Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674422605, 9780674422599

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Alexander Pope

ALEXANDER POPE

Tradition and Identity

John Paul Russo

Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts 1972

© Copyright 1972 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Hyder Edward Rollins Fund Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 70-188354 SBN 674-01520-7 Printed in the United States of America

For my mother and father

Preface

My attempt in this essay is to study the development of Pope's identity and to create a portrait of the author from his early years in the beginning of the eighteenth century to his death in 1744. By identity, in the broadest sense, I mean important facts in Pope's life, the image he had of himself, and the figure of himself he set forth in his poetry, as each component of identity shades into or sheds light upon the other. As man and artist, Pope looked to the past for his ethical and intellectual models, for forms, styles, and attitudes, and for his very materials. In short he looked to tradition, to the line of great poets and moralists that had made up the literature of Europe. Tradition served him as a continual and self-renewing source of strength for his progress as an artist. The bond between the self and the self's heritage, between identity and tradition, is particularly strong in Pope's case. His life and works reveal that he maintained and developed his own identity through deep absorption of classical and English poetic tradition. His lifelong ambition was to emulate the great writers, to gather strength and confidence from this contact and to prove their essential relation to his own age and nation. In this way he would assure himself a place within poetry's temple of fame; vil

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and fame is a major theme in his writings just as it was a fixed star in his life. Pope knew from experience the lesson of one of his favorite critics, Longinus, that in any given age there would be few, if any, "lofty and transcendent natures," and that one would have to seek that fellowship in the past, through years of study, through conscious imitation of their works, through actual emulation of their idealism. Tradition continually set Pope moral challenges equal to his genius. For he was not content with the fame that his own early verse brought him, verse that put him by the age of thirty among the foremost European writers. He used his poetic gift for a more heroic purpose : to attack a society he considered increasingly materialist, void of taste, and corrupted in its political and administrative mechanism. Although Pope saw himself at the end of what we now call the neoclassical poetic tradition—he referred to himself as "the last"—he was able through his interchange with the past to free himself from the limitations of his own self and time, to reach back and use the past in a formative and creative manner throughout his life. "He who would not be frustrate," wrote Milton, "of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem." I wish to thank the Clarendon Press for permission to quote from The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, edited by George Sherburn, and from Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men; Yale University Press and Methuen 8c Co. Ltd. for permission to quote from the Twickenham Edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd. for permission to quote from T. S. Eliot's "East Coker," in Collected Poems, 19091962; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd. for permission to quote from Robert Lowell's "Waking Early Sunday Morning," in Near the Ocean; Mr. M. B. Yeats, Macmillan & Co., Ltd. (London), Miss Bertha Geòrgie Yeats, and the Macmillan Co. (New York), for permission to quote "The Coming of Wisdom with Time," and from "The Second Coming," from W. B. Yeats's Collected Poems; Henry Regnery Co.,

Preface

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for permission to quote from Salvatore Quasimodo's "Following the Alpheus," from To Give and to Have and Other Poems, translated by E. Farnsworth; the Yale University library, for permission to print the chalk drawing of Alexander Pope by Jonathan Richardson, listed as number 21 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; and Harvard University Press, for permission to quote from The Loeb Classical Library. It remains a most pleasant task at the end of this undertaking to thank several friends, teachers, and already a few students for their assistance and encouragement. Robert A. Ferguson and Lorna C. Ferguson have given much aid and comfort, and I have profited deeply from many conversations with them. Roland J. Godfrey has been over many years a thoughtful and kindly mentor. For helpful points of departure in the later poetry of Pope I am grateful to B. A. Boucher, Robert V. Edgar, Alan S. Geismer, Jr., and W. B. Johnson. Martha J. Walters, Lorraine James, and Eleanor Meglio assisted in editing the manuscript. I express my gratitude to Simeon M. Wade, now completing a comprehensive study of the idea of luxury, for sharing many ideas on the English moralists, for sympathetic encouragement and penetrating criticism. Herschel Baker has constantly offered suggestions and ideas concerning the Renaissance literary and humanist background for my work. Reuben Brower aided me at several points through his own close knowledge of Pope's life and poetry. Conversations with Harry Levin have been of assistance in my understanding of the critical background on classicism. At the outset, Earl Wasserman helped me to define the relation between biographical and literary problems. I. A. Richards offered much advice with regard to classical writers, particularly Homer. I wish to thank David Perkins, who has taught me about English poetry as a whole and who read the completed manuscript with care. My largest debt is to Walter Jackson Bate. Over the past nine years he has challenged and corrected me; he has helped me

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Preface

to understand the nature of literary biography; and he has continually informed and reminded me of that with which the finest literature concerns itself, that is, in Johnson's words, "what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use." J. P. R. Cambridge, Massachusetts September 1971

Contents

1.

The Pantheon of Literature

1

"The mighty dead" · the identity and the tradition · the neoclassical dilemma * concordia discors · resolution

2.

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero

25

Childhood and adolescence (1688-1707) · disease and deformity · self-education · early advocates · the young rake · the poetry of a bachelor · religious isolation

3.

Homer and the Heroic Ideal

83

Translation and originality ( 1714-1725) · the composition of Pope's "Homer" · the Preface to the Iliad (1715) · invention and fire · the heroic imagination · Sarpedon and Achilles · heroism and solitude

4.

Pope and the Temple of Fame

133

"Fame became of him" · The Preface to the Works ( 1717) • The Temple of Fame · the ruins of time · elegies and epitaphs

5.

A Living Image: Swift

176

A friend in absentia (1714-1726) · the Scriblerus Club · the letters of 1725 · The Dunciad I-III (1728) · Pope's image of Swift · retirement

6.

The Free Soul

199

A system of ethics · Horace · Caesar and King George · The Epistle to Augustus (1737) · political and literary fame and infamy · The Dunciad IV (1742) · "CHAOS! is restor'd"

Index

235

Alexander Pope

Abbreviations Coir. Ε-C Griffith Johnson Sherburn Spence TE Warburton

The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn. 5 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956. The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Whitwell Elwin and W. J. Courthope. 10 vols. London: John Murray, 18711889. R. H. Griffith, Alexander Pope: A Bibliography. 2 vols. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1922, 1927. Samuel Johnson, "Alexander Pope." In Lives of the English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill. 3 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1905. III, pp. 82-276. The Early Career of Alexander Pope. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn. 2 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1966. The Twickenham Edition of The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt. 10 vols. London and New Haven: Methuen and Yale University Press, 1939-1967. The Works of Alexander Pope Esq. . . . with his Last Corrections, Additions, and Improvements, ed. William Warburton. 9 vols. London: J. and P. Knapton, H. Lintot et al., 1751.

Poem Titles lmit. Hor. Sat. Il.i lmit. Hor. Sat. Il.ii lmit. Hor. Ep. I.i lmit. Hor. Ep. I.vi lmit. Hor. Ep. Il.i lmit. Hor. Ep. Il.ii

The First Satire of the Second Book Imitated [to Fortescue] The Second Satire of the Second Book Paraphrased [to Bethel] The First Epistle of the First Book Imitated [to Bolingbroke] The Sixth Epistle of the First Book Imitated [to Murray] The First Epistle of the Second Book Imitated [to Augustus] The Second Epistle of the Second Book

of

Horace

of

Horace

of

Horace

of

Horace

of

Horace

of

Horace

1. The Pantheon of Literature "Which, sir, do you look upon as our best age for poetryV' [asked Spence]. "Why, the last, I think; but now the old are all gone, and the young ones seem to have no emulation among them." (Pope, 1 7 3 5 )

From the solitude of his parents' home in Windsor Forest, young Alexander Pope wrote to a friend, commenting : "I keep the pictures of Dryden, Milton, Shakespear, &c., in my chamber, round about me, that the constant remembrance of 'em may keep me always humble." 1 It was the summer of 1711 and Pope had just turned twenty-three. At this age Keats would receive a handsome engraving of Shakespeare which in like manner he would hang in his room and take with him when he traveled, "this Presider." And, to step back in time, there is a passage in the fourth Canto of the Inferno where Dante, wandering through Limbo, comes upon the great pagan poets huddled around a light, "enclosed in a hemisphere of darkness." They turn, beckon toward Dante and welcome him to their eternal communion, and "I was the sixth among those high intelligences. Thus we went on as far as the light, talking of things which were fitting 1. COTT., I, 120. The inventory of Pope's estate taken after his death included busts of Homer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. In addition, as Maynard Mack writes, "the most striking category of Pope's goods was its fifty-six or more portraits, mainly of his personal friends. In other furnishings it was extremely modest." Among his personal friends were many of the most illustrious figures in his age. The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 244; for a portrait tour of the house, see pp. 31-32.

1

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Alexander Pope

for that place and of which it is well now to be silent" (Sinclair's translation). In the pantheon of English poets—his chamber seemed nothing less than that—Pope had found peace with himself. As usual with Pope it would have to be peace inside a paradox. While the great poets might "keep me always humble," the youthful poet of the Pastorals and the Essay on Criticism already saw literary immortality in his own future. Yet, however intermittent the peace of this restless poet, a moment of it shows him in the living stream of his own life. If not pressed too far, a moment might reveal a drawing together of various elements in his youth, extraordinary as it was, and an assuming of that assured sense of self that we have come to call identity. Many writers decide to become writers; Pope always claimed that for him it was natural from birth. His baptism was one of ink : Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in Ink, my Parents', or my own? As yet a Child, nor yet a Fool to Fame, I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came. I left no Calling for this idle trade, No Duty broke, no Father dis-obey'd. The Muse but serv'd to ease some Friend, not Wife, To help me thro' this long Disease, my Life. ( Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 125-132) Pope's arrival in the line of great English poets is so inevitable that he appears, as one scholar has said, almost to have been invented. Thus, his verse protestations to Dr. Arbuthnot asserting the very naturalness of his coming to be a poet are in fact couched in language borrowed from Ovid.2 In Pope's life the forces of tradition and identity, the pressure of the past and will to belong to the great tradition of poets in Western literature and the desire to distinguish himself as a poet, complement one another. He had to distinguish himself from them in order to be among them; to be among them meant to participate cre2. Ovid, Tristia, bler, no. 143.

4.10.21-26. Johnson first noted the source in The

Ram-

The Pantheon of Literature

3

atively in their tradition of style and moral—heroic—idealism. "He that imitates the divine Iliad," Edward Young was to say in a few years, "does not imitate Homer." Pope made of his poetry a comment on the past, moving deliberately from one genre to another, imitating, at times translating, one poet after another from the very earliest imitations of Homer before 1700 to his climactic fourth Dunciad of 1742. Shaw once explained how he came to discover his own sense of self, an acceptance of what one seems to be made to be, or as he put it, "of finding one's place." "Whether it be that I was born mad, or a little too sane, my kingdom was not of this world : I was at home only in the realm of my imagination, and at my ease only with the mighty dead."3 Throughout Alexander Pope's long career, from his childhood and rise to fame in his early twenties down to his death in 1744 at fifty-six, he kept before him a personal ideal for which the prototypes were the "mighty dead." If he referred to them as the Ancients, just as often he extended his kinship to the great English writers as far back as Chaucer. Later in life he recalled being taken to a coffeehouse when he was about twelve and there being presented to Dryden, then in his last years : "I remember his face, for I looked upon him with the greatest veneration even then, and observed him very particularly," Pope told the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Joseph Spence, who indicated that Pope pointed to the bust of Dryden in his own home at Twickenham. 4 And in the very first letter of Pope's that has come down to us, written in his sixteenth year, he addresses the aging dramatist Wycherley: "It was certainly a great Satisfaction to me to see and converse with a Man, whom in his Writings I had so long known with Pleasure : But it was a high addition to it, to hear you, at our very first meeting, doing justice to your dead friend Mr. Dryden. I was not so happy as to know him; Virgilium tantum vidi—Had I been born early enough, I must have known and lov'd him : For I have been assur'd, not only by your self, but by Mr. Congreve and Sir William Trumbul, that his personal 3. Quoted by Erik Erikson, Identity: Norton, 1968), p. 149. 4. Spence, no. 57.

Youth and Crisis ( N e w York: W. W.

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Alexander Pope

Qualities were as amiable as his Poetical."5 Dryden, Congreve, Wycherley, the former Secretary of State William Trumbull— all members of the "last" age—it is quite a company for a boy of sixteen. Dryden heads the list : Virgilium tantum vidi, "I saw just so much of Virgil," wrote Ovid sadly about the one brief time he saw Virgil.6

% That we live in antihistorical times is commonplace, and the very idea of the past has been so pulverized in our culture that it is difficult to comprehend what the Renaissance and classical authors meant by aemulatio. Perhaps the most illustrious use of the concept in antiquity was by Pericles in his Funeral Oration in 431 B.C., in the midst of the Peloponnesian War. Contrasting Athens with Sparta, Pericles stated proudly that the heritage and culture of Athens was such that it "did not emulate, but was rather the model for others to follow." Cicero defined emulation as mental striving toward a heroic principle of action, but he distinguished between a good and a bad sense to the term. 7 Quintilian, "a particular favourite with Mr. Pope," credited Homer and Virgil for amplifying young minds with the loftiest sentiments: Interim et sublimitate heroi carminis animus adsurgat et ex magnitudine rerum spiritum ducat et optimis imbuaturß Then Petrarch in De Ignorantia and De Viris Illustribus, Erasmus in the Adages and The Education of a Christian Prince, More in his letters and in Utopia, Thomas Wilson in the Arte of Rhetorique, and Milton in Of Education, 5. Coir., I, 1-2. 6. Tristia, 4.10.51. 7. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.37 (my translation); Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.8.17. 8. Spence, no. 549; see also no. 45. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. Η. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1920), 1.8.5: "It is therefore an admirable practice which now prevails, to begin by reading Homer and Vergil, although the intelligence needs to be further developed for the full appreciation of their merits : but there is plenty of time for that since the boy will read them more than once." Then follows directly the passage cited: "In the meantime let his mind be lifted by the sublimity of heroic verse, inspired by the greatness of its theme and imbued with the loftiest sentiments." Plutarch, "who if I have any Taste, is the greatest of Moral Philosophers" (Corr., I, 75), could also be cited (Morals [London, 1704], I, 15-17).

The Pantheon of Literature

5

each in his own way stressed conduct over technical specializing and held emulation of ancient heroes as of high educational value. Such humanists cherished the hope, as Douglas Bush writes, "that boys who learned and recited the utterances of the Greeks and Romans could not but become like them. Thus the Renaissance author, brought up to worship and emulate the ancients, became thereby a conscious link in a great tradition, a member of the European community."9 Many writers could be brought in and quoted on this point. I choose Montaigne because Pope was especially familiar with him. Montaigne devoted an entire essay to the "institution and education of Children"—and who dares summarize him controverts his whole purpose. For he disclaims having any method, doubting the strategy of any prefabricated scheme at all. He distinguishes between the well-made and the well-filled head and encourages novelty and a more personal mode of instruction. He warns against overquoting the Ancients, but happily exemplifies his point by quoting extensively. Even before he considers the education of the child, he sets down some strong remarks about the character of the teacher. History and poetry are Montaigne's favorite subjects, as both inform us of "the worthiest minds that were in the best ages." For a teacher should "imprint not so much in his schollers mind the date of the ruine of Carthage, as the manners of Hanniball and Scipio, nor so much where Marcellus died, as because he was unworthy of his de voire he died there . . . To some kind of men, it is a meere gramaticall studie, but to others a perfect anatomie of Philosophie; by meanes whereof, the secretest part of our nature is searched-into."10 It is interesting to observe Montaigne warn against allowing education to collapse into "meere gramaticall studie." Like the other great Renaissance humanists he fears making the study of literature purely technical or stylistic or philological—the 9. Douglas Bush, " T h e Isolation of the R e n a i s s a n c e Hero," Prefaces to Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, M a s s . : Harvard University Press, 1 9 6 5 ) , p. 93. 10. Michel de Montaigne, "Of the Institution a n d Education of Children," in Essayes, trans. J o h n Florio ( 1 6 0 3 ) , ed. T h o m a s Seccombe (London: Grant Richards, 1 9 0 8 ) , I, 186-187.

6

Alexander Pope

humanists were never the best philologists. At the same time, like DuBellay a few years before him, Montaigne refuses to divorce the aesthetic from the moral value of art. The division of these values we are correct in thinking a contemporary problem, but it appears on the whole to be a perennial humanistic concern. As Herschel Baker remarks, for the early humanists the phrase bonae litterae "became an ethical principle . . . Without Greek, Colet told Erasmus, we are nothing." 11 Baker has chronicled the disintegration of Christian humanism in the seventeenth century, showing how the ideal of the unity of moral and aesthetic value precariously maintained itself. By the time Pope began his education in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the humanist cause had been severely challenged by the new science and by religious sectarianism. But the very intellectual situation of Pope is part of the humanist point of view, a looking back to tradition in order to gather mental and moral strength. "All that is left us," he writes in the preface to his early Works, "is to recommend our productions by the imitation of the Ancients : and it will be found true, that in every age, the highest character for sense and learning has been obtain'd by those who have been most indebted to them." 12 He claimed that as a boy he learned "very early to read and delighted extremely in it." Pope's education, especially when he was left on his own at twelve, was, like Montaigne's, the kind that truly liberates : "I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the woods and fields just as they fall in his way . . . I did not follow the grammar, but rather hunted in the authors for a syntax of my own, and then began translating any parts that pleased me particularly in the best Greek and Latin poets."13 Many of these early and fragmentary imitations and translations survive. Perhaps the most interesting was burned in the winter of 1716-17 on 11. Herschel Baker, The Dignity of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1947), pp. 270-271; reprinted as The Image of Man (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1961 ). See also Baker, The Wars of Truth: Studies in the Decay of Christian Humanism, in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 25-42. 12. TE, I, 7. 13. Spence, nos. 24 and 22.

The Pantheon of Literature

7

the advice of Bishop Atterbury—in mock imitation of Virgil, whose dying wish was that his unfinished Aeneid be burned. This epic was Pope's youthful "trial of Invention," to borrow Keats's phrase for his Endymton, and Pope began to write it just after his twelfth year. It tells the story of a young hero Alcander (surrogate for Alexander?) driven from the throne by a conspiracy of princes. As Pope told Spence, "I endeavoured (says he, smiling) in this poem to collect all the beauties of the great epic writers into one piece. There was Milton's style in one part and Cowley's in another, here the style of Spenser imitated and there of Statius, here Homer and Virgil, and there Ovid and Claudian." Then, in an extreme understatement of the case, Spence asked: "It was an imitative poem then, as your other exercises were imitations of this or that story?" "Just that," Pope answered. 14 To John Butt this anecdote is most revealing of the continual inspiration Pope drew from the "forms, the styles and the thoughts of previous poets."15 In the four thousand lines of Alcander, Pope admitted, he overcame particular structural and stylistic problems by following in a "slavish" manner the way in which an ancient author found a solution. Such minor imitations would have enormous import for the young poet's development. "My next work after my epic," Pope informed Spence, "was my Pastorals, so that I did exactly what Virgil says of himself : Cum canerem reges et proelia, Cynthius aurem Vellit, et admonuit; 'pastorem, Tityre, pinguis Pascere oportet ovis; deductum dicere carmen.' " (Eclogues 6.3-5) When I was fain to sing of kings and battles, the Cynthian plucked my ear and warned me: "A shepherd, Tityrus, should feed sheep that are fat, but sing a lay fine-spun."1® In one way or another Pope was always trying to be like the great writers, and his statements on the subject are innumer14. Spence, no. 40. 15. TE, IV, xxix. 16. Spence, no. 47; Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), I, 42.

8

Alexander Pope

able among the observations of Spence, Swift, Bolingbroke, and others, in his voluminous correspondence, and, most valuably, in his poetry. Even "to copy Nature is to copy Them," he argues in the Essay on Criticism, where Nature serves in part for what Arnold later would call "the best that has been thought and known in the world." "For to say truth," writes Pope in his preface to the early Works, "whatever is very good sense must have been common sense in all times; and what we call Learning, is but the knowledge of the sense of our predecessors."17 Moderns, beware ! Or if you must offend Against their Precept, ne'er transgress its End, Let it be seldom, and compelí'd by Need, And have, at least, Their Precedent to plead. ( Essay on Criticism, 163—166) But this form of imitation runs close alongside the type Pope celebrates in the early poem "Prologue to Mr. Addison's Tragedy of Cato" ( 1713) : "To make Mankind in conscious Virtue bold,/ Live oe'r each Scene, and be what they behold."18 Elsewhere, as in a passage on Aristotle (who was guided by the example of Homer, the "Maeonian Star"), such alignment with the Ancients could take the form of the sublime: The mighty Stagyrite first left the Shore, Spread all his Sails, and durst the Deeps explore; He steer'd securely, and discover'd far, Led by the Light of the Maeonian Star. (Essay on Criticism, 645-648) Or, as in this piece of self-projection, it could partake of the ridiculous : There are, who to my Person pay their court, I cough like Horace, and tho' lean, am short, Ammon's great Son one shoulder had too high, 17. TE, 1,7. 18. I am here following the typography of the first edition (The Guardian, no. 33, 18 April 1713) rather than the Twickenham text in order to make the meaning more explicit.

The Pantheon of Literature

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Such Ovid's nose, and "Sir! you have an Eye—" Go on, obliging Creatures, make me see All that disgrac'd my Betters, met in me : Say for my comfort, languishing in bed, "Just so immortal Maro held his head :" And when I die, be sure you let me know Great Homer dy'd three thousand years ago. ( Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 115-124) Horace of course had spoken of his size and cough (Ep. 1.20.24; Sat. 1.9.32); Pope was too fond of this kind of namedropping. Yet he could not level such abuse at himself without irony. In comparing himself with the famous poets, even unfavorably and through imaginary flatterers, Pope induces us to ponder the covert yet daring satirical reversal. "All that disgrac'd my Betters, met in me" is but the obverse of "All that enhanc'd my Betters, met in me."

% Pope said he set out exactly like Virgil, proceeding from the pastoral and didactic to the epic (his epic, significantly, would have to be a translation). He concluded his career with closer ties to Horace and Dryden—but his life is no patchwork of imitation. His lifelong desire was to revive, to make relevant the past, to imitate the forms and ideals of the Ancients in the newly refined language of Augustan England. Thus, he became preoccupied with translating foreign authors—Ovid, Statius, Boethius, Cicero, Horace, Malherbe, Homer—and with imitating English poets—Chaucer, Spenser, Waller, Cowley, Dorset, Dryden, Swift. Each new effort provided another way of establishing and reinforcing his sense of self and his sense of tradition. It was a complicated and self-created relationship between Pope's desire to be himself and his desire to share in a moral, intellectual, and poetic tradition that went back through the Restoration and seventeenth-century France, Elizabethan England, Rome, Greece—to Jerusalem. Pope invokes the nymphs of old Solyma and Isaiah's God in his Messiah (1712), but he celebrates the Ancients in similar language of the sublime, opening the possibility of a transcendent vision of man, past and future :

10

Alexander Pope Still green with Bays each ancient Altar stands, Above the reach of Sacrilegious Hands, Secure from Flames, from Envy's fiercer Rage, Destructive War, and all-involving Age. See, from each Clime the Learn'd their Incense bring; Hear, in all Tongues consenting Paeans ring! In Praise so just, let ev'ry Voice be join'd, And fill the Gen'ral Chorus of Mankind! Hail Bards Triumphant! born in happier Days; Immortal Heirs of Universal Praise ! Whose Honours with Increase of Ages grow, As Streams roll down, enlarging as they flow! Nations unborn your mighty Names shall sound, And Worlds applaud that must not yet be foundl Oh may some Spark of your Coelestial Fire The last, the meanest of your Sons inspire. (Essay on Criticism, 181-196)

Much later in the century, André Chénier, who like Pope learned to write poetry by imitating the Iliad, wrote with similar understanding : Allumons nos flambeaux à leurs feux poétiques; Sur des pensers nouveaux faisons des vers antiques. (L'Invention, 183-184) Pope and Chénier stood among "the last," if not "the meanest," of the sons; and metaphors of parent-son and of sustenance are as frequent among classical authors as metaphors of outcast sons are among the Romantics. There would be few paeans as sonorous as the one above to the Ancients in the Essay on Criticism, a pindaric tour de force imbued with strong emotion and religious love. For Pope was the neoclassic poet from the loftiest expression of the heroic ideal down to his footnotes as, for example, to a line from Book XIII of his translation of the Iliad, where he claims he can do little justice to Homer, but must "be content to imitate these Graces and Proprieties at more distance, by endeavouring at something parallel, tho' not the same." 19 19. TE, VIII, 138-139. The note is to line 720: "Bending he fell, and doubled to the Ground." We have another instance in a note to line 191 : "The Translation, however short it falls of these Beauties, may serve to shew the Reader, that there was at least an Endeavour to imitate them."

The Pantheon of Literature

11

Thus far we have considered tradition and identity only in the broadest terms as intellectual and moral ideals that Pope wished to share with the greater writers and thinkers who had shared in creating the European experience. Definitions have been vague, but then we are not dealing with any simple, dialectical opposition. We cannot say that Pope cast about in his youth for a poetic tradition any more than we can say "dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did," to which T. S. Eliot replied, "Precisely, and they are that which we know." For no point exists, at least no point capable of criticism, at which we could say of Pope, there was pure identity without poetic tradition. 20 His mind was constantly filtering, amalgamating, and interacting with the past, and, to the benefit of his poetry, growing continually from what Donne would call "interinanimation." At any time in his career we approach his mind and art, we already find an interpretation of tradition. An interpretation? If the concept of identity is necessarily hazy, tradition cannot be much less so. In some sense all writers have written from a similar standpoint, constantly looking beyond their own experience to the past, not just paying lip service, to help define themselves and shape moral and aesthetic ideals. But the past, or tradition, is obviously not fixed or stable; it changes unceasingly, and, while an "existing order" may appear complete before a really new work appears, afterward, as Eliot remarks, "the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new." 21 Although Pope and his circle believed that certain of the Ancients were imperishable, he was not blind to this truth when in his early twenties he wrote an imitation of Chaucer entitled The Temple of Fame. 20. On this point see Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx," Nietzsche, Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie, No. VI (Paris: Les Éditions des Minuit, 1 9 6 7 ) , pp. 188-189. Quoted by J. Hillis Miller, Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 36. 21. T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Selected Essays: 1917-1932 ( N e w York: Harcourt Brace, 1 9 3 2 ) , p. 5.

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There a youthful, somewhat naive poet is given a bleak preview of a writer's reputation : Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd, The greater Part by hostile Time subdu'd; Yet wide was spread their Fame in Ages past, And Poets once had promis'd they should last. Some fresh ingrav'd appear'd of Wits renown'd; I look'd again, nor cou'd their Trace be found. Criticks I saw, that other Names deface, And fix their own with Labour in their place : Their own like others soon their Place resign'd. Or disappear'd, and left the first behind. Nor was the Work impair'd by Storms alone, But felt th'Approaches of too warm a Sun; For Fame, impatient of Extreams, decays Not more by Envy than Excess of Praise. (31-44) Shortly the poet enters the temple and views statues of literary, philosophical and political figures that form what the later Renaissance considered the imperishable Western past. Here Time's scythe is reversed "and both his Pinions bound." But looking at the poem today we find that even m a n y of these figures have in fact dropped f r o m view. We know that we cannot assume, even for a time, a stable past. And besides, individual authors vary so much in the conception of their past that, as Jorge Luis Borges says, an author seems to create his precursors. The creation of the past in this sense may appear challenging and exciting, but any author knows that in the end he cannot hope to emulate its greatness. Dante, Shaw, and Keats have already been mentioned. This last, according to W. J. Bate, had to face the problem both ways: how to sustain what had become "the burden of the past" and, at the same time, be sincere to his own feelings and aspirations and be original. Neoclassical and Romantic writers were on the whole confronted with a major dilemma that has not ceased preying on the artistic imagination down to our time, i n the light of an immense written literature, they asked themselves, what remains to be done? Pale imitations of past writers in the major genres, or eccentric "original" efforts in the minor genres? Bate points up with re-

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gard to the English neoclassical writers that the "essential strength of the movement lay in its firm hold on the classical (or at first a selective conception of the classical) as a prototype of what still remained to be done." And yet, even for those writers with a commitment to the past and a daring boldness of their own, the power of Greece and Rome could be altogether intimidating: "It is one thing to weigh our immediate predecessors against the classical model ( a model extracted from the best of eight centuries, with most of the dross removed, and rendered still more compact and formidable through further centuries of study and eulogy) and then to find our predecessors wanting, at least in some respects. But it is another thing to find that the same standard is now to be applied to ourselves, and to our actual performance rather than just our proclaimed aspirations."22 This is the essential message in Longinus' On the Sublime: Why aren't there any "lofty and transcendent natures" anymore? How can we use the past? How can we catch its spirit in order to pull up out of the prison of our selves or our age? Thus, to glance again at The Temple of Fame, the young poet has a vision of a storm-swept world of a contemporary writer's reputation. Then he views the classical temple of fame rising serenely atop a mountain of forbidding, slippery ice : The Rocks's high Summit, in the Temple's Shade, Nor Heat could melt, nor beating Storm invade. Their Names inscrib'd unnumber'd Ages past From Time's first Birth, with Time it self shall last; These ever new, nor subject to Decays, Spread, and grow brighter with the Length of Days. (47-52) From one end of the neoclassical period to the other, from Edmund Waller's pessimistic "Of English Verse" and Suckling's satiric "Sessions of the Poets" to Thomas Warton's "Verses : On Sir Joshua Reynolds's Painted Window at New College, Oxford" (1782), the dolorous theme may be heard as authors strove to 22. W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 34.

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Alexander Pope

be original, to distinguish themselves within tradition without openly bolting from it, under an almost overwhelming burden of classical and Elizabethan achievement. In a late verse-epistle "To Mr. Congreve" (1694), Dryden had written: Our Age was cultivated thus at length; But what we gain'd in skill we lost in strength. Our Builders were, with want of Genius, curst; The Second Temple was not like the first. If Dryden found the situation so lamentable, his literary heir could only find it more so. Against this background, one should consider the poet William Walsh's advice to the precocious Pope in his mid-teens— he would come to maturity within five years—as strategic and beneficial: "Mr. Walsh . . . used to tell me that there was one way left of excelling, for though we had had several great poets, we never had any one great poet that was correct—and he desired me to make that my study and aim." 23 Correct should be taken in the latinate sense of corrigere, to set right, to bring into order, as well as to refine and perfect. Protagoras, in Plato's dialogue of that name (339-348b), makes a similar argument for the Greek word orthotes. There may be little wonder, then, in Pope's conceiving himself "the last" of the sons in the Essay on Criticism; what is worthy of wonder and admiration is the manner in which Pope grew to this potentially crippling awareness, yet sustained himself by continually drawing inspiration and materials from poetic and philosophic tradition. "A mutual commerce," he wrote Walsh in the summer of 1706, "makes Poetry flourish; but then Poets like Merchants, shou'd repay with something of their own what they take from others; not like Pyrates, make prize of all they meet." 24 As long as the commerce was mutual in its intellectual, moral, and poetic ideals, Pope's poetry flourished. He took what he thought to be the next logical step for a poet; and to members of his generation down to the advent of Romanticism it seemed as if it were 23. Spence, no. 73. 24. Corr., I, 20.

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the last step in refinement. Thus, even Walsh wisely cautioned Pope against overrefmement in his early imitations: "a Man may correct his Verses till he takes away the true Spirit of them; especially if he submits to the correction of some who pass for great Critics, by mechanical Rules, and never enter into the true Design and Genius of an Author." 23 Concurring with this advice later in the century, Johnson could write of Pope as "the last," warning that any more refinement in the direction Pope took would be "dangerous." "Art and diligence have now done their best," he concludes, "and what shall be added will be the effort of tedious toil and needless curiosity."26 t Far from conceiving Pope's life as a kind of tidying up of the classical tradition or praising his "exquisite littleness," we must view his career as an attempt at reaching out toward the past and making it meaningful to himself as a poet and to his age. He was, and remains, the chief European poet of the eighteenth century. In the following chapters I hope to point out relations between poetic ideals and biographical realities at major stages in Pope's career. As a rule eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics responded unfairly to the biography of the "wasp of Twickenham." Some of this antipathy was not Pope's fault. His prestige was so inflated at the time of his death that it was bound to suffer some depression. But some perhaps was his fault. The sage Chesterfield, who stayed occasionally at Pope's Twickenham villa and "saw his mind in its undress," called him "the most irritable of all the genus irritabile vatum." He claimed Pope was "offended with trifles, and never forgetting or forgiving them . . . His poor, crazy, deformed body was a mere Pandora's box, containing all the physical ills that ever afflicted humanity. This, perhaps, whetted the edge of his satire, and may in some degree excuse it."27 Pope had a defender in Coleridge and an advocate in Byron, but De Quincey's response was typical of their age : "It is a great calamity for an author such 25. Corr., 1,21. 26. Johnson, III, 251. 27. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Characters (London, 1778), p. 14. The Latin tag is from Horace, Epistles, 2.2.102.

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as Pope, that, generally speaking, it requires so much experience of life to enjoy his peculiar felicities as must argue an age likely to have impaired the general capacity for enjoyment." 28 In their massive nineteenth-century edition of Pope ( 1871-1889), Whitwell Elwin and W. C. Courthope were inexcusably hostile, accusing the poet of pathological lying and betrayal. It may be true, as Johnson recorded, that Pope hardly drank tea without a strategem, but to say he resorted to equivocation and subterfuge to the point of monomania is gross exaggeration. "Almost every publication of his life," writes a shocked Leslie Stephen, "was attended with some sort of mystification passing into downright falsehood." 29 Then Oscar Wilde said there were two ways of disliking poetry: one was to dislike it and the other was to read Pope. And, early in this century, Strachey portrayed him pouring hot oil on his enemies from a second-story window. As a result of such criticism, writers on Pope in the past thirty years, hoping to restore Pope and the Augustan period generally to their proper place, have tended to eschew biographical inferences altogether. The direction that criticism—the New Criticism—was taking seemed to encourage such an oversight while raising the status of Pope's verse. Where better than in Pope could one find ironic poise and distance, that balance and reconciliation of opposed attitudes, the spatial, inorganic structures, closed forms, and multiple personae? The poet was a hidden god. However, in 1939, in the first volume of the Twickenham edition, John Butt wrote that autobiography, literary criticism, and politics were, in that order, the main themes of Pope's poetry in the 1730's, when his finest work was written. 30 Geoffrey Tillotson, in his Pope and Human Nature, remarks that "if we were to judge by the mere quantity of this direct self28. Thomas De Quincey, Autobiography, in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889), II, 58. 29. Leslie Stephen, "Pope as a Moralist," Hours in a Library (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), I, 143. "In more modern days," Stephen surmises, "we may fancy that his views would have taken a different turn, and that Pope would have belonged to the Satanic school of writers, and instead of lying enormously, have found relief for his irritated nerves in reviling all that is praised by ordinary mankind" (p. 144). The image of Pope as symboliste is tantalizing. 30. TE, IV, X X X .

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expression, it is Pope not Milton who is the sublime egotist" of English letters. 31 Most recently Maynard Mack has linked elements of Pope's Ufe with the later poetry, claiming that "Pope's taking himself for a s u b j e c t . . . is a subject that has not so far been adequately explored."32 While we may heed Mack's caveat against making Pope's poetry overtly autobiographical or treating its creation in terms similar to, say, The Prelude, we need not shy away from discussing the figure of Pope as he imagines himself to be and as he fashions that image in his verse. If Pope wrote numerous poems like The Rape of the Lock and An Essay on Man, our understanding of his work would still be enhanced by a study of his life; but when so much of his experience is drawn upon to create an image of himself in his poetry, and when the interplay between his ideal self-image and the ideals of classical tradition becomes incorporated into the poetic act, such a study seems especially pertinent. Each single incident, for example, from the satires and epistles from 1731 to 1738 may be derived from the poet's biography. "We are presented," as John Butt writes, "with a peculiar blending of the artifact and the real, one of the strangest confusions of life and letters. So accustomed had he become to this blend that Pope himself may not have known how precisely to distinguish the historical portrait from the literary one."33 A single voice, he asserts, may be heard as early as the lovely epistle 'To Miss Blount, With the Works of 31. Geoffrey Tillotson, Pope and Human Nature (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 146. "Pope gives us," remarks Tillotson, "whole treatises about h i m s e l f — A n Epistle from. Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot, several other Epistles, all the 'Imitations of Horace'—several shorter poems, many parts of poems, and letters by the hundred . . . The assemblage of his personal characteristics and affairs is more various, more splendid and civilized, more exquisitely collected and manipulated, more closely lived-with and thoroughly valued—and also more subject to vexations and contentions—than any drawn on by any other English poet" (pp. 1 4 6 - 1 4 7 ) . 32. Mack, Garden and City, p. 234. 33. "Pope: The Man and the Poet," in Of Books and Humankind: Essays and Poems Presented to Bonamy Dobrée, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 79. On this point Geoffrey Tillotson has said: "My own comment on Pope's complex moral character, in so far as it concerns his tricks, is one that he would not have cared to accept, and which in any event is an explanation scarcely to be hazarded of one so shrewd. I do not think he really understood himself, being, as I think, bemused by his own brilliance" (Pope and Human Nature, p. 2 2 3 ) .

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Voiture" (probably 1710, when Pope was twenty-two), through "To Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation" (1715), "To Mr. Gay" (1720), "To Robert Earl of Oxford" ( 1721 ), "To Mrs. M. B. on her Birth-day" (1723), and on to the first of the great satires "To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington" (1730-1731). My concern in this book is not with biography, but with a biographical problem. It is to approach the identity of, in Pope's own words, "so Atmospherical a creature" through his poetry, letters, miscellaneous prose, and anecdotes, in the hope of a better, more coherent understanding of the poet's work. For Butt has struck upon a truth in hearing a single voice, which must belong to a single person, growing larger and deeper as an authorial narrative voice through his life. Such an endeavor naturally implies a very personal engagement with the remains of an "impersonal" poet, even though this poet so often took himself as a fit subject for his own verse. Pope's image of himself, his identity in time, is my concern, a portrait from a thematic point of view. My attempt at characterization and at pointing to the character's relation to the literary text is kept to the knowable facts and, I hope, within the bounds of literary interpretation—without being tipped to one side, life or work, to the exclusion of the other—in order to build a lively image of the individuality of Pope in the process of living and developing as a writer. Some readers may question my naiveté in taking for primary evidence of "the real poet" what are in fact Pope's literary posturings and personae and voices in his playacting his way toward the truth. But with a poet for whom paradox was axiomatic one might be excused for resorting to the Borgian irony that an artful juxtaposition of artful self-portraits can shake loose a kind of reality—truth never guaranteed not to be odd. Or, to take a more commonsensical attitude, given the character of Pope's literary work, no reader can escape an image of the poet, and my effort is to render that image as studiously precise and refined as I can. Yet I will grant readily that the study has been made somewhat difficult by the fact that Pope so frequently admitted his incongruencies.

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Pope's self is as implicit in his own works as in the mountains of circumstance that could be compiled about him, some of which we must necessarily traverse. But the form of the book was suggested by the famous passage from Milton's Areopagitica: "I cannot praise a fugutive & cloister'd vertue, unexercis'd and unbreath'd, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortali garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary." Pope's ruling passion was to maintain against the corruption of his age the ideals and spirit of the Ancients; his achievement was to establish thereby his just fame among them. My concern with Pope's growing identity naturally leads me to concentrate with especial attention on the idea of fame. But those who have always claimed that fame was the idée fixe in the mind of young Pope, bent on becoming a great writer, should be reminded that Pope was not content with the easily won fame that his own early poetry brought him—fame that set him immediately above the rest of his contemporaries. In the end he would earn fame only through challenging the false materialist values within his society, in many respects a society whose avowed ideals he himself shared. "I agree with you," he wrote Swift, when he was about to launch his Essay on Man, "in my contempt of most popularity, fame, &c. even as a writer I am cool in it, and whenever you see what I am now writing, you'll be convinced I would please but few, and (if I could) make mankind less Admirers, and greater Reasoners."34 Pope's dissent was one grounded in tradition, based not on nostalgia for the political and social past of Renaissance England, but on a more basic idealism within Western tradition.35 In the last ten years of his life, Pope set himself solidly against the Walpole establishment, measuring its values against his own, and find34. Corr., Ill, 250. 35. Irving Kramnick states an opposite position in his Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 2 1 7 - 2 2 3 .

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ing theirs wanting. Having a great writer in a country, says a character in one of Solzhenitsyn's novels, is like having another government. Lastly, from the self-image that Pope has created and its moral challenge we may learn something of what he teaches of the lofty afterimage of human worth and the self against the dark backdrop of time.

% Pope identified with the "mighty dead"; in the business of his life he identified with their heirs, the mighty living—men such as Swift and Oxford and Bolingbroke. The consequences were felt naturally beyond the purely aesthetic, and when we speak of the interplay of tradition and identity we refer to the development of Pope's moral and intellectual life as well. His friends were among the most illustrious in the age : Envy must own, I live among the Great, No Pimp of Pleasure, and no Spy of State, With Eyes that pry not, Tongue that ne'er repeats, Fond to spread Friendships, but to cover Heats, To help who want, to forward who excel; This, all who know me, know; who love me, tell; And who unknown defame me, let them be Scriblers or Peers, alike are Mob to me. (Imit. Hor. Sat. II. i. 133-140) Life "among the Great" would have its effects. For the greater part of his life, Pope felt himself to be apart. Of course, Pope was not an alienated modern artist, but rather an outsider in the sense of a Renaissance hero who lives according to shared, established values but nonetheless embodies a magnified, or at times distorted, projection of those values. One type of idealized hero holds the wisdom of the race, and Pope, at his best the heir of such knowledge, knew only too well that societal values and ideals of his day fell far below those of the mighty dead. But unlike a modern rebel who might ally himself with a society to come and its system of values, Pope looked first to the past. In his ethical idealism he became allied with the literary, religious, and political Outs rather than the Ins. "I will venture to

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say," he wrote in 1714 to his friend John Caryll, when he was anticipating an attack upon his translation of Homer, "no man ever rose to any degree of perfection in writing, but through obstinacy and an inveterate resolution against the stream of mankind." 36 Much of Pope's life, in politics, in religion, in disease, and in physical deformity, went against the grain, and if Pope has come to represent an age in which he was at odds, one may accept Shaw's bitter truth on the discovery of his own identity : "This finding of one's place may be made very puzzling by the fact that there is no place in ordinary society for extraordinary individuals." The outer conflicts reflect inner ones. Although Pope excoriated Lord Hervey as "one vile Antithesis," he often willingly acknowledged his own antitheses : You laugh, half Beau half Sloven if I stand, My Wig all powder, and all snuff my Band; You laugh, if Coat and Breeches strangely vary, White Gloves, and Linnen worthy Lady Mary! But when no Prelate's Lawn with Hair-shirt lin'd, Is half so incoherent as my Mind, When (each Opinion with the next at strife, One ebb and flow of follies all my Life ) I plant, root up, I build, and then confound, Turn round to square, and square again to round. (Imit. HOT. Ep. I.i.161-170) "So incoherent"—one thinks of Henry James's comment on Hawthorne, that he could not be a poet because poetry is by its nature "inconclusive." Poetry, especially neoclassical poetry, can be quite conclusive as well, but James's point is well taken. Antithesis and paradox are Pope's commonest figures, division and unity among his central themes; and his couplet art is especially well suited to reflect his striving to reconcile diverse, often conflicting, attitudes and doctrines, even to harmonize the "easy" and the "strong" styles of neoclassical verse. In recent studies on Pope, Earl R. Wasserman has analyzed the poetics of 36.

Corr.,

1,239.

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Alexander Pope

reconciliation, pointing out that the principle of concordia discors, "the active harmonizing of differences . . . permeates almost all of Pope's writings and probably is even more central to this thought than the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being."37 In the biographical sphere the idea usefully indicates how Pope awarded the claims of tradition and identity, how this naturally mercurial poet "learned," as he wrote, "to smooth and harmonize my Mind," of which the poem is a crystal mirror. But ask not, to what Doctors I apply? Sworn to no Master, of no Sect am I : As drives the storm, at any door I knock, And house with Montagne now, or now with Lock. (Imit. Hor. Ep. I.i.23-26) For this reason, while Pope's development proceeds from the Pastorals and the didactic Essay on Criticism to a heroic phase, the translations of Homer and their satiric inversions in the early Rape of the Lock and the Dunciad I—III (1728), it settles late in an imitation of Horace himself, retired from the town, a "free Soul" above partisan squabbles but holding on to Socratic ideals by which life might be measured. Then, of course, there is the final apocalypse in the fourth Dunciad of 1742. For the storm drove Pope to many doors: "there are some Tories," he wrote Caryll even in the palmier days of 1714, "who will take you for a Whig, some Whigs who will take you for a Tory, some Protestants who will esteem you a rank Papist, and some Papists who will account you a Heretick." Nevertheless, he quickly bolsters his ego : "while Mr. Congreve likes my poetry, 37. Earl R. Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), p. 103: "[Pope's] world, like Denham's, is a dynamic harmony, where 'All subsists by elemental strife' [Essay on Man, i, 169] and where the great threats are the stagnation of mere harmony and the chaos of mere energy." See also Wasserman's Pope's Epistle to Bathurst (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), pp. 35—40, and his "Pope's Ode for Musick," Journal of English Literary History 28 (1961), 163-186, reprinted in Maynard Mack, ed., Essential Articles for the Study of Alexander Pope (Hamden, Conn. : Archon Books, 1964), pp. 149-174. For a full discussion of the concept of concordia discors, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), chapter 2.

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I can endure Dennis and a thousand more like him." 38 Perhaps in 1735, when his atrabiliousness was rising, he protests too much when he berates his archcritic and says he "Can sleep without a poem in my head, / Nor know, if Dennis be alive or dead." But by this time life was growing increasingly contentious. "For you know, to speak plain to you," Pope's half sister remarked to Spence, "my brother has a maddish way with him." 39 And about 1736, feeling his age, Pope wrote: I am not now, alas ! the man As in the gentle Reign of My Queen Anne. Ah sound no more thy soft alarms, Nor circle sober fifty with thy Charms. (The First Ode of the Fourth Book of Horace: To Venus, 3-6) Except for brief respites, mere moments, as when he described himself sitting among portraits of the immortals or resting amid the statuary of his Grotto, Pope seems to have been the kind of person who is rarely at peace with himself. Although divisive factors have been stressed, it must be said that Pope did achieve what so often served as a poetic, social, and philosophical ideal—concordia discors. The principle of harmony through discord operates on the most fundamental level in the relation between Pope's identity and his cultural inheritance. It manifests itself in his blending of Ufe styles, the active and the contemplative life. In one letter he cites images he had inserted into a poem by William Wycherley, "The Various Mix'd Life," commenting: "Methinks the Moralists and Philosophers have generally run too much into extremes in commending intirely either solitude, or publick life. In the former, men for the most part grow useless by too much rest, and in the latter are destroy'd by too much precipitation; as waters lying still, putrify and are good for nothing, and running violently on do but the more mischief in their passage to others, and are swallow'd up 38. Corr., I, 238. See also Corr., I, 220-221. Later, he would boast with confidence, "I now fling off Lords by dozens" (Spence, no. 379). 39. Spence, no. 28. As Chesterfield said, "He was as great an instance as any he quotes of the contrarieties and inconsistencies of human nature" (Characters, p. 14).

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Alexander Pope

and lost the sooner themselves." 40 In politics, too, Pope opposed the bitter factious spirit, maintaining a benevolist position for the good of the whole, not for a single interest. Though his feelings were increasingly cool toward Sir Robert Walpole, he could receive him and the "leader" of the Opposition, Bolingbroke, at Twickenham. And to the end of his life he refused to join either political party : In Moderation placing all my Glory, While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory. (Imit. Hor. Sat. II.i.67-68) Furthermore, he could be a "Papist or a Protestant by turns," preferring a liberal Catholicism. This attitude, too, is refined in his verse, where we find a model of religious conciliation in the great Renaissance humanist : Papist or Protestant, or both between, Like good Erasmus in an honest Mean. (Imit. Hor. Sat. II.i.65-66) But the surest resolution of seemingly irreconcilable antitheses for the poet would be—in his poetry. Much has been written on the manner in which Pope perfected the heroic couplet. It is interesting to imagine, and we can only imagine, how much the dialectics of the couplet shaped Pope's thought, reducing numerous options into alternatives, multiplicities into dualities, and resolving dualities into paradoxical unity, a Shakespearean "What You Will": 41 My Head and Heart thus flowing thro' my Quill, Verse-man or Prose-man, term me which you will. (Imit. Hor. Sat. II.i.63-64) 40. COTT., I, 146. For the lines in Wycherley, see Miscellaneous ed. Lewis Theobald (London, 1728), pp. 3-4: So waters putrifie with Rest, and lose At once their Motion, Sweetness, and their Use; Or haste in headlong Torrents to the Main, To lose themselves by what shou'd them maintain, And in th' impetuous Course themselves the sooner drain. 41.

