2 WORKS

(a) AN ESSAY ON CRITICISM (1711) [TE I: 195-326]

The Essay on Criticism was Pope’s first independent work, published anonymously through an obscure bookseller [12-13]. Its implicit claim to authority is not based on a lifetime’s creative work or a prestigious commission but, riskily, on the skill and argument of the poem alone. It offers a sort of master-class not only in doing criticism but in being a critic: addressed to those – it could be anyone – who would rise above scandal, envy, politics and pride to true judgement, it leads the reader through a qualifying course. At the end, one does not become a professional critic – the association with hired writing would have been a contaminating one for Pope – but an educated judge of important critical matters.

Much of the poem is delivered as a series of instructions, but the opening is tentative, presenting a problem to be solved: ”Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill/Appear in Writing or in Judging ill’ (EC, 1-

2). The next six lines ring the changes on the differences to be weighed in deciding the question:

’^»>;’K.T ,;-

But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence, To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense: Some few in that, but Numbers err in this, Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss; A Fool might once himself alone expose, Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

(EC, 3-8)

The simple opposition we began with develops into a more complex suggestion that more unqualified people are likely to set up for critic than for poet, and that such a proliferation is serious. Pope’s typographically-emphasised oppositions between poetry and criticism, verse and prose, patience and sense, develop through the passage into a wider account of the problem than first proposed: the even-handed balance of the couplets extends beyond a simple contrast. Nonetheless, though Pope’s oppositions divide, they also keep within a single framework different categories of writing: Pope often seems to be addressing poets as much as critics. The critical function may well depend on a poetic function: this is after all an essay on criticism delivered in verse, and thus acting also as poetry and offering itself for criticism. Its blurring or categories which might otherwise be seen as fundamentally distinct,

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ALEXANDER POPE

and its often slippery transitions from area to area, are part of the poem’s comprehensive, educative character.

Addison, who considered the poem ’a Master-piece’, declared that its tone was conversational and its lack of order was not problematic: The Observations follow one another like those in Horace’s Art of Poetry, without that Methodical Regularity which would have been requisite in a Prose Author’ (Barnard 1973: 78). Pope, however, decided during the revision of the work for the 1736 Works to divide the poem into three sections, with numbered sub-sections summarizing each segment of argument. This impluse towards order is itself illustrative of tensions between creative and critical faculties, an apparent casualness of expression being given rigour by a prose skeleton. The three sections are not equally balanced, but offer something like the thesis, antithesis, and synthesis of logical argumentation – something which exceeds the positive-negative opposition suggested by the couplet format. The first section (1-200) establishes the basic possibilities for critical judgement; the second (201-559) elaborates the factors which hinder such judgement; and the third (560-744) celebrates the elements which make up true critical behaviour.

Part One seems to begin by setting poetic genius and critical taste against each other, while at the same time limiting the operation of teaching to those ’who have written well’ (EC, 11-18). The poem immediately stakes an implicit claim for the poet to be included in the category of those who can ’write well’ by providing a flamboyant example of poetic skill in the increasingly satiric portrayal of the process by which failed writers become critics: ’Each burns alike, who can, or cannot write/Or with a Rival’s, or an Eunuch’s spite’ (EC, 29-30). At the bottom of the heap are ’half-learn’d Witlings, num’rous in our Isle’, pictured as insects in an early example of Pope’s favourite image of teeming, writerly promiscuity (36-45). Pope then turns his attention back to the reader, conspicuously differentiated from this satiric extreme: ’you who seek to give and merit Fame’ (the combination of giving and meriting reputation again links criticism with creativity). The would-be critic, thus selected, is advised to criticise himself first of all, examining his limits and talents and keeping to the bounds of what he knows (46-67); this leads him to the most major of Pope’s abstract quantities within the poem (and within his thought in general): Nature.

’      First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame    .        ” By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,

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One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light, .’-   ,               ’   , .

Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, – ^ i.,          »o

At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art. .   ••>

(EC, 68-73) -H

Dennis complained that Pope should have specified ’what he means by Nature, and what it is to write or to judge according to Nature’ (TE I: 219), and modern analyses have the burden of Romantic deifications of Nature to discard: Pope’s Nature is certainly not some pantheistic, powerful nurturer, located outside social settings, as it would be for Wordsworth, though like the later poets Pope always characterises Nature as female, something to be quested for by male poets [172]. Nature would include all aspects of the created world, including the non-human, physical world, but the advice on following Nature immediately follows the advice to study one’s own internal ’Nature’, and thus means something like an instinctively-recognised principle of ordering, derived from the original, timeless, cosmic ordering of God (the language of the lines implicitly aligns Nature with God; those that follow explicitly align it with the soul). Art should be derived from Nature, should seek to replicate Nature, and can be tested against the unaltering standard of Nature, which thus includes Reason and Truth as reflections of the mind of the original poet-creator, God.

In a fallen universe, however, apprehension of Nature requires assistance: internal gifts alone do not suffice. ,,  ,•,, ,>,.,<.,. -,-,,

’ vV,;  ;••;’> -,’;*’.:./;

Some, to whom Heav’n in Wit has been profuse,   •;.-,.$.” ;/>..:•«v -. • Want as much more, to turn it to its use; *•/’*•••’»,.•>     ’•’’•

For Wit and Judgment often are at strife, jy?    :;-.y,,

Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife.     :•.      ,    ;«  ,.

(EC, 80-03)  • ,;  .     ,

’      ’ •) •     ”’!

Wit, the second of Pope’s abstract qualities, is here seamlessly conjoined with the discussion of Nature: for Pope, Wit means not merely quick verbal humour but something almost as important as Nature – a power of invention and perception not very different from what we would mean by intelligence or imagination. Early critics again seized on the first version of these lines (which Pope eventually altered to the reading given here) as evidence of Pope’s inability to make proper distinctions: he seems to suggest that a supply of Wit sometimes needs more Wit to manage it, and then goes on to replace this conundrum with a more familiar opposition between Wit (invention) and Judgment (correction). But Pope stood by the essential point that Wit itself could

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ALEXANDER POPE

be a form of Judgment and insisted that though the marriage between these qualities might be strained, no divorce was possible.

Nonetheless, some external prop to Wit was necessary, and Pope finds this in those ’RULES’ of criticism derived from Nature:

-.,:,’») Those RULES of old discover’d, not devis’d,   ^,s

’•’’-, -!’ Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d; • v;

” ;•:. Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain’d

’•;?! By the same Laws which first herself ordain’’d. /;••; (EC, 88-91)

*f.;w

’. I•’ft :,<•):

Nature, as Godlike principle of order, is ’discover’d’ to operate according to certain principles stated in critical treatises such as Aristotle’s Poetics or Horace’s Ars Poetica (or Pope’s Essay on Criticism). In the golden age of Greece (92-103), Criticism identified these Rules of Nature in early poetry and taught their use to aspiring poets. Pope contrasts this with the activities of critics in the modern world, where often criticism is actively hostile to poetry, or has become an end in itself (114-17). Right judgement must separate itself out from such blind alleys by reading Homer: ’You then whose Judgment the right Course would steer’ (EC, 118) can see yourself in the fable of ’young Maro’ (Virgil), who is pictured discovering to his amazement the perfect original equivalence between Homer, Nature, and the Rules (130-40). Virgil the poet becomes a sort of critical commentary on the original source poet of Western literature, Homer. With assurance bordering consciously on hyperbole, Pope can instruct us: ’Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem;/To copy Nature is to copy Them’ (EC, 139-40).

Despite the potential for neat conclusion here, Pope has a rider to offer, and again it is one which could be addressed to poet or critic: ’Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare/For there’s a Happiness as well as Care’ (EC, 141-2). As well as the prescriptions of Aristotelian poetics, Pope draws on the ancient treatise ascribed to Longinus and known as On the Sublime [12]. Celebrating imaginative ’flights’ rather than representation of nature, Longinus figures in Pope’s poem as a sort of paradox:

Great Wits sometimes may gloriously offend,        .” > i/?,, i/i ••,.!•• >:-..

And rise to Faults true Criticks dare not mend;       ’.,: r.n••/•;;•   ::’..>(,,’’;

from vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part, •••,••’ .in-;,,;.);,’;,’!

And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art, . : uv\    ••:.;:..>

Which, without passing thro’ the Judgment, gains /:       :

The Heart, and all its End at once attains. -’’,. … :   •

(EC, 152-7)

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t>- nr

WORK        : ’•.

This occasional imaginative rapture, not predictable by rule, is an important concession, emphasised by careful typographic signalling of its paradoxical nature (’gloriously offend’, and so on); but it is itself countered by the caution that ’The Critick’ may ’put his Laws in force’ if such licence is unjustifiably used. Pope here seems to align the ’you’ in the audience with poet rather than critic, and in the final lines of the first section it is the classical ’Bards Triumphant’ who remain unassailably immortal, leaving Pope to pray for ’some Spark of your Coelestial Fire’ (EC, 195) to inspire his own efforts (as The last, the meanest of your Sons’, EC, 196) to instruct criticism through poetry.

Following this ringing prayer for the possibility of reestablishing a critical art based on poetry, Part II (200-559) elaborates all the human psychological causes which inhibit such a project: pride, envy, sectarianism, a love of some favourite device at the expense of overall design. The ideal critic will reflect the creative mind, and will seek to understand the whole work rather than concentrate on minute infractions of critical laws:

,”ilp’ -’’’*, > %\    •;’ •’

A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit   –    ’ ’•”-’•«.-’; «.\’”’•

With the same Spirit that its Author writ,                *« •(•;;>;,

Survey the Whole, nor seek slight Faults to find,        ^f -wi .*-• Where Nature moves, and Rapture warms the Mind;       I

(EC, 233-6)     ”

Most critics (and poets) err by having a fatal predisposition towards some partial aspect of poetry: ornament, conceit, style, or metre, which they use as an inflexible test of far more subtle creations. Pope aims for a kind of poetry which is recognisable and accessible in its entirety:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,

What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest, •.

Something, whose Truth convinc’d at Sight we find,   te

That gives us back the Image of our Mind:

(EC, 296-300)     •’

This is not to say that style alone will do, as Pope immediately makes plain (305-6): the music of poetry, the ornament of its ’numbers’ or rhythm, is only worth having because The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense’ (EC, 365). Pope performs and illustrates a series of poetic cliches – the use of open vowels, monosyllabic lines, and cheap rhymes:

Tho’ oft the Ear the open Vowels tire … (EC, 345)        ••••>,   • ”•>’

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ALEXANDER POPE

n    And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line … (EC, 347)

%    Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze, ;; • .

:;1    In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees… (EC, 350-1)        …,. ’;•:

u

’;  These gaffes are contrasted with more positive kinds of imitative

effect: v   •ri.v.’iijuft :!•.:•;? ^

’•><    Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,    -.->•: ••.-,! \.’r”;!!.-;;:-’v,;’i. •ii    And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;   :>• ::f ,!.,;!?•.••.-•»: But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,      :> / h1: ;.;:!r<5:y’;; >;     The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the Torrent roar.  ; .’wiv/^.’kvt a (EC, 366-9) :.

Again, this functions both as poetic instance and as critical test, working examples for both classes of writer.

After a long series of satiric vignettes of false critics, who merely parrot the popular opinion, or change their minds all the time, or flatter aristocratic versifiers, or criticise poets rather than poetry (384-473), Pope again switches attention to educated readers, encouraging (or cajoling) them towards staunchly independent and generous judgment within what is described as an increasingly fraught cultural context, threatened with decay and critical •warfare (474-525). But, acknowledging that even ’Noble minds’ will have some ’Dregs … of Spleen and sow’r Disdain’ (EC, 526-7), Pope advises the critic to ’Discharge that Rage on more Provoking Crimes/Nor fear a Dearth in these Flagitious Times’ (EC, 528-9): obscenity and blasphemy are unpardonable and offer a kind of lightning conductor for critics to purify their own wit against some demonised object of scorn.

If the first parts of An Essay on Criticism outline a positive classical past and troubled modern present, Part III seeks some sort of resolved position whereby the virtues of one age can be maintained during the squabbles of the other. The opening seeks to instill the correct behaviour in the critic – not merely rules for written criticism, but, so to speak, for enacted criticism, a sort of ’Good Breeding’ (EC, 576) which politely enforces without seeming to enforce:

<r.    LEARN then what MORALS Criticks ought to show,

•K’    For ’tis but half a Judge’s Task, to Know.

:v    Tis not enough, Taste, Judgment, Learning, join;

In all you speak, let Truth and Candor shine …

Be silent always when you doubt your Sense;

And speak, tho’ sure, with seeming Diffidence …    •..• ’ ,

.••!. tv

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Men must be taugfit as if you taught them not; And Things unknown propos’d as Things forgot: (EC, 560-3, 566-7, 574-5)

k.j

<•&

This ideally-poised man of social grace cannot be universally successful: some poets, as some critics, are incorrigible and it is part of Pope’s education of the poet-critic to leave them well alone. Synthesis, if that is being offered in this final part, does not consist of gathering all writers into one tidy fold but in a careful discrimination of true wit from irredeemable ’dulness’ (584-630).

Thereafter, Pope has two things to say. One is to set a challenge to contemporary culture by asking ’where’s the Man’ who can unite all necessary humane and intellectual qualifications for the critic (EC, 631-

42), and be a sort of walking oxymoron, ’Modestly bold, and humanly severe’ in his judgements. The other is to insinuate an answer. Pope offers deft characterisations of critics from Aristotle to Pope who achieve the necessary independence from extreme positions: Aristotle’s primary treatise is likened to an imaginative voyage into the land of Homer which becomes the source of legislative power; Horace is the poetic model for friendly conversational advice; Quintilian is a useful store of ’the justest Rules, and clearest Method join’d’; Longinus is inspired by the Muses, who ’bless their Critick with a Poet’s Fire’ (EC,

676). These pairs include and encapsulate all the precepts recommended in the body of the poem. But the empire of good sense, Pope reminds us, fell apart after the fall of Rome, leaving nothing but monkish superstition, until the scholar Erasmus, always Pope’s model of an ecumenical humanist, reformed continental scholarship (693-696). Renaissance Italy shows a revival of arts, including criticism; France, ’a Nation born to serve’ (EC, 713) fossilised critical and poetic practice into unbending rules; Britain, on the other hand, ’Foreign Laws despis’d,/And kept unconqmr’d, and unciviliz’d’ (EC, 715-16) – a deftly ironic modulation of what appears to be a patriotic celebration into something more muted. Pope does however cite two earlier verse essays (by John Sheffield, Duke of Buckinghamshire, and Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon) [13] before paying tribute to his own early critical mentor, William Walsh, who had died in 1708 [9]. Sheffield and Dillon were both poets who wrote criticism in verse, but Walsh was not a poet; in becoming the nearest modern embodiment of the ideal critic, his ’poetic’ aspect becomes Pope himself, depicted as a mixture of moderated qualities which reminds us of the earlier ’Where’s the man’ passage: he is quite possibly here,

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ALEXANDER POPE

Careless of Censure, nor too fond of Fame, <#/ :,;>.«? >;:>.?/.

Still pleas’d to praise, yet not afraid to blame,   u> -,: i,:r’ V iv; •’•, Averse alike to Flatter, or Offend, ’’•.:’•    , ,

Not />ee from Faults, nor yet too vain to mem/. , (EC, 741-44)       vJi.M^:^..,.

It is a kind of leading from the front, or tuition by example, as recommended and practised by the poem. From an apparently secondary, even negative, position (writing on criticism, which the poem sees as secondary to poetry), the poem ends up founding criticism on poetry, and deriving poetry from the (ideal) critic.

Early criticism celebrated the way the poem seemed to master and exemplify its own stated ideals, just as Pope had said of Longinus that he 7s himself that great Sublime he draws’ (EC, 680). It is a poem profuse with images, comparisons and similes. Johnson thought the longest example, that simile comparing student’s progress in learning with a traveller’s journey in Alps was ’perhaps the best that English poetry can shew’: The simile of the Alps has no useless parts, yet affords a striking picture by itself: it makes the foregoing position better understood, and enables it to take faster hold on the attention; it assists the apprehension, and elevates the fancy’ (Johnson 1905: 229-30). Many of the abstract precepts are made visible in this way: private judgment is like one’s reliance on one’s (slightly unreliable) watch (9-

10); wit and judgment are like man and wife (82-3); critics are like pharmacists trying to be doctors (108-11). Much of the imagery is military or political, indicating something of the social role (as legislator in the universal empire of poetry) the critic is expected to adopt; we are also reminded of the decay of empires, and the potential decay of cultures (there is something of The Dunciad in the poem). Much of it is religious, as with the most famous phrases from the poem (’For Fools rush in where angels fear to tread’; To err is human, to forgive, divine’), indicating the level of seriousness which Pope accords the matter of poetry. Much of it is sexual: creativity is a kind of manliness, wooing Nature, or the Muse, to ’generate’ poetic issue, and false criticism, like obscenity, derives from a kind of inner ’impotence’. Patterns of such imagery can be harnessed to ’organic’ readings of the poem’s wholeness. But part of the life of the poem, underlying its surface statements and metaphors, is its continual shifts of focus, its reminders of that which lies outside the tidying power of couplets, its continual reinvention of the ’you’ opposed to the ’they’ of false criticism, its progressive displacement of the opposition you thought you were looking at with another one which requires your attention.

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Further Reading

Johnson thought the poem perhaps Pope’s greatest work: ’it exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or dignify didactick composition, selection of matter, novelty of arrangement, justness of precept, splendour of illustration, and propriety of digression’ (Johnson 1905:

228-9). It has been less popular in modern times, but Empson (1950) gives an exhilarating display of the ramifications of the word ’Wit’ in the poem. For a reading of the poem’s strategies of imagery and metaphor see Spacks (1971: 17-40). Morris (1984) champions the poem’s serious and intelligent commitment to the practice of literary criticism. Savage (1988) delves deeply into the poem’s mythological and classical roots to discuss the far-reaching significance of Pope’s use of ’Nature’.

(b) WINDSOR-FOREST (1713) [TE 1:145-94]

The hyphenation of Pope’s title reminds us that the poem unites two objects of attention: a town overlooked by an ancient royal castle, and a wooded area originally set out for royal use, but also available for solitary reflection on natural beauty: Pope will celebrate Thy Forests, Windsor\ and thy green Retreats/At once the Monarch’s and the Muse’s Seats’ (WF, 1-2), explicitly linking poetry and politics. The poem was written over a long period, and does not propose a single location for its viewpoint; in this it is unlike Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill (several versions between 1642 and 1668), the poem with which Pope’s is most often compared. Denham’s more limited topographic or ’prospect’ poem uses its natural eminence as prompt for reflections on national issues, in a manner which Pope is certainly aware of; but Pope’s is a more comprehensive and complex attempt to provide a vision of England, past, present and future, from the starting point of a well-known area. Thus the poem starts in Windsor Forest, but ends up voyaging down the Thames to London, and out to the world of commerce and empire; Denham’s poem retreats in the opposite direction, moving from an aerial view of the City, which Denham (a Royalist) finds politically offensive, to the solitary views afforded by the hill of the title, overlooking the plain of Runnymede where Magna Carta was signed. Pope, writing at the other end of the civil upheaval which prompts Denham’s reflections, has similar sympathies but (in 1713 at least) slightly more to celebrate [14-15].

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ALEXANDER POPE

WORK

The poem cannot take the landscape for granted: it has work to do. ’The Groves of Eden, vanish’d now so long/Live in Description, and look green in Song’, Pope announces (WF, 7-8), and to rebuild a lost paradise is a very self-conscious poetic act of vision:

7>(3.

:< Here Hills and Vales, the Woodland and the Plain, : ; • v.r •<

’,’ Here Earth and Water seem to strive again, ”.ii:!;,        •::!•

a Not Chaos-like together crush’d and bruis’d,    >••.;:..:;;.’.•• .’!’”< rv:/””’’.;j;;

•i But as the World, harmoniously confus’d:         ;«•;•> >o 1 ,;;.;w;j; afi;

3 Where Order in Variety we see, «>,.••••.    >:: :;:^ t-:;^

:< And where, tho’ all things differ, all agree. ’.’», •’.;•.x-

1; (WF, 11-16)       l*.,/.;^sv»v

•*j ;••.; ,•;>:.<:;

This aesthetic principle, known as concordia discors or ’concord in discord’, by which the sum total of opposing elements produces a pleasing jigsaw-like harmony (’Order in Variety’), is a clear signal of the type of poem this is to be: the couplet, sometimes doubled into a quatrain, can be the perfect medium for the harmonious matching and balancing of discordant essences, and in this initial scene elements which might be ’together crush’d and bruis’d’ are seamlessly paired off into appropriate couples: Hills, Vales; Woodland, Plain; Earth, Water. Using a pair of adverbs of direction (’Here … There’) to guide us round the ’chequer’d Scene’ (WF, 17), Pope highlights those aspects which make up its balanced, static quality. It is something like conjuring, as if the landscape emerges into view as Pope points to it (as it does, of course, in the actual reading of the poem):

’,«r,

•,’MSfc»ll’

There, interspers’d in Lawns and opening Glades, Thin Trees arise that shun each others Shades. Here in full Light the russet Plains extend; There wrapt in Clouds the blueish Hills ascend: Ev’n the wild Heath displays her Purple Dies, And ’midst the Desart fruitful Fields arise, That crown’d with tufted Trees and springing Corn, Like verdant Isles the sable Waste adorn.

(WF, 21-8)

The landscape isn’t just there, it is doing something: extending, ascending, displaying, arising, springing, adorning, all at the touch of the poet-observer. The magic extends into coloration: the vision is colourful, but not in any sense which might be described as natural. It is a form of extreme colour, purified, as if each element can only have

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one colour and that colour must be significant: not just green and black but Verdant’ and ’sable’.

The landscape is being made mythological: Pope celebrates this English landscape as a reclaimed version not only of Eden but of classical mythology: ’See Pan with Flocks, with Fruits Pomona crown’d/Here blushing Flora paints th’enamel’d Ground’ (WF, 37-8). All this means, literally, is that herds of sheep, orchards of fruit, and fields of flowers can be seen in the landscape. But Pope insists on the painted and ceremonial quality of his representation, enthroning the classical gods in Windsor Forest, enamelling the ground for Flora (goddess of vegetation) to ’paint’. It is a golden age, almost literally, and the reason is the transforming and magical presence of the last legally sanctioned member of the Stuart line, Queen Anne: ’Rich Industry sits smiling on the Plains,/ And Peace and Plenty tell, a STUART reigns’ (WF, 41-2). The baroque orchestration of the scene has been leading up to this eulogy: to invest Windsor Forest with colours more usually associated with coats of arms in heraldry (as Pope does throughout the poem), and to discover in the landscape the presence of mythological figures, shows a momentary commitment to a mode of panegyric which Pope would abandon immediately at the Hanoverian accession. The reign of Anne is celebrated here as the flower of the Stuart line, that succession of monarchs whose magical and quasi-religious claims she resumed in her own reign.

Johnson, who celebrated Pope’s ’variety and elegance, and the art of interchanging description, narrative, and morality’, thought that the apparent ’want of plan’ in the poem was natural: since ’the scenes, which they must exhibit successively, are all subsisting at the same time, the order in which they are shewn must by necessity be arbitrary’ (Johnson 1905: 225). But the poem is not really driven by a succession of descriptive scenes: its contrasts are as much about time as space. After establishing an Edenic Windsor, Pope immediately plunges into extreme historical contrast: ’Not thus the Land appear’d in Ages past,/ A dreary Desart and a gloomy Waste’, Pope writes (WF, 43-4), picking up his own earlier lines, ”midst the Desart fruitfull Fields arise’ and ’Like verdant Isles the sable Waste adorn’ to enforce the catastrophic nature of the contrast. Lines 43-84 (numerically matching the paradisal opening, 1-42) detail the terrible ’appearance’ of the landscape under invader kings, William the Conqueror and his son, William Rufus. These were kings who followed Nature only in the sense of hunting it to death (though in the New Forest, not Windsor, which escapes contamination). Pope makes the love of hunting take the form of a tyrannical abuse of human law whereby game animals were more valuable than human subjects – the New Forest was:

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f

WiOfc’HW

fear j W.-

ALEXANDER POPE

To Savage Beasts and Savage Laws a Prey, >, t

And Kings more furious and severe than they:     «^’ Who claim’d the Skies, dispeopled Air and Floods, The lonely Lords of empty Wilds and Woods.

(WF, 45-8)

Whereas Anne only figures, without being named, as the concealed magical goddess who inspires fruitful labour, in this section the tyrants who have created forest laws to protect their own realm of savage play are everywhere, despoiling churches, ruinating cities, incriminating subjects. Pope sees the deaths of William Rufus and another of William’s sons in hunting accidents as providential revenge for the tyrannic oppression of indignenous subjects (WF, 79-84), though this also leaves the passage open to being read as a criticism of William III, Anne’s predecessor in Ages past’ and another foreign ruler of Britain whose death was hastened by a fall while hunting [166].

The section which follows sees a restoration of British political liberties in concert with a restored fruitfulness of landscape, imprecisely placed somewhere among ’Succeeding Monarchs’ (WF, 85-92). When these principles are agreed, it then becomes possible for hunting to take its place among the proper uses of the forest landscape: Anne herself was a notable hunter, and Pope, personally more sympathetic to animals than most of his contemporaries, has to absorb the fact that the Forest was a Royal hunting preserve by invoking a utility and propriety to the scene: ’Vig’rous Swains’ can hunt appropriately enough (93-6), channelling the energy of youth into activities which might have more aggressive implications – as is indicated by Pope’s comparison of the capture of partridges with the capture of a foreign town (107-

10). The pheasant which is shot in the immediately succeeding lines reinforces this sense, for though the bird appears gloriously and richly part of the stained-glass ’nature’ of the first section, it is also vulnerable to the violence of the second:

See! from the Brake the whirring Pheasant springs, t.dtii* MI.J And mounts exulting on triumphant Wings; if’ »r»;i<,

Short is his Joy! he feels the fiery Wound, .       ,§c.;f:H’

Flutters in Blood, and panting beats the Ground. V .r;<:\iA r-Huvi’, Ah! what avail his glossie, varying Dyes, ! K, />«fr ssj,.ij? it»His Purple Crest, and Scarlet-circled Eyes, »tf; ”4 tyio^?};«£« The vivid Green his shining Plumes unfold; ”* ’”’””•’ ’” .>;rrr His painted Wings, and Breast that flames with Goldi ”,» .>’

(WF, 111-18)      :,:.

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Still more given over to pathos are the Larks shot alongside lapwings and woodcocks: ’Oft, Oft as the mounting Larks their Notes prepare,/ They fall, and leave their little Lives in Air’ (WF, 133-4). The best we have is the precarious power of the order of the seasons, which underlies and modulates the kinds of ’pleasing Toils’ hunting affords (in Autumn, beagling, in Winter, shooting, in Spring, fishing, in Summer, hunting on horseback) against the possibility of excess, of return to Norman tyranny (’slaught’ring Guns’, WF, 125, ’Leaden Death’, WF, 132, ’Sylvan War’, WF, 148). Pope’s preference is clearly for a quieter kind of catch, that nature which offers itself to be ’painted’ by art into unbroken surfaces:

Our plenteous Streams a various Race supply; «••>*.,

The bright-ey’d Perch with Fins of Tyrian Dye, ”’?•,

The silver Eel, in shining Volumes roll’d, ;-r..

The yellow Carp, in Scales bedrop’d with Gold, •{-.

Swift Trouts, diversify’d with Crimson Stains, ”r •VJ*-.,-M

And Pykes, the Tyrants of the watry Plains. :,:’,;••’•

(IFF, 141-6) –

Like the pheasant, the fish are painted with an almost metallic sense of pure colour which submerges the emblematic catalogue of characteristics (political or natural) into a peaceful assemblage viewed through the tranquilizing mirror of water (or art).

