just as order lapses into chaos, light
into darkness. Fame turns out to be doubly elusive, as the
attitude that in The Temple of Fame remained a sub-
merged possibility now comes to the surface of Pope's
verse. Not only does the poet die, but he finds little
likelihood that his work will long survive him. The
poet's craft, that noble metaphor for human creativity
in general, bows to the uncreating word of Dulness
both the poet and the song must yield to darkness and
death.
A powerful vision of dissolution dominates the Fourth
Book. As Pope's Argument says, "The Progress and
Effects [of Dulness' final yawn] on all Orders of Men,
and the Consummation of all, in the Restoration of
Night and Chaos, conclude the Poem." The poem sings
of Dulness' "Mysteries restord" (IV, 5), the return to
the "Saturnian days of Lead and Gold" rather than to
the genuinely Golden Age of pastoral myth. The god-
dess finally stands revealed as the deity of "Night Pri-
meval, and of Chaos old" (IV, 630) "Lo! thy dread
Empire, CHAOS! is restored" (IV, 653). The origin of
created order, to which it must return, is the eternal
darkness of chaos; the idea is Miltonic, 16 but there is
genuine feeling in Pope's use of it. The critical intelli-
gence that made the poem possible must bow before
the onslaught of nature a nature no longer seen as a
synonym for light and order but as a ceaseless muta-
bility destroying everything that makes life dignified
or even possible.
"This "tragic" dimension of the Dunciad depends
upon the resonances that the more consistently serious
imaginative design of the Fourth Book strikes in what
had been written earlier. The "sublimity" noted by Dr.
Leavis is most evident in the invocation to Book IV
and the conclusion, and it is such passages as these,
when Pope draws most openly upon Miltonic resources,
that bring the underlying seriousness of the other books
to life. The poem in three books is narratively more tidy
129
than the final version, just as the original Rape of the
Lock is neater and more "exquisite" than the great poem
Pope made from it; but it is the Fourth Book, with its
open appeal to deep feeling and something like the
"degree of horror" by which Edmund Burke was to
identify the sublime, that withholds the poem from the
limbo that received its many eighteenth-century imi-
tations and preserves it as literature.
It would be easy, and wrong, to overstate the case.
The "tragic" sublimity of the Dunciad is a tendency in
the poem but not quite an accompjyjshsdjact. Its posi-
tive, Augustan meaning is not wholly overcome; the
threatened decay of order, the triumph of entropy, re-
mains a threat ^ndno^jceitBi^y. Though it is severely
strained, the tensioiTbetween the ideal and the recog-
nition that man's dark estate poses some awful chal-
lenges to ideals does not snap, for even the expressions
of sublime terror and disgust remain within the bounds
of Pope's Augustan style. He can make beauty out of
fright, just as he can out of ugliness; the "habits of
thought and feeling" embodied in his verse are strong
enough to control and direct his vision of disorder. I
should put it that in the Dunciad Pope's Augustanism
meets its sharpest challenge from the actual world and
conquers it; but the struggle, like Shakespeare's in the
last plays, exhausted the medium of expression, and
Augustan sensibility was never to triumph so finely
again. There are great moments in the later Augustans,
but for anything like the sustained achievement of the
Dunciad, we must wait for Blake and his radical redefi-
nition of the poetic act.
130
Conclusion
POPE'S CAREER, interpreted from the point of view this
reading has adopted, falls into a kind of pattern. The
Augustan style is in the early poems a way of express-
ing what Basil Willey has called "Cosmic Toryism," *
the belief that "nature" can best be conceived of as
universal, regular, and ultimately moral, and that man
can himself be moral if he knows its laws and models
his behavior upon them. Although individual experi-
ences of nature, and especially of its central principle of
change ( which for man is death ) , may suggest that it
is indifferent to the human lot, the imagination can re-
sist this idea by appealing to various myths of perma-
nence. In Pope, any positive statement about experi-
ence implies that an opposing negative possibility has
been faced and disciplined. He understood that no
social or intellectual system fully describes reality,
which always includes potentialities for tragedy. But he
knew too that a reality conceived of as wholly tragic
makes art impossible and life unendurable; the response
to such a reality can only be silence, and art is the ac-
tivity of breaking silences. Pope's Augustan mode is
thus in essence a dialogue between "comic" myths of
recurrence and "tragic" ideas of time's finality.
As Pope's career proceeds, the mythic opposition to
silence becomes increasingly difficult to sustain. The
biographer and literary psychiatrist might be of help
here. To what extent was Pope's anxious reliance upon
friendship and personal loyalty a condition of his phys-
ical suffering and his alienation from "normal" living?