COTT.,

Ill,

354.

Poems,

2. The Isolation of an Augustan Hero Good. God! what an Incongruous Animal is Man? how unsettled in his best part, his soul; and how changing and variable in his frame of body? The constancy of the one, shook by every notion, the temperament of the other, affected by every blast of wind? What an April weather in the mind! In a word, what is Man altogether, but one mighty inconsistency? (Pope to John Caryll, 14 August 1713)

"Just as the Twig is bent, the Tree's inclin'd," Pope wrote in his "Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men," in the Epistle to Cobham. We should take him at his word and consider in some detail his childhood and adolescence, when he was educated, mostly self-educated, in the attitudes, styles, and ideals that would foster his development as an artist. In these years we encounter the young poet meeting advancement at every step, overcoming obstacles such as precarious health, physical deformity, and religious intolerance, establishing himself as the modern "ancient" in the culture of Augustan England. The development of an artistic temperament seems always more perfect, more symbolic than the ordinary life. Pope's was no exception. His insight into the formation of that temperament makes him one of the more privileged mortals. Pope was born in London on 21 May 1688, the only and longed-for son of parents well into middle age. Alexander Pope, Sr., a successful linen merchant, was forty-two at the time. By his first wife, who died in 1678, he had a daughter who was thus at least nine years old (Pope would never be on close terms with h e r ) ; a son by his first wife had died in 1682. One biographer described this quiet m a n about whom little is known as "an im25

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Alexander Pope

pressive but shadowy figure."1 A convert to Catholicism, he retired from business in the year of his son's birth, the year of the Glorious Revolution, when the government threatened to enforce old, while enacting new, antipapist legislation. Still fearing reprisals ten years later, or possibly just desiring to "cultivate his garden," Mr. Pope moved with his family to the hamlet of Binfield, near Reading, on the edge of Windsor Forest. His son would write a tribute to him in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot: Born to no Pride, inheriting no Strife, Nor marrying Discord in a Noble Wife, Stranger to Civil and Religious Rage, The good Man walk'd innoxious thro' his Age. No Courts he saw, no Suits would ever try, Nor dar'd an Oath, nor hazarded a Lye : Un-learn'd, he knew no Schoolman's subtle Art, No Language, but the Language of the Heart. (392-399) The "Noble Wife" was four years older than her husband and almost forty-six when her son was born. Edith Pope seems a rather dull, strait-laced sort of lady, and her personality rarely comes alive in Pope's correspondence or in the vivid anecdotes of Joseph Spence and others. Swift enjoyed her company, but Voltaire shocked her from the table with an indelicate expression on a visit to the poet's home in 1726.2 In all fairness, one should remember that she was in her mid-eighties by then. She died at ninety-two, having lived with her son to the last decade of his life. Thus, the son had to carry the burden of responsibility for her long after his father's death, and he was not infrequently confined to his home because of her illnesses. 3 Several traumatic experiences occurred in Pope's very early years. His half sister, Magdalen, who later married and is known to history as Mrs. Rackett, informed Spence that when the poet was between three and five "a wild cow that was driven by the 1. Sherburn, p. 30. 2. Corr., II, 393; E. Audra, L'Influence française dans l'oeuvre de Pope (Paris: Librarie ancienne Honoré Champion, 1931), p. 76. 3. Corr., II, 261, 270, 273; III, 3, 11, 14, 19, 53, 145, 160, 254, 259, 279, 288, 3 3 1 - 3 3 2 .

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27

place where he was . . . filling a little cart with stones . . . struck at him with her horns, tore off his hat which was tied under his chin, wounded him in the throat, beat him down, and trampled over him." 4 Such an incident, equivalent perhaps to being struck down by an automobile, was one of the first to leave its mark on the boy. Pope says further that his education was erratic. He studied under four priests. Under the first, John Banister, he studied for about a year. Then, when he was eight or nine, he was sent by his parents, stalwart Roman Catholics, to a seminary school at Twyford, near Winchester. Here Pope was "whipped and ill-used" for writing (of all things) a satire, possibly on his second priest, the schoolmaster. Pope was eventually expelled and thereupon sent to "Mr. Deane's seminary at Marylebone, and some time under the same, after he removed to Hyde Park Corner." 5 The Reverend Thomas Deane, who had left his position as Fellow of University College, Oxford, after refusing to take the oath to William and Mary in 1688, was being harassed by "a busy Justice in that neighbourhood." The poet, in his ninth through twelfth years, was already developing interests on his own. Evidence is sparse, but not contradictory. An anonymous biographer who claimed he had consulted one of Pope's classmates at Deane's school wrote: "at the Hours of Recreation, whilst the Rest of his School-fellows were diverting themselves at such Games and Sports, as was usual with Boys of their Age, Mr. Pope used to amuse himself with Drawing, and such like improving and rational Accomplishments." When Pope was twelve he went with his family to Windsor Forest, where he studied for a few months under a fourth priest. "This was all the teaching I ever had, and, God knows, it extended a very little way." 6 Mrs. Rackett later informed Spence that her brother discovered at least one sensuous delight in childhood—Keats would do the same—in delicious foods. 7 Pope later devoted an entire 4. 5. 6. don: done 7.

Spence, nos. 3 and 4. Spence, no. 15. The Life of Alexander Pope, Esq: With Remarks on His Works (LonWeaver Bickerton, 1744), pp. 12, 1 3 - 1 4 ; Spence, no. 15. "When I had with my priests I took to reading by myself" (Spence, no. 2 4 ) . Spence, no. 16; see also nos. 625 and 648a.

28

Alexander Pope

satire to the subject, the imitation of the second satire of the second book of Horace. There he claims he can "live on little with a chearful heart." "Content with little, I can piddle here / On Broccoli and mutton, round the year" (137-138). Shortly he protests, too much, that "no Turbots dignify my boards, / But gudgeons, flounders, what my Thames affords." The description of carps, mullets, "a whole Hog barbecu'd," and various exotic birds served up on platters assures us that throughout his life, in Johnson's words, Pope "would oppress his stomach with repletion; and though he seemed angry when a dram was offered him, did not forbear to drink it." Such a fault, Johnson admits, is "easily incident to those who suffering much pain think themselves entitled to whatever pleasures they can snatch." 8 Spence was surprised that in Pope's "last infirmities" he would be "dining at table when others would have been on their death-beds." All the evidence confirms that Pope the poet was born, not made. Although by his later admission his early education was "extremely loose and disconcerted," Pope learned from an aunt "very early to read and delighted extremely in it. I taught myself to write very early, too, by copying from printed books with which I used to divert myself." Ruskin would make a similar remark in his autobiography. Of his days in Windsor Forest Pope recalled that he had a "very great eagerness and enthusiasm, especially for poetry."9 For his first exercises he imitated those stories from classical authors, Homer, Virgil, Ovid, that pleased him most : 8. Johnson, III, 199: "The death of great men," Johnson continues, "is not always proportioned to the lustre of their lives. Hannibal, says Juvenal, did not perish by a javelin or a sword; the slaughters of Cannae were revenged by a ring. The death of Pope was imputed by some of his friends to a silver saucepan, in which it was his delight to heat potted lampreys." See COTT., IV, 225: "Tho I still continue to make Water my ordinary drink, with a little Mixture of Wine as before. I am determind to fix my dining to Two a clock, 8c tho I dine by myself, comply afterwards with the Importunities 8c Civilities of friends in Attending, not Partaking their Dinners." Pope seems aware of his bad habit. See also Corr., I, 484; II, 384; III, 409, 414; IV, 46, 150. 9. Spence, nos. 15, 23, and 24.

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero

29

Bred up at home, full early I begun To read in Greek, the Wrath of Peleus' Son. (Imit. HOT. Ep. Il.ii. 52-53) As a boy, then, Pope "taught himself both Greek and Latin": "I did not follow the grammar, but rather hunted in the authors for a syntax of my own . . . I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers"10 And he happily recalled how he would often take his books, go out alone, and stroll all day in what he called his rambles through Windsor Forest that within five years would "Live in Description, and look green in Song."11 Important events occurred when Pope was about twelve and set free from school to learn by himself. Although he had been writing "verses of my own invention farther back than I can remember," he then wrote two plays in verse. The first he described as "something toward a tragedy." Significantly, it contained "a number of speeches from the Iliad, tacked together with verses of my own." Here one may view Pope leaning in his exercises on classical authorities and using other writers to help him overcome structural and stylistic problems that he faced at the time. Pope would never outgrow or be embarrassed by his desire to imitate. But nothing of Pope's first tragedy remains, except an anecdote: Pope's editor William Warburton told Spence that the young boy "even prevailed on the Master's Gardener to represent Ajax." 12 Pope's other early play, an "entire tragedy," he wrote shortly afterwards, "when I was about thirteen." It dramatized the legend of Geneviève, the French saint who dedicated herself to God at seven, took the veil at fifteen, and devoted her Ufe to mortification. Pope found her tragedy "very moving," though why he called it a tragedy we do not know. In any case he 10. Spence, nos. 15, 22, and 24. 11. If we take Pope at his word, Windsor-Forest was begun in 1704 when Pope was sixteen; the last section of the poem, beginning with line 291, was written in 1712-1713 while the Treaty of Utrecht was being negotiated; and the whole was published in 1713. 12. Spence, no. 33; Warburton, IV, 17.

30

Alexander Pope

was a Catholic in a devout, recusant household, and the story would appeal to his youthful zeal and sympathy for the pure, solitary, and suffering coreligionist. In what appears to be the first complete poem of Pope's that has come down to us, an Horatian "Ode on Solitude" written "when I was not Twelve years old," he makes a simple request "for a rural life": 13 Repose at Night; Study 8c Ease, Together mixt; sweet Recreation; And Innocence, which most does please, With Meditation. Thus, let me live, unseen, unknown, Thus, unlamented, let me die, Steal from the World, & not a Stone Tell where I lye. In a few years Pope would be inserting similar thoughts into William Wycherley's "Poem on Mixt Life." More interest attaches to his epic poem Alcander, Prince of Rhodes. Its two thousand couplets date from his "thirteenth into fifteenth" year, but it was destroyed on Bishop Atterbury's advice in the winter of 1716-17. The similarity between the name "Alcander" and its author's "Alexander" may put one on guard : "Alcander was a prince driven from his throne by Deucalion, father of Minos, and some other princes."14 Of the three 13. Corr., I, 68. For a more extended treatment of this theme, see Pope's letter to Henry Cromwell (19 October 1709) in which he cites a favorite passage f r o m Horace, oblitusque meorum, obliviscendus & illis ( "You know what Lebedus is—a town more desolate than Gabii and Fidenae: yet there would I love to live, and forgetting my friends and by them forgotten, gaze f r o m the land on Neptune's distant rage," Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library [Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1966], Ep. 1.11.7-10). In this letter Pope cites Cicero's Pro Archia: "The only Companions I had were those Muses of whom Tully says, Adolescentiam alunt, senectutem oblectant, secundas res ornant, adversis perfugiam, ac solatium praebent, delectant domi, non impediunt foris, pernoctant nobiscum, peregrinantur, rusticantur. which indeed is as much as ever I expected f r o m them; for the Muses, if you take 'em as Companions, like all the rest, are very pleasant & agreable; but whoever shou'd be forc'd to live or depend upon 'em, woud find himself in a very bad Condition." And Cowley's "Of Obscurity" is cited as well. See also Pope's letter to Cromwell, 18 March 1708. 14. Spence, no. 38. For Pope's later interest in the epic form and his own projected epic on Brutus, see Edward D. Snyder, "Pope's Blank Verse Epic," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 18 (1919), 580-583.

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero

31

historic or literary Alcanders, Pope may have dredged up the reference from a line in Homer, though he made the slip of thinking Deucalion the son of Minos, whereas he is the father. 15 Once again a young hero suffers deprivation, but now he is driven into exile. "It was better planned than Blackmore's Prince Arthur, but as slavish an imitation of the ancients. Alcander showed all the virtue of suffering, like Ulysses, and of courage, like Aeneas or Achilles. Apollo as the patron of Rhodes was his great defender, and Cybele as the patroness of Deucalion and Crete his great enemy. She raises a storm against him in the first book as Juno does against Aeneas, and he is cast away and swims ashore just as Ulysses does to the island of Phaecia." 16 Pope, shall we say, has not fought free of his influences, but the epic displays an almost Nietzschean conflict between the male god of light, reason, and poetry, and the female, Asiatic goddess, the great mother of the Mediterranean myth who appears years later in the guise of the goddess Dulness in The Dunciad. Twelve brief fragments of Alcander survive, several of which Pope fitted economically into poems and prose pieces, such as the Essay on Criticism, Peri Bathous, and the third book of The Dunciad itself. In these early exercises Pope may be seen laying down some of the parameters of his mental life and dominant ideas within them. "When I met with a passage or story that pleased me more than ordinary, I used to endeavour to imitate it or translate it into English—and this was the cause of my Imitations published so long after." 17 Battles of the Trojan War, an outcast man, the satire against the Twyford master for which he was whipped, the piety of Saint Geneviève, a paraphrase of a prayer 15. Osborn lists the Iliad, 5 . 7 8 ; Aeneid, 9 . 7 6 6 ; a n d A n t o n i n u s L i b e r a l i s , Metamorphoseon, 14. 16. S p e n c e , no. 38. Sir R i c h a r d B l a c k m o r e ' s Prince Arthur w a s publ i s h e d in 1695. 17. S p e n c e , no. 45, reported in J u n e 1739. " W a l l e r , S p e n s e r , a n d D r y d e n were Mr. Pope's great f a v o u r i t e s in the order they a r e n a m e d , in h i s first r e a d i n g till he w a s about t w e l v e , " S p e n c e c o m m e n t s . C h a u c e r w o u l d soon be i n c l u d e d in Pope's p a n t h e o n : " I r e a d C h a u c e r still with a s m u c h pleasure a s a l m o s t a n y of our poets. H e is a m a s t e r of m a n n e r s a n d of description, a n d the first tale-teller in the true enlivened n a t u r a l w a y . " Spence, nos. 4 3 a n d 411.

32

Alexander Pope

from Thomas à Kempis, courtly love lyrics after Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley, imitations of Chaucer's caustic tale of the Merchant and the inimitable prologue of the Wife of Bath, a satire on Spenser's false archaizing and flavorsome vocabulary—each type of theme grows in its own way, sometimes developing alongside one another, at other times pulling in different directions. The boy was endeavoring to discover himself, working with the materials of ancient and not-so-ancient writers and with pagan and Christian myth. Pope's efforts to compose the roughly four thousand lines of Alcander in couplets, sometimes on solitary walks through Windsor Forest, "rambles of mine through the poets," call to mind the twelve-year-old Tennyson composing an epic poem which he "would 'go shouting about the fields in the dark,' " 18 whereupon, bewildered, he would sit down and say over and over again, "Alfred, Alfred." During this period of intense activity beginning in his twelfth year, Pope suffered from a long and serious disease that left him hunch-backed and ill-at-ease for life. 19 This affliction, which plagued him from his twelfth to his seventeenth year, is now considered to have been Pott's disease, a form of spinal tuberculosis picked up from infected milk. Thus, at a crucial period in his life his growth was stunted, his spine deformed, and he never grew taller than four feet six inches. Furthermore, to this physical damage to a child already plagued by headaches and fevers corresponds an inward psychological damage. All the evidence—literary output, physical disease, comments by relatives and friends—points to a life in crisis, a heightening of emotional turbulence, a sense that now matters may go, for good or bad, one way or the other, decisively. Young Alexander Pope had been till then, in Mrs. Rackett's words, "excessively gay and lively." Afterward things would be different. "The weakness of his body continued through his life," Johnson notes, "but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood." 20 When Pope was fifty, Mrs. Rackett confided to 18. Poetry 19. 20.

Harold Nicolson, Tennyson: Aspects (London: Constable, 1923), p. 46. Spence, no. 69. Johnson, III, 83.

of His Life,

Character,

and

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero

33

Spence she "never saw him laugh very heartily in all my life," a remark that may, admittedly, betray some animosity toward her brother. But the observant Spence, who spent months at Twickenham collecting anecdotes, added to her remark that when Pope "told a story he was always the last to laugh at it, and seldom went beyond a particular, easy smile on any occasion that I remember." 21 Although Pope was never known to be especially farouche, a pencil portrait by Jonathan Richardson dated January 1737, perhaps the most aesthetically intriguing of the portraits we have, reveals a naturally somber and acrimonious expression. 22

% Since the matter of Pope's pain-racked body looms large as an isolating factor in his life, more so than in the life of any other English writer of his rank, it is necessary to consider it in some detail. His physical condition became an idée fixe in what he called "this long Disease, my Life." It is a recurrent theme in his poems; and it is the dominant topic, other than poetry, in the two thousand closely printed pages of his correspondence. It is the subject of a long essay in a recent book, aptly entitled This Long Disease, My Life, that deals with medical and biographical aspects of Pope's diseases. 23 Yet, surprisingly, Pope averred on his deathbed he "never was hippish" ( hypochondriacal ). Weak tho' I am of limb, and short of sight, Far from a Lynx, and not a Giant quite. (Imit. HOT. Ep. I.i.49-50) A sepia drawing probably executed by Pope himself depicts a slender, straight-backed person with spindly legs, and the person looks suspiciously like Pope. The handsome face appears troubled and pensive. In his left hand there is an engraving of the Prodigal Son. The person contemplates the ruins of time, 21. Spence, no. 10. The remarks were made in the summer of 1738. 22. William K. Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 179. 23. Marjorie Hope Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau, "This Long Disease, My Life": Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 7-82.

34

Alexander Pope

for a broken shaft of a massive fluted column rises in the background. On one pedestal is enscribed Viro Immortali; on another, Sic transit gloria mundi. At the person's feet are broken pieces of a marble statue. In a later engraving Hogarth depicts Pope in the company of Palladiane, William Kent, Lord Burlington, and others; the hump on Pope's back is grossly exaggerated. 24 In their own transpontine manner, the "dunces" often made Pope's size, shape, and health the butt of their satire, hoping to point up inner perversities from the outward image of a "paranoid imp." Thus, we have the critic Charles Gildon's description of Pope in his first year in London : a "little Aesopic sort of animal in his own cropt Hair, and Dress agreeable to the Forest he came from. I confess the Gentleman was very silent all my stay there, and scarce utter'd three Words on any Subject we talk'd of, nor cou'd I guess at what sort of Creature he was." 25 Toward the end of Pope's life, Sir Joshua Reynolds observed, "He was about four feet six high, very hump-backed and deformed. He had a very large and very fine eye, and a long handsome nose; his mouth had those peculiar marks which are always found in the mouths of crooked persons, and the muscles which run across the cheeks were so strongly marked as to appear like small cords."26 But it may be more important to consider what Pope himself thought of his physical condition and how it affected his poetic imagination. As he confessed to the aging litterateur Henry Cromwell in the spring of 1710 from Windsor Forest, "I assure you I am look'd upon in the Neighborhood for a very Sober & well-disposed Person, no great Hunter indeed, but a great Esteemer of the noble Sport, & only unhappy in my Want of Constitution for that, & Drinking. They all say 'tis pitty I am so sickly, & I think 'tis pitty thay [sic] are so healthy." 27 This 24. TE, III, pt. I, xc, plate II. For details on its provenance, see Corr., I, 187n.; Wimsatt, Portraits of Alexander Ρ ope, p. 118; M. Dorothy George, Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (London: Allen Lane, 1967), pp. 2 2 , 3 0 . 25. Charles Gildon, Memoirs of the Life of William Wycherley (London, 1718), p. 16. 26. E-C,V, 345. 27. Corr., I, 81.

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero

35

unhappiness would deepen; the last sentence of the passage exposes a sardonic temperament that will rise closer and closer to the surface. "Drunk or Scandalous" (according to his company in London), Pope probably brought on illnesses from trying to keep up with "a superior Species," that is, man. Again, writing Cromwell : "Death has of late been very familiar with some of my Size . . . and tho I may now without vanity esteem my self the Least Thing like a Man in England, yet I can't but be sorry two Heroes of such a Make shou'd dye inglorious in their Beds; when it had been a Fate more worthy Our Size, had they met with theirs from an Irruption of Crane[s] or other Warlike Animals, that of old were Enemies to our Pygmaean Ancestors! You of a superior Species little regard what befalls us, Homunciolos Sesquipedales."28 Of course there is much wit and raillery here, but it rises out of disaffection. The jocose references to himself as a homunculus mitigate his pain in the knowledge of death's being "of late . . . very familiar with some of my Size." More serious still is the reference to a "Lady, who rally'd my Person so much, as to cause a total Subversion of my Countenance." Pope would avenge himself on this lady, casting a lampoon in the innocent form of a rondeau: You know where you did despise (T'other day) my little eyes, Little legs, and little thighs, And some things of little size, You know where. You, tis true, have fine black eyes, Taper legs, and tempting thighs, Yet what more than all we prize Is a thing of little size, You know where. "Rondeau to Phillis" During the unusually harsh winter of 1712 Pope wrote his friend Caryll, giving a report of his condition: "I feel no thing 28. Corr., I, 89; "however," Pope continues, "you have no reason to be so unconcern'd, since all Physicians agree, there is no greater Sign of a Plague among Men, than a Mortality among Frogs."

36

Alexander Pope

alive but my heart and head; and my spirits, like those in a thermometer mount and fall thro' my thin delicate contexture just as the temper of air is more benign or inclement." English weather would always be indicted for undermining his health. "In this sad condition," Pope goes on to say, "I'm forced to take volatile drops every day: a custom I have so long continued, that my doctor tells me I must not long expect support from them, and adds that unless I use some certain prescriptions, my tenement will not last long above ground. But I shall not prop it (as decayed as it [is])." 29 These examples of Pope's "present, living dead Condition," among many that could be cited, suggest the manner in which Pope denigrated what old Wycherley fondly called his "little, tender, and crazy Carcase," or what he described to Swift as his Lilliputian size. Perhaps Pope's most impressive statement on his health was made to Bolingbroke in April 1724. He was especially careful in composing letters of this type, for he knew he, or another, would someday publish them : You will think me very Indolent till I tell you I have been very Sick, the only reason that has left your Letter unacknowledged so long by Words which has every day been acknowledg'd in my heart. A severe fit of illness ( a sort of intermitting Fever) has made me unfit for all sorts of Writing and application. You will see (I fear) the effects of it in this Letter, which will be almost enough to convince you that all those mighty hopes of the Improvement of the English Language, and the glory of its Poetry, must rest upon some abler Prop than your Servant. Pope continues in this direction and considers his advancing age : "I own I am already arriv'd to an Age [he was only thirtysix] which more awakens my diligence to live Satisfactorily, than to write unsatisfactorily, to my self: more to consult my happiness, than my Fame . . . To write well, lastingly well, Immortally well, must not one leave Father and Mother and cleave unto the Muse? Must not one be prepared to endure the reproaches of Men, want and much Fasting, nay Martyrdom in 29.

COTT.,

X, 1 6 5 .

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero

37

its Cause. 'Tis such a Task as scarce leaves a Man time to be a good Neighbour, an useful friend, nay to plant a Tree, much less to save his Soul."30 Here are echoes from the King James Bible ("leave Father and Mother and cleave unto the Muse?" Gen. 2:24) and from Hamlet ("endure the reproaches of men"); the longing for fame is emphasized by repetition; religious metaphors are associated with the craft of writing; and then there are the last pointed, almost confessional, phrases. Through this elaborate trope, leaving home, enduring, fasting, and undergoing martyrdom, he is granted immortality, only it is literary and secular. Pope trades on the meanings of fama, "rumor" and "report" as well as "fame." But he questions whether literary martyrdom and immortality could be only the obverse of another selfishness and death of spirit. In the decade that followed this letter, Pope attempted to fuse to a finer degree morality and literature, fame and happiness, in his Imitations of Horace. Even apart from health, Pope's life appears crisis-ridden. Examples abound in correspondence and anecdotes. One is the serious setback to Pope's erratic health that happened on the night of 8 or 9 September 1726, when Bolingbroke's coach-andsix overturned crossing a ford. 31 Pope would have drowned had not the driver broken the window and pulled him through. Pope severely cut his hand on the glass, damaging two nerves permanently. This caused him much pain for the rest of the year and some paralysis for life. My "two least fingers," he complained to Swift later in the fall, "hang impediments to the others, like useless dependents." And he informed Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, that "an unexpected cold intirely disabled me, threw me into perfect torment by settling in the same arm, and yet deprives me of any use of my hand." 32 Despite his ailments Pope usually boasted a healthy "contempt for sickness." To Swift in January 1728 he was in a "Continuation of such very ill health that I cared not to give 30. Corr., II, 2 2 6 - 2 2 7 . 31. Corr., II, 399-401. 32. Corr., II, 412, 402.

38

Alexander Pope

you such an Account as from your friendship, would have been so uneasy to you."33 Or again to Oxford on 14 August 1729, he writes : "The reason that hinderd my giving your Lordship under my hand an account of my easy & safe arrival was an Illness that succeeded it the next day before Night, which made me glad that I had parted even from my best friends." 34 Small wonder that Pope's intimate friends, usually writing from considerable distances and hoping to pull the poet out of his despondent isolation, inquire so often about his health. This, of course, sets Pope to composing a new report, so that his letters frequently begin or conclude on the subject of health. One particularly desperate experience occurred when Pope was fortyone. As he wrote to the Earl of Oxford, "I have reserved to the last a piece of news your good nature will not like: namely that last week, all on a sudden, from being in as much health as ever falls to My Lot, I was seiz'd with a Fever, knockd down to my Bed some days in London, & carryd very closely boxed & glass'd up to this place three days since, from which time I have never quitted my Room. But no part of the fever is on me; and probably I may live to be troublesome, grateful, & importunate to you."35 The strong, active verbs, "seiz'd," "knockd down," may show some of the force his diseases exerted on his imagination, and the story of his being carried in a carriage "boxed 8c glass'd up" offers an unforgettable image of his debility. "My life in thought and imagination," Pope wrote Lord Bathurst probably in 1730, "is as much superior to my life in action and reality as the best soul can be to the vilest body." He protests that he must now study and write in private "as the only way I have left to entertain others, though at some expense to my own health." His spleen mounted to contemptus mundi, and he vents his own demon theory, his expressed loathing of the body: "I find [my body] grows yearly so much worse and 33. COTT., II, 467-468. A year later he characteristically reverses himself, writing again to Swift that the "natural imbecillity of my body, join'd now to this acquir'd old age of the mind, makes me at least as old as you, and we are the fitter to crawl down the hill together; I only desire I may be able to keep pace with you" {COTT., Ill, 80). 34. COTT., Ill, 45-46. 35.

COTT.,

Ill,

62.

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero

39

more declining that I believe I shall soon scruple to carry it about to others; it will become almost a carcase, and as unpleasing as those which they say the spirits now and then use for vehicles to f r i g h t e n folks. My health is so temporary that if I pass two days abroad it is odds but one of them I must be a trouble to any good-natured friend and to his family." 3 6 One thinks back twenty years to Wycherley's affectionate reference to Pope's "little, tender, and crazy Carcase." Earlier in the year of this letter ( 1730 ), a r a t h e r bad year for the poet even by his standards, he had said to his friend H u g h Bethel that he is "put in m i n d of my ill Constitution by Headakes on the least T u r n of weather," an ailment he would occasionally relieve by inhaling the f u m e s of coffee. 37 In his Life of Pope Johnson described Pope's behavior as a houseguest: He brought no servant, and had so m a n y w a n t s that a n u m e r o u s attendance was scarcely able to supply them. Wherever he was he left no room for another, because he exacted the attention and employed the activity of the whole family. His errands were so frequent and frivolous that the footmen in time avoided and neglected him, and the Earl of Oxford discharged some of the servants for their resolute r e f u s a l of his messages. The maids, when they neglected their business, alleged that they had been employed by Mr. Pope. 3 8 The letters show that Pope was aware of the inconveniences he created, and in his best m o m e n t s he was even apologetic. Indeed, such dis-ease reminds us of the dis-ease of Johnson, who said to Dr. Hawkins that his life "never afforded m e a single day of ease" and that he "knew not w h a t it was to be wholly free f r o m pain." During the 1730's we know that Pope grew increasingly paranoid and depressed over his health. Never very lively in company, not a good or even fair conversationalist (like Dryden in this respect), at war with the "dunces," with Swift away in 36. Corr., Ill, 156-157. 37. Corr., Ill, 113. Pope's cure w a s not quack; derivatives of caffeine are part of the antimigraine pharmacology. 38. Johnson, III, 198-199.

40

Alexander Pope

Dublin and ill himself and Bolingbroke fled abroad, Pope seems to have become more and more self-absorbed. He was rarely seen in public. This period in Pope's life has yet to be adequately studied, and one must resort to correspondence and anecdotes for this, the busiest part of the poet's literary career. He wrote typically to Lord Bathurst: "I begin to resolve upon the whole rather to turn myself back again into myself."39 Or again, 15 April 1731 : "continued succession of accidents . . . First, a violent rheumatic pain settled in the shoulder joint, which was a distemper quite new to me : that kept me sleepless so long till a fever succeeded. A constant course of evacuations and plasters and phlebotomy and blisters, &c., &c., &c. Lastly, another fever from a cold taken after I went out. In the whole, nine weeks pain, confinement, and sickness."40 Interestingly he adds that he is going to take "a course of asses' milk to repair the weakness left behind by those disorders." In a few years he would revile Lord Hervey, and at the same time reveal his disgust with his own invalid condition: 41 "Sporus, that mere white Curd of Ass's milk?" (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 306). If through his middle years Pope strived to keep up the semblance of an active social life, in his last five years his illnesses began to complicate one another. He had never been able to travel out of England, but after ten years without seeing Swift, Pope begged him to go to France because the English Channel would be less difficult for Pope to cross than the Irish Sea, "as a sea-sickness might indanger my life."42 Swift was already suffering from Ménière's disease, and Pope never brought up the subject again. "I am here still," he told the Earl of Orrery in 1737; by "here" he meant as much "alive on earth" as "in Twickenham." "I have not only lost my Fever, but recover'd almost all the little Strength & Vigor I ever was Master of. My Eyes suffer the most by my past ailment, and I write large." About 1740 Pope began the energetic project of beautifying his already famous Grotto. I "hope it will be the best Imitation of 39.

COTT.,

Ill, 157.

40. Corr., Ill, 189-190. 41. I owe this observation to H. H. Erskine-Hill, ed., Pope: Horatian Satires and Epistles (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 122. 42. Corr., IV, 63 (23 March 1737).

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero

41

Nature I ever made." Following his correspondence through this labor of love, one discovers it only increased the frequency of his colds and the intensity of his rheumatism, and Pope even began to suffer from asthma. Nevertheless, his spirit was adamant: "Next to patching up my Constitution, my great Business has been to patch up a Grotto."43 By the early 1740's Pope was busily "hitching together" the fourth book of The Dunciad and revising his entire works for a monumental edition. "I must make a perfect edition of my works," he told Spence a few months before his death, "and then I shall have nothing to do but to die."44 When his eyes began to fail seriously—they had never been good—he employed numerous readers. On 17 November 1743, taking his favorite figure, antithesis, he wrote to the Earl of Orrery: "I have a Heart, but I have no Eyes. I have the Spirit strong, but the Flesh is weak, I have nothing to do, 8c therefore want Time."45 By now dropsy (edema), asthma, incessant headaches, and rheumatism plagued him altogether. A case of piles made travel so difficult that he strayed less and less from Twickenham. In 1744 the renewed support for the Catholic Pretender's son "Bonnie Prince Charlie" for a while prevented Pope's seeking better medical attention in London. "We go down the Hill arm in arm," he commiserated with his ailing friend Hugh Bethel, "for every month this winter I have been lower & lower . . . Catching cold above all things hurts me, 8c I am grown so tender as not to be able to feel the air, or get out of a multitude of Wastcotes."46 Finally the poet who had once compared himself to a spider (in The Guardian, no. 92), who excoriated Timon as "A puny insect, shiv'ring at a breeze," and Lord Hervey as a "Bug with gilded wings," refound in this image an emblem for his own self-disgust : "I live like an Insect."47 43. Corr.,IV, 64,229, 261. 44. Spence, no. 622. See also Con·., IV, 491. 45.

COTT.,

IV, 482.

46. COTT., IV, 498—499. 47. COTT., IV, 499. For a discussion of Pope's use of the insect metaphor, see Paul Fussell's "The Vermin of Nature," The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 233-261.

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% The setting for Pope's adolescence is pastoral. Sometime around 1700 his family moved from London to Windsor Forest. Earlier the poet had been sent to school in the country near Winchester; now he would live in a rural environment permanently. "Ours are a sort of modest inoffensive People," Pope wrote gaily at sixteen from the Forest, "who neither have Sense, nor pretend to any, but enjoy a jovial sort of Dulness. They are commonly known in the World by the Name of honest, civil Gentlemen. They live much as they ride, at random . . . I can't but prefer Solitude to the Company of all these." 48 His Horatian "Ode on Solitude" quoted above reveals his early love for a rural life. Seventeen years later he wrote Caryll: "I can tell you no news of the world, for I generally live out of it in this deep desert solitude four miles from London." Though he would always have friends in London, "sometimes for a week together I see no company but our own family, and hear not a syllable of what is done so near me." 49 During his early adolescence when Pope was trying to cope with the onslaught of the tubercular infection, he was studying and writing on his solitary walks in Windsor Forest. "I believe nobody ever studied so hard as my brother did in his youth," Mrs. Rackett remarked, "He did nothing but write and read." 50 Writing his epic and borrowing passages from the great poets —"as slavish an imitation of the ancients" as Blackmore's Prince Arthur—Pope worked at his projects compulsively, quite obviously aware of their imperfections. One of the very few anecdotes we have about his father is interesting on this point : "He was pretty difficult in being pleased," Mrs. Pope told Spence, "and used often to send him back to new turn them. 'These are not good rhymes' (he would say), for that was my husband's word for verses."31 Pope himself had to admit "My first taking to imitating was not out of vanity, but humility. I saw how defective my own things were, and endeavoured to mend my man48. 49. 50. 51.

Corr., 1,11. Corr., I, 463. Spence, no. 27. Spence.no.il.

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ner by copying good strokes from others."52 If he never labored under any illusions about the excellence of his verse in later life, we cannot expect him to have done so at this time. The boy must have been disappointed with himself. And, besides, we know he believed his course of reading to be faulty through this period. Pope told Spence how he spent "seven years unlearning what he had got (from about twenty to twentyseven?)." 53 And his editor Warburton claimed in the great edition of Pope's works in 1751 that in his twenties the meticulous poet "went over all the parts of his education a-new, from the very beginning, and in a regular, and more artful manner."54 With his imperfect reading, bad rhyming, and physical illness, some sort of emotional breakdown was in the making, and it finally occurred about 1705, when Pope was seventeen. We are told that he "resolved to give way to his distemper" and that he "sat down calmly, in a full expectation of death in a short time." In a kind of mock death he "wrote letters to take a last farewell of some of his more particular friends." 55 These morbid postures of the young poet—he claimed he had already written two-thirds of Windsor-Forest and most of the Pastorals —foreshadow future psychosomatic disorders that would lead him to seek shelter against the crowd, to ensconce himself in his Twickenham villa and in his Grotto. It is the more remarkable that during these very years Pope was becoming acquainted with leading Augustan illuminati—poets, critics, and statesmen well advanced in years. Early in life Pope identified with the "mighty dead"; an imaginative association in this development was one he formed with the very old; but at last Pope would find a circle of friends. 52. Spence, 110. 46. Pope waited until 1736 before publishing his "Imitations of English Poets," which were written over a twenty-four year period beginning about 1700 and included inter alia imitations of Chaucer, Spenser, Waller, Cowley, Rochester, and Swift. 53. Spence, no. 50. 54. Warburton, IV, 211. 55. Spence, no. 69. Sherburn is perhaps right in saying that this remark is "obviously tinged with a half-conscious cast of adolescent melancholy that evokes a smile as well as pity" (p. 43).

44

Alexander Pope

In the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot he tells the story himself, laying at the door of original sin an unanswerable question. Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in Ink, my Parents', or my own? As yet a Child, nor yet a Fool to Fame, I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came. I left no Calling for this idle trade, No Duty broke, no Father dis-obey'd. The Muse but serv'd to ease some Friend, not Wife, To help me thro' this long Disease, my Life, To second, ARBUTHNOT ! thy Art and Care, And teach, the Being you preserv'd, to bear. (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 125-134) "Why did I write?" Only a dipping in baptismal "Ink" could absolve the poet of his mysterious "sin to me unknown," the origins of which lay buried in himself, or in his parents, or theirs. Thus, he is bound by the strength of religious mandate, the strength being implied by the religious metaphors, so that writing would be for him a symbolic absolution and resurrection, itself a metaphor for immortal literary fame. In a later satire he draws an analogy between himself and a divinely inspired hero, calling his pen : O sacred Weapon! left for Truth's defence, Sole Dread of Folly, Vice and Insolence ! To all but Heav'n-directed hands deny'd, The Muse may give thee, but the Gods must guide. (Epilogue to the Satires, II, 212-215) In his initial promptings to write, Pope confesses that his leanings toward writing did not transgress any familial tradition. For him it was "natural." His father had long since retired from business; hence no trade that he might ordinarily follow was spurned except his own, paradoxically "idle" trade. Earlier in the poem Pope had satirized the young "Clerk, foredoom'd his Father's soul to cross, / Who pens a Stanza when he should engross," and likewise another "giddy Son [who] neglects the Laws." But Pope claims he was left free to discover what he

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would excel in. "I began writing verses of my own invention," he told Spence in the last year of his life, "farther back than I can remember." 56 Not yet a "Fool to Fame" as he sees himself becoming, Pope "lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came." The passage recalls a letter Pope wrote to the elderly Wycherley when he was just seventeen : "People are usually spoil'd instead of being taught, at their coming into the World; whereas by being more conversant with Obscurity, without any Pains, they would naturally follow what they were meant for."57 Antithetically Pope's compelling devotion to his Muse holds out two values: it gave "ease" to his friends and relieved his own long "Dis-ease," both his numerous physical ailments and his occasionally splenetic temperament. 58 Following his own natural inclination, then, led Pope to "ease some Friend." And the first seems to have been Sir William Trumbull: "It was while I lived in the Forest that I got so well acquainted with Sir William Trumbull, who loved very much to read and talk of the classics in his retirement. We used to take a ride out together three or four days in the week, and at last almost every day."59 A former Secretary of State, ambassador, and Oxford don, Trumbull (1636-1716) was in his late sixties when he met Pope and at the time held the title of verderer of Windsor Forest. How Pope made his acquaintance is not known, though Trumbull mentions in a letter that he appreciated the senior Mr. Pope's gift of "Hartichokes."60 At any rate the event was fortuitous. Trumbull had tasted the power of the active life, yet he was a man of refined taste and was well grounded in the classics. Pope naturally cultivated the friendship of a man who had been formerly a Fellow of All Souls, and who could perhaps tutor him in classics. Their cor56. Spence, no. 32. 57. COTT., I, 11. One may compare Keats's axiom in a letter to John Taylor (27 February 1818): "That if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all." 58. Thomas Maresca offers a challenging interpretation of the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot in his Pope's Horadan Poems (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1967), chapter 3. 59. Spence, no. 71. 60. Corr., I, 17. For new letters in this period, see Review of English Studies 9 ( 1958), 388-406.

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respondence reveals that they were on close terms. "Sir," Trumbull affectionately addressed his "little Pope": I return you the Book you were pleas'd to send me, and with it your obliging letter, which deserves my particular acknowledgment; for next to the pleasure of enjoying the company of so good a friend, the welcomest thing to me is to hear from him. I expected to find, what I have met with, an admirable genius in those Poems, not only because they were Milton's, or were approved by Sir Hen. Wootton, but because you had commended them; and give me leave to tell you, that I know no body so like to equal him, even at the age he wrote most of them, as your self. fil The book Pope lent Trumbull was L'Allegro, II Penseroso, Lycidas and the Masque of Comus. Such praise, the comparison of Milton in his twenties to Pope in his teens, did not fall on deaf ears. Flattery is always irresistible, but especially to adolescents, who are always seeking to know what they are good at. (Pope would soon be keeping a picture of Milton in his chamber.) Trumbull goes too far in his comparison with Milton and (only slightly less so) in valuing Pope's recommendation more than Wotton's. Within a year the perceptive Trumbull would suggest that Pope translate Homer, "to make him speak good English."62 For Trumbull and his student, Homer and the great classical writers have need at times of "divine ventriloquy." "From this gentleman's Acquaintance," Pope's contemporary biographer William Ayre writes of Trumbull, "we may date Mr. Pope's first Entrance into the polite World."63 Through Trumbull Pope was probably introduced to the dramatist William Wycherley, of whom Pope said : "My first friendship at sixteen, was contracted with a man of seventy, and I found him not grave enough or consistent enough for me, tho' we lived well 61. Corr., I, 10. Sherburn suggests that during Pope's entire Binfield period Trumbull was "perhaps the most important influence on the young poet." Pope showed his gratitude by dedicating his first "Pastoral" to him, and praised him by name in Windsor-Forest: "Such as the Life great Scipio once admir'd, / Thus Atticus, and Trumbul thus retir'd" (11. 257-258). 62. Corr., I, 45. This important suggestion was made in the spring of 1708. 63. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope, Esq. (London, 1745), I, 5.

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to his death" (in 1715). 6 4 Gravity and consistency hardly seem characteristic of Pope. Through Wycherley, in any case, Pope would be introduced to Lord Lansdowne, the actor Thomas Betterton, Samuel Garth, and Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, the poet William Walsh—in short, the "World."

% Pope's entrance into the polite world is best related by the poet himself. Altogether he left five lists naming distinguished artists and statesmen who encouraged him both to write and to publish his poetry: a manuscript of the Pastorals, the printed Pastorals, a conversation with Spence, another with Jonathan Richardson, and a final one in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot : But why then publish? Granville the polite, And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write; Well-natur'd Garth inflam'd with early praise, And Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my Lays; The Courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read, Ev'n mitred Rochester would nod the head, And St. John's self (great Dryden's friends before) With open arms receiv'd one Poet more. Happy my Studies, when by these approv'd ! Happier their Author, when by these belov'd ! From these the world will judge of Men and Books, Not from the Burnets, Oldmixons, and Cooks. (135-146) Although the facts bear out this assertion, Pope is also imitating Ovid (Tristia 4.10.19-64), Horace (Sat. 1.10) and Boileau (Ep. 7). One is assured that Pope ought to write and publish by the "effective contrast between the eminence of those who encouraged him, and the insignificance of those who attacked him." 08 Pope perhaps inflated his list with Talbot, Somers, and Sheffield, for none of these eminent men was intimately acquainted with him. In fact, the final list reads like a roll call of heroes in Homer, or royal lines in Shakespeare; it might impress the reader in the same way it did the impressionable poet in his late teens and early twenties. After all, they were the 64. Corr., Ill, 80 ( 2 8 November 1729). 65. Erskine-Hill, Pope, p. 116.

48

Alexander Pope

ideal prototypes of their age, the guardians of literary and aristocratic traditions and thus the "persons to whose Account the Author charges the publication of his first pieces." As Pope adds in a note to these very lines from the Epistle: "Persons with whom he was conversant (and he adds belov'd) at 16 or 17 years of age; an early period for such acquaintance! The catalogue might be made yet more illustrious," Pope continues pompously, "had he not confined it to that time when he writ the Pastorals and Windsor Forest."66 What all of young Pope's mentors shared with each other and shared with Pope's own parents was age. In 1708, when Pope was twenty, Granville (Lord Lansdowne) was forty-one; Walsh (who died in this year), forty-five; Garth, forty-seven; Congreve, thirty-eight; Swift, forty-one; Talbot, forty-eight; Somers, fifty-seven; Sheffield, sixty; Rochester, forty-six. Trumbull was seventy-two, and Wycherley, whose date of birth is uncertain, in his late sixties. Henry St. John, not yet Viscount Bolingbroke, the youngest, was thirty. Pope would outlive nearly all of them, which would have the effect of making him hyperconscious of death. He once told Spence that his acquaintance with old men "when I was young . . . has brought some habits upon me that are troublesome." Could these habits, as Osborn suggests, refer to a "more melancholy and thoughtful" temperament? 67 Years foll'wing Years, steal something ev'ry day, At last they steal us from our selves away; In one our Frolicks, one Amusements end, In one a Mistress drops, in one a Friend : This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time, What will it leave me, if it snatch my Rhime? If ev'ry Wheel of that unweary'd Mill That turn'd ten thousand Verses, now stands still. (Imit. Hor. Ep. II.ii.72-79) The influence of these eminent older men on Pope was twofold : they offered intellectual stimulus for a nonuniversity student, 66. TE, IV, 106. 67. Spence, no. 565; see Corr., II, 480.

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and they provided an imaginative link with the past. Swift excepted, all of them had frequented Will's Coffee-House and were "great Dryden's friends before" as much as they were Pope's friends now. Several of these friends played major roles in the shaping of Pope's career in late adolescence. Already we have considered the influence of "knowing Walsh," with whom Pope became acquainted when he was "about fifteen." Pope had every reason to respect Walsh's advice that he become the first "correct" poet. In the postscript to his translation of Virgil, Dryden himself had praised Walsh "without flattery" as "the best critic of our nation."68 Walsh "told" Pope he could write; and his encouragement was no idle flattery, for he writes about Pope's pastorals to Wycherley on 20 April 1706 : "He has taken very freely from the Ancients, but what he has mixt of his own with theirs, is no way inferior to what he has taken from them. 'Tis no flattery at all to say, that Virgil had written nothing so good at his Age."69 Just a few years later, in the Essay on Criticism, Pope returned the compliment generously to Walsh's "lamented Shade" : Such late was Walsh,—the Muse's Judge and Friend, Who justly knew to blame or to commend; To Failings mild, but zealous for Desert; The clearest Head, and the sincerest Heart. ( 729-732) Pope's "Muse," "whose early Voice you taught to sing," is described as helpless—"Her Guide now lost"—and has not yet found a higher strain of writing, "But in low Numbers short Excursions tries" ( 738 ). To return to Pope's biographia literaria, the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, a word must be given to the other figures in the roll 68. Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1962), II, 261. This curious complaint was included by Dryden in the essay: "in my declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in m y genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write" (p. 2 5 8 ) . If Pope sought to imitate the work of his hero Dryden, the life of Dryden must also be said to have played a role in Pope's conception of what it would be like to be a poet. 69. Corr., I, 7.

50

Alexander Pope

call. "Granville the polite," the Secretary of War, was another of Pope's early poet-friends. As he wrote in Windsor-Forest, which was dedicated to Granville : Who now shall charm the Shades where Cowley strung His living Harp, and lofty Denham sung? But hark! the Groves rejoice, the Forest rings! Are these reviv'd? or it is Granville sings? (279-282) Granville, like Pope, "reviv'd" the past through his poetry, permitting his entrance into an immortal company. A writer is admitted into the company of the Ancients by recreating their "presence." Granville, we know, had a keen ear for his own young successor's poetry, writing to an unidentified friend "Harry": [Wycherley] shall bring with him, if you will, a young poet, newly inspir'd, in the Neighbourhood of Coopers-Hill, whom he and Walsh have taken under their Wing; his name is Pope; he is not above Seventeen or Eighteen Years of Age, and Promises Miracles: If he goes on as he has begun, in the Pastoral way, as Virgil first try'd his Strength, we may hope to see English Poetry vie with the Roman, and this Swan of Windsor sing as sweetly as the Mantuan.70 By this statement the genealogy of the topographical poets is extended in both directions. Denham whom Granville "reviv'd" has now "inspir'd" Pope through the association of Cooper's Hill near Windsor Forest. Faithful to the tradition, Pope includes both Denham and Granville in his own encomium in WindsorForest. The remaining figures on Pope's list in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot played a less direct role in Pope's early formation. Garth's Dispensary would be influential for the writing of The Rape of the Lock. Well-natur'd Garth inflam'd with early praise, And Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my Lays. 70. George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, Works 437.