The Lodona episode (171-218) alternatively transforms hunting through mythology. In the hunting section, summer energies of the ’Sylvan War’ (hunt), with their faint sexual connotations are offset by the controlling presence of Anne, again unnamed, but likened to Diana, goddess of hunting and chastity. The story that follows describes the sexual pursuit of the chaste nymph Lodona by the savage god Pan (here quite removed from his pastoral and ceremonial role in line 37). At, or possibly before, the moment of rape, Lodona is metamorphosed in Ovidian manner into the River Loddon (a small river which flows into the Thames near Pope’s then home, Binfield). Pope thus arranges a poetic exit for the pursued victim of sexual violence, not exactly into nature, but into that preserving, transforming gloss of surface which marks the visual colorations of the poem. What you see in the stream that Lodona has become is nature still, but nature surreally inverted into a chaste, emblematic picture: . •…-; .-.’,

Oft in her Glass the musing Shepherd spies .•,-,.

The headlong Mountains and the downward Skies,

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ALEXANDER POPE

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;%> The watry Landskip of the pendant Woods,        ’vt£;.-?•.•;: m usd \,5< And absent Trees that tremble in the Floods;         ’’••’xxihoov b, w In the clear azure Gleam the Flocks are seen, :•& .’’;;,» v:»l

?-vf And floating Forests paint the Waves with Green.       s ”,-’ • ^/ -tw.- ,«:•,” (WF, 211-16)     ftuitvrnb”

The poem (thus purified) ’flows’ with Lodona/Loddon into praise of Father Thames, a Neptune-like figure beyond the reach of such passions (though Pope includes a vignette of the notoriously promiscuous Jove, 233-4). The poem retreats from passion and violence into an artistically-ordered inner world: we are at the centre of the poem when Pope chooses to celebrate rural retirement.

To retire from life at court is to ’follow Nature’ (WF, 252), studying, exercising, watching the seasons, observing the cosmos. Such retirement is explicitly figured as poetic, designed for the man ’Whom Nature charms, and whom the Muse inspires’ (WF, 238). Such a man, in fact, as Pope, who places his self-inscription in the poem at this point with an invocation of the Muses, female figures for whom desire may be safely expressed: ’Ye sacred Nine! that all my Soul possess/Whose Raptures fire me, and whose Visions bless’ (WF, 259-60). The landscape becomes a visionary home for ’God-like Poets’ associated with Windsor such as Denham, Cowley, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Yet these poets cannot be simply associated with retreat, for Denham was active in the civil war and Surrey was a soldier: ’Matchless his Pen, victorious was his Lance’ (WF, 293). And Pope does not claim for himself a line of succession from these poets: instead he claims this union of retirement and activity, poetry and politics, for George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, the dedicatee of the poem. The reason for ceding this task to Granville, who did combine the tasks of politician and poet, is that Pope is building up here to a celebration of the Treaty of Utrecht, which Granville had been involved in negotiating, and which was about to be signed, bringing an end to the War of Spanish Succession [14-15]. From 283 to 328 Pope artfully suggests, while partially executing it, the poem that Granville should write: a celebration of the martial conquests of Edward III, and a somewhat dense subsequent history, which would demonstrate Lansdowne’s supposed ability to ’call the Muses to their ancient Seats’ and ’Make Windsor Hills in lofty Numbers rise’ (WF, 284,

287).

This would be a magical form of utterance. When Anne is actually named for the first time she acts as a sort of redemptive divinity, putting an end to a crisis which seems to be as much internal (the civil war giving rise to ongoing Whig-Tory strife) as external (the battle with

France): ’At length great ANNA said – Let Discord cease I/She said, the World obey’d, and all was PeaceV (WF, 327-8). The peace which the politician-poet Granville has been instrumental in negotiating is not just an end to the European war, in this mythology, but the composition of all strife everywhere. The celebration of the peace announced by Anna is voiced by another mythological figure, Father Thames. Highly coloured in the poem’s baroque manner (azure, verdant, golden), Thames and his attendant tributaries look like an allegorical painting in a baroque palace. Pope fuses this heraldic throwback to the days of Stuart power with a more modern view of prosperity, commerce, and imperial power. Arriving from Windsor Forest, along the river, at the united cities of London and Westminster (375-80), where ’Kings shall sue, and suppliant States be seen/Once more to bend before a British QUEEN’ (WF, 383-4), we find the power deriving from Windsor’s monarchic source issuing from the port of London to control the world, with the trees of the forest, representing the British navy, launching out on voyages of commerce and exploration (385-92). Pax Britannica is seen to guarantee universal freedom, mutual commerce, an interesting interchange between primitive and civilised races, a world where ’Seas but join the Regions they divide’ (WF, 400), indicated in the movements of the poem outward from Thames and inward to it (’Earth’s distant Ends our Glory shall behold,/And the new World launch forth to seek the Old’, WF, 401-2).

Pope seems however to have laced the celebratory mode of panegyric which he projects onto Landsdowne and Anne with points which inhibit full triumphalist assent. Thames tells us, for example, that The shady Empire shall retain no Trace/Of War or Blood, but in the Sylvan Chace’ (WF, 371-2), that is, in hunting; but we have already seen how easily hunting shades into the excess of tyranny and rapacity. When Thames envisages the trade which will accrue to London from the Treaty, he uses a common enough figure whereby labour is completely removed from view, and nature itself seems to supply the goods (the trees which willingly ’rush’ to become ships are doing the same thing, WF, 385-6):

For me the Balm shall bleed, and Amber flow, The Coral redden, and the Ruby glow,

The Pearly Shell its lucid Globe infold, ;

And Phoebus warm the ripening Ore to Gold. ;

(WF, 393-6)

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ALEXANDER POPE

In some ways, nature merely offers up its bright, warm, glamorous minerals; but a hint of violence left encoded in ’the Balm shall bleed’, which has very nearly a sacrificial resonance (’The Corall redden’ might have the same suggestion). Pope could have ended his vision of a glorious future with images of golden restoration: ’Peru once more a Race of Kings behold/And other Mexico’s be roof’d with Gold’ (WF, 411-12). Instead, Thames concludes his prophecy in ’deepest Hell’, where various allegorical forces of disorder (Discord, Pride, Terror, and so on) have been exiled by ’Peace’. It is not quite comforting to have this array of tortured emotion displayed as the condition of universal peace: ’gasping Furies thirst for Blood in vain’ (WF, 422).

As if to acknowledge this faint discrepancy, Pope turns his poem away from the celebration voiced by Thames, suggesting that Granville should be the poet to recite ’The Thoughts of Gods’, while Pope himself should stay back in Windsor Forest, at the level of the Pastorals of 1709: ’Enough for me, that to the list’ning Swains/First in these Fields I sung the Sylvan Strains’ (WF, 433-4). This shying away from the role of public herald, with the continual deference to the man of public action, Granville, and the voicing of power through Thames and Anna, suggests that the poem is not quite so perfectly aligned with the Tory view of history as it is often thought to be.

Further Reading

Wasserman (1959), a complex reading of the poem in relation to Denham’s Cooper’s Hill and the concept of concordia discors, is the place to start. Rogers (1973a) analyses the poem’s use of colour in heraldic and potentially political terms, while his later article (1979) explores the poem’s alternating attentions to the dimensions of time and space. Caretta (1981) examines the poem’s idea of history. Morris (1984) reads the poem in relation to Virgil and finds much ambiguity in Pope’s description of military success, while Brown (1985) gives a more hostile account of the poem’s political compromises; Brooks-Davies (1988) decodes the poem’s magical political transformations to see it as a ’Jacobite Georgic … that enshrines political failure at its heart’ (142).

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:»’>’.V*

.:•»”

(c) THE RAPE OF THE LOCK

(1712/1714/1717) [TE II: 79-212]

Pope’s first ’heroi-comical poem’ coupled together heroic language and contemporary life, producing a medium appropriate for a poet who was engaging in a massive epic translation but whose temperament was satiric. Originally designed as a palliative in a family quarrel [14], it was itself expanded from the miniature squib of 1712 into a fivecanto version complete with a race of mythological beings to act in parody of the epic ’machinery’ of divine action [17]; in the later version (used here), contrasts of perspective, the conflation of big and little, high and low, animate and inanimate, offer Pope a fertile field both for imaginative play and for explorations of the strangeness of mental and emotional life. The poem poses explicit questions, but its answers are more diffuse.

Say what strange Motive, Goddess! cou’d compel

A well-bred Lord t’assault a gentle Belief

Oh say what stranger Cause, yet unexplor’d,

Cou’d make a gentle Belle reject a Lordt-

In Tasks so bold, can Little Men engage,

And in soft Bosoms dwells such mighty Rage^

(RL, I: 7-12)

««?

In his opening invocation, Pope has already identified ’am’rous Causes’ as the stimulant to the Baron’s ’dire Offence’ (RL, I: 1); but the poem goes on to suggest more complicated manoeuvrings between ’mighty Contests’ and ’trivial Things’ (RL, I: 2).

Belinda is a little ’Belle’, or fashionable beauty, celebrated in conventional language (’those Eyes that must eclipse the Day’, RL, I: 14), but dozing her way through the morning, absolutely without responsibility or occupation. Her attempts at action are curious: we may take ’Thrice rung the Bell the Slipper knock’d the Ground/And the press’d Watch return’d a silver Sound’ (RL, I: 17-18) to indicate that she rings for her maid, knocks on the floor for attention, then checks the time, but her agency is nowhere specified and the objects appear to perform the actions themselves. Belinda is, in any case, put back to sleep again by her ’Guardian Sylph’, Ariel, who puts into her head (in a parody of epic and biblical dreams) an attractive male figure to warn her of some impending disaster (I: 27-114). The long speech grafts onto Belinda’s

UK

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ALEXANDER POPE

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childhood imaginings (’Of airy Elves by Moonlight Shadows seen’, RL, I: 31) a new mythology, which also serves to provide the reader with the necessary background: what Belinda takes to be her own autonomous activity in life is actually a contrivance of her miniature attendants, the ’light Militia of the lower Sky’ (RL, I: 42). Female vanities, Ariel explains, continue after death, and the four main types of female characters return to elemental identities: Prudes become Gnomes, Termagants turn into Salamanders, ’Soft yielding Minds’ become Nymphs, and Coquettes (’Whoever fair and chaste/Rejects Mankind’, RL, I: 67-8) become Sylphs. Ariel has identified Belinda as a woman of this last kind, and seeks to protect her chastity against temptation: though ’Honour is the Word with Men below’ (RL, I: 78), all that really prevents the coquette from ’warm Desires’ (RL, I: 75) is the guardian Sylph. Mental life is envisaged as a near-arbitrary play of forces; the Sylphs contrive to balance out desires so that no one male seems more

attractive than another: ,.,..,.,.;,,„ ,»y«<jn

/1

With varying Vanities, from ev’ry Part, , ..,./rtiVjt.,,,,s.ri^»,-.,,,

They shift the moving Toyshop of their Heart; Where Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-knots Sword-knots strive, Beaus banish Beaus, and Coaches Coaches drive.

(RL, I: 99-102)

Men become a succession of metonymic objects, a series of external stimulants which substitute for desire in a heart which is itself no more than a catalogue of toys.

Exterior protection is forthcoming in the description of the Toilet’ or dressing-table. A flamboyant parody both of epic scenes in which heroes are armed for battle, and descriptions of ritual sacrifice, the passage (1:121-48) suggests how for Belinda, the entire world is turned into an available commodity, and how she turns herself (with the invisible aid of the Sylphs) into an object of desire.

A heav’nly Image in the Glass appears, ’\     To that she bends, to that her Eyes she rears;   ”’• Th’inferior Priestess, at her Altar’s side, j,

Trembling, begins the sacred Rites of Pride.      ”, Unnumber’d Treasures ope at once, and here  ; ( The various Off’rings of the World appear; ”      From each she nicely culls with curious Toil, And decks the Goddess with the glitt’ring Spoil. This Casket India’s glowing Gems unlocks,

66

K|’4i’

JV.,4/’.

,-* bii-r

•*••(

And all Arabia breathes from yonder Box. The Tortoise here and Elephant unite, Transform’d to Combs, the speckled and the white. Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows, Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux. «.A.» »:;•,

(RL, 1:125-38)    r,wi &.,?.*

As ’awful Beauty puts on all its Arms’ Belinda is close to blasphemy

– through her self-devotion (with its reminiscences of Milton’s Eve) and her casual arrangement of bibles among similarly plural objects of merely cosmetic or amatory importance (1:138). But more significantly, Belinda can be accused of making herself up to look like the ’Image in the Glass’, a material object for visual consumption. The epic powers of the ’cosmos’ are reduced to ’Cosmetic Powr’s’ (I: 124), or make-up; the world is distilled into miniatures on Belinda’s dressing table: ’all Arabia breathes’ from Belinda’s perfume-box, the whole of India is apparently represented by what is in her jewellery box. Tortoise and elephant (mythological actors in a Hindu myth of creation) comically ’unite’ into ivory and shell combs in what might appear an extreme perversion of the proportions of nature into the distortions of art.

Canto II launches the ’made-up’ Belinda on the world in a similarly ambivalent guise. The desirable but untouchable female works to an unwritten code of coquettish behaviour (II: 9-18). But her transformation into object continues: ’On her white Breast a sparkling Cross she wore/Which Jews might kiss, and Infidels adore’ (RL, II: 7-8), suggesting that her commitment to religion is ornamental and attracts primarily sexual attention, itself displaced onto the ritual object rather than the human flesh. The ’painted Vessel’ (RL, II: 47) might refer to the boat she is sailing in, or simply to her. Pope gives us the locks of hair as small but commanding engines of sexual power:

This Nymph, to the Destruction of Mankind, Nourish’d two Locks, which graceful hung behind In equal Curls, and well conspir’d to deck With shining Ringlets the smooth Iv’ry Neck. Love in these Labyrinths hi’s Slaves detains, And mighty Hearts are held in slender Chains.

(RL, II: 19-26)

After the lock is lost, Belinda’s companion Thalestris asks a rhetorical question which indicates something of Belinda’s labour in creating this metallic metonymy of herself:

67

’iiL^B

.•M.-WA’!

ALEXANDER POPE

Was it for this you took such constant Care The Bodkin, Comb, and Essence to prepare; For this your Locks in Paper-Durance bound, For this with tort’ring Irons wreath’d around1?-   : For this with Fillets strain’d your tender Head, And bravely bore the double Loads of Lead-?

(RL, IV: 97-102)

’Rape’ comes from the Latin verb to ’seize’ and does not etymologically imply sexual possession; but in terms of sexual politics, the Baron clearly conceives that if Belinda has turned her sexuality into an object, she can be possessed in the metonymic form of part for whole: Th’ Adventurous Baron the bright Locks admir’d,/He saw, he wish’d, and to the Prize aspir’d’ (RL, II: 29-30). For the Baron, like everyone in the poem, is a creature of objects, and his parody sacrifice (II: 35-46), complementing Belinda’s ritual of self-worship, consigns ’the Trophies of his former Loves’ (women’s garters and gloves) to the flames in order to appeal for possession of the supreme ’Prize’ (a prize is something which is ’taken rather than given’, often in war, etymologically not very far removed from rape, and akin to the ’Spoil’ with which Belinda is equipped in RL, I: 132).

The Sylphs too regard Belinda’s sexual purity as just another object in her collection: Ariel warns them of some unknown ’dire Disaster’ in terms which appear (in the shifting balances and antitheses of the couplet) to avoid making distinctions of moral scale:

Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law, ,.„„•’••.&*.-. v -.; c;;i« Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw, s •,,-•„.*-: .”•. .: :-•:;,;:

Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,   •,.;<•, .?;,;.. i , w:.

Forget her Pray’rs, or miss a Masquerade, !:’:i;v:;. :••>•.< .. • • ii.w-i Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball; ;•;:,&: :v..• •• :U;h Or whether Heav’n has doom’d that Shock Must fall. ;.,’rf. I

(RL, ItttdUO)     ,  i-1

Inner and outer, costume and character, religion and entertainment, are all the same to Ariel’s Belinda: her chastity (Diana’s Law’) is as breakable as a ’frail China Jar’, and Ariel sets ’Fifty chosen Sylphs’ to guard Belinda’s hoop-petticoat, a ’sev’nfold Fence’ (by analogy with Achilles’s ’sev’n-fold Shield’ in the Iliad) against sexual advances, as if chastity was something you could preserve with whalebone [174-7,

181-2].

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Such delusive misapprehensions of value have a social cost, as the opening of Canto III indicates. The boat arrives at Hampton Court, one of Queen Anne’s palaces and thus a site of political importance as well as social intercourse.

Here Britain’?, Statesmen oft the Fall foredoom Of Foreign Tyrants, and of Nymphs at home;        -’ .’!- v.r.t a’ Here Thou, Great Annal whom three Realms obey,     *’’•: !’,’••:,• ,•”.• •>:• Dost sometimes Counsel take – and sometimes Tea.    VH’O”•••.- ••;;

(£1,111:5-8)

Politics and sex, politics and tea: Pope’s mock-epic wonders if society estimates these activities at the correct points on the scale. Something very costly and problematic about social mores is glimpsed in an aside which is not the less chilling for mimicking the casualness it captures: Pope indicates the time of his epic event by reference to the kind of justice you are likely to get after a long day in a different sort of court: The hungry Judges soon the Sentence sign/And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine’ (RL, III: 19-22). It is only an aside, but it casts an especially ominous shadow across the ensuing card-game in which Belinda seeks to ’decide’ the ’Doom’ of two of her suitors.

Belinda becomes (in her own view) an epic or romance hero, her cards take on the aspect of martial forces, and her first words in the poem parody God’s creative fiat: ’The skilful Nymph reviews her Force with Care;/Ief Spades be, Trumps! she said, and Trumps they were’ (RL, III: 45-6). The pack of cards is transformed into a miniature version of

the European war which had just come to an end:

f*

.’!*•••

Now move to War her Sable Matadores, /

In Show like Leaders of the swarthy Moors.    ».••’. Spadillio first, unconquerable Lord! i<y.->;:”:;i; •        ”i b;/’\

Led off two captive Trumps, and swept the Boards’ : ’ ”*i>–j,ft<|. < As many more Manillio forc’d to yield, ’•’’• •   ’ ’ i   ’ •

And march’d a Victor from the verdant Field. t>

(#1,111:47-52)       ••.-,;«.•>,;,

They are only cards, as in Alice in Wonderland; yet as often in the poem the comic effect is not wholly controlling, and the conceit of warring armies enlivens the inanimate object in a surreal way (III: 47-

100). When Belinda wins it is as if her instinct for sexual mastery, indeed her entire personal agency, has become transferred to and embodied in a playing card:

69

ALEXANDER POPE

s     An Ace of Hearts steps forth: The King unseen       . • ’ ;h r’au’f, Lurk’d in her Hand, and mourn’d his captive Queen. > V: git’tnxi

g      He springs to Vengeance with an eager pace, .    v-*uO }•.> ;i

And falls like Thunder on the prostrate Ace. \ >p?> na Ii«

(RL, III: 95-8)

In this sexually overcharged atmosphere even the making of coffee takes on the aspect of something tremendous (the coffee-grinder has previously been likened to Ixion’s wheel in hell, II: 133-6):

For lo! the Board with Cups and Spoons is crown’d, The Berries crackle, and the Mill turns round. kW.i>$ ’

On shining Altars of Japan they raise r^r, •^•ir^’^K^l’jf ••

The silver Lamp; the fiery Spirits blaze. •’••’•• ilyri’s’v;.>’•:••! vi:”:

<•!     From silver Spouts the grateful Liquors glide,   •’•’ •       -> -..’»> ?•:!,;?,.

f<     And China’s Earth receives the smoking Tyde. iit-oi sc ;•!

:;: (£1,111:105-110)     y>tf\n::^;

i *-:’.’,;• ••.!’’1P;>

Nor is this comically excessive transformation of the social coffee ritual a mere digression, for when it comes to the actual ’rape’ of the lock of hair, we learn that the Baron does not so much plan the act as get inspiration from coffee, which ’Sent up in Vapours to the Baron’s Brain/New Stratagems, the radiant Lock to gain’ (RL, III: 119-20). Similarly, though the act is human, the description concentrates on those aspects which appear external to the conscious control of the Baron: the necessary scissors are a fascinating ’two-edg’d Weapon’ from a ’shining Case’, a ’little Engine’, a ’glitt’ring Forfex’ and a ’fatal Engine’ (RL, III: 125-50). In the end, ’Fate urg’d the Sheers’, Belinda’s hair gives way to the force of steel as did ’th’Imperial Tow’rs of Troy’ (RL, III:

174) and the Baron scarcely seems to exert more agency than Belinda had in summoning her maid in Canto I.

Belinda’s initial reaction is heroic, but mocked: her ’Screams of Horror’ (RL, III: 156) are undercut by the indication that such reactions are forthcoming in serious and trivial instances alike, ’When Husbands or when Lap-dogs breathe their last’ (RL, III: 155-60). And yet Canto IV turns this perspective around again by suggesting that Belinda’s reactions are also driven by forces beyond her conscious control. Umbriel, a Gnome (or ex-Prude), and ’a dusky melancholy Spright’, representing the dark side of the poem, (RL, IV: 13) visits the ’Cave of Spleen’ to garner more force for Belinda’s hysteria. The canto is a sort of parody of underworld journeys in which heroes encounter the dead (Aeneid, book VI). But this underworld appears internal, for Pope is

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visiting the shady psychology of bodily-inspired melancholy. The ’Spleen’ is an abdominal organ, thought in Pope’s time to give rise to a range of conditions: migraine, depression, hysteria. Pope envisions a physical scene of bizarre psychological aberrations, again fusing the animate with the inanimate:

Unnumber’d Throngs on ev’ry side are seen Of Bodies chang’d to various Forms by Spleen. Here living Teapots stand, one Arm held out,        ; •; • One bent; the Handle this, and that the Spout: A Pipkin there like Homer’s Tripod walks; •« ,;,.

Here sighs a Jar, and there a Goose-pye talks; u-.ii

Men prove with Child, as pow’rful Fancy works,       o:;.:v. And Maids turn’d Bottels, call aloud for Corks. r

(RL, IV: 47-54)     •’-

Though ’Men prove with Child’, the ’pow’rful Fancy’ which transforms people into objects of surreal sexual suggestion is still in some ways a female domain: Umbriel addresses himself to the ’wayward Queen’ who rules ’the Sex’ (women) ’to Fifty from Fifteen’ (in other words, from puberty to menopause). This turns Belinda’s response to the loss of the lock into something which is driven by irrational bodily impulse, with undisclosed sexual significance. Umbriel gets ’Spleen’ to gather up ’the Force of Female Lungs’/Sighs, Sobs, and Passions, and the War of Tongues’ in ’a wondrous Bag’ (mimicking Odysseus’s bag of winds in The Odyssey, but also suggesting the womb); he also receives a ’Vial’ filled with ’fainting Fears/Soft Sorrows, melting Griefs, and flowing Tears’ (RL, IV: 81-6). Emotion becomes something like a chemical experiment, and Umbriel returns to tear the ’swelling Bag’, allowing ’all the Furies’ to issue ’at the Vent’ (RL, IV: 89-94), and breaks ’the Vial whence the Sorrows flow’ (RL, IV: 142). The result is a ’raging’ tirade from Thalestris, Belinda’s Amazonian companion, against the triumphant male sex (IV: 93-122), and a weeping lament from Belinda (IV: 141-76). Emotions of this extent, the poem appears to suggest, cannot be authentic but must be artificially stimulated or produced by some element which would be better controlled.

It is in this spirit which Clarissa speaks at the opening of Canto V, a speech added by Pope in 1717, in order, as a (much later) note puts it, ’to open more clearly the MORAL of the Poem, in a parody of the speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus in Homer’ (RL, V: 7-34; TE II: 199). Clarissa urges Belinda to value lasting ’good Sense’ above the superficial and transient claims of Beauty and the social power it wields. This has

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ALEXANDER POPE

been taken as the authorial view, imputed to a ’sensible’ female character. Feminist critics especially have seen the poem as not merely poking fun at Belinda’s over-reaction but as a wider attempt to socialise and domesticate a powerful young woman into mature self-possession, and acceptance of the state of marriage. The whole mock-epic framework can be taken as a comic inflation of an emotional situation which was already inflated (principally by the woman in the case) beyond its true value, though no critic would deny that such a satiric gesture has wider corrective and interrogative implications as well: if the behaviour of smart young people is so ridiculous when it takes itself so seriously, what (if it is not a cod-mythology of Sylphs and Gnomes) can possibly be responsible for it£ The opening questions of the poem (I: 7-12) remain throughout. But the treatment of Belinda herself might easily suggest the necessary imposition of moral control; Ariel is forced to abandon her during the Baron’s assault because, as he searches the ’close Recesses of the Virgin’s thought’ and watches ’th’Ideas rising in her Mind’, he sees ’in spite of all her Art/An Earthly Lover lurking at her Heart’ (RL, III: 138-145). Pope seems to think it stranger that she should ’reject a Lord’ than that the Lord should assault her (RL, I: 7-

10), even though the Baron seems to want nothing from her but her hair (he has not proposed marriage or indeed made any explicit sexual advance). Ariel seems to sense Belinda’s hidden sexuality; to gain her attention, the figure in the dream poses as an attractive young man That ev’n in Slumber caus’d her Cheek to glow’ (RL, I: 24); Belinda is woken by her lapdog’s tongue (I: 116), suggesting that she is receptive to sexual advances (the lapdog is a kind of substitute husband, as III:

158 indicates); and the vision vanishes because Belinda is more interested in the oversexed love-letter she finds on waking (1:117-20). Even as the Baron advances she looks back three times, without defending herself (III: 138). She ’Burns to encounter two adventrous Knights’ (RL, III: 26), declaring Spades (originally swords) to be trumps at the game of ’Ombre’ (after Spanish hombre, Man), suggesting a kind of unconscious attempt to usurp phallic sexual power. Some of Pope’s allusions in the poem remind us that the shearing of hair was in classical times a pre-marital ritual (Wasserman 1966). In other words, the Baron might simply have reminded her of her own sexual needs and the right way to initiate intercourse: perhaps Belinda herself is contrived to be one of the ’Maids turn’d Bottels’, who ’call aloud for Corks’ (RL, IV:

54).

This could not be a complete view of the poem’s effects, however. Belinda’s speech at the end of Canto IV appears to mock her as a hypocrite: ’Oh hadst thou, Cruel! been content to seize/Hairs less in sight,

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;••’.<  WORK

or any Hairs but these!’ (RL, IV: 175-6). Rather the crime of actual rape (the ’Hairs less in sight’ indicating pubic hair) than the theft of her own highly visible sexual weapon; she is going to have to tear the other lock off herself. But in another sense she has gauged the system in which she lives exactly right. It is a world of objects, rituals, gestures. Belinda’s ’Honour’ (her reputation for sexual chastity) has been evacuated into a mere word by Ariel (I: 78), then made into a hollow victory (III: 103), and finally turned into something which can be physically removed: the Baron swears by the ’sacred Lock’ ’Which never more its Honours shall renew/Clipt from the lovely Head where late it grew’ (RL, IV: 135-6) to wear the lock forever: ’He spoke, and speaking, in proud Triumph spread/The long-contended Honours of her Head’ (RL, IV: 139-40). It is not then merely Spleen which has made Thalestris complain:

Gods! shall the Ravisher display your Hair, ,    , ; .i,.;!;;-(S While the Fops envy, and the Ladies stare! …’.•’•       .’    •   ’ ”’h’) Methinks already I your Tears survey,

Already hear the horrid things they say, ••           ;,    ;:’:    .•••.

Already see you a degraded Toast, ••.•••••.’:’.•’•’

And all your Honour in a Whisper lost! , • -.<V<1,  •

(RL, IV: 103-4, 107-10) ;^-.-   .

This is a world in which appearance counts for more than reality, and possession of a symbol counts for more than the possession of what is symbolised.