How strongly did he feel the political injustices (as he
saw them) done to such friends as Atterbury and Bol-
ingbroke? 2 How close is the relation of the deaths of
his mother, Gay, and Arbuthnot, and the growing de-
spair of Swift, to the darker mood that prevails in the
later poems? But such questions are for those com-
petent to answer them. Whatever the causes, the later
poems show an increasing strain being exerted on the
Augustan expressive manner by views of experience
that are essentially "grotesque/'
If this interpretation of Pope is at all valid, then some
adjustments of the usual view of eighteenth-century
literary history suggest themselves, 3 It is customary to
see Pope as the greatest Augustan poet, the perfector of
a poetic mode that though it lingers on and finds some
moments of glory in Johnson, and some moments of at
least real distinction in Churchill, Goldsmith, Cowper,
and Crabbe is essentially completed as a literary in-
strument by the time Pope is through with it. The view
of Pope as the normative Augustan seems to me true as
far as it goes, but it does tend to draw a historical line
between him and the great poets of the next age. (Even
the notion of "ages'* is a danger here.) And this line
may obscure important affinities quite as much as it
defines genuine differences.
Writers on Blake, for example even such perceptive
ones as Northrop Frye and Mark Schorer have found
in Pope a convenient figure to represent, for special
purposes, the whole climate of literary practices and
intellectual attitudes against which Blake rebelled. 4
The trouble is that the "Pope" of the Blakeans seems
largely to consist of the earlier poems and especially
the Essay on Man. I have tried to show that the Essay,
read literally, is a dangerous source for determining
132
Pope's views of nature and man. If instead you compare
Blake with the Pope of the Epistle to Bathurst, the
Epilogue to the Satires, and the Dunciad, you get rather
a different picture. You see, I think, that both men ex-
press profound discontent with the official attitudes of
their societies, especially in "economic" matters. You
see Pope, though certainly to a less radical extent, re-
sorting to a personal abruptness of tone and a privacy
of symbolism that suggests Blake far more than it does
the other Augustans. You see that Pope's moralizing of
his song led him eventually into grotesque fantasias, a
process different only in degree from the way Blake's
conventional early lyricism proceeded through the
Songs of Experience to the grotesque fantasias of the
Prophetic Books.
The similarities between Pope and Blake can of
course be overemphasized quite as easily as they have
usually been underemphasized. There is nothing in
Pope equivalent to Blake's determined assault upon the
foundations of a whole epistemology, and even in the
areas where they are comparable it is usually a matter
of seeing a tendency in Pope where you see a full reali-
zation in Blake. Pope remains an Augustan even as he
questions the assumptions upon which his Augustanism
depends. This is in fact his strength. Blake is a great
lyric poet and a greater intellectual revolutionist, but
in his most ambitious works, the Prophetic Books, the
attempt to recreate epic is flawed by too narrowly Bib-
lical a tone and by the hyperprivacy of the symbolic
machinery. Even if one suspects some doctrinal animus
in D. G. James's account of Blake's mythological mud-
dles, it remains difficult to deny that Mr. James is often
right. 5 Blake's theogony is confusing, though in his own
mind it may not have been confused; his attempt at so
radical a redefinition of values drove him into a privacy
of vision and more important, of expression that de-
nied him an audience. It is impossible to believe that
133
Blake was mad in any but a Philistine sense of the word,
but it is hard to blame his contemporaries for supposing
that he was.
Though he was driven toward a similar kind of pri-
vacy, Pope retained an audience. It was an increasingly
small one, certainly; but as Milton observed, the audi-
ence fit for great poetry is apt to be few. Even at his
most grotesque moments, when he dramatizes his poetic
"self' at its highest pitch of eccentricity, alienation, or
despair, Pope speaks to, for, and about a culture that
was the imaginative and (in part) the substantial pos-
session of real people, ones who knew that they pos-
sessed it and were grateful for it. Blake's contemporaries
may have been too grateful, too uncritical of their tradi-
tion; when a culture is accepted mechanically it ceases
to be valuable, but Pope (I have tried to show) knew
this quite as well as Blake, and had in many respects
more effective ways of saying so.