(London, 1732), I, 4 3 6 -

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Characteristically Congreve "lov'd" his early efforts at writing; I have quoted above Pope's defense to Caryll, 25 July 1714: "while Mr. Congreve likes my poetry, I can endure Dennis and a thousand more like him." 71 But Swift, whom Pope did not meet until he was in his early twenties, only "endur'd" his poetry—high praise from an acerb critic who referred once to Pope's translations as "drudgery" (in a letter to Pope!). The Courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield, read, Ev'n mitred Rochester would nod the head, And St. John's self . . . Three eminent names crowded into one line might betray the fact that they had less to do with Pope than he would like us to think. The favoring "nod" of Bishop Atterbury is enhanced, of course, because the head is "mitred," an especially fine example of Pope's ability to compress much content into a single line, which in Augustan poetics is referred to as "strength." Pope's list includes several Anglican Tory intellectuals who formed his inner circle of friends—Granville, Garth, Swift, Atterbury, and St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. "It is from this viewpoint that Pope has worked out his apology for his literary life," writes Thomas Maresca; "it is by these standards that he damns the Hanoverian king, courtiers, literature, and influence."72 Yet this statement ought to be at least partially qualified, for among Pope's early advocates were Low Churchmen and, if the term is at all relevant, Whigs as well. "Courtly Talbot," for example, was instrumental in bringing the Protestant William of Orange to England to replace the Catholic James II, and after Queen Anne's death he played a prominent role in safeguarding a Protestant succession. John, Baron Somers, led the Whig party during the early years of Anne's reign. Theologically speaking, Bolingbroke was closer to deism than to Anglican orthodoxy. Pope's circle, in short, was not as homogeneous as one would think. And whatever the militancy and allegiance of specific members of the circle, Pope himself can71. Corr., I, 238. 72. Maresca, Pope's Horatian

Poems, p. 100.

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Alexander Pope

not be easily straightjacketed. As he writes in an imitation of the first epistle of Horace's first book, addressed significantly to Bolingbroke : Sworn to no Master, of no Sect am I : As drives the storm, at any door I knock, And house with Montagne now, or now with Lock. Sometimes a Patriot, active in debate, Mix with the World, and battle for the State, Free as young Lyttleton, her cause pursue, Still true to Virtue, and as warm as true : Sometimes, with Aristippus, or St. Paul, Indulge my Candor, and grow all to all; Back to my native Moderation slide, And win my way by yielding to the tyde. (24-34) A poet may "grow all to all," being ideally above party conflicts, "Still true to Virtue." Thus, Pope can embrace opposition "Patriots," yet remain as politically "Free as young Lyttleton," a rising member of the opposition Whigs and "a very particular and very deserving friend," as Pope told Swift, "one of those whom his own merit has forced me to contract an intimacy with, after I had sworn never to love a man more, since the sorrow it cost me to have loved so many, now dead, banished, or unfortunate." 73 Aristippus, the Cyrenaic, hedonistic philosopher, may be encountered as well as the more astringent St. Paul, for Pope follows Horace's entertaining both Stoic and Cyrenaic points of view. Furthermore, the poet may "Mix with the World, and battle for the State" in a vigorously active life or he may "Back to [his] native Moderation slide" into retirement and contemplation. "The ideologies of the super-ego," Freud remarked, "perpetuate the past, the traditions of the race and the people, which yield but slowly to the influence of the present, and to new developments."74 Leading poets and critics of an older genera73. Corr., IV, 134. Even in later years Pope avoided joining either political party, although his friends were chiefly, but not exclusively, among the Tories and the Whig opposition to Walpole. 74. New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1933), pp. 95-96.

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tion inculcated in young Alexander Pope that profound sense of inner continuity of which Freud speaks. That many of these figures were old, identified with Dryden's age, served but to enhance their stature. If "Dryden, Milton, Shakespear, &c." were in the pantheon, these living men were the high priests who could lead a young poet to the shrine. The key phrase in Pope's list of intellectual and poetical benefactors in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot is found in parentheses—it is a Popean trick : (great Dryden's friends before ) With open arms receiv'd one Poet more. Dryden's "before," and Pope's now, the figure of antithesis is at work unifying Pope's sense of tradition and sense of self as he is "receiv'd"—"one Poet more." For among "Dryden's friends" Pope found a company of men who made the values of the classical tradition vital to a young man growing up in early eighteenth-century England. As in so many other respects— subjects, forms, styles, versification—Dryden seems to have been the focal character, and it must be seen as symbolic that Pope, age twelve, was presented to him. "I remember his face," Pope recalled thirty years later, "for I looked upon him with the greatest veneration even then, and observed him very particularly."75 Perhaps Pope's first editor, Warburton, put the influence of Dryden most clearly : "On the first sight of Dryden, he found he had what he wanted. His Poems were never out of his hands; they became his model; and from them alone he learnt the whole magic of his versification."7® Ï

Young Pope brooded over his illnesses and slight stature, but his anxiety was bound to be exacerbated in early manhood when he wished to follow another stereotype of the age and become a bon vivant. To devote much space to analyzing his paranoid behavior in this respect or the fantasies in which he indulged himself in letters to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu or to the 75. Spence, no. 57. 76. Warburton, IV, 18. Reuben A. Brower has explored this in " A n Allusion to Europe," the introductory chapter of Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion ( O x f o r d : The Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 1-14.

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sisters Teresa and Martha Blount, or to assess the frustration that arose from his physical inadequacies is beyond the scope of this essay. Yet it deserves some attention, for it helps to show in what ways Pope grew to be reconciled to the single life. The following lines were addressed to a young lady in 1710 or so, but Pope must have thought the advice applied equally well to a bachelor : Ah quit not the free Innocence of Life ! For the dull Glory of a virtuous Wife ! Nor let false Shows, or empty Titles please; Aim not at Joy, but rest content with ease. 77 If few poets have written of the frailties and follies of woman with as fine and Mozartean a grace as Pope, few have suffered as deeply. The poet who became one of the more perceptive writers on women in any modern language was denied finally the joy of which he speaks. The following paragraphs outline stages of that denial and his acceptance of it. The stereotype that Pope elected during his twenties was, pathetically, that of the Restoration rake. The image is, of course, but the obverse of another reality—the homely rural villager. "[I] first came up to town," Pope later recollected of his early life in London, "with short rough hair, and that sort of awkwardness one always brings up at first out of the country." We have already quoted the critic Charles Gildon, describing him mercilessly as a "little Aesopic sort of animal in his own cropt Hair and Dress agreeable to the Forest he came from." 78 Such a portrait accords well with that of love-sick Polyphemus in Pope's rather lame translation of a passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses, "Done at 14 years old," in 1702. The passage may also show through its jerky rhythms and tangled syntax that young Pope was from the start his own best critic in being so dissatisfied with his early pieces : 77. Norman Ault discusses early versions, dating, and problems in identifying the addressee in the "Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture," from which these lines are taken, in his New Light on Pope (London: Methuen, 1949), pp. 49-56. 78. Gildon, Memoirs, p. 16.

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Now all neglected, he forgets his home, His flocks at random round the forest roam : While nice, and anxious in his new disease, He vainly studies every art to please : To trim his beard, th' unweildy scythe prepares; And combs with rakes, his rough, disorder'd hairs: Adjusts his shapes; while in the crystal brook He views and practices a milder look. ("Polyphemis and Acis," 19-26) In the traditional image of the love-crazed giant of Ovid's verses Pope has found his own image. On matters of rakishness, as on those of religion, Pope's parents were probably as strict and easily scandalized as Pope says they were. But by 1708, at twenty, the ingénu had found an indulgent correspondent in the elderly boulevardier Henry Cromwell. "I have no very violent Inclination," Pope strikes out, "to lose my Heart, especially in [so] wilde and savage a place as this Forest is: In [th]e Town, 'tis ten to one but a young Fellow may [f]ind his Stray'd Heart again, with some Wilde-Street [o]r Drury-Lane Damsell; but here, where I cou'd have met with no Redress from an unmercifull, virtuous [d]ame, I must for ever have lost my little Traveller in a Hole, where I cou'd never rummage to find him again."79 At another time Pope's racy esprit flowed into couplets : If Wit or Critick blame the tender Swain, Who stil'd the gentle Damsels in his Strain The Nymphs of Drury, not of Drury-Lane ; Be this his Answer, and most just Excuse— "Far be it, Sirs, from my more civili Muse, Those Loving Ladies rudely to traduce. Allyes and Lanes are Terms too vile and base, And give Idea's of a narrow Pass; But the well-worn Paths of the Nymphs of Drury Are large & wide; Tydcomb and I assure ye."80 79.

COTT.,

I,

42.

80. COTT., I, 47. For other instances of Pope's intemperate comments, see letters to Cromwell of 7 May 1709, 11 July 1709, 10 April 1710, 25 November 1710, and 21 December 1711, and the two verse-epistles to Cromwell, TE, VI, 24-28, 3 9 ^ 0 .

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Pope must have destroyed most of Cromwell's letters to him since so very few are extant, and Pope's sometimes raffish letters to Cromwell survive only because of the machinations of the bookseller Edmund Curii, who procured and published the correspondence in a piratical first edition in 1726. As usual, however, Pope got the last laugh by vilifying Curii in The Dunciad, pointing out in a note (II, 70) : "We only take this opportunity of mentioning the manner in which those Letters got abroad, which the author was asham'd of as very trivial things, full not only of levities, but of wrong judgments of men and books, and only excusable from the youth and inexperience of the writer." Robert Carruthers, one of Pope's nineteenth-century biographers, dates his rakish period from 1714 to 1718. Although in one letter Pope fashioned himself as Satan tempting Eve, adding self-consciously "inspite of my Evil forme," his escapades more often ended in exhaustion, repentance, or ridicule. In New Light on Pope, Norman Ault has worked out the elements of an episode that occurred in 1714 or 1715, one that may serve to illustrate Pope's unhappy state of affairs. The Earl of Warwick and Colley Cibber "slily seduced" Pope and perhaps John Gay to a "House of Carnal Recreation near the Hay-Market"—so Cibber reported the story in his A Letter from Mr. Cibber to Mr. Pope ( 1742), which J. V. Guerinot labels "one of the cruellest charges ever made against Pope."81 Evidently Warwick hoped to "trick Pope into a ludicrous situation," but meddlesome Cibber intervened at the crucial moment, claiming in an envenomed pun his concern for the future of Pope's "Homer," only several books of which had been translated. After the Letter appeared, engravings were circulated about the town illustrating The Poetical Tom-Titt Perch'd upon the Mount of Love. Although it is unlikely that the story is true—Pope confided to Spence it was an absolute lie—he was mortified at the Letter. In the Memoirs of the Life of Garrick one learns how out of a sense of expiation Pope "read it in agony to his friends." In his lifetime there would often be comparisons between Alexander Pope and Alexander 81. J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711-1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 293.

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the Great; but there is none more touching than his own to Caryll in January 1711: " 'Tis certain the greatest magnifying glasses in the world are a mans own eyes, when they look upon his own person; yet even in those, I appear not the great Alexander Mr Caryll is so civil to, but that little Alexander the women laugh at."82 Only two women, so far as we know, ever seemed to have drawn Pope's romantic devotion on a grand scale. The first was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) and what can be said of her except, to adapt her own epigram, "The world consists of men, women, and Montagus." Pope addressed his headiest love letters to her, and like many others from the early correspondence, they contain rhetorical elements of the précieux epistolary style of seventeenth-century French belles-lettres.83 Thus, Pope wrote sometime in 1716 or 1717: "I foresee that the further you go from me, the more freely I shall write, & if (as I earnestly wish) you would do the same, I can't guess where it will end"—a rather dangerous remark since Lady Mary was then on her way to Turkey. "If you must go from us, I wish at least you might pass to your banishment by the most pleasant way; Might all your road be roses and myrtles, and a thousand objects rise round you, agreable enough to make England less desireable to you. I am glad, Madam, your native Country uses you so well as to justify your regret for it."84 But Pope's relation to Lady Mary must have been in the end one of utter fantasy : "Let us be like modest people, who when they are close together keep all decorums, but if they step a little aside, or get to the other end of a room, can untye garters or take off Shifts without scruple," he writes in the same letter, adding "Make me less wicked then." Or again, 3 February 1717: "Tho I am never to 82. Corr., 1,114. 83. See especially the letters of the summer and fall of 1716: 18 August 1716, 20 August 1716, October 1716, 10 November 1716. Pope's letters to Lady Mary number nineteen although she boasted "fifty or sixty" ( Spence, no. 7 5 2 ) . 84. Corr., I, 384. "If this Distance ( a s you axe so kind to s a y ) enlarges your belief of m y friendship; I assure you it h a s so extended m y notion of your Value, that I begin to be impious on your account, and to wish that even Slaughter Ruin and Desolation might interpose between you and Turkey: I wish you restored to u s at the expence of a whole People" Corr., I, 384.

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see you again, may you live to please Other eyes, and improve other minds than mine; may you appear to distant Worlds like a Sun that is sunk out of the sight of our Hemisphere, to gladden the other." 85 Pope even commissioned Sir Godfrey Kneller to paint her portrait for him in 1719. One wonders whether it was Pope or Sir Godfrey (he had painted her portrait twice before) who decided on her posing in the romantic Turkish headgear. Or was it Lady Mary herself? As Pope wrote upon its completion : The play full smiles around the dimpled mouth That happy air of Majesty and Youth. So would I draw (but oh, 'tis vain to try My narrow Genius does the power deny) The Equal Lustre of the Heavenly mind Where every grace with every Virtue's join'd Learning not vain, and wisdom not severe With Greatness easy, and with wit sincere. With Just Description shew the Soul Divine And the whole Princesse in my work should shine. 86 It is not surprising in the end to find Pope later growing embittered toward Lady Mary, since this love could only remain unrequited. It was bruited about London that she once laughed at him when he was making advances to her, and this rumor, too, stung him. She also crossed him in her miscellaneous publishing ventures, and such betrayal to the first English poet who earned a living by publication was never to be forgiven. "What a goddess he made of me in [his letters]," she told Spence in Rome in 1741, "though he makes such a devil of me in his writings afterwards, without any reason that I know of."87 She did not know, either, that in his bedroom Pope kept Kneller's portrait of her until he died. 88 Pope's affection for Miss Martha Blount (1690-1763) of Mapledurham began earlier and lasted longer than his passion 85. Corr.,1, 389. 86. TE, VI, 211-212. 87. Spence, no. 752. 88. Robert Halsband, Τ he Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 98-99.

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for Lady Mary. He was becoming well known and could have been introduced to her, perhaps as early as 1711, by any of several associations among the extended Catholic families. They grew to be friends; she became his lifelong companion, and to his dear "Miss Patty" Pope addressed several of his finer poems and willed the lion's share of his estate. "If Pope's 'carcase' had not been so crazy and insignificant," writes Sherburn, "and if Martha Blount had not been so tall and stately, one imagines they might have married." 89 Both Pope and Miss Blount were sensitive to scandal among the recusant population; whether or not she was more than a friend is impossible to know. When Lord Harcourt proposed that Pope marry one of his own impoverished relatives, Pope confided sadly to Martha "'twas what he could never have thought of, if it had not been his misfortune to be blind, and what I could never think of, while I had eyes to see both her and my self."90 The last Unes must have grieved Pope deeply because he omitted printing the rest of the original letter when he brought out his own correspondence. Pope's later statements on matrimony substantiate the remarks of this letter. He wishes on the one hand to marry, yet he dispraises his physical constitution. In 1725 he thanks William Fortescue for a present of thatch-pegs: "Alas! with any Female they will do me little credit, if I eat them myself : I have no way so good to please 'em, as by presenting 'em with anything rather than with my self." Four years later, when he was forty-one, he told Caryll that he was at last beyond the age to indulge in any "tendresse." Although Caryll had possibly encouraged marriage, even by the generous offer of a dowry, to Martha Blount, Pope decided against it. "But truth is truth," he writes, "you will never see me change my condition any more than my religion, because I think them both best for me." In the end, as Pope wrote to Martha, he would only beget "such Sons upon the Muses, as I hope will live to see their father." 91 The theme of love frustrated informs one of Pope's best poems, the sonorous Eloisa to Abelard. It was written about 89. Sherburn, p. 291. 90. Corr., 1,431.

91. Corr., II, 290; III, 70, 75; I, 428.

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1716-1717, when, it appears f r o m the letters we have, Pope's love for Lady Mary was most fervid. Why did he choose to versify this particular medieval romance? Probably not through any identification with Abelard, who so tormented the wits and dunces of his own time that they castrated him. In a foreword Pope tells us that Eloisa retired to a convent after the cruel incident. In the opening lines we see her years later, her love not extinguished, but, in fact, rekindled. A letter that Abelard has written to a friend describing his love and misfortune has fallen into her hands. The scene is one of still, claustral isolation, shortly transformed by her burning imaginative temperament: In these deep solitudes and awful cells, Where heav'nly-pensive, contemplation dwells, And ever-musing melancholy reigns; What means this tumult in a Vestal's veins? Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat? Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat? Yet, yet I love !—From Abelard it came, And Eloisa yet must kiss the name. ( 1 - 8 ) From remarks in the correspondence already cited and from later passages in his poetry, we might suspect Pope's own pent-up thoughts of personal isolation in the Forest vent themselves here : But o'er the twilight groves, and dusky caves, Long-sounding isles, and intermingled graves, Black Melancholy sits, and round her throws A death-like silence, and a dread repose : Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene, Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green, Deepens the m u r m u r of the falling floods, And breathes a browner horror on the woods. ( 1 6 3 - 1 7 0 ) It is true that each image in the above lines can be traced to earlier poets, but the spirit in their gathering here is unmistakably Pope. Indeed, sad Eloisa yearns at the end of her monologue for "some future Bard . . . In sad similitude of griefs to mine"

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( 3 5 9 - 3 6 0 ) to f r a m e her story in proper perspective: "He best can paint 'em, who shall feel 'em most" (366). Moreover, the date of the poem falls within the period of Pope's more extravagant love letters. But such a relation between life and work seems trifling when one compares Pope's letters with the poem itself. Eloisa's plea for a future bard may be conventional, but we might expect some deeper kinship between the distressed n u n and the distressed poet. Eloisa to Abelard has been seen to stand apart from Pope's other work, a great and solitary masterpiece of dramatic monologue, written in the midst of the Homer translation and personal love problems. Possibly, in Eloisa's very isolation, her inability to fulfill her love, yet her willingness to go on loving, her thirst for what she calls "the best of passions, Love and Fame" ( 4 0 ) , her struggle to reconcile the values of grace and nature and of virtue and passion— perhaps in all these ways Pope found a sympathetic figure in whom to invest his own creative power. During the course of the monologue Eloisa's thoughts gyrate dynamically, almost spasmodically, between "rebel nature" and "stern religion," between her love for Abelard and for God, between "blood" and "spirit," an emotional range "from Indus to the Pole." "Tho' cold like you," Eloisa addresses the pitying statues of the saints, "unmov'd, and silent grown, / I have not yet forgot my self to stone" ( 2 3 - 2 4 ) . Here as elsewhere in Eloisa, Pope follows conventions that Milton had brought to perfection in II Penseroso, the melancholic temperament, the internal colloquy (to borrow I. A. Richards' phrase), settings both indoor and landscape, well beyond the settings Ovid had provided for his heroines in the Heroides. Early in the poem Eloisa points a way to a utopia, a "happy state . . . When love is liberty, and nature, law" ( 9 1 - 9 2 ) . (Chateaubriand would find in the debate between pagan and Christian values the grounds for the poem's superiority over its Ovidian models.) 9 2 Besides these antitheses, there are large countervailing tensions: while in the process of the poem Eloisa unburdens herself of a lover's memories, the growing knowledge of her guilt, here rehearsed 92. Audra, L'Influence

française,

pp. 431 ff. See also TE, II, 2 8 3 - 2 8 5 .

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Alexander Pope

before us, sharpens her delight in such memories. Only at the close does she hint at resolution when she dreams forward through purgatorial fires to heaven, "Where flames refin'd in breasts seraphic glow" (320). But even this thought is curtailed by the image of love-crazed Dido : See my lips tremble, and my eye-balls roll, Suck my last breath, and catch myflyingsoul ! ( 324-325 ) "For love is strong as death," writes Solomon, "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it" (Song of Sol. 8 : 6 - 7 ) . Yet Eloisa longs for that final extinction so that she may with Abelard "be drown'd" in "trance extatic." One recalls that human, not angelic, voices wake Prufrock, "and we drown," but Eliot had noted and preserved by quotation an association between Eloisa and his own constrained hero who, too, has "trembled, wept, and pray'd, / Love's victim" (311-312). The poem concludes, following what would be common in Pope, with a wish for human memory to keep alive the lesson, "And graft my love immortal on thy fame" (346), thereby uniting the two best of passions. The only references to Eloisa and Abelard before or during publication in 1717 are found appropriately in letters to Martha Blount and Lady Mary (during the period of his strongest attachment to her?). In Holy Week of 1716 Pope informed Martha "I am here studying ten hours a day, but thinking of you in spight of all the learned. The Epistle of Eloise grows warm, and begins to have some Breathings of the Heart in it, which may make posterity think I was in love."93 To Lady Mary, rambling in Turkey, Pope sent a box of goods including "all I am worth, that is, my Workes: There are few things in them but what you have already seen, except the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard; in which you will find one passage, that I can't tell whether to wish you should understand, or not?"94 In the Twickenham edition Geoffrey Tillotson suggests that the passage is 93. Corr., 1,338.

94.

COTT.,

1,407.

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from the conclusion which refers "pretty directly to Pope's experience of Lady Mary's absence" : 95 Condemn'd whole years in absence to deplore, And image charms he must behold no more. Martha Blount would never be "whole years in absence." The "Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture" (1710), addressed originally to an imaginary young lady, deals with the single life vis-à-vis marriage. It is the first of those poems in which, as John Butt notes, there "is evident a persona that is clearly intended to resemble the features of the historical Alexander Pope"; in it one may hear the voice that the young Pope had to develop on his own "before The Spectator could have taught it him." 96 The title informs us of the poet's intention of presenting Miss Blount with an edition of Voiture's familiar letters as translated by Dryden, John Dennis, and others. 97 Vincent Voiture (1598-1648) was, like Pope, born into a comfortable, middle-class family, and through social grace and solid merit rose to prominence and "lived among the Great." Sometime after 1625 he became associated with the Hôtel de Ramboiiillet, frequented by the greatest French wits and men of letters including Malherbe, Saint-Évremond, La Rochefoucauld, and the Scudérys. Catherine, the illustrious marquise de Ramboiiillet, presided over the salon with her daughter Julie, 95. TE, II, 291. 96. "Pope: The Man and the Poet," Of Books and Humankind: Essays and Poems Presented to Bonamy Dobreé, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), pp. 77-78. Perhaps Professor Butt is qualifying a remark made by Brower (Alexander Pope, p. 148): "Pope's intimacy of address (his Spectator tone) in the close of the Epistle to Miss Blount." 97. The Works of Monsieur Voiture, trans. John Dryden, Thomas Cheek, Henry Cromwell, John Dennis et al. (London, 1705). The Twickenham editor refers to a selection of letters published by Dryden and Dennis in 1696, but others shared a hand in this volume as well. As we have seen, Pope was on good terms with one of the translators, Henry Cromwell, and some of the lines in the poem are anticipated in a letter to Cromwell (29 August 1709). For a full treatment of Voiture and his circle, see Émile Magne, Voiture et l'hôtel de Rambouillet: Les Origines, 1597-1635 (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1929), and Magne, Voiture et l'hôtel de Rambouillet: Les années de gloire, 1635-1648 (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1930).

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the "Ramboüillet" of the poem, and there in all its forms flourished préciosité. By the end of the seventeenth century the haute couture of Voiture and the Hôtel had become a French myth, according to Paul Bénichou, and for Pope it provided an appropriate legend with which to express his own predicament —that of a bachelor, apprehensive, for numerous reasons, of marriage. The life of Voiture is sketched in the opening verse-paragraph in a few deft strokes : In these gay Thoughts the Loves and Graces shine, And all the Writer lives in ev'ry Line; His easie Art may happy Nature seem, Trifles themselves are Elegant in him. Sure to charm all was his peculiar Fate, Who without Flatt'ry pleas'd the Fair and Great; Still with Esteem no less convers'd than read; With Wit well-natur'd, and with Books well-bred; His Heart, his Mistress and his Friend did share; His Time, the Muse, the Witty, and the Fair. Thus wisely careless, innocently gay, Chearful, he play'd the Trifle, Life, away. ( 1-12) That Swift's motto was "Vive la Bagatelle !" reminds us that the "wisely careless" life was not to be spurned by serious men. "Horace still charms with graceful Negligence," Pope would say in the Essay on Criticism within a year, borrowing a rich French word. Love, innocence, gaiety, and carelessness need not discredit books, wisdom, and art. 98 The key to the design of the paragraph, and indeed the poem, is found in line 12. The inner rhyme of "the Trifle, Life" enforces an association between a trifle and life itself, an association insisted upon by the strident i sound and softened by the delicate f. Moreover, rhythms are wistfully suspended in the couplet, and phrases play antithetically within and against themselves: "wisely careless," "innocently gay," and "Chearful at death. The aesthetic ideal is borrowed from Voiture's "easie Art." 98. On his deathbed (Spence, no. 648) Pope would repeat his own lines from the imitation of the second epistle of Horace's second book : "I, who at some time spend, at others spare, / Divided between Carelesness and Care" (290-291).

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Yet even death hardly strikes a discordant note, and "Fate" behaves as gently as a courtier, acting in the style of those who live in such a manner : 'Till Fate scarce felt his gentle Breath supprest, As smiling Infants sport themselves to Rest : Ev'n Rival Wits did Voitures Death deplore, And the Gay mourn'd who never mourn'd before ; The truest Hearts for Voiture heav'd with Sighs; Voiture was wept by all the brightest Eyes; The Smiles and Loves had dy'd in Voiture's Death, But that for ever in his Lines they breath. ( 13-20 ) That Voiture's name is repeated four times serves to effect the echo in our minds. For Voiture is now an immortal as certainly as "all the Writer lives in ev'ry Line" (2), or "But that for ever in his Lines they [Smiles and Loves] breath" (21). Although the first verse-paragraph presents the life and death of Voiture, it begins and ends with his "life" after death. Pope does not delay drawing a moral from the valuably old metaphor, life as a well-wrought play. "Graver mortals"—let them act out their lives in a "long, exact, and serious Comedy," at the end of which one may well expect the traditional marriage. For Pope and Martha, however, such a conclusion will not suffice, nor will too strict attention to the dramatic unities: Let mine, an innocent gay Farce appear, And more Diverting still than Regular, Have Humour, Wit, a native Ease and Grace; Tho' not too strictly bound to Time and Place.

(25-28)

In editions of the poem published before 1726, the first line above read "Let mine, like Voiture's a gay Farce appear," and the revision is an example of Pope's usual practice of revising toward the generality. But one need not know this to see the parallel, explicitly verbal, which Pope draws between Voiture and himself. The one was "wisely careless, innocently gay"; the other wishes to live an "innocent gay Farce." Moreover, Pope wrote Cromwell the year before that "Life for the most part [is] like an old Play . . . As for myself, [I] wou'd not have my life

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a very Regular Play; let it be a good merry Farce, a G ds [name] and a figg for the Critical Unities!" 99 And even in early editions of the poem, in line 28 Pope took a more direct swipe at the dramatic unities: "Have Humour, Wit, a native Ease and Grace; / No matter for the Rules of Time and Place." This consciousness of freedom f r o m constraining rules bears on what we have encountered earlier in Pope's life, the inescapability of playacting oneself to the truth, however much life resembles a farce more than a well-made play. The third verse-paragraph represents a yet more daring beginning. He not only advises Miss Blount to enjoy an innocent, gay life, but warns her against marriage—unless she would surrender both innocence and gaiety: Too much your Sex is by their Forms confin'd, Severe to all, but most to Womankind; Custom, grown blind with Age, must be your Guide. (31-33) Severe formalities are opposed to "the Trifle, Life," just as the "innocent gay Farce" to the "serious Comedy," a farce "more Diverting still" than the "Regular" comedy. Pope sympathizes with a woman's plight and satirizes the tyrannical male : Still in Constraint your suff'ring Sex remains, Or bound in formal, or in real Chains; Whole Years neglected for some Months ador'd, The fawning Servant turns a haughty Lord; Ah quit not the free Innocence of Life ! For the dull Glory of a virtuous Wife ! Nor let false Shows, or empty Titles please : Aim not at Joy, but rest content with Ease. (41-48 ) By now the antitheses are irreconcilable. Around one metaphorical pole there is the life of graceful poise, innocence, gaiety, carefreeness; around the other, marriage, responsibility, formality, chains. And although marriage can lead to Joy, in this context, a higher pleasure than Ease, nevertheless, its cost may 99. Corr., 1,70-71.

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be too high. "False shows" and "empty Titles" are amply illustrated in the next verse-paragraph, a "character" of Pamela. This rather anxious young lady prayed for a husband till the gods granted her prayers for the "gilt Coach," the "shining Robes, rich Jewels, Beds of State / And to compleat her Bliss, a Fool for Mate" (51-52): She glares in Balls, Front-boxes, and the Ring, A vain, unquiet, glitt'ring, wretched Thing! Pride, Pomp, and State but reach her outward Part, She sighs, and is no Dutchess at her Heart. ( 53-56 ) The St. James Park Ring, where the carriages drive round and round, becomes her treadmill. Here adumbrated is the image of Hampton Court that Pope will expose in The Rape of the Lock. One also thinks ahead to the numerous satiric remarks aimed at theaters, Italian opera, and so forth in the later works, particularly the Epistle to Augustus (1737). But Pope is prepared for the worst, the young lady's marriage. He shows, however, that even marriage need not destroy the "Good Humour" that Voiture and his circle prized so highly : But, Madam, if the Fates withstand, and you Are destin'd Hymen's willing Victim too, Trust not too much your now resistless Charms, Those, Age or Sickness, soon or late, disarms; Good Humour only teaches Charms to last, Still makes new Conquests, and maintains the past : Love, rais'd on Beauty, will like That decay, Our Hearts may bear its slender Chain a Day, As flow'ry Bands in Wantonness are worn; A Morning's Pleasure, and at Evening torn : This binds in Ties more easie, yet more strong, The willing Heart, and only holds it long. ( 57-68 ) Like marriage, good humor "binds"; ironically its "Ties" are "more easie, yet more strong." For the young lady, and generally for the young, the paradox must be accepted on faith, although experience "soon or late" will prove as much. One thinks ahead just a few years to Clarissa's speech in The Rape

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of the Lock. Since "all shall fade, / And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid," we must above all "keep good Humour still whate'er we lose." Significantly Clarissa is described in the poem as both "grave" and "graceful," uniting the virtues of both worlds. Voiture and his mistresses, by now almost forgotten in the poetry of maidenhood, return at the close to reinforce the paradox. In a "willing Heart" good humour "binds in Ties, more easie, yet more strong" : Thus Voiture's early Care still shone the same, And Monthausier was only chang'd in Name; By this, ev'n now they live, ev'n now they charm, Their Wit still sparkling and their Flames still warm. Now crown'd with Myrtle, on the Elysian Coast, Amid those Lovers, joys his gentle Ghost, Pleas'd while with Smiles his happy Lines you view, And finds a fairer Ramboiiillet in you. ( 69-76 ) Voiture's "early Care" was the Mademoiselle Paulet. She never married, yet "still shone the same," and when Voiture died she was comforting him at his bedside. However, Julie Lucine, the eldest daughter of the Marquise de Ramboiiillet, married the duc de Monthausier. Pope obviously delights in the beauty of her names, the maiden Ramboiiillet, the married Monthausier, and even employs them poetically to illustrate the paradox of the poem. As Monthausier, Julie was still the same good-humored lady, a true duchess as the wife of the duc de Monthausier, but also, unlike poor Pamela, a "Dutchess at her Heart," at her "willing Heart." Martha Blount, as yet unmarried, may thus be complimented by the epithet "a fairer Ramboiiillet," the maiden name. In a line as delicate as "And finds a fairer Ramboiiillet in you" the name is like a poem in itself; here the word in sound and significance enacts the key metaphor of the epistle. "Still shone the same": what is eternal is the goodness of the "willing Heart." And through the poem the theme of the gentle poet's eternality has been subtly put forward:

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In these gay Thoughts the Loves and Graces shine, And all the Writer lives in ev'ry Line; •

·

·

·

·

The Smiles and Loves had dy'd in Voiture's Death, But that for ever in his Lines they breath. •

·

·

·

·

By this [book], ev'n now they live, ev'n now they charm, Their Wit still sparkling and their Flames still warm. (1-2,19-20,71-72) And the concluding couplets include even the recipient of Pope's gift· The brightest Eyes of France inspir'd his Muse, The brightest Eyes of Britain now peruse, And dead as living, 'tis our Author's Pride, Still to charm those who charm the World beside. (77-80) Voiture had been Pope's surrogate throughout the poem for the carefree state of bachelorhood, achieving immortality through his letters and poetry. One thinks of any number of passages from Pope's letters and poems, but especially one in a letter to Martha Blount that has been cited already: "The Epistle of Eloise grows warm, and begins to have some Breathings of the Heart in it."100 For the "brightest Eyes of Britain," Martha's, are now perusing not the works of Voiture, but Pope's own verseepistle. Thirteen years later, in 1723, Pope wrote the brief 'To Mrs. M[artha] B[lount] on her Birth-day." By then Mrs. Blount was in her mid-thirties, adopting the conventional "Mrs." for the unmarried woman well past her youth. The old debate between aiming for Joy or being content with Ease is now silenced : Let Joy or Ease, let Affluence or Content, And the gay Conscience of a life well spent, Calm ev'ry thought, inspirit ev'ry Grace, Glow in thy heart, and smile upon thy face. 100. Corr., I, 338. See also Corr., I, 60, 179, 293, 428; II, 226-227.

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Alexander Pope Let day improve on day, and year on year, Without a Pain, a Trouble, or a Fear; Till Death unfelt that tender frame destroy, In some soft Dream, or Extasy of joy : Peaceful sleep out the Sabbath of the Tomb, And wake to Raptures in a Life to come. ( 11-20)

As in the earlier poem, Joy is associated with the affluence of marital life, Ease with inner contentment. But now. as a confirmed bachelor, Pope has new premises that permit him to view an old debate with the detachment of middle age. In this poem even as in the other where gaiety and innocence are celebrated, there is nonetheless a memento mori, in a tone as poignant as Montaigne could create. A "gay Conscience" unites on a higher plane the best values of both the "gay" and the "conscientious" worlds. The "life well spent" may be led in either one of them. As the poem (and the life) draws to a close, matters grow more serious. Pope sets forward a daring metaphysical extension of his theme : Peaceful sleep out the Sabbath of the Tomb, And wake to Raptures in a Life to come. It is fitting that the closing rhyme should echo quietly. Finally, Ease is the peace of death, and Joy, the rapture of resurrection. One of the finest passages in Pope's verse was conceived originally for this birthday poem. An early version of this poem, published in the 'last" volume of the Pope-Swift Miscellanies in 1728, reveals that six lines were deleted. Tucked away by Pope for a few years, they reemerged as the climax of Pope's Epistle to a Lady (1735), the second of the Moral Essays, addressed to Martha Blount and subtitled "Of the Characters of Women." 101 It will perhaps be obvious from the bleak vision of life presented in these lines why Pope found them inappropriate for a birthday poem—or perhaps he found the passage too good to bury in so slight an effort. Up to this passage in the Epistle to a Lady, 101. The passage printed in the Miscellanies is identical with the one in the Epistle to a Lady except for the first line, "Not as the World its pretty Slaves rewards." See also Corr., II, 180; III, 18-19.

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Pope has been faulting various kinds of women one after another, satirizing their follies and typing their characters. In the impassioned climax Pope sees a vision of all human life in the fading society ladies, "Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide, / And haunt the places where their Honour dy'd." Then follows the passage in question: See how the World its Veterans rewards ! A Youth of frolicks, an old Age of Cards, Fair to no purpose, artful to no end, Young without Lovers, old without a Friend, A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot, Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot! (243-248) As if such knowledge could be borne no further, Pope turns to the only woman in the poem who is praised, his dear "Miss Patty" : Ah Friend ! to dazzle let the Vain design, To raise the Thought and touch the Heart, be thine! That Charm shall grow, while what fatigues the Ring Flaunts and goes down, an unregarded thing. So when the Sun's broad beam has tir'd the sight, All mild ascends the Moon's more sober light, Serene in Virgin Modesty she shines, And unobserv'd the glaring Orb declines. (249-256) Martha's cheerful temperament was among the chief happinesses of Pope's life and to her he bequeathed the better part of his estate. In the conclusion of the Epistle to a Lady, Pope is already numbering the gifts Martha has received from Apollo, and appropriately the god of poetry includes Pope. This Phoebus promis'd (I forget the year) When those blue eyes first open'd on the sphere; Ascendent Phoebus watch'd that hour with care, Averted half your Parents simple Pray'r, And gave you Beauty, but deny'd the Pelf That buys your sex a Tyrant o'er itself. The gen'rous God, who Wit and Gold refines, And ripens Spirits as he ripens Mines,

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% A convert, Pope's father was a Catholic out of conscience and not by accident of birth. Such individuals frequently make up the best of the faithful : Bred up at home, full early I begun To read in Greek, the Wrath of Peleus' Son. Besides, my Father taught me from a Lad, The better Art to know the good from bad : (And little sure imported to remove, To hunt for Truth in Maudlins learned Grove. ) But knottier Points we knew not half so well, Depriv'd us soon of our Paternal Cell; And certain Laws, by Suff'rers thought unjust, Deny'd all Posts of Profit or of Trust : Hopes after Hopes of pious Papists fail'd, While mighty W I L L I A M ' S thundring Arm prevail'd. For Right Hereditary tax'd and fin'd, He stuck to Poverty with Peace of Mind; And me, the Muses help'd to undergo it; Convict a Papist He, and I a Poet. But (thanks to Homer) since I live and thrive, Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive. (.Imit. Hor. Ep. II.ii.52-69) Mr. Pope's dogged adherence to his faith—he "stuck to Poverty"—was imitated by his son. "Certain Laws" under which Roman Catholics labored in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, together with the latent hostility of the general populace, set more barriers for the young poet to overcome, which at the same time helped to strengthen his moral fiber. Religious intolerance became codified a quarter of a century before Pope's birth in the Clarendon Code. By this Code, anyone not receiving rites from an Anglican minister could not serve in a municipal corporation, attend the Universities, or sit in Parliament. 102 William's Jove-like "thundring Arm prevail'd"— 102. G. N. Clark, The Later Stuarts (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934), pp. 19-24, 148; Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy, 2d ed., rev. C. H. Stuart (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1962), pp. 68-69.

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the allusion fits well in a passage that begins with homage to Homer—in 1688, the year of Pope's birth. After that date, by a variety of laws, Catholics were not permitted to purchase or sell land without severe taxation, own a horse worth over five pounds, live within a ten mile radius of the city of Westminster (or wherever the Court presided), study under a priest, or inherit an estate. From birth to death Pope labored under these restrictions, particularly in national emergencies such as in 1688, 1698, 1714, and 1744. During the Glorious Revolution, Pope's father found it prudent to retire f r o m business, at fortytwo. He moved outside the city during the disturbance ten years later, and shortly afterward removed for safety still farther to Windsor Forest. In 1715 antipapist sentiments rose when the Catholic Pretender James invaded England to protest the Protestant succession. On 26 June 1716, the King approved a strongly worded Commissioner's Bill "to inquire of the estates of certain traitors, and of Popish recusants, and of estates given to superstitious uses, in order to raise money out of them severally for the use of the public." Thus, Pope's aging father had to transfer the estate at Binfield and move his family once again, this time to Chiswick. Pope wrote a memorandum on one of the leaves on which the Iliad XIII was translated concerning the mortgaging of this new residence—such mortgaging enforced on Catholics. 103 On account of the Test Act Pope was, perhaps fortunately at this time, prevented from attending Oxford or Cambridge. But even the "loose and disconcerted" education that he did receive was interrupted when his schoolmaster Thomas Deane, suspected of being a priest, or worse, a Jesuit, had to transfer his school from Marylebone to Hyde Park Corner. Pope's ineligibility for a state pension or a civil service post forced him to Uve on a modest legacy, but especially his own writings: "Unplac'd, unpension'd, no man's Heir or Slave," he boasts to the lawyer Fortescue in his imitation of the first satire of Horace's second book. Another time he offers "thanks to Homer" f r o m the translation of whose work he made £10,000. In 1735 alone he saw 103.

Corr.,

I, 3 4 4 , 3 2 5 .

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sixty-eight books and pamphlets through the press. "If Pope is not the greatest among English poets," his modern bibliographer R. H. Griffith has remarked, "he is the greatest advertiser among them . . . the first man in English literature to accumulate an independent fortune from the sale of books that were written as works of art."104 Because of antipapist legislation Pope was forced to maintain a permanent residence outside London, and no less than three times he had to vacate his country villa at Twickenham when the Court moved to nearby Hampton. (When he was dying he was advised against going to London for medical attention because of the proclamation of April 1744, aimed at thwarting papist support for the incipient invasion of the old Pretender's son Charles.) It was with irony, therefore, that Pope wrote to his friend John Caryll that "the greatest fear I have under the circumstances of a poor papist is the loss of my poor horse," itself the gift of Caryll : yet if they take it away, I may say with the resignation of Job, tho' not in his very words Deus dedit, Diabolus abstulit, I thank God I can walk. If I had a house and they took it away, I could go into lodgings; if I had money and they took it away, I could write for my bread. 103 Because Pope was many-sided, humanist, and, in the Essay on Man, almost nonchalantly untheological, it is often assumed that he, like many Enlightenment figures, found little use for religion. Yet when attacked by fellow Roman Catholics for laxity or by the state during emergencies, Pope issued stalwart defenses of his faith. The publication of certain remarks in the Essay on Criticism in 1711, for example, disturbed some leading Roman Catholic families. It was one thing to face intolerance from Anglican authorities, quite another to face it from one's own Catholic brethren. Pope had denigrated the superstition of medieval monks and extolled the open-minded human104. Griffith, II, xlvi-xlvii.

105. Corr., I, 241-242.

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ism of Erasmus, who for Pope served as an heroic model of religious toleration.106 Particularly damnable was a passage in which Pope likened narrow and dogmatic critics to religious sectarians: Some foreign Writers, some our own despise; The Ancients only, or the Moderns prize : (Thus Wit, like Faith, by each Man is apply'd To one small Sect, and All are damn'd beside. ) Meanly they seek the Blessing to confine, And force that Sun but on a Part to Shine. (394-399) Pope defended himself in two letters to his friend Caryll, whose uncle, Lord Caryll, was attached to the Pretender's Court. Pope claimed the word they in the line "Meanly they seek the Blessing to confine" applied not to Catholics, but rather to "those critics there spoken of, who are partial to some particular set of writers." As Pope explicates, like a formalist critic : the "simile of wit and faith (if you please to cast your eye once more upon it) plainly concludes at . . . a full stop" after beside.107 Of course, the Catholics might very well argue (and it makes critical sense) that the metaphor of "Blessing" in the very next line carries with it associations from the previous simile. But Pope had anticipated such objections and retaliated by raising the question to a higher plane, leveling sharp criticism at "limited notions of the mercy of the Almighty." In his Argument 106. Robert M. Schmitz has written that "Pope's references to the church tended to reflect the caustic wit of his time rather than any personal animus to the church." Schmitz shows that one of Pope's "corrections" prior to publication, a deleted line in which holiness is equated with pride in the Middle Ages—"When none but Saints had licence to be proud"— was made for reasons of poetic rightness rather than Catholic orthodoxy, since this line, when removed, "left unobstructed the lines describing the intellectual deluge of the Middle Ages" (687-692). Indeed, there were enough passages left to disturb the Catholic orthodoxy, and one must admit on Pope's part some degree of antipathy to their sectarianism, if not to the Church itself. See Schmitz's Pope's "Essay on Criticism" 1709: A Study of the Bodleian Manuscript Text with Facsimiles, Transcripts, and Variants (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1962), p. 13. 107. Corr., I, 118. The parentheses around lines 396-397 did not appear in the first edition and may have been inserted further to isolate the simile and so to placate the Catholics.

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against Abolishing Christianity (1708), Swift's projector had said that "I hope, no Reader imagines me so weak to stand up in the Defense of real Christianity, such as used in primitive Times." Three years later Pope extols the "unrevenging spirit of primitive Christianity," citing "that excellent example of that great man and great saint, Erasmus," who sought in the spirit of honest compromise to reconcile the factious elements within the Church. A month after the first missive to Caryll, the criticism must not have waned, for Pope apparently had to defend himself again: "besides the small number of the truly faithful in our Church, we must again subdivide, and the Jansenist is damned by the Jesuit, the Jesuit by the Jansenist, the strict Scotist by the Thomist, &c. There may be errors, I grant, but I can't think 'em of such consequence as to destroy utterly the charity of mankind, the very greatest bond in which we are engaged by God to one another as Christians."108 The anxiety that Pope and his family suffered during the first years of George I's reign had lasting effects on the poet. Having moved to Binfield to escape penalties, they were again uprooted; Pope writes in a melancholy letter to Caryll on 20 March 1716: "I write this from Windsor Forest, which I am come to take my last look and leave of. We here bid our papistneighbours adieu, much as those who go to be hanged do their fellow-prisoners, who are condemned to follow 'em a few weeks after." 109 The letter should be viewed in the context of a time when being uprooted was much more painful than in our present, mobile society. This was the fourth time that Pope, then twenty-nine, and his family were forced to move. The sudden wave of anti-Catholicism after the Hanoverian succession elicited a strong defense of his religion from Pope, again in a letter to Caryll: "I am sure, if all Whigs and all Tories had the spirit of one Roman Catholic that I know, it would be well for all Roman Catholics; and if all Roman Cath108. Corr., I, 126. 109. Corr., I, 336-337. In Adam. Bede George Eliot describes the removal of the Poysers after Hetty's trial. Although they have to move only twenty odd miles, old Mrs. Poyser says "We should leave our roots behind us, I doubt, and never thrive again."

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olics had ever had that spirit, it had been well for all others." 110 Between foreign Catholics and English Catholics there existed a large disparity: "It is indeed very unjust to judge of us in this nation by what other members of our communion have done abroad. Our Church Triumphant there is very different f r o m our Church Militant here (if I may call that a Church Militant which is every way disarmed)." To Pope it seemed as if the English Catholics labored under severe restrictions and therefore concentrated their efforts on the salvation of their souls. Before and after the great anti-Catholic emergencies, Pope's attitude toward his religion, it must be admitted, was less intensely partisan. While his parents were celebrating Easter in 1709, they were scandalized when they found their son writing: they "take it for granted I write nothing but ungodly Verses; and They say here so many Pray'rs, that I can make but few Poems; For in this point of Praying, I am an Occasional Conformist. So just as I am drunk or Scandalous in Town, according to my Company, I am for the same reason Grave & Godly here." 111 In an "Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation" ( 1 7 1 4 ) , Pope sympathizes with her sad routine : "Up to her godly garret after sev'n, / There starve and pray, for that's the way to heav'n." Or one thinks ahead six years, when in the sacrilegious "Roman Catholick Version of the First Psalm" he writes : No wicked Whores shall have such Luck Who follow their own Wills, But Purg'd shall be to Skin and Bone, With Mercury and Pills. For why? the Pure and Cleanly Maids Shall All, good Husbands gain : But filthy and uncleanly Jades Shall Rot in Drury-Lane. 110. Corr., 1,241. 111. Corr., 1,81.

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Here Pope is "imitating" the sublime version of this psalm by the poet Sternhold. Pope once told Bishop Atterbury that during his boyhood he had been paradoxically a "Papist and a Protestant by turns, according to the last book [he] read." He nonetheless spurned Atterbury's advice to turn Protestant. When Atterbury was being spied upon for alleged conspiracy with the Pretender, Pope's carefully worded statement to him has the air of an "official position" : I hope all churches and all governments are so far of God, as they are rightly understood, and rightly administred: and where they are, or may be wrong, I leave it to God alone to mend or reform them; which whenever he does, it must be by greater instruments than I am. I am not a Papist, for I renounce the temporal invasions of the Papal power, and detest their arrogated authority over Princes, and States. I am a Catholick, in the strictest sense of the word. If I was born under an absolute Prince, I would be a quiet subject; but thank God I was not.112 Instead of a Roman, French, or Spanish Catholic, he would rather see a "true Catholick." His strictures against the "one small Sect" again come to the fore. Pope argues for a universal type, for which Erasmus serves as paradigm, guiltless of local prejudices or national goals. Papist or Protestant, or both between, Like good Erasmus in an honest Mean. (lmit. Hor. Sat. II.i.65-66) Pope's consistency in matters of religion was, for him, remarkable. Later in his life he again was called upon to defend his religion—again on account of his poetry. In Louis Racine's poem La Religion (1742), Racine attacked Pope for deistical leanings in the Essay on Man. When the Chevalier Ramsay protested on Pope's behalf, Racine asked for an unequivocal elaboration from Pope. Thrown on the defensive, Pope replied in a statement that Sherburn calls his "clearest statement as 112. Corr., I, 4 5 3 - 4 5 4 .