Clarissa’s speech, like Sarpedon’s, is a reminder of transience and mortality; but in the Iliad it is also an incitement to battle. Pope places the speech at the start of Canto V, as a possible response, though astute readers will remember that Clarissa is the one who gave the Baron the scissors in the first place. But Belinda takes nothing of the advice except the concealed reminder of the incitement to warfare, which is what then takes place: Pope does not in the end put the lid on her anger and subjugate it to an easily available moral norm. Not only does Belinda resist, but she fights with a certain success through the rest of the Canto: Jove’s scales (the most fully epic borrowing of the poem, from the Iliad, the Ae.ne.id, and Paradise Lost) reckon the Lock more weighty than the combined ’Wits’ of the Men. This does not mean that the battle is not comic, but it does suggest that Belinda is not necessarily wrong to reject Clarissa’s advice.

The gender war (V: 35-102) is mock-epic in full cry: Homeric passions and mythological conflicts (’Jove’s Thunder roars, Heav’n

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ALEXANDER POPE

trembles all around;/Blue Neptune storms, the bellowing Deeps resound’, RL, V: 49-50) are superimposed on the aggressive rattle of female costume (’All side in Parties, and begin th’Attack;/Fans clap, Silks russle, and tough Whalebones crack’, RL, V: 39-40). However, while the battle is taken seriously by the women as a struggle for power, it appears to be persistently regarded by the men as an especially titillating form of sexual game in which the ’killing’ is all done by the conventions of lyric poetry:

When bold Sir Plume had drawn Clarissa down, Chloe stept in, and kill’d him with a Frown;    .• : She smil’d to see the doughty Hero slain,         H.J But at her Smile, the Beau reviv’d again.

(RL, V: 67-70)

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She subdues him with a mere pinch of snuff, comically, but then produces a ’deadly Bodkin from her Side’ in a final appropriation, or reappropriation, of quasi-phallic power: the bodkin, we learn, has a history (RL, V: 87-96): ’Her great great Grandsire’ wore it ’about his Neck/In three Seal-Rings’, but these male insignia have subsequently been melted down through matrilinear successions of power into such an object as Belinda uses in her hair (IV.98). The threatened Baron, nonetheless, construes the assault sexually: ’ah let me still survive,/ And burn in Cupid’s Flames, – but burn alive’ (RL, V: 101-2).

This is an impasse of understanding, heroic against comic, power against sex, and as usual in Pope the only way out is by poetry itself. Belinda gains the right to have the lock (her reputation, her chastity) restored, but what she actually receives is the poem itself (reputation of an arguably greater kind). The lock is not to be found; not that it has gone (as rumoured) to ’the Lunar Sphere’ where the worthless junk which symbolises human love affairs fetches up (RL, V: 113-22). Instead: : j :,,•:’’:• •>•.. o^;, ••.-’•:••• :/rr ’ ;.;j-; •••••’f ;•/•! .;;.>..•••>•,..;•••.;;. •;.•<,.’

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But trust the Muse – she saw it upward rise,.:j :

Tho’ mark’d by none but quick Poetic Eyes: £. •• >

A sudden Star, it shot thro’ liquid Air, And drew behind a radiant Trail of Hair.

(RL, V: 123-4, 127-8)

Belinda’s hair becomes comet-like (’comet’ is from the Greek for ’hair’, because of its hair-like tail); its visibility becomes intangible, inviolable. Pope is offering his own poem as the compensatory vehicle of a stellar transformation: Belinda loses the lock but wins the poem, Pope claims, in adopting a male perspective on her redeemed ’fame’:

For, after all the Murders of your Eye, When, after Millions slain, your self shall die … This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame, And mid’st the Stars inscribe Belinda’s Name! (RL, V: 145-6, 149-50)

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’This Lock’ is of course the poem, The Rape of the Lock, which serves to replace the missing lock (with all that it signifies).

While it is certainly possible to read the mock-epic form as a moral comment on a society which has confused its own best interests, its confidence as art seems to exceed its burden as satire. In the ’Toilet’ passage in Canto I, for example, mock-epic can certainly point to an inversion of values in that it can make the serious appear trivial and the trivial important. But in miniaturising the world onto Belinda’s dressing table Pope gives the objects a compressed life, and there is a kind of poetic thrill about presenting the world in this way: the ’various Off’rings of the World’ are not dissimilar to those in the contemporary Windsor-Forest, 393-396, which no-one would accuse of being mockheroic. There is an evident imaginative as well as satiric pleasure in confining emotions within things in the ’Lunar Sphere’: ’There Heroes’ Wits are kept in pondrous Vases/And Beaus’ in Snuff-boxes and TweezerCases’ (RL, V: 115-16). The sylphs have a satiric part to play in making human emotions look vacuous and contrived, and thus querying our sense of perspective and moral values; but they are also the light of pure imagination, representing the pleasures of freedom: Transparent Forms, too fine for mortal Sight/Their fluid Bodies half dissolv’d in Light’ (RL, 11:161-2). Pope takes no less pleasure in making this insubstantiality visible than he does in the more strictly mock-heroic picture of possible punishments for neglectful sylphs stuck forever in cosmetics

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ALEXANDER POPE

(II: 123-36), or for that matter in the wierd but psychologically impressive pathologies of the Cave of Spleen and the malign gnomes in Canto IV, which resound far beyond their ostensible satiric function. While the miniature ’machinery’ of the sylphs and gnomes brings an ethical scheme into sharp focus (we are forced to scrutinize because Belinda is viewed through a microscope, but we need to keep things in proportion), the focus also makes the ordinary world something strange and exciting. And attention to the play of light on objects (for such a painterly poet as Pope) is finally a self-conscious reflection on the poetic act itself.

Further Reading

Pope’s early readers (even moralists such as Johnson) responded primarily to the poem’s sometimes dark charm, though Dennis took the poem apart with customary literal-minded moralism (Barnard 1973:

97-106). Modern debate has to an extent recapitulated the divide between moral and poetic readings; Wasserman (1966) uses the allusions to classical epic submerged in the poem to produce a sustained moral critique of the heroine’s behaviour, visible to the classically educated but not to Belinda. Brooks (1949) studies the poem as an elaborate sexual game, proceeding under known rules and conventions, with particular emphasis on the exposure of Belinda’s moral character; the game of cards which is at the centre of the war is studied in detail in Wimsatt (1973). On the other hand, Rogers (1974a) sees the poem in the light of what Addison calls the ’fairy way of writing’, its links to Shakespearian and Spenserian mythologies, and stresses its psychodramatic and hallucinatory ’quality of deliberate freakishness, wild prodigies, sudden transformations’ (77). The appeal of this aspect of the poem to illustrators (the poem appeared with engravings from 1714 onwards) is richly presented in Halsband (1980). Martindale (1983) highlights the elements of play within the poem, which sometimes extend to a tongue-in-cheek take on the epic form itself (particularly in his miniaturisation of the sylphs from Milton’s devils) by which we delight in incongruity as much as in satiric recognition. Fowler (1988) suggests a whole range of ways in which the imaginative ’machinery’ of the poem extends and complicates our response to Belinda. Landa (1971) views the poem’s notable obsession with objects as part of a contemporary fascination with England’s suddenly and rapidly expanding commercial dominion over the world. The manner in which individuals become constructed out of the commodities they invest in

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has been studied in Nicholson (1979), and given an altogether more malign cast in Brown (1985), which is itself critiqued in Crehan (1997). Feminist criticism has been particularly active on the poem [174-82]. Readers interested in accessing some of the contemporary material (social, economic, critical, political) with which the poem engages, and on which modern ’political’ criticism is based, should consult not only the TE volume (edited by Geoffrey Tillotson) but also editions of the poem with contemporary documents, by Tracy (1974), Kinsley (1979), and Wall (1998). Useful compilations of criticism can be found in Hunt (1968) and Bloom (1988).

(d) ELOISA TOABELARD (1717) [TE II: 291-349]

Though voiced in the person of an eleventh-century French nun, Eloisa to Abelard has the reputation of being one of Pope’s more intimately personal poems, partly because the emotional conflict of the speaker finds solace and release in the closing image of a sympathetic ’future bard’ (the Pope who writes the poem), and partly because Pope used the poem privately to indicate something of his hapless sexual feelings towards the Blount sisters and (especially) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [19-20]. It was this poem above all which proved to Pope’s contemporaries that he had the capacity for feeling, tenderness, and imagination: ’how does my very soul melt away, at the soft Complaints of the languishing Eloisa^, an American reader wrote to Pope in 1727; it was ’the warmest, the most affecting, and admirable amorous Poem in the world’, as a later critic put it (Barnard 1973: 154, 470).

In her confinement and pathos, Eloisa casts an interesting backward light on the miserable Belinda in Rape of the Lock. Nonetheless, as with that earlier poem, Eloisa to Abelard does in some ways embody and describe a complex interface between private and public, for it is as public a document as anything else Pope wrote, converting a private emotional situation into a literary form instantly recognisable as the ’Heroic Epistle’, deriving chiefly from the Heroides of Ovid, a collection of verse epistles in florid style from (mainly) women to the lovers who have left them trapped at home (Penelope to Ulysses, Dido to Aeneas and so on). Pope translated Ovid’s Sapho to Phaon, an example worth reading alongside Eloisa to Abelard [10]. But in producing a medieval version, Pope added a significant new element: while the form gives ample space to the expression of erotic disappointment, by transferring the situation to a convent Pope turns the mere absence of the lover

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ALEXANDER POPE

into a conflict between desire and religious faith, flesh and spirit, commitment to God and love for a man. Indeed, the conflict is worse still, because Abelard, a theologian who had historically been Eloisa’s teacher and husband, is not only absent but has been castrated on the orders of Eloisa’s uncle for seducing her; so Eloisa’s desire is not only unfulfilled but, confessedly, unfulfillable.

The Letters of Abelard and Eloisa (available to Pope in an English version of 1713) give (as Pope puts it in the ’The Argument’ which heads the poem) a lively ’picture of the struggles of grace and nature, virtue and passion’. Pope’s poem is only from Eloisa to Abelard, as if no reply existed. Historically there were replies, and visits, and eventually the burial together which Eloisa sadly celebrates as her one future prospect of communing with Abelard; but Pope’s poem condenses that history into a solitary, conflicted longing, making the letter the site of opposed forces. Sometimes this interaction is very clearly focused within the symmetries offered by the couplet: w H; 1.^.^.^ i ^<.v;i;

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,; I view my crime, but kindle at the view,            i .-’”” . *:-i ; >’;

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:j Now turn’d to heav’n, I weep my past offence,      -’v

J Now think of thee, and curse my innocence.         ’ – >:.

}                                                            (EA, 185-8)    ’J • ;:

Sometimes it is a matter of contrasting the outer identity, as professed nun, with the inner sense of being Abelard’s wife: Ah wretch! believ’d the spouse of God in vain,/Confess’d within the slave of love and man’ (EA, 177-8). The poem as a whole is constructed as a series of mood swings, paragraph by paragraph or couplet by couplet, punctuated by alternative injunctions to Abelard to ’Come’ or ’Come not’, alternating between frustrated desire for Abelard and the virtuous promptings of the Church towards holy meditation, penitence for sexual ’crimes’ and resignation. Eloisa’s situation is one in which discernible choice becomes increasingly hard to identify, no matter how precisely the couplet disposes itself:

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How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, •.’^•i-i-’p’..«*,•?’*

,i And love th’ offender, yet detest the offence1?- <’’y,l’> rb: .a-. .’ How the dear object from the crime remove, ’.•;•! ,«’ ’’•’t-

1 Or how distinguish penitence from love i THS.: vc syy’.v

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The apparently watertight categories of the couplet become contaminated by those elements they might be used to insulate Eloisa from. Abelard’s image is inextricably ’mix’d with God’s’ (EA, 12). Even in the onset of their tutor-pupil relationship, when Abelard schools her in theology, doctrine is blasphemously melded with the physique of the instructor:

Guiltless I gaz’d; heav’n listen’d while you sung; vt And truths divine came mended from that tongue. From lips like those what precept fail’d to move1? Too soon they taught me ’twas no sin to love.

(EA, 65-8)

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This infiltration of the divine by the sexual is thorough: when devoting herself to God, Eloisa recalls, her eyes were fixed on Abelard, not the cross. At her religious devotions, church music takes on an unmistakably sexual tone (’swelling organs lift the rising soul’, EA,

272); Eloisa even eroticizes her death-scene, with Abelard performing ’the last sad office’ as her priest: ’See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll/Suck my last breath, and catch my flying soul! (EA, 323-4). Even after trying to expunge this semi-necrophiliac fantasy, Eloisa replaces it with another, that of Abelard’s death, which also does not quite manage vestal purity, since she hopes that on arrival in heaven ’Saints embrace thee with a love like mine’ (EA, 342).

Eloisa’s letter is full of imperatives, the most frequent of which is ’come’. Abelard is asked to write, to visit the convent which he founded, to fill the ’craving Void’ in whatever way still remains possible in his castrated state. Fundamentally, this is fantasy, as Eloisa knows.

Still on that breast enamour’d let me lie, ft .;/?i; :<t . , ;,,-’ ;n Still drink delicious poison from thy eye, rPbH; ; vtr ;. ,-ovv ”•Al Pant on thy lip, and to thy heart be prest; •••’- .•.;.;• : : I’.KV”, Give all thou canst – and let me dream the rest.

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But the battle between God and Abelard is not one that God can win, for in the end, Eloisa’s capacity for ’dream’, imagination, fantasy, acts as a substitute which will actively attempt to fill the space left by Abelard’s castration. In her vision of the attack on Abelard she envisages her own ability to preserve him:

xw..

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ALEXANDER POPE

Alas how chang’d! what sudden horrors rise! A naked Lover bound and bleeding lies! Where, where was Eloiset her voice, her hand, Her ponyard, had oppos’d the dire command.

(EA, 99-102)

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Though the vision breaks off with its own form of castrated retreat into femininity (’I can no more; by shame, by rage supprest,/Let tears, and burning blushes speak the rest’, EA, 105-6), her confidence in her ability to rescue the bound and bleeding lover with her voice, or hand, or dagger, is striking. Her imagination suggests a kind of mastery.

In the engraving which fronted the 1719 printing of the poem, Eloisa is depicted clutching an outsize quill pen, poised over a circular inkpot in a gesture which now seems transparently sexual: not only does writing in some way compensate for an imprisoned sexuality, it is Eloisa who masters the male art of writing. Eloisa herself comes close to equating writing with intercourse in asking for a letter from Abelard: ’Yet write, oh write me all, that I may join/Griefs to thy griefs, and eccho sighs to thine’ (EA, 41-2). Letters themselves are a form of sexual expression available to women: They live, they speak, they breathe what love inspires’, they ’Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul’ (EA, 51-8). The worst that Pope’s enemies could find to say about the poem was that it was lubricious, or prurient (Guerinot 1969: 70, 150,

262); in modern times it has been described, not unsympathetically, as masturbatory (see Jackson 1983). It is merely Abelard’s letter which causes sexual tumult, it is the written name ’Abelard’ which Eloisa kisses at the start of the poem (8), which she seeks to hide in the close disguise of her heart (11-12), to retain with the holy enclosure of her lips (10), which her heart nonetheless inscribes on paper at the dictates of her heart (16). This ability to transform writing into sexual mastery, the word into the thing, can be likened to Eloisa’s talent for filling the available space with imagination.

It may have a malign function as well. Eloisa to Abelard is, though set inside a convent, markedly given to depictions of landscape. Though Eloisa is ’In’ (the first word of the poem) ’deep solitudes and awful cells’, her thoughts ’rove… beyond this last retreat’ (EA, 5) and populate a world which is evidently internal in a different way, more like the cave of spleen which is Belinda’s inside-out mental landscape in The Rape of the Lock. Abelard’s foundation of the Paraclete is seen as a replenishing Eden in the mist of deserts (And Paradise was open’d in the Wild’, EA, 134), now lacking Abelard’s fulfilling presence so that Black Melancholy, clearly an emanation from Eloisa, has filled and transformed it instead (155-70). Eloisa can fill her mental space with

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’Fancy’ (indicating dream or imagination): ’Fancy restores what vengeance snatch’d away’, but her landscape remains marked by castration: in her dreams she and Abelard commune ’Where round some mould’ring tow’r pale ivy creeps/And low-brow’d rocks hand nodding o’er the deeps’ (EA, 244-5). She sets her own scene as a contrast between her emotional life (’I have not yet forgot myself to stone’) and the deadness of the ’darksom round’ which she inhabits:

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Repentant sighs, and voluntary pains: ,.:;

Ye rugged rocks! which holy knees have worn; i ,

Ye grots and caverns shagg’d with horrid thorn! \&

(EA, 17-20)

But this visionary encompassing is itself part of an imaginative projection of which the natural end is the space of the tomb. After several repetitions of the plea ’Come’ to Abelard, Eloisa finally hears the instruction ’Come, sister, come’ from a shrine (EA, 309), and promises ’I come, I come’ (EA, 317), as if fulfilling the desire for union in the only way now possible.

In the end imaginative triumph is ceded to a greater poet, in the deft fast-forward by which Pope arrives at himself in the last 24 lines of the poem (343-366): finally ’some future Bard’, joined ’In sad similitude of griefs to mine’ (EA, 360), purifies the scene with his sympathetic writing:

Such if there be, who loves so long, so well; Let him our sad, our tender story tell; The well-sung woes will sooth my pensive ghost; He best can paint ’em, who shall feel ’em most.

(EA, 363-6)

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We should sense in these lines something other than the ’sad similitude’ by which Pope identifies himself with the wife of a castrated lover, for it is also a replacement of a fantasy which has failed (Eloisa’s) with one which has not (Pope’s).

Further Reading

Eighteenth-century critiques of the poem were unusually positive about it, despite its blasphemous suggestions and the immorality of Eloisa’s longings (the poem was rumoured to be popular amongst kept

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ALEXANDER POPE

mistresses (Barnard 1973: 11)); even twentieth-century criticism has largely approved its claims to a ’female’ sensibility, often by contrast with Pope’s more problematic versions of womanhood in The Rape of the Lock [181]. In an important article Gillian Beer argues that some genuine power emerges for female roles in this and other poems of its tradition because of its ’appeal to the authority of women, who were assumed to be naturally learned in the realms of erotic knowledge and suffering’ (Beer 1982: 140). Though the form is based on disempowerment and martyrdom, it nonetheless encodes a constant protest against it. Other critics have approved of Eloisa’s imaginative resolution, the genuineness of the Christian repentance, and Pope’s psychological analysis of or identification with his heroine (Kalmey 1980; Jack 1988; Manning 1993; Williams 1995). Others remind us that Eloisa’s voice is always ventriloqual, mediated and dramatized, and can be read as a sort of study in self-deception (Jackson 1983; Bygrave 1990). For these critics, Eloisa is displayed, as it were, as continually self-dramatizing, made to write of herself in the third person (’Eloisa yet must kiss the name’, EA, 8), and invite voyeuristic interest (’See in her Cell sad Eloisa spread’, EA, 303); her final retreat is to abandon the quill to the later male poet (who has of course been constructing this spectacle).

(e) ESSAY ON MAN (1733-34) a   [TE III; I]

In the opening lines of the Essay on Man [34, 37], Pope proposes to Vindicate the ways of God to Man’ in a sweeping survey of God’s ’mighty maze’, and thus conspicuously picks up the mantle of poetic and theological authority from Milton, whose Paradise Lost sought to ’justify the ways of God to Man’ (references to ’A Wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot/Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit’, EM, I: 7-8, make the ’target’ poem still more obvious); but the context has changed from Milton’s apocalyptic and fundamentalist account of the archetypal human Fall to a far more diagrammatic view of the universe, in which all forms of life, from flies to humans to angels, have an allotted, correct place. Pope’s cosmos functions as an expression of complementary forces; Milton’s dynamic narrative of war in heaven is replaced by a system of balances; catastrophe and redemption become stasis and resignation. No doubt Milton’s poem derives some of its energies from the conflicts of the Civil War, while Pope’s was written in an era of greater political stability, at least nominally. Nonetheless, despite the monumental (and sometimes

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couplet-like) symmetry of Pope’s four-part ’Essay’, the poem is perhaps not best read as a systematic treatise, but as a looser, more flexible treatment of the world in relation to some constant concerns. The ’Epistles’ which make up the poem were published separately and take the form of a serious quasi-letter to a friend: ’Essay’ in the sense of ’A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition’ (Samuel Johnson’s definition).

Pope describes hisfss^y as ’steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite … forming a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of Ethics’ (TE Ill.i: 7). The main gravamen of the Essay is thus an assault on pride, on the aspiration of mankind to get above its station, scan the mysteries of heaven, promote itself to the central place in the universe. Pope’s manner is not bardic or prophetic like Milton’s, but it does cast itself as having authority: ’Know then thyself, presume not God to scan…’, an attitude borrowed from Milton’s Raphael, who counsels Adam not to seek higher knowledge than is appropriate. But there is something disturbing about this assumption of authority. Milton’s angel warns Adam against seeking heavenly knowledge in a voice scripted for him by the earthbound poet Milton in a poem whose vision of the cosmos from Hell, through Chaos, Eden and on up to Heaven is one of its main readerly pleasures. Similarly, Pope counsels concentration on the human scale in what is, nonetheless, his cosmological testament. Milton aspires to be the poet of God, and so indeed does Pope; if the latter is seeking to stifle adventurous mental journeys, he can only do so by giving them a certain amount of weight and interest.

The vision which is offered the reader after the opening invocation to the philosopher-friend to Awake!’ is not however either simply satirical or straightforwardly didactic. Despite the continual use of imperative verbs such as See, Look, Mark, Note, which make it evident that it is part of the poem’s didactic design to make visible the plan of the maze, the theological defence of God’s providence depends on the assertion that we cannot know more than our own very limited place in the pattern. Pope seeks a way out of this paradox by contrasting visions: human vision is limited to its own state, but can reason and infer other states from that position.

Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known,

’Tis ours to trace him only in our own. …….   ;•;.   .-•••

He, who thro’ vast immensity can pierce, See worlds on worlds compose one universe, Observe how system into system runs,

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ALEXANDER POPE

What other planets circle other suns, •••^t^fl\w(i^& J-idd”

What vary’d being peoples ev’ry star, * &£i-i^-?r y*^: ’

May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are. t *

(EM, I: 21-8)      ””

Pope instantly oversteps the limits he places on human knowledge (”Tis ours to trace him only in our own’), by imagining an infinity of parallel universes, the knowledge of which is only available to the unidentified ’He’ who is the subject of the long-delayed main verb ’May’ at line 28; the ’He’ ought to be God, but he seems oddly separated from his agency as Creator. But the delay between subject and object here actually makes the passage read the other way, and gives us for the duration of the sentence the sensation that we are in the position of the nameless ’He’, envisaging other systems running into each other, watching other planets circling round other suns, imagining lives in other worlds.

Pope draws on Renaissance images of a ’great chain’ (EM, I: 33) by which all creatures from microscopic organisms to angels are like links in a graded series which cannot be broken without destroying the hierarchical pattern; thus aspiration to see higher up the chain is conflated with aspiration to be higher up it. Again the proposition is that our limited vision cannot see only the limitations of our place in the chain, and not its active dynamism:

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’     So Man, who here seems principal alone, ”>• I”:-”:’Vr< :>..;„;•;•

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Our cosmological position is also limited temporally by our blindness to the future, and Pope reminds us of our superiority of knowledge over other creatures on earth, to indicate our own inferiority to creatures we cannot (but again, do) imagine (I: 81-6). We might imagine, for example, a Heaven ’*,»«’••/ ,•••>•=;.MX; .XH,J<:MN

Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, A hero perish, or a sparrow fall, Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d, And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

(EM, 1: 87-90)

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But in doing so Pope has once again opened a syntactic window for the reader limited to seeing only a part, to imagine what it would be like to see the whole, to be the person ’Who sees … as God of all’ the role of all disasters from miniscule to cosmic in some functionally perfect arrangement. In some ways, Pope is giving room to that restless desire for advancement and knowledge which the poem’s overall task is to stifle.

Pope discovers this intellectual pride to operate at more or less every level of human experience, including the bodily senses.

Why has not Man a microscopic eye^ .. .:,’•. \ .U;.;A ;•…• , For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly. Say what the use, were finer optics giv’n,

T’ inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav’n£ /. .-. •.  .•••: ad 1

Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er, ,;-..;( TIC, ’jrsl’

To smart and agonize at ev’ry pore4- • .:.,-.;ow o;jv>/

Or quick effluvia darting thro’the brain, .-.    .    ’.^-v-

Die of a rose in aromatic pain1?- ’   ,;• -vino-;

(EM, I: 193-200) •.-..-jaw

Pope is resisting the imaginative world opened up by improved microscopic technology, just as his cosmic vision ambivalently absorbs the epochal discoveries in physics made by Newton; his moral point is that Man has the right amount of perception for his state and position in the system, no more and no less. And yet the intensification of experience offered by shifting one’s sense of one’s senses (so to speak), has attracted him into one of the most memorable pieces of imagining in the entire poem. These lines on human senses open a new vista of creation in which the differences in perception (’The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam’, deaf fish against hyper-alert birds, stupid pig against thoughtful elephant) are seen as fascinatingly complementary. If we renounce inappropriate intensities of sensual experience, as Pope says we must, we can nonetheless celebrate them vicariously in other, notionally lesser creatures: ’The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine!/ Feels at each thread, and lives along the line’ (EM, I: 217-8). Pope’s ’line’ becomes the line for this feeling to live along, an exquisite model of his theory of connection between self and exterior, creature and creature.

It is tempting (for Pope tempts us) to imagine what it would be like to dissolve the boundaries between reason and sensation, between the mind of the ’half-reas’ning elephant’ and human reason – ’For ever sep’rate, yet for ever near!’ (EM, I: 224). The reason we cannot, and

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should not seek to, break this bound or alter our place on the ladder, is correspondingly huge in its theological overtones. Since the system which Pope has imagined is cosmological, if anything steps out of line the entire cosmos is ruined:

Let Earth unbalanc’d from her orbit fly, •:•’

Planets and Suns runs lawless thro’the sky, ”ti

Let ruling Angels from their spheres be hurl’d, •/fciv^.i.i

Being on being wreck’d, and world on world, fu-.ru.-tj

Heav’n’s whole foundations to their centre nod, ’•.•.:! i   -:   .    :

And Nature tremble to the throne of God: r»i .fdWSi

(EM, I: 251-6) i’»vH .-’,•,,%’  ;

This is the over-reaching imagination turned Satanic, with the verb ’Let’ ambiguously placed between a sort of ironic command to those who would aspire beyond their station, and a more internalised third person imperative, suggesting the poet as God-substitute could actually conjure such an impiety. As if to suppress that suggestion, poetry is then turned to the service of discovering the immanence of God not at the top of the scale, but in every part of ’one stupendous whole’, as the soul of that body which is nature (EM, I: 267-80). This is a kind of sleight of hand whereby the scale becomes nullified as a system of differences and hierarchies, because God is in fact present in equal measure everywhere: As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart’ (EM, I: 276). No point, then, but to ’Submit – In this, or any other sphere’ (EM, I:

285), since all the angles are covered by God:

:      All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; <; ?’•< ;.a*< .-/•’*

,’:     All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;  iri:A ,T>. r-;>.” ••

2     All Discord, Harmony, not understood;

,\     All partial Evil, universal Good: ;

4     And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite,

,1     One truth is clear, ’Whatever IS, is RIGHT.’

(EM, I: 289-94) t

Pope works up this dominating, pacifying rhetoric partly out of a sense of his own poetic audacity and its closeness to the aspirations of reason and pride. The final crowning hyperbole, ’Whatever IS, is RIGHT’, is based on an assumed power of poetic imitation of God and a suppressed identification with that voice which might find much of what IS, to be WRONG.