Austin Warren has said that Pope "felt the precarious-
ness of civilization"; 6 he knew that civilization is not
only an idea but an activity, the activity of putting
properly together words and things that if left to them-
selves would rather remain separate. This activity is a
form of love, and like all forms of love it is both diffi-
cult and necessary. "We love the things we love for
what they are" in his own terms Pope reiterates this
rueful wisdom of Robert Frost, adding the proviso that
if our love is to mean anything we must guarantee its
force by also hating the tilings we hate for what they
are. (It is an embarrassing message for a world of com-
mittees, councils, and associations, which prefers co-
operating to discriminating.) Pope's poems state the
identity of things without evasion, and so they are full
of love, the love that cherishes its objects because they
are imperfect and mortal. Like another great attempter
of poetic systems for holding the world in a single
imaginative whole, he came in time to apparent defeat:
Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. 7
But the defeat is only apparent. Like Yeats, Pope comes
finally to accept his own vulnerability; he acknowl-
edges, as Swift could never quite do, the unbreakable
ties between noble principles and the essential if often
unlovely and ignoble imperfections that unite us with
other men. In his mediations between "myth" and
"fact," his expression of both the necessity and the
enormous difficulty of civilized love, he reminds us of
who we are and what we're worth.
Notes
("TE" = Twickenham Edition: The Poems of Alexander
Pope, ed. John Butt et al. [London, Methuen; New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1939-1961] 6 vols.).
PREFACE
*W. B. Yeats, Letters, ed. Allan Wade (London, Rupert Hart-
Davis, 1954), p. 310.
2 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution ( London, Chatto and
Windus, 1961), p. 260.
CHAPTER 1.
1 For a statement of this view, see Joseph Wood Krutch, "Pope
and Our Contemporaries," in Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays
Presented to George Sherburn, ed. J. L. Clifford and L. A. Landa
(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1949), pp. 251-259.
2 "If he had smiled why would ne have smiled?
"To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the
first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series
even if the first term of a succeeding one, each one imagining him-
self to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither the first nor
last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to in-
finity." James Joyce, Ulysses (New York, The Modern Library,
1934), P. 7i6.
8 For an exhaustive study of Windsor Forest as a political poem
based on the theme of concordia discors, see Earl R. Wasserman, The
Subtler Language (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), pp. 101-
168. My reading had been worked out before Mr. Wasserman's ap-
peared, but I have been encouraged by some general agreements
between our views.
*For this pun, see Maynard Mack, "On Reading Pope," College
English, VII (1946), 264-265.
137
5 Bonamy Dobree, "The Theme of Patriotism in the Poetry of the
Early Eighteenth Century," Proceedings of the British Academy,
XXXV (1949), 62-63.
6 1 owe this point, and much of my understanding of Windsor
Forest as a whole, to David R. Ferry.
7 For this passage and the tradition behind it, see Reuben A.
Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion ( Oxford, Clarendon
Press, 1959), PP. 45-48, 54-55* 57~5 8 -
8 For Mr. Wilson Knight's interpretation of The Temple of Fame,
see his Laureate of Peace (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1954), pp. 79-110.
See Douglas Knight, Pope and the Heroic Tradition ( New Haven,
Yale University Press, 1951)? PP- 34-39-
10 For an account of how Dryden's satiric procedure draws upon
"heroic" resources, see R. A. Brower, "An Allusion to Europe: Dry-
den and Tradition" ELH } XIX (1952), 38-48.
n I ignore the important "mock-epic" aspect of The Rape of the
Lock both because it is so familiar and because I think a "pastoral"
treatment gets closer to the heart of Pope's relation to his subject.
^William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London, Chatto
and Windus, 1935), pp. 11-12.
13 For The Rape of the Lock as a comic treatment of serious sexual
matters, see Cleanth Brooks, "The Case of Miss Arabella Fermor/'
in The Well Wrought Urn (London, D. Dobson, 1948), pp. 74~95-
14 For the serious effect of the Homeric parody in Clarissa's speech,
see Maynard Mack, "Wit and Poetry and Pope," in Pope and His
Contemporaries, p. 37; and Brower, Alexander Pope, p. 161. ^
15 Pope changed the original "Verses" to the more precise "Elegy"
in the 1736 Works.
10 For Ovidian elements in these poems, see Geoffrey Tillotson's
introductions, TE, II, 275-291, 334-336; and Brower, Alexander
Pope, pp. 63-84.
CHAPTER 2.
1 For a strong refutation of "romantic" objections to didacticism
per se, see Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (New York, Swallow
Press and William Morrow, 1947), pp. 239-240.
2 Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion ( Ox-
ford, Clarendon Press, 1959), PP- 213-239, considers the Essay on
Man as a version of the Horatian diatribe-epistle.
8 Martin Price, Swift's Rhetorical Art (New Haven, Yale University
Press, 1953), p. 65.
4 For the "correspondences," see E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabe-
than World Picture (London, Chatto and Windus, 1943), pp. 77-
93, Their breakdown in the eighteenth century is discussed by Earl
R. Wasserman, "Nature Moralized: The Divine Analogy in the Eight-
eenth Century," ELH, XX (1953), 39-76.
* Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New
York, Macmillan, 1925), p. 118.
138
8 A. O. Lovejoy, "'Pride' in Eighteenth-Century Thought," in
Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press,
1948), p. 68.
7 See A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.,
Harvard University Press, 1936), p, 202. My argument in this chap-
ter owes much to this great work.
8 For the difference between arguing from analogy and genuine
analogical thinking, see S. L. Bethell, The Cultural Revolution of the
Seventeenth Century (London, D. Dobson, 1951), chap. iii.
TE, III (i), xxxiv-xxxv,
10 Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, pp. 229-230.
11 1 adopt "externalist! c pathos" from ibid,, pp. 11-12.
13 Nov. 24, 1737; George Sherburn, The Correspondence of Alex-
ander Pope (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956), IV, 89.
13 "Argument of the Fourth Epistle," TE, III (i), 127.
14 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 62 (Friday, May 11, 1711).
15 Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, p. 11.
1Q TE, III (i), Ixxii.
CHAPTER 3.
1 R. A. Brower, The Fields of Light ( New York, Oxford University
Press, 1951), p. 147, describes the clash between "the accent of
Roman cultivation" and "backstairs vulgarity" in the Epistle to Bur-
lington.
-Rebecca Price Parkin, The Poetic Workmanship of Alexander
Pope (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1955), pp. 223-
230, discusses Pope's condemnation of "solipsism."
8 TE, III (ii), 2in.
* Line numbers for the Epistle to Bathurst follow F. W. Bateson's
welcome rearrangement of Warburton's "deathbed" text, in TE, III
(ii).
C R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York,
Harcourt, Brace, 1926), p. 248.
For the difference or view between Pope and Bathurst, and an
elaborate reading of the poem in the light of Christian moral tradi-
tion, see Earl R. Wasserman (ed.), Pope's Epistle to Bathurst (Bal-
timore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), pp. 11-55.
7 L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson ( London,
Chatto and Windus, 1937).
8 To appreciate how remarkably Pope anticipates the social agonies
of the next century, see Raymond Williams' brilliant Culture and
Society 1780-1950 (London, Chatto and Windus, 1958), especially
some of the commentary on Ruskin, pp. 138-146.
9 Here I am in disagreement with Mr. Brower (Alexander Pope,
pp. 251, 258-260) and with Paul J. Alpers, "Pope's To Bathurst and
the Mandevillian State/' ELH, XXV (1958), 23-42, though my
discussion of the point may suggest that our differences are more
terminological than substantial.
139
10 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,
:r. Talcott Parsons (New York, Scribner's, 1930)* P- 71-
11 Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change, (ad. ed,; Los Altos,
Calif., Hermes Publications, iQ54)> P- 4*-
12 Summa Theologica, 2 a 2 ao , Q. Ixxxiii, art. vi., quoted by Tawney,
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 32.
18 William Empson, Seoen Tt/pes of Ambiguity (ad. ed.; London,
Chatto and Windus, 1947), PP-
CHAPTER 4.
1 Quoted by Ian Jack, Augustan Satire ( Oxford, Clarendon Press,
2 Reuben A.' Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Ox-
ford, Clarendon Press, iQ59)> PP- 287-288, suggests that Horace
himself was on occasion "un-Horatian" in a Juvenalian way,
a The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Whitwell Elwin and W. J.
Courthope (London, J. Murray, 1871-1889), X, 551.
4 William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral ( London, Chatto and
Windus, 1935), Pp. 11-12.
5 1 adopt the useful term adversarius from Mary Claire Randolph,
"The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire/' Philological
Quarterly, XXI (1942), 37*.
6 TJS, IV, 3 27n.
7 Henry James, Preface to The Lesson of the Master, in The Art of
the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (New York, Scribner's, 1934 ), P- 222.
8 Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (ad. ed.; Los Altos,
Calif., Hermes Publications, 1959), pp- 59~6o.
9 For a perceptive view of the poem's organization, see D. J.
Greene, "'Logical Structure' in Eighteenth-Century Poetry," Philo-
logical Quarterly, XXI (1952), 33-33i-
10 Gilbert Wakefield, Observations on Pope (London, 1796), p.
233.
n Maynard Mack (ed.), The Augustans (New York, Prentice-Hall,
1950), P- 3o.