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to his religious views," although one senses some irony, however delicate, in the phrasing: "Upon the whole, I have the pleasure to answer you in the manner you most desire, a Sincere Avowal that my Opinions are intirely different from those of Spinoza; or even of Leibnitz; but on the contrary conformable to those of Möns: Pascal & Möns. Fenelon: the latter of whom I would most readily imitate, in submitting all my Opinions to the Decision of the Church."113 In fact, Pope had long since submitted for approval at least parts of the Essay on Man to Bishop Berkeley, the philosopher, who convinced Pope to strike "an address to our Saviour, imitated from Lucretius' compliment to Epicurus."114 In any case Pope sent along a copy of Warburton's commentary on the Essay in order to clear up any theological difficulties. As Johnson commented dryly : "The positions which he transmitted from Bolingbroke he seems not to have understood, and was pleased with an interpretation that made them orthodox."115 The specific debates that Pope touched off with his Essay on Man have been amply researched, most recently by Maynard Mack in his introduction to the Twickenham text and by D. H. White in Pope and the Context of Controversy.116 Like the Swift of the Sermons, Pope is unmystical, unquestioning, urbane: "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of Mankind is Man." As a humanist he is decidedly against becoming embroiled in systematic theology. And the Essay on Man will be found, not unlike the Essay on Criticism, to be an attempt to forge poetic unities out of long-standing controversies inherited from the seventeenth century. One particular passage from the second Essay may help illustrate Pope's own theodicy : Virtuous and vicious ev'ry Man must be, Few in th' extreme, but all in the degree; The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise, 113. Corr., IV, 416. 114. Spence, no. 305. 115. Johnson, III, 215. 116. TE, III, pt. I, x i - x x i i ; D. H. White, Pope and the Context of Controversy: The Manipulation of Ideas in An Essay on Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

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Alexander Pope And ev'n the best, by fits, what they despise. 'Tis but by parts we follow good or ill, For, Vice or Virtue, Self directs it still; Each individual seeks a sev'ral goal; But H E A V ' N ' S great view is One, and that the Whole : That counter-works each folly and caprice; That disappoints th' effect of ev'ry vice : That happy frailties to all ranks apply'd, Shame to the virgin, to the matron pride, Fear to the statesman, rashness to the chief, To kings presumption, and to crowds belief, That Virtue's ends from Vanity can raise, Which seeks no int'rest, no reward but praise; And build on wants, and on defects of mind, The joy, the peace, the glory of Mankind. (II, 231-248)

Virtue's only "reward" is "praise," an equivalent of "fame." Like a poet, God judiciously balances opposing extremes, seeking that harmony that will embrace "the Whole," a concordia discors. One may fault the Essay for its optimism, but it is a cautious optimism at best. And one should not forget that for a later edition of the poem Pope suffixed the moving "Universal Prayer": Thou Great First Cause, least understood! Who all my Sense confin'd To know but this,—that Thou art Good, And that my self am blind : Yet gave me, in this dark Estate, To see the Good from 111; And binding Nature fast in Fate, Left free the Human Will. What Conscience dictates to be done, Or warns me not to doe, This, teach me more than Hell to shun, That, more than Heav'n pursue. What Blessings thy free Bounty gives, Let me not cast away; For God is pay'd when Man receives, T' enjoy, is to obey.

The Isolation of an Augustan Hero Yet not to Earth's contracted Span, Thy Goodness let me bound; Or think Thee Lord alone of Man, When thousand Worlds are round.

81

(5-24)

What may be emphasized, then, is the open-minded position Pope took on matters of religion—open-minded and moderate despite the fact that he himself suffered from religious persecution. It is to his credit that he was not driven, as were so many of the "one small Sect," to extreme partisanship, but was directed rather by liberal theological principles and by an allegiance to men such as Erasmus, who upheld those principles. "Some wonder why I did not take in the fall of man in my Essay, and others how the immortality of the soul came to be omitted. The reason is plain. They both lay out of my subject which was only to consider man as he is, in his present state, not in his past or future." 117 Erasmus was one symbol for religious consensus, but there was even a more recent one. Pope once said that he could "house with Montagne now, or now with Lock." On maintaining the separation between church and state, Pope followed the philosopher of the Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) : "I regard it as necessary above all to distinguish between the business of civil government and that of religion, and to mark the true bounds between the church and the commonwealth. If this is not done, no end can be put to the controversies between those who truly have or pretend to have at heart a concern on the one hand for the salvation of souls, and on the other for the safety of the commonwealth . . . the care of souls cannot belong to the civil magistrate, because his power consists wholly in compulsion. But true and saving religion consists in the inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing has any value with God; and such is the nature of human understanding, that it cannot be compelled by any outward force. Confiscate a man's goods, imprison or torture his body: such punishments will be 117. Spence, no. 306. See also TE, III, pt. I, 7-8.

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in vain, if you hope that they will make him change his inward judgement of things." 118 Pope witnessed a falling off in both taste and morality and made reformation a central theme in his poetry. Yet he rejected sectarian notions about which way that reformation should take. Not that he did not have notions of his own—only a month before he died he told Spence about an abandoned design, a work "wholly upon human actions, and to reform the mind." One section was to have treated of government, both ecclesiastical and civil, and "this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have said what I would have said without provoking every church on the face of the earth, and I did not care for living always in boiling water." 119 A liberal Catholic all his life, he made sure at the very end that, in a classic "retraction," he received the last rites. And the Benedictine monk who administered them said that "he had Pope's Directions to declare to every body, that Pope was very sorry for every thing he had said or wrote, that was against the Catholick Faith." 120 The dispassionate Chesterfield is cooler: "He was a deist believing in a future state: this he has often owned himself to me; but when he died he sacrificed a cock to Esculapius, and suffered the priests who got about him to perform all their absurd ceremonies upon his body."121 118. John Locke, Epistola de Tolerantia, ed. Raymond Klibansky, trans. J. W. Gough (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. 65, 69. It should be pointed out that toleration for Locke should not be extended to Roman Catholics, Jews, and atheists. 119. Spence, nos. 295 and 302. 120. Huntington Library MS 1211. Quoted in Corr., IV, 526n. 121. Philip Dormer Stanhope, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, Characters (London, 1778), pp. 14-15.

3. Homer and the Heroic Ideal O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible. (Pindar, Pythian Odes, III)

With the possible exception of Dry den, Pope would devote more years of his life to translating another poet's work t h a n any other English writer of his rank. Moreover, it was sheer boldness, to borrow Pope's most commonly used word to describe Homer's amplitude and style, for a young poet of twenty-five to set himself on the line with Dryden, who approached the translation of the Aeneid only in the last decade of his life, and who, besides, left a version of part of the Iliad unfinished, possibly his next project. The young poet would be imitating Dryden, perhaps precociously, and continuing to merit a worthy place in the neoclassical tradition. But Pope would be imitating Homer as well. Modern scholarship h a s returned to the concept of a single Homer dictating the Iliad about 725 B.C. and the Odyssey some twenty-five or more years later. Should this be so—and, more important, artists f r o m Sophocles to Pope held it to be so—Homer, too, was a relatively young m a n when he composed the Iliad.1 Again Pope would be following the artist as well as the poem. Clearly Pope's "Homer," as it came to be called, would be a translation and something more. Most students of Pope prefer to leapfrog the twelve years 1. Cedric H. Whitman, Homer and the Heroic Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), pp. 9 - 1 6 .

Tradition

(Cambridge,

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1714-1725 in which he labored on the translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey and edited the works of Parnell, Sheffield, and Shakespeare, devoting himself essentially to the works of other writers. During this time, from his twenty-seventh to his thirtyeighth year, he wrote so few original poems that he halfseriously pondered "retirement." Of course we find exceptions, notably Eloisa to Abelard, but also the Elegy, the Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford, and the slight but perfect birthday poem "To Mrs. M. B." Yet the exceptions are few, mostly short, and hardly capable of filling the gap of a dozen years in the middle of a major poet's career—one that had had such a blazing start. Our impatience is due partly to our own insatiable appetite for novelty and partly to a general prejudice against translations themselves. We simply do not pay them the same attention we pay something "original," even though (to adopt that standard a moment) there may in fact be more essential originality in a translation than in a patently original work. Pope was not blind to this prejudice—it is a recurrent theme in the letters—when the Earl of Oxford attempted to dissuade him from "engaging in that work [the Iliad]. He used to compliment me with saying that 'so good a writer ought not to be a translator.' " 2 Yet in the eighteenth century Pope's "Homer," and particularly the Iliad, was considered his m a g n u m opus, a "poetical wonder," Johnson proclaimed, that "no age or nation can pretend to equal . . . His version may be said to have tuned the English tongue, for since its appearance no writer, however deficient in other powers, has wanted melody." 3 It is part of the critical heritage of Romanticism that Pope's Iliad should have so fallen in esteem, while the semiautobiographical Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, not especially popular in the eighteenth century, should now be prized among his highest achievements. Our attitude toward translation is now shifting once again. Several modern poets of widely different styles—Robert Lowell, 2. Spence, no. 226. For further remarks in the letters, see Corr., I, 347; [I, 219-220, 226-228, 311, 321-322, 341. 3. Johnson, III, 236, 238. While Wordsworth dispraised Pope's scenepainting in the Iliad translation, Coleridge found the work as a whole an 'astonishing product of matchless talent and ingenuity." Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), I, 11.

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James Dickey, Robert Fitzgerald, Richmond Lattimore—have shown how insightful and rewarding translation or imitation or "exchanges" between poets may be when performed under imaginative pressure. For the writings of an early master may serve both as a structural model and moral touchstone—and as literary inspiration as well. The new work creates a resonance between the present and the past, and this resonance is as much a part of the meaning of the poem as theme and image by themselves. The early Greeks recognized the role that memory played in developing a tradition—appropriately an oral, not a written, tradition—and honored Mnemosyne as mother of the Muses. In yet another and more meaningful way current attitudes have shifted to make us better disposed toward Pope's intentions with Homer. That is, we are again searching for deeper relevance in our literature, and if the current demand becomes selfdefeating as it fast approaches the "high-fantastical," it may lead us nonetheless to reevaluate literature in terms of its basic concerns with human nature, as Johnson said, with "what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use." In his monumental translations Pope attempted to make the founder of Western poetic tradition—he praised him unceasingly as "the Father of Poetry"—relevant to the Augustan Age. Only the Bible surpassed Homer in scope and grandeur; as Pope wrote of him, "We acknowledge him the Father of Poetical Diction, the first who taught that Language of the Gods to Men."4 In the classical tradition (and to Pope, unlike to us, there was no other) Homer was the original. And what Pope believed his own mission to be may best be gauged from a remark that he made on Homer in a letter to his friend the artist Charles Jervas : "It is my employment to revive the old of past ages to the present, as it is yours to transmit the young of the present, to the future. I am copying the great Master [Homer] in one art, with the same love and diligence with which Painters hereafter will copy you in another."5 Pope published the letter in all editions of his correspondence. 4. Corr., I, 406; Preface to the Iliad, TE, VII, 9. 5. Corr., I, 239.

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t

An acquaintance with Homer reaches f a r back into Pope's childhood. In the imitation of Horace's second epistle of the second book ( 1 7 3 7 ) , he admits proudly.· Bred up at home, full early I begun To read in Greek, the Wrath of Peleus' Son.

(59-60 )

Homer was the first author, Pope wrote in plain English, "that made me catch the itch of poetry, when I read him in my childhood," adding that he hoped his translation would cure him of this disease entirely. 6 "I had been nursed up in Homer and Virgil," 7 he said to Spence, and even thought himself the better for not having a regular education. This was a frequent boast of Pope's and yet another instance of his ability to extract an ornament f r o m an inconvenience. "He (as he observed in particular) read originally for the sense," noted Spence, "whereas we are taught for so many years to read only for words. This no doubt was one reason of his being pleased so excessively—at eight or nine years old—with Ogilby's Homer. The greatness and novelty, and all the excellencies of the matter struck him in spite of the language. He saw the greatness of Homer's beauties through all the rags that were flung over him." John Ogilby's ragged-edged translation of the Iliad (1660) and the Odyssey ( 1665) were among "the first large poems that ever Mr. Pope read," and in 1743 he could still speak "of the pleasure it then gave him, with a sort of rapture." As Pope recalled : "It was that great edition with pictures . . . This led me to Sandys's Ovid, which I liked extremely, and so I did a translation of part of Statius by some very bad hand." 8 Then at twelve, one recalls, 6. Corr., 1,297. 7. Spence, no. 195. The entire anecdote reads: "If I had not undertaken that work [the translation of the Iliad] I should certainly have writ an epic, and I should have sat down to it with this advantage—that I had been nursed up in Homer and Virgil" (March 1743). In 1743 or thereabouts Pope was considering an epic poem "wholly on civil and ecclesiastical government. The hero is a prince who establishes an empire. That prince is our Brutus from Troy, and the scene of the establishment, England." Spence, no. 343. 8. Spence, nos. 29 and 30. Pope refers to this translation in The Dunciad (1743), I, 141: "Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great."

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he tacked together "a kind of play" out of speeches from the Iliad connected with verses of his own. Pope cast his classmates in the various roles, and we know that he even "prevailed on the Master's Gardener to represent Ajax; and contrived to have all the actors dressed after the pictures in his favourite Ogilby."9 It is an amusing example of nature's imitating art. The task of translating Homer was ominously large. The decision to go forward with it was not so much made as developed inevitably over at least five or six years. Pope's elderly friend Sir William Trumbull wrote his nephew Ralph Bridges at Oxford in 1707, when Pope was nineteen, that "Little Pope is returned from Mr. Walsh's; and resolves to go on with translating of Homer."10 Trumbull refers to a number of short pieces that Pope had "taken out here & there according to his Fancy" and had shown him, mere episodes, like the challenging speech of Sarpedon to Glaucus from the twelfth Iliad, or his death in the sixteenth, or the arrival of Ulysses at Ithaca from the thirteenth Odyssey. These passages are already so well polished that Pope would include them with only minor revisions in the later translations. In a letter to the young Pope, Trumbull praises these pieces warmly, indicating he himself was well aware of their worth: "I must say (and I do it with an old-fashion'd sincerity) that I entirely approve of your Translation of those Pieces of Homer, both as to the versification and the true sense that shines thro' the whole" : nay I am confirmed in my former application to you, and give me leave to renew it upon this occasion, that you wou'd proceed in translating that incomparable Poet, to make him speak good English, to dress his admirable characters in your proper, significant, and expressive conceptions, and to make his works as useful and instructive to this degenerate age, as he was to our friend Horace, when he read him at Praeneste, Qui, quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non &c. I break off with that quid non? with which I confess I am charm'd. 11 9. Spence, no. 33; Warburton, IV, 17. 10. Quoted in TE, I, 353. 11. Corr., I, 45-46. Trumbull is quoting Horace's

Epistles

1.2.2-3.

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One might be charmed also by the intimate manner in which Trumbull introduces Horace almost as a living presence, "our friend." Homer, according to Horace, "tells us what is fair, what disgraceful, what is helpful, what not"; and on the quid non Trumbull breaks off. But could Pope make Homer "speak good English" where to Augustan taste three previous writers had failed? George Chapman's Elizabethan version of Homer, despite its nobility and insight, had long since gone out of fashion; Ogilby's and Hobbes's translations were poetically much inferior. Dryden had translated the first book of the Iliad, and "If it shall please God to give me longer life, and moderate health," he remarks in his "Preface to the Fables" (1700), "my intentions are to translate the whole Ilias." For "the Grecian is more according to my genius than the Latin poet . . . Virgil was of a quiet, sedate temper: Homer was violent, impetuous, and full of fire."12 But Dryden had translated the Aeneid, and one wonders whether here it was a matter of what Yeats would call the will seeking its opposite mask. Nevertheless, Dryden died shortly after declaring his intentions with Homer, and Pope must have recognized the need for completing an unfinished task. A number of Pope's short translations and imitations were published in the sixth part of Tonson's Poetical Miscellanies (1709), and it must have been during this time between 1707 and 1710 that he entertained thoughts of composing a florilegium of "all the most celebrated Greek poets by translating one of their best short pieces, at least, from each of them : a hymn of Homer, another of Callimachus, an ode or two from Pindar, and so on." It would have a historical perspective, "exhibiting a general view of their poesie, throughout its different ages." But the project collapsed, and "I engaged in the translation of the Iliad. What led me into that, which was a work so much more laborious and less suited to my inclination, was purely want of money. I had then none—not even to buy 12. Critical 274.

Essays,

ed. George Watson (London: J. M. Dent, 1 9 6 2 ) , II,

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books."13 The difference between recasting an epic and putting together a little anthology is obvious. One may question, however, why Pope should find himself less suited to the first. Perhaps he is being modest in offering such a judgment of himself late in life; and by 1743 he would know more certainly what he was most suited for. Yet this is only hindsight. We know from the correspondence he was embarrassed by his lack of proper scholarly training before the more learned University reviewers.14 Furthermore, such a task—and it would take years to carry through—demanded a commitment perhaps too large for a temperamental young man. If initial volumes failed, should he continue? There must have been genuine fears of inadequacy. In any case the motives must have been something more than acquisitive, even though financial success would enable him to override his religious disqualifications for a government post or pension and settle him securely in his career. His gamble paid off handsomely. Apart from his own sense of personal achievement and the international fame he won by his translations, each poem netted roughly £5,000. By comparison, the Essay on Criticism, and the final version of The Rape of the Lock were each sold for only £15. (Gay's Beggar's Opera, which was highly successful, earned not quite £700.) As Pope would boast in an imitation of a Horatian epistle : But (thanks to Homer) since I live and thrive, Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive. (Imit. Hor. Ep. II.ii.68-69) Pope's astute business sense, which he might have acquired from his father, is illustrated in this early venture. He only be13. Spence, no. 192; Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1782), II, 38. Warton adds that Pope would have included an "idyllium of Theocritus" in his anthology. 14. Corr., I, 220. "Some have said I am not a master in the Greek, who either are so themselves or are not. If they axe not, they can't tell; and if they are, they can't without having catechised me. But if they can read (for I know some criticks can, and others can't) there are fairly lying before them and all the world, some specimens of my translation from this author in the Miscellanies, which they axe heartily welcome to. I have also encountered much malignity on the score of religion." He goes on to discuss political antagonisms as well.

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gan translating when his advertisements for subscribers—the first was in October 1713—assured him of some profit. The contract with his publisher Bernard Lintot stipulated that he publish six annual volumes, each containing four books of the Iliad. Basic translating was done in the late spring and summer. Like Keats facing his own "trial of Invention" Endymion, Pope set himself fifty lines a day : "I fell into the method of translating thirty or forty verses before I got up, and piddled with it the rest of the morning." If he worked daily, and from his correspondence we know that he most often kept to his schedule, four books would take about two months. He jokes with Martha Blount, "When I am to be entertain'd only with that Jade whom every body thinks I love, as a Mistress, but whom in reality I hate as a Wife, my Muse. Pitty [sic] me, Madam, who am to lye in of a Poetical Child for at least two Months." Two summers later he complains of his being "Achilles's humble Servant these two Months (with the good Leave of all my Friends.)" 15 Yet his energy rarely flagged, and something of the dynamic style in which he paced himself is caught up in the poetry of translation. A translation of Homer, Matthew Arnold would say, must be "rapid." For his usual method of work Pope took advantage of what he called his "first heat" of concentrated activity: "The things that I have written fastest have always pleased most," he reminisced, "I wrote the Essay on Criticism f a s t . . . The Rape of the Lock was written fast . . . I wrote most of the Iliad fast." Much of the rough draft was done during summer travels, out of a little pocket Homer. For economy, "paper-sparing" Pope, to quote Swift's sobriquet, used only old scraps or the backs of letters and envelopes. For example, two-thirds of the letters we possess for 1719 are written on Homer manuscripts, which of course helps considerably in dating them, for Pope would be working on the last books during this time. During the fall and winter Pope would "correct" his work, first by the text, then by other translations, and finally, 15. Spence, no. 198;

COTT.,

I, 293, 408^109.

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"to give it a reading for the versification only."16 Thus, the famous verse 687 of the eighth Iliad, "As when in stillness of the silent night," became "As when the moon in all her lustre bright" before Pope (with the aid of Virgil! ) settled on "As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night." Publication was in the spring; only one volume, the fifth, was delayed and published with the sixth and last in May 1720.

% Pope's struggle to fit Homer's strung hexameters into his own closed pentameters is recorded at length in the correspondence and among the anecdotes, forming an extraordinary portrait of the artist. We enter again the gray area where the life shades into the work and the work helps create the style and ideals by which the life is lived. Let us concentrate on the translation of the Iliad. Alone it runs 19,000 lines, longer than all his other works put together. The metaphors he most frequently uses to describe his effort are lifted from Homer: most prominently, the journey and the battle. At the outset of the whole project he writes confidently to his friend Caryll, "Tis no comfortable prospect to be reflecting (as else I must) that so long a siege as that of Troy lies upon my hands, and the campaign above half over before I have made any progress. I must confess the Greek fortification does not appear so formidable as it did, upon a nearer approach." For Homer, he believes, "secretly seems inclined to correspond with me, in letting me into a good part of his designs." Yet Pope cannot resist the impulse to satirize and, in what will be the fashion of The Dunciad, mocks the "sort of underl[i]ng auxiliare to the difficulty of the work, called commentators and criticks, who would frighten many people by their number and bulk. These lie entrenched in the ditches, and are secure only in the dirt they have heaped about 'em." "Engaged 16. Spence, nos. 107 and 202. "After writing a poem one should correct it all over with one single view at a time. Thus for language, if an elegy: 'these lines are very good, but are not they of too heroical a strain?', and so vice versa. It appears very plainly from comparing parallel passages touched both in the Iliad and Odyssey that Homer did this, and 'tis yet plainer that Virgil did so, from the distinct styles he uses in his three sorts of poems. It always answers in him, and so constant an effect could not be the effect of chance." Spence, no. 391 (Pope to Spence, May 1730).

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in the fight," Pope will take the main works "by a more speedy and gallant way than by mining under ground; that is, by using the poetical engines, wings, and flying thither over their heads."17 A month later, however, the commentators are winning the day as Pope writes Thomas Parnell, who later would contribute an introductory "Life of Homer" and some of the notes: "The minute I lost you Eustathius with nine hundred pages, and nine thousand Contractions of the Greek Character Arose to my View-—Spondanus with all his Auxiliaries in Number a thousand pages (Value three Shillings) & Dacier's three Volumes, Barnes's two, Valterie's three, Cuperus half in Greek, Leo Allatius three parts in Greek, Scaliger, Macrobius, & (worse than 'em all) Aulus Gellius: All these Rushed upon my Soul at once & whelm'd me under a Fitt of the Head Ach, I curs'd them all Religiously, Damn'd my best friends among the rest, & even blasphem'd Homer himself" (25 May or 1 June 1714). 18 But later in the summer Pope's interest in his project had not waned. On 28 July 1714 he wrote to Jervas with whom he often stayed on his visits to London: "what can you expect from a man who has not talk'd these five days? who is withdrawing his thoughts as far as he can, from all the present world, its customs and its manners, to be fully possest and absorpt in the past? When people talk of going to Church, I think of Sacrifices and libations; when I see the parson, I address him as Chryses priest of Apollo; and instead of the Lord's Prayer, I begin —God of the silver Bow, &c. While you in the world are concerned about the Protestant Succession, I consider only how Menelaus may recover Helen, and the Trojan war be put to a speedy conclusion."19 Three weeks later Homer is advancing so fast that Pope urges his friend Jervas to hurry with the portrait-bust of Homer he plans to use as the frontispiece: "My Rêverie has been so deep," continues Pope, "that I have scarce had an interval to think of my self 17. 18. 19.

Corr., I, 2 1 9 - 2 2 0 . Corr., 1 , 2 2 5 . Corr., 1 , 2 4 0 .

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uneasy in the want of your company. I now and then just miss you as I step into bed; this minute indeed I want extremely to see you, the next I shall dream on nothing but the taking of Troy, or the recovery of Briséis."20 Maynard Mack points out that these periods of intense withdrawal, associated by Pope and Spence with "rapture" and "transport" (the rhetoric is from Longinus), and like experiences belong "among the phenomena of imagination with which the testimony of many poets has made us familiar." 21 Mack quotes from a well-known letter of Pope's : Like a witch, whose Carcase lies motionless on the floor, while she keeps her airy Sabbaths, & enjoys a thousand Imaginary Entertainments abroad, in this world, & in others, I seem to sleep in the midst of the Hurry, even as you would swear a Top stands still, when tis in the Whirle of its giddy motion. 'Tis no figure, but a serious truth I tell you when I say that my Days & Nights are so much alike, so equally insensible of any Moving Power but Fancy, that I have sometimes spoke of things in our family as Truths & real accidents, which I only Dreamt of; 8c again when some things that actually happen'd came into my head, have thought (till I enquir'd) that I had only dream'd of them. 22 So Pope wrote to Caryll late in 1712, and the experience reveals the intensity with which Pope could be absorbed in his project for days or weeks on end. "At the very least, one would expect to find," Mack writes, "the process had brought about some degree of interpénétration of Pope's world by Homer's, at all levels, in a way difficult, perhaps impossible, to assess or describe, but nevertheless important for the life of his imagination and his career as poet."23 Toward the end of that first summer of translation, "Homer's Image begins already to vanish from before me. The Season of the Campaigne before Troy is near over, and I rejoyce at the prospect of my Amusements in Winter-Quarters with You in 20. 21. 22. 23.

Corr., 1,243. TE, VII, ccxxiii. Corr., I, 163. TE, VII, ccxxiv.

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London," he writes in relief to Dr. Arbuthnot. And coming from Oxford, in a whimsical mood, he imagines no journey but rather an heroic march on London : "I who talk and command at this rate, am in danger of losing my horse, and stand in some fear of a country justice. To disarm me indeed may be but prudential, considering what armies I have at present on foot, and in my service : a Hundred thousand Grecians are no contemptible body."24 Pope refers to the current wave of anti-Catholic feeling following the accession of George I. Pope began the second summer's work with something less than enthusiasm. The anxieties and frustrations inherent in such an undertaking began to be felt. There is a short pasquinade, a "Farewell to LONDON," written probably toward the end of May 1715, in which he conveys his mixed feelings: London was hectic, yet exhilarating; Binfield will be restful and sober, but tedious : Dear, damn'd, distracting Town, farewell! Thy Fools no more I'll teize : This Year in Peace, ye Critics, dwell, Ye Harlots, sleep at Ease! Soft Β and rough C s, adieu! Earl Warwick make your Moan, The lively Η k and you May knock up Whores alone. To drink and droll be Rowe allow'd Till the third watchman toll; Let Jervase gratis paint, and Frowd Save Three-pence, and his Soul. Farewell Arbuthnot's Raillery On every learned Sot; And Garth, the best good Christian he, Altho' he knows it not. Lintot, farewell! thy Bard must go; Farewell, unhappy Tonson! Heaven gives thee for thy Loss of Rowe, Lean Philips, and fat Johnson. 24. Corr., I, 250, 246.

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Why should I stay? Both Parties rage; My vixen Mistress squalls; The Wits in envious Feuds engage; And Homer (damn him!) calls. (1-24) Later Pope referred to this time as one of "great pain and apprehensions," and although "I conquered the thoughts of it in the day, they would frighten me in the night." He describes a recurrent dream "of being engaged in a long journey and that I should never get to the end of it. This made so strong an impression upon me that I sometimes dream of it still [March 1743] : of being engaged in that translation and got about half way through it, and being embarrassed and under dreads of never completing it." There are even daydreams of self-torture : "In the beginning of my translating the Iliad I wished anybody would hang me, a hundred times."25 Pope planned his most strenuous work, his "Campaigne before Troy," for the summers, and one wonders whether in his own prescient way he did so in order to defeat depression. Surely the "first heat" of concentration and escapist travels, carried on simultaneously, must be related. Racing up and down the English countryside with his pocket Homer, a host of invitations, growing every year, and a self-imposed deadline of fifty lines a day, he best exemplifies what Mrs. Rackett later said to Spence "For you know, to speak plain to you, my brother has a maddish way with him." 26 He lived, and performed optimally, in the paradoxical combination of exhausting work and the relief of vacation—"The things that I have written fastest have always pleased most"—as if the high pressure of imagination needed a ready outlet. Pope resembles the sick man in Dante who keeps moving in bed to find comfort. (It is usually emphasized, I believe mistakenly, that because Pope was a meticulous reviser of his work he was slow in his initial composition as well. ) William Hazlitt remarked that Pope's "Muse never wandered with safety, but from his library to his grotto, or from his grotto into his 25. Spence, 110s. 193 and 197. "I listed my self in the battles of Homer, and I am no sooner in war, but like most other folks, I wish my self out again" ( Corr., I, 324). 26. Spence, no. 28.

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library back again." 27 Actually, he wandered far afield, and in the summer of 1717, as Sherburn notes, the "rambles were more numerous though not more extensive than in other years."28 This summer, we know from his correspondence, would be particularly difficult for Pope. He would be going over the top of the Iliad, the Great Battle, Books XIII through XVI : 2 June 1717 : "It is not to be exprest how heartily I wish the Death of Homer's Heroes, one after another. The Lord preserve me in the Day of Battle, which is just approaching!" 30 June 1717: "Having got rid of many businesses, Homer yet lies so heavy upon my hands . . . people will seldom read in a good humour, what a man writ in an ill one." 6 July 1717, to Parnell: "It is through your mediation that Homer is to be saved,—I mean my Homer, and if you could yet throw some hours away, rather upon me than him, in suggesting some remarks upon his 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th books, it would be charitable beyond expression; for I am very backward in this year's task, through the interruption of many different cares and distractions." 6 August 1717, to Caryll: "But, at worst, see you will I, this summer; tho' friends and enemies oppose, and tho' pleasure and business intervene; Homer with all his gods has not the force to control me." 8 September 1717, on reading Geoffrey of Monmouth's British History in its first translation : "Ajax and Hector are no more, compared to Corinaeus and Arthur, than the Guelphs and Ghibellines were to the Mohocks of ever-dreadful memory. This amazing Writer has made me lay aside Homer for a Week, and when I take him up again, I shall be very well prepared to translate with belief and reverence of the Speech of Achilles' s Horse." Pope seemed to have exhausted all his nervous energy. By September he had not reached his goal. Next summer he would accomplish even less. Yet during these same months of 1717 Pope kept up a frantic pace of travel. "In short, if I stay at home," he writes in early June to Caryll at his estate in Sussex, "I shall do nothing; I must go abroad to follow my business; and if Ladyholt shades afford me protection, it is there Homer's battles must be fought." 29 Yet 27. Quoted by Sherburn, p. 210. 28. Ibid. 29. Corr., 1,411.

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the young saloneur of twenty-nine writes Caryll two months later, apologizing for not yet coming to Ladyholt : I have been indispensably obliged to pass some days at almost every house along the Thames; half my acquaintance being upon the breaking up of Parliament become my neighbours. After some attendance on my Lord Burlington, I have been at the Duke of Shrewsbury's, Duke of Argyle's, Lady Rochester's, Lord Percival's, Mr. Stonor's, Lord Winchelsea's, Sir Godfrey Kneller's (who has made me a fine present of a picture) and Dutchess Hamilton's. All these have indispensable claims to me, under penalty of the imputation of direct rudeness, living within 2 hours sail of Chiswick. Then am I obliged to pass some days between my Lord Bathurst's, and three or four more on Windsor side. Thence to Mr. Dancastle, and my relations on Bagshot Heath. I am also promised three months ago to the Bishop of Rochester for 3 days on the other side of the water. Besides all this, two of my friends have engaged to be here a week; and into this computation I don't reckon Dr Arbuthnot and others in town, who have an immediate jurisdiction over me. In a word, the minute I can get to you, I will.30 One might think of the maxim of La Rochefoucauld : "the deference we pay to princes is a second self-love." By October, when Pope was back in London and a great cold had set in, he had still not visited his old friend Caryll. Such behavior may qualify Pope's sincerity in a comment made ten years later to Hugh Bethel that "one's chief business is to be really at home." 31 Paul Fussell has taken this remark quite rightly as a statement of the humanist ethic, yet with Pope it should be remembered that the ideal was often more honored in the breach than in the observance. 32 In achievements of such scope as Pope's "Homer," perseverance accounts almost as much for success as does genius. The 30. Corr., I, 417—418. 31. Corr., II, 386. 32. Paul Fussell, The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 266: "a remark w h i c h implies most of the Augustan attitude towards man's moral duties within the overwhelming, uncomprehensible universe i n which he finds himself."

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last two years of labor on the Iliad were the most trying. When his father died suddenly in October 1717, Pope had to console his aging mother; with her he thought of moving their residence from busy Chiswick, to which they had moved only two years before; possibly a town house in London was considered at this time. Pope fell ill in the winter of 1718, quite seriously to judge from a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. But already in August 1718 he complains of having "two or three fits (and pretty long ones) of illness, 2 or 3 journeys, many and continual interruptions of business and company, much application to Homer, and what not?" He accepted an invitation from Lord Harcourt to sojourn at his country estate Stanton Harcourt, and there he went into hiding, "in a desert incognito," from friends and neighbors. Harcourt even provided him with "a lone house" where he could proceed with his translation in peace. 33 On a pane of red stained glass in his lofty chamber at Stanton Harcourt, Pope inscribed the fact that "In the year 1718 Alexander Pope finished here the Fifth Volume of Homer."34 In October he wrote Caryll again that the volume was "in a manner finished."35 In the next and last year few letters remain. It was in this year that Pope contemplated his retirement as a miles emeritus, a distinguished veteran of Homer's battles, in search of "deliverance from poetry and slavery." At least there was tangible booty, for Pope had used his earnings to lease a country villa, just a few miles upstream from London, yet far enough away for privacy, in Twickenham. Ì. In Les mots et les choses Michel Foucault so well arranges our ideas of "the order of things" in the neoclassical period that it is difficult to dispute his basic argument. 36 But while neoclassical writers share a belief in "general nature" and man, they discriminate nicely over their affirmation. Several conceptions, for example, are brought together and typically harmonized in the Essay on Criticism: 33. Corr., I, 4 8 3 - 4 8 4 . 34. Ε-C, IX, 14. 35. Corr., I, 518. 36. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses chapters 3 - 4 .

(Paris: Gallimard, 1 9 6 6 ) ,

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First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same : Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang'd, and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art. ( 68-73 ) Images of light, of permanence and unity, and of divinity and infallibility suggest the Judeo-Christian godhead—one that the neoplatonic associations support. In the first line the word "frame" is borrowed from carpentry and architecture; this word and like metaphors of conscious fabrication are employed in An Essay on Man to express the underlying structure of the Newtonian universe, as firm and solid as a building, "Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame" (III, 317). 37 Another conception of Nature informs the brief description of Virgil's first efforts at poetry : When first young Maro in his boundless Mind A Work t' outlast Immortal Rome design'd, Perhaps he seem'd above the Critick's Law, And but from Nature's Fountains scorn'd to draw : But when t'examine ev'ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. (130-135) "Boundless" initially prepares the reader for Homer, but in the neoclassic aesthetic that word can be taken pejoratively, implying wild and unrestrainted poetic license. But early authors may be excused; they were first in the field and staked large claims. For Homer is one of those originals—Pindar is another —who "From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part, / And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art." For poets that follow after, "beware !" Or if you must offend Against the Precept, ne'er transgress its End, Let it be seldom, and compelí'd by Need, 37. Martin Kallich, Heav'n's First Law: Rhetoric and Order in Pope's Essay on Man (De Kalb, 111.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1967), chapter 2.

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Why, one may ask, cannot Virgil imitate the boldness of Homer up to Homer's own limits or beyond them? The critical act has supervened in the growing consciousness of the tradition: 38 Convinc'd, amaz'd, he checks the bold Design, And Rules as strict his labour'd Work confine, As if the Stagyrite o'erlook'd each Line. Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; To copy Nature is to copy Them. ( 136-140) The same advice is given the young poet of The Temple of Fame. In An Essay on Criticism, Homer and Virgil stand metaphorically for the two ends of a tradition. Each symbolizes himself and his personal endeavor, his epic, and the complex relation between himself and the tradition to which he belongs. The myth of Homer as the poet of nature opposed to conscious art, as the first, the original, and the parent of Western poetic tradition is one of the hallmarks of classicism : Be Homer's Works your Study, and Delight, Read them by Day, and meditate by Night, Thence form your Judgment, thence your Maxims bring, And trace the Muses upward to their Spring; Still with It self compar'd, his Text peruse; And let your Comment be the Mantuan Muse. (124-129) Far from being an original, actually Homer was late, and he would have thought himself more nearly as the last of a tradition, coming at the end of centuries of epic development, just before the transition from oral to written verse. "If there is one thing evident in the Iliad," Cedric Whitman writes on the structure of the Iliad, more elaborate than any post-Virgilian sense of rules, "it is the self-conscious control of a mature artist." 39 38. "Critics w h o stress the imitation of nature," Northrop Frye points out in a perceptive essay, "usually have a strong respect for tradition." "Nature and Homer," in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology, ed. Northrop Frye ( N e w York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), p. 43. 39. Whitman, Homer and the Homeric Tradition, p. 14; see also pp. 58-64.

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But this is a historical "Homer," one that had its origins in the later eighteenth century in F. A. Wolf's Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795). Could Pope have an understanding of this Homer? The historical Homer is adumbrated in Thomas Blackwell's Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, which, we know, Pope read only weeks after its publication in 1735. Blackwell describes Homer's milieu as a time when primitive folk "lived naturally," when their language did not consist of the "Prattle, and little pretty Forms that enervate our polished Speech." Pope could agree; in Blackwell, according to Spence's cryptic note, he found "n[othin]g new."40 Pope's spirited preface to the Iliad, written for the first volume in 1715, is among his finest prose essays. The topic sentence sets the trajectory that the essay will follow : "Homer is universally allow'd to have had the greatest Invention of any Writer whatever."41 Since the word invention recurs frequently in the preface and is so thoroughly bound up with Pope's conception of Homer, it is worthwhile to study its meaning for a moment. It should be taken in its Latin sense, invenire, to find or to come upon, even to discover. "Those R U L E S of old," Pope warned in the Essay on Criticism, were "discover'd, not devis'd." They were perceived as forms external to the mind and as objective principles governing reality—as objective as Newton's laws. To swerve from those rules meant to destroy the relation between cause and effect and to distort, in short, artistic probability. Such rules could not be created out of the artistic imagination or devised in any way. If such language appears too abstract, it was meant to rationalize and preserve a concrete hold on reality. "Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible," writes Auerbach on Homer's Odyssey; "and not less clear—wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor—are the feelings and thoughts of the persons involved."42 "In different 40. Spence, no. 196. 41. TE, VII, 3. On Pope's preface and his preference for Homer over Virgil in particular, see D. H. Rawlinson, The Practice of Criticism (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 145-146. 42. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1957), p. 2.

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degrees," continues Pope, invention "distinguishes all great Genius's: The utmost Stretch of human Study, Learning, and Industry, which master every thing besides, can never attain to this." The faculty of invention "furnishes Art with all her Materials, and without it Judgment itself can at best but steal wisely." In such a capacity for invention Homer is "yet unrival'd." (Ten years later, Pope, after laboring on his critical edition of the plays, revised his opinion in favor of Shakespeare. ) Invention furnishes conscious art with her materials, experience furnishes invention, and Lockean psychological principles provide Pope with a convenient intellectual model. The emphasis is on sight—on that which can best be measured, tested, ascertained. Homer's characters are drawn with "so visible and surprising a Variety" that we are given "lively and affecting Impressions of them." Moreover, "if we observe his Descriptions, Images, and Similes, we shall find the Invention still predominant . . . To what else can we ascribe that vast Comprehension of Images of every sort, where we see each Circumstance of art and Individual of Nature summon'd together by the Extent and Fecundity of his Imagination; to which all things, in their various Views, presented themselves in an Instant, and had their Impressions taken off to Perfection at a Heat?" Pope explains the aesthetic and moral purpose to which Homer put his faculty of invention. In a note to the Iliad XIV he vindicated Homer against critics who fault him for piling up comparisons to express the Trojan struggle with Neptune in the battle at the Greek ships : Not half so loud the bellowing Deeps resound, When stormy Winds disclose the dark Profound; Less loud the Winds, that from th' Aeolian Hall Roar thro' the Woods, and make whole Forests fall; Less Loud the Woods, when Flames in Torrents pour, Catch the dry Mountain, and its Shades devour. (XIV, 457-462) To those who object that the "principle Object is lost amidst too great a Variety of different Images," Pope responds with

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the aid of Longinus to the effect that the "principle Image is more strongly impress'd on the Mind by the Multiplication of Similes, which are the natural product of an Imagination labouring to express something very vast: But finding no single idea sufficient to answer its Conceptions, it endeavours by redoubling the Comparisons to supply this Defect." Elsewhere, as when Hector's horses are racing in pursuit of Patroclus and the Trojan armies are urging Hector on, Homer interrupts the action with the following descriptive simile : when in Autumn Jove his Fury pours, And Earth is loaden with incessant Show'rs, (When guilty Mortals break th' eternal Laws, And Judges brib'd, betray the righteous Cause ) 43 From their deep Beds he bids the Rivers rise, And opens all the Floodgates of the Skies : Th' impetuous Torrents from their Hills obey, Whole fields are drown'd, and Mountains swept away; Loud roars the Deluge till it meets the Main; And trembling Man sees all his Labours vain ! (XVI, 466-475) In a note to these lines Pope comments that the passage is one, "among a thousand Instances," of Homer's "indirect and oblique manner of introducing moral Sentences and Instructions. These agreeably break in upon his Reader even in Descriptions and poetical Parts, where one naturally expects only Painting and Amusement. We have Virtue put upon us by Surprize, and are pleas'd to find a thing where we should never have look'd to meet with it." Pope goes on to repay an old poetical debt: "I must do a noble English Poet [Sir John Denham] the justice to observe, that it is this particular Art that is the very distinguishing Excellence of Cooper's-Hill, throughout which, the Descrip43. Pope had already "imitated" Homer's ability to juxtapose human values and natural occurrences in order that the one highlights the other in The Rape of the Lock: Mean while declining from the Noon of Day, The Sun obliquely shoots his burning Ray; The hungry Judges soon the Sentence sign, And Wretches hang that Jury-men may Dine; The Merchant from th' Exchange returns in Peace, And the long Labours of the Toilette cease—(III, 19-24)

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tions of Places, and Images rais'd by the Poet, are still tending to some Hint, or leading into some Reflection, upon moral Life or political Institution." In his own early Windsor-Forest, modeled on Cooper's Hill, Pope hoped his description would accomplish a similar end. 44 A psychological model in which the mind is likened to a screen on which the images or impressions of sense experience are projected seems primitive indeed. Nevertheless, in its crude, empirical fashion, it may serve to buttress the classical precept that the artist should not create but rather copy nature. The Iliad and the Odyssey appear like a wild paradise rather than an ordered garden because Homer lived when the world was in a less cultured or less cluttered state. Shakespeare, too, according to Dryden, lived at a time when "all the images of Nature were still present to him." As Pope wrote to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu when she was traveling through the Near East in June 1717: "You are now glowing under the Climate that animated him; you may see his Images rising more boldly about you, in the very Scenes of his story and action; you may lay the immortal work on some broken column of a Hero's Sepulcher, and read the Fall of Troy in the Shade of a Trojan Ruin." With his letter Pope sent his third volume of the Iliad (IX-XII) for, if Lady Mary did not wish to visit the places herself, no matter, "you may at least, at ease, in your own Window, contemplate the Fields of Asia, in such a dim & remote prospect, as you have of Homer in my Translation." 45 Ì. Homer's unsurpassed invention is made the central argument of the preface. Fire is its recurrent image. The critic Longinus had supplied the rhetoric of fire and light in his discussion of Homer, Demosthenes, and Plato in On the Sublime. There he 44. "I could wish you tryd something in the descriptive way," Pope writes to Judith Cowper, "on any Subject you please, mixd with Vision & Moral; like the Pieces of the old Provençal Poets . . . I have long had an inclination to tell a Fairy tale; the more wild & exotic the better, therfore a Vision, which is confined to no rules of probability, will take in all the Variety & luxuriancy of Description you will. Provided there be an apparent

moral to it." Corr., II, 202. 45. Corr., I, 406-407.

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describes that impassioned elevation of mind that "strikes like lightning" and in "speed, power and intensity . . . can by fire consume and carry away all before him" (XII). So Pope speaks of Homer's "unequall'd Fire and Rapture" so "forcible . . . that no Man of a true Poetical Spirit is Master of himself while he reads him." As would Arnold years later, Pope emphasizes Homer's rapid movement, "The course of his Verses resembles that of the Army he describes . . . 'They pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it'" (11.780). Taking an image from the chariot of Ezekiel ( 1:20 ), Pope claims that Homer's imagination "grows in the Progress both upon himself and others, and becomes on Fire like a Chariot-Wheel, by its own Rapidity." Other poets have "Exact Disposition, just Thought, correct Elocution, polish'd Numbers," but this "Poetical Fire, this Vivida vis animi," is found only "in a very few." Virgil, for example, has fire, "but discern'd through a Glass, reflected from Homer, more shining than fierce." In Shakespeare, the fire, "strikes before we are aware, like an accidental Fire from Heaven." In Milton, the fire "glows like a Furnace kept up to an uncommon ardor by the Force of Art." Only in Homer, however, does the fire burn "every where clearly, and every where irresistibly." All aspects of Homer reveal invention welded by fire : fable, characters, speeches, descriptions, images, and similes are each enumerated. And, "on whatever side we contemplate Homer," Pope concludes, "what principally strikes us is his Invention." At one point, invention and fire are brought together in a simile : "Like Glass in a Furnace which grows to a greater Magnitude, and refines to a greater Clearness, only as the Breath within is more powerful, and the Heat more intense." In short, Homer seems "like his own Jupiter in his Terrors, shaking Olympus, scattering the Lightnings, and firing the Heavens." Anyone wishing to translate the Iliad or the Odyssey, Pope advises, must "above all things . . . keep alive that Spirit and Fire which makes his chief character." Of the three complete translations of Homer before him, Pope disparages Hobbes's and Ogilby's as "too mean for criticism," but Chapman's, despite

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its "fustian," nonetheless must be allowed that "daring and fiery Spirit that animates his Translation." Fire serves as a metaphor for the heroic ideal; it symbolizes the personal or social animus and the imaginative vision by which it is lived. The heroic life was never led so much in life as in the imagination, but that does not lessen its worth. Homer himself says that the men in his own times are not half so strong as his heroes.46 Longinus and Pope both appropriated the metaphor of fire from Homer's epics. In the Iliad alone the image recurs two hundred times and in most cases it is a focal, not an incidental, image. Homer employs fire as a symbol of the war in general, the clash of individual heroes, or the tragic vision that comes of Achilles' wrath, the wrath itself also symbolized most frequently by fire. The metaphor is first mentioned in the sacrifice of Chryses to Apollo, which is the initial incident of the plot: If e'er with Wreaths I hung thy sacred Fane, Or fed the Flames with Fat of Oxen slain; God of the Silver Bow ! thy Shafts employ, Avenge thy Servant, and the Greeks destroy.

(I, 57-60)

Shortly afterward, the Greeks are burning their funeral pyres as Apollo avenges the seizure of Chryseis; there are many funeral pyres in the Iliad: in Book VIII, the gathering of the dead; in Book XXIII, the funeral of Patroclus; and in Book XXIV, the funeral of Hector. Again and again we see the "Living Fire" in the eyes of angry Agamemnon (I, 130); Achilles recognizes Athena "by the Flames that Sparkle from her Eyes" (I, 268); and Achilles' eyes "flash incessant like a Stream of Fire" when he is presented with his new armor: the Hero kindles at the Show, And feels with Rage divine his Bosom glow: From his fierce Eye-balls living Flames expire, Andflashincessant like a Stream of Fire : He turns the radiant Gift; and feeds his Mind On all th' immortal Artist had design'd. (XIX, 19-24) 46. Iliad, V, 371; XII, 539 (Pope's translation).