The second Epistle sets about redeploying those energies of enquiry into the microcosmos of the human mind. Man is situated amid warring conceptions of his own nature: A being darkly wise, and rudely great’, ’In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast’, ’Created half to rise, and half to fall’ (EM, II: 3-18). Using his favourite device of the telling oxymoron, Man becomes a miniature cosmology which has internalised that war which Milton turns into narrative: he is both Adam and Satan, top and bottom of the scale. But the solution to the ’riddle’ cannot be Newtonian science, which (Pope implies) insensibly slides from describing the universe to imagining that it controls it (EM, II: 19-30). Pope acknowledges Newton’s genius as a scientist but limitations as a philosopher:

U;;. ••’>’! f:fi)

Could he, whose rules the rapid Comet bind, ,     ;,;;n

Describe or fix one movement of his Mind^ .-’•••:          , srf

Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend, ,   :• :;;.;>.; gjdi

Explain his own beginning, or his endi , > v .lofc*,;

(EM, II: 35-8) .•      ”’i-,,*

The real mystery is the human mind, Pope declares, and after a further lofty dismissal of the new learning (II: 43-52), he offers a theory which does appear to attempt to fix ’the Mercury of Man’, under the direction of ’Eternal Art’ (EM, II: 175-7) – a kind of thermodynamics of the self: Two Principles in human nature reign;/Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain’ (EM, II: 53-4). This opposition is dynamic, functional – it is not that reason is good and self-love bad, but that both function according to ’their proper operation’ within the human system.

Self-love is a kind of id, appetitive, desiring, urging, instigating action; reason is an ego which judges, guides, advises, makes purposeful the energies of self-love. Without these complementary forces human nature would be either ineffectual or destructive (this is the true cosmic drama):

Man, but for that, no action could attend,

And, but for this, were active to no end; .       .                   /

Fix’d like a plant on his peculiar spot, •<                      ••-:•:»:.

To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot; <  !     .aq

Or, meteor-like, flame lawless thro’ the void, •   :«. ,.•:.’:• :r

Destroying others, by himself destroy’d. st’    :>   l ::-

(EM, 11:61-6)

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Pope is clearly fascinated by the energies of this self-love, which might ’flame lawless thro’ the void’, and is considerably less moralistic about it than one might expect. In his subsequent discussion, self-love is a strong, active ’moving principle’, and reason appears rather tame and distant. Pope wants to strengthen reason’s claim gradually; by the end of the passage we find ’Attention, habit and experience gains,/ Each strengthen Reason, and Self-love restrain’ (EM, II: 79-80), allying each element with its opposite quality in a characteristic pattern. Pope gives weight to what moralists often shun: contending that ’strength of mind is Exercise, not Rest’ (EM, II: 104), Pope wants to enjoy the tempestuous nature of this internal cosmos: ’Nor God alone in the still calm we find/He mounts the storm, and walks upon the wind’ (EM, II: 109-10).

Pope must find something resulting from this elemental strife, however, which explains differences in human characters, and he does this with the theory of the ’ruling passion’, a kind of debased, dark version of self-love which Pope initially characterises as the ’Mind’s disease’ which is inherent from birth in the way death is (EM, II: 133-

60). ’Passions, like Elements, tho’ born to fight,/Yet, mix’d and soften’d, in his work unite’ (EM, II: 111-12), Pope contends, to some extent converting an innate psychomachia into a dynamic ’well accorded strife’ which ’Gives all the strength and colour of our life’ (EM, II: 121-22). The middle section of the epistle actually posits a far more negative theory of the mind, in which a baneful ’ruling passion’, aligned from birth with a kind of death instinct, dominates the individual in an almost toxic way (II: 141-4); a kind of internal fall, in which the mind’s energies are all poisoned by some dominant characteristic (envy, hatred, greed). Reason can negotiate with this force (II: 162-4), but only Th’ Eternal Art’ (of God), can reclaim the disastrous energy of the ruling passion by grafting onto it some matching virtue: ”Tis thus the Mercury of Man is fix’d/Strong grows the Virtue with his nature mix’d’ (EM, II: 177-8). We are on a knife-edge between lust and love, avarice and prudence, anger and fortitude, with only The God within the mind’ (EM, II: 204) to distinguish and prioritise the contrary energies.

Thus committed to a view of the psyche as functioning according to some ’mysterious use’ which combines moral opposites in an aesthetic process determined by God, Pope can open the case for a social patterning required by inherent weaknesses in mental life: ’Each individual seeks a sev’ral goal;/But HEAV’N’s great view is One, and that the Whole’ (EM, II: 237-8). Aware of the multiplicity of shades of character between the tidy oppositions of Virtue and Vice (EM, 11:210), Pope offers in the last fifty lines of the epistle vignettes which refuse

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to show lives, however clearly defined individually, operating in isolation; each condition has its unexpected compensations (’See some strange comfort ev’ry state attend’, EM, II: 271); but only in social interaction is the plan of God really being enacted. Across the structure of the epistle, Heaven has replaced science as the artist of the mind, with society as the place in which psychomachic forces operate to a benign ratio.

Epistle III opens with a bravura display of the ’chain of love’, finding even in the most basic matter the tendency to unite:

<::••«’;•*-

(4j

See plastic Nature working to this end,    ,••.    : The single atoms to each other tend,        • >    n Attract, attracted to, the next in place     ; Form’d and impell’d its neighbour to embrace.

(EM, III: 9-12)

Sociality is the basic pattern of all nature; life-cycles provide a chronological sequencing of the same principle, one which should remind us of our own place in the scheme, a mutual dependency of created things (III: 21-6).

In Pope’s imagination, everything works by analogy with something else; relations between wild animals and human beings are transformed into visions of power relations between animals and other animals, wild and tame, domestic and feral (III: 49-70). The psychology which in Epistle II contrasted self-love and reason inside the human mind now contrasts animal instinct with human reason, providing a different set of conflicts and analogies. Again, ’honest Instinct’ is valued surprisingly highly- ’Sure never to o’er-shoot, but just to hit/While still too wide or short is human Wit’ (EM, III: 89-90). Pope finds art in the spider’s web, ’Columbus-like’ courage to explore in the stork (EM, III:

103-6); he contends that instinct is God’s direction, reason merely man’s. Wresting the garden of Eden from Milton’s narrative of Adam led astray by inferior Eve, Pope posits a ’state of nature’ of undivided unity between human and animal, in which human Reason is instructed to learn from animal Instinct to find food, medicine, the arts of building, ploughing and sailing; even politics. Animals show the arts of society before mankind has them (III: 183-8).

Pope is in somewhat dangerous water here, and deliberately maintains absolute balance between two types of political system: a communitarian republic (the Ants), and a property-owning monarchy (the Bees). In discovering these ’subterranean works and cities’ (EM, III:

181) to the eye, Pope is privileging the function of naturally-ordered

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society, of whichever kind, over any sort of individualism. How Pope gets from here to modern political systems is a good deal more vexed, though it has been plausibly suggested that in playing off ’patriarchal’ theories of the origins of government (based on the authority of the father) against ’contractual’ ones (based on mutual agreement), Pope finally has ’something for the contractualists, and something more for the patriarchalists’ (Erskine-Hill 1988, 79-93). By secularising and naturalising the mythic origins of government, Pope adapts patriarchalism for civil society. From a state of nature in which gender divisions play no part at all except in providing the object of mutual desire, Patriarchs suddenly appear, ’by Nature crown’d … King, priest, and parent of his growing state’ (EM, III: 215-16). The patriarch becomes a type of God, and it is by analogy with such a god, Pope suggests, that people discover ’One great first father, and that first ador’d’ (EM, III:

226). Thus hierarchical monarchy, and the belief system which underpins it, emerge along patriarchal lines. But Pope draws on both sides to celebrate a modern system which reconciles competing energies:

’Till jarring int’rests of themselves create Th’according music of a well-mix’d State. Such is the World’s great harmony, that springs From Order, Union, full Consent of things!

(EM, III: 293-6)

M

The ’mixed monarchy’ for which Britain deemed itself famous is registered in the movement of Pope’s verse as a series of checks and balances in which no one element predominates, just as the commons, the lords and the monarch were supposed to make up a political system which avoided the extremes of anarchy and tyranny (III: 297-302). In the end, Pope argues, the social nature of human interaction can be viewed by analogy with wider cosmology:

I

!      On their own Axis as the Planets run, ,, ..    . , . .,   -,

•      Yet make at once their circle round the Sun:   /,:• ,:,;>:jy i;i:    .;:: So two consistent motions act the Soul; / lu = •• ••>;’•?&?•• t.fc

And one regards Itself, and one the Whole.     •.”   :,ai;: ••;

(EM, III: 313-16)  ••’•”

,*   ’Regarding the whole’ then became Pope’s chief poetic problem. f   Epistle IV was published somewhat apart from the earlier epistles, in 1734 [37], and in many ways it is the least in keeping with the trthers, showing a pronounced tendency to dissolve its polished sense

of order into a more stridently satirical account of human folly. Order is still ’Heav’n’s first law’ in Pope’s scheme (EM, IV: 49), and human disparities still work in harmonious formation: ’All Nature’s diff’rence keeps all Nature’s peace’ (EM, IV 56). But the epistle shows Pope searching for a means of addressing the multivalence of human experience, and social inequalities in particular, without entirely being able to rely on the format of the vertical chain of being or the horizontal analogy from physics; in what is largely a catalogue of human errors on the subject of happiness, and a teaching of contempt for material good, Pope begins to quote some of his own earlier formulations in newly problematic contexts. So ’All partial Evil, universal Good’ (EM, I: 292) is rephrased at IV: 114 as one of a range of possibilities for explaining the presence of ’111’ in the world; ’Whatever IS, is RIGHT’, the triumphantly confident punchline of Epistle I (EM, 1:294), appears now to need further qualification (IV: 145). Pope’s answer to these problems – the presence of evil, inequalities of fortune, potential for happiness not being realised – is in the end located in a retreat from the world into personal Virtue. The public world is presented as increasingly corrupt and unstable, with fame intangible and misleading (IV 217-58); the only universally available and reliable happiness is an inner conviction of virtuous life. There is path and pattern attached to the life of Virtue, for he who is ’Slave to no sect, who takes no private road’ (EM, IV: 331) can perceive ’that Chain which links th’immense design’ (EM, IV: 333), and acts his part in it. Pope’s privileging of virtue is not however an isolating condition but a sort of precondition for outward-directed action. Inner virtue leads to civic virtue, charity, benevolence, but it must be that way round:

God loves from Whole to Parts: but human soul Must rise from Individual to the Whole. Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,   v/, As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake; ;

The centre mov’d, a circle strait succeeds, Another still, and still another spreads, Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace, His country next, and next all human race, Wide and more wide, th’o’erflowings of the mind Take ev’ry creature in, of ev’ry kind; Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest, And Heav’n beholds its image in his breast. a ..:• . ’ (EM, IV: 361-72)

•y^Hof

: .r;WJ»

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ALEXANDER POPE

The physical metaphor of the mind rippling and overflowing into wider contexts itself oversteps its ostensible purpose here and reminds us of several of the physics-derived images in earlier epistles; this is the ecological system of mind, world and universe as it is supposed to work at the end of the argument.

But the actual end of the work is curious. Pope onece more addresses Bolingbroke, his ’guide, philosopher, and friend’ (EM, IV: 390), according him as an exile from worldly political success the sort of inner virtue already established as God’s true template and suggesting that Bolingbroke’s future fame might preserve Pope’s as well. So much is placed in the form of a question (IV: 383-90). However, as Pope comments on the truth-value of his work, and moves finally into recalling the summaries of each earlier epistles so as to provide argumentative closure (IV: 391-8), the question mark, though grammatically required because the statement depends on the question to Bolingbroke, is lost, and the apparent certainties of Pope’s own commentary on what he has achieved in his fearsomely disciplined attempt to systematise chaos are haunted by a ghostly sense of query.

Further Reading

The poem has been the subject of several full-length expositions which grant it varying degrees of philosophical coherence (Kallich 1967; White

1970; Nuttall 1984; Solomon 1993). For some critics, the pedagogic project of the poem is lucid and coherent; Varey (1979) sees the poem’s instructive manner as an attempt to prompt the reader to a higher level of vision. But critics have also responded to the unsettling ways in which the poem seems to embody paradox and contradiction. For Jackson (1983, 67-86), the poem dramatises a series of complex psychological falls, divisions, subversions, and conflicts, which probe and question the sources of the self’s identity and stability. For Hammond (1986: 38-67), the poem’s promotion of a supposedly neutral order of civic virtue conceals the partisan political nature of Pope’s position, aligned with Bolingbroke and the opposition to Walpole [163-71]. For Brown (1985: 68-93), the poem is caught between an appropriation of early capitalist, self-help ideals and a commitment to an older Christian ethic of self-abnegation. Copley and Fairer (1990) translate these divisions into an effect on the reader of the poem, continually addressed as if s/he were being offered ’polite’ and accessible discourse, and as continually disabled by a shifting scale of perception which suggests that most readers are not in fact competent to comprehend the totality

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of the system available to the poet: the poem’s ’expository formulations insist on the unknowability of the design it asserts’ (220). ’     ’

(f) EPISTLES TO SEVERAL PERSONS (1731-35) [T£ III: ii]

Alongside the Essay on Man came four ’epistles’ addressed to friends, three eminent men, and one obscure (and unnamed) woman. As with the Essay on Man itself, the skewing of the potential symmetry is significant, for Pope never quite resolved how much system, and how much satire, the poems were supposed to contain. In the second volume of his Works (1735), they were revised and grouped in their now conventional order (Cobham, Lady, Bathurst, Burlington), as Ethick Epistles, book II, where the Essay on Man supplied book I; clearly they constitute an attempt to bring the abstract ideas of the Essay on Man into the world of actual human experience. Other epistles to other people (Addison, Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot) were in some editions grouped with the four, which were sometimes called collectively ’Moral Essays’, but in the edition of the poems which Pope had printed shortly before his death he called them Epistles to Several Persons, which seems more accurately to reflect their original separateness and tonal flexibility. However, it would be odd not to read the poems as in some ways a collective entity. There is much thematic overlap between them: Cobham, the addressee of the first epistle, is also one of the heroes of the last (To Burlington). The Epistle to Cobham, notionally about character, ends with sketches about riches, which is the theme of To Bathurst and To Burlington.

The Epistle to Cobham [36-7] is designed to act as the pivotal site for the continuing change of focus between the cosmic framework of Essay on Man and the micro-history which that poem begins to move towards, and which the epistles complete. In structure, Cobham is a question with an answer: how can we know the truths about human motivation and personality when so many obstacles and opacities lie between us and other minds, which are themselves extremely variable £ Pope’s answer is to ’Search the RULING PASSION’, where character will always be constant, in the manner already described in Epistle II of Essay on Man. Cobham also shares with the Essay an obsession with optics and perception, and a challenging pedagogic technique whereby doctrine rescues us from chaotic paths into which the poetry deliberately leads us.

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Quickly demolishing the satiric certainties which men who live only in their studies can lay claim to (1-22), Pope moves rapidly through a series of expanding vistas of human difference under which the unity of character begins to crack:

r$!m ;’*}

: Yet more; the diff’rence is as great between \ • ” ’•’<•

The optics seeing, as the objects seen. ..’v…,-«,.>.,„„,… .

All Manners take a tincture from our own, ’: ::» :; :;fiirt-

Or come discolour’d thro’ our Passions shown.    <   • •:••<•.ihii-j • Or Fancy’s beam enlarges, multiplies, :lf”, »-: j ;f^\

Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes. •’; -•/;•. •.’•••• .’!>.!’,’••

(Cob, 23-8)  •V^JWH* f – w :•*•&••.**<•’

’Optics’ was the title of one of Newton’s best-known treatises, the one which fathomed the prismatic nature of white light; but here the triumph of empirical science is turned into the potential disaster of a subjectivism which can see nothing without its own contaminations. Such visual interference would normally be thought of as one of Pope’s nightmares (it is characteristic of Dulness in theDunciad). But there is evidently something not unattractive in this vein to Pope, for he uses it as a springboard to another imagining of the unimaginable, a physical landscape invisible to physics, an anatomy of the mind inaccessible to empirical science:

•ifc,-^,’^:

’      Our depths who fathoms, or our shallows finds, ?;•.••;; > :; ..

;      Quick whirls, and shifting eddies, or our minds’?- …      ,’.jV} .;…..;j.*•,.•. i      Like following life thro’ creatures you dissect, ;•(•:•,,•.• -,?;

You lose it in the moment you detect. ••:<• -,v.v.,,il}

t (Cob, 29-30,39-40) ’•>’

3

– Offering what seems to be a metaphor for mental life (’Quick whirls, and shifting eddies’) Pope then produces the mind itself (’or our minds’) as if it were somehow even more unimaginable than metaphor; and he appears to enjoy the sleight of hand. Man, and Life, exceed attempts to explain them, which effect a kind of death (’dissect’). Self-knowledge, the great hope of Essay on Man, appears to be no refuge either, since ’Oft in the Passions’ wild rotation tost,/Our spring of action to ourselves is lost’ (Cob, 41-2); our ’internal view’ (Cob, 49) is as fallible as our external sight, partly because our motivation is not even fully conscious. ’Not always Actions shew the man’ (Cob, 61), for exemplary actions may stem from accidental motives; actions are often comically contradictory (71-86), and our judgement of them too often influenced

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by social position (87-100). Piling ’turns of mind’ upon ’puzzling Contraries’ (Cob, 133-4), Pope produces deliberately opposite snapshot contexts for facets of character to dazzle in:

See the same man, in vigour, in the gout; Alone, in company; in place, or out;      s> ;’t:I; Early at Bus’ness, and at Hazard late;    v;/ •••’ Mad at a Fox-chace, wise at a Debate;       ” 1 Drunk at a Borough, civil at a Ball; v ••-.-.

Friendly at Hackney, faithless at Whitehall.         ’ -’

(Cob, 130-5)

Forms of social and political activity, no less than internal and private situations, produce opposite signs of ’character’, as Pope goes on to illustrate in a series of satiric vignettes where the poet is apparently granted quasi-novelistic omniscience to determine true motivations beneath uninterpretable actions (136-65).

It is perhaps such poetic omniscience as this which allows Pope to propose an answer to the problem formerly elaborated in his own. Essay on Man: ’Search then the Ruling Passion: There, alone/The Wild are constant, and the Cunning known’ (Cob, 174-5). Pope’s key example is Philip, Duke of Wharton (1698-1731), a useful model of instability in that he came of Whig stock but became a Jacobite and Roman Catholic, eventually dying in a monastery in Catalonia after being outlawed for taking up arms against England in 1727. The Ruling Passion in this case is ’Lust of Praise’ (Cob, 181), a ’clue once found’ which ’unravels all the rest’ (Cob, 178) precisely because it converts inner desire into outward appearance, thus dissolving the problematic boundary entirely. Wharton’s identity actually depends on being assessed by others in a variety of contexts (parliament, club, literary scene, church, brothel, and so on, 180-91). Pope is enabled by this evacuation of content, this turning-inside-out of selfhood, to fix the oppositions of ’character’ in couplets which unify in a single individual seemingly contrary qualities (198-203). ’Comets’, those astronomical terrors which Pope had likened to destructive human energies in Essay on Man, become in this poetic system ’regular’, as Wharton’s character becomes ’plain’ (Cob, 208-9).

The critic Walter Benjamin contends that ’Death is the sanction of everything the story can tell’; death confers meaning on the narratives of our lives and gives retrospective shape to them as the full stop defines the meaning of the sentence (Benjamin 1969: 94). Pope’s final examples indicate character at the moment of death precisely to fix their charac-

m

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ters at the moment when everything is real. Death shows you life, in a way opposite to the method of dissection, which destroys life (39-40). With the exception of the closing tribute to Cobham’s patriotism [36-

7], a very different sort of emanation of the private into the public from Wharton’s self-promotion, the examples are all comic, indicating an intellectual problem overcome. The crone who dies blowing out a candle to save money, the lady who asks her maid to see that her makeup is not neglected in death, the ’Courtier smooth’ who goes on promising to serve his clients in the afterlife, are all ’characters’ whose personality is accessible and intelligible at this end of life, and the poem; all too concerned with appearances to notice their own motivations, they display their inner compulsions for us instead.

Though the poem is subtitled ’Of the Knowledge and Characters of MEN’, it casually identifies women as the gender especially given over to dissembling (Cob, 177). In the Epistle to a Lady, On the. Characters of Women [37-8,173-81], Pope explores the problem of character in what appears to be a more extreme form. His main metaphor in the poem derives from painting: ’How many Pictures of one Nymph we view,/ All how unlike each other, all how true!’ (5-6). Drawing on the common enough social practice whereby noble women had their portraits painted in various guises, classical, pastoral, and so on, Pope envisages women as engaged in a ceaseless self-presentation in comically incompatible roles, the uniforms of rank alongside fancy dress, domesticity merging with eroticism: Vi* <’•.; V •

:’,’.’f. :  l

Arcadia’s Countess, here, in ermin’d pride,     ’;;  – •/;>••• – : ,v ;       Is there, Pastora by a fountain side. ”’).. ?.!•>>•..•,, v:;sl v

Here Fannia, leering on her own good man,       . < j.: • -, <. • v And there, a naked Leda with a Swan. – i« ><»•.••    <,’,. •,

(Lady, 7-10) *..

If the characters of men are opaque, the problem with women is that they strike attitudes, pose, display themselves in charade with no reference to content at all.

Nonetheless, in listing further examples of women’s ability to frame themselves in random identities, Pope acknowledges: ’Whether the Charmer sinner it, or saint it,/If Folly grows romantic, I must paint it’ (Lady, 15-16). Pope responds to the painted or performed nature of the gender by painting back, and claiming it is a challenge:

k,r,-,,,.,. ..

Come then, the colours and the ground prepare!   ’<-.   -;;• Dip in the Rainbow, trick her off in Air, :-

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Chuse a firm Cloud, before it fall, and in it Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute.

(Lady, 17-20)

•!;&’•••

’”(.».; fe; .sat

The character sketches that follow (21-150) are not merely satiric identifications of an essential instability in female character (though they are that), but a self-reflexive exercise in painterly skill, as if Pope has become the painter that women offer themselves to. As such, the instability curiously aligns itself with, and feeds, imaginative skill.

While the epistle might be drastically summarised in the Virgilian tag varium et mutabile semper femina, ’woman is always fickle and changeable’, this is also a source of artistic, and sexual, desire: ’Ladies, like variegated Tulips, show,/Tis to their Changes half their charms we owe’ (Lady, 41-2). Calypso (named after one of Odysseus’s beguiling nymphs) was attractive in a way which the poet can barely define:

Strange graces still, and stranger flights she had, Was just not ugly, and was just not mad; Yet ne’er so sure our passion to create, As when she touch’d the brink of all we hate.

(Lady, 49-62)

She challenges any accepted formulation of beauty and skates perilously along the edge of something unnamed, but also incurs a kind of confession from the poet. Other portraits assess oppositions and extremes more confidently; Narcissa might be taken as a concentrated version of Eloisa, or Eloisa without sympathetic narrative perspective:

V*

Now Conscience chills her, and now Passion burns:     •••• ” And Atheism and Religion take their turns;     :.-.•.•.• :;.=,’-:      a’ A very Heathen in the carnal part, tew&’/v•’«•’•’   ,r;;\r4:

Yet still a sad, good Christian at her heart.      >,; •:,>’.,*’. , .; •,’•

(Lady, 65-8)

Philomede’ so manages her oppositional qualities as to reverse the positive and negative connotations of different forms of sexual behaviour (69-72), while Flavia’s performances and roles manage to confound even the oppositions of pleasure and pain, and life and death: ’You purchase Pain with all that Joy can give,/And die of nothing but a Rage to live’ (Lady, 99-100). In all these examples Pope is on sure ground, efficiently turning what might have been a sort of harmonious pattern lrito chaotic oxymoron.

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The Atossa portrait, however, represents a greater challenge, for Atossa’s energies cannot be tidily arranged in the contrary snapshots of Pope’s couplets. She is ’Scarce once herself, by turns all Womankind!’ (Lady, 116), insanely proud, storming, passionate, unpredictable. Nothing matches, she cannot even sin successfully: ’So much the Fury still out-ran the Wit/The Pleasure miss’d her, and the Scandal hit’ (Lady,

127-8). All the couplets can do (Pope proposes) is show the uniform direction of otherwise incompatible emotions: ’Who breaks with her, provokes Revenge from Hell,/But he’s a bolder man who dares be well’ (Lady, 129-30). Yet Atossa too is a creature of Pope’s imagination, as he goes on to remind us:

*c ’<’. >   ;; /’ *    ”.*’ .1.

Pictures like these, dear Madam, to design,    ,:j::;<j’  as^ •

Asks no firm hand, and no unerring line; : «,’-/*”4

Some wand’ring touches, some reflected light, : jfciy

Some flying stroke alone can hit ’em right: .   ,,,,    ,  …•„:

For how should equal Colours do the knacki Mij fiv/;’«;,;-:,

Chameleons who can paint in white and black^ „>..;,• Jp,t« <;:&<*’

(Lady, 151-6)

Pope clearly can, if ’white and black’ be taken as the basic antithesis of the couplet – and perhaps of the printed page, Pope’s actual medium. It is interesting that to ’hit’ these characters the painter/poet must become like them – abandoning ’firm hand’ and ’unerring line’ to wander, reflect, fly, ’do the knack’ (a vulgarism). If Atossa can be likened to a self-involving satirist who ’Shines, in exposing Knaves, and painting Fools/Yet is, whate’er she hates and ridicules’ (Lady, 119-20), there must be some implications for Pope’s role as satirical portraitist: he creates what he claims to describe.

The implications are gendered ones. Atossa’s ’Eddy brain’ (Lady, 121) might remind us of the ’shifting eddies’ by which Pope characterised all male minds (Cob, 30), and the storming, passionate Atossa might be comforted to remember another Popean view of maleness: ’Oft in the Passions’ wild rotation tost,/Our spring of action to ourselves is lost’ (Cob, 41-2). If her life appears to be a warfare upon earth, we might recall that this was exactly Pope’s characterisation of his own life as a ’Wit’ in the Preface to the 1717 Works [21]. The gender separation on which Pope appears to base the pair of poems is not as absolute as it looks, since men’s presence in To a Lady is usually a guilty one: blame is actually being apportioned to the various husbands and partners who populate the poem in ghostly, inept fashion, including the ’we’ who love Calypso against better judgement (Lady, 50).

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But just where gender oppositions might be undermined, Pope shifts the argument to realign public with male, and private with female ’character’, as boundaries are reinscribed with apparent ruthlessness.

But grant, in Public Men sometimes are shown,  ,> A Woman’s seen in Private life alone: ’       .,-   ,-

Our bolder Talents in full light display’d; ’..•••i.^,-’-

Your Virtues open fairest in the shade. ’’uKfii, \<

(Lady, 199-202)

We are still in the world of portraiture here (shown, seen, light, display’d, shade), as if men and women need to learn where and how to show themselves off. But the next opposition is one internalised by women: ’Bred to disguise, in Public ’tis you hide’ (Lady, 203). At this key point, gender suddenly appears to become absolutely knowable and specific: ., ,,»/,…..?.,* •.;:•;v.

Men, some to Bus’ness, some to Pleasure take; .;      , ’••,’ • .–>

But ev’ry Woman is at heart a Rake; .    , i-

Men, some to Quiet, some to public Strife; But ev’ry Lady would be Queen for life.

(Lady, 215-18) < v.-       .<»’.’

•y –

The lines themselves privilege men by putting them first and giving them balanced, even-handed options, pausing at the commas to make choices; women don’t even get the ’caesura’ or pause in the centre of their lines. And though Pope has announced that a mere two ’Ruling Passions’ ’divide the kind’, ’The Love of Pleasure, and the Love of Sway’ (Lady, 207-10), here he appears to undermine even that distinction (unless there is a difference to be drawn between ’Woman’ and ’Lady’, as there is between the ’Lady’ of the title and the ’Women’ she describes in line 2). But it is interesting that Pope chooses ’Rake’, traditionally a male form of sexual license, for womens’ aspiration, as if really what is being acknowledged in women is not so much inappropriate sexual desire as lack of power. The problem for these women is that there is nothing for them to do outside the domestic sphere, however passionate, intelligent, or witty, except to play-act in various ready-made roles.