"Mack, "Wit and Poetry and Pope," in Pope and His Contem-
poraries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn, ed. J. L. Clifford and
L. A. Landa (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1949), P- 36.
13 For representative views of the persona, see Elder Olson, "Rhet-
oric and the Appreciation of Pope," Modern Philology, XXXVII
(i939), 13-35; and Maynard Mack, "The Muse of Satire," Yale
Review, XLI (1951), 83.
14 F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (London, Chatto and Windus,
1953), p- 86.
CHAPTER 5.
1 Aubrey L. Williams, Pope's Dunciad: A Study of Its Meaning
(Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1955).
140
2 For this parody, see Geoffrey Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope
(2d. ed.; Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1950), p. 155.
F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit ( London, Chatto and Windus,
4 Although my treatment of light and darkness in the Dunciad is
not indebted to them, I should mention the interesting comments on
the subject by G. Wilson Knight in Laureate of Peace (London,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 57-58, and Rebecca Price
Parkin in The Poetic Workmanship of Alexander Pope (Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press, 1955), pp. 116-123. For complaints
that the poem lacks unity, see Tillotson, On the Poetry of Pope, p.
58, and Ian Jack, Augustan Satire (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952),
pp. 125-126.
5 There is a cluster of images here that Pope was remarkably fond
of; for a discussion, see T. R. Edwards, Jr., "The Colors of Fancy:
An Image Cluster in Pope," Modern Language Notes, LXXIII ( 1958),
485-489-
6 When the poem was exclusively about bad writers, it was "wit"
that finally was engulfed in darkness: "Let there be darkness! (the
dread pow'r shall say) / All shall be darkness, as it ne'er were Day;
/ To their first Chaos Wit's vain works shall fall, / And universal
Dulness cover all!" All the 1728 editions have this reading; although
Pope made the major revisions for the first Variorum edition ( 1729 ) ,
their full import becomes clear only in the context of the 1743 version.
7 Though it is possible to take lines 651-652 as parallel, "public"
going with "human" and "private" with "divine," I read "human
Spark" as including both the kinds of "flame" mentioned in 651, so
that "Glimpse divine" adds a new term.
8 Compare "As things seem large which we thro' Mists descry, /
Dulness is ever apt to Magnify" (Essay on Criticism, 392-393). The
Dunciad shows Pope reconsidering the confident association of light
and nature made in the Essay.
Marjorie Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse (Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 52, quotes Locke, Berkeley,
and Addison on sight as the most important sense.
10 Thomas De Quincey, "Pope," in Works (Edinburgh, 1863), XV,
134.
11 For the story, and Aubrey's efforts to refute it, see D. G. James,
The Life of Reason (London, Longmans, Green, 1949), p. 7.
13 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books
and Men (London, 1858), pp, 150, 158.
18 William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London,
Chatto and Windus, 1951), p. 92.
M A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas ( Baltimore, Johns
Hopkins Press, 1948), p. 80.
lts Leavis, The Common Pursuit, p. 91.
10 See Williams, Pope's Dunciad, p. 139, for Paradise Lost II,
980986 as a key to Pope's emphasis on original darkness. (All
italics in this paragraph are mine,)
141
CONCLUSION
x See Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (London,
Chatto and Windus, 1940), pp. 1-2.
3 Louis I. Bredvold, "The Gloom of the Tory Satirists," in Pope
and His Contemporaries, pp. 1-19, points out that darkness of mood
characterized the writings of Pope's whole literary circle, and ascribes
the fact to politically motivated distaste for "the declining moral tone
of England under Walpole." Just as I dissent from Mr. Bredvold's
belief that "even the darkest page of Swift leaves us with [a] feeling
of soundness at the core," so I must say that Pope's "satiric" gloom
and disgust seem to me too powerfully stated to be merely political
protest,
3 Invaluable material for a revised view of eighteenth-century
literature is contained in Ernest Tuveson's The Imagination as a
Means of Grace (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California
Press, 1960), though I should insist that Pope comes perilously close
to the "breakdown of the sense of value in the cosmos, and of con-
fidence in the dignity of man" which Mr. Tuveson (p. 67) says did
not occur until the next century.
4 See, for example, Mark Schorer, William Blake ( New York, Henry
Holt, 1946), pp. 31-33, 38-39; and Northrop Frye, Fearful Sym-
metry (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 161-168.
In fairness, it should be noted that Mr. Frye explains that his sum-
mary of Blake's view of the Augustans is in some ways "caricature."
*D. G. James, The Romantic Comedy (London, Oxford University
Press, 1948), pp. 1-63.
Austin Warren, Rage -for Order (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1948), p, 50.
7 W. B. Yeats, "The Circus Animals' Desertion," The Collected
Poems ofW.B. Yeats (New York, Macmillan, 1956), p. 336.
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