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In one passage that Pope particularly admired, the Greek campfires are reflected by the walls of Troy, a dim presage of catastrophe : So many Flames before proud Ilion blaze, And lighten glimm'ring Xanthus with their Rays. The long Reflections of the distant Fires Gleam on the Walls, and tremble on the Spires. (VIII, 699-702) In the Great Battle when the Trojans attempt to set fire to the Greek ships, Hector "fires his Host with loud repeated Cries": A dreadful Gleam from his bright Armour came, And from his Eye-balls flash'd the living Flame; He moves a God, resistless in his Course, And seems a Match for more than mortal Force. (XII, 555-558) Later, as Cedric Whitman comments, Hector is compared to a "blazing eagle, so that in his most victorious moment, his fire is joined by the bird of Zeus," who gives him victory.47 Two of Hector's four horses are named Aithon (blazing) and Lampus (torch). Jupiter casts a fiery splendor around Hector: "Now all on fire for Fame; his Breast, his Eyes / Burn at each Foe, and single ev'ry Prize" (XV, 740-741). Jupiter's own might is likened to thunder and lightning, as in the famous passage where he weighs the fates of the Greeks and Trojans: But when the Sun the Height of Heav'n ascends; The Sire of Gods his golden Scales suspends, With equal Hand : In these explor'd the Fate Of Greece and Troy, and pois'd the mighty Weight. Press'd with its Load the Grecian Balance lies Low sunk on Earth, the Trojan strikes the Skies. Then Jove from Ida's Top his Horrors spreads; The Clouds burst dreadful o'er the Grecian Heads Thick Light'nings flash; the mutt'ring Thunder rolls; Their Strength he withers, and unmans their Souls. Before his Wrath the trembling Hosts retire; The God in Terrors, and the Skies on fire. (VIII, 87-98) 47. Whitman, Homer and the Homeric Tradition,

p. 132.

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The typical image of the rout, as Whitman observes, is a forest fire: As when a Flame the winding Valley fills, And runs on crackling Shrubs between the Hills; Then o'er the Stubble up the Mountain flies, Fires the high Woods, and blazes to the Skies, This way and that, the spreading Torrent roars; So sweeps the Hero thro' the wasted Shores. (XX, 569-574) Achilles' shield, the image of man's cosmos, is forged in our presence by Hephaestus, god of fire. In the poetry of Pope, metaphors of fire, lightning, and thunder often inform a context with an heroic ideal. In The Rape of the Lock the battle of the sexes takes on Homeric overtones : So when bold Homer makes the Gods engage, And heav'nly Breasts with human Passions rage; 'Gainst Pallas, Mars; Latona, Hermes arms; And all Olympus rings with loud Alarms. Jove's Thunder roars, Heav'n trembles all around; Blue Neptune storms, the bellowing Deeps resound; Earth shakes her nodding Tow'rs, the Ground gives way; And the pale Ghosts start at the Flash of Day!48 (V,45-52) The metaphor is present in passages of his later poetry in which he attempts to mythologize certain aspects of his life. Thus, the heroic ideal characterizes his inner circle of friends, the Achilles-like "Chiefs, out of War," and noble "Statesmen, out of Place." There are several catalogues in the poetry, functioning like a roll call of heroes in Homer. In his imitation of the 48. Cf. Pope's Iliad: Such War th' Immortals wage: Such Horrors rend The World's vast Concave, when the Gods contend. First silver-shafted Phaebus took the Plain Against blue Neptune, Monarch of the Main: The God of Arms his Giant Bulk display'd, Oppos'd to Pallas, War's triumphant Maid. Against Latona march'd the Son of May; The quiver'd Dian, Sister of the Day. (XX, 8 9 - 9 6 )

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first satire of Horace's second book (1733), Pope inserts a passage for which there is no parallel in the original : There St. John mingles with my friendly Bowl, The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul : And He, who Lightning pierc'd th' Iberian Lines, Now, forms my Quincunx, and now ranks my Vines, Or tames the Genius of the stubborn Plain, Almost as quickly, as he conquer'd Spain. ( 127-132 ) The parallel exists with Homer. The ritualistic friendly bowl derives from the numerous feasts, particularly those in the Odyssey, but also from the "Foaming Bowl" that Sarpedon recalls as a symbol of noble fellowship in the midst of battle. "He" in the third line is Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, who captured Barcelona and Valencia (1705—1706) in the War of the Spanish Succession. Then, most Jove-like, he hurled lightning against his foes. How could Mordaunt adjust to his new life? Now, to cite Milton, "peace hath her victories / No less renowned than war," and Mordaunt's heroic ideal need not end. If swords are beaten into plowshares, Peterborough still "forms," "ranks," and "tames the stubborn Plain," as military metaphors are employed in an agricultural setting. In the second dialogue of the Epilogue to the Satires ( 1738 ) Pope includes another roll call of his friends. One fine couplet bears out plainly to what uses retreat may be put: Oft in the clear, still Mirrour of Retreat, I study'd SHREWSBURY, the wise and great :

( 78-79 )

In solitude, nonetheless, one must study and prepare for an active life; Horace had recommended it in the Ars Poetica (308316). Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, was a case in point. He had been a Secretary of State, an Ambassador to France, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Chamberlain, and Lord Treasurer. Cincinnatus-like, he had retired from active life on several occasions, yet he returned to it as he was needed, thus serving as a symbol of the higher unity of the active and contemplative life. The next couplet treats the problem from another perspective :

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Alexander Pope CARLETON'S calm Sense, and STANHOPE'S noble Flame, Compar'd, and knew their gen'rous End the same : How pleasing ATTERBURY'S softer hour! How shin'd the Soul, unconquer'd in the Tow'r! How can I PULT'NEY, CHESTERFIELD forget, While Roman Spirit charms, and Attic Wit : ARGYLE, the State's whole Thunder born to wield, And shake alike the Senate and the Field. (80-87)

To point out one of the antitheses in the passage, Lord Carleton's "Sense" is contrasted with the "Flame" of James Earl Stanhope, though both men are shown to realize that the particular qualities and talents that each brings to his office are aligned by shared ideals. Marlborough's general, the Duke of Argyle, is likened to Jupiter in battle or in council. In his "Verses on a Grotto," Pope describes the company at Twickenham in the 1730's and early 1740's : Approach : But aweful ! Lo th' Aegerian Grott, Where, nobly-pensi ve, ST. JOHN sate and thought; Where British Sighs from dying WYNDHAM stole, And the bright Flame was shot thro' MARCHMOUNT'S Soul. Let such, such only, tread this sacred Floor, Who dare to love their country, and be poor. ( 9-14 ) The goddess Egeria made prophecies to Numa Pompilius; a high calling for the Augustan poet in his Grotto is symbolized in the allusion. "Nobly-pensive" Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, is, like Nestor, deep in thought; Sir William Wyndham, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Queen Anne and a leader of the Tory Opposition, had died recently (1740), and his death is lamented after heroic fashion by the race. Hugh Hume, Earl of Marchmount, a prominent member of the Whig Opposition, is described with one of Homer's frequently cited formulae, "the bright Flame." In the First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated, Pope includes a character portrait of the ideal type of his circle : Great without Title, without Fortune bless'd, Rich ev'n when plunder'd, honour'd while oppress'd, Lov'd without youth, and follow'd without power,

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At home tho' exil'd, free, tho' in the Tower. In short, that reas'ning, high, immortal Thing, Just less than Jove, and much above a King, Nay half in Heav'n—except (what's a mighty odd ) A Fit of Vapours clouds this Demi-god. ( 181-188 ) Achilles-like, Pope's archetypal public man endures his exile by conquering himself. We forget that in the heroic tradition the final glory of the hero is that he should conquer, and thus become, himself. "Antony / Will be himself."49 All these catalogues and portraits of course include by implication the poet host, who will record their imperishable fame and champion an ideal type that is beyond factional self-interest. Horace had set down as his motto Uni aequus virtuti atque eius amicis. As Pope imitates the Une in his own emblematic type: T o VIRTUE ONLY a n d HER FRIENDS, A FRIEND,

The World beside may murmur, or commend. (Imit. Hor. Sat. II.i.121-122) One might expect heroic imagery to inform Pope's most personal of poems, the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,50 At its outset, the great poet is besieged by amateur poets and critics: Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu'd I said, Tye up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead, The Dog-star rages ! nay 'tis past a doubt, All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out : Fire in each eye, and Papers in each hand, They rave, recite, and madden round the land. What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide? They pierce my Thickets, thro' my Grot they glide, 49. Antony and Cleopatra, 1.1.42, 57-59; 3.13.187; 4.15.14-17; 'Tor Brutus only overcame himself," Julius Caesar, 5.5.56; "Samson hath quit himself / Like Samson, and heroicly hath finish'd / A life Heroic," Samson Agonistes, 1709-1711. 50. "Personal" in a very special sense: "All I had to say of my Writings is contained in m y Preface to the first of these Volumes [TE, I, 3-10], printed for J. Tonson, and B. Lintot in year 1717: And all I have to say of Myself will be found in my last Epistle [to Dr. Arbuthnot]." Preface to volume 2 of the edition of Works (London, 1735).

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Metaphors of ambush and self-defense figure prominently and form the antitheses of this dire dilemma, irreconcilable, and hence a matter of either victory or defeat. Images of piercing, gliding through, renewing the charge with weapons of paper and with the appropriate "Fire in each eye" are balanced against Pope's guarding, hiding, shutting out. Perhaps he protests too much; one suspects that at times he loved to resist such attention, that he wanted the pleasure of turning down the multitude. As Johnson said of Pope's scorn of the beau monde, for example, "It is too often repeated to be real." On the subject of fire and the heroic ideal, it is worthwhile to note how that ideal involves itself in another shopworn Augustan antithesis, fire and art, or imagination and refinement. In the Pastorals, published in 1709, Pope is already praising "The Art of Terence, and Menander's Fire" ("Autumn," 8). Later in the Epistle to Mr. Jervas, with Dryden's Translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting (1716), Pope links Jervas with Fresnoy's French "art" and himself with Dryden's "native fire": Read these instructive leaves, in which conspire Fresnoy's close art, and Dryden's native fire : And reading wish, like theirs, our fate and fame, So mix'd our studies, and so join'd our name, Like them to shine thro' long succeeding age, So just thy skill, so regular my rage. (7-12) Does not Pope imply by "native fire" the energetic spirit of English poetic tradition—of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden—over against the French refinement? He does hope for himself a mutual friendship with Jervas, that their opposing values and ideals will become "mix'd" and "join'd." The doctrine of concordia discors is invoked (Pope disliked discarding any valuable critical principle that could be assimilated). For if Pope has "rage" (that is, fire), at any rate it is "regular." He at last has been able to temper the values of imagination and

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correctness to a degree finer than previous authors in his tradition. A similar antithesis is articulated in the Epistle to Augustus (1737). There we read of "Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire" ( 2 7 4 ) , referring to the scrupulous art of Racinian tragedy and the emotional passion and heroic proportions of Corneille's protagonists. A little further on another antithesis, between abundance and measure, is stated: Ev'n copious Dryden, wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest Art, the Art to blot.

( 280-281 )

Pope, being next and last in the tradition, would not forget. Ì.

"Perhaps I shall not seem tedious, my friend," wrote Longinus, "if I bring forward one passage more from Homer—this time with regard to the concerns of men—in order to show that he is wont himself to enter into the sublime actions of his heroes" (On the Sublime, IX). The spirit of heroic idealism, of imaginatively entering "into the sublime actions of his heroes," came to be the noblest and most lasting influence Homer exerted on Pope, and it was this spirit that Pope used as his absolute standard and this spirit that he imparted to his translations. Framing Homer's rapid strung hexameters into his own end-stopped couplets, portraying one image by another, and aligning idea to idea involved a reinterpretation and re-creation of Homer's world for Augustan England. And yet the Homeric spirit does not become translated out of Pope's versions. Even Arnold, who criticized the way in which Pope poured the spirit of Homer into the "literary and rhetorical crucible" of the couplet, praised the "real nobleness" of Pope's Iliad, and this quality, Arnold urges, is the stamp of the grand style. 51 The emphasis Pope placed on invention and the symbol of fire has been observed. But Homer had objectified the heroic ideal chiefly through character, and Pope concentrates on just this aspect of his work. 51. "On Translating Homer," in The Complete Ρ rose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R.T. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), I, 109, 142.

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By the time Pope was nineteen he had already translated passages from the Iliad, including the aristeia of Sarpedon. At the head of a band of Lycians, Sarpedon had come to the aid of Troy and, like most heroes, sought for glory on the battlefield. Perhaps because he seldom enters into the action of the poem, his impassioned charge to his cousin Glaucus stands out the more boldly. It obviously struck the young Pope as a touchstone for heroic vision. He published his "Episode of Sarpedon" first in 1709, but the final version is preferred; it is a passage, writes Arnold, "of strong emotion and oratorical movement": Why boast we, Glaucus! our extended Reign, Where Xanthus' Streams enrich the Lycian Plain, Our num'rous Herds that range the fruitful Field, And Hills where Vines their purple Harvest yield, Our foaming Bowls with purer Nectar crown'd, Our Feasts enhanc'd with Music's sprightly Sound? Why on those Shores are we with Joy survey'd, Admir'd as Heroes, and as Gods obey'd? Unless great Acts superior Merit prove, And vindicate the bount'ous Pow'rs above. 'Tis ours, the Dignity they give, to grace; The first in Valour, as the first in Place. That when with wond'ring Eyes our martial Bands Behold our Deeds transcending our Commands, Such, they may cry, deserve the sov'reign State, Whom those that envy, dare not imitate ! (XII, 371-386) The richly pictorial images briefly open to a pastoral world. Its very plenitude and beauty, depicted colorfully at the harvest, intensify the sacrifice Sarpedon makes to his ideal. He convinces Glaucus, who serves as our surrogate, that the world is well lost to a vision of merited personal fame and aidos, a type of mutual responsibility and public commitment. "First in Place," he must prove likewise "first in Valour," his inner standard transcending the limitations set upon others, who "dare not imitate." He is emboldened to the point of defeating death itself because he knows that his deeds, when sung, will live in the memory of his race ;

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Could all our Care elude the gloomy Grave, Which claims no less the fearful than the brave, For Lust of Fame I should not vainly dare In fighting Fields, nor urge thy Soul to War. But since, alas! ignoble Age must come, Disease, and Death's inexorable Doom; The Life which others pay, let us bestow, And give to Fame what we to Nature owe; Brave tho' we fall, and honour'd if we live, Or let us Glory gain, or Glory give ! (XII, 387-396) Sarpedon is mortal, but his father is Zeus himself, and there is something godlike to his heroic vision. It could not have been lost on Glaucus, who earlier had likened the generations of men to falling leaves (VI, 181). When Sarpedon dies at the hands of Patroclus in the sixteenth Iliad, there is hardly time to dispute his body on the field. Zeus rains down a bloody dew in lamentation and commands Apollo to convey the body to Sleep and Death, who return it to his native Lycia "where endless Honours wait the sacred Shade." In the Rape of the Lock Sarpedon's speech is parodied closely, but gently. While the sentiments are applied to the battle between the sexes, they nonetheless are used to express the moral ideal of the poem. As the purest Clarissa says : How vain are all these Glories, all our Pains, Unless good Sense preserve what Beauty gains : That Men may say, when we the Front-box grace, Behold the first in Virtue, as in Face ! Oh ! if to dance all Night, and dress all Day, Charm'd the Small-pox, or chas'd old Age away; Who would not scorn what Huswife's Cares produce, Or who would learn one earthly Thing of Use? To patch, nay ogle, might become a Saint, Nor could it sure be such a Sin to paint. But since, alas! frail Beauty must decay, Curl'd or uncurl'd, since Locks will turn to grey, Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade, And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid; What then remains, but well our Pow'r to use, And keep good Humour still whate' er we lose? (V. 1 5 - 3 0 )

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Beginning in line 18, where in The Rape the word "Face" substitutes happily for Sarpedon's "Place," we are aware that Clarissa is adapting the heroic ideal to her own, not ignoble, purpose. Her speech, furthermore, is not without life-or-death seriousness; and at least part of our pleasure in hearing her recapitulate Sarpedon's sentiments comes from a very paradoxical relation between the satire on, and the very appropriateness of, her heroic model. Achilles differs from Sarpedon in valuing a concept of personal integrity beyond glory—beyond merited glory—and in spurning aidos. In his bitter confrontation with Agamemnon and the other warlords, he calls into question their heroic code, finds it wanting, and sets forth an ethical position yet more heroic, but internalized. He rejects the traditional ideal—the fellowship of princes, the violence of struggle, the division of spoils, and fame sung through succeeding ages—all that Sarpedon had prized. At one time he would have accepted this code; indeed he had accepted it in coming to Troy. However, when Agamemnon violates the heroic ethic and greedily demands Achilles' own lawful prize Briséis (whom Achilles calls his wife), then Achilles repudiates all pretenses to military fame and privilege and claims a higher standard. For he himself will have "honor from Zeus"; he is no longer dependent on human values. "So, too, Lear enlarges his particular wrongs into the universal suffering of the universe," writes C. M. Bowra; "Achilles, the man of action, has paused for thought, and his thought has led him to an overpowering disgust with his life."52 Homer's problem is, thus, the ethicization of heroism; it is not so much the subjective question "to be, or not to be" as it is the objective "to act, or not to act," and the lesson he holds out for Pope's development is of grave import. Achilles' implacable wrath, symbolized by fire and the gray sea from which his mother springs, objectifies an internal debate between his personal ideal with the life it inspires him to lead, and the public responsibility he owes to his fellow Greeks. It was the very 52. C. M. Bowra, Tradition and Design in "The Iliad" (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1930), p. 196.

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problem he had brought with him to Troy, to which he did not even wish to come. Achilles' character is tested in the first book where he encourages the priest Calchas to reveal which of the Greeks had provoked the vengeance of Apollo. Achilles says "From thy inmost Soul / Speak what thou know'st, and speak without controul," (I, 107-108), and Pope's version may owe something to Albany's "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say" at the close of Lear (5.3.325). We observe among his strongest attributes that Achilles speaks from the "close Recesses of the Soul" and that alone makes him hateful to the covert Agamemnon. When at length Agamemnon is shown to be guilty by Calchas, and when he must return the daughter of Apollo's priest, Chryseis, he threatens to seize Ajax's, or Ulysses,' or Achilles' prize chattel in her place. At this point Achilles takes up the challenge, accuses the king of not playing according to the code, and exposes his greed and ruthless abuse of power. It is significant that Achilles' speech echoes Sarpedon's in its brief glimpse into the pastoral world forsaken for the heat of heroic struggle—a theme that has long been central to poets nourished by the classical tradition, down to Matthew Arnold where cool glades and Wordsworthian retreats are set against hot cities and a contentious life.53 Achilles asks : What Cause have I to war at thy Decree? The distant Trojans never injured me. To Pythia's Realms no hostile Troops they led; Safe in her Vales my warlike Coursers fed : Far hence remov'd, the hoarse-resounding Main And Walls of Rocks, secure my native Reign, Whose fruitful Soil luxuriant Harvests grace, Rich in her Fruits, and in her martial Race. Hither we sail'd, a voluntary Throng, T'avenge a private, not a publick Wrong. (I, 199-208) Ideals of the retired and the public life exert opposing forces in the consciousness of Achilles; and one recalls the aphorism 53. The debate is central in Arnold's Empedocles on Etna; it is also carried on in "Resignation," "The Sick King in Bokhara," "The Buried Life," "The Scholar-Gipsy," and "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse."

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of Plato, who said he had found in Homer the teacher of all Greece, that only those not eager to rule should rule. When Achilles' own prize, Briséis, is expropriated by Agamemnon, he is tempted to slay his king. Athena intervenes, however, and on her advice Achilles withdraws from the war, leaving Zeus to decide who was right. In the ninth book Achilles again steps to the fore. The war has turned against the Greeks, and it becomes obvious who has overreached his fate and for whom Zeus has decided. Agamemnon dispatches an embassy laden with the gifts of bribery, including Briséis, to placate the hero and win him back to the war. In the scene between the three ambassadors, Ulysses, Achilles' old tutor Phoenix, and the bluntly sincere Ajax, and Achilles, Homer focuses on a reassessment of the heroic ideal that Achilles will press. "Return, Achilles!" urges Ulysses: oh return, tho' late, To save thy Greeks, and stop the Course of Fate; If in that Heart, or Grief, or Courage lies, Rise to redeem; ah yet, to conquer, rise! The Day may come, when all our Warriors slain, That Heart shall melt, that Courage rise in vain. Regard in time, O Prince divinely brave ! Those wholsome Counsels which thy Father gave. When Peleus in his aged Arms embrac'd His parting Son, these Accents were his last. My Child! with Strength, with Glory and Success, Thy Arms may Juno and Minerva bless ! Trust that to Heav'n—but thou, thy Cares engage To calm thy Passions, and subdue thy Rage : From gentler Manners let thy Glory grow, And shun Contention, the sure Source of Woe; That young and old may in thy Praise combine, The Virtues of Humanity be thine— (IX, 320-337) We have not space here to explore the ways in which Homer's three ambassadors are used to analyze Achilles' motives and options. Although he is not unmoved by the plight of the Greeks, especially after Ajax's forthright appeal to a fellow comrade, Achilles scorns his being purchased by Agamemnon, who, after all, did not even come in person to apologize and

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who thinks he can buy off his insult with material goods. The subtle and diplomatic Ulysses contrasts most strikingly with the straightforward Achilles : "What in my secret Soul is understood, / My Tongue shall utter": No—let the stupid Prince, whom Jove deprives Of Sense and Justice, run where Frenzy drives; His Gifts are hateful : Kings of such a Kind Stand but as Slaves before a noble Mind. Life is not to be bought with Heaps of Gold; Not all Apollo's Pythian Treasures hold, Or Troy once held, in Peace and Pride of Sway, Can bribe the poor Possession of a Day ! (IX,492-495, 524-527) Achilles will not accept anything less than the highest possible moral standard of justice, objectified by Zeus and his golden scales. In such a balance nothing is more precious than a single h u m a n life. He does not hesitate in risking self-righteousness to assert his position : Thy Friend, believe me, no such Gifts demands, And asks no Honours from a Mortal's Hands : Jove honours me, and favours my Designs; His Pleasure guides me, and his Will confines: And here I stay, (if such his high Behest) While Life's warm Spirit beats within my Breast. (IX,715-720) Achilles' defense of his conduct may be compared with statements by Pope in various contexts. In the course of the following pages we shall have reason to return to the problem of the heroic versus the retired life, and some tracing back to Homer will be necessary. No other writer, not Shakespeare on whose edition he labored at the same time he was working on the Odyssey translation, 54 nor Horace whose writings he imitated through the 1730's, seems to have so thoroughly imbued Pope's spirit. "True, conscious Honour is to feel no sin, / He's arm'd without that's innocent within," he averred, and declared war 54. 1721-1725.

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first on the literary dunces and later on the political knaves. He conceded that a poet could "but Skirmish, & maintain a flying Fight with Vice; its Forces augment, & will drive me off the Stage."58 "Thanks to Homer," that is, the proceeds from the two translations, "I live and thrive, / Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive." The French poet Boileau who was "pension'd" could not "lash in honest Strain." Nor could "Laureate Dryden" either "Pimp and Fry'r engage" without sending either the licentious Charles II or the Catholic James II "in a Rage." But Pope is "Un-plac'd, un-pension'd, no Man's Heir, or Slave": arm'd for Virtue when I point the Pen, Brand the bold Front of shameless, guilty Men, Dash the proud Gamester in his gilded Car, Bare the mean Heart that lurks beneath a Star. (lmit. Hor. Sat. II.i.105-109) The star is, of course, the insignia of the Knights of the Garter, as well as a token of undeserved—lucky—success: I will, or perish in the gen'rous Cause. Hear this, and tremble! you, who 'scape the Laws. Yes, while I live, no rich or noble knave Shall walk the World, in credit, to his grave. ( 117-120) Perhaps the conclusion of the second dialogue of the Epilogue to the Satires (1738) evokes Pope at his most intransigent. It is his noblest defense of the Achillean ideal. He likens his satire to a "sacred Weapon ! left for Truth's defence"—Michael's sword as certainly as Achilles' : When black Ambition stains a Publick Cause, A Monarch's sword when mad Vain-glory draws, Not Waller's Wreath can hide the Nation's Scar, Nor Boileau turn the Feather to a Star. Not so, when diadem'd, with Rays divine, Touch'd with the Flame that breaks from Virtue's Shrine, Her Priestless Muse forbids the Good to dye, 55. Imit. HOT. E P. I.i, 93-94, "To Bolingbroke"; Corr., IV, 109.

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(228-237)

John Anstis was Chief Herald at Arms; at the funeral of great peers, Pope explains, it is customary "to cast into the grave the broken staves and ensigns of honour" : Let Envy howl while Heav'n's whole Chorus sings, And bark at Honour not confer'd by Kings; Let Flatt'ry sickening see the Incense rise, Sweet to the World, and grateful to the Skies: Truth guards the Poet, sanctifies the line, And makes Immortal, Verse as mean as mine. Yes, the last Pen for Freedom let me draw, When Truth stands trembling on the edge of Law : Here, Last of Britons! let your Names be read; Are none, none living? let me praise the Dead, And for that Cause which made your Fathers shine, Fall, by the Votes of their degen'rate Line! (242-253) It may appear unwise to interpret poetry with poetry in a critical essay, but a passage from Arnold's "Strayed Reveller" seems appropriate : such a price The Gods exact for song: To become what we sing. Arnold was thinking of the anxiety as much as the moral vision attendant on writing after the heroic manner (and the adjective is both moral and stylistic at once). In the knowledge of both pain and vision, Pope had strengthened his own moral fiber in his "ten years' War of Troy." It is not merely a matter of borrowing or imitation; Homer had become the very stuff of Pope's experience. It is true that Pope's "improving" on many passages in Homer "too gross to be translated," his sententiousness, his scene-painting, Augustan vocabulary, and overcorrectness—though Pope shrewdly recognized that with Homer he had even to correct in

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order to appear less correct 56 —all separate Pope's versions f r o m the Homeric original. "A pretty poem, Mr. Pope," said the acerb scholar Richard Bentley, "but you mustn't call it Homer." 57 Yet in his grasp of what is essential to Homer, the heroic idealism and its redefinition by Achilles, the concept of merited fame, and spiritual perfection, Pope's "Homer" is firmly secure. "Homer doubtless owes to his translator many Ovidian graces not exactly suitable to his character," Johnson sums up, "but to have added can be no great crime if nothing be taken away. Elegance is surely to be desired, if it be not gained at the expence of dignity . . . To a thousand cavils one answer is sufficient; the purpose of a writer is to be read, and the criticism which would destroy the power of pleasing must be blown aside. Pope wrote for his own age and his own nation : he knew that it was necessary to colour the images and point the sentiments of his author; he therefore made him graceful, but lost him some of his sublimity." 58 I Even as the Iliad was being completed, Pope wrote to his editorial assistant William Broome that he sought a "deliverance from poetry and slavery" and planned to abandon the former to release himself f r o m the latter, "this summer." It is Pope's first "retirement"; it serves to crystallize a problem that is fun56. "I correct daily, and make [my verses] seem less corrected, that is more easy, more fluent, more natural, which give m e leave to say is the style of Homer" (Corr., II, 3 2 0 ) . 57. Sir John Hawkins, The Works of Samuel Johnson (London, 1 7 8 7 ) , XI, 126n.; see also Douglas Knight, Pope and the Heroic Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 1. 58. Johnson, III, 2 3 9 - 2 4 0 . It is surprising that, whatever the deficiencies of Pope's "Homer," it should have been thought weak in the scenes of pathos: the farewell of Hector to Andromache in the sixth Iliad; Priam's begging Achilles for the body of Hector in the twenty-fourth. Or, to glance at still another example, in the third book, Helen stands with Priam on the battlements of Troy, pointing out the Greek heroes but searching vainly for her brothers Castor and Pollux: Perhaps the Chiefs, from warlike Toils at ease, For distant Troy refus'd to sail the Seas: Perhaps their Sword some nobler Quarrel draws, Asham'd to combate in their Sister's Cause. So spoke the Fair, nor knew her Brothers Doom, Wrapt in the cold Embraces of the Tomb; Adorn'd with Honours in their native Shore, Silent they slept, and heard of Wars no more. ( I l l , 3 0 7 - 3 1 4 )

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damental to his development from his early days in Windsor Forest : "I shall retire a miles emeritus, and pity the poets militant who are to succeed me. I really wish them so well, that if my gains by Homer were sufficient, I would gladly found an hospital, like that of Chelsea, for such of my tribe as are disabled in the muses' service, or whose years require a dismissal from the unnatural task of rhyming themselves, and others, to death." 59 There were of course illustrious models, men who did retire, such as Horace to his farm in the Sabine Hills and Montaigne to his famous tower, or men who pretended to retire, such as Augustus to Capri or Cicero to Tusculum. "My Tusculum" Pope writes Bishop Berkeley, describing his five-acre country villa at Twickenham, to which he had moved in 1719. Then in Pope's own time, or just before, there was the notable example of Swift's patron Sir William Temple who retired in mid-career to Moor Park, Surrey, and resisted pressure to become Secretary of State. Pope's health and religion were of course strong factors toward leading a retired life : "Two fits of the headache make me a philosopher at any time," he wrote Broome, "and I had one yesterday and another this morning." 60 Or as he wrote Bishop Atterbury: "But if I could bring myself to fancy, what I think you do but fancy, that I have any talents for active life, I want health for it; and besides it is a real truth, I have less Inclination (if possible) than Ability. Contemplative life is not only my scene, but it is my habit too."61 In many colorful letters he portrays his scene at Twickenham. 62 59. Corr., 11,3. 60. Corr., I, 227. 61. Corr., 1,454. 62. On 31 December 1719 Pope invited Broome to Twickenham: "The Place I am in is as delightful as you can imagine any to be, in this season; the situation is so very airy, and yet so warm, that you will think yourself in a sort of heaven, where the prospect is boundless, and the sun your near neighbor . . . As a last unfailing motive to draw you here, I will tell Mrs. Betty Marriot such wonders of the enchanted bowers, silver streams, opening avenues, rising mounts, and painted grottos, that her very curiosity shall bring her to us, and then—see whether your lawful wife can keep you. Consider also the ease, the quiet, the contentment of soul, and repose of body, which you will feel, when stretched in an elbow chair, mum for your breakfast, chine and potatoes for dinner, and a dose of burnt wine to give you up to slumbers in the evening, without one sermon to preach and no family duty to pay." Corr., II, 19-20. See also Corr., II, 125, 141, 296297; IV, 267.

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During these middle years Pope would be occupied with translating the Odyssey and preparing editions of Parnell in 1722, Sheffield in 1723, and Shakespeare in 1725. "Comma's and points they set exactly right," Pope would satirize such editors in a few years, "And 'twere a sin to rob them of their Mite." His purely creative efforts appeared to be sinking. He was not unaware of this when he addressed Swift just a few years later: Hibernian Politics, O Swift, thy doom, And Pope's, translating three whole years with Broome. (TheDunciad [1728], III, 327-328) Later revised, as usual, to the more general (though also to placate poor Broome) : 63 Hibernian Politics, O Swift! thy fate; And Pope's, ten years to comment and translate. (The Dunciad [1743], III, 331-332) There are many statements in these years in which Pope sketches the life of a harried literary figure. "I have plagued myself," he writes Robert Digby, "like great Ministers, with undertaking too much for one Man, and with a Desire of doing more than was expected from me, have done less than I ought." He includes himself among the tribe of "Downright dull Translators"—"quite idle, tho' not so much a poet as formerly." 64 And he apologizes to his friend Caryll for being too preoccupied to write a letter: "I have wholly given over scribbling, at least any thing of my own, but am become, by due gradation of dulness, from a poet a translator, and from a translator, a mere editor." Qui notus nimis omnibus, / Ignotus moritur sibi, he quotes from Seneca's Thy estes (401-402), "Who, known too well by all, dies to himself unknown." 65 His life, then, during the years 63. In a reissue of The Dunciad in 1735 Pope substituted a new leaf with this revision as an apology to his friend, "and Pope's, whole years to comment and translate." See also his letter to Broome, 18 November 1735 (Corr., Ill, 510); that of 12 January 1736 (Corr., IV, 2 - 3 ) ; and Griffith, no. 405.

64. Corr., II, 43, 202. 65. Corr., II, 140. For similar sentiments, see Corr., II, 109.

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1720 to 1725, for all his protestations to retirement, was no less busy than his summer campaigns in translating the Iliad or his work in winter quarters correcting it. And though he was being acknowledged "king of Parnassus," as Broome addressed him, he was far from being his own man; "A man that Uves so much in the world," he complains, "does but translate other men; he is nothing of his own."66 What could be the reasons for Pope's first retirement from poetry and his growing frustration with his career? His editions of Homer had given him financial security. Perhaps the publication of his collected Works in 1717—most writers put off such a task to the last decade of their life—gave Pope a sense of finality to his achievement. He had lived the life of the artisthero, even if it was the life in miniature, a parody-life, and, if you will, a mock epic. All very Popean, to be sure, but later Pope himself would refer to this early period as if it had a wall around it, as a time when "pure Description held the place of Sense," a time when he merely "wander'd" in "Fancy's maze." There even exists in his early work as a whole a tonal unity, which, from his viewpoint in 1719, might well seal off the period. Asking himself the traditional question of the artist "What next?" Pope had found no answer. Like Mill, by his education and genius and company, he was always a quarter of a century ahead of his contemporaries, and since everything in his precocious life had been premature, there was no reason to expect retirement to be otherwise. "I hope to conclude my long labour," Pope continues in his letter to Broome, "with more ease than triumph"; and one may recall an earlier use of this favorite antithesis in his "Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture": "Aim not at Joy, but rest content with Ease." But Pope could not be a contemplative poet. Simply he could not "rest content with Ease," no matter how much he enjoyed his "refreshing kind of inaction." Many compelling arguments for campaigning against the dunces and the Walpole ministry he would advance himself. In his very first imitation of Horace he defends his declaration of war made in The Dunciad of 1728. 66. Corr., II, 345, 390, 302.

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The imitation takes the form of a dialogue between Pope and his lawyer William Fortescue; Fortescue argues that Pope should look to his health and his safety: F. : I'd write no more. P. : Not write? But then I think, And for my Soul, I cannot sleep a wink. I nod in Company, I wake at Night, Fools rush into my head and so I write. (11-14) Pope's first avowed reason for taking up his pen is for the defense of Truth. We have already noticed how Pope, "arm'd for Virtue,"67 drew on themes from the heroic life and character and deployed his metaphorical engines of war. Branding the guilty and dashing the gamester was as much Pope's scene as his life at Twickenham: "What Walls can guard me, or what Shades can hide?" 68 When in 1732 Lord Bathurst counseled Pope not to "wear out his body by letting his soul ride it too hard," not to "whip and spur perpetually," 69 Pope was only beginning his war, and five years later he was listening to "Reason's voice, which sometimes one can hear": "Friend Pope! be prudent, let your Muse take breath, And never gallop Pegasus to death; Lest stiff, and stately, void of fire, or force, You limp, like Blackmore, on a Lord Mayor's horse." (Imit. Hor. Ep. I.i.12-15) Against Swift's worldly advice to avoid provoking individuals, Pope will "by Name the Guilty lash." 70 "A Lash like mine no honest man shall dread, / But all such babling blockheads in his stead.'"71 "He stood the furious Foe, the timid Friend, / The damning Critic, half-approving Wit, / The Coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit.'"72 One after another the Whig ministers and their 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Imit. Hor. Sat. Il.i. 105, "To Fortescue." Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 7. Corr., Ill, 313. Epilogue to the Satires, II, 10. Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 303. Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 343-345.

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friends are unhorsed, Bubb Dodington, Sir William Yonge, John Ward, the Duke of Wharton, Peter Walter, the Governor of the Bank of England Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Lord Hervey and his protégés, the Whig scribblers Ridpath and Henley, the Speaker of the House of Commons Arthur Onslow, the Speaker of Lords De la Warr, the Lord Chamberlain, Charles, Duke of Grafton, the bishops of London and Winchester, the archbishops of York and Canterbury, and great Walpole himself. Four sons of rich lords and a lord chief justice have earned immortality from a single line in The Dunciad (IV, 54). Others are slain in ponderous footnotes. Pope kept his promise to Caryll when he said he was through with translation : "When I translate again I will be hanged; nay I will do something to deserve to be hanged, which is worse, rather than drudge for such a world as is no judge of your labour. I'll sooner write something to anger it, than to please it."73 Thirteen years later, in 1738, he could write with justification : Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me. (Epilogue to the Satires, II, 208-209) It would be difficult for Pope to lead the contemplative life because of his determination to choose, as a socially committed poet, the heroic alternative. In the first phase of his career, his very love for the world of the imagination, "Fancy's maze," served but to encourage, as it would for Keats, the desire to abandon the anxiety and pace of an active Ufe. But the signposts in his poetry after his "ten years to comment and translate," his own "centre of indifference," all point to his growing vision of evil and mindlessness. That this vision was sharpened by the personal abuse he received from literary, political, or religious enemies does not demean or qualify his motivation. As he writes defiantly in his very first imitation of Horace : Satire's my weapon, but I'm too discreet To run a Muck, and tilt at all I meet; 73. Corr., II, 341.

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Alexander Pope I only wear it in a Land of Hectors, Thieves, Supercargoes, Sharpers, and Directors. Save but our Army! and let Jove incrust Swords, Pikes, and Guns, with everlasting Rust! Peace is my dear Delight—not Fleury's more : But touch me, and no Minister so sore. Who-e'er offends, at some unlucky Time Slides into Verse, and hitches in a Rhyme. Then learned Sir! (to cut the Matter short) What e'er my Fate, or well or ill at Court, Whether old Age, with faint, but chearful Ray, Attends to gild the Evening of my Day, Or Death's black Wing already be display'd To wrap me in the Universal Shade; Whether the darken'd Room to muse invite, Or whiten'd Wall provoke the Skew'r to write, In Durance, Exile, Bedlam, or the Mint, Like Lee or Budgell, I will Rhyme and Print. (Imit. HOT. Sat., II.i.69-78,91-100)

Pope's personal greatness lies in his realization of his heroic potentiality. In laying down his challenge he compares himself to no one less than Louis XV's chief minister the aged Cardinal Fleury, who tirelessly sought peace in Europe. For the morally alert citizen, however, there exists no peace. In the society of contemporary England—-a society of bankers and businessmen, of politicians and a scheming military, and, of course, of obsequious poets—no peace : While with the silent growth of ten per Cent, In Dirt and darkness hundreds stink content. (Imit. HOT. Ep. I.i.132-133) "After such knowledge," Reuben Brower writes, a "pretence to Horatian good temper could only be shrewdly ironic"; 74 it is a couplet "which Ezra Pound might envy." Indeed the urban, financial ethos of which Pope writes perhaps resembles our own more than the society of the Renaissance. And consequently, the willingness to lead the traditional heroic life, the 74. Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion ford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 311.

(Ox-

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idea of which survives in our language, cannot be satisfied as easily. In a modern age it would be as difficult for Pope to find a way of leading a heroic life, a life of worthy public commitment, as it would be for George Eliot's Dr. Lydgate. He, too, sought to lead a heroic life, but in the new, intellectual terrain, pathology.75 Pope adjusted his actions to his age and employed traditional heroic language (but often with its satiric reversals, for example, "Hectors" or bullies in line 71 above for the Trojan Hector), and in his life and art he cut for himself the figure of an Augustan hero. One may question further what could have made Pope so defensive, so combative, so antithetical in his desire for the contemplative life and in his even stronger desire for an active life. He steers "betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite" ("The Design," An Essay on Man): He hangs between, in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much : Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd; Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd. (Essay on Man, II, 7-14) Many factors have been shown to contribute toward isolating Pope: his physical constitution and health, his religion, his sexual frustrations, in childhood those friendships with elderly men, many of whom died in his early adulthood—Trumbull, Walsh, Wycherley, Cromwell, Congreve—his later intimate association with the political outs such as Bolingbroke, Atterbury ("free, tho' in the Tower"), 76 Oxford, Swift, and still later with the Patriot opposition to Walpole—Wyndham, Marchmont, Murray, and Lyttleton: "Chiefs, out of War, and Statesmen, out of Place."77 Above all, as he himself adopted for his seal, amicus 75. Middlemarch, chapter 15. 76. Imit. Hor. Ep. I.i. 184, "To Bolingbroke." 77. Imit. HOT. Sat. Il.i. 126, "To Fortescue."

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Plato sed magis amica veritas, "Plato is a friend, but a greater friend is truth." 78 These elements converge to help us identify the elusive personality of Pope as they helped him. Thrown on the defensive, it is possible either to fight or to retire, and he opted, like Achilles waiting in his tent, for an heroic life on his own terms. "The life of a Wit," he once wrote, paraphrasing Job (7:1), "is a warfare upon earth." 79 Pope delivered his philippics in couplets. One thinks back to the early prophetic letter to Caryll in which he laid down firmly that "no man ever rose to any degree of perfection in writing, but through obstinacy and an inveterate resolution against the stream of mankind." 80 No poet was ever more dogged in his devotion to his craft; nulla dies sine linea, "not a day without a line," he quotes twice in the letters. It would be a disservice to Pope to argue that he ran for the poet's laurel instead of fighting for an ideal of personal and public virtue. More probably those complex Achillean desires for public morality and personal glory, no less than his impulses to lead now the contemplative, now the active life, conjoin in Pope—yet another example of his most characteristic figure, antithesis. "Oh to vex me," Donne wrote, "contraryes meet in one." And Montaigne, another of Pope's most revered authors, admits of himself what best describes Pope's multiple personality : "Sometimes I give myself one visage, and sometimes another, according unto the posture or side I lay her in. If I speak diversely of my selfe, it is because I look diversely upon my selfe. All contrarities are found in her [his soul] according to some turne or removing; 78. Corr., II, 3 6 0 - 3 6 1 , 470. 79. TE, I, 6. The phrase translates the Vulgate vita hominis militia super terram. For this allusion, which bears on the image of the consciously suffering Pope, I am indebted to Professor Gerald W. Chapman. The confluence of classical and Judeo-Christian traditions in Pope's career occurs poignantly in Arnold, w h o wrote i n his "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse" : Achilles ponders in his tent, The kings of modern thought are dumb; Silent they are, though not content, And wait to see the future come. They have the grief m e n had of yore, But they contend and cry no more. 80. Corr., I, 239.

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and in some fashion or other."81 "Moyen, divers et ondoyant" Montaigne describes himself, and it applies well to Pope. Writing of notable figures in the Renaissance, Burkhardt remarked that banishment "either wears the exile out or develops whatever is greatest in him." 82 Pope's isolation, his self-styled exile at Twickenham, was of the latter category, intensifying his belief in ideal values. "I am already arriv'd to an Age," he complains to Lord Bolingbroke in 1724, "which more awakens my diligence to live Satisfactorily, than to write unsatisfactorily, to my self: more to consult my happiness, than my Fame; or (in defect of happiness) my Quiet."83 Maynard Mack has shown that Pope found a way of "living Satisfactorily" in his garden at Twickenham, and that against the garden Pope could measure the corrupt society downstream in man's earthly City, London. Heroic ideals can impose a voluntary exile on a person. Pope had other pressing factors besides. Religious intolerance directed at him would make him conscious of the need for a truly catholic worship at times bordering on deism. Poor health and physical deformity made him all the more sympathetic to friends in need; it is worth noting that though none of the dunces he excoriated has lived in posterity, several striving younger poets, such as James Thomson and Samuel Johnson, were actively encouraged or abetted by Pope, who was not blind to the merit of others.84 Sexual frustration or inadequacy may have made him the more knowledgeable of and loving toward women. Finally, there is the power that death held over his imagination, a persistent theme in his poetry and the letters. It was natural for the poet who wished in every way to be like the "mighty dead" to wish further to be among them etere i . "Of the inconstancie of our actions," in Essayes, trans. John Florio (1603), ed. Thomas Seccombe (London: Grant Richards, 1908), II, 7. 82. Jacob Burkhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1962), p. 83. 83. Corr., II, 226. 84. Pope's kindness extended as far as his archcritic John Dennis. When Dennis was old, blind, and impoverished, Pope probably helped petition for subscribers for a projected edition of his Works (Corr., Ill, 171n); and when that failed, Pope helped organize a benefit performance of Dennis' The Provoked Husband in 1734, writing a "Prologue" for the occasion.

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nally. And of Pope's quest for fame, a passage from another notable exile, Bertrand Russell, is a fit starting-point : For my part, I do not even wish to live with eternal things, though I often give them lip-service; but in my heart I believe that the best things are those that are fragile and temporal, and I find a magic in the Past which eternity cannot possess. Besides, nothing is more eternal than the Past—the present and future are still subject to Time, but the Past has escaped into immortality—Time has done his worst and it yet lives.85 85. Bertrand Russell, Autobiography (Boston: Little Brown, 1967), I, 284.

4. Pope and the Temple of Fame Posterity, alarmed at the way in which its literary baggage grows upon it, always seeks to leave behind it as much as it can, as much as it dares,—everything but masterpieces. (Arnold, "George Sand" [ Î 8 7 6 ] )

The inward development of Pope's identity finds a most impressive manifestation of itself in his passion for fame. This correspondence between identity and fame results, almost inevitably, from his firm adherence to the ideals of the "mighty dead." It began simply by a boy's imitating brief passages from Ovid and Homer and hitching them together with verses of his own. It received a powerful stimulus from the poet Walsh's advice that correctness was the "one way left of excelling"—one way to be original and yet to remain traditional, one way to outstrip the Moderns, one way to be numbered among the illustrious Ancients. Fame, the just honor awarded the hero, would weld in a most permanent bond those two divisive impulses : to be one's self, and to be a part of something else, something greater. One must earn one's way into the pantheon of immortal poets even if, as Robert Lowell notes, it is only "a pass to the minor slopes of Parnassus." 1 For fame, growing or waning through time, acknowledges how man regards the poet, and through it Pope would be admitted to the communion of the Ancients. One recalls Dante's admittance to the gathering of pagan poets, 1. "Reading Myself," Notebook, 3d ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 213.