Pope reserves the most accomplished lines in the poem to admonish the female will to power, and consequent mapping of sex onto politics, which the poem is itself half seduced by: ’Yet mark the fate of a whole Sex of Queens!/Pow’r all their end, but Beauty all the means’ (Lady,

220). As in Rape of the Lock, beauty is a finite, transient source of leverage.

98

99

ALEXANDER POPE

Once gone, those who have used it to conquer in the public arena discover that they have condemned themselves to being shadows, nonpersons, spectators of their own absence from effective action:

As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spight,        -. . ,      I So these their merry, miserable Night; •f ’

Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide, •ll , And haunt the places where their Honour dy’d.       ’

(Lady, 239-42)

This is a social problem, Pope recognises, even as he dancestfiifllbly on the grave: i..!’.:•:•• i. /<ii.

::!x; • :’.-ifK rir,-^ V->ri

See how the World its Veterans rewards!    .(: •’.•…<:; ”.’y<t   ;->.;•: A Youth of frolicks, an old Age of Cards,   ’•’<  ” rA. • -;.; ,; :,;xi Fair to no purpose, artful to no end, x<;. i,’.-. :.

Young without Lovers, old without a Friend, A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot,         ,’>s ,;«:.•:. .fi?;? Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot! n>A’” vrv < IL-.’J

(Lady ,243-8)    o,”     ’    ,…- :

rf, >*:.

Yet the only way out of this catastrophic sequence of diminishing returns is provided by an alternative series of positively balanced qualities, extending over the last fifty lines and becoming, gradually, and with details that disguise it, a portrait of Martha Blount. The Lady whose remark ’Most Women have no Characters at all’ (Lady, 2) Pope uses to clear the way for his gallery of portraits, is herself granted the only stable female character in the poem. Against the round of dazzling surfaces, Martha’s serene self-command is celebrated as an inexhaustible virtue. For a woman self-command is also, of course, self-surrender, as Pope translates the ’ruling passions’ of pleasure and power into acceptably feminine paradoxes: :<»:

••    She, who ne’er answers till a Husband cools, •••-i    Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules; ’        ’   <

/    Charms by accepting, by submitting sways,         i >

•    Yet has her humour most, when she obeys;

(Lady, 261-4) .      -«*•

If this is a flattering poetic compromise, Pope aligns it with God’s artistic labours, distantly recalling the making of Eve in Paradise Lost:

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Heav’n, when it strives to polish all it can d,i,

Its last best work, but forms a softer Man;

Picks from each sex, to make the Fav’rite blest,   •<<•••: i

Your love of Pleasure, our desire of Rest, ic

Blends, in exception to all gen’ral rules, ••>.-. -i*.:v

Your Taste of Follies, with our Scorn of Fools, :>h.i

Reserve with Frankness, Art with Trust ally’d      ..- ’:i

Courage with Softness, Modesty with Pride, .. j.; >

Fix’d Principles, with Fancy ever new; ,  ; -o;’

Shakes all together, and produces – You.

(Lady, 271-80) ,

The ’best kinds of contrarieties’, as Pope puts it in his note, do not quite evade the earlier oppositional extremes of female behaviour (the lines are preceded by ’Woman’s at best a Contradiction still’, Lady,

270), nor do they suggest that women can be other than secondary; but they offer as a compliment a kind of option on characteristics initially defined as male. The exchanges and minglings do not take place simply in columns of male and female qualities, rigidly divided, but replace and displace each other, losing the ’Your/Our’ markers in a limited field of interchange.

Pope’s relations with Martha Blount were almost as close as marriage, but without the powers over her which marriage would have conferred. The conclusion recognises the injustice that married women lost most of their property rights, but can only offer a strictly poetic compensation: Martha is better off without the ’Pelf/That buys your sex a Tyrant o’er itself (Lady, 277-8), because ,-,.,<,:

• • . V

The gen’rous God, who Wit and Gold refines, And ripens Spirits as he ripens Mines, –

Kept Dross for Duchesses, the world shall know it,    •     – •::•.: m, To you gave Sense, Good-humour, and a Poet. :     V-H.»

(Lady, 289-92)

In the final arrangement of the four poems, this leads straight into the discussion of riches in the epistles addressed to Bathurst and Burlington. The contrast between these two poems is in some ways less marked than that between Epistle to Cobham and Epistle to a Lady, since both are addressed to rich aristocrats, and both concern the social application of money. Nonetheless contrast and opposition are again the sources of dynamic sequence.

In Epistle To Bathurst [33-4], as with Epistle to a Lady, contrasting extremes appear both threatening and curiously liberating. The poem

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ALEXANDER POPE

opens with a disagreement: Bathurst holds the view that money (’Gold’) is Heaven’s joke on mankind, randomly distributed, randomly malign. Pope ascribes to himself a more providential view in which avarice is countered by prodigality in a sort of pumping operation: ’Then careful Heav’n supply’d two sorts of Men/To squander these, and those to hide agen’ (Bathurst, 13-14). But this won’t quite solve the problem, for money is stranger than this positive/negative, absent/present model can envisage: its operations are mysterious, in a way which commodities themselves are not, and Pope indulges in the whimsical fantasy of life without money (35-64), where bribes would be obvious (a hundred oxen, a thousand jars of oil) and even the most profligate wastrel would be unable to ’squander all in kind’. Yet even gold appears solid compared with credit, as the story about the ’Patriot’ leaving the king’s chamber with a concealed but bursting bag of guineas indicates (65-8). Credit, on the other hand, is bizarrely free-floating, surreally displacing any principle with magical and dreamlike power:

y:.;’t. :’•’

:wi   Blest paper-credit! last and best supply! Wij«;.A-t.> \l.

.ti.r<   The lends Corruption lighter wings to fly! ^ r;t \’\t”-

e> (   Gold imp’d by thee, can compass hardest things, bit »:..uq

Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings; :• bbD to.!’rr

i-.f.    A single leaf shall waft an Army o’er, A- a’&jfe1!.•

6vi   Or ship off Senates to a distant Shore; w-’, vs*1.: BJ:I>,

<#••&   A leaf, like Sibyl’s, scatter to and fro 11 fW:;.UK

;»•’!   Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow: <fc  .-   /i.’l

td*   Pregnant with thousands flits the Scrap unseen, ”SJi-f.:; ,’•.’•’»

••’•   And silent sells a King or buys a Queen. ”.WivF * ’/•

(Bathurst, 69-78) :      :

The financial revolution which had invented all this paper money the Bank of England, 1694, the institutionalisation of the National Debt, the growth of insurance of all kinds – is here demonised as a kind of self-producing, uncontrollable semiotic event, disconnecting power from intention in a travesty of providence: everything is equal under that economy which anonymously and at no-one’s direction ’silent sells a King or buys a Queen’ (Bathurst, 78). Giving this full rein, indeed driving it even beyond the limits of hyperbole, Pope sets himself a problem not dissimilar to that laid down in Epistle to a Lady: how to tame in poetry that which appears unstable and unpredictable. Part of Pope’s answer is to restore non-monetary content to the foreground of the poem. Riches cannot buy you health, offspring, life, or body, Pope reminds us in a series of severe moral examples, he goes on to ridicule

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from a high moral position the various fears, dependencies and fantasies by which individuals envisage their relation to money (109-24). But the lines on Peter Walter, who hopes ’this Nation may be sold’ (Bathurst,

126), and Sir John Blunt, principle architect of the South Sea Bubble which burst stupendously in 1720 [25], and who is here envisaged in ironic encomium as attempting to put a stop to party disagreements by buying both sides (135-52), indicate that the problem requires a large-scale answer.

Accordingly Pope rewrites the alternating rhythm of avarice and prodigality into a grand scheme; half-quoting lines from the Essay on Man, Pope installs near the centre of his poem a cosmic view of the flow of money:

w. ;<v

”Extremes in Nature equal good produce,         «; « ,’: ”Extremes in Man concur to gen’ral use.” ;,; -A?.1’;.

Ask we what makes one keep, and one bestow?- – •;.;’• v.> :«,;• That POW’R who bids the Ocean ebb and flow, . < v •’ **••:•:•’-, Bids seed-time, harvest, equal course maintain, ,”u;f

Thro’reconcil’d extremes of drought and rain, ..;• ;• \

Builds Life on Death, on Change Duration founds, f •• ••

And gives th’ eternal wheels to know their rounds. y., •.•>>:»< vilb

(Bathurst, 163-70) -j;?

The circulation of money is as natural as the changing of the seasons, as stable as the relation between life and death or between one rhyme and another. Pope illustrates this symmetry in the stories of Old Cotta and his heir (179-218). In a section singled out by Joseph Warton [153] for its brilliant vividness, Pope envisions Old Cotta’s hall as all but deserted, over-run with weeds (which Cotta eats), cold, guarded by a starving mastiff: an eerie, almost medieval vision of a ruin. His son, however, ’mistook reverse of wrong for right’ (Bathurst, 200) and bankrupted himself in feasting all and sundry and funding the Hanoverian regime. These are both travesties of nature, extreme wanderings from the seasonal sequence providence ordains; not only does Cotta live off nettles and cress (’soups unbought’, Bathurst, 184), thus disconnecting his estate from productive agriculture and the wider economy, he fails in his social duties as a landlord (191-94). His son, by contrast, feeds everyone with ’slaughter’d hecatombs’ and ’floods of wine’, upsetting natural balances in a thoroughly modern way; he cuts down the woods (’The Sylvans groan’), offloads his sheep (’Next goes his Wool’), and in the ultimate crime, ’sells his Lands’ (Bathurst, 210-12). From these contrary extremes it is then possible to deduce a providentially-ordered

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central way, represented initially by Bathurst himself (223-8), and subsequently in the story of ’the Man of Ross’ (249-80), celebrated for funding civic utilities and for his paternalist care for local people, all on a moderate income. These examples are in sharp contrast to the immense and dirty wealth of those criminals whose careers Pope cites and annotates in earlier lines of the poem (20), as well as to the restoration rake-poet Villiers, ’lord of useless thousands’ whose death in rags Pope goes on to describe (Bathurst, 299-314).

Thus the poem seems architecturally designed to offer symmetrical contrasts of unstable but dynamic relations to wealth revolving around a core of stable civic practice; Sir Balaam’s fall through the catastrophic corruptions of money closes the poem with absolute technical and moral mastery, aligning it with a biblical contempt for riches. Nonetheless, that story is itself introduced as a kind of retreat from troublesome questions about money (335-8), and not every extreme in the poem can be easily ’reconcil’d’ (Bathurst, 168). Most of the villains of the piece are Whig-inclined, if not actually henchmen of the ministry, but the poem cannot state this openly; Bathurst and the Man of Ross here are examples of civic virtue based on the rural values of Pope’s undisclosed political allegiance. Before the Man of Ross gets around to dividing the bread ration, paying for orphans to be apprenticed, and healing the sick, he is celebrated for reorganizing the landscape itself along magical-biblical lines: his virtue is derived from a supposedly pre-political ’nature’ (253-62). Young Cotta’s mistake, by contrast, is to devote his landed inheritance to ’GEORGE and LIBERTY’, the Hanoverian cause, always aligned in Pope’s imagination with an inability to appreciate landed virtues. Balaam has all the lineaments of a joyless Whig businessman, whose acknowledged virtues are easily corrupted (not by failure, but by success) into an overweening selfsufficiency: finally compromised by his lubricious wife’s gambling debts, the Whigs desert him but pillage his fortune for ’the Crown’: ’The Devil and the King divide the prize/And sad Sir Balaam curses God and dies’ (Bathurst, 401-2). The Whig King is here aligned with the Devil in a fantasy of Tory revenge for years of harassment by Whig politicians: the ’Coningsby’ who ’harangues’ against Balaam (Bathurst,

397) was a key player in the impeachment of Pope’s friend Robert Harley in 1715 [19]. One element of the poem is thus a nostalgic retrieval of a mythic state whereby money could only be properly distributed on the basis of landed security, against a ’modern’ situation full of embezzlement, fraud and forgery.

But there are difficulties in the more transcendent argument about uses of money within a providential scheme; if providence ordains an

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overall balance, where is the moral basis for criticizing or recommending individual spending patterns^ To move horn Bathurst to Burlington [33], as we do in Pope’s rearrangement, is to approach the question from a different angle. Here, we enter a world where the power that money confers appears strangely divorced from the intentional actions of those that possess it. In Bathurst money is always forceful, it does things, whether positive or negative; in Burlington the proper connection between money and power often seems severed and in need of appropriate restoration. Neither the miser nor the prodigal, the economic motors of Bathurst, can actually enjoy, use or ’taste’ their wealth. The prodigal cannot internalise his property: ’Not for himself he sees, or hears, or eats;/Artists must choose his Pictures, Music, Meats’ (Burl,

5-6); when he buys works of art, Think we all these are for himself £ no more/Than his fine Wife, alas! or finer Whore’ (Burl, 11-12). There is a loss of agency: other people choose what he eats, his buying is all vicarious and externalised towards those with a focused idea of their collections, even sexual relations turned into a matter of relatively priced and prized commodities which are also the property of others (’fine’ and ’finer’ are particularly ironic adjectives, derived from the language of connoisseurship). ’Taste’, one of the concepts signalled in the first version of the poem, posits a literal root for the metaphorical sense of intellectual pleasure: but the prodigal cannot even eat according to his own desire.

The idea of property turning into show is metamorphosed through the examples of Virro, Visto and Bubo (13-22) into the supposed solidities of architecture and gardening. Aspiration to ’taste’ only produces ’show’, a self-satirising demonstration of lack of taste: ’A standing sermon, at each year’s expense/That never Coxcomb reach’d Magnificence!’ (Burl, 21-22). Burlington is introduced now as the arbiter of architectural theory, responsible for the recovery of the classical orders of architecture, civic designs based on roman models, grand symmetrical forms against the baroque love of intricate detail and ornament. But the celebration of Burlington’s achievements is muted: only one couplet is actually assigned to the main point (’You show us, Rome was glorious, not profuse/And pompous buildings once were things of Use’, Burl,

23-4). Even this ’show’ will probably do no more than spawn tasteless imitations, random excrescences, which faintly cloud the picture of Burlington’s own positive contributions with ail-too visible grotesqueries (29-32). Publication of elaborate volumes, themselves ’monumental’ in scope, is not enough to prevent wastrels starving ’by rules of art’  .- … •-•’.’.’

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ALEXANDER POPE

Pope comes to the rescue by tactfully ascribing to Burlington the sentiment that ’more needful than Expence’ (the outward ’show’), and more primary than taste (the process of internalization) is ’Sense’, an inbuilt faculty of appreciation, which like Taste conveniently grounds its metaphorical meaning of intellectual order in bodily feeling. Sense is a ’Light, which in yourself you must perceive’ (Burl, 45), Pope proposes, in a line which might be acknowledging Burlington’s selfawareness or more generally advocating self-study for the wider readership – for Pope is subtly turning the ground of taste and sense towards his own special area of landscape gardening. In the section that follows (47-70), Pope positions himself as instructor (the recipient of the instruction might again be Burlington, or it might be the general reader).

Consult the Genius of the Place in all; That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall, ’   ’

Or helps th’ ambitious Hill the heav’ns to scale,      >       <    ’ Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale, Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades, Now breaks, or now directs, th’ intending Lines; *<)’

Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

(Burl, 57-64)

Pope’s garden (an example of the shift away from geometric patterning towards softer, curved lines and ’natural’ planting) takes over from the neoclassical symmetries of architecture. The landscape appears (like Belinda in The Rape of the Lock) to conspire in its own transformation into art. Pope is doing more than telling us to cooperate with our landscape environment, rather than impose on it, when we make our gardens (though this is an important point). It is rather that proper imaginative power actually dissolves the relation between agency and object: the ’Genius of the Place’ instructs and aids the landscape in its operations (as the Man of Ross did in Bathurst), actively furthering (’Scoops’, ’Calls in’, ’catches’) what the landscape itself desires (’willing woods’), bracketing human action with its own prior agency (’Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs’). In effect the landscape does it all for you; ’Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole’, like some magically dreamed-up poem where ’Spontaneous beauties’ simply line up to be admired (Burl, 66-7).

It is possible to sin against these theoretical recreations of WindsorForest: Villario completes a garden which appears perfectly in line with the checks and balances advocated by Pope, but which is left to the

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instructed reader to enjoy because he does not actually like it (79-88); Old and Young Sabinus rush to extremes of open and closed vistas in a strange transformation of the avarice and profligacy which characterised Old and Young Cotta in Bathurst into landscape terms (89-98). But at the centre of Pope’s vision is Timon’s villa (99-168), itself a massive set-piece collecting together all the negative satiric attributes of false taste which are locally distributed through the rest of the poem (a sort of arrogant totality in itself) [33]. Timon suffers from a problem of scale:

Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught As brings all Brobdignag before your thought. To compass this, his building is a Town, His pond an Ocean, his parterre a Down: Who but must laugh, the Master when he sees, A puny insect, shiv’ring at a breeze!

(Burl, 103-8)

J^:ft

a»t3..

The more grandiose the scheme, the more diminished the ’Master’; this garden hubristically claims superhuman draughtsmanship. Timon’s landscape is all about control, imposition, art, a symmetry which disfigures: v ^ , -i” , • …*ar>a

•   ’.       ”*’’•       *      ’’’’-.•   •:>        ’ •         ’ ”’   I”’.,..’

No pleasing Intricacies intervene,        v     ’•>• • •

No artful wildness to perplex the scene;          ::.;:.;.’ fi*

Grove nods at grove, each Alley has a brother, k    –: •;

And half the platform just reflects the other. ,c;   f’v’f

(Burl, 115-18) *»v       a

It is precisely the couplet art of symmetry which rejects the formal pattern of landscape. The order of symmetry was for houses; the order of variety for landscape. As often in Pope that which is over-symmetrical becomes grotesquely contradictory: . • > ;

The suff’ring eye inverted Nature sees,

Trees cut to Statues, Statues thick as trees, .   ,

With here a Fountain, never to be play’d,

And there a Summer-house, that knows no shade;        •   ’ •)•:>

(Burl, 119-22)       ,    ;*’;..’

Pope contrives these horrors to have a certain incongruous beauty, (’There Gladiators fight, or die, in flow’rs’) as if the poetry’s guidance

106

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ALEXANDER POPE

through the scene reclaims unintentional pleasures from the disasters of taste. But this only emphasises the disconnection between intention and result so far as Timon is concerned.

Pope has two answers to these perversions of power. One justifies the situation in a way familiar from Bathurst: ’Yet hence the Poor are cloath’d, the Hungry fed’ (Burl, 169): a fool and his money stabilise the economy, as the adage might run. Another answer runs deeper:

Another age shall see the golden Ear —   :,   «  •••.-:-><••..

:       Imbrown the Slope, and nod on the Parterre, ,••••

Deep Harvests bury all his pride has plann’d, ,’, .•’ £.-i••&,••!•,• nv’ And laughing Ceres re-assume the land.         : ’.-,, :?;•.<•&.:.!•…••’ ,•..>,-,

(Burl, 173-6)    \ ’^ *<:-,,:, oT

This mythic revenge restores Roman agrarian values to the land: Ceres is the Roman goddess of agriculture. There have been many candidates for the ’original’ of Timon’s villa, since government hacks put it about that it was specifically intended to satirise Cannons, the mansion of the Duke of Chandos; others include Houghton, Sir Robert Wai pole’s vast monument to himself in Norfolk; Blenheim, Marlbrough’s breathtakingly self-aggrandizing palace near Oxford; and Chatsworth in Derbyshire. They are all Whig palaces: in Pope’s imagination, the Country gets its own back here.

Laughing Ceres ushers in the prophetic coda, which sees the land as the dynamic origin of all monetary and aesthetic virtues. There is less sense of providential ordering here than in Bathurst: it is up to individuals to produce money the right way, and use it wisely. Bathurst and Burlington are models of planting and building, but the real template is more archetypal still:

His Father’s Acres who enjoys in peace, Or makes his Neighbour glad, if he encrease; Whose chearful Tenants bless their yearly toil, Yet to their Lord owe more than to the soil; Whose ample Lawns are not asham’d to feed   .,<( The milky heifer and deserving steed; Whose rising Forests, not for pride or show,     >i But future Buildings, future Navies grow: Let his plantations stretch from down to down, First shade a Country, and then raise a Town.

(Burl, 181-90)

•iiavi –

•<,W,

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This is the way things ought to be done: the landlord himself acts as paternalistic steward of the soil, looking after the tenants (who create his wealth), using his land to nurture farm animals which thus become valuably ’milky’ and ’deserving’, and finally running, in the substitute form of his estate’s produce, wood, the country and its empire: a dazzling Tory version of Young Cotta’s misplaced Hanoverian project.

Only after this mythic regeneration of country values is installed does Pope allow Burlington to occupy any sort of controlling role: ’You too proceed!’, he charges the Earl, as if the Earl and his money were somehow absent from what has gone before. The finale looks triumphalist, with Burlington apparently in godlike control of stone forms like harbours which themselves reach out to control ’the roaring Main’ (Burl, 199-202). But coming at the edge of the poem, there is something marginal as well as elemental about the contest between water and stone, fluid and solid. The ’Imperial Works’ (an architecture which promotes imperial expansion) are a kind of challenge to Burlington, who is perhaps not quite a straightforward representative of architectural virtue. No doubt Pope positioned the Epistle to Burlington at the end of his sequence because the final upsurge of architectural power is more forward-looking than the precipitate fall of Balaam which ends the Epistle to Bathurst; yet that power may itself not be without a certain equivocal hyperbole.

Further Reading

The Epistles have for some time been regarded as at the core of Pope’s moral endeavours. Rogers (1955) and Dixon (1968) offer standard introductory readings of the poems in historical context. Morris (1984) reads the poems as reflecting a complex and intelligent purpose; more hostile accounts of the ’ideology’ the poems promulgate can be found in Brown (1985). The individual poems have occupied a diverse role in criticism, with much less on Epistle to Cobham than the others (though a good account of that poem’s ’argument’ can be found in Sitter 1977), and with Epistle to a Lady more or less fenced off in gender issues (though Parkin 1965 offers a sensitive account of ’time’ in the poem) [171-

81]. The Epistle to Bathurst has attracted a good deal of critical attention. Wasserman (1960) defends the poem’s unity of argument as a sort of secular sermon in which concordia discors, the clash of opposites which constitutes an overall harmony in the cosmos, is combined with Aristotelian tnediocritas, which sees virtue as the mid-point between opposing vices. But several critics have argued that the poem is more

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ALEXANDER POPE

morally ambiguous in its view of monetary disorder, even complicit, overall, with the laissez-faire economics it locally satirises, than it can comfortably acknowledge (Erskine-Hill 1972b; Nicolson 1994; Brown

1985, 108-17). Barrell and Guest (1987) see the poem as even more fundamentally riven by the contradictory forces of ’economic amoralism’ and Christian-based satire; they also argue that certain practices of composition and of reading trained Pope’s contemporaries to ignore or synthesise such contradictions in the ideological interests of the emergent capitalism with which the poem engages. In a different vein, Engell (1988) interestingly aligns literary and monetary concerns in the poem, with writing becoming like money and vice versa. The Epistle to Burlington, too, has come to seem less secure in its architectural certainties (Ayres 1990). Ferraro (1996) argues (on the basis of Pope’s revisions to the poem in manuscript and print) that Burlington’s role as positive exemplum is a good deal less central in the later versions than it was in the early versions; that what Burlington represents is more vulnerable to disastrous imitation than is normally assumed; and that something altogether greater than Burlington is being elaborately provided as the true context for Pope’s critiques.

(g) EPISTLE TO DR ARBUTHNOT (1735) [TE IV: 91-127]

Pope advertises the fact that his poem is a patchwork or hybrid, created from several existing fragments and versions [37]. As the poem emerges from various levels of publicity – private notes, manuscript circulation, miscellany fragment, letter – so it is about the various forms of publicity which writing and writers have to engage with. In his Advertisement’ Pope gives as the occasion for publication two verse attacks on him: Verses Address’’d to the Imitator… of Horace, compiled in ’witty fornication’ (Pope’s phrase) between Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey, and Hervey’s Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity from a Nobleman at Hampton Court which transgressed the boundaries of public and private in that they attacked not only his writing (’of which being publick the Publick judge’), but his ’Person, Morals, and Family’ (TE IV: 95) [36]. The poem is, on the other hand, addressed to a dying friend, and acts as a testimony to that mutual regard. The most obviously autobiographical of Pope’s poems, it gives not only a defence of his stance as a writer but a beautifully imagined mythic account of his parentage. Not introspective in the manner of Wordsworth, it defines a personal space which is always under pressure from

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the selfish probing of the Dunces, but also always made meaningful by the presence of the virtuous. i’i.

In some ways, the poem is a miniature, personalised Dunciad, with the itch for writing destabilizing all manner of propriety – class, gender, the bourgeois ethics of trade – and invading not just Westminster but Twickenham, a place of holy retirement. Paradoxically, the poem opens with the repeated word ’Shut’. Private space is all too permeable, as Pope characterises it:

What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide£ They pierce my Thickets, thro’ my Grot they glide, By land, by water, they renew the charge, They stop the Chariot, and they board the Barge.

(Arb, 7-10)

Partly this is comic exaggeration, the first means of rebutting Hervey’s assertions that Pope was a friendless outcast: he has only too many so-called ’friends’ (a more lasting answer to the charge is registered by the pervasive dialogue with the true friend Arbuthnot, and by the catalogue of those by whom he is ’belov’d’ at 135-44). It is also partly designed to idealise the ambiguous space which the poem creates, an ’at home’ with Alexander Pope, offered to Arbuthnot/the reader rather than seized by some Dunce (some of the poem’s contrary depictions of space oddly resemble those in Eloisa to Abelard). ’Twit’nam’, as Pope familiarly names his home, may be besieged by refugees from Parnassus (home of the Muses), or Bedlam (the London madhouse) – it is hard to tell the difference, Pope imlies – but poetry itself can offer alternative versions of representative space. The trouble with the Dunces is that not only do they not respect other people’s privacy, but they do not respect their own. The drunk parson, ’maudlin poetess’ and ’rhyming peer’ who beset Pope for advice (’to keep them mad or vain’, Arb, 22) are by definition ’wrong’ as writers; aspirant poets should not give up the day job (15-26). Indeed, poetic aspirations are cruelly in contrast to material needs: the ’Man of Rhyme’ who walks so casually forth on Sundays and is ’happy’ to catch Pope ’just at Dinnertime’ is only in jovial mood because he cannot be arrested for debt on a Sunday and Pope will give him a meal (Arb, 11-14); another is incongruously ’Lull’d by soft Zephyrs thro’ the broken Pane’ (Arb, 41), and finds himself ’Oblig’d by hunger and Request of friends’ (Arb, 43) to publish, in Pope’s snigger at the way writers pretend to have been encouraged into print by zealous friends. In a succinctly modulated example, ’Three things another’s modest wishes bound/My Friendship,

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*”>-«b>.’itr,5K ’-CIS*, h v’i i.(ro:«it;

,-..:•• •<,,!••,   ;-.’.   t”

ALEXANDER POPE

and a Prologue, and ten Pound’ (Arb, 47-8). In many ways, Pope argues, opposition is better than this kind of friendship, and Pope recalls the opening lines of the poem by getting rid of the most importunate and impoverished (in every sense) Dunce: ’Glad of a quarrel, strait I clap the door,/Sir, let me see your works and you no more’ (Arb, 67-8).

Better, Pope argues, a foe who can actually bite than a flatterer whose spittle might infect one (106). The desire for opposition continues into a comic self-portrait which deals with the Hervey-Montagu charge that Pope’s deformity represented his deformed mind (they write: ’with the Emblem of thy crooked Mind,/Mark’d on thy back, like Cain, by God’s own hand’: Barnard 1973: 272) by constructing a composite statue of bizarre flattery through which Pope’s self-knowledge can shine through:

:  There are, who to my Person pay their court, …

;i’SM I cough like Horace, and tho’ lean, am short, ; :„•.•••.”      ”,<:,;]’

Amman’s, great Son one shoulder had too high, \ •>:•.-. >, .,.:iv.»»:

Such Ovid’s nose, and ”Sir! you have an Eye-” v4ij.:i:>;» vis*.