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Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil in bleak Limbo, but Dante's situation illustrates the anxieties weighing on a Christian poet in search of fame. We first see Dante attracted by the glory of pagan poets, conversing eternally around a light "enclosed in a hemisphere of darkness." Then, all along Dante's descent in Hell, the perished souls beg him to keep alive their memory on earth, at least their memory, no matter for good or evil. In a famous passage from the Purgatorio XI, the miniature painter Oderisi reproves Dante for his love of vana gloria in the very phrases that Aquinas had employed.2 "In painting," Oderisi goes on to say, "Cimabue thought to hold the field and now Giotto has the cry, so that the other's fame is dim; so has the one Guido taken from the other the glory of our tongue" (Sinclair's translation). And so Dante is exposed to the bitter truth of lo gran disio / dell' eccellenza; he sees fame for what it is; he spurns it, he condemns it, he embraces it again. At the beginning of the twenty-fifth canto of the Paradiso, Dante's longing for literary glory re-emerges with God's blessing on his sacred poem. Now that Dante's desire for fame has merged fully with God's glory proclaimed by his very poem, Dante may justify his passion "in His will": "I shall return a poet," he cries down from the sphere of the fixed stars, "and at the font of my baptism take the laurel crown." After Dante, Petrarch and many other Renaissance poets attempted to reconcile pagan and Christian attitudes toward earthly glory, exposing its spiritual emptiness and betraying their own natural longing for it. An Augustan poet, Pope, too, will attempt a resolution of this problem, but there are other grounds on which the issues should be considered. Does fame in any way attenuate the fear of death? For death as a theme in Pope's verse, particularly the later verse, is central. He refers to it as "our second Life" in the Essay on Criticism (1711,1. 480), "that second Life in others' Breath, / Th' Estate which Wits inherit after Death!" in The Temple of Fame (1715, 11. 505-506). He questions "how little from the grave we claim? / Thou but preserv'st a Face 2. For a rich discussion, see Jacob Burkhardt, The Civilization Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon, 1962), pp. 87-93.

of the

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and I a Name" in the Epistle to Mr. Jervas (1716, 11. 77-78); and in his imitation of the second epistle of Horace's second book, he ponders : Years foll'wing Years, steal something ev'ry day, At last they steal us from our selves away; In one our Frolicks, one Amusements end, In one a Mistress drops, in one a Friend : This subtle Thief of Life, this paltry Time, What will it leave me, if it snatch my Rhime? If ev'ry Wheel of that unweary'd Mill That turn'd ten thousand Verses, now stands still. {Imit. Hor. Ep. II.ii.72-79) In the second dialogue of the Epilogue to the Satires (1738), Pope declares, not unlike the Dante of the Paradiso, "Truth guards the Poet, sanctifies the Une, / And makes Immortal, Verse as mean as mine" (246-247). On his deathbed he passed out copies of the Moral Essays and compared himself to the condemned Socrates in his last hours, distributing "my morality to friends." Could Pope have found any comfort in knowing that, like Horace, "I shall not altogether die" (Odes 3.30)? In a pragmatical sense, fame bruited his name about so much that his books sold well—an absolute necessity for Pope both in terms of earning a living and in maintaining that "unplac'd, unpension'd" figure, the "free Soul" that serves as the narrator of his satires and epistles. Finally, like the grotto, fame would prove a cunning stratagem of self-defense for his often beleaguered self. Pope's exile, spiritually and physically, geographically and philosophically, would terminate if he could establish suzerainty on the printed page. What more appropriate emblem, then, could be found than those grand editions of his collected works, the 1717 edition, one in 1735, and the so-called deathbed edition, which Pope did not live to see completely through the press. The Works of Mr Alexander Pope (1717) were especially remarkable, for no other poet had set out so young to guard and to advance his reputation. Shakespeare's and Donne's collected editions were published posthumously. Dryden's appeared just five years be-

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fore his death. There might be a parallel with William Congreve who too achieved early fame, but Congreve could not adapt his genius to the new age and did not develop as an artist. At twenty-nine, however, Pope had enough material to put together a quarto and folio edition. There was a portrait of the author by Sir Godfrey Kneller; there were headpieces and tailpieces to the poems by Simon Gribelin, commendatory verses by William Wycherley, the Countess of Winchilsea, the Earl of Oxford, Thomas Parnell, and the Duke of Buckingham. Besides these trappings the collection contained such pieces as The Rape of the Lock, the Pastorals, Windsor-Forest, The Temple of Fame, and, in the last sheets, the recent Eloisa to Ahelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. Later in life Pope would look back on this edition, as John Butt remarks, "with some measure of affectionate condescension; yet it was a volume which both in poetical merit and in physical appearance could rival what other poets had achieved at the end of a lifetime's endeavour." 3 The volume points up only Pope's early zeal for reputation; each succeeding volume, meticulously planned, would add measurably to that reputation. There is some truth in the charge that he made a graven image of the printed word. In 1735, Pope's most active year for publication, he saw sixty-eight works through the press, including eighteen new pieces. His fame spread across Europe during his own lifetime. Voltaire beat a path to his door, calling him in a letter to Thiériot (26 October 1726) the "best poet of England, and at present of all the world . . . I never saw so amiable an imagination." 4 Pope was the first English poet to achieve contemporary renown by his poetry in Germany, France, Switzerland, and Italy. In the frontiers of Ohio, one young lady, prevented from reading him by day, read him at night with light from a "saucer of lard with rag wick." Mather Byles, a young student at Harvard, addressed Pope in a poem entitled "To My FRIEND : Occasioned by 3. "Pope: The Man and the Poet," in Of Books and Humankind: Essays and Poems Presented to Bonamy Dobrée, ed. John Butt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964), p. 69. 4. E. Audra, L'Influence française dans l'oeuvre de Pope (Paris: Librarie ancienne Honoré Champion, 1931 ), p. 71-72.

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his poem on ETERNITY" (1727): "whose numbers reach our shore, / Though oceans roll between, and tempests roar."® His couplets provided window dressing for the pamphleteers of the American Revolution. Perhaps the very antithetical nature of his verse enabled such antinomies as the philosophes of the Enlightenment and the Augustan humanists to embrace him as their own. Both groups lionized him equally and as frequently cited what Whitehead called the touchstone of the eighteenthcentury mind, the Essay on Man. Kant held Pope to be among his very favorite poets, recommending his works to the young Herder; and Boswell reported Johnson's prophecy that "a thousand years may elapse before there shall appear another man with a power of versification equal to that of Pope."6 He had become what he wished to become, "a Citizen of the World."7 Such glory did not fail to reverberate, now harmonious, now cacophonous, in Pope's imagination. Before he became in his words a "Fool to Fame," he wrote about becoming famous. After he became famous, he wrote about being famous. His life became a myth before his eyes no less than it did for Byron, or, in our time, for Hemingway, of whom Archibald MacLeish sadly asked : "And what became of him? Fame became of him." 8 Pope would have to control the distortions that fame wrought upon his identity, although fame itself was a necessary and even strategic element in his identity with the great pagan and English poets. They are famous; he must be. "We are presented with a peculiar blending of the artifact and the real," John Butt says, "one of the strangest confusions of life and letters. So accustomed had he become to this blend that Pope himself may not have known precisely how to distinguish the historical portrait from the literary one."9 Concerned as he was with imi5. Quoted by Agnes Marie Sibley, Alexander Pope's Prestige in America, J725—J835 (Columbia: King's Crown Press, 1 9 4 9 ) , pp. 21, 12. Pope would have delighted at Byle's praising him as "of all the Moderns [the one who] seems to have attained the greatest Mastery" (p. 12). 6. Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1 9 3 4 ) , IV, 46. 7. Corr., 1,344. 8. "Years of the Dog," Collected Poems, 1917-1952 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 135. 9. "Pope: The Man and the Poet," p. 79.

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tating the life or career of the grand poet, he anticipated it at every stage, even designing an official text before he was thirty. 10 His couplets were so famous in his lifetime that they seemed to detach themselves f r o m his works, and even he began quoting them as adages again and again in his poems, in speech, even on his deathbed, where he complained that his life was "Divided between Carelesness and Care" (Imitations of Horace, Ep. 2.2.291). He became interested in his appeal to the growing reading public (particularly women), with his social status as a celebrity, and with the delicate timing of publications to assure maximum distribution of his works. More important, f a m e provided a challenge equal to his genius—a genius, as Johnson remarked in perhaps the most pregnant statement ever made on him, "active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do." 11 For Pope would not be content with the easily won approval of his own early poetry. He refused to be, as he referred to Dorset and Rochester, a "holiday writer." 12 "He never exchanged praise for money," Johnson continues, "nor opened a shop of condolence or congratulation . . . He suffered coronations and royal marriages to pass without a song, and derived no opportunities f r o m recent events, nor any popularity from the accidental disposition of his readers. He was never reduced to the necessity of soliciting the sun to shine upon a birth-day, or calling the Graces and Virtues to a wedding, or of saying what multitudes have said before him." 13 10. "Designed" is perhaps a strong word, proper to some poems, e.g., An Essay on Criticism, but not to all. Both the 1717 and the deathbed editions are, almost certainly, in accidentals, the handiwork of the printers Bowyer. The 1735 folio-quarto edition remains a bibliographical mystery. 11. Johnson, 111,217. 12. Spence, no. 469; see also Corr., I, 465: "But you are sensible," Pope writes Caryll, " 'tis not the task of an Heroic Poet like myself, to sing, at marriages, burials, and Christenings" (18 February 1718); and Corr., II, 469: "Courts I see not, Courtiers I know not, Kings I adore not, Queens I compliment not," he tells Swift, "so am never like to be in fashion, nor in dépendance" (January 1728). 13. Johnson, III, 219.

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Soft were my Numbers, who could take offence While pure Description held the place of Sense? (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 147-148) With Pope's sparkling early verse, who could take offence? And yet in The Temple of Fame (1715), the "youthful bard," possibly unaware of the seriousness of his request, begs the Queen to "grant an honest Fame, or grant me none"; Pope's own life reveals he stood behind that statement. Ultimately he would gain fame through a forthright challenge to corruption in his government and his society. "When a true Genius appears in the World," Swift once said, "you may know him by this infallible sign : that the Dunces are all in Confederacy against him." 14 After Pope yielded to the place of sense, he drove the literary dunces and political frauds to take offence. That not for Fame, but Virtue's better end, He stood the furious Foe, the timid Friend. (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 342-343) With this in mind one may turn to his ex cathedra position on the subject, the preface to the collected Works of 1717. I The preface to the Works of 1717 drives home its points soundly. It is as unremitting a piece as Pope ever wrote, and for a major satirist it is fairly humorless. In fourteen paragraphs one hears in the making the prickly antagonist that informs lengthy stretches of later satires and epistles : as caustic as assured, sometimes untoward, à rebours. He is the very antithesis of Swift's modern writer complaining to Prince Posterity in the Epistle Dedicatory to A Tale of a Tub written twenty years earlier—so much the antithesis that interesting parallels may be drawn. In Swift's preface, an anonymous modern writer, who well deserves his anonymity, beseeches Prince Posterity, then in his nonage, for a share of fame. To gain his end, the modern writer must devise arguments to convince the Prince that, on his reaching his majority, he must rebuke the counsels 14. "Thoughts on Various Subjects," in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), I, 242.

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of his moral tutor, Time. Already, the modern asserts, the "never-dying" works of one hundred thirty-six poets have been hastily consigned to "unavoidable death" by Time, "though each of them is now an humble and earnest appellant for the laurel, and has large comely volumes as ready to shew, for a support to his pretensions." 13 As in The Temple of Fame where Pope describes a Queen dispensing her favors, sometimes quite foolishly, Swift portrays his Immortality as a "great powerful Goddess." What Swift accomplishes by jeu d'é sprit Pope attempts by crisp or surly candor. He begins by fighting shy of the issues, noting shrewdly that most writers are "generally not a little unreasonable in their expectations." 16 Either the writer expects approval or the reading public expects sheer entertainment; both want pleasure. As a result of this vicious circle, "writers and readers are under equal obligations, for as much fame, or pleasure, as each affords the other." This situation is, however, untenable, for no side will make allowances for the other. It is thus a "wild notion" to expect perfection, and, besides, there is always the figure of the critic who "supposes he has done his part, if he proves a writer to have fail'd in an expression or err'd in any particular point." In just a few sentences Pope has drawn up sides, writer and public; and he employs his typical device, antithesis; in the remainder of the preface, he will work out this dialectic. "Extreme zeal on both sides," Pope writes, eager to make peace, "is ill-placed." After all, a fair review of the matter would show that both poetry and criticism are "by no means the universal concern of the world." They are the pastime only "of the idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there." Bad writing is not as contemptible as bad criticism; at least the writer was trying to give pleasure. Pope then sets out to defend publishing his own collected works. One never knows at the outset, he concedes generously, whether one is a genius or not, and so one must follow natural inclinations, try writing, and await judgment. Writing ill, as opposed to per15. Swift, Prose Works, I, 22. 16. TE, I, 3 - 1 0 .

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sisting in writing ill, is no sin in itself, and a poor author does not deserve being made an object of ridicule. "I wish we had the humanity to reflect that even the worst authors might, in their endeavour to please us, deserve something at our hands." Bad poets, however, deserve abuse if they continue to write. As Pope put it earlier in the Essay on Criticism: "Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past, / Turn'd Criticks next, and proved plain Fools at last." So much for bad poets. 17 "A good Poet no sooner communicates his works with the same desire of information, but it is imagin'd he is a vain young creature given up to the ambition of fame." (The issue of fame is reintroduced from the first paragraph where it passed as "approval.") Society has ways of destroying even the best of poets: first, by untruthfulness on the part of his audience; second, by flattery, which may leave an author suspicious. Many of these themes are tested poetically in the volume itself. But between the good and the evil, Pope distinguishes "a third class of people who make the largest part of mankind, those of ordinary or indifferent capacities." These will either hate or suspect him and damn him as either a wit or a satirist. Such are the penalties of fame and genius, against which Pope neatly balances three assets which we might have guessed from our knowledge of Pope's identity and isolated condition: the power of self-amusement; the privilege of being admitted into the best company ("Envy must own, I live among the Great," he later wrote); and, curiously, "the freedom of saying as many careless things as other people, without being so severely remark'd upon." Pope would come to know how true and false these privileges were in the next twenty-five years. "The life of a Wit is a warfare upon earth." Perhaps since this paraphrase of Job ( 7 : 1 ) is the most combative statement in the preface, we might pause and examine the problem of Pope's strident tone here. In the essay he has already pleaded 17. In a long footnote to line 328 of Book I of The Dunciad ( 1 7 4 3 ) , Pope again shows "prodigious Tenderness for a bad writer," the translator John Ogilby. "We see he selects the only good passage perhaps in all that ever Ogilby writ; which shows how candid and patient a reader he must have been. What can be more kind and affectionate than these words in the preface to his Poems, 40. 1717 where he labours to call up all our humanity and forgiveness toward these unlucky men."

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for his verse in case it should be bad; he has even shown how meager the rewards will be if it is granted its just praise. The pronoun I has been recurring with inordinate frequency; the only parallel might be the modern writer's dedication to Prince Posterity, in which Swift is simply having fun at an egomaniac's expense. Now Pope openly discloses his metaphor, warfare, and declares himself equal to the battle. Indeed, Pope asserts, "one must have the constancy of a martyr, and a resolution to suffer for its sake" to lead the life of a wit. And one feels pressing close behind these lines a love for such life, much like Arnold who enjoyed what he called "the controversial life we all lead,"18 or Milton who dispraised a "fugitive and cloister'd vertue . . . that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortali garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."19 The heart of the preface lies appropriately at the very midpoint of the middle paragraph : "I could wish people would believe what I am pretty certain they will not, that I have been less concern'd about Fame that I durst declare till this occasion, when methinks I should find more credit that I could heretofore." One should note here the sudden confessional tone of the sentence, diminishing the distance between author and reader: "I could wish people . . . I am pretty certain" Does Pope fear he might be protesting too much? Or is there ground for our belief in his motives? He quickly puts aside the usual ways in which an audience is cajoled into granting a poet "reputation": prefaces, recommendations, names of great patrons, fine reasons and pretenses or excuses—all of which, incidentally, fill both his preface 18. "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super ( A n n Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), III, 272. 19. Areopagitica, in The Works of John Milton, Columbia Edition, ( N e w York: Columbia University Press, 1931), IV, 311. Johnson's comment on this point is most perceptive: "Upon an attentive and impartial review of the argument, it will appear that the love of fame is to be regulated, rather than extinguished; and that men should be taught not to be wholly careless about their memory, but to endeavour that they may be remembered chiefly for their virtues, since no other reputation will be able to transmit any pleasure beyond the grave" ( T h e Rambler, no. 49). Nor would Pope have been displeased with David Hume's justification of f a m e on grounds of utility and psychology in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739), II, 1, 11; III, 1,2; 111,3,2.

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and his volume of collected works. But Pope then goes on to give his raison d'écrire: "I writ because it amused me: I corrected because it was as pleasant to me to correct as to write; and I publish'd because I was told I might please such as it was a credit to please." These sentences make one look ahead to those biographical passages we have already considered from the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot published seventeen years later. 20 Pope then turns to the Ancients. Like himself, they corrected, polishing their works so that they would last. And if he takes the same care, Pope asks whether it is not just for him to earn the same reward. The doctrine is succinctly stated in a few lines from the earlier Essay on Criticism: Regard not then if Wit be Old or New, But blame the False, and value still the True. (406-407) One will find it a major theme in the late Epistle to Augustus, published in 1737: Had ancient Times conspir'd to dis-allow What then was new, what had been ancient now? Or what remain'd, so worthy to be read By learned Critics, of the mighty Dead? (135-138) Comparison of himself to the "mighty Dead" serves to plunge this modern writer Pope into despair, and he wonders how he even dare compete with their overwhelming achievement. The languages of the Ancients "became universal and everlasting, while ours are extremely limited both in extent, and in duration." The statement owes something to Joachim Du Bellay's De ffenee et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549). Following the sixteenth-century Italian humanist Sperone Speroni, Du Bellay laments the state of his nation's letters, but argues forcibly for a vernacular literature that will rival the Greek and Latin classics. 21 The mutability of the vernacular had likewise 20. See chapter II. 21. Joachim Du Bellay, La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Albert Fontemoing, 1 9 0 4 ) , chapters 3 and 4.

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been the subject of Waller's "Of English Verse." Waller himself had been among young Pope's three favorite poets : Poets that lasting marble seek, Must carve in Latin or in Greek; We write in Sand; our language grows, And like the tide, our work o'erflows. Chaucer his sense can only boast, The glory of his numbers lost! Years have defac'd his matchless strain, And yet he did not sing in vain. Or, as Pope himself lamented in the Essay on Criticism: No longer now that Golden Age appears, When Patriarch-Wits surviv'd a thousand Years; Now Length of Fame (our second Life) is lost, And bare Threescore is all ev'n That can boast : Our Sons their Fathers' failing Language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.22 (478-483) Such issues as the progress of poesy and correctness are now beside the point. As in a painting, through time "all the bright Creation fades away" (493). The portraits of the great English writers Pope placed in his room "to keep me always humble." Now, in the preface, the very language he uses is seen as a crumbling edifice: "A mighty foundation for our pride! when the utmost we can hope, is but to be read in one Island, and to be thrown aside at the end of one Age." Yet the only road left open to a true author lies in the direction of the Ancients. The finest authors, Pope avers, have always been those most indebted to the Ancients. "For to say 22. In 1737, more confident in his language, Pope will declare the poet's responsibility : Command old words that long have slept, to wake, Words, that wise Bacon, or brave Raleigh spake; Or bid the new be English, Ages hence, ( For Use will father what's begot by Sense ) Pour the full Tide of Eloquence along, Serenely pure, and yet divinely strong, Rich with the Treasures of each foreign Tongue; Prune the luxuriant, the uncouth refine, But show no mercy to an empty line. (I mit. HOT. Ε p. II, ii. 1 6 7 - 1 7 5 )

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truth, whatever is very good sense must have been common sense in all times; and what we call Learning, is but the knowledge of the sense of our predecessors. Therefore they who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients, may as well say our faces are not our own, because they are like our Fathers: And indeed it is very unreasonable, that people should expect us to be Scholars, and yet be angry to find us so." Here Pope invokes a cardinal principle of the Enlightenment, what Ernst Cassirer labels the "presupposition of the immutability of the human spirit" : "The real substance of this spirit remains aloof from all historical events, and these do not affect its innermost being. Whoever is able to separate the shell from the kernel of historical phenomena, knows that the forces which control and guide history are always and everywhere the same." 23 Cassirer's summary is instructive, and he cites copiously from Machiavelli and Lodovico Vives to Thomas Reid and Voltaire, who, in his recapitulation to the Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations, remarks confidently that "whatever concerns human nature is the same from one end of the universe to the other." And, in England, David Hume expresses the rationale for historical writing : "Mankind is so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature." 24 On this point liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment and classical humanists concurred: "good sense," as Pope writes, "must have been common sense in all times." After paying due respect to the doctrine of correctness, the heretofore reticent poet lets fall a daring question: "In this office of collecting my pieces, I am altogether uncertain, whether to look upon my self as a man building a monument, or burying the dead?" "Presumptious Man!" Pope would later write, even to think of his building a monument. For the Second Folio (1632), Milton had written a short poem in homage to Shake23. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), p. 219. 24. Quoted in Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 95.

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speare, claiming "Thou . . . has built thy self a live-long Monument." Shakespeare himself had boasted of the enduring power of his verse to the young man of the Sonnets: "And thou in this shalt find thy monument, / When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent" (107). But Pope probably was thinking of the famous passage from the third book of Horace's Odes: Exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens possit diruere aut innumerabilis annorum series et fuga temporum. Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam usque ego postero crescam laude recens. 25 (1-8) I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier that the Pyramids' royal pile, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, or the countless chain of years and the ages' flight. I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of me shall escape the death-goddess. On and on shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time. For Pope to consider the word "monument" again reveals his aspiration for fame rising to the surface. And yet Pope puts by the question and, setting the example for his later work, ends his essay within the knowledge "of his own desert." Rancor will not stir him if he is passed over or defamed by the public : "I desire it may be known that I die in charity, and in my senses; without any murmurs against the justice of this age, or any mad appeals to posterity." One thinks of the contrast to the modern writer's "mad appeals" in the Epistle Dedicatory to A Tale of a Tub. For if his poetry is destined to perish (or even perhaps, win fame), why, Pope asks, should contemporary critics bother excoriating him in their reviews and criticism? In the end Swift's Time, the moral tutor of Prince Posterity, will decide. When seventeen years later, in 1735, Pope added a second volume to his collected Works, his 25. Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1914), 3.30.

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new preface was terse: "All I have to say of my Writings is contained in my Preface to the first of these volumes printed . . . in the year 1717." Pope was obviously satisfied with his original performance. M

f.

From its publication in 1715, little interest has attached to Pope's first sustained statement on the subject of the poet's relation to the illustrious past and to the unknown future, The Temple of Fame. Apropos its subject matter, the poem is an imitation of Chaucer's lively House of Fame. Johnson was right in prophesying that the poem—it is essentially a poet's poem— would be "turned silently over, and seldom quoted or mentioned with either praise or blame." 26 While he thought "every part is splendid," he admitted nonetheless that "the original vision of Chaucer was never much improved." On this point, the brothers Warton disagreed: Joseph Warton found Chaucer "improved and heightened by the masterly hand of Pope";27 in his History of English Poetry, Thomas Warton argued oppositely that Pope "not only misrepresented the story, but marred the character of the poem."28 In the late nineteenth century Sir Leslie Stephen dismissed the poem as a frigid imitation of Chaucer and one of Pope's "least successful performances." 29 Modern critics have not been less willing to judge the poem on grounds of its improvement of, or deterioration from, Chaucer's House of Fame. Yet in 1938 Robert Root found it "essentially a dull performance"; 30 and in his works on Pope, Geoffrey Tillotson has found little to say in its favor. More recently still, however, there has been considerable praise from critics responding to its metaphorical language. In his Laureate of Peace: On the Genius of Alexander Pope (1954), G. Wilson Knight claims that The Temple of Fame "contains some of our very 26. Johnson, III, 226. 27. Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1782), I, 356. 28. London, 1774,1, 396. 29. Leslie Stephen, Alexander Pope (London, 1898), p. 33. 30. Robert K. Root, The Poetical Career of Alexander Pope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938), p. 71. Root does bring up the justly famous setpiece describing winter in Nova Zembla, praising the lines as "fine enough to redeem a poem much duller than the Temple of Fame" (p. 71 ), but passes quickly on to The Rape of the Lock.

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finest realizations of the action-prose, together with perhaps our finest example of a living architecture . . . A positive treasurestore of noble sculptures exists in this richly compacted poem." 31 Reuben Brower calls the poem "one of his most interesting early works . . . In style and attitude the poem is prophetic of the lines along which Pope will develop, and it anticipates in a curious fashion 'The Temple of Infamy' with which his career closed."32 The "Hint" of the poem, Pope discloses in the advertisement, is "taken from Chaucer's House of Fame [chiefly book III]. The Design is in a manner entirely alter'd, the Descriptions and most of the particular Thoughts my own." Pope's design includes three major parts contiguously related : a description of the landscape and the temple, a procession of suppliants to the queen of fame, and the mansion of rumor. A brief but crucial concluding statement concerns the young poet's frightened response to his dream-vision. To this external design correspond two antithetical continuities of metaphor, wonder and ambiguity. The ambiguities exist from the outset. The season is spring, and the "youthful Bard" describes the renewal of the earth through traditional pastoral images and gentle rhythms. In spirit and image, the lines borrow more from Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales than from the House of Fame: In that soft Season when descending Showers Call forth the Greens, and wake the rising Flowers; When opening Buds salute the welcome Day, And Earth relenting feels the Genial Ray. (1-4) Images of piercing and accepting, what one critic calls the latent sexuality of the Chaucerian original, and the bright atmosphere suggest organic process renewing its eternal cycle.33 In the House of Fame Chaucer's rambling, kaleidoscopic nar31. G. Wilson Knight, Laureate of Peace: On the Genius of Alexander Pope (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), pp. 92, 100. 32. Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 354. 33. Arthur W. Hoffman, "Chaucer's Prologue to Pilgrimage: The Two Voices," Journal of English Literary History 21 (1954), 3.

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rator impatiently awaits initiation into love's mysteries by Venus. But the pastoral world and the thoughts of love are swiftly dismissed by Pope in the sixth line: "And Love it self was banish'd from my Breast." For the narrator has fallen asleep, and the springlike scene is dispersed by a "wild promiscuous Sound" and we are presented with an "Intellectual Scene," or what we might label a surrealistic landscape. Although the latinate denotation of "promiscuous" (mixed together) is perfectly correct, Pope trades on more recent meanings connoting falsity, suspicion, and deceit. In place of spring, the speaker is transported outside the realm of process to a forbidding and lifeless terrain symbolic of another type of eternity, one without cycle : Then gazing up, a glorious Pile beheld, Whose tow'ring Summit ambient Clouds conceal'd. High on a Rock of Ice the Structure lay, Steep its Ascent, and slipp'ry was the Way; The wond'rous Rock like Parian Marble shone, And seem'd to distant Sight of solid Stone. (25-30) In a late satire Pope would write: "Whether we dread, or whether we desire, / In either case, believe me, we admire." The mountain of solid ice on which the temple is set evokes both dread and desire but, above all, admiration, or wonder. To express the permanence of eternal fame, Pope has migrated to an arctic zone where the inorganic and wasted landscape contrasts with the pastoral images with which the poem began. The road to fame is steep, slippery, and altogether forbidding, yet the ice "like Parian Marble" calls forth classical aesthetic associations that immediately restore our desire to approach more closely. The imagined temple is what Yeats might call an "artifice of eternity." It stands outside of time and the seasons in lines that have always been singled out for praise : So Zembla's Rocks (the beauteous Work of Frost) Rise white in Air, and glitter o'er the Coast; Pale Suns, unfelt, at distance roll away, And on th' impassive Ice the Lightnings play :

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Alexander Pope Eternal Snows the growing Mass supply, Till the bright Mountains prop th' incumbent Sky : As Atlas fix'd, each hoary Pile appears, The gather'd Winter of a thousand Years. (53-60)

The lines contain many qualities inherent in Pope's conception of fame. Earlier the ice mountain was depicted as steep and slippery for the unwary glory-seeker. Now, in Zembla, one notes both its remoteness and its imperishable beauty; the snow is an emblem of purity, even if its "glitter" reminds us of the pejorative "glistering foil" of Milton's Fame in Lycidas. Moreover, the adjective "impassive," while neutral and bordering on the negative, is countered by the more positive "eternal" and "fix'd." Above all, the frigidity and permanence of the ice palaces and terrain stand out; both positive and negative qualities inhere in the description of Zembla as in fame. The solidity of the mountain supports the "Stupendous Pile." The young bard is at once fascinated with his own dream and his hope of fame. Instead of Chaucer's essentially organic, Gothic palace, Pope's baroque temple expresses, in Worringer's aesthetic, the rigidly life-denying geometric: "Four Faces had the Dome," "Four brazen Gates," and inside the temple a shrine surrounded by six "pompous Columns." Our immediate impression is one of stability and order—"venerable Order" we are asked to praise—and since the temple faces "different Quarters of the Sky," even the universe is firmly structured. "Truth and beauty, reason and nature," Ernst Cassirer writes on the Enlightenment, "are now but different expressions for the same thing, for one and the same inviolable order of being."34 In their decorations the four gates symbolize major myths of the world. The western gate of Doric pillars, for example, upholds an architrave on which one may view Theseus, Perseus, "the great Alcides stooping with his toil," drawn, as Pope notes, "with an eye to the Position of the famous Statue of Farnese," but also to the living images emblazoned on Achilles' shield in the eighteenth Iliad. The eastern gate "was glorious to behold, / With Diamond flaming, and Barbaric Gold," like the palace of 34. Cassirer, Philosophy of the Enlightenment,

p. 281.

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Satan in Paradise Lost. The poet, who was at the same time including sylphs and salamanders in The Rape of the Lock, is caught up by the magicians pictured there : These stop'd the Moon, and call'd th' unbody'd Shades To Midnight Banquets in the glimmering Glades; Made visionary Fabricks round them rise, And airy Spectres skim before their Eyes; Of Talismans and Sigils knew the Pow'r, And careful watch'd the Planetary Hour. (101-106) But as if to place this long digression in moral perspective, Pope concludes his relation of the eastern front with these lines on Confucius : Superior, and alone, Confucius stood, Who taught that useful Science, to be good.

(107-108)

After some unhappy lines on the southern gate, the narrator's eye is caught by the northern, Gothic gate. In a note to the lines Pope praises the "savage virtue" of the "heroick Barbarians," admiring the heroic ideal by which they "accounted it a Dishonour to die in their Beds, and rush'd on to certain Death in the Prospect of an After-Life, and for the Glory of a Song from their Bards in Praise of their Actions." The status of the poet clearly had fallen from such heights, and Pope's imagination must have been fired at the prospect of the ancient bard (the speaker refers to himself as a "youthful Bard" in line 502). The description is not, however, without its "horrid" side, for Gothic fame, like all fame, has an amorality to it. The "rude Iron Columns" of the gate are "smear'd with Blood," and the architraves depict a "Thousand" heroes of "doubtful Fame" : Nor void of Emblem was the mystic Wall, For thus Romantick Fame increases all.

(135-136)

"Fame is called 'romantic,' " G. Wilson Knight comments, "because it sometimes romanticizes." 35 35. G. W. Knight, Laureate of Peace, p. 97.

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t The design of the temple's interior points toward the future design of Pope's shell temple and especially of his grotto, that "undistinguishable Mixture of Realities and Imagery": 36 Of bright, transparent Beryl were the Walls, The Freezes Gold, and Gold the Capitals : As Heaven with Stars, the Roof with Jewels glows, And ever-living Lamps depend in Rows. (141-144) "When you shut the Doors of this Grotto, it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera obscura," he writes Edward Blount. Like the temple of fame the cinematographic walls of Pope's grotto contain "all the Objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats . . . forming a moving picture in their visible Radiations : And when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different Scene: it is finished with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular forms; and in the Cieling is a Star of the same Material, at which when a Lamp (of an orbicular Figure of thin Alabaster) is hung in the Middle, a thousand pointed Rays glitter and are reflected over the Place."37 But the numerous statues in the temple may resemble the interior of Pope's library. Alexander, Epaminondas, Timoleon, and Scipio are in the temple. Caesar ("The World's great Master and his own") and Marcus Aurelius are especially honored for conquering, not only foreign lands, but their own will. In the "Centre of the hallow'd Quire," we find the most illustrious poets and philosophers. The metaphors by which Homer is pictured should by now be familiar : High on the first, the mighty Homer shone; Eternal Adamant compos'd his Throne; 36. "An Epistolary Description of the late Mr. POPE'S House and Gardens at TWICKENHAM," The Newcastle General Magazine, or Monthly Intelligencer, 1 (January 1748), 2 5 - 2 8 ; reprinted in Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 239. 37. Corr., II, 2 9 6 - 2 9 7 .

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Motion and Life did ev'ry Part inspire, Bold was the Work, and prov'd the Master's Fire; A strong Expression most he seem'd t'affect, And here and there disclos'd a brave Neglect. (182-183,192-195) The statue of Virgil follows next : Finish'd the whole, and labour'd ev'ry Part, With Patient Touches of unweary'd Art: The Mantuan there in sober Triumph sate, Compos'd his Posture, and his Look sedate; On Homer still he fix'd a reverend Eye, Great without Pride, in modest Majesty. (198-203 ) What impresses us most in Pope's description of the "hallow'd Quire" is the selection of Ancients: Homer, Virgil, Pindar (whom Pope, in 1736, would find "tiresome"), 38 Horace, Aristotle, and Cicero. Warton dispraised Pope for not including such moderns as Shakespeare and Milton. Pope could have done so, for in the original version Chaucer had included a curious and whimsical mixture of moderns from Geoffrey of Monmouth to "Colle tregetour," a contemporary juggler! But for Pope the Renaissance had enhanced the importance of classical antiquity and at the same time focused powerfully on individual merit. One must first be very ancient to accrue fame, which becomes a type of racial consciousness, at least the memory of the race. At the midpoint of the poem the Queen of Fame is introduced. She is the first of many Popean queens, and not a little like the last, the Queen of Dullness. She works wonders on a youthful bard's imagination : When on the Goddess first I cast my Sight, Scarce seem'd her Stature of a Cubit's height, But swell'd to larger Size, the more I gaz'd, Till to the Roof her tow'ring Front she rais'd. With her, the Temple ev'ry Moment grew, And ampler Vista's open'd to my View, Upward the Columns shoot, the Roofs ascend, And Arches widen, and long lies extend. 38. Spence, no. 533.

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Alexander Pope Such was her Form, as antient Bards have told, Wings raise her Arms, and Wings her Feet infold; A Thousand busy Tongues the Goddess bears, And Thousand open Eyes, and Thousand list'ning Ears. (258-269)

The wonder of the passage is informed with and undercut by irony and hyperbolical expressions. The speaker suffers from what Johnson would call the "dangerous prevalence of imagination," creating what it longs for. (Nil admirari, "Not to admire is all the art I know," Pope would later imitate from Horace's epistle in 1735. ) The description of the goddess shows, of course, that Pope's elaborate conception owes much to Virgil's "Fama" or Rumour : Tot vigiles oculi subter (mirabile dictu), tot linguae, totidem ora sonant, tot subrigit auris. 39 (Aeneid, IV, 182-183) The wings on her arms and feet derive from Virgil's pedibus celerem et pernicibus alis. In the following section, the procession of suppliants, the ambiguities of fame emerge through the dramatic situation, and we are warned of Fame's capriciousness and deceit and of her sister Fortune, the power behind the throne : Millions of suppliant Crowds the Shrine attend, And all Degrees before the Goddess bend; The Poor, the Rich, the Valiant, and the Sage, And boasting Youth, and Narrative old Age. Their Pleas were diff'rent, their Request the same; For Good and Bad alike are fond of Fame. Some she disgrac'd, and some with Honours crown'd; Unlike Successes equal Merits found. Thus her blind Sister, fickle Fortune reigns, And undiscerning, scatters Crowns and Chains. (288-297) 39. Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), I, 408: "as many watchful eyes below—wondrous to tell— as many tongues, as many sounding mouths, as many pricked-up ears." Hereafter cited as Virgil.

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Thus, the "Golden Trumpet" proclaims the fame of the "Good and Just." Yet when "another Crowd . . . [that] No less deserv'd a just Return of Praise" appears before the goddess, "the black Trumpet" blares cacophonously and Slander and Rumour ruin their reputation. 40 In this great procession the smallest tribe of all dresses "plain"; their mien is "modest." This group neither claims merit nor desires fame, but prefers to die "unheard of, as we liv'd unseen," not unlike the youthful Pope of the "Ode on Solitude." They beg : O let us still the secret Joy partake, To follow Virtue ev'n for Virtue's sake.

( 364-365 )

At this request, of course, Fame is affronted since the smallest tribe has challenged her authority : And live there Men who slight immortal Fame? Who then with Incense shall adore our Name? But Mortals! know, 'tis still our greatest Pride, To blaze those Virtues which the Good would hide. (366-369) It is important to keep these lines in mind when approaching the conclusion of the poem, for the young poet will protest that he, too, prefers Virtue to Fame. (Another prefiguring of the conclusion has already been noted in the description of Caesar and Aurelius, who conquered themselves. ) The Queen of Fame nonetheless willfully grants the tribe their reward as if to assert her power : Rise! Muses, rise! add all your tuneful Breath. These must not sleep in Darkness and in Death. She said : in Air the trembling Musick floats, And on the Winds triumphant swell the Notes; So soft, tho high, so loud, and yet so clear, Ev'n list'ning Angels lean'd from Heaven to hear : 40. See The Dunciad theme.

IV, 7 1 - 8 5 for a scatological variation on this

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Alexander Pope To farthest Shores th' Ambrosial Spirit flies, Sweet to the World, and grateful to the Skies. (370-377)

Music and harmony are used in The Temple of Fame to express the beauty of honest fame as commonly as noise expresses the ugliness of slander and rumor. The next train of claimants is a scandalous collection of courtiers; these "Men of Pleasure . . . in Fancy vanquish'd ev'ry Maid" and told "leud Tales . . . Of unknown Dutchesses" ("Yet would the World believe us, all were well"). The Queen of Fame carelessly awards them their request: the Trumpet rends the Skies, And at each Blast a Lady's Honour dies.41

(392-393 )

As this procession ends one is reminded of that later parade on a Lord Mayor's Day, which forms the main action of The Dunciad. There after another blast from another queen, sleep and forgetfulness prevail. After the peregrinations of the claimants, Pope's verse once again takes a giant stride in the third section of the poem. From the throne of the goddess "some Pow'r unknown" snatches the speaker and places him in a "Site uncertain." Before him spreads what Montaigne called in his essay "Of Glory" "this breathie confusion of bruites, and frothy Chaos of reports and of vulgar opinions which still push us on" : 4 2 if in Earth or Air; With rapid Motion turn'd the Mansion round; With ceaseless Noise the ringing Walls resound : Not less in Number were the spacious Doors, Than Leaves on Trees, or Sands upon the Shores; Which still unfolded stand, by Night, by Day, Pervious to Winds, and open ev'ry way. 41. Compare the scandalmongers of Hampton Court in The Rape of the Lock: "A third interprets Motions, Looks and Eyes; / At ev'ry Word a Reputation dies" (III, 1 5 - 1 6 ) . 42. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Glory," in Essayes, trans. John Florio ( 1 6 0 3 ) , ed. Thomas Seccombe (London: Grant Richards, 1908), II, 432.

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As Flames by Nature to the Skies ascend, As weighty Bodies to the Center tend, As to the Sea returning Rivers roll, And the touch'd Needle trembles to the Pole : Hither, as to their proper Place, arise All various Sounds f r o m Earth, and Seas, and Skies, Or spoke aloud, or whisper'd in the Ear; Nor ever Silence, Rest or Peace is here. (421-435) Already Pope has associated Virgil's "Fama" or Rumour with the Queen of Fame—her wings, her thousand eyes and tongues. Now he invents a natural history of Rumour, borrowing from seventeenth-century Royal Society projectors, the second book of Chaucer's House of Fame ( 7 7 4 - 8 5 2 ) , and Shakespeare's Induction to II Henry IV: ev'ry Voice and Sound, when first they break, On neighb'ring Air a soft Impression make; Another ambient Circle then they move, That, in its turn, impels the next above; Thro undulating Air the Sounds are sent, And spread o'er all the fluid Element. (442-447) The amorality of the Queen of Fame is most tellingly expressed through her relation to Rumour's "Lyes" : "Fame sits aloft, and points them out their Course, / Their Date determines, and prescribes their Force" ( 4 8 3 - 4 8 4 ) . The origin of Lyes resembles the wretched birth of the offspring of Death and Sin in Paradise Lost ·. When thus ripe Lyes are to perfection sprung, Full grown, and fit to grace a mortal Tongue, Thro thousand Vents, impatient forth they flow, And rush in Millions on the World below. (479-482) By the last verse-paragraph, the poet expresses his own weariness at what his dream-vision has revealed. Wonder and incredulity have yielded to reason and virtue: How vain that second Life in others' Breath, Th' Estate which Wits inherit after Death !

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Alexander Pope Ease, Health, and Life, for this they must resign, (Unsure the Tenure, but how vast the Fine!) (505-508)

The second life of Fame is vain by comparison to the resurrection of the spirit, but the tone of anomie evokes Montaigne's words: "All the glory I pretend in my life, is, that I have lived quietly. Quietly not according to Metrodorius, Arcesilas, or Aristippus, but acording [sic] to my selfe. Since Philosophie could never find any way for tranquility, that might be generally good, let every man in his particular seeke for it."43 Montaigne's entire essay, in fact, provides an excellent gloss on the conclusion of Pope's Temple of Fame. Neither spurns an honest fame. Only, "She comes unlook'd for, if she comes at all" (514). Above all, fame is not to be valued as essential to our truest self and its happiness. Here, Pope follows Christian doctrine. "It is requisite for man's perfection," remarks Aquinas, "that he should know himself; but not that he should be known by others"; but since he is replying to an objection of Cicero's, he adds cautiously that fame "may, however, be desired as being useful for something, either in order that God may be glorified by men, or that men may become better by reason of the good they know to be in another man, or in order that man, knowing by the testimony of others' praise the good which is in him, may himself strive to persevere therein and to become better."44 So in conclusion, the "youthful Bard" has come to such awareness; he no longer beseeches the Queen, but rather begs of heaven the strength to "scorn the guilty Bays": Drive from my Breast that wretched Lust of Praise; Unblemish'd let me live, or die unknown, Oh grant an honest Fame, or grant me none! (522-524)

43. Ibid., p. 71. 44. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates, 1922), II, II, Q, 132, Art. 1, See also Corrado Rosso, "Vauvenargues, Γ ideale dell' eloquenza e la morale della gloria," Filosophia 15 ( 1 9 6 4 ) , 4 8 9 - 4 9 8 .

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Μ

t Fame asserts itself even through the ruins of time. From Du Bellay and Spenser to Piranesi and Gibbon, a chief myth of the West troubled the artistic imagination: if, with all its might, Rome fell, what then of human endeavor? The medieval mind fixed on death as the great leveler, but for the Rensaissance spirit death only highlighted the pageant of human life. The spectacle was enhanced by the dignity of its ruins. To the wandering visitor who searches for "Rome en Rome," Du Bellay offers the plangent admonition : Rome de Rome est le seul monument, Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement. Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s'enfuit, Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance! Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit, Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistance. 45 (Les Antiquitez de Rome [1558], III) In Piranesi's series of engravings Vedute di Roma ( 1748-1778 ) even the enduring ruins of the Temple of Jupiter dwarf the houses built haphazardly in their midst, and living men lean on canes and crutches beneath giant statues of Romans. Pope's verse-epistle "To Mr. Addison" (ca. 1713) chooses yet another emblem to lament the ruins of time, ancient medallions. In the first verse-paragraph Pope describes the ruins of Rome, a "wild Waste of all-devouring years ! / How Rome her own sad Sepulchre appears" ( 1 - 2 ) . The lines echo Du Bellay's Rome de Rome est le seul monument: With nodding arches, broken temples spread! The very Tombs now vanish'd like their dead ! Imperial wonders rais'd on Nations spoil'd, Where mix'd with Slaves the groaning Martyr toil'd; 45. Rome now of Rome is th' only funerali, And only Rome of Rome hath victory, Ne aught save Tiber hast'ning to his fall Remains of all. O world's inconstancy! That which is firm doth flit and fall away, And that is flitting doth abide and stay. (Edmund Spenser's translation)

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Alexander Pope Huge Theatres, that now unpeopled Woods, Now drain'd a distant country of her Floods; Fanes, which admiring Gods with pride survey, Statues of Men, scarce less alive than they. (3—10)

No mean army of destruction conspires against these edifices : "Barbarian blindness," "hostile fury" and "Gothic fire" form one metaphorical pole; the other, "religious rage," "Christian zeal" and "Papal piety." Above both Christian and pagan forces, however, Time dominates, "the silent stroke of mould'ring age." The poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets said "Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate." In the following verses Pope, too, contemplates the world's vanity : Ambition sigh'd; She found it vain to trust The faithless Column and the crumbling Bust; Huge moles, whose shadow stretch'd from shore to shore, Their ruins ruin'd, and their place no more ! ( 19-22 ) For Shakespeare's poet, the written verse shall withstand "the wrackful seige of battering days." For Pope, ambition seeks a more solid image : Convinc'd, she now contracts her vast design, And all her Triumphs shrink into a Coin. ( 23-24 ) In the aesthetic of Théophile Gautier, a similar emblem will be taken and, as in Pope, the medal becomes symbolic of strength and durability, a fitting symbol, then, for the marmoreal verse : Tout passe. —L'art robuste Seul a l'éternité. Le buste Survit à la cité. Et la médaille austère Que trouve un laboureur Sous terre Révèle un empereur.

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Within the medal's narrow orb (and the animation may owe something to the description of Achilles' shield) Pope finds a microcosm of the world. In one, "sad Judea weeps," in others, "scantier limits the proud Arch confine," or "a small Euphrates," or the "Nile or Rhine"; and "little Eagles wave their wings in gold." Like the poem, the medal will be "faithful to its charge of fame"; "Gods, Emp'rors, Heroes, Sages, Beauties," the subjects of heroic poetry, are found emblematized. But Pope cannot stave off mockery, and the poem suddenly shifts in tone. One might say that this shift is prepared for by the subtle reductionism that cuts transversely through the poem, namely that the world should shrink into a coin. Partly because of Pope's praise for Addison's study of medals, and partly because of his own fascination with the grandeur of his subject, up to this point Pope has not inveighed against man's pride. Now, however, he whipsaws the coin collectors : With sharpen'd sight pale Antiquaries pore, Th' inscription value, but the rust adore; This the blue varnish, that the green endears, The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years ! To gain Pescennius one employs his schemes, One grasps a Cecrops in ecstatic dreams; Poor Vadius, long with learned spleen devour'd, Can taste no pleasure since his Shield was scour'd; And Curio, restless by the Fair-one's side, Sighs for an Otho, and neglects his bride. (35-44) Pope succumbs to the irresistible impulse to satirize, and one may look ahead for a moment to those Unes in the fourth book of The Dunciad leveled possibly at Sir Andrew Fountaine, an antique dealer with a rich clientele : But Annius, crafty Seer, with ebon wand, And well dissembled em'rald on his hand, False as his Gems, and canker'd as his Coins, Came, cramm'd with capon, from where Pollio dines. (IV,347-350)

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Virgil addressed his fourth prophetic eclogue to his friend Asinius Pollio, and in "To Mr. Addison" the Virgilian Pope looks forward to the day when Addison, like Pollio, will be "on the cast ore" of the coin. But Annius—the name is borrowed from a monk notorious for his forgeries—deals with counterfeit coin with the same pleasure he has when he feasts gluttonously on capon. In his specious prayer Annius begs the "gracious Goddess" of Dulness for a rare "Attys, now a Cecrops," just as one of the "pale Antiquaries" in "To Mr. Addison" "grasps a Cecrops in ecstatic dreams." Furthermore, in "To Mr. Addison" the mad Curio "Sighs for an Otho," whereas in The Dunciad Annius would be "Lord of an Otho." (Coins of the emperor Otho were valued among the rarest of the twelve Caesars.) That Annius in the late poem would achieve through counterfeit what Curio in the early poem merely desired out of greed may show how greed at length resorts to deceit in order to achieve its ends. By 1743 Pope could write in Annius' prayer to Dulness : O may thy cloud still cover the deceit! Thy choicer mists on this assembly shed, But pour them thickest on the noble head. So shall each youth, assisted by our eyes, See other Caesars, other Homers rise. (IV, 356-360) The eyes of the "crafty Seer" see nothing but their own ecstatic dreams. Dismissing the coin collectors and antiquaries in "To Mr. Addison," Pope nevertheless offers one of his own ecstatic dreams, a worthy one: the future glory of a civilization. He first extols Addison's learning, through which, "Touch'd by thy hand, again Rome's glories shine." Like the medallions and the poet's verses, which we have also observed operating in Pope's lines on Voiture, Addison's work has gone some distance toward rescuing the past from unmerited oblivion : Oh when shall Britain, conscious of her claim, Stand emulous of Greek and Roman fame? In living medals see her wars enroll'd, And vanquish'd realms supply recording gold ?

(53-56)

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Despite the satiric notion of a world "shrinking" into a coin, Pope still would seek that earthly glory for Britain. A just fame rewards a just nation, and the medal and the marmoreal verses in each case serve as an emblem for that fame. The poem opened with a wide survey of Roman glories, soon reduced to the narrow orb of the medal. Now again, the prospect widens as the medal fires the imagination of its viewer. Here, rising bold, the Patriot's honest face; There Warriors frowning in historic brass : Then future ages with delight shall see How Plato's, Bacon's, Newton's looks agree; Or in fair series laurell'd Bards be shown, A Virgil there, and here an Addison. ( 57-62 ) That last line does strain credulity, but young Pope was probably sincere. In 1713, when the poem was begun, Addison's fame and Pope's admiration were at their highpoint. But Pope had enough literary tact not to end on this note, for the poem moves to a quiet, dignified conclusion. As in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," the last lines are an engraved message from a realm beyond time : "Statesman, yet friend to Truth ! of soul sincere, In action faithful, and in honour clear; Who broke no promise, serv'd no private end, Who gain'd no title, and who lost no friend, Ennobled by himself, by all approv'd, And prais'd, unenvy'd, by the Muse he lov'd." Though Addison at length lost one friend, Pope himself, there is no rancor here. Pope's final message is one of reason and virtue, which raises the question of fame to a higher plane. The passage is close in spirit to themes expressed by the young Milton, the author of the seventh prolusion (1631-32?). In this work ignorance hails the "speedy destruction of all things," declaring "our name is to abide but a short time." But Milton counters this defeatist attitude and hopes for an eternal life "which will never wipe out the memory at least of our good deeds on earth: in which, if we have nobly deserved anything

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here, we ourselves, being present, shall hear it."46 Such fame is alone imperishable. Pope concludes on the same note of seriousness on which The Temple of Fame closed.