Go on, obliging Creatures, make me see it \/’i i.»ro.j;«i>;;

All that disgrac’d my Betters, met in me: <•••:••, ?r!> •,”.; I

(Arb, 115-20) vir^o,

•!(:»    , :••«•(«   • I

Pope is not to be won by flattery any more than he is to be hurt by ridicule of his ’wretched little Carcase’ (Hervey/Montagu, in Barnard

1973: 271) [184-5].

Beyond physique lies personality, and Pope leads us inside to a moment of questioning which links poetic with personal origins: ’Why did I write £ what sin to me unknown/Dipt me in Ink, my Parents’, or my owni’ (Arb, 125-6). This parody of baptism, with its overtones of original sin, is immediately redeemed by the image of Pope as the poet who is born, not made: ’As yet a Child, nor yet a Fool to Fame,/I lisp’d in Numbers, for the Numbers came’ (Arb, 127-8). Poetry comes naturally to Pope, and unlike the pestilential Dunces of the opening lines, Pope ’left no Calling for this idle trade/No duty broke, no Father dis-obey’d’ (Arb, 129-30). The ’idle trade’ suggests that Pope’s ’Muse’ is not tainted by anything so sordid as money, functioning ’merely’ for private consumption, seconding the palliative care of Dr Arbuthnot

– ’To help me thro’ this long, Disease, my Life’ (Arb, 132). Pope finds a way of converting the disease/life link which his enemies highlighted into a celebratory union between poetry and medicine, poet and doctor: a sort of self-protecting circle to which we gain privileged access. The circle is widened, as it must be, when Pope goes on to ask ’But why

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then publish^’ (Arb, 135). The answer is that the publication that matters has already happened, for Pope’s early friends would all ’tell me I could write’ (Arb, 136): the list of early critics (Granville, Walsh, Garth, Congreve, Swift and so on) is here arranged in a decorous gallery of supporters who combine private friendship with a sort of publication circle. The request of such friends to publish (in contradistinction to the hack’s imaginary friends at 44) cannot be denied.

Surmounting ’venal’ critics like Gildon and Dennis by not answering them (151-4), and Verbal’ critics such as Theobald and Bentley by converting their pedantic attention to trifles into a sort of curious insect life such as a man of taste might observe in a museum (169-70), Pope leads to the first of the three satiric portraits which, with the contrasting self-portraits, form the argumentative core of the poem. In a vast conditional sentence (beginning ’were there One’, Arb, 193), Pope sketches a different and more important kind of literary corruption. This ’One’ has everything going for him, in the same way that Pope has: ’Blest with each Talent and each Art to please/And born to write, converse, and live with ease’ (Arb, 195-6). His problem is a self-regarding authority which can make no authentic contact with anyone outside himself, especially anyone who resembles himself: ••••’•- •..;

Shou’d such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne, View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, And hate for Arts that caus’d himself to rise;

(Arb, 197-200)

His critical views are not open (whether positive or negative) but poisonously covert: ’Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,/ And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer’ (Arb, 201-2); like the Dunces whose open enmity is better than false friendship, and unlike Pope, this ’One’ is compromised by combinations of qualities which are mutually corrupting:

Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, . ;-.;£”

Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike; .    ”. £.’;/•’•;

Alike reserv’d to blame, or to commend, ftCi

A tim’rous foe, and a suspicious friend … . ’           fff!

(Arb, 203-6) f-     ••.:’.•.*        ’• «;i

He is throned (like the hack/spider of 89-94), self-pleasing amid his own flattery: ’Like Caw, give his little Senate laws/And sit attentive

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ALEXANDER POPE

to his own applause’ (Arb, 209-10). The Cato reference hints at the identity which Pope is about to reveal: ’Who but must laugh, if such a man there be^/Who would not weep, if Atticus were he!’ (Arb, 213-

14). As with the two other portraits, Pope does not quite reveal identity: Atticus is close enough to ’Addison’ [18] for the identification to be obvious, yet as Pope has promised in the Advertisement a decent veil is retained. But as Pope’s note to these lines suggest there is a complex argument going on here about publicity, for the portrait was already in controversial circulation as an example of Pope’s ingratitude to friends; Pope is here constructing a sort of reverse self-portrait in which aspects ascribed to his own personality (jealousy, secretiveness, fear) are corralled into an alter ego who can be contrasted with his own selfimage to follow. The manner of the lines’ insertion here, as a satiric set-piece, also exemplifies the art of satiric characterisation which Pope’s Addison was too timid to engage in.

Sandwiched between this portrait and the next is a segment contrasting Pope’s position with Addison’s. Pope established his contrary kingdom precisely in the absence of clubbish courts:

,./. j!;-’!i’w \ ;;joiij

I sought no homage from the Race that write;    •;.•;•.:•••. •,•?.; k.w

I kept, like Asian Monarchs, from their sight:

Poems I heeded (now be-rym’d so long) o i?

No more than Thou, great GEORGE! a Birth-day Song.    e»,S’ ’,..:; (Arb, 219-22)   >#/•,

Pope’s ’Asian Monarchs’ are greater, nearer God’s invisibility, than Addison’s jealous ’Turk’ (Arb, 218), and the further ironic comparison with George II, a supremely insolent piece of chumminess, pointedly conjoins the false and empty world of routine panegyric (the fulsome odes the Poet Laureate, Gibber, was supposed to produce each year for the philistine George) with the flattery which Pope has already rejected.

Flattery is for patrons, and in the ’Bufo’ section (231-48) Pope changes the register into amused condescension towards the desperate scramble for reward which the patronage system engendered. Another throned figure (’Proud, as Apollo on his forked hill/Sate full-blown Bufo, puff’d by ev’ry quill’; Arb, 231-2), the bloated Bufo is ’Fed with soft Dedication all day long’ in a glorious transformation of the written word into pre-digested baby-food. Bufo (the latin name means Toad’, for Pope is stepping up his abusiveness) likes it, in a more dangerous way than Addison. Bufo is a caricature of noble patrons who modelled their largesse on the Roman noble Maecenas who gave Horace the Sabine farm on which he could display his independence. For Pope,

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vvhose Twickenham version of the Sabine farm had been won not from patronage but from the Homer translation, this reciprocity no longer applied and the description of one’s patron as a latterday Maecenas was simply a cheap cliche (’Horace and he went hand in hand in song’, Arb, 234). Again, the language is one of politeness and poetic aspiration, but what the poets really want is cash, or food: the poets ’first his Judgment ask’d, and then a Place’ (Arb, 237-244). As this picture has become more bodily in accent (the patron gets fed on dedication while the aspiring ’Bards’ lack real food) than that of Atticus, so the importance of the scene is greater: Atticus was confined to his ’little senate’, but Bufo thinks he’s Apollo, god of poetry, and moreover is capable of wielding patronage in the political sense of being able to award a ’place’, a safe government job.

Again, the portrait is designed to offer discriminations. Bufo’s comic situation should recall to mind Pope’s at the start of the poem: but whereas Pope is harassed by those importuning him for help (’My Friendship, and a Prologue, and ten Pound’, Arb, 48), Bufo thrives on it. Patrons have their uses, for they may draw the crowd from Pope (’May Dunce by Dunce be whistled off my hands!’, Arb, 254), and tend to leave alone true poets (Dryden, 245-8, and Gay, 256-60). Closing another door, Pope leaves Bufo to his role and depicts himself as enjoying the greater ease of independence: ’Above a Patron, tho’ I condescend/ Sometimes to call a Minister my Friend’, as he puts it with mock grandeur (Arb, 265-6). Against the concealed contention between poet and patron, Pope suggests that he is so comfortable with his own relation to poetry and criticism that he need not have the relation at all – he ’Can sleep without a Poem in my head,/Nor know, if Dennis be alive or dead’ (Arb, 269-70). This is a pose, of course – Pope knew perfectly well that Dennis had died very recently, but affects not to have noticed – but it is important here to establish the primacy of ordinary living as the basis for verse. ’Heav’ns! was I born for nothing but to write^’, he queries (Arb, 272), echoing his earlier image of himself as lisping in numbers, but now suggesting that the born poet needs to do more than simply reel off verses. Silence has its virtues, and Pope cannot ’chuse but smile’ at those who imagine every new poem must be by him – poor critics, who pay him the wrong sort of compliment again with their rumours and guesses (275-82). From this position of untouchable retirement Pope swivels towards more serious exponents of libellous misrepresentation, in the public repudiation and truthtelling he unleashes upon ’Sporus’.

The third portrait intensifies images from the other two. ’Sporus’ was a boy castrated, dressed as a woman and ’married’ by the Emperor

114

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J

ALEXANDER POPE

Nero; in 1735 he is Lord Hervey, supporter of Walpole, confidant of the Queen, and a flamboyant bisexual. He is also many of the things Pope was alleged to be – insect-like, venomous, impotent, scandalous, dirty: in the Verses Pope figures as a ’fretful Porcupine.’, ’angry little Monster’, a wasp, and (in a barbed quotation from Pope’s own Epistle to Burlington) ’a puny Insect shiv’ring at a Breeze’ (Barnard 1973: 271). ’Sporus’ is a clear attempt to alienate all the unfavourable qualities ascribed to Pope into a demonic alter ego who destabilises poetry, politics, gender, and self. Arbuthnot vainly suggests that satire is harmless in the case of so insubstantial a thing as Sporus – ’”Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel<?•”’ (Arb, 308); but Pope takes the butterfly image and works it up and down with icy efficiency in order to prove the covert toxicity of the creature – the decorative, ineffectual nature of the insect is itself offensive:

’T,

Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings, •   ?••

This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings; :;-,<

Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys, :i ty;&i\ ;•.;•; •:.!,’<.

Yet Wit ne’er tastes, and Beauty ne’er enjoys, / etl  ’:; :>.-,;•• u\

So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight KJ’.:;’»:>-,  :>/i:

g     In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite. i ,xx>L **• .,

;J (Arb, 309-14) :« ;-,;,;,:.

’4 J.J. £• ;,’ -•• ’;

Sporus is an insect without a sting or bite, whether satiric or sexual; civility becomes a meretricious way of avoiding engagement and expression. Hervey wore make-up, but had no teeth: surface flamboyance and inner impotence are superbly caught in these images. ’Mumbling’ also suggests poor literary utterance, and in the following lines Pope takes an image which Hervey and Montagu had contrived for Pope, reverses it, aligns it with Milton and shows which combatant can really write. Hervey/Montagu:

!H<?<TTY;

JiiifflfR-

When God created Thee, one would believe, He said the same, as to the Snake of Eve; To Human Race Antipathy declare, ’Twixt them and thee be everlasting War.

(Barnard 1973: 271)

Pope turns this ’antipathy’ around: w

Whether in florid Impotence he speaks, …;••.

And, as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet sqUeaks;

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Or at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad,      •* Half Froth, half Venom, spits himself abroad, In Puns, or Politicks, or Tales, or Lyes, Or Spite, or Smut, or Rymes, or Blasphemies.

(Arb, 317-22)

:(^

As a politician, Hervey tells Queen Caroline (’Eve’) what Walpole (’the Prompter’) wants her to hear; as a poet, he ’spits himself abroad’, in an egotistical display of toothless but poisonous lather (’Half Froth, half Venom’) in which blasphemy is the same as rhyme and puns the same as politics. Nothing has stable identity, not even gender:

His Wit all see-saw between that and this, Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss, And he himself one vile Antithesis. Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part, The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart! Fop at the Toilet, Flatt’rer at the Board, ’3=

Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord.         ?” Eve’s Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest, A Cherub’s face, a Reptile all the rest; Beauty that shocks you, Parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and Pride that licks the dust.

(Arb, 323-33)

•te

’.#’

».

Hervey’s sexual identity is all performance and gesture, and no authentic essence (’Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord’); his mind and writing are like a couplet gone wrong (’His Wit all see-saw… Now Master up, now Miss’), and the Vile Antithesis’ which Pope gives as ’he himself comes outside the couplet to which it notionally belongs, in a third rhyming line, as if Hervey’s contradictions cannot be balanced out within a couplet pattern but engender an overloaded triplet [182-

4].

It is against this summation that Pope sets the record of his entire career, with a series of defiant, discriminating negatives: .,…_•„,,, x,…

Not Fortune’s Worshipper, nor Fashion’s Fool, Not Lucre’s Madman, nor Ambition’s Tool, Not proud, nor servile, be one Poet’s praise That, if he pleas’d, he pleas’d by manly ways;

(Arb, 334-7)

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ALEXANDER POPE

After the gender ambivalences of Sporus we are given Pope’s ’manly ways’, and manly ways indicate an heroic poetry which considers flattery shameful, truth superior to ’Fancy’s Maze’, Virtue better than Fame. Pope defines himself against the whole range of corrupt social practices into which Sporus pours his energies (362-7).

Yet Pope has more still to offer, and seeks in the last fifty lines to modulate his voice once again into something more apparently private. The other author of the Verses was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Pope devotes a mere two lines to her, and not even really lines of attack but self-inculpation: ’Yet soft by Nature, more a Dupe than W\.t,/Sapho can tell you how this Man was bit’ (Arb, 368-9). Perhaps answering the contention that Pope was ’No more for loving made, than to be lov’d’ (Barnard 1973: 271), this is a quite unexpected and dangerous admission, as if Pope publishes the fact that Lady Mary could embarrass him by revealing some of their earlier flirtatious relations (’bit’ here means something like ’smitten’ or ’cheated’); it translates the lovelessness ascribed to Pope in the Verses into a reminder to Lady Mary of that earlier relationship, an exposure of the grief attached to it, and a self-portrait of the supposedly venomous satirist as ’soft by Nature’. It is this last aspect with which Pope ends the poem. Answering the charge that his birth was ’obscure’, Pope chooses the calmest of tones to give an idealised portrait of his father, a patriot of ’gentle Blood (part shed in Honour’s Cause,/While yet in Britain Honour had Applause)’ (Arb,

388-9), who kept out of all controversy (’The good Man walk’d innoxious thro’ his Age’, Arb, 395), in a true indication of ’gentle Blood’. The elegiac depiction of his dying mother, nursed with all imaginable piety, returns us to the domestic scene, an independence which is not loneliness, the door shut against the world, but open to the sympathetic reader.

Further Reading

Modern critics have tended to regard the poem as one of Pope’s most skilful attempts to portray ’the poet in the poems’, or to follow and explicate the turns and modulations of that image (Rogers 1973b; Hotch

1974; Donaldson 1988). The literal truth of the record, is of course as open to question as it is carefully constructed, and the multiplicity of roles, voices and positions can be made to look contradictory rather than complementary. Materialist criticism points out that Pope omits from the poem all mention of his own engagement with the book trade, presenting instead a wholly mythic account of himself as a poet born

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not made (Hammond 1986). Such critiques, however, have not seriously dented the poem’s position as Pope’s most complex, meaningful and dynamic apologia for his role as poet in society.

(h) IMITATIONS OF HORACE (1733-40) [TE IV]

The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot offers an autobiographical image of the platform from which the critique of society in Epistles to Several Persons is launched; but in his poetry of the 1730s Pope increasingly utilised the Roman satirist Horace asjnentor, sounding board and model. The series of poems published in the Horatian mode between 1733 and

1738 presents a great range of voice (there are lyrics, as well as epistles and satires), giving Pope the opportunity to try out in extended form the many tonal variants he had deployed in To Arbuthnot: domestic, filial, fraternal; witty, ironic, self-mocking; bitter, angry, cold. Imitations of Donne and Swift (and, in a double-bluff, of Pope himself) are woven into the sequence. Taken as a whole the series selects the values of retirement, friendship, independence, and poetry itself from Horace’s oeuvre, and conspicuously ditches Horace’s imperial panegyric and ’insider’ status: the only patron Pope can come up with to match Horace’s Maecenas is Bolingbroke, the ’Patriot’ outsider in permanent internal exile. Horace’s Sabine farm, the place of his sober economy, is a gift from the noble patron Maecenas; Pope’s Twickenham is more hard-won, and less protected. [35-7]

The first poem in the series (The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated [35]) was occasioned, Pope tells us, ’by the Clamour

I raised on some of my epistles. An answer from Horace was both more full, and of more Dignity, than any I could have made in my own person’ (TE IV: 3). But he goes on to make the point that both Horace and Donne (who had also imitated Horace) ’were acceptable to the Princes and Ministers under whom they lived’, a condition which, he implies, has disappeared from the current literary scene; in presenting the Latin text opposite the English version (his habit throughout), Pope makes it immediately obvious that his poem is not far short of twice the length of Horace’s (he also used typographical emphasis to show up particular deviations from his model). The additions greatly enrich the irony of the self-presentation:

There are (I scarce can think it, but am told) There are to whom my Satire seems too bold,

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ALEXANDER POPE

’ Scarce to wise Peter complaisant enough,        r And something said of Chartres much too rough., Tirn’roUs by Nature, of the Rich in awe, j

I cometo Council learned in the Law. You’ll g’ve me> l*ke a Friend both sage and free, Advice; and (as you use) without a Fee. ’

(Sat. Z.i, 1-4, 7-10)

1

U>lvrf:

The pretend head-shaking, the conversational interjections, the

casual naming of individuals satirised by Pope, the little dig at (most)

• .Dyers’ appetite for fees – all these are extensions of Horace’s more

direct scenario- The fake piety of Tim’rous by Nature, of the Rich in

a\ye’ sets up a seductively non-satiric persona, in need of professional

help Pope stresses the unofficial nature of the consultation (omitting

Horace’s report that some have accused his satire of stretching ultra

le&etn beyond the law), for though it is part of his overall concern to

jjjtinmjish satire from libel, and to establish satire as a quasi-legal

sanction in itself, at this point the pose is one of engaging bemusement.

There follows a series of exchanges between the prudential lawyer

(”Pope’s friend William Fortescue, a court insider and confidant of

V/alpole), v/no advises rest, sleep, drugs, sex – anything to take the mind

off writing” and the wheedling poet, who, it seems, just can’t keep his

mouth shut- This gradually mutates into a discussion of what poetry

n be under a royal family who ’scarce can bear their Laureate twice a

Year’ (Sat.^-i, 34); those who go down the route of patronage and

nanegyric produce noisy nonsense (23-8) while the king trusts to

’History’ f”r ’Praise’ – a somewhat ironic hope, Pope implies.

The central section of the poem (45-100) quietly shifts gear: Pope takes centre stage, initially defending poetry as no more than a personal afnusement; like drinking or eating, then as a form of self-expression, before swivelling round to a startling revision of the standard metaphor of satire as social mirror:

In mewhat Spots (for Spots I have) appear, .<•. •;•.<•: „, v[<:\.

Will p’ove at least the Medium must be clear. ?»:.’mi,;., j . :

In this impartial Glass, my Muse intends ,,.;,,, •„,,; .„

Fair to expose myself, my Foes, my Friends … •.•,-; TG ;’:,>’::

(Sat. Zi,55-8) -,-.-   ;>.,•  ’<;  „•

’•. ’•<<    : ’>• :    *’•   (’>’>:

The self-deprecation is no longer ironic, but actually a guarantee of honesty: f»es and friends are linked by the equations of alliteration in a ’glass’ v/hich makes no distorting distinctions because it does not

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spare the ’self which writes. Self-criticism becomes self-celebration as the exigencies of the public’s obsession with Pope remind us (he contends) of his essential, and virtuous, centrality:

My Head and Heart thus flowing thro’ my Quill, Verse-man or Prose-man, term me which you will, Papist or Protestant, or both between, •*

Like good Erasmus in an honest Mean, >3 &.’* tV

•-•    In Moderation placing all my Glory, i:      –

i ”    While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.

(Sat. Z.i, 63-8)

Moderation gets you called an extremist only by extremists: honest, uncorrupted expression is bound to issue in an unmediated truth unaffected by ties of any literary or political form. It is not quite straightfaced, and Pope goes on to evince some characteristic sharp practice. Arguing that he is ’too discreet’ to wield satire against all and sundry, he claims ’I only wear it in a Land of Hectors/Thieves, Supercargoes, Sharpers, and Directors’ (Sat. Z.i, 71-2), lines replete with the kind of ready irony Pope was already famous for: while thieves and sharpers (cheats) are sitting targets, proscribed by law, supercargoes are officers who embezzle the cargo in their trust and the supposedly neutral word ’Directors’ conjures in actuality the whole litany of abuse against the South Sea Directors of 1720 [25] and the ensuing sense that to be that high up the professional tree was to be automatically corrupt. That it is made to rhyme with ’Hectors’, a cant name for bullies ironically derived from the most stalwart of the Trojan heroes, indicates something of the allusive stimulus embedded in apparently off-the-cuff remarks.

This off-setting of absolute moral positions by covert displays of skilful insinuation continues through the poem. The satire which pickles the enemy for ever is likened to the unforgiving manoeuvres of politicians – one of whom, Walpole, is Pope’s major target (’But touch rue, and no Minister so sore’, Sat. Z.i, 76). The lawyer can only respond to the poet’s defiance by a resigned shrug and a warning to watch out for assassins (101-4), which the poet takes as an opportunity to recast the whole sense of what ’law’ is. If the law fails to regulate the state, the poet can become a vigilante, not so much ultra legem as supra legetn, at>ove the law, dispensing a satiric justice which is every bit as rough as circumstance requires: ’arm’d for Virtue when I point the Pen/Brand the Front of shameless, guilty Men’ (Sat. Z.i, 105-6). Suddenly poetry

18 a Jove-like assault on the world, carried out by an untainted satirist

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ALEXANDER POPE

who outstrips his models (Horace, Boileau, even Dryden, 111-14) by being ’Un-plac’d, un-pension’d, no Man’s Heir, or Slaved (Sat. Z.i, 116). At a high rhetorical moment, the position of satirist is all but dehumanised, principle so high that it can hardly attain syntactic connection with the world:

]’•>:’

TO VIRTUE ONLY and HER FRIENDS, A FRIEND,        , <: 1 The World beside may murmur, or commend. !i. i

(Sat. Z.i, 121-2)         ’•;

Having claimed this highest of moral grounds (which Horace actually ascribes to his lawyer friend Trebatius), Pope climbs down from it a little, sketching his retirement from the ’distant Din’ of the world among some other ’friends of virtue’, grafting satiric honesty onto the homely pleasures of gardening and feasting in a glorified echo of his previous argument about the innocence of pleasure (125-32). The request for advice has become a speech in defence (’This is my Plea, on this I rest my Cause-’, Sat. Z.i, 141), approved by the lawyer, albeit with the caution that ’Laws are explain’d by Men – so have a care’ (Sat. Z.i,

144). With an engagingly comic imitation of a lawyer’s fussy exactitude, Pope has his lawyer show him the statute book and remind him of the law which might be cited against his own independent satiric ’law’ (145-8). This brings us down to earth. But Pope’s parting shot is poised between a hopeful innocence about satire and a devious bamboozling of his lawyer:

•,tU’Hj:;.t”/tr };•

P. Libels and Satires! lawless Things indeed! i.’isn br.vnb

But grave Epistles, bringing Vice to light, v-V>   ;; «;••-!

Such as a King might read, a Bishop write, .;.fo.,-,>;’<’^

Such as Sir Robert would approve – f. Indeed1?- 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 dismiss’d.

(Sat. Z.i, 151-6)

We know that Pope preferred to think of his work in this light; writing to Swift, who (ever the provocateur) was happy to think of his satires as ’libels’, Pope says ’I would rather call my satires, epistles. They will consist more of morality than of wit, and grow graver, which you will call duller’ (Letters III: 366). But he can hardly have thought that ’Sir Robert’ [Walpole] would approve of anything he was about to

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write, or that the King would read it, and the close of th»*e Poem ^Seems close to ironising the lawyer friend – as if in invoking Sir ’ Robert, . however ironically, the lawyer’s canny carefulness simply ev.«-aporateffis. It is possible that the lawyer is also acting ironically, participatingin Dope’s knowing wink about the foibles of great men: but the eno-d of the ’ P°em sets up a sort of reading problem for the series, between^1 ’°Pen’ -statements and ’closed’ ones, requiring the key of irony to de^code tri**£m.

This variation in tone, in which moral urgency is protected from overbalancing into pomposity by a comic sense of self, pervade^ the Horatian poems, though the balance is different in ’&&ach instance. Contrast between excesses and artifices at court, and natu ural appetites of country life, inform The Second Satire of the Second B^ook °f ^orace Paraphrased [37], which also contains a charmingly daPwnbeaCt selfportrait encapsulating much of Pope’s sense of moral plac0 e at this time:

In South-sea days not happier, when surmis’d ,,•• .•.,.-,*.

The Lord of thousands, than if now Excis’d; •’, ,,*,’-o.

In Forest planted by a Father’s hand, y^’t»’ !

Than in five acres now of rented land. ..-:,,.•;„? ;t

Content with little, I can piddle here V1. q r •’ i

On Broccoli and mutton, round the year; .   .>.. r—«-.•. ••’•*

But ancient friends, (tho’poor, or out of play) –   •••..     ”••’•,*> !

That touch my Bell, I cannot turn a.way. ;., ? -: r. : • r

(Sat.zji, 133-40)    ; , ’  ’ 1

Pope indicates an indifference to the vagaries of the mc&ney maa*rket; to be deemed ’Lord of thousands’ bya spurious stock-rt013^611 ;is n° happier state than to ’piddle … On Broccoli’ under Walpoole’s purmitive tax regime: the important thing is the simple exchange o of friendJlship. Even the loss of paternal acres is not a problem for the r**11311 °f ^nner self-mastery. Pope jokes about property’s tendency to ’Slid0 e’ (no m*iatter how architecturally stable) into the hamds of ’a Scrivn’n^61” or a City Knight’ through fraud or law, and counsels staunchly ’Let)=t us be Wfix’d, and our own Masters still’ (Sat. Z.ii, 167-80).

As the series progresses, moving away from the satires to & ^ ePi:-! sties, this fixed self becomes increasingly autobiographical. The g&e-cond£llpistle of the Second Book of Horace [40] is unussually poignant \ in tone2: and contains a rare and very carefully moderated account of PopdP6’3 uPb0|lringing and tribulations under anti-Catholic legislation:

,.,^,,8?^’ -ittYt

Bred up at home, full early I begun :.   .–r* ’«:>:• •        •-•(. k

To read in Greek, the Wrath of Peleu-s’s Son.        (> ,, .;:> ’•’•, ;•      -•-:•-

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ALEXANDER POPE

Besides, my Father taught me from a Lad, > ; .u ;=„ .-i :-<’- The better Art to know the good from bad: … :». .’•:.;m->r.i,,’ v-ot; But knottier Points we knew not half so well, :;,; ., it ->r.i:.:::/ .’’iv».it Depriv’d us soon of our Paternal Cell; .wi:;.viui;• ;,*;;;?;*:

..;:.’   And certain Laws, by Suff’rers thought unjust, Jf >:(^-   ; i.;v.-. •:”,.;

n’ Deny’d all Posts of Profit or of Trust: … ’’ ” •;. ij *•.

For Right Hereditary tax’d and fin’d, ,.-:..

ii;i   He [Pope’s father] stuck to Poverty with Peace of Mind;      ! I

:-.’i   And me, the Muses help’d to undergo it;

•v;   Convict a Papist He, and I a Poet. ;  .’

’-,: (Ep. 2.H, 52-5, 58-61, 64-7)       ? = <,

Poetry has here become the equivalent of the paternal religion for which the true patriot suffers – though it is also a main economic resource, as Pope in a rare confession signals: ’But (thanks to Homer) since I live and thrive/Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive’ (Ep. 2.H, 68-

9). Where Horace had been educated at Athens, Pope has a more literary nurturing; Homer had been primarily a text of moral learning, associated with the father (in a section very close to the Horatian source), but in translation the fathering author (or Popean text) has become the very source of equanimity, a self-education in ’the equal Measure of the Soul’ (205). But apparent poise comes tinged with the knowledge of the duncely, bathetic jostle of history, as Horace’s advice ’Learn to live well’ becomes framed by the metaphor of play-acting:

:Js   Walk sober off; before a sprightlier Age ^*:

or.   Comes titt’ring on, and shoves you from the stage: :<•..,          •:>•

’>v   Leave such to trifle with more grace and ease, .;’;         ; < ;•

,QJ   Whom Folly pleases, and whose Follies please.   , ’      ,•’ ’;•

(Ep. Z.ii, 324-7)    • ”it. –.-I ,;’• . -…{

»f’TO!-’   Mrt’*.ii*:fSi,’f”1i’:tf,

The trace of Macbeth’s ’poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more’, casts an ominous shadow across this most inward of the Horatian poems.

In The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated [40], Pope returns to his grand manner with the fiercest irony of the series. Horace’s poem is addressed to the Emperor Augustus, writing with what Pope calls ’a decent Freedom’ to him, ’with a just Contempt of his low Flatterers, and with a manly Regard to his own Character’ (TE IV: 192), in defence of the utility of poetry to society. Pope shares many of these aims. But while Horace was genuinely in contact with the court of Augustus, and could celebrate a ruler whose powers included

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literary appreciation, Pope had no chance at all of addressing George II, : who was notoriously dismissive of literary culture. Though George’s second name was Augustus, in a rather hopeful tribute to the imperial ideal which plays directly into Pope’s irony, he had very little of Augustus’s political abilities, and all the compliments to princely qualities which Pope translates from Horace become flagrantly ironic when ascribed to George. The opening of the poem is a ringingly false panegyric:

While You, great Patron of Mankind, sustain

The balanc’d World, and open all the Main;

Your Country, chief, in Arms abroad defend, :

At home, with Morals, Arts, and Laws amend; :

How shall the Muse, from such a Monarch, steal

An hour, and not defraud the Publick Weali

(Ep.Z.i, 1-6)

ii Embedded in this we can see standard opposition claims: that Walpole’s government failed to protect British interests abroad through military means, that the only form of ’patronage’ it knew was systematic bribery and corruption, and that this corruption extended itself through the whole cultural and moral landscape. It is irony on a grand scale, compounded in the ensuing potted history of the British monarchy and its martial achievements (7-30).

The history of poetry, and the history of the state, are closely interwoven in the poem: Pope views poetry from the point of view of history, and then overlays this with history viewed in the eyes of poetry, searching for a stable basis for status in authorship, power in verse (69-160). His position, like Augustus’s, is always hedged about with irony; he derides the Toe tick Itch’ which has seized the nation: ’Sons, Sires, and Grandsires, all will wear the Bays/Our Wives read Milton, and our Daughters plays’ (Ep. z.i, 169-72), but specifically includes himself (as Horace did) in this comic malaise (175-80). Pope advises Augustus to pay no attention to this harmless hobby-horse on the ironic grounds that it keeps everyone quiet and politically inactive (179-200). But the last hundred lines of the poem have a further contrast to offer. The theatre is seen as a literary space particularly prone to fickle changes of taste and absurd pandering to the mob. Where money is all, morality is irrelevant: ’But fill their purse, our Poet’s work is done/Alike to them, by Pathos or by Pun’ (Ep. Z.i, 294-5); and the ’many-headed Monster of the Pit’, that is the crowds in the cheap seats, takes on an ominous ability to run the show, calling for farce, cheap spectacle, bawdy jokes,

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ALEXANDER POPE

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the appropriation of martial costume into the easy heroics of actors. Against this, Pope offers to ’instruct the times/To know the Poet from the Man of Rymes’ (Ep. Z.i, 340-1), suggesting (still with the bounds of theatrical poetry) the power of real literary skill – the ’pathos’ to which the rhymester is indifferent:

•iu;s;f

’Tis He, who gives my breast a thousand pains, • • ••    ’ •« •” i-v

Can make me feel each Passion that he feigns, .>;•/:, ’•,,:, Inrage, compose, with more than magic Art,

With Pity, and with Terror, tear my heart; >.’<.:<V’ ••>•, :••. >

And snatch me, o’er the earth, or thro’ the air, *,’$&.(’•: v:’i

To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where. sua>..’ :>,!,•.;

(Ep. 2.i, 342-7)

> Pope renounces this dramatic ground (as Horace had), but claims its emotional force. Teasingly pointing out the foibles of non-dramatic poets (going on too long, moaning about lack of appreciation, writing epistles to the King, and so on, 356-71), Pope amuses himself by casting himself as potential (but impossible) poet laureate, ’T’ enroll your triumphs o’er the seas and land’ (Ep. Z.i, 373). Reminding Augustus that Kings depend on poets for the transmission of their image to posterity, Pope for a moment does a very good impersonation (with help from Horace) of straightforward royal panegyric:

Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian wing, • •

Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing! …        ”<.’ How barb’rous rage subsided at your word, And Nations wonder’d while they dropp’d the sword! How, when you nodded, o’er the land and deep, Peace stole her wing, and wrapt the world in sleep…

(Ep. Z.i, 394-5, 398-401)

But compared with the eulogy of Anne in Windsor-Forest [62-3], the irony is impudently plain: Pope had mounted on the Maeonian (Homeric) wing, by translating Homer for his own purposes rather than panegyric, and George had done (according to those of Pope’s persuasion) nothing whatsoever in Arms or Action (though ’Repose’ was appropriate enough); when Augustus nods it is not the imperial nod of Zeus, which signifies assent or command, but nodding off, asleep, while the rest of Europe goes onto a war footing. Small wonder then that Pope acknowledges in a way that Horace cannot, ’Besides, a fate attends on all I write/That when I aim at praise, they say I bite

[satirise]’ (Ep. Z.i, 408-9). With perfect aplomb masquerading as humility, Pope concludes his letter to the king with a refusal to flatter, and a reminder that A vile Encomium doubly ridiculesj/There’s nothing blackens like the ink of fools’ (Ep. Z.i, 410-11).

Subsequent Horatian essays retreated slightly from this daring mode; the series explores the mutability and strangeness of mental life in order to comment on the wayward trajectories of the court, money, property, and desire. But Pope rounded off the series with a pair of dialogues, in Horatian manner but not tied to particular poems, which first appeared under the title One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight and were later/echristened as Epilogue to the Satires [40]. In these we return to the dialogue form of the first Imitation, and there is a similar progression from low-key, comic manoeuvring to high-powered satiric denunciation. The Friend who talks with Pope opens with an ironic challenge: ’Not twice in twelvemonth you appear in Print/And when it comes, the Court see nothing in’t’ (Epil. i, 1-2). This is Pope wrong-footing criticism, since there was everything for the Court to ’see’ if it looked hard enough. But the ’impertinent Censurer’ (Pope’s note to line 1) has another axe to grind about the whole concept of Horatian imitation, which is that Horace’s stance was essentially palliative:

But Horace, Sir, was delicate, was nice;    •   ”••-.    ••••.. Bubo observes, he lash’d no sort of Vice:       ,     . ••• \ M. • Horace would say, Sir Billy serv’d the Crown,         • j-;<«;; Blunt could do Bus’ness, H-ggins knew the Town,    * ;s$C In Sappho touch the Failing of the Sex, ’> jffe4

In rev’rend Bishops note some small Neglects, J> iM^-. And own, the Spaniard did a waggish thing, ,J^A Who cropt our Ears, and sent them to the King.

(Epil.i, 11-18)

;w;*;

The Friend recasts in miniature the whole of Pope’s enterprise, rewriting it in a supposedly more ingratiating style which he takes to be truer of Horace. For Pope of course this renders Horace no more than a sort of Court puppet, of the kind the whole series denounces, and the Pope-figure does not really respond to the actual point at hand, leaving it an open question how far Pope has departed from his model.

’Pope’ enters the poem in response to the key-word, ’Sir ROBERT’ (Epil. i, 27), picking up a suggestion that he go and see him with a backhanded compliment precisely drawn from Walpole’s private life, where he is ’uncumber’d with the Venal tribe’ and can ’win without a

i

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ALEXANDER POPE

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Bribe’ (Epil. i, 31-2). Coolly setting himself up as the Top Bard who knows all there is to know about the First Minister, Pope listens unmoved to the Friend’s bland catalogue of those he may satirise without danger (including in a characteristic manoeuvre some ’honest’ Whigs, who voted against Walpole, 39), only to unleash a tirade of objects (people, crimes, vices) which require the satiric opposition which readers of the series will know Pope has evinced. In an impressive tirade which silences the mealy-mouthed Friend, Vice is imagined as a triumphant, destructive empress, not unlike Dulness, adored by the whole of British society with the exception of its uncrowned laureate poet (141-72).

The second dialogue momentarily inverts the relation between Friend and Pope by making the Friend more earnest and giving Pope comic-defensive lines in which satiric imagination, often accused of being libellous, cannot outstrip social actuality: KI

Vice with such Giant-strides comes on amain, Invention strives to be before in vain; Feign what I will, and paint it e’er so strong, Some rising Genius sins up to my Song.

(Epil. ii, 6-9)

In a more agitated, if still comic, vein of debate, the hapless Friend tries to allot Pope an acceptable level of target, without success (10-

62). Pope points out (with a customary barb) that his satire is not all negative: ’God knows, I praise a Courtier where I can’ (Epil. ii, 63); ’Ev’n in a Bishop I can spy Desert’ (Epil. ii, 70). But praise is confessedly directed towards Opposition heroes: ’But does the court a worthy Man removed/That instant, I declare, he has my Love’ (Epil. ii, 74-5), and Pope resists the courtly requirement for ’random Praise’ (Epil. ii, 106) as much as he berates the ’spur-gall’d Hackney’ and ’new-pension’d Sycophant’ who write in defence of Walpole (Epil. ii, 140-2) and whose Courtly ’Perfume’ smells only too disgusting to the honest poet (Epil. ii, 182-4) [186].

Pope seems to be seeking an object for anger, which eventually resolves itself into something which is hardly personal at all: ’Ask you what Provocation I have had^/The strong Antipathy of Good to Bad’ (Epil. ii, 197-8). Pope internalises the charge, implicit in the bold black/ white opposition, that the claim is too large, in the last and least comic of the self-presentations: ^M ^,;t,,,«^<.:< -•» <;:?. 4.i<. „•>•., ,.,… .„•»..

Fr. You’re strangely proud. P. So proud, I am no Slave: ,:F,.,,*   v i«    So impudent, I own myself no Knave: -M , •  i< ;• v<v,

”:?   So odd, my Country’s Ruin makes me grave. -1 ; . ;:«;,’;»,<v..! ’*

•i:;   Yes I am proud; I must be proud to see r*>-rt’’;.v’’ -Jiff–*

•’”   Men not afraid of God, afraid of me: j,5!;.t

’:- (Epil. ii, 205-9) ,<;•.:•

;.,-,( •   ;;^y,-t

In a further apocalyptic vision, Pope addresses ’Ye tinsel Insects! whom a Court maintains’ and pledges The Muse’s wing shall brush you all away’ (Epil. ii, 220-3). We have moved a long way from the interdependence of satirist and victim proposed in Pope’s opening lines (6-9), where satiric invention seemed almost to conjure social enactment; Pope now claims a kind of Noah-like status against a flood of ’insuperable corruption and depravity of manners’ (his note to line

255). A saving irony is still precariously preserved, as the Friend, despairing of bringing Pope to heel, counsels him to go on with further ’Essays on Man’, as more politically innocuous than satire (255). But the last poem of all (1740. A Poem), a thorough-going political diatribe which Pope did not publish and which he wrote partially in hieroglyphics to resist the scrutiny of government spies, indicates something of the desperate climate in which Pope saw himself prior to revision of The Dunciad [169].

Further Reading

This extreme position (’Yes, the last Pen for Freedom let me draw,/ When Truth stands trembling on the edge of Law’, Dialogue II, 248-9) has not always commanded reverence from commentators. For Fabricant (1988) for example, the presentation of poetic self as poethero is a signal of unbalanced solipsism and unfocused bellicosity – a kind of aggressive narcissism, in effect, lacking the more sharply-defined and rational opposition which characterises The Dunciad. But Pope’s Horatian persona as a whole includes self-deprecation, a sense of oddness, irony about the limitations of physique, and a certain pathos (Parker 1990). Arguments about the satiric persona have also included questions about Pope’s appropriation of Horace: Weinbrot contends that Pope began to doubt the witty, conversational Horace as a model because of the Roman poet’s affiliations with Augustus, known to historians as somewhat more autocratic than Horace could acknowledge: during the 1730s Pope transferred his allegiance to the more turbulent satirists, Juvenal and Persius, ending, in the Epilogue to the

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ALEXANDER POPE

Satires, in ’overwhelmingly Juvenalian-Persian elevation and gloom’ (Weinbrot 1982: 331). Erskine-Hill (1983) has however argued for a more complex understanding of Pope’s Augustanism, which (with some ambivalence) retained a fundamental trust in Horace’s independence and wisdom. Very detailed studies of Pope’s Horace by Stack (1985) and Fuchs (1989) have tended to confirm that however Pope deviated from his model (and the deviations are always part of the point), his view of Horace remained substantially appreciative.

(i) THE DUNCIAD (1728-42) [TE V]

It is in many ways an error to speak of The’ Dunciad, as if it were unitary, for part of its point is its extraordinary responsiveness to a changing literary and cultural environment. There are four main versions:

(a) The Dunciad: An Heroic Poem. In Three Books (1728), with a false ’Dublin’ imprint and shabby format; [28-30]

(b) The Dunciad Variorum (1729), with voluminous mock-critical apparatus and a more detailed text; [31-2]

(c) The New Dunciad (1742), a first version of what became book IV of the poem; [43]

(d) The Dunciad, In Four Books (1743), a final full version in four books with a new hero, the poet laureate Colley Gibber, replacing the

•/£   old one, Lewis Theobald, and extended commentaries and

i£:   appendices [44]. It is this version, as the poem to which Pope

j,,j,   returns at the end of his career, the poem in which he engages his

energies most completely, which will be examined here. The poem

is a continuing site for the collision between the aristocratic and

heroic culture of epic and the political and literary culture of mass

production; the mock-heroic form allows Pope to superimpose a

jjf   highly contemporaneous vision of London onto the timeless

~,    morphology of epic in comic and disturbing ways.

•<.t ,-V

,’,j Book One opens with a conventional-sounding epic formula:        ;

^   The Mighty Mother, and her Son who brings ,*.   The Smithfield Muses to the ear of Kings,

,v    I sing.

(D, I: 1-3)

.8 fit

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”•’••   WORK

Everything about this is epic except the word ’Smithfield’, the London meat market where (as Pope’s note to line 2 tells us) Bartholomew Fair was held, ’whose shews, machines, and dramatical entertainments, formerly agreeable only to the taste of the Rabble, were, by the Hero of this poem and others of equal genius, brought to the Theatres of Covent-garden, Lincolns-inn-fields, and the Hay-market, to be the reigning pleasures of the Court and Town’. Precisely aligning this potted cultural history with the reigns of George I and II (’Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first’, D, L 6), Pope gives us a nutshell version of the poem’s action: Dulness regains empire over the human mind by leading the exponents of contemporary culture from their dingy lodgings in the penumbra of the philistine City towards the seat of government in the West End.

Pope’s note to line 1 reminds us that ’theMother, and not the Son, is the principal Agent of this Poem’. In classical epics, heroes (Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas) are guided and protected by their divine mothers (Thetis, Athena, Venus) towards performance of heroic duty; but what Dulness promotes in her offspring is finally the reverse of epic action. The epic which primarily informs the design of the poem is, as Pope’s notes indicate, the Aeneid, in which Aeneas escapes from a defeated Troy to found a new empire in Rome. The empire of Dulness, in moving from the City to the Court, is performing an ironic version of this overarching action. In its cosmological allusions, however, The Dunciad also alludes heavily to Milton’s Paradise Lost, as in the mock genealogy of Dulness herself:

In eldest time, e’er mortals writ or read, E’er Pallas issu’d from the Thund’rer’s head, Dulness o’er all possess’d her ancient right, Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night: Fate in their dotage this fair Ideot gave, Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave, Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind, She rul’d, in native Anarchy, the mind.

(D, I: 9-16)

ejS;!’;>j;

Dulness’s lineage echoes Paradise Lost II: 894-6, where Satan, having left his domain of Hell, must pass through the ’Eternal anarchy’ of ’eldest Night,/And Chaos’. Milton’s vision of noxious chemical elements is incorporated here into the body of the ’fair Ideot’, in contrast with Pallas (Athena, goddess of wisdom and art) who emerges fullyarmed from the head of the king of the gods, Zeus (’the Thund’rer’). Milton’s poem also envisages a war between the creative Godhead,

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ALEXANDER POPE

who creates the world by speaking and whose ’son’ (Christ) is the Divine logos or creative word, and Satan, whose creativity is a bestial and mechanistic travesty of the logos (he gives birth to Sin from his own head and copulates with his daughter to produce Death). The ’Mighty Mother’ has some of the lineaments of Milton’s Sin, though she is also a composite allusion to various dark mother-goddesses associated with night, fertility, and the underworld (Cybele, Isis, Ceres, Persephone) [179].

Pope’s goddess is housed in ’The Cave of Poverty and Poetry’ (D, I:

34), close to Bedlam (the lunatic asylum) and Grub Street (spiritual and sometimes literal home of hack writers). The ’high’ mythological home is also the matrix of ’low’ cultural production, such as ’hymning Tyburn’s elegiac lines’ (D, I: 41), where Pope nicely dignifies the wretched verse ascribed to those executed at Tyburn. Dulness is not unproductive; as the note to line 15 decodes the allegory, ’Dulness … includes… Labour, Industry, and some degree of Activity and Boldness: a ruling principle not inert, but turning topsy-turvy the Understanding, and inducing an Anarchy or confused State of Mind’. But creativity here is a womb-like space producing on its own without the intervention of Zeus-like intelligence:

Here she beholds the Chaos dark and deep, ’..:•      > :.<”.

fv:\ Where nameless Somethings in their causes sleep… >;;j>riv: i.sv:

vv..; How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie, •;-;• j(k, <>?’•

How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry, ’. Jvvccj^’^ ’••

Maggots half-form’d in rhyme exactly meet,

And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. wstiwji?   .

(D, I: 55-6, 59-62) ”•’•>-(.

Chaos meets Grub Street (’Grub’ means both ’ditch’ and ’larva’), as Pope spins an apparently unstoppable fantasy of poetic copulation and unauthored linguistic mayhem:

r;t-,rv.Tt

There motley Images her fancy strike,    ;,   ,<»•,’fc,r,Tti Figures ill pair’d, and Similies unlike. She sees a Mob of Metaphors advance, Pleas’d with the madness of the mazy dances :=i;  ’ ’ How Tragedy and Comedy embrace;    .   , •’ >. •   •..    ’ How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race; •••’’••’• < How Time himself stands still at her command, Realms shift their place, and Ocean turns to land.

(D, I: 65-72)

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’ It is like watching evolution speeded up: the spawn, embryo, and maggot of literary hints become image, figure and simile, capable of bizarre procreation; literary forms jumble and hybridise; geology and nationhood become unstable counters of exchange.

The productions of the ’Grub-street race’ (D, I: 44) are seen in vision: Pope’s compressed syntax superimposes a complaint about stylistic errors, or cheerfully inaccurate writing (’Here gay Description Aegypt glads with show’rs’, D, I: 73) onto the surface of the poem itself, so that we experience as event what is being satirised as badly-constructed writing. The vision is, however, distanced by a critique of Dulness’s disfiguring aesthetic:

All these, and more, the cloud-compelling Queen Beholds thro’ fogs, that magnify the scene. p

She, tinsel’d o’er in robes of varying hues, i,

With self-applause her wild creation views; * :,

Sees momentary monsters rise and fall, , ’ ’

And with her own fools-colours gilds them all. i, -1  ”   ^

(D, I: 79-84)

Pope here inverts Newtonian optics, the physics of light which clarifies and divides, into a mock-epic subversion of intelligence: ’cloudcompelling’ is very nearly an exact epithet of Zeus (the Thund’rer’ whom Homer calls ’cloud-gathering’) but Dulness’s clouds are marshalled precisely to obfuscate, distort and discolour what would otherwise be clear.

Dulness chooses Lord Mayor’s day (with a possible allusion to the Coronation Day of George II) to elect a King in place of the deceased City Poet, Elkanah Settle. Lord Mayors, like Kings, had their ceremonial verses, flagrant instances of poetry surrendering to political flattery (I:

85-94). Dulness reviews the ’succession’ of City poets (a kind of mockheroic version of the succession of kings) in terms which recall the shapeless mutations of matter from her earlier vision (’growing lump’, D, 1:102). The succession leads her to Gibber and his ’monster-breeding breast’ (D, I: 108). Named ’Bays’ here, by allusion to the laurel wreath figuratively worn by the Poet Laureate, Gibber is pictured in a parody of epic anger; having lost at gambling, he seems to embody the uncontrollably self-propagating tendencies of matter even as he internalises Satan’s fall through Chaos in Paradise Lost (II: 927-42):

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Swearing and supperless the Hero sate, *..       ,’• .

Blasphem’d his Gods, the Dice, and damn’d his Fate.

133

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ALEXANDER POPE

Then gnaw’d his pen, then dash’d it on the ground, Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! , Plung’d for his sense, but found no bottom there,    ’; Yet wrote and flounder ’d on, in mere despair. !

Round him much Embryo, much Abortion lay, Much future Ode, and abdicated Play; Nonsense precipitate, like running Lead, That slip’d thro’ Cracks and Zig-zags of the Head;   ! All that on Folly Frenzy could beget, Fruits of dull Heat, and Sooterkins of Wit. :

(D, I: 115-26) r

This characteristically alarming vision, in which recognisable comic actions (gnawing the pen) coexist with nightmare images of literature as bodily excrescence and mental waste, continues into Pope’s account of the Hero’s library, in which books become animate, material, even edible (1:127-54). Above all they are flammable, in the travesty sacrifice which accompanies Bays’s petition to Dulness, a near-blasphemous boast of Gibber’s malign activities (underpinned by very selective quotation from his Apology in the notes) (I: 155-256). Like his unacknowledged model, Satan, Gibber glories in his ’brazen Brightness’ and ’polish’d Hardness’ (D, I: 219-20), metallic metaphors for superficial confidence which melt easily into the underlying metaphor of material heaviness (’our head like byass to the bowl’, D, I: 170).

Gibber matches Dulness: his monsters answer hers, his materialism is equated with hers, his superficial and dazzling performance suits hers, his inability to distinguish prose from verse is mirrored in hers. Gibber is ’form’d by nature Stage and Town to bless/And act, and be, a Coxcomb with success’ (D, I: 109-10); he is all performance [182-

3]. As he weeps to set fire to his altar (in a parody of Priam’s tears at the destruction of Troy, here close to the hypocrisy of acting: ’a Tear… Stole from the Master of the sev’nfold Face’, D, I: 243-4), Dulness puts out the fire with a particularly cold and heavy specimen of GrubStreet writing (I: 257-60) and arrives in full comic majesty (’Her ample presence fills up all the place/A veil of fogs dilates her awful face’, D,

1:261-2) to summon Gibber to her ’sacred Dome’ (D, 1:265) and anoint him King, with opium, in a blasphemous dual parody of the baptism of Jesus and of the coronation of a king (I: 287-92). The anointing with the narcotic opium is ominous, for Gibber has little to do from this point on. The ’Great Mother’ (D, I: 269) is the real ruler here and the point is made in terms which crystallise the various hints in the poem that Dulness bears more than a passing resemblance to George

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II’s Queen Caroline, widely held to be, with Walpole, the real power in the land. In her wish to be a ’Nursing-mother’ and ’rock the throne’ (a neat conflation of political destabilization and maternal fondness), Dulness parodies the biblical passage in the Coronation liturgy which signalled that queens were meant to be ’nursing mothers’; while her stated programme (I: 311-18) matches the standard anti-Walpole charges (absolutism, reliance on standing armies and court placemen, ’screening’ the king from the people and from law), the gendering of Dulness turns corruption into a malign version of motherhood which returns the adult male to smothered, infantile quiescence.

At the opening of Book II, Gibber is seated on a throne which alludes complexly to Milton’s Satan, the coronation of George II, and the mockcoronation of Richard Flecknoe, hero of Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe, an important literary-political source with which the poem sees itself as allied. /.)

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High on a gorgeous seat, that far out-shone ’«V

Henley’s gilt tub, or Fleckno’s Irish throne … ,. •>;y«m OAK «… Great Gibber sate: The proud Parnassian sneer, wis? uift;!! ;|.,y The conscious simper, and the jealous leer, .•*•: • MS*. Jist&sj?

Mix on his look: All eyes direct their rays m««- tet e^1;

On him, and crowds turn Coxcombs as they gaze. :MJ ”»1. <\: , ’> His Peers shine round him with reflected grace, y>;i «, -, , •< <

New edge their dulness and new bronze their face.      y*^ t”

(D, II: 1-2, 5-10)       *»•’•

Satan’s power was always for Milton partly the power of the supreme actor, his heroism that of a vaunting braggart; Gibber’s trademark expressions as an actor are here Satanised by allusion to the opening of Book II of Paradise Lost as the Dunces travesty the malign energy of Milton’s devils.

The book as a whole is concerned, however, to remove Gibber from an active role and demonstrate the kinds of activity his ’Peers’ engage in. The games proposed by Dulness to celebrate Gibber’s coronation are modelled on the funeral games of Virgil’s Aeneid (book V), which are themselves modelled on the funeral games in book XXIII of the Iliad: they are thus associated with death, a dark aspect of the most riotously comic section of the poem. In the first game, two booksellers (Pope’s old enemy, Edmund Curll, and his erstwhile publisher, Bernard Lintot) are made to race for possession of a poet – an allegory of the book-trade tyranny Pope had escaped. Pope contrives a revengeful accident for Curll:

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ALEXANDER POPE

. ;   Full in the middle way there stood a lake, , • . • ’•,!.” ::   ;: •;..     😉

Which Curl’s Corinna chanc’d that morn to make:  d •;;.!  i,,:  ’ vi; ; , •;;,  (Such was her wont, at early dawn to drop •i.:-cr-no,v ;-:.”

,’!;. Her evening cates before his neighbour’s shop,)      oois;} <:.&w>: • > »-: Here fortun’d Curl to slide; loud shout the band,      • i:r Jrti.,’f>r.v;-. i.c And Bernard! Bernard! rings thro’ all the Strand. .’• ^.ttq. ’”•:;< ; /i- Obscene with filth the miscreant lies bewray’d, ’.v’-’^i;; i.^r-1- : ID   Fal’n in the plash his wickedness had laid: <y; *c’j ’y/arY.XI -:

(D, 11:69-76) ’v •„. ,

Like the epic phantom, this has a classical precedent (Virgil’s runner Nisus slips on the blood of sacrifice inAeneid V), but the point is clearly made, despite the decorous language (’lake’, ’chanc’d’, ’fortun’d’), that the filth is directly traceable to the victim himself. The crime for which Curll is punished here is the publication of youthful letters by Pope which had been passed to Curll by Henry Cromwell’s mistress Elizabeth Thomas (charmingly dignified into ’Curl’s Corinna’) [11-12]; but Pope is also repaying Curll for what he takes to be a truly epic and ’dauntless’ (D, II: 58) career in turning literature into commerce, as he details in a poised note (to line 58). Pope also draws on Curll’s widespread reputation for obscene publications (the ironic ’Curl’s chaste press’ of D, I:

40), and associates bodily malfunction with corrupt creativity generally. Curll is not abashed by his fall; he prays to Jove, who happens to be sitting on the celestial privy where it is his custom to use the prayers of mankind for toilet paper (’Amus’d he reads, and then returns the bills/Sign’d with that Ichor which from Gods distills’ as Pope puts it with high euphemism, D, II: 91-2). But Curll’s prayer is granted special attention through his ongoing liaison with Cloacina, the Roman goddess of the sewer, who selects Curll’s petition for the royal treatment. The worlds of epic deities and London street culture are promiscuously fused, as Pope suggests that Curll gets his literature from dark sexual forays along the Thames docks: ’Where as he fish’d her nether realms for Wit,/She oft had favour’d him, and favours yet’ (D, II: 101-2). Jove having ’sign’d’ the prayer, Curll is in his element:

Renew’d by ordure’s sympathetic force, As oil’d with magic juices for the course,        v ;•»;:;’

Vig’rous he rises; from th’ effluvia strong ;?,; ; •;•

Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along; .   , :   ,,.