! Two early poems relate the question of fame to pagan and Christian female suicides. In "On the Statue of Cleopatra, made into a Fountain by Leo the Tenth" (1710), translated from the Italian of Castiglione, Cleopatra states proudly that she killed herself to preserve her reputation : What, shou'd a Queen, so long the boast of fame, Have stoop'd to serve an haughty Roman dame ?

( 5-6 )

Used to being "ador'd with rites divine" in life, she begs seductively "Whoe'er thou art whom this fair statue charms" now at least to listen to her plight: simply, she approves Leo X's removal of her statue to a fountain where the water may symbolize the tears kept hidden within the statue for fifteen hundred years. Still, tho' a rock, can thus relieve her woe, And tears eternal from the marble flow. No guilt of mine the rage of Heav'n cou'd move; I knew no crime, if 'tis no crime to love. Then as a lover give me leave to weep; Lull'd by these fountains the distrest may sleep; And while the Dogstar burns the thirsty field, These to the birds refreshing streams may yield; The birds shall sport amidst the bending sprays, And fill the shade with never ceasing lays. ( 58-67 ) Since no question arises over the morality of her suicide, and since she is so concerned with her image in history—an image that Leo X has gone part of the way toward restoring—the pagan atmosphere of the poem is preserved. Fame for Cleopatra is measured in terms of filling the minds of her viewers. When at the end she would thank her patron Leo, and by extension, the poet Castiglione, for her memorial, she expresses her tranquil composure through richly pastoral verse : 46. Milton, Works, XII, 2 7 9 - 2 8 1 .

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New greens shall spring, new flow'rs around me grow, And on each tree the golden apples glow; Here, where the fragrant Orange groves arise, Whose shining scene with rich Hesperia vies. Besides, these verses symbolize continuance of her fame in the natural world, which to her is an eternally blossoming garden of Alcinous. Cleopatra's concern for earthly fame is in keeping with the Greco-Roman ideal. As one of its finest exponents, Cicero expostulated in his speech "Pro Archia": Nullam enim virtus aliara mercedem laborum periculorumque desiderat praeter hanc laudes at gloriae: qua quidem detracta, indices, quid est quod in hoc tam exiguo vitae curriculo et tam brevi tantis nos in laboribus exerceamus (For its labor and peril, virtue asks for no reward other than applause and fame. Deprive it of that, judges, and in this short, harsh life what would we ask ourselves to strive for?). 4 7 Here virtue is perhaps best rendered in its Renaissance sense of virtù or manly courage, a moral and heroic ideal of the vita attiva. But fame has been variously valued among humanists and, as C. B. Watson points out in writing on Cicero, the "pagan humanist considers the indifference to public opinion of the Christian saint or the Stoic sage as mere vanity. The Christian, in turn, frequently disparages the Greco-Roman concern for public approval and praise as a manifestation of pride and self-esteem."48 For example, when a philosopher or society (Plato, the Christian Middle Ages) posits a supernatural world against which human values are to be measured, the desire for and bestowal of earthly fame is inevitably denigrated. On the contrary, if the gods are humanized or intellectualized, are "mere shadowy figures," or are done away with altogether, the philosopher or society (Cicero, Aristotle, or certain figures of the Enlightenment such as Turgot 47. "Pro Archia," in Cicero, The Speeches, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1 9 2 3 ) , p. 36 ( m y translation). 48. C. B. Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Conception of Honor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 26. See also Arthur O. Lovejoy, "The 'Love of Praise' as the Indispensable Substitute for 'Reason and Virtue' in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Theories of H u m a n Nature," Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1961 ), pp. 153-193.

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and Condorcet) may adopt a predominantly h u m a n moral standard and the opinion of one's fellow men. Now for Pope, both a Christian and a humanist, these antitheses must in some way be harmonized. We have observed his treatment of f a m e in an essentially pagan context. In the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, a poem of similar length, he embraces the Christian attitude toward fame. Both women are suicides for love and honor. Just as Cleopatra claims she "knew no crime, if 'tis no crime to love," the poet of the Elegy asks "Is it a crime, in heav'n to love too well?" Both echo the Othello of Act 5, who loved "not wisely but too well." Each woman is driven to her desperate act by authoritarian figures, and each attains peace with herself through a poetic narrative in which the record is set straight. In the first poem there is a proudly statuesque figure; as the stage direction indicates at the outset, "Cleopatra speaks." However, in the spectral Elegy, as perfect as an elegy Hamlet might have written for Ophelia, the poet himself must express the theme. Cleopatra had already won historical f a m e ; Leo X, his statue, and Castiglione only serve to bear its testimony. In the Elegy it falls to the poet to keep alive her memory, not simply to "bear about the mockery of woe" : What tho' no weeping Loves thy ashes grace, Nor polish'd marble emulate thy face? What tho' no sacred earth allow thee room, Nor hallow'd dirge be mutter'd o'er thy tomb ?

( 59-62 )

More important, in the Christian atmosphere the poet must attempt to explain, and in part to pardon, her suicide. In a scene reminiscent of Aeneas' wandering in hades or Dante in the purgatory, the poet confronts the "beck'ning ghost" and asks whether heaven will reward or d a m n her : Is there no bright reversion in the sky, For those who gre atly think, or bravely die ?

(9-10)

Milton had set forth in Lycidas a concept in which fame was meted out by the "perfet witness of all-judging Jove; / As he

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pronounces lastly on each deed." But the unknown, fatalist powers here addressed by the poet of the Elegy either have not decided in her favor or have need, as does the lady herself, of an interlocutor to express their decision. "If eternal justice rules the ball," the lady will be avenged on her "false guardian" and granted an "honest Fame." Again Pope points the moral: Thus unlamented pass the proud away, The gaze of fools, and pageant of a day! So perish all, whose breast ne'er learn'd to glow For others' good, or melt at others' woe. (43-46) After the poet has chastised the guilty guardian and at least partially absolved the lady of her crime of passion, priestlike he may pray for an eternal peace. As in the poem in which Cleopatra speaks, the poet borrows from pastoral convention: What tho' no sacred earth allow thee room, Nor hallow'd dirge be mutter'd o'er thy tomb? Yet shall thy grave with rising flow'rs be drest, And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast : There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow, There the first roses of the year shall blow; While Angels with their silver wings o'ershade The ground, now sacred by thy reliques made.

( 61-68 )

This passage is informed by both Christian and pagan conventions. The specifically pastoral images derive from Theocritus' Idyl XV and the Lament for Bion; "turf lie lightly on thy breast" corresponds to Sit tibi terra levis, of which the initials S Τ Τ L were commonly engraved on Roman tombstones. "Angels with their silver wings" derives from Judeo-Christian tradition, and the sanctifying reliques are both pagan and Christian. But the poem concludes with a brief memento mori: Poets themselves must fall, like those they sung; Deaf the prais'd ear, and mute the tuneful tongue. Ev'n he, whose soul now melts in mournful lays, Shall shortly want the gen'rous tear he pays; Then from his closing eyes thy form shall part,

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The conclusion inscribes the readers of his verse and the poet in the lists of death. What will be painful at the moment of death, however, will be consciousness of the loss of the now beloved, and now restored, lady; death extinguishes the poet's sensibility. The poem opened with a vision of the wandering ghost, her bosom bleeding from the visionary sword. It closes with the poet's own heart torn by his love and sorrow for the wronged lady; the elegy to her memory was born of that love and sorrow; and who will there be—except perhaps the present reader—to love and honor the lady after his death? "The Muse forgot, and thou belov'd no more!" I Pope may have adopted the convention of concluding his poems on a serious and subdued note from Milton. Like the Elegy, The Rape of the Lock ends by fortelling the inevitable, the death of the self. For this ultimate dissolution the poet initially prepares us with a comic inversion, the stolen lock and its midnight apotheosis—a malicious parody of fame. Mysteriously it vanishes, and courtiers and ladies search for it in vain: Some thought it mounted to the Lunar Sphere, Since all things lost on Earth, are treasur'd there. There Heroes' Wits are kept in pondrous Vases, And Beaus' in Snuff-boxes and Tweezer-Cases. There broken Vows, and Death-bed Alms are found, And Lovers' Hearts with Ends of Riband bound; The Courtier's Promises, and Sick Man's Pray'rs, The Smiles of Harlots, and the Tears of Heirs, Cages for Gnats, and Chains to Yoak a Flea; Dry'd Butterflies, and Tomes of Casuistry. (V, 113-122) Here only the muse can say for sure where the lock has vanished for she will preserve its immortality in verse. She "saw it upward rise, / Tho mark'd by none but quick Poetic Eyes." Its emblem is the meteor :

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A sudden Star, it shot thro' liquid Air, And drew behind a radiant Trail of Hair. Not Berenice's Locks first rose so bright, The Heav'ns bespangling with dishevel'd Light. (V,127-130) Pope is here drawing on classical and biblical traditions that associated hair with light. Thus, the Greek noun kome means both the hair style of a god and a comet. Similarly the Latin crinis translates as either hair or the bright tail of a meteor. 49 Valerius Flaccus, the medieval Victorines, and Milton, among numerous others, traded on the various meanings of the word, and so does Pope. For the "bright hair" will share in the eternality of the heavens, both as the luminous reminder of the heroicomical event and as a memento mori. The spritely Rape concludes with a cruel truth for the young Belinda and her admirers : For, after all the Murders of your Eye, When, after Millions slain, your self shall die; When those fair Suns shall sett, as sett they must, And all those Tresses shall be laid in Dust; This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame, And mid'st the Stars inscribe Belinda's Name ! (V,145-150) The last of the early verse to consider is the elegant Epistle to Mr. Jervas, with Dryden's Translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting (1716). Charles Jervas was a portrait artist under whom Pope studied in 1713-14, and at whose home he frequently stayed on visiting London. In the Essay on Criticism painting symbolized the gradual dissolution of an artist's fame : "And all the bright Creation fades away." In the Epistle to Mr. Jervas, however, there is more hope of art's defeating time: "Where life awakes, and dawns at ev'ry line." And from the canvas call the mimic face : Read these instructive leaves, in which conspire 49. For a full discussion, see Earl R. Wasserman, "The Limits of Allusion: Pope's 'Rape of the Lock,' " Journal of English and Germanic Philology 65 ( 1 9 6 7 ) , 3 - 3 4 .

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Pope's "regular rage," one recalls, succinctly illustrates his concordia discors. In verse-paragraphs that follow, Pope reflects on his friendship with Jervas, how each shared such an interest in the other's art, and how they both re-created "ideas of fair Italy" and the classical ideal. Yet death again intrudes, Jervas' admired Countess of Bridgewater has died of smallpox, and in her death Pope reads the death of Lady Mary (60), Martha Blount (61 ), and Belinda (62) of The Rape of the Lock: Yet should the Graces all thy figures place, And breathe an air divine on ev'ry face; Yet should the Muses bid my numbers roll, Strong as their charms, and gentle as their soul; With Ζeuxis' Helen thy Bridgewater vie, And these be sung 'till Granville's Myra die; Alas ! how little from the grave we claim? Thou but preserv'st a Face and I a Name. ( 71-78 ) 1 "To define an epitaph is useless," writes Johnson, "every one knows that it is an inscription on a tomb."50 Pope wrote twentythree of them, and although they do not equal Browne's verses on the Countess of Pembroke or any of Jonson's exquisite epitaphs, they do concern Pope's concept of immortality and fame and may therefore be treated briefly here. Generally his epitaphs have a lapidary tone, as the one for Charles Sackville whom Pope thought the best of the Restoration wits : 5 1 Dorset, the Grace of Courts, the Muses Pride, Patron of Arts, and Judge of Nature, dy'd! The Scourge of Pride, tho' sanctify'd or great, 50. Johnson, III, 254. 51. Spence, no. 472.

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Of Fops in Learning, and of Knaves in State : Yet soft his Nature, tho' severe his Lay, His Anger moral, and his Wisdom gay. The first couplet, Johnson finds, "contains a kind of information which few would want, that the man for whom the tomb was erected 'died.' " S2 The slow, ceremonious pace of the lines, the weighty thoughts, abundant use of capitals, rhymes all of elegaic, long vowels, and the unchecked tendency toward depersonalization show that Pope is attempting to be deadly formal : Blest Peer! his great Forefathers ev'ry Grace Reflecting, and reflected in his Race; Where other Buckhursts, other Dorsets shine, And Patriots still, or Poets, deck the Line. The "line" is seen as a prop upon which to deck or hang adornments, another example of the Renaissance conception of style as the garment of thought. One may note Pope's alliance of poets with a noble aristocracy. Both seek fame; but Dorset is assured of fame through the success of his line, or offspring, whereas the poet receives immortality through his line of verse. Elsewhere Pope shows wide variety in his treatment of epitaphs. Sometimes he uses an epitaph to show the power of death over man, and the theme becomes associated with the "vanity of human wishes" : Then, when you seem above mankind to soar, Look on this marble, and be vain no more ! ("Epitaph on Lord John Caryll" [1711]) Or Pope trifles with death, like Voiture, and he writes up his own epitaph in a gay moment (Johnson criticized it for its flippancy): Under this Marble, or under this Sill, Or under this Turf, or e'en what they will; Whatever an Heir, or a Friend in his stead, Or any good Creature shall lay o'er my Head; 52. Johnson, III, 255.

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In the weighty "Epitaph on Sir Godfrey Kneller" (1723) the artist who was known for his vanity is appropriately lauded for his "Merit, and brave Thirst of Praise." This brave thirst we have seen is not among Christian virtues, and it contradicts Augustine's warning "to resist this desire than yield to it." (In the earthly city "where the dead are succeeded by the dying— what else but glory should they [the Romans] love?" 53 ) Pope's bombastic conclusion, imitated from Raphael's epitaph, points toward the victory and the defeat of secular fame: Living, great Nature fear'd he might outvie Her works; and dying, fears herself may die. Because Johnson thought it the "most valuable,"54 and because Wordsworth singled it out for insincerity in his second essay Upon Epitaphs,55 "On Mrs. Corbet, Who Died of a Cancer in her Breast" has received more attention than any other: Here rests a Woman, good without pretence, Blest with plain Reason and with sober Sense; No Conquests she, but o'er herself desired, No Arts essay'd, but not to be admir'd. Passion and Pride were to her soul unknown, Convinc'd, that Virtue only is our own. So unaffected, so compos'd a mind, So firm yet soft, so strong yet so refin'd, Heav'n, as its purest Gold, by Tortures try'd; The Saint sustain'd it, but the Woman dy'd. Less marmoreal than his other epitaphs, the poem comes near in tone to Pope's "To Mrs. M. B. on her Birth-day" discussed above. "Of such character, which the dull overlook, and the gay despise, it was fit that the value should be made known," Johnson wrote, and perhaps he recalled his own "To the Memory of 53. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), V, 220. 54. Johnson, III, 262. 55. William Wordsworth, The Prose Works (London: Macmillan, 1896), II, 162-167.

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Dr. Robert Levet" which also resembles this epitaph in the praise it bestows on a good person from the middle ranks. Because the life has been well led, the soul of Mrs. Corbet may rest in silence; there is even the hint that the tortures of her cancer refined to purest gold her soul, as would purgatorial fires. "No conquest she, but o'er herself" reminds one of the special praise for Caesar and Marcus Aurelius in The Temple of Fame. And the praise of sober sense is high indeed from Pope. Chiefly the poem preserves the memory of someone unmemorable as far as fame is concerned, and the poet feels responsible for bringing her humbly to light among "the Good" no less than he sought to celebrate the passing of "the Great" in more heroic language. One may agree with William Warburton in preferring among all the epitaphs the Roman "Epitaph on Edmund Duke of Buckingham, who died in the Nineteenth Year of his Age, 1735." If modest Youth, with cool Reflection crown'd, And ev'ry opening Virtue blooming round, Could save a Mother's justest Pride from fate, Or add one Patriot to a sinking state ; This weeping marble had not ask'd thy Tear, Or sadly told, how many Hopes lie here ! The living Virtue now had shone approv'd, The Senate heard him, and his Country lov'd. Yet softer Honours, and less noisy Fame Attend the shade of gentle Buckingham : In whom a Race, for Courage fam'd and Art, Ends in the milder Merit of the Heart; And Chiefs or Sages long to Britain giv'n, Pays the last Tribute of a Saint to Heav'n. Here, "less noisy Fame" is gently softened by its rhyming with the quiet last syllable of Buckingham. This epitaph presents a poetic mixture of Christian and classical themes. For in the tone to which the speaker keeps and in the type of classical detail, the epitaph reminds us of Virgil's Unes on the young Marcellus (Aeneid 6.860-886) who died aged twenty in 23 B.C. In both passages the figure of the mother is mentioned: Virgil wrote to console Marcellus' mother Octavia, the sister of

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Augustus; Pope hoped to heal a breach between himself and Katherine, Duchess of Buckingham (after whom the haughty figure of Atossa in the second of the Moral Essays, "Of the Characters of Women," is partly drawn). In both poems a young member of the nobility in whom the hope of the race was placed is lamented; in both, the virtues of courage and reflection, the vita attiva and vita contemplativa, are extolled: Atque hie Aeneas (una namque ira videbat egregium forma iuvenem et fulgentibus armis, sed frons laeta parum et deiecto lumina voltu) : "quis, pater, ille, virum qui sic comitatur euntem? filius, anne aliquis magna de stirpe nepotum? qui strepitus circa comitum ! quantum instar in· ipso!· • · · nec puer Iliaca quisquam de gente Latinos in tantum spe tollet avos, nec Romula quondam ullo se tantum tellus iactabit alumno, heu pietas, heu prisca fides, ínvictaque bello dextera! 56 (Aeneid 6.860-865, 6.875-879) And hereon Aeneas, for he saw coming with him a youth of wondrous beauty and brilliant [sic] in his arms—but his face was sad and his eyes downcast: "Who, father, is he who thus attends him on his way? A son, or one of the mighty stock of his children's children? What whispers in the encircling crowd! What noble presence in himself!" . . . "No youth of Ilian stock shall exalt so greatly with his promise his Latin forefathers, nor shall the land of Romulus ever take such pride in any of her sons. Alas for goodness ! alas for old-world honour, and the hand invincible in war." "To crown with reflection is," Johnson notes on Pope's epitaph, "surely a mode of speech approaching to nonsense." 57 Yet again we discover a classical allusion informing this context. The epithet crowned Pope may owe to Virgil's lines on Numa, the second king of Rome, whom Aeneas also observes from a distance : Quis procul ille autem ramis insignis olivae / sacra ferens (6.80856. Virgil, 1,568. 57. Johnson, III, 271.

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809). 5 8 The link in this connection was provided by Dryden's translation of this very passage : "But what's the man, who from afar appears? / His head with olive crown'd, his hand a censer bears!" (Aeneis 6.1103-1104). And, there is, too, Dryden's poignant elegy to the memory of Mr. Oldham : Once more, hail and farewell; farewell thou young, But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue; Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound; But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around.

%

The relation between Pope's identity and his tradition has been explored in this chapter through one of his central themes, the hunger for fame. As a personal aspiration and an honored ideal, fame looms large in his life and his poetry as his own friends knew and as his foes never stopped ridiculing. Yet this idea provides one direct way of studying how he saw himself gradually earning a place in Western literature, how he wished to present his own heroic self-image to posterity, and what are and should be the criteria by which fame is meted out. In the last chapter I shall take up this theme again as it emerges in Pope's final period of writing, in the Epistle to Augustus particularly, but also in the fourth book of The Dunciad (1742). But first it is necessary to return to the life itself. 58. Virgil, I, 562. " B u t who is he apart, crowned with olive-sprays, and bearing the sacrifice?"

5. A Living Image: Swift Sublimity is the echo of a great soul. (Longinus, On the Sublime, I X )

It was during the doldrums of Pope's labors on the translation of the Odyssey and the edition of Shakespeare that Jonathan Swift reentered his life. "I have often endeavoured to establish a Friendship among all Men of Genius, and would fain have it done," Swift suggested to Pope in September 1723. "They are seldom above three or four Cotemporaries and if they could be united would drive the world before them; I think it was so among the Poets in the time of Augustus." 1 The letter must have cheered Swift's fellow Augustan—it had been a long time since Pope, John Gay, Dr. Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, and Swift had met together in the winter and spring of 1714 in the Scriblerus Club. John Gay had been the one who provoked the giant out of his isolation in Dublin, his virtual political exile, "to wake me out of a Scurvy Sleep" of nine years, as Swift exclaimed, during which he believed himself to be "condemned for ever to another Country" and forced to endure a "humdrum way of Life" as Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin; "My Business, my Diversions my Conversations are all entirely changed for the Worse." 2 After 1. Corr., II, 199. 2. Corr., II, 152.

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1723 the friendship between Pope and Swift grew warm again, and, more than anyone else, Swift was responsible for the younger poet's spiritual and poetic renewal—a renewal that began with the joint Pope-Swift Miscellanies in Prose and Verse and Pope's own Dunciad in three books published in 1728. I "had reason to put Mr. Pope on writing the Poem, called the Dunciad,"3 Swift admitted with pride in 1732. And on his part Pope asked his friend, "Do you care I shou'd say anything farther how much that poem is yours? since certainly without you it had never been." 4 As with Coleridge and Wordsworth, or Goethe and Schiller, friendship between the foremost literary figures of an age is most remarkable and worthy of close attention. Fortunately for the Swift-Pope relationship, so especially beneficial to the younger Pope, the one excelled in prose and the other in verse. And they knew it, often pointing it out; one cannot imagine their rivaling each other in the same medium. But whether they wrote in prose or verse, their souls were, as Dryden elegized on his young friend Mr. Oldham, "cast in the same poetic mold." They were cast in the same humanist mold as well. It may prove helpful to cite Joseph Wood Krutch's definition: A humanist is anyone who rejects the attempt to describe or account for man wholly on the basis of physics, chemistry, and animal behavior. He is anyone who believes that will, reason, and purpose are real and significant; that value and justice are aspects of a reality called good and evil and rest upon some foundation other than custom; that consciousness is so far from being a mere epiphenomenon that it is the most tremendous of actualities; that the unmeasurable may be significant; or, to sum it all up, that those human realities which sometimes seem to exist only in the human mind are the perceptions, rather than merely the creations, of that mind. 5 3. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), IV, 53. 4. Corr., II, 522. 5. Human Nature and the Human Condition ( N e w York: Random House, 1959), p. 197.

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We are all moralists by nature, remarks Johnson, we are geometricians only by chance. A reading of the third book of Swift's Gulliver's Travels or the second book of Pope's Essay on Man attests to their faith in the humanist code. "Go, wond'rous creature!" Pope has in mind the research intellectuals of the Royal Society : mount where Science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old Time, and regulate the S u n . . . Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule— Then drop into thyself, and be a fool ! (II, 19-22,29-30) If Pope's wildest fancies—and they are shared by Augustine and Aristophanes—have become part of our own reality, he would have us the more on guard. As close as Pope and Swift were, however, they saw little of each other their whole lives; it is the most paradoxical of literary friendships. Pope revered the Tory pamphleteer, moralist, historian, Irish patriot, poet, satirist—"O thou! whatever Title please thine ear"—who was more than twenty years older than himself. Swift, with his challenging and direct personality and immense intellectual power, must have shed an aura before the young aspiring poet. The aura brightened with distance, and Swift's image grew more and more ideal. After just a year's active friendship from sometime in 1712 to the spring of 1714, they saw each other for a few months in 1726, when Swift visited England to arrange for the publication of Gulliver's Travels, and for a few months in 1727. Even though Swift outlived Pope by a year, they never saw each other again. Thus, as an image in Pope's imagination, Swift served as a model for the Ufe of a poet. In the mid-1720's that image embodied values of the heroic and the contemplative life blended to a degree finer than Pope had hitherto realized.

% The two writers met by 1712. Swift had already spurned the Whigs and joined the Tory cause, becoming its most ardent

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apologist. The young impressionable Pope, however, had not yet broken off from his newly made Whig friends, later dubbed the "little Senate," who met at Button's coffeehouse under the aegis of Addison. (Swift had once been on cordial terms with Addison but their friendship cooled on Swift's going over to the Tories.) After Pope's Pastorals appeared, the various Whig writers overlooked his poems in favor of the inferior pastorals of Ambrose Philips, and the young poet was obviously piqued. "The Little Senate seemed to be conspiring against his reputation as a poet, or at least as a pastoral poet," writes Sherburn. "Pope's 'Pastorals' had been overpraised by the best judges of the day [Walsh, Wycherley, Congreve], but for the Little Senate they did not exist."6 Then, toward the end of 1711, George Granville, Baron Lansdowne, "the poetical Secretary of War," encouraged the young poet to finish Windsor-Forest with a word of praise for the approaching Peace of Utrecht. "Swift must have embraced lovingly this tribute from a neutral source to the Tory peace," writes Irvin Ehrenpreis. 7 "Mr Pope has publishd a fine poem calld Windsor Forrest," Swift jotted to "Stella," "read it."8 Perhaps at Lansdowne's suggestion, the two men met and Pope gravitated toward the Tory circle. By 1713, when his amateur interest in painting was at its high point, Pope confided to Caryll that he painted Swift four times; and though he destroyed three, the fourth he placed among his "masterpieces."9 An energetic friend, Swift began soliciting the court for subscriptions to the recently announced (October 1713) translation of the Iliad. 6. Sherburn, pp. 117, 119. 7. Irvin Ehrenpreis, Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 2, Dr. Swift, p. 593. Ehrenpreis adds in a note: "Pope uses, perhaps by coincidence, some elements of the rhetoric of [Swift's] The Conduct of the Allies [1711]. In recommending the peace, he dwells on the importance of agriculture, describes the rural sports of the country gentlemen, condemns military violence, and celebrates the British navy. These might be called Tory themes. But he also attacks tyranny and identifies the Tory peace with liberty and commerce. These Whiggish themes Pope (like S w i f t ) treats as naturally derived from the others." Actually, Pope would never be as politically committed as Swift, m u c h to Swift's regret. 8. Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1 9 4 8 ) , II, 635 ( 9 March 1713). 9. Spence, no. 125: Con., I, 189 ( 3 1 August 1713).

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Then there was that constellation of genius, the Scriblerus Club. Lansdowne and Swift were members of the Brothers Club, a private Tory circle founded by Bolingbroke to bring together "men of wit" with "men of interest" and to aid worthy authors. But Swift was disappointed in the unwieldy size of the gathering and in its inability to raise funds. 10 In October 1713 Pope (not a Brother) approached Swift with a project to ridicule false taste in learning. Only the year before he contributed to the Spectator (no. 457) the following thoughts : It is my design to publish every month, An Account of the Works of the Unlearned. Several late productions of my own countrymen, who many of them make a very eminent figure in the illiterate world, encourage me in this undertaking . . . Our party authors will also afford me a great variety of subjects, not to mention editors, commentators, and others, who are often men of no learning, or what is as bad, of no knowledge. To Swift, the author of the Battle of the Books, A Tale of a Tub, and the Bickerstaff Papers, the idea was immediately appealing, and in the winter of 1713—14 the Scriblerus Club came into existence. The Scriblerus Club convened in one or another coffeehouse or in Dr. John Arbuthnot's lodgings in St. James's Palace. Perhaps the "Friendship among all Men of Genius" that Swift envisaged was formed less to drive the world before them than to console one another. Swift, for example, invites the busy Lord Chancellor Oxford to a gathering : The Doctor and Dean, Pope, Parnell and Gay In manner submissive most humbly do pray, That your lordship would once let your cares all alone And climb the dark stairs to your friends who have none : To your friends who at least have no cares but to please you To a good honest junta that never will teaze you. 10. My discussion is partly drawn from Charles Kerby-Miller, ed., Memoirs of . . . Martinus Scriblerus ( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), pp. 7ff.

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It was a small, intimate club, just what Swift missed among the Brothers. "There remains a special drama in the sight of Swift with a price on his head, Arbuthnot with his secret knowledge of the Queen's desperate health, and Oxford with the catastrophe of his long career in view, all playing literary games with Parnell, Gay, and Pope."11 But politics intervened: Oxford's ministry fell, the Queen died, and Swift began his ten-year political exile in Dublin (later he would say he had been sent to die "like a poison'd rat in a hole") while Pope was racing through his first summer's work on the Iliad. The projects that had been proposed by the Club, among them a life of the pedant "Martinus Scriblerus," were put off indefinitely. But, most remarkably, Gulliver's Travels, The Dunciad, and The Beggar's Opera owed their initial inspiration to Scriblerus activity. t Then silence, or virtual silence. Few letters passed between Swift and Pope during the next nine years; only three are extant, and it is unlikely that there were many more. In August 1723, Pope reopened the correspondence on a warm note, saying that "Whatever you seem to think of your withdrawn & separate State, at this distance, & in this absence, Dr Swift lives still in England . . . We have never met these many Years without mention of you."12 Actually, except for sporadic revivals, the Scriblerus Club had fairly ceased functioning. In the same letter Pope complains as usual of extreme "busy-ness," and although he has been pestered increasingly by knaves and fools, "I never retaliated; not only never seeming to know, but often really never knowing any thing of the matter." But mostly Pope urges that they renew their friendship : "The Top-pleasure of my Life is one I learnd from you both how to gain, 8c how to use the Freedomes of Friendship with Men much my Superiors." And he concludes by suggesting that they meet again in person. Non sum qualis eram, "1 am not such as I was," Swift replied 11. Ehrenpreis, Swift, II, 725. 12. Corr., II, 184 (August 1723): "Tis sure my particular ill fate," continues Pope, thinking of Bolingbroke, Oxford, and Atterbury, "that all those I have most lov'd & with whom I have most liv'd, must be banish'd."

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within weeks, quoting from Horace's fourth book of Odes. To Pope's admission that "the Civilities I have met with from Opposite Sets of People have hinder'd me from being either violent or sowre to any Party," Swift offers gentle raillery. A fondness for concordia discors may be natural to Pope's temperament: Your happiness is greater than your Merit in chusing your Favorites so Indifferently among either party, this you owe partly to your Education and partly to your Genius, employing you in an Art where Faction has nothing to do. For I suppose Virgil and Horace are equally read by Whigs and Toryes you have no more to do with the Constitution of Church and State than a Christian at Constantinople, and you are so much the wiser, and the happier because both partyes will approve your Poetry as long as you are known to be of neither. But I who am sunk under the prejudices of another Education, and am every day perswading my self that a Dagger is at my Throat, a halter about my Neck, or Chains at my Feet, all prepared by those in Power, can never arrive at the Security of Mind you possess.13 Is Swift reproving his busy friend, so buried in the "dull duties" of translation and editorial work, so "misemploying his genius" that he scarcely had time for the world, particularly the world of morality and politics? Only months before, as a character witness, Pope had forthrightly defended Bishop Atterbury, who was on trial for treason. But he had nonetheless avoided open political activity; he was still on fair terms with the government under Walpole. Was it in Pope to take sides when, as a poet, he believed he could make an appeal to values and ideals beyond the purely partisan? (Later, in the 1730's, he maintained close personal relations with members of the Opposition, yet he still avoided explicit affiliation. The doctrine of concordia discors to which Pope subscribed so avidly may be at the root of his attitude toward politics. The doctrine bears striking similarities to the conception of government that Pope's friend Bolingbroke would shortly develop—a government by political parties in 13. Corr., II, 199 ( 2 0 September 1723).

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which the clash of opposites could result in both maximum freedom and national harmony. 14 ) As for Pope's thoughts on what he termed in his letter "Study and Retirement," Swift will have not a word of it and unmasks the poseur: "I have no very strong Faith in you pretenders to retirement, you are not of an age for it, nor have you gone through either good or bad Fortune enough to go into a Corner and form Conclusions de contemptu mundi." Rather, Swift encourages Pope to do exactly what the younger poet had disclaimed, to retaliate and attack the individuals who had slandered him unjustly. Didn't Pope have ample provocation, and hadn't he exhibited his forbearance long enough? Pope had already been slandered or criticized maliciously by Aaron Hill, Charles Gildon, Leonard Welsted, John Dennis, and Jonathan Smedley, and the floodgates had barely opened. However, if "a Friendship among all Men of Genius" could be forged, Swift muses, together they "could drive the world before them." The challenge was there, but Pope was too preoccupied still and had to lay it aside. Two more years of silence. Then in the fall of 1725, a series of letters passed between them in which one may observe a clear refocusing of energies in Pope's career. In these letters the animus of Swift burned brightly. For years he had fought English interference in Irish affairs. In 1720, in A Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture, he had urged his fellow countrymen to boycott British goods. But in March 1724 he began the famous succession of pamphlets under the pseudonym of M.B., a Dublin draper, in which he withstood an attempt by the English Parliament to debase the Irish coinage, an act that he feared would plunge Ireland into financial ruin. Thus, he became an Irish hero and, buoyed by his success, was in a position to urge Pope to shake off his burdensome duties and turn to writing again—to writing satire. In his first letter Swift had dropped a hint about his latest lit14. See Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government: A Study of Burke and Bolingbroke (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 9 6 5 ) , pp. 4 5 - 6 5 .

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erary project: "I am so full (quod ad me attinet) of grand designs that I believe I shall never bring them to pass but to your Comfort (grandia loquimur) they are all in prose."15 Pope had heard of the "grand designs" for Gulliver's Travels from their mutual friend Charles Ford, for he replies on 14 September 1725 : "Your Travels I hear much of; my own I promise you shall never more be in a strange land, but a diligent, I hope useful, investigation of my own Territories. I mean no more Translations, but something domestic, fit for my own country, and for my own time."16 Although Warburton noted that Pope here refers to the Essay on Man, Pope's words could point toward almost anything he wrote after 1725. Swift had always worried about Pope's lavish expense of spirit in translation and replied from Ireland within two weeks, plotting the trajectory he thinks Pope's new work should take. After all, Pope had before complained of his excessive business and even considered he might throw himself "again into Study & Retirement." "I am exceedingly pleased that you have done with Translations," replies Swift, "Lord Treasurer Oxford often lamented that a rascaly World should lay you under a Necessity of Misemploying your Genius for so long a time" : But since you will now be so much better employd when you think of the World give it one lash the more at my Request. I have ever hated all Nations professions and Communityes and all my love is towards individualls for instance I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Councellor such a one, Judge such a one for so with Physicians (I will not Speak of my own Trade) Soldiers, English, Scotch, French; and the rest but principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I hartily love John, Peter, Thomas and so forth, this is the system upon which I have governed my self many years (but do not tell) and so I shall go on till I have done with them I have got Materials Towards a Treatis proving the falsity of that Definition animal rationale; and to show it should be only rationis capax. Upon this great foundation of Misanthropy (though not Timons manner) The whole building of my Tra veils is 15. Corr., 11,311 ( 1 9 July 1725). 16. Corr., II, 3 2 1 - 3 2 2 ( 14 September 1725).

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erected : And I never will have peace of mind till all honest men are of my Opinion: by Consequence you are to embrace it immediately and procure that all who deserve my Esteem may do so too17 Since for Swift, "my Face and Letters are Counterparts of my heart," 18 this letter is a key document in his career and hence of paramount importance in the history of Augustan thought. Swift betrays the humanist's traditional antipathy to system. "For forms of government let Fools contest," Pope writes in the Essay on Man. There is, moreover, a distrust of human nature— at least of false estimates of its reasoning powers. There is pessimism and disdain but an ironic detachment as well; human reason is limited, and we cannot radically improve upon the human condition. Man is not rational, only "capable of reason." But if there is little reason, luckily there is love: "I love hartily." "Not Timons manner," not retreat to the solitude of a cave by the sea, so "when you think of the World give it one lash the more at my Request." The best defense is attack, runs the French proverb. "The matter is so clear," adds Swift, "that it will admit little dispute, nay I will hold a hundred pounds that you and I agree in the Point." Treated apart from its context, the letter is a moving statement of Swift's fierce idealism. But set in the development of Pope's life—he was then seeking ideals and direction—the letter served as a lightning rod. Pope wrote back almost immediately that he is "wonderfully pleased" that at long last a visit from Swift is in the making. Then, wistfully, he imagines the old Scriblerus Club sub specie eternitatis, "after there has been a New Heaven, and a New Earth, in our Minds, and bodies, that Scarce a single thought of the one any more than a single atome of the other, remains just the same": I've fancy'd, I say, that we shou'd meet like the Righteous in the Millennium, quite in peace, divested of all our former passions, smiling at all our own designs, and content to enjoy the Kingdome of the Just in Tranquillity. But I find you 17. Corr., II, 325 (29 September 1725). 18. Corr., II, 342 (November 1725).

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Alexander Pope would rather be employ'd as an Avenging Angel of wrath, to break your Vial of Indignation over the heads of the wretched pityful creatures of this World; nay would make them Eat your Book, which you have made as bitter a pill for them as possible.19

More particularly with regard to Swift's modest moral proposals, Pope assures him that he has already on hand a "very good conclusion of one of my Satyrs, where having endeavour'd to correct the Taste of the Town in wit and Criticisme, I end thus. But what avails to lay down rules for Sense? In [George]'s Reign these fruitless lines were writ, When Ambrose Philips was preferr'd for wit!" The lines were possibly from "The Progress of Dulness," which would become a working title for The Dunciad (where, in fact, they appeared near the end of the third book). Later in the letter Pope admits to his having poetical "designes . . . in my head" but awaits Swift's visit to England, when "you shall have no reason to complain of me, for want of a Generous disdain of this World." "My name," continues Pope, "is as bad an one as yours, and hated by all bad Poets, from Hopkins and Sternhold to Gildon and Cibber." Over a month passed, Swift was ill, but in the late fall of 1725, he replied cursively: "Drown the World, I am not content with despising it, but I would anger it if I could with safety. I wish there were an Hospital built for it's despisers, where one might act with safety and it need not be a large Building, only I would have it well endowed."20 Swift would help endow such an institution in a few years, but more generally his statement may serve as a touchstone for one important tenet of the Christian humanist credo, the disease and dis-ease of human nature, its "sickness unto death." One thinks of the last two books of Paradise Lost, or of passages from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets: The whole world is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire, 19. Corr., II, 3 3 2 - 3 3 3 ( 1 5 October 1725). 20. Corr., II, 342 ( 2 6 November 1 7 2 5 ) .

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Wherein, if we do well, we shall Die of the absolute paternal care That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere. ("East Coker," IV) Would Pope grow to the knowledge of Swift? For Swift upbraids him in this same letter for his whim and fancifulness in a corrupt age—"To hear Boys like you talk of Milleniums and Tranquility" : I tell you after all that I do not hate Mankind, it is vous autres who hate them because you would have them reasonable Animals, and are Angry for being disappointed. I have always rejected that Definition and made another of 21 my own. I am no more angry with Then I was with the Kite that last week flew away with one of my Chickins and yet I was pleas'd when one of my Servants Shot him two days after. After this challenge, it is not difficult to understand why Pope felt he should h a m m e r out his later philosophy in replying to Swift at the end of the fall. "I am the better acquainted with you for a long Absence . . . Absence does but hold off a Friend, to make one see him the truer." Distance and time have enhanced the power Swift exerts over him, and Pope's letter acknowledges the debt. He says he will "put an end to Slanders only as the Sun does to Stinks; by shining out, exhale 'em to nothing." Moreover, Pope now responds to Swift's suggestion about the "Hospital," referring to an earlier letter he had written Broome concerning retirement f r o m the "muses' service" and the founding of a hospital for broken poets : 2 2 I wish as warmly as you, for the Hospital to lodge the Despisers of the world in, only I fear it would be fill'd wholly like Chelsea with Maim'd Soldiers, and such as had been dis-abled in its Service. And I wou'd rather have those that out of such generous principles as you and I, despise it, Fly in its face, than Retire from it. Not that I have much Anger 21. Man? 22. Corr., II, 3.

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Alexander Pope against the Great, my Spleen is at the little rogues of it : It would vexe one more to be knockt o' the Head by a Pisspot, than by a Thunderbolt. As to great Oppressors (as you say) they are like Kites or Eagles, one expects mischief from them: But to be Squirted to death (as poor Wycherley said to me on his deathbed) by Ρotecaries Prentices, by the under Strappers of Under Secretaries, to Secretaries, who were no Secretaries—this would provoke as dull a dog as Ph[lip]s himself. 23

In The Dunciad Pope would go after the scoundrels; later, in the 1730's, after the great. t The visit Swift made to England in 1726 was ostensibly to publish Gulliver's Travels and to see what could be done about the body of work written during Scriblerus activity. He arrived in mid-March and, after a few weeks in London, set off for Pope's villa at Twickenham, where he remained till the beginning of August. When he later returned to Ireland, he wrote back nostalgically : "I can only swear that you have taught me to dream, which I had not done in twelve years further than by inexpressible nonsense; but now I can every night distinctly see Twitenham, and the Grotto, and Dawley, and Mrs. B[lount]. and many other et cetera's, and it is but three nights since I beat Mrs. Pope."24 At backgammon, suggests Sherburn? Possibly the glowing letter indicates why Swift longed to return. The visit had proved extraordinarily productive. Gulliver came out in the fall, and the pieces planned for the two volumes of the Swift-Pope Miscellanies were edited. It would be reinforcing to Pope to have his name associated with the political hero and literary giant whose Gulliver had won him grander fame : "Our Miscellany is now quite printed. I am prodigiously pleas'd with this joint-volume," Pope writes to Swift in Ireland (17 February 1727), "in which methinks we look like friends, side by side, serious and merry by turns, conversing interchangeably, and walking down hand in hand to posterity; not in the stiff forms of learned Authors, flattering Corr., II, 349-350 24. Corr., II, 393. 23.

(14 December 1725).

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each other, and setting the rest of mankind at nought: but in a free, un-important, natural, easy manner; diverting others just as we diverted ourselves."25 Some flattering verses addressed to Gulliver and Mrs. Gulliver are mentioned. Pope and perhaps Arbuthnot wrote them. And unexpectedly Pope discloses what Swift well knew, "how much like a Poet I write, and yet if you were with us, you'd be deep in Politicks," referring to the factious state of affairs and to the new political organ called the Craftsman that the anti-Walpolian forces under Bolingbroke and William Pulteney had created (first number, 5 December 1726). "I stay at Twitnam," continues Pope, "without so much as reading news-papers, votes, or any other paltry pamphlets . . . For my own part, methinks, I am at Glubdubdrib with none but Ancients and Spirits about me." 26 Again Pope was in his favorite company. During the first visit Swift had encouraged Pope to complete "The Progress of Dulness," and Pope later admitted to Swift's having saved it from the fire. As Pope said in a note to the Dunciad Variorum in 1729 : Dr. Swift . . . may be said in a sort to be Author of the Poem : For when He, together with Mr. Pope . . . determin'd to own the most trifling pieces in which they had any hand, and to destroy all that remain'd in their power, the first sketch of this poem was snatch'd from the fire by Dr. Swift, who persuaded his friend to proceed in it, and to him it was therefore Inscribed. 27 Although this anecdote seems concocted (it echoes Virgil's last request that his unfinished epic be burned), it may conceal a graver truth : "it is possible that Swift not only saved the manuscript," comments James Sutherland, but indicated "how the poem itself might be saved."28 The origins of The Dunciad are sufficiently shrouded, and we cannot ascribe any great influence 25. Corr., II, 426. 26. Corr., II, 427. 27. TE, V, 201. 28. TE, V, xiv. Cf. Pope's perhaps exaggerated remark to Thomas Sheridan about "my Friend the Dean, w h o is properly the Author of the Dunciad: It had never been writ but at his Request." Corr., II, 523 ( 1 2 October 1728).

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to Swift in any given passage. 29 Did he help Pope elaborate the "fable?" supply incidental phrases? darken the tone? Thomas Edwards has described the progress of Pope's "speaking voice" in his poetry in This Dark Estate. Might Swift have played a role in the development of Pope's caustic and grotesque tone? 30 At any rate, Pope was planning to publish his poem in a third volume of Pope-Swift Miscellanies. Swift revisited England for the last time in April 1727. After a brief stay in London he moved again to Twickenham, where he found Pope hard at work on what had metamorphosed into The Dunciad. (The Swiftian stimulus was felt by Gay as well; he was busily composing the Beggar's Opera, another byproduct of Scriblerus activity.) By August, however, Swift was suffering from vertigo and deafness. Perhaps to console himself he wrote a poem to his host, "Dr. Sw 1 to Mr. Ρ e While he was writing the Dunciad," in which he claims praise for being ill enough to allow Pope time to write his poem. Pope's writing on "Backs of Letters" and other scraps is gently satirized : Pope has the Talent well to speak, But not to reach the Ear; His loudest Voice is low and weak, The Dean too deaf to hear. A while they on each other look, Then diff'rent Studies chuse, The Dean sits plodding on a Book, Pope walks, and courts the Muse. Now Backs of Letters, though design'd For those who more will need 'em, 29. All we have for manuscript materials of The Dunciad are Jonathan Richardson's transcriptions from Pope's marginalia in the New York Public Library and some snippets in the correspondence. 30. When Pope was preparing the new variorum edition of The Dunciad, he wrote Swift "The Dunciad is going to be printed in all pomp, with the inscription, which makes me proudest [it is to Swift]. It will be attended with Proeme, Prolegomena, Testimonia Scriptorum, Index Authorum, and Notes Variorum. As to the latter, I desire you to read over the Text, and make a few in any way you like best, whether dry raillery, upon the stile and way of commenting of trivial Critics; or humorous, upon the authors in the poem; or historical, of persons, places, times; or explanatory, or collecting the parallel passages of the Ancients." Corr., II, 503 (28 June 1728).

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Are fill'd with Hints, and interlin'd, Himself can hardly read 'em. Each Atom by some other struck, All Turns and Motion tries; Till in a Lump together stuck. Behold a Poem rise ! Yet to the Dean his share allot; He claims it by a Canon; That, without which a Thing is not Is, causa sine quâ non. Thus, Pope, in vain you boast your Wit; For, had our deaf Divine Been for your Conversation fit, You had not writ a Line. Of Prelate thus, for preaching fam'd, The Sexton reason'd well, And justly half the Merit claim'd Because he rang the Bell.31 Swift's second visit was not nearly as pleasant as his first. Now Pope was ill, too, and, with the normal stream of visitors to Twickenham, Swift became increasingly uncomfortable. He moved to a cousin's house nearby, and finally left for Ireland in September. Anxious about each other's health and progress, they corresponded uninterruptedly for a dozen years, until Swift, afflicted by Menière's disease, was incapacitated. Though they planned numerous visits, even to France, they never saw each other again. A deeply moving letter from Pope to Swift on 15 September 1734 begins : I have ever thought you as sensible as any man I knew, of all the delicacies of friendship, and yet I fear (from what Lord Bfolingbroke], tells me you said in your last letter) that you did not quite understand the reasons of my late silence. I assure you it proceeded wholly from the tender kindness I bear you. When the heart is full, it is angry at all 31. Jonathan Swift, The Poems ed. Harold Williams, 2d ed. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1958), II, 4 0 5 ^ 0 6 .