,     ,,,    (D, II: 103-6)       H.i-    -*• .- r: •

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The bookseller derives a weird sexual kick (’Vig’rous he rises’) out of bodily waste in what is probably the most elegant excremental vision in literature [185-6].

The first ’poet’ offered for enslavement to a bookseller by the Goddess turns out to be a phantom of the kind the book trade occasionally used to disguise responsibility or to insinuate high-class authorship (as Dulness explains, II: 131-40). But Curll also wins the next contest, for the more substantial body of Eliza Haywood, author of scandalous memoirs and novels. The Goddess proposes:

”Who best can send on high ”The salient spout, far-streaming to the sky; ”His be yon Juno of majestic size, •„;

”With cow-like udders, and with ox-like eyes. ”This China Jordan let the chief o’ercome ”Replenish, not ingloriously, at home.”

(D, II: 161-6)

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Translated, this epic proposition means that he who can piss the furthest wins the breeding machine (already presented with Two babes of love close clinging to her waist’, 158, indicating actual bastard children or illegitimate literary productions); the loser gets a chamber pot. Not surprisingly, Curll wins again: the rival bookseller Osborne wets his own face and goes off happily enough with the chamber pot on his head, while Curll’s brazen self-confidence results in truly epic urination: ’Thro’ half the heav’ns he pours th’exalted urn;/His rapid waters in their passage burn’ (D, II: 179-84). Curll’s productions are all productions of the body, waste, filth, corruption: the paradoxical burning of the waters is a marker of venereal disease, caught, as the note delicately puts it, ’in unhappy communication with another’.

Pope pursues this degradation of literature to infantile physical pleasures in a tickling contest (II: 191-220), and a ’braying’ competition displaying ’the wond’rous power of Noise’ (D, II: 221-68). But in the end he returns to the Duncely element of mud. Taking an insalubrious route round Bridewell prison To where Fleet-ditch with disemboguing streams/Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames’ (D, II: 271-2), the Goddess asks the Dunces to dive in the mud to show ’who the most in love of dirt excel/Or dark dexterity of groping well’ (D, II:

277-8). Fleet ditch was an open sewer running into the Thames; though Pope comically transforms pollution into something which almost shares the heraldic colouring of the rivers in Windsor-Forest (The King of dykes! than whom no sluice of mud/With deeper sable blots the

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ALEXANDER POPE

silver flood’, D, II: 273-4), the association between Fleet street (a key area of the book trade) and its nearby sewer allows Pope to rewrite Curll’s personal obsession with filth on a much grander scale.

In diving into the mud, the Dunces are also testifying to their commitment to low rather than high, dark against light, bathos (’depth’) against sublime. Pope deposits various literary enemies in the swamp with due comic grandeur – none more so than Jonathan Smedley, who returns from his underworld voyage like a river god, ’in majesty of Mud’ (D, II: 326):

First he relates, how sinking to the chin,

Smit with his mien, the Mud-nymphs suck’d him in:         . ”   ’^.

How young Lutetia, softer than the down, ’’.. •

•”’•      Nigrina black, and Merdamante brown,

C     Vy’d for his love in jetty bow’rs below, ’;  ”

•A     As Hylas fair was ravish’d long ago. ”’’ >.   ’•

I (D, 11:331-6)

Pope imputes to Smedley an autoerotic fascination with filth (at the same time, he risks readerly identification with that fascination through his careful detail): the ’suck’d’, and ’softer than the down’ are Smedley’s apprehension of a sexual caress from ’Nut-brown maids’ (D, II: 337) who appear to be animated excrement (’Merdamante’ means something like ’shit-loving’). Smedley’s further voyage along a ’branch of Styx… That tinctur’d as it runs with Lethe’s streams/And wafting Vapours from the land of Dreams’ (D, II: 338-40) suggest an intoxicating inhalation of sewer gas which Smedley receives as divine inspiration.

But lethargy is the state which Dulness values most, and the book concludes with all the critics failing to stay awake during a reading of the dullest of contemporary poets. The crude materialism of Book II is succeeded by a psychological exploration, expanding the Smedley’s ludicrous underworld vision into a full-scale parody of Aeneas’s visit to the underworld mAeneid, book VI: But whereas Aeneas goes physically underground, Bays’s trip is internal, a dream, induced by Dulness’s potions in a disturbing fusion of the roles of mother and lover: ’But in her Temple’s last recess inclos’d,/On Dulness’ lap th’ Anointed head repos’d’ (D, III: 1-2). The status of what Bays is about to dream is made problematic by the poem’s comparisons with madmen and other visionaries, not excluding poets; he is conveyed downwards ’on Fancy’s easy wing’ (D, III: 13), led by a ’slip-shod Sibyl’ (D, III: 15), suggesting the rickety nature of his imaginative vision.

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Here the book trade parodies epic conceptions of reincarnation:

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Here, in a dusky vale where Lethe rolls, I•;<•>*.: :0 :–.toOld Bavius sits, to dip poetic souls, ”   •’..;”-: And blunt the sense, and fit it for a skull )-V>  •• Of solid proof, impenetrably dull: 7,A Instant, when dipt, away they wing their flight, -H Where Brown and Mears unbar the gates of Light,   *        !,;>;   – ’ Demand new bodies, and in Calf’s array, v.-A Rush to the world, impatient for the day. /$-    . Millions and millions on these banks he views, i) Thick as the stars of night, or morning dews, UK.        v8. As thick as bees o’er vernal blossoms fly,              ..’J <       .-•*& As thick as eggs at Ward in Pillory.

(D, III: 23-34)

The pushy confidence of duncely poets is insisted on, alongside their nightmarish thronging; the lines encompass the direct comedy by which Thetis’s ’dipping’ of Achilles to render him invulnerable is turned into a sort of mechanical process of case-hardening, the transforming fantasy of poets ushered into the light by disreputable booksellers (Brown and Mears) in ’Calf’s array’ (cheap bookbindings), and the tasteful epic similes which run without warning into the brutal light of day of a London scene (’As thick as eggs at Ward in Pillory’).

Recalling Aeneas’s encounter with his father Anchises, Pope stages the encounter between Bays and his poetic forbear, Elkanah Settle, who wonders with rapture at the possible material embodiments of his son’s soul through time (III: 43-66). The notion of lineage and fatherhood, here as in Book I, is a way of classifying enemy literature as all of a family, as well as condemned to physical status, so much material endlessly reproduced. When Settle grants Bays a prophetic vision of the triumph of Dulness over science he emphasises knowledge’s vulnerability to simple, brutal destruction: books, cities, and people get burnt (III: 67-112). The account derives a kind of perverse magnificence from Adam’s vision of redemptive Christian history at the end of Paradise Lost, itself based on Anchises’ prophecy of the glories of Augustan Rome; at the same time it betrays its limited and local focus by celebrating the new armies Dulness is lining up in London. Augustan Rome was destroyed by armies of Goths and Vandals (III:

83-94), then by superstition (III: 101-12); Britain has already had its superstition (III: 113-22), and now come the armies, those same ’millions’ thronging the bookshops (D, III: 127-38).

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ALEXANDER POPE

After a number of characteristic vignettes of this roll-call, Dunces who are both frivolous and threatening, sublime and bathetic, classic and Grub-Street, Pope grants Bays a pantomime apocalypse:

All sudden, Gorgons hiss, and Dragons glare,

And ten-horn’d fiends and Giants rush to war.

Hell rises, Heav’n descends, and dance on Earth:      •.’.

Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth, rfi

•    A fire, a jigg, a battle, and a ball, !’

’Till one wide conflagration swallows all. •«;

Thence a new world to Nature’s laws unknown,     ,’fi

Breaks out refulgent, with a heav’n its own: •:>&.f^r ;,,.

Another Cynthia her new journey runs, .i.Jiri’ – A

And other planets circle other suns. •; i?’j ,./•

The forests dance, the rivers upward rise,

Whales sport in woods, and dolphins in the skies; •j.”    And last, to give the whole creation grace, ’! ! ••: ’’   ;

ci;    Lo! one vast Egg produces human race. ’ui, ai¥;;p

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In one sense, what Pope is mocking here is the taste for cosmic spectacle in the ’low’ theatrical entertainments of his time: Theobald’s Rape of Proserpine (1727), is implicated as the source of the ’monstrous absurdity’ whereby Hell rises and Heaven descends (note to III: 237). The conflagration is based on that underworld fantasy, and on Settle’s own spectacular (and to Pope, ridiculous) Siege of Troy (1707); the ’sable sorcerer’ episode is based on pantomime versions of the Faust story. More widely, Pope caricatures in these chaotic manoeuvres aspects of duncely writing which contravene the rules of nature: whales sporting in woods (III: 246) recall the absurdities mocked in Horace’s Ars Poetica which Pope had drawn on in the Essay on Criticism [49-57]. But at the back of it all lies the possible decreation implicit in any creative act, the idea that by representing God’s world amiss you can do it a blasphemous injury. The Miltonic sublime turns God into the original poet and Satan into the original parodist: the Dunces are firmly of the devil’s party. The boundaries of the vision are very nearly transgressed: this is Pope imagining Bays having a vision of selected highlights from duncely shows with such sequence and momentum that a theatrical pantomime nearly becomes a genuine apocalypse. The vision of orchestrated chaos is comically intense, so that, momentarily, we share it as something (almost) rich and strange [158-9].

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> We are allowed to escape from the full identification with disaster which fascinates Bays: seeking a source for such wonders, Bays is told ’Son; what thou seek’st is in thee! Look, and find/Each Monster meets his likeness in thy mind’ (D, III: 251-2), confirming the powerful pathology to which he is subject, and we are not. Hell’s pantomime continues in Settle’s prophetic descriptions (III: 253-72), but the stagey nature of their construction becomes more comically evident. John Rich, manager of Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields (where some of these shows took place), is characterised as a ’matchless Youth’ whose ’nod these worlds controuls’, but his epic status is undermined by timely reference to what gets thrown at him in the theatre:

Angel of Dulness, sent to scatter round

Her magic charms o’er all unclassic ground:

Yon stars, yon suns, he rears at pleasure higher, ,•.,

Illumes their light, and sets their flames on fire.  ; a

Immortal Rich! how calm he sits at ease ><vvv? *          4

’Mid snows of paper, and fierce hail of pease; .as:* :rKa :*«.;   ,

And proud his Mistress’ orders to perform, 5«-.; (- •*.’,;. ’i.-^b

Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm. •’•••’    ”s^ …   –   -.,-

(D, III: 257-64) ’   (•:.

All this would-be Zeus controls is an illusory universe, considerably less real than the paper and peas the booing audience rain down on him.

Settle’s rapturous account of the future of Dulness’s empire envisages ’low’ theatricals merging with ’high’ culture, ”Till rais’d from booths, to Theatre, to Court/Her seat imperial Dulness shall transport’ (D, III: 299-300). Again the merger is aligned with death: ’Pluto with Cato thou for this shalt join/And link the Mourning Bride to Proserpine’ (D, III: 309-10; Cato was a severe neoclassical play by Addison [16], The Mourning Bride a tragedy by Pope’s friend Congreve; they are fused by Dulness with underworld pantomimes). But this vision disappears through the ’Iv’ry Gate’, traditionally associated with false dreams, as Pope’s spoof note points out, leaving open the possibility of redemption; his competing notes to lines 5 and 6, one citing the vision as a ’chimera of the dreamer’s brain’ and the other pointing to the fulfilment of the prophecies in Book IV, puts into play the different interpretations of the book, which were of course still open in the threebook version of 1728-29. The Dunciad, in Four Books comes after the decade of Horatian satire, however, and shares the darkening vision of those poems.

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ALEXANDER POPE

Bays appears never to awaken from his rapturous dream on his mother’s lap (IV: 20): the final condition of Dulness is loss of consciousness, and Bays is as unheroic in action as George II is in kingship (Pope’s note indicates). Book IV gestures towards an extinction which can scarcely be withstood even by the poet whose normal working habit was to inscribe his own survival through poetry:

Yet, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night! … Suspend a while your Force inertly strong, Then take at once the Poet and the Song.

(D, IV: 1-2, 7-8)

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Miltonic Chaos is still faintly comic (’inertly strong’), but the book as a whole, in its length, density, and sometimes suffocating difficulty, can be taken to mimic the drift towards gravitational entropy that Dulness represents.

At a moment of malign cosmic influence (IV: 9), the ’Seed of Chaos’ (Dulness) rises ’To blot out Order, and extinguish Light/Of dull and venal a new World to mold/And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold’ (D, IV: 14-16). In doing so she fulfils both the prophecy of I: 28 and gives material body to the pantomimic fantasies of (un)creation in Book III: Book IV is a sort of Royal interview in which Dulness reviews and rewards her supporters. Dulness sits in emblematic majesty, a nightmare parody of the iconographic celebrations of monarchs that Pope drew on in Windsor-Forest, with abstract virtues like Morality, Poetry and Logic made material, punished and chained at her feet (IV:

2l_44). The way from allegory to satire is paved by the figure of Opera, personified here as a beguiling foreign harlot who entices the aristocracy away from poetry towards the effeminate spectacles of the opera house. Opera, for Pope, was an illegitimate form of entertainment which relied wholly on sound independent of sense, thus violating a cardinal precept of the Essay on Criticism. (It was also the one art form which the foreign king George II enjoyed, and was associated with effeminacy because of the prominence of castrati in heroic roles.) Opera silences the enchained Muses, drowning them out with artificial sound with no end in view other than self-celebration (IV: 45-71). This materialization of culture is also prophetic.

Dulness summons her followers through ’Fame’s posterior Trumpet’ (D, IV: 71), a formulation characteristically invoking resonances both epic and rude, but the Dunces arrive in dark parody of Newtonian physics: \ ’*-’

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None need a guide, by sure Attraction led,     ’•   • And strong impulsive gravity of Head: None want a place, for all their Centre found, Hung to the Goddess, and coher’d around…. 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 pow’r confess.

(D, IV: 75-8, 81-4)

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Within the comic cod-science it is also possible to see the lineaments of the smothering mother, infantilizing her offspring. What follows is in effect a catalogue of cultural vices, beginning naturally with bad writers, patrons, pompous officials proud of their ’culture’ (IV: 91-

118). But the catalogue is much expanded from the more literary interests of the first three books. Pope (by his own account freely selfeducated among the trees of Windsor Forest) imagines the reign of Dulness beginning in infancy, with an education which separates words from things, sound from sense, and turns mental life into a Blakean prison – a schoolmaster speaks:

’«)’*.   •

Then thus. ”Since Man from beast by Words is known,    *\’,iWords are Man’s province, Words we teach alone. … We ply the Memory, we load the brain, ,   ,,„• , .s <:

Bind rebel Wit, and double chain on chain, Confine the thought, to exercise the breath; v

And keep them in the pale of Words till death. ’” – k   ’-•

Whate’er the talents, or howe’er design’d, We hang one jingling padlock on the mind:      . ’

(D, IV: 149-50, 157-62)

’.^

The picture of mental talents bound at Dulness’s feet with which the book begins (IV: 21-44) is here given a literal explanation – and a political force, since schoolboys go on to be politicians, and kings have been known to act like schoolmasters (IV: 165-88).

A ’sable shoal’ of academics then swamps the floor like cattle (’Thick and more thick the black blockade extends/A hundred head of Aristotle’s friends’, D, IV: 191-2), headed by the textual critic Richard Bentley in the mock-epic guise of Aristarchus (an Alexandrian commentator and editor). Aristarchus commends his own efforts in Dulness’s service as a heroic battle to demean ancient culture into shreds: ’In ancient Sense if any needs will deal,/Be sure I give them

143

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ALEXANDER POPE

Fragments, not a Meal’ (D, IV: 230, echoing the Goddess’s commands to critics, IV: 119-26). His pedantic attention to the letter rather than the spirit itself approaches unintelligibility:

:tt,J ••«.,•*•?.:.••; sv.tfh : •

Tis true, on Words is still our whole debate, r; ;-y;   ””Ss -;::; Disputes of Me or Te, otaut or at, u.«! – –   . :; •;

To sound or sink in cano, O or A, s>   –  ’.’”<•*•’

Or give up Cicero to C or K. »••>.•.-,.<  \\i:*% .””

(D, IV 219-22)

Bentley’s philological minuteness is characterised by Pope as a perverse fragmentation of classical heritage into mere phonemes: the first line of Virgil’s Aeneid (’Arma virumque cano’, ’Arms and the Man I sing’, itself the prime source behind the singing of The Dunciad) becomes here a matter of trivial pronunciation; Bentley can’t work out whether to pronounce the name of the great Roman orator as Cicero or Kikero (Pope, in another guise, appears to encourage the pronunciation of Gibber as Kibber). Academic discourse is as much lumber as the heavy books of Bays’s study:

For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the head With all such reading as was never read: For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, Goddess, and about it:

(D, IV: 249-52)

;W-

;W

The pointless repetitiveness enacted here extends the ’padlock’ of school education into adulthood.

Individuation is resisted. As if to prove the point that ’With the same Cement, ever sure to bind/We bring to one dead level ev’ry mind’, (D, IV: 267-8) Bentley and the pedants have to make way for an unnamed but representative ’Pupil’, returning from his further education on the European ’Grand Tour’ with his tutor, his whore, and his companions. The Pupil’s career is presented as a disfiguring parody of Aeneas’s upbringing and adventuring: protected by Dulness’s ’kind cloud’ as Aeneas was made invisible in Carthage by his mother Venus (though Dulness’s cloud is a cloud of ignorance, a lack of exposure to proper formative influences), the ’young Aeneas’ traverses Europe in a blaze of self-regarding frivolity quite opposite to the epic intent of Virgil’s hero. In theory the Grand Tour allowed students to complete their classical education by visiting the sites of classical civilisation; in practice, Pope suggests, it continues the erasure of classical values

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already visible in the cultures which have replaced the earlier ones: ’All Classic learning lost on Classic ground;/And last turn’d Air, the Echo of a Sound!’ (D, IV: 321). While Bentley turns classical culture into fragments, the Italians have turned it into opera, the ’Air’, i.e., Aria, or song from an opera, which the ’Heir’ hums in an unconscious pun. The presence of a whore (a sort of literal embodiment of the ’Harlot form’ of opera) guarantees this mental corruption will have bodily effects down the generations, as the tutor promises in his vision of the ’sons of sons of sons of whores’ propping up Dulness’s empire (D, IV:

331-4).

Next in line come a number of satiric victims whose education has turned into obsessive self-directed study. The quarrel between Annius, a dealer in (and faker of) antiquarian curiosities (coins, statues, rnummies), and Mummius, one of his customers, affords Pope an opportunity to satirise the psychological and economic roots of collecting (IV: 347-

97). Annius and Mummius are reconciled: the energies which might break apart Dulness’s empire become cosily collaborative. The same thing happens when two further ’students’ (one of gardening, one of insects), arrive to dispute in infantile fashion about their hobbies. Again, Dulness views both kinds of narrow-minded obsession as equally favourable to her cause, and their squabble, which suggests a certain intellectual liveliness, is patched up into the anaesthetic doziness which she most esteems (IV 437-58). It is the reverse of the questing, cosmic vision of Essay on Man, which seeks to place the details of the material universe in a theological and ethical framework: here, Dulness Wants to channel mental energy into obsessive and singular pursuits, ’See Nature in some partial narrow shape/And let the Author of the Whole escape’ (D, IV: 455-6).

Pope continues this ominously counter-theological process in the ensuing account of theologians and philosophers. Here too the processes of materialism have a task: against those who humbly seek God through common sense and careful study (’to Nature’s Cause thro’ Nature led’, D, IV 468), the ’gloomy Clerk’ (D, IV 459), argues from preconceived notions of God to the imperfections of the world which in turn cause doubts about the existence of God. Philosophers seek nothing less than to materialise God, indeed, into ’some Mechanick Cause’ (D, IV: 475). It is a matter of superimposing a sense of self on the world, and thus allying oneself with the Satanic claim to be one’s own ’author’: ’See all in Self, and but for self be born’ (D, IV 477-80). Dulness herself is idolised as ’Wrapt up in Self, a God without a Thought’ (D, IV: 485).

The condition aimed for is finally one of sleep, the self-centred abandon which characterises Bays’s dozy presence throughout the last

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book. The figure of Silenus (a satyr from Virgil’s Eclogues who sings the praise of drink, here representing a government journalist) commends the appropriately educated throng to Dulness’s breast (IV: 515), then introduces a ’WIZARD OLD’ whose mysterious ’Cup’ reduces them to swinish, infantile pleasures. This wizard is unlike the pantomime sorcerers of Book III: he has direct political power and cogency. The

112-line passage (IV: 493-604), perhaps the most obscure in the whole poem, parodies initiation rites of ancient ’Mysteries’ under a metaphor for political corruption: the ’Cup’ represents bribes and pensions, used by Walpole’s regime to anaesthetise the political will of anyone given to Opposition. All ’drinks’ of this kind lead to a poisonous loss of principle: ’Lost is his God, his Country, ev’ry thing;/And nothing is left but Homage to a King!’(D, IV: 523-624). Dulness awards the gifts of ’Firm Impudence, or Stupefaction mild’ (D, IV: 530) to guard her devotees from any useful form of self-knowledge, as a classical goddess might award a hero a weapon. Classical magic and biblical miracles are turned into a riot of corrupt festivity, with luxurious rituals of French cookery (IV: 549-664) looking like a blasphemous parody of the communion service.

Dulness attempts to send her approved apostles out to ’MAKE ONE MIGHTY DUNCIAD OF THE LAND’ (D, IV 604), thus claiming the poem as the poet had indicated at the start of the Book (IV: 8), but interrupts herself with a yawn before which ’All Nature nods: /What Mortal can resist the Yawn of Godsi’ (D, IV 605-6). This epic action has some very immediate, contemporary consequences: the Church authorities fall asleep first (IV: 607-10), followed by parliament and the armed forces (IV 611-18), as effective action of any sort is lost. The ’Muse’ is invited to relate the process in detail (IV: 619-26), but is apparently interrupted by Dulness in person, claiming not only the song but the poet, again as announced at the start of the Book. We are returned to the emblematic level of the start of the Book, as a Miltonised Dulness comes to extinguish the cosmic lights of Art, Truth, Morality, Religion and Philosophy:

She comes! she comes! the sable Throne behold Of Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old! Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay -T .

And all its varying Rain-bows die away. :.••;- .’:; Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires, •• ”•<•.’ ’ The meteor drops, and in a flash expires.

(D, IV 629-34)

:?/

,\:&.

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In a final nightmare vision, Chaos (Dulness’s father) returns to

occupy the place of Creation: :AS,’.   . . /sv:;;,m   •.^.::\-.^:y. :; w’:

•iy”*’. ’ ’’• <”-’’iff;-’!.’i-’4

Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;   ’    ’’!.««,!«:•:«:,«;«•,’ Light dies before thy uncreating word: ,••;,•:«••.•;’• :; K< . •.

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;       v v,,  .      .•,   •, And Universal Darkness buries All. :«’K- : v-,    •-.     ;

(D, IV 653-6)       -A^te- <,-. .v

In the 1728/9 Dunciad this final narrative had been installed in the hero’s vision at the end of Book III as a prophecy, and was framed by a couplet which signalled it as a mere dream; here, the prophecy is fulfilled, and the creating word of God (’Let there be light’) is erased by the fiat of uncreation.

Pope apparently used to read these final lines with sombre emphasis. Erskine-Hill (1972a: 66) comments that ’In the fiction of The Dunciad there is no consolation, absolutely nothing’; Pope’s own death was less than a year away at publication. As a final vision, a last tilt at Walpole, it approaches an epic tone in which the ’mock’ element is virtually absent. There is, however, a tiny reminder of the possible tawdriness of Dulness’s apocalypse: The hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall’ recalls the cheap theatrical effects of the Dunces in the first three books, and as such gives the final extinction a trace of comic wobbliness. Moreover, though these lines are the end of the poem, they are not the end of the book.

The publication history of The Dunciad, with its multiple formats and ability to incorporate new material across the decades, gives it a special status in Pope’s writing [195-7]. The overt parody of textual scholarship, and covert compilation of actual information and defensive material, which Pope had begun in the three-book Dunciad Variorum, was extended considerably in the four-book text: the spoof classical edition has the subliminal function of presenting the modern poem as something equivalent to Horace or Virgil. Not all of what Scriblerus does in the notes is riotously parodic, and his discussion of the poem’s epic nature does promote The Dunciad as epic of its time, by one who had truly mastered the epic vein. The Testimonies of Authors’ (normally in a classical edition a chorus of praise, such as had prefaced Pope’s Works of 1717) is here a set of quotations from attacks on Pope designed to justify the poem as retribution rather than the initiation of conflict; but it is also a chorus of praise from various worthies, including many of the Dunces themselves. Appendix II is a straightforward bibliography of attacks on Pope ’with the true Names of the Authors’ identified.

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Appendix VI presents ’A Parallel of the Characters of Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope, As drawn by certain of their Cotemporaries’; here Pope compares on facing pages attacks on him with attacks on the by now unimpeachable Dryden and finds considerable solidarity with the earlier poet: both are traduced as rebels, illiterates, cheats, asses and apes, and so on. The work of the poem, that is to say, continues outside the poem itself, and the sombre ending of the mock-epic is somewhat lightened by the textually-based joke of the mock-book.

Further Reading

Criticism of the poem took some time to emerge from the controversy it aroused: complaints about the personal nature of the satire, and the pathology of the satirist, were in a sense the poem’s lifeblood and Pope managed to incorporate controversy into the texture of the poem in an ongoing signal of his authorial power. In the twentieth century, Johnson’s view that it was one of Pope’s ’greatest and most elaborate performances’ (Johnson 1905: 145) has been amply ratified [157-9]. Williams (1955) established the basic geographical pattern of the poem’s reference (its parody of Lord Mayor’s Day celebrations), and its sociological transformations of living individuals. He examined in detail the nature of the poem’s ongoing citation and incorporation of the Ae.ne.id and Paradise. Lost as standards of heroic and theological activity which the Dunces invert. Williams’s geographical work has been very substantially revised and extended by Rogers (1972) to indicate the profundity of its local reference and sociological specificity and by the same critic (1985) to clarify the poem’s allusions to the coronation of George II: Rogers also extends Williams’s analysis of the semantic use (and abuse) of personal names and identities in the poem (1974b). Despite its reputation for scabrous personal bitterness, Leavis (1976:

94) argued that Pope takes such pleasure in the creation of his ’marvellously organised complexity of surprising tropes, felicitously odd images, and profoundly imaginative puns’, that the poem’s actual mood, in some instances ’might fairly be called genial’, and that episodes such as those which satirise collectors and scientists in Book IV indicate something of Pope’s own private attraction to those sciences. Jones (1968) argued that Pope has a much greater sense of involvement with his Dunces than initially appears: the ’strangeness’ of the poem Jones relates to its ’psychomachic’ elements of ambiguous attraction; Pope is not simply bearing the standard for culture against the barbarians but responding to, ordering, exorcising his attraction to the world of

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unrestricted play which Dulness represents: ’what Pope as a deliberate satirist rejects as dully lifeless his imagination communicates as obscurely energetic – states of being densely, but often unconsciously, animated’ (637). Even the apocalyptic conclusion has its elements of poetic and readerly pleasure, as Pope repudiates but also responds to the vitality of anarchy: ’what destroys the world completes the poem’ (647). Such a line has also led to more hostile assessments of Pope’s relation to what he attacks: Brown (1985) manages to read the poem as a perverse celebration of the energies of an economic system it ostensibly demonises, and Stallybrass and White (1985) argue that Pope is inevitably tainted and compromised by the very forms of bodily excess which he renders so grotesquely vivid. The gendering of Dulness has also been brought more into question in recent years [179].

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