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Alexander Pope words that cannot come up to it; and you are now the man in all the world I am most troubled to write to, for you are the friend I have left whom I am most grieved about. Death has not done worse to me in separating poor Gay, or any other, than disease and absence in dividing us. I am afraid to know how you do, since most accounts I have give me pain for you, and I am unwilling to tell you the condition of my own health.32

%

The third volume of the Pope-Swift Miscellanies was published finally in March 1728, but The Dunciad: An Heroic Poem had outgrown the volume and instead was published in May separately and anonymously. When in the following year Pope printed his Dunciad "in all pomp" with "Proeme, Prolegomena, Testimonia Scriptorum, Index Authorum, and Notes Variorum," he included an inscription to Swift :33 O thou ! whatever Title please thine ear, Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver! Whether thou chuse Cervantes' serious air, Or laugh and shake in Rab'lais' easy Chair, 32. Corr., 111,431-432. 33. Con., II, 503. The dedication was added to the 1729 variorum. quarto, but Swift's name is not mentioned until the 1729 octavo "Mourn not, my SWIFT, at ought our Realm acquires" (see Griffith, no. 213 and following); the epigraph "To Dr. Jonathan Swift" did not reach print until 1736 (Griffith, no. 431). An early version of the inscription was sent to Swift in Ireland in January 1728: " I send you however what most nearly relates to yourself, the Inscription to it, which you must consider, re-consider, criticize, hypercriticize, and consult about with Sheridan, Delany, and all the Literati of (the Kingdom I mean) to render it less unworthy of you. Incipit Propositio Books and the Man I sing—8tc. Inscriptio And Thou I whose Sence, whose Humour, and whose Rage At once can teach, delight, and lash the Age ! Whether thou chuse Cervantes' serious Air, Or laugh and shake in Rab'lais' easy chair, Praise Courts and Monarchs, or extoll Mankind, Or thy griev'd Country's copper Chains unbind: Attend, whatever Title please thine ear, Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver. From thy Boeotia, lo! the Fog retires; Yet grieve not thou at what our Isle acquires : Here Dulness reigns with mighty wings outspread, And brings the true Saturnian Age of Lead. 8cc." Corr., II, 468-469

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Or praise the Court, or magnify Mankind, Or thy griev'd Country's copper chains unbind; From thy Boeotia tho' Her Pow'r retires, Grieve not at ought our sister realm acquires : Here pleas'd behold her might wings out-spread, To hatch a new Saturnian age of Lead. (1,17—26) The passage stands as a splendid example of the compact texture of Pope's later style—a style that Swift himself so envied : In Pope, I cannot read a Line, But with a Sigh, I wish it mine : When he can in one Couplet fix More Sense than I can do in Six.34 As Dean, Swift upheld moral idealism; as Drapier, just four years before, he crusaded as a political activist for Ireland; as Bickerstaff, he satirized false learning and academic madness; and as Gulliver, he satirized just about everything. It is the universal genius that Pope praises, a Renaissance hero for Augustan England. The two Renaissance writers, mentioned antithetically, are viewed now as aspects of Swift, who unites their seriousness and mirth. 35 Vive la bagatelle! Ironically, Swift is seen to "praise the Court"; likewise, the great reductionist is hardly liable to "magnify Mankind," which he once called detestable ("but principally I hate and detest that animal called man," Swift had written Pope three years before). The line "Or thy griev'd Country's copper chains unbind" is masterfully compressed and involves a whole social battle Ireland waged against the English attempt to alloy its coin with copper. As Pope notes on the lines following, "Boeotia of old lay under the Raillery of the neighboring Wits, as Ireland does now; tho' each of those nations produced one of the greatest Wits [that is, Pindar; Swift and Congreve], and greatest Generals [that is, Epaminondas; James Butler, Duke of Ormonde], of their age."36 As London is compared with Athens, the satire grows heavier. And Milton's 34. "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," Swift, Poems, II, 555. 35. "Dr. Swift was a great reader and admirer of Rabelais, and used sometimes to scold me for not liking him enough" (Spence, no. 133). 36. TE,V, 62.

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dove makes pregnant, not a new Eden or a golden age of Saturn, but an "age of Lead," the last and busiest. That Pope should have found his age the "last" in the cycle, both for its evil and for himself as a saving remnant, indicates his teleological perspective. The world was growing worse; Swift and he would only prevent it from growing worse more quickly. The passage from The Dunciad is not the only image of Swift that Pope created. Earlier, in the Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford ( 1721 ), he brings the poet and the ailing Chancellor once again together in the couplet: "For Swift and him, despis'd the Farce of State, / The sober Follies of the Wise and Great." During the 1730's, however, when Pope was writing epistle after verseepistle to his friends, Swift asked constantly for one to be addressed to himself. 37 His name is found frequently among these poems. In the imitation of Donne's fourth satire, Pope portrays himself beseiged by a court wit who facilely asks for literary opinions. Pope was always ready to satirize such fondness for literary chitchat, but praises Swift's style for its exactness and propriety in his reply : "But Sir, of Writers?"—"Swift, for closer Style, And Ho[adl]y for a Period of a Mile." (72-73) In 1733 we know that Swift looked forward to "being personated"38 in a paraphrase of the second satire of Horace's second book. Pope has been describing his busy life at Twickenham when Swift suddenly interrupts : Pray heav'n it last! (cries Swift) as you go on; I wish to God this house had been your own : Pity! to build, without a son or wife : Why, you'll enjoy it only all your life. ( 161-64 ) The lines were not precisely what Swift had in mind. The cantankerousness of the "personated" dean displeased Swift, who wrote the young Earl of Oxford that he "could willingly have excused his placing me not in that Light. .. but it gives me not the 37. Corr., Ill, 203, 38. Corr., Ill, 369.

3 4 8 - 3 4 9 , 492; IV, 12, 45, 7 1 - 7 2 ; V, 15, 17.

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least offence, because I am sure he had not the least ill Intention, and how much I have allways loved him, the World as well as Your Lordship is convinced."39 In the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot Pope prides himself on his early audience, "And Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my Lays" (138), and Swift again reveals himself as the uncompromising critic. Pope wrote two poems (1738-1739) in the colloquial, octosyllabic, couplet "Manner of Dr. Swift," but when Swift was shown a copy of one of them, he replied that he "did not think it at all a right imitation of his style."40 Pope never wrote an "Epistle to Dr. Swift" but he included a portrait of Swift in one of his favorite poems, the Epistle to Augustus ( 1737), one of the last of the Imitations of Horace: Let Ireland tell, how Wit upheld her cause, Her Trade supported, and supply'd her Laws; And leave on S W I F T this grateful verse ingrav'd, The Rights a Court attack'd, a Poet sav'd. Behold the hand that wrought a Nation's cure, Stretch'd to relieve the Idiot and the Poor, Proud Vice to brand, or injur'd Worth adorn, And stretch the Ray to Ages yet unborn. (221-228) This description immediately follows the passage in which Horace outlines "the nobler office of a Poet" (Pope's note) : "The poet turns the ear from obscene words and soon moulds the heart by friendly precepts, correcting harshness, envy, and anger; he speaks of great deeds, offers the new age instrumental examples, and consoles the impoverished and the sick." Horace, however, had not provided a biographical "exemplum," and Pope's interpolation is a stroke of genius. The qualities of the poet are to be those of the hero. Swift fought with "Wit" against British political and economic oppression, published the Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture (1720), lent out money for a mental hospital, and established a fund for the poor. (£10,000 was willed for the purpose of founding a hospi39. Con., Ill, 429. 40. Spence, no. 143. See John M. Aden, Something Like Horace: Studies in the Art and Allusion of Pope's Horatian Satires (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969), pp. 92-105.

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tal, which eventually opened in 1757.) Swift earns the title "Poet" which is later distinguished from the "Man of Rhymes" : [The Poet] gives my breast a thousand pains, Can make me feel each Passion that he feigns, Inrage, compose, with more than magic Art With Pity, and with Terror, tear my heart. (342-345) At last Swift was pleased with the highest praise from the poetic master of "faint praise." He referred to the lines as "the greatest honour I shall ever receive from posterity, and will outweigh the malignity of ten thousand enemies." 41 t With the publication of The Dunciad—"my chef d' oeuvre," he declared to Swift—in May 1728, Pope opened war on the Grub-Street dunces, the Court poets and propagandists, and, by extension, the Court and Parliament. (George II, who had assumed the throne in 1727, reigned like George I.) The pamphlet attacks on Pope would now intensify. Some of these would be small clouds, but they would rain right over Pope's head. In 1728 no less than twenty-two printed attacks were made against him. The dunces claimed that he plagiarized, that he blasphemed the Holy Scriptures, that he was a Catholic, that he was able to be bought, that he was physically deformed, mentally unbalanced, a Jacobite, a disloyal friend, rich and ungrateful, a literary dictator, with Swift fond of filth, that he attacked the poor, was sexually promiscuous and, worst of all, a bad poet. 42 In July 1728 the double-dealing bookseller Edmund Curii published The Popiad in which he draws the conclusion: "The most partial Popeling, or Dunciadier, cannot but allow, upon an impartial Perusal of what Mr. Dennis, and Madam Datier have herein advanced, that, the present Residence of the Goddess of Dullness 41. Corr., IV, 56, (9 February 1737): "the ages to come will celebrate me," Swift would later write on this same point, "and know you were a friend who loved and esteemed me, although I dyed the object of Court and Party-hatred." Corr., IV, 72 (31 May 1737). 42. J. V. Guerinot, Pamphlet Attacks on Alexander Pope, 1711-1744: A Descriptive Bibliography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 101-159.

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is at Twickenham." 43 Elijah Fenton, who had collaborated with Pope and William Broome on the translation of the Odyssey, wrote Broome in 1729 that "war is carried on against him furiously in pictures and libels; and I heard of nobody but Savage and Cleland who have yet drawn their pens in his defence." 44 Mrs. Rackett later told Spence that, even under attack, her brother "does not seem to know what fear is" but went out alone, with his Great Dane Bounce and loaded pistols. In his letter to Broome, Fenton also mentioned that Pope "told me that for the future he intended to write nothing but epistles in Horace's manner, in which I question not but he will succeed very well."45 The year is 1729, and, in light of Pope's later writings, the eight major "imitations" of Horace's satires and epistles, Fenton's remark is of critical importance. Why so shortly after his defiant challenge to the city does he wish to choose the retiring Roman poet for his model? Has Swift's hold on him loosened? To judge from the vigor and brilliance of Pope's later satires, his concern with social and political, not merely literary, themes, his heroic public stance, his increasing intransigence and darkening apprehension at the world—to judge from all this, Swift's influence was not only pervasive but permanent in Pope's life. And yet Pope needed a model that would allow for retirement as well. The need lies deeply rooted in his nature from his early rambles in Windsor Forest. Retirement would enable him to hold London—and England—at arms length. "A Glutt of Study & Retirement in the first part of my Life cast me into this [extreme business]," Pope once confided to Swift, "& this I begin to see will throw me again into Study & Retirement." 46 Pope may well have viewed his life as oscillating between these extremes. The vita attiva and the vita contemplativa were cherished Renaissance ideals and typically Pope must have considered how best to unite them, how to unite an active life of public commitment and a private life of contemplation. In the person of Horace, happy at Rome, far happier on his Sabine 43. 44. 45. 46.

Ibid., p. 133. Corr., Ill, 37. Corr., Ill, 37. Corr., II, 185.

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farm, Pope acknowledged a fellow poet who had maintained his inner freedom and yet had served the state. Pope had laid down a challenge in The Dunciad; the challenges would multiply in the 1730's. But "in Horace's manner" Pope would maintain a safe distance, mental and geographical, between himself and the town.

6. The Free Soul I only search for dissonance, Alpheus, something further than perfection. (S. Quasimodo, "Following the Alpheus")

For Pope, flight or retirement could only be a temporary eddy in the onrushing stream. From his youth he had lived within striking distance of London. With his many ventures in publication, with social acquaintances, political allies, and literary associations, there was never any chance of his removing to, say, the Lake District or the English west country. If he strongly desired solitude, he could have had it; he chose not to. Pope sought, entertained, and enjoyed the company of a cultivated audience. He would live neither in the city nor in the country; sub-urban Twickenham, a few miles upstream from London, afforded all the advantages of both—the happiest resolution of antitheses. Flight, however, was the metaphor Pope so often used to portray his feelings on leaving the town. Some exaggeration must certainly be allowed for, and yet, if one surveys the period from 1729 to his death in 1744, the pressure to flee and to retire is evident in the correspondence and among the many anecdotes. Metaphors of flight and retirement figure prominently in the later poetry. Thus, Maynard Mack entitled his recent study of Pope The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743. Mack's thesis is that the values of the city and the Walpole government are measured against values and ideals derived f r o m the traditional concepts of the 199

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garden and the retired life—and found wanting. At middle age, Pope would seek out and imitate the masters of the retired life in order to measure his society against both tradition and his own sense of self which he now so firmly identified with that tradition. But in 1729 Pope was just forty-one. Although his health was only fair, his retirement would be active and ambitious. Sometime in the late 1720's he conceived of a large-scale moral poem, or group of poems. The project is first disclosed in a letter to Swift, 28 November 1729, where Pope writes that he is planning "a system of Ethics in the Horatian way." The phrase itself is a Popean paradox, for Horace is among the least systematic of moral or didactic poets. As Pope had written in the Essay on Criticism: Horace still charms with graceful Negligence, And without Method talks us into Sense, Will like a Friend familarly convey, The truest Notions in the easiest way. (653-656) "Mr. Pope's present design," notes Spence after conversing with Pope during the first week of May 1730, is "wholly upon human actions, and to reform the mind." 1 In 1734 Pope drew up "the plan for my Ethic Epistles much narrower than it was at first," which survives as follows : Index to the Ethic Epistles The Second Book The First Book OF THE N A T U R E A N D STATE

OF THE U S E OF THINGS

OF M A N

Epistle I —With Respect to the Universe Epistle II —As an Individual Epistle III —With respect to Society 1. S p e n c e , no. 2 9 5 .

Of the Limits of Human Reason —Of the Use of Learning —Of the Use of Wit Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men

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Of the particular Characters of Women Of the Principles and Use of Civil and Ecclesiastical Polity —Of the Use of Education A View of the Equality of Happiness in the several Conditions of Men —Of the Use of Riches, &c.2 If, as Pope planned, each verse-epistle were to be on the scale of an epistle from the Essay on Man, roughly three hundred lines, then he was right in flattering himself "when we think we can do much good." But the anatomy of system was not according to Pope's nature: "He spoke a little warmer as to the use of it," remarked Spence, "but more coldly as to the execution."3 System was antipathetic not only to Pope's mercurial temperament, but also to the more traditional humanist in him, always suspicious of prefabricated attempts to "reform the mind." Furthermore, if we see Pope not only as a Christian humanist but as a figure within the European Enlightenment—as did the philosophes, who found equal justification for their claims within his poetry —then system was just as odious to their generally empirically minded representatives such as D'Alembert and Condillac, who rejected l'ésprit de système. In any case, Pope's plan was dismantled, perhaps just after 1734. The First Book, "Of the Nature and State of Man," became, of course, An Essay on Man (1733-1734), the poetic touchstone of the Enlightenment. "Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men" developed into the first of the Epistles to Several Persons (also known as the Moral Essays); it was addressed to Lord Cobham. "Of the particular Characters of Women" ended up as the second of the Epistles to Several Persons, addressed appropriately to Martha Blount. "Of the Use of Riches" may have 2. Spence, no. 300. 3. Spence, nos. 298 and 301.

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gone to either or both of the epistles to Burlington and Bathurst, the other two of the Epistles to Several Persons. Other parts of the scheme were fitted economically into the Imitations of Horace, revisions of The Dunciad, or the fourth book of The Dunciad added in 1742. J. M. Osborn suggests that the material on "Civil and Ecclesiastical Polity" might have gone into Pope's projected epic, Brutus, that he was considering toward the end of his life. 4 One important conclusion to be drawn from Pope's structural designs during the 1730's is that, excepting parts of the fourth book of The Dunciad, there exists a tonal unity in the work of the retirement period. Many parts of the late poems—the Essay on Man, the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, the Epistles to Several Persons, and the Imitations of Horace—were originally designed to fit together into some sort of plan. That plan was held together by a hierarchy of inherited values, a common point of view, and a highly individual, conversational style. "These two lines," Pope told Spence late in 1730, "contain the main design that runs through the whole : Laugh where we must, be candid where we can : / But vindicate the ways of God to Man."5 The Miltonic echo in the second line underscores the high intentions Pope had for his magnum opus. In these many different poems Pope focused on one theme or another, yet all the poems embody the same perspective, and each contains a good number of all the themes—the decadence of the court and town, ancient English virtue, the rise of materialist values, the importance of poetic tradition, the poverty of education, and so forth. Yet the chief theme of the late poems must be Pope himself, the retired yet active poet, the modern Ancient, Christian humanist, and chief poetic spokesman for the Enlightenment, the center of "harmonious discord." t I have already had occasion to speak of the doctrine of concordia discors in Pope's life and work.6 As an idea it probably exerted more of an influence upon him than the Great Chain of Being. The classic instance of the idea in Pope's "system of 4. Spence, p. 133. 5. Spence, no. 299. 6. See above, pp. 21-24.

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Ethics in the Horatian way" occurs in the famous description of man in the opening of Book II of An Essay on Man: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest, In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast; In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer, Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much : Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd; Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of Truth, in endless Error hurl'd : The glory, jest, and riddle of the world ! Man is the isthmus, a paradoxical metaphor both for man's smallness and his strategic centrality. Antithesis is the most common figure in the passage: mind and body, thought and passion, wisdom and ignorance, God and beast, lord and prey. One must accept the limitations of man, but at the same time one feels sheer wonder and admiration; and positive wonder at the state of man helps unify the otherwise sharp divisions and disharmonies, a "Chaos of Thought and Passion." No other creature in the universe contains to its benefit these antinomies. No other creature is, in Thomas Mann's epithet, "the lord of counterpositions" (The Magic Mountain, VI). Pythagoras may have considered the philosophical value in the laws of proportion and harmonic intervals, but Heraclitus was probably the first philosopher to see in concordia discors a rationale for the universe: "Existing things are brought into harmony by the clash of opposing currents . . . all things come into being by conflict of opposites and the sum of all things flows like a stream." For Pope the reality of the universe is reflected in man's own consciousness :

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Alexander Pope Better for Us, perhaps, it might appear, Were there all harmony, all virtue here; That never air or ocean felt the wind; That never passion discompos'd the mind : But ALL subsists by elemental strife; And Passions are the elements of Life. The gen'ral ORDER, since the whole began, Is kept in Nature, and is kept in Man. (Essay on Man, 1,165-172)

If there were not strife, there would be dangerous stagnation, moral, political, psychological. Man would become imprisoned within the crystal palace of his own Reason, where Reason itself can be unreasonable. Life lived at its fullest involves the active harmonization of conflicting emotions and ideas, without which man would sink into rigid dogma and intellectual decadence. Man must strive, then, to reconcile and grow from his inherent dividedness, as in himself, so, too, through political parties and parliamentary government. He must govern himself through conflict. As Pope states later in the Essay on Man, "Extremes in Nature equal ends produce, / In Man they join to some mysterious use." In the First Epistle of the First Book of Horace Imitated (1738), addressed to Lord Bolingbroke (to whom Pope had addressed the Essay on Man), Pope begins with an innocent plea to be allowed to retire from writing : ST. JOHN, whose love indulg'd my labours past Matures my present, and shall bound my last! Why will you break the Sabbath of my days? Now sick alike of Envy and of Praise. Publick too long, ah let me hide my Age ! See modest Cibber now has left the Stage : Our Gen'rals now, retir'd to their Estates, Hang their old Trophies o'er the Garden gates, In Life's cool evening satiate of applause, Nor fond of bleeding, ev'n in BRUNSWICK'S cause.

The metaphor of the veterans is significant; for Pope the heroic phase is at an end or, perhaps, a pause. Shortly, Reason tells him "never gallop Pegasus to death" (1. 14). And, "Farewell

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then Verse." Pope begs indulgence from the philosopher Bolingbroke who may be too irritably reaching after fact and reason : But ask not, to what Doctors I apply? Sworn to no Master, of no Sect am I : As drives the storm, at any door I knock, And house with Montagne now, or now with Lock. (23-26) Warburton's gloss on the second couplet points to Pope's achieved harmony : And house with Montagne now, and now zuith Locke,] i.e. Chuse either an active or a contemplative life, as is most fitted to the season and circumstance. —For he regarded these Writers as the best School to form a man for the world; or to give him a knowledge of himself: Montagne excelling in his observation on social and civil life; and Locke, in developing the faculties, and explaining the operations of the human mind. 7 We might more readily associate Montaigne with a combination of the active and contemplative life, not merely active, for Montaigne, as conseiller and later as mayor of Bordeaux, twice "retired" to his famous Tower, installed with his library, well before he ordinarily would have retired. The passage continues with admission of a "discordant" life. Sometimes he sides with the Patriot opposition, at other times he is as "free" as the politically neutral Lyttleton. He can be an epicurean like Aristippus or a stoic like St. Paul : Sometimes a Patriot, active in debate, Mix with the World, and battle for the State, Free as young Lyttleton, her cause pursue, Still true to Virtue, and as warm as true : Sometimes, with Aristippus, or St. Paul, Indulge my Candor, and grow all to all; Back to my native Moderation slide. And win my way by yielding to the tyde. (27-34) 7. Warburton, IV, 102-103, note to line 26; quoted in Thomas E. Maresca, Pope's Ηοταϋαη Poems (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), p. 179.

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"I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some" wrote St. Paul; and "let your moderation be known unto all men."8 For Pope's moderation depends on an endless activity of imagination and thought, as Coleridge would say, in all the possible associations of thought with thought, thought with feeling, or with words, of feelings with feelings, and of words with words. At times the image of the poet himself quite literally is an emblem of harmonious discord : You laugh, half Beau half Sloven if I stand, My Wig all powder, and all snuff my Band; You laugh, if Coat and Breeches strangely vary, White Gloves, and Linnen worthy Lady Mary! But when no Prelate's Lawn with Hair-shirt lin'd, Is half so incoherent as my Mind, When (each Opinion with the next at strife, One ebb and flow of follies all my Life) I plant, root up, I build, and then confound, Turn round to square, and square again to round. (161-170) At other times the image conceals the deeper energy needed to bear up under the burden of illness and advancing age : "Not to go back, is somewhat to advance" ( 53 ). In the concluding verses of the poem Pope praises Bolingbroke and includes an ideal portrait of what he himself "ought" ( 179 ) to be, "That Man divine whom Wisdom calls her own" : Great without Title, without Fortune bless'd, Rich ev'n when plunder'd, honour'd while oppress'd, Lov'd without youth, and follow'd without power, At home tho' exil'd, free, tho' in the Tower. In short, that reas'ning, high, immortal Thing, Just less than Jove, and much above a King, Nay half in Heav'n—except (what's mighty odd) A Fit of Vapours clouds this Demi-god. (181-188) Though neither Pope nor any one of his circle is specifically portrayed here, Pope draws traits from many of them—Atter8. ICor., 9:22; Phil. 4:5.

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bury's seizure, trial, and incarceration, Bolingbroke's exile and lack of political power, Pope's lack of title, Swift's (and many another's) age, Gay's poverty, and so forth. In short the ideal portrait is the concordia discors of the circle itself. t The archetype of the free soul was Horace. Unlike Pope, Horace never had to sweeten the uses of adversity. He was not a political or religious "exile," nor was he physically deformed or plagued with illnesses. He was not as antagonistic as Pope, and he had no worry over his personal safety (as Pope, who sometimes wore a pistol, claimed for himself, though we need not believe him.) When in 1734 Dr. Arbuthnot advised Pope to "continue that noble Disdain and Abhorrence of Vice, which you seem naturally endu'd with, but still with a due regard to your own Safety; and study more to reform than chastise," Pope replied that he would on the contrary not "omit any thing which I think becomes an honest [man]." True enough, he adds, "much freer Satyrists than I have enjoy'd the encouragement and protection of the Princes under whom they lived. Augustus and Mecoenas [sic] made Horace their companion, tho' he had been in arms on the side of Brutus." 9 In fact, Horace had fought in the battle of Philippi on the losing side, and quietly passed over to Augustus. According to Suetonius, Horace not only was a companion of the court, but was even offered a position as private secretary to Augustus. He turned down the post. When Horace was granted a farm in the Sabine Hills, he accepted it, but contrary to the expectations of Augustus, who hoped for an epic poem, he temporized, choosing to stay on his 9. Corr., Ill, 417, 420-421. In this reply to Dr. Arbuthnot, Pope gives us his clearest rationale for the moral aesthetic: "To reform and not to chastise, I am afraid is impossible, and that the best Precepts, as well as the best Laws, would prove of small use, if there were no Examples to inforce them. To attack Vices in the abstract, without touching Persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with Shadows. General propositions are obscure, misty, and uncertain, compar'd with plain, full, and home examples: Precepts only apply to our Reason, which i n most m e n is but weak: Examples are pictures, and strike the Senses, nay raise the Passions, and call in those (the strongest and most general of all motives) to the aid of reformation. Every vicious m a n makes the case his own; and that is the only way by w h i c h such m e n can be affected, m u c h less deterr'd. So that to chastise is to reform."

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farm much of the time, keeping Rome at arms length, though no farther, and maintaining a safe psychological as well as geographical distance. Horace, writes Suetonius, was even pressed to write an epic on the exploits of Augustus. Again he refused and offered instead his epistle to Augustus, explaining why he would rather not. As Pope notes in his Advertisement to his imitation of the Episle to Augustus: "We may farther learn from this Epistle, that Horace made his Court to this Great Prince, by writing with a decent Freedom toward him, with a just Contempt of his low Flatterers, and with a manly Regard to his own Character." No matter how many parallels are found between Horace and Pope, the Roman poet did enjoy the favor of his emperor. What then could Pope mean by saying in the above letter that Horace was "much freer" as a satirist than himself, or by claiming in the advertisment that Horace wrote with a "decent Freedom?" Pope was in fact the more caustic and daring and "took more chances" with the establishment (perhaps another reason for his popularity among certain philosophes ). In any case, Horace removed to the Sabine farm out of choice; Pope lived in Twickenham because of the ten-mile rule. Nullius addictus iurare in verba magistri,10 "I am not bound over to swear as any master dictates," Horace wrote, and the tag became the motto of the Royal Society. For Pope, however, the metaphors he more commonly employs with regard to freedom are not drawn from law but from warfare. Even in their appreciation of solitude the differences between the poets are striking. Pope's scorn of the great "is repeated too often to be real," Johnson writes, "no man thinks much of that which he despises; and as falsehood is always in danger of inconsistency he makes it his boast at another time that he lives among them."11 But though Horace did "Uve among the Great" as well—Pope's line derives from Horace's tarnen me / cum 10. Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), Epistles 1. 1.14. Quotations and translations of the satires and epistles are from this edition; quotations and translations of the odes and epodes are from the Loeb edition, trans. C. E. Bennett ( L o n d o n : W i l l i a m Heinemann, 1914). 11. Johnson, III, 211.

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magnis vixisse (Sat., 2.1.75-76)—one feels that Horace preferred the "simple myrtle" more than Pope ever could : Pérsicos odi, puer, apparatus, displicent nexae philyra coronae; mitte sectari, rosa quo locorum sera more tur. simplici myrto nihil adlabores sedulus, cura : ñeque te ministrum dedecet myrtus neque me sub arta vite bibentem. (Odes, 1.38) I hate the trappings of the Persians, boy; and garlands of lindenbark displease me; do not search for the place where the late rose lingers. And don't care whether you add anything to the simple myrtle—the myrtle neither disgraces your serving, nor my drinking here beneath the thickclustering vine [my translation]. The sensuous love of the retired life—Horace's most southernly temperament—is evoked by these lines, and that love and temperament have no real parallel in Pope's birdlike, alert contemplation or in his downright pride in English common sense. As he lays down in his paraphrase of Horace's second satire of the second book : But ancient friends, (tho' poor, or out of play) That touch my Bell, I cannot turn away. 'Tis true, no Turbots dignify my boards, But gudgeons, flounders, what my Thames affords. To Hounslow-heath I point, and Bansted-down, Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own: From yon old wallnut-tree a show'r shall fall; And grapes, long-lingring on my only wall, And figs, from standard and Espalier join: The dev'l is in you if you cannot dine. Then chearful healths (your Mistress shall have place) And, what's more rare, a Poet shall say Grace. (139-150) There is no chance of a stomachache, Pope delights in telling, from this sober (by no means starvation) diet. But compare Horace's lines that are being imitated :

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Alexander Pope ac mihi seu longum post tempus venerat hospes, sive operum vacuo gratus conviva per imbrem vicinus, bene erat non piscibus urbe petitis, sed pullo atque haedo; tum pensilis uva secundas et nux ornabat mensas cum duplice ficu. post hoc ludus erat culpa potare magistra, ac venerata Ceres, ita culmo surgeret alto, explicuit vino contractae seria frontis. (118-125) and if after long absence a friend came to see me, or if in rainy weather, when I could not work, a neighbour paid me a visit—a welcome guest—we fared well, not with fish sent for from town, but with a pullet or a kid; by and by raisins and nuts and split figs set off our dessert. Then we had a game of drinking, with a forfeit to rule the feast, and Ceres, to whom we made our prayer—"so might she rise on lofty stalk!"—smoothed out with wine the worries of a wrinkled brow.

The tone borders on being intime, and in the richly pictured setting the experiences seem to be felt as Horace relates them. Old friends might indulge in a meal that trails off in winedrinking, with a toast to "revered Ceres"—even she is portrayed through the tall grain—for the blessings of the harvest. In the poetry of the 1730's Pope's fondness for the retired life is expressed most forcefully in his imitation of the fourth satire of John Donne. From what does Pope wish freedom? Through this bitter poem Pope shows himself increasingly annoyed and enraged at the town and court until, halfway through, he "Ran out as fast, as one that pays his Bail, / And dreads more Actions, hurries from a Jail." The metaphor of the prison is one of the explicit continuities of the poem; what to some is freedom, for Pope is jail. Bear me, some God ! oh quickly bear me hence To wholesome Solitude, the Nurse of Sense : Where Contemplation prunes her ruffled Wings, And the free Soul looks down to pity Kings. There sober Thought pursu'd th'amusing theme Till Fancy colour'd it, and form'd a Dream. A Vision Hermits can to Hell transport, And force ev'n me to see the Damn'd at Court.

The Free Soul Not Dante dreaming all th' Infernal State, Beheld such Scenes of Envy, Sin, and Hate. Base Fear becomes the Guilty, not the Free; Suits Tyrants, Plunderers, but suits not me.

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(184-195)

"Truth," his "fair Mistress," is embraced; and "huffing, braggart, puft Nobility," in the idiom of Corinthians 1:13, is spurned. There follows a list of crimes that meretricious British youth, dressing in their best foppery (what Pope aptly calls their "splendid Poverty"), are likely to commit. Pope escapes to restore his soul to freedom. The metaphor in which he chooses to express his freedom probably derives from medieval tradition, as Maynard Mack comments, "where the souls of the just are represented by birds."12 Milton was drawing on this tradition in Camus : And Wisdoms self Oft seeks to sweet retired Solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings That in the various bustle of resort Were all to ruffl'd, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own cleer brest May sit i' the centre, and enjoy bright day. (374-381 ) If Pope ranks himself among the "Hermits," he also compares himself to another political exile, Dante, whose Vision of Hell could not be more horrific than the corrupt government of George Augustus and Walpole, an ignoble nobility, stockjobbers and "Directors," the money men, and the troglodyte dunces honoring both Court and City. No wonder Pope pronounces himself "the Terror of this sinful Town" (196). Then there was the Grotto Pope had built, a retreat within a retreat, like his revered Montaigne's Tower, his arrière boutique, a little back room to the shop, where one might absorb the purest solitude : 12. Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1 9 6 9 ) , p. 90.

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Alexander Pope Soon as I enter at my Country door, My Mind resumes the thread it dropt before; Thoughts, which at Hyde-Park-Corner I forgot, Meet and rejoin me, in the pensive Grott. There all alone, and Compliments apart, I ask these sober questions of my Heart. (Imit. Hör. Ep. II. it.206-211 )

Secretum iter et fallentis semita vitae, Pope inscribed the Horatian touchstone over the entrance to his Grotto, "A secluded journey along the pathway of a life unnoticed" (Ep., 1.18.103). There the hero would be most heroic and learn to be master of himself: "Teach ev'ry Thought within its bounds to roll, / And keep the equal Measure of the Soul" (204-205). Of the many illustrious predecessors, Homer's Achilles, Milton's Samson, and Milton himself in his last years were among the noblest exemplars of heroism in solitude.

% Whatever biographical circumstances led Horace and Pope to champion "the free Soul," both were the kind of poet that is ever bound to his Muse. Pope looked forward to a time when he would be "By Rules of Poetry no more confin'd," and Horace confessed openly : ipse ego, qui nullos me adfirmo scribere versus, invenior Parthis mendacior, et prius orto sole vigil calamum et Chartas et scrinia poseo. (Ep., 2.1.111—113) I myself, who declare that I write no verses, prove to be more of a liar than the Parthians: before sunrise I wake, and call for pen, paper, and writing-case. Or as Pope imitated the lines, proudly emphasizing the "I" and the "lye" by a balancing inner rhyme: "I, who so oft renounce the Muses, lye": When, sick of Muse, our follies we deplore, And promise our best Friends to ryme no more ; We wake next morning in a raging Fit,

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And call for Pen and Ink to show our Wit. (Epistle to Augustus, 177-180) Writing is one thing; Horace and Pope were bound to write recte, "rightly," "by rule," correctly. As Horace pronounces in a famous passage from the Ars Poetica: Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons. rem tibi Socraticae poterunt ostendere chartae, verbaque provisam rem non invita sequentur. qui didicit patriae quid debeat et quid amicis, quo sit amore parens, quo frater amandus et hospes, quod sit conscripti, quod iudicis officium, quae partes in bellum missi ducis, ille profecto reddere personae seit convenientia cuique. ( 309-316 ) Of good writing the source and fount is wisdom. Your matter the Socratic pages can set forth, and when matter is in hand words will not be loath to follow. He who has learned what he owes his country and his friends, what love is due a parent, a brother, and a guest, what is imposed on senator and judge, what is the function of a general sent to war, he surely knows how to give each character his fitting part. To write well and, Pope would add in the Essay on Criticism, to criticize well depend upon our knowledge of standards that ultimately are extraliterary, sapere est et principium et fons. Socrates here symbolizes the wise and sensible consensus gentium, not any particular philosophical system. The knowledge that a poet must have is knowledge of life and not simply of art, though it is interesting that Pope would follow Dryden in the neoclassical tradition of conciseness and refinement in a manner similar to the way that Horace followed Catullus and the Neoterics. Bound by their art, they are directed to serve humanity, to be of some use, however humble, to the state. Utilis urbi, "useful to the City," writes Horace in his Epistle to Augustus at the outset of a passage on the "whole account of a Poet's character." 13 That the end of poetry is moral action is 13. Pope's note in TE, IV, 211. Pope's character portrait of Swift is interpolated in the lines following (see pp. 195-196 above).

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a poetic ideal for which there would be a long tradition extending down through the Renaissance to the early English humanists, Colet, More, and Ascham, through Spenser, Milton, and Dryden (the latter two particularly useful to the state). In his Defence of Poesie Sir Philip Sidney phrased the doctrine most succinctly: "So that, the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills, that most serve to bring forth that, have a most just title to be princes over all the rest." And one Renaissance commentator, Laevinius Torrentius, set forth with regard to Horace : Summum artifìcium est: praeiudicio certe ob similem Caesaris causam, vincunt poetae, ("This is the highest skill. On account of the similar purpose of Caesar, the poets are doubtless vindicated"). 14 For a poet's use is measured by the ideals he exemplifies through his craft and his capacity for expounding them. It is what Pope in a note to Horace's lines in the Epistle to Augustus calls the "nobler office." For the passions are not to be driven out, as Plato asserts in Book X of the Republic. This would drive the artist out of business, and, besides, it is impossible. As Horace writes in the Epistle: torquet ab obscenis iam nunc sermonibus aurem, mox etiam pectus praeceptis format amicis, asperitatis et invidiae corrector et irae, recte facta refert, orientia tempora notis instruit exemplis, inopem sola tur et aegrum. (127-131) Pope imitates the lines : He, from the taste obscene reclaims our Youth, And sets the Passions on the side of Truth; Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art, And pours each human Virtue in the heart. (217-220 ) But Horace, Milton, and Dryden could be useful to the established state. How could Pope be? 14. Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Antwerp, 1608), p. 1722, col. 2. From quite another point of view Pope writes: "No writing is good that does not tend to better mankind some way or other. Mr. Waller has said that 'he wished everything of his burnt that did not drive some moral.' Even in love-verses it may be flung in by the way." Spence, no. 456.

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In its own way Pope's imitation of the first epistle of Horace's second book, the magisterial Epistle to Augustus, would enable a retired poet to be useful—mercilessly and viciously useful— to the state. The ironic parallels that existed between Horace's well-intentioned laudes Caesaris and Pope's own ironic "praise" of King George II Augustus (as he styled himself) would not be lost on an Augustan audience. And to help his readers to the feast of wit, Pope cunningly published the Horatian text and his own imitation on facing pages. There would be no doubt of the disparity between the ideal and the reality or, for that matter, between Pope's tradition and his self-image. Pope's text is a mirror image, but the mirror is curved. We know from Pope's correspondence that his Epistle to Augustus was among his favorite poems. During the winter of 1743-44 when his life was ebbing, he wrote to Warburton that his sedulous ritual, correction, was proceeding: "My present Indisposition takes up almost all my hours, to render a Very few of them supportable: yet I go on softly to prepare the Great Edition of my things with your Notes, & as fast as I receive any from you, I add others in order, determining to finish the Epistle to Dr. Arb. & 2 or 3 of the best of Horace, particularly that to Augustus." 15 Pope's high opinion of his poem has not been shared by later writers. Johnson, for example, found the Horatian imitations generally mere "relaxations of his genius." Only in the past fifteen years have these poems been read with the attention they merit. 16 S The Epistle to Augustus is a poem on fame. In its way it is a "temple of fame," involving the poet in relation to his literary and historical past, to his contemporary audience, and to posterity. I say "fame" but I might have said "infamy," for a 15. Con., IV, 491. 16. To mention only books, see Robert W. Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope (Urbana: U. of Illinois Press, 1955); Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), chapters 6 - 9 ; Thomas E. Maresca, Pope's Horatian Poems; John M. Aden, Something Like Horace: Studies in the Art and Allusion of Pope's Horatian Satires (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969); Mack, Garden and City.

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large number of the figures in the poem are treated with irony and sarcasm, if not outright contempt. Fame and infamy are words that now have much of the grand manner about them. We might approach Pope's meaning more nearly if we substituted for "fame" our own vaunted "success." This word embodies enough meaning by association, negative and positive, to give ample scope for Popean satire. I. A. Richards calls such helpful verbal equivalents "parallel corridors" that lead to the same end. For the ethics of success and the ethics of fame in cultures oriented similarly toward achievement at all costs are divided by the thinnest partitions. And if Pope reviles King George's innumerable propagandists, in our time Robert Lowell has written : O to break loose. All life's grandeur is something with a girl in s u m m e r . . . elated as the President girdled by his establishment this Sunday morning, free to chaff his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff, swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick of his ghost-written rhetoric ! No weekends for the gods now. Wars flicker, earth licks its open sores, fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance assassinations, no advance. Only man thinning out his kind sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind swipe of the pruner and his knife busy about the tree of life .. ,17 Indeed Lowell's "monotonous sublime" resembles Pope's ironic attempt at the close of the Epistle to Augustus to "mount on the Maeonian wing / Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing." "The Reflections of Horace, and the Judgments past in his Epistle to Augustus," wrote Pope in the advertisement to his 17. From "Waking Early Sunday Morning," reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. from Near the Ocean by Robert Lowell, copyright © 1963, 1965, 1966, 1967 by Robert Lowell, and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

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imitation, "seem'd so seasonable to the present Times, that I could not help applying them to the use of my own Country." Like a pitchfork with two prongs, Pope's Epistle has both a political and historico-hterary point. A brief comparison of Pope's introduction with Horace's illustrates the political issues at stake : Cum tot sustineas et tanta negotia solus, res Italas armis tuteris, moribus ornes, legibus emendes, in pubüca commoda peccem, si longo sermone morer tua tempora, Caesar.

( 1-4)

Seeing that you alone carry the weight of so many great charges, guarding our Italian state with arms, gracing her with morals, and reforming her with laws, I should sin against the public weal if with long talk, O Caesar, I were to delay your busy hours. T h e noble sentiments, the pace of the rhythms that support these sentiments, the artful deference of the epistolary narrator, and the strategic positioning of "solus" and "Caesar" all point to a worthy Emperor who carries out the functions of a well-run state. Augustus' political slogan—he was then Octavi a n — t h e Res Italas was made to capture the Roman public's sense of national pride and honor against the corruption of Marc Antony's regime. Furthermore, Augustus had forged a bond between morality and law, referring to the ancient Roman mores; and he had introduced social reforms. Busy about the affairs of state, he lived in his old house, modestly and with pride. There could be no more vivid contrast to Caesar Augustus than in King George Augustus. Pope's "imitation" of Horace conceals its satiric thrusts behind the most fulsome praise : W h i l e You, great Patron of Mankind, sustain T h e balanc'd World, and open all the Main; Your Country, chief, in Arms abroad defend, A t home, with Morals, Arts, and Laws amend; H o w shall the Muse, f r o m such a Monarch, steal A n hour, and not defraud the Publick Weal? ( 1-6 )

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Following the Roman poet, Pope affects to address his ruler with delicacy and humility. Since he cannot approach George as an equal, through a wayward periphrasis he begs to be forgiven for imposing on his time. For it is not only the "Monarch" that is being defrauded, but the English "Publick Weal" which he effectively embodies. (George's inordinate love of money is at issue.) The "personal interest of Caesar coincides with what Lucilius called the commoda patriae," Eduard Fraenkel writes of Horace's straightforward exordium.18 Atlas-like, George is portrayed sustaining the "balanc'd World," as Pope alludes to the present balance of powers that the Opposition thought disadvantageous to England. The "Arms abroad" are, of course, those of war, but also those of Madame de Walmoden, with whom George dallied eight months during the previous year in Hanover. Words such as "steal" and "defraud" betray by innuendo the grossness of Pope's "praise." In the second part of the exordium ( 7 - 2 2 ) Pope introduces historical personages : Edward and Henry, now the Boast of Fame, And virtuous Alfred, a more sacred Name, After a Life of gen'rous Toils endur'd, The Gaul subdu'd, or Property secur'd, Ambition humbled, mighty Cities storm'd, Or Laws establish'd, and the World reform'd; Clos'd their long Glories with a sigh, to find Th' unwilling Gratitude of base mankind !

(7-14)

The historical phrases that build to a climax are carefully selected to indicate not only what Edward III and Henry V and "virtuous Alfred" did, but exactly what George was not doing. France, artfully hidden in "Gaul," was not being "subdu'd," property not "secur'd," and a Licensing Act would be among the hated "reforms." "Unwilling Gratitude" and a just "Boast of Fame" have become central themes to a poet who has been so poorly rewarded by the established powers. Worthy heroes, Edward, Henry, and Alfred, were not rewarded either, and Pope, 18. Eduard Fraenkel, Horace p. 384.

( O x f o r d : The Clarendon Press, 1957),

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as usual, places himself in good historical company. He plays on the topic of unrewarded merit so pointedly that we become quickly aware of its inverse, rewarded worthlessness, only too real in George's case. The great Alcides, ev'ry Labour past, Had still this Monster to subdue at last. Sure fate of all, beneath whose rising ray Each Star of meaner merit fades away ; Oppress'd we feel the Beam directly beat, Those Suns of Glory please not till they set.

(17-22 )

"Ingratitude!" cries King Lear, and Pope's "Monster" owes much to Shakespeare's "marble-hearted fiend." Regarding "Alcides" (Hercules), one thinks back to the "great Alcides" resting on his club in The Temple of Fame. Following Horace, Pope isolates Hercules from the others to emphasize the struggle and endurance of the greatest of heroes. Thus, Pope draws on both history and myth to back up his pithy moral: "All human Virtue to its latest breath / Finds Envy never conquer'd, but by Death" (15-16). The pun on "Suns of Glory" fairly demolishes the not very glorious son of George I, who will not please until he sets. The third section of the opening lines once again focuses this lamentable panegyric on George Augustus. Fraenkel points out that the first seventeen lines of the Horatian text contain a number of elements of the laudes Caesaris, first directly expressed in the poem (1—4), then partly disguised ( 5 - 1 2 ) , partly overt ( 1 5 - 1 7 ) : "Horace was reluctant to engage Augustus straight away in a discussion on poetry as he might have done with anyone else. Such disinvoltura might have been taken as a lack of modesty. While avoiding any fulsome flattery he is anxious to show his awareness of the very special situation in which he finds himself. Besides it is a rule of common politeness not to assail of your personal concerns, but first to entertain him with something that is nearer to his own interests." 19 The rhetorical exaggeration of Pope's praise undercuts its 19. Fraenkel, Horace, p. 386.

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meaning; his third section mixes religious and classical metaphors : To Thee, the World its present homage pays, The Harvest early, but mature the Praise : Great Friend of LIBERTY ! in Kings a Name Above all Greek, above all Roman Fame : Whose Word is Truth, as sacred and rever'd, As Heav'n's own Oracles from Altars heard. Wonder of Kings ! like whom, to mortal eyes None e'er has risen, and none e'er shall rise. (23-30) That George could be a "Friend of LIBERTY" when the recent Licensing Act tightened censorship is of course impossible. Pope even alludes indirectly to his Horatian model to place George II above "all Roman Fame," including of course Caesar Augustus. But the last series of allusions prove the most savage for they exploit the central doctrine of Christianity : the son of the first George is likened to the son of God, "Whose Word is Truth." He is the "Wonder of Kings," the resurrected Christ like whom "None e'er has risen." Indeed "None e'er has risen" like George, and hopefully "none e'er shall rise." After such "vile Encomium" (410) a rather jocose exposition follows. Pope derides the prevalent notion that authors "like Coins [!] grow dear as they grow old," and that the more ancient the author, the better. Just in one instance, be it yet confest Your People, Sir, are partial in the rest. Foes to all living worth except your own, And Advocates for Folly dead and gone.

(31-34)

It is an "easy" transition; George, as Pope addresses his monarch, stands forth the one "modern" worth praising according to the present taste (which, we learn through the poem, is at a low ebb). But the satire is not to be simply political, and Pope shortly veers off in the direction of English literary history.

% As far as the literary dimension to Pope's satire is concerned, the Epistle to Augustus stands among Pope's last statements on

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poetic tradition and may be considered an ironic recapitulation. Here he performs what he enjoyed doing in conversation, pronouncing his own poetic taxonomies, ranking authors and periods, noting who is "correct" and who isn't, lopping here and grafting there. 20 He was secure in the knowledge that his own verse was nothing less than the culmination of English poetry and the revived body of both classical literatures as well. All those whom he loved and respected—Trumbull, Walsh, Swift, Oxford, Bolingbroke, Gay—had been telling him so nearly all his life. In this lengthy, satirical epistle, somewhat like Napoleon, finding no one greater to crown him, Pope simply crowned himself. As William Broome said, he had become "king of Parnassus." This is not to say that by this self-aggrandizement Pope put by his humility before the past; he is, after all, imitating a poem of Horace's. Authors he especially admires, such as Dryden, he only criticizes with warmth, and many others he evalutes without condescension. But in his review Pope fairly clears the field of contemporary adversaries and secures free passage for himself to the "hallow'd Quire" of his own temple of fame. And while Pope proves to be both plaintiff and judge, he at least convinces us of his basic critical premise : that fame ought not to be based on prejudice but on critical intelligence. The added pleasure we may receive from the poem over his contemporaries is that Pope has proved to be in the right. Although the poem entertains a coherent view of literary tradition from Pope's perspective, he often includes popular opinions, literary jargon, and uncritical estimates. "Beastly Skelton Heads of Houses quote" (38), Pope writes in the Epistle, and his judgment is corroborated by Spence. Skelton's verses are "all low and bad; there's nothing in them that's worth reading." 21 Although Pope mentions Chaucer's ribaldry—"Chaucer's worst ribaldry is learn'd by rote" (37)—we know that Pope's opinion of the poet was high: "I read Chaucer still with as much pleasure as almost any of our poets."22 Pope denigrates 20. Spence, nos. 4 0 8 - 4 8 5 . 21. Spence, no. 414. 22. Spence, no. 411.

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Spenser's affecting the "obsolete" (97) in the Shepheardes Calender, though he admired the Faerie Queene; he mocks the excessive popularity of Jonson's comedies (80), though he praises his "Art" (82). And so forth. In short, one cannot be sure from the Epistle to Augustus how Pope evaluates many of the authors he brings up. Rather, he intends to satirize the irrationality of city and court taste—the very taste that has "defamed" him. Such popular critical commonplaces only wreak havoc on critical truth. He darts playfully and disrespectfully over the field of English literary tradition, and he puts objections into the mouth of a "true-born" Englishman: "Yet surely, surely, these were famous men ! What Boy but hears the sayings of old Ben? In all debates where Criticks bear a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Johnson's Art, Of Shakespear's Nature, and of Cowley's Wit; How Beaumont's Judgment check'd what Fletcher writ; How Shadwell hasty, Wycherly was slow; But, for the Passions, Southern sure and Rowe. These, only these, support the crouded stage, From eldest Heywood down to Cibber's age." ( 79-88) But Pope will not be concerned with refuting or backing up the sophisticated jargon of the critics or the varieties of lowbrow taste. Moreover, his argument cannot even be said to defend the moderns against an excessively reactionary audience. That Pope would even consider defending any modern (excepting the very sacred few) is part of the satire. As with Horace, "what is vital for him, since the success of his life's work depends on it, is to overcome the dull opposition to any fresh production and the common incapacity to recognize any higher stylistic standards." 23 All this may be; the People's Voice is odd, It is, and it is not, the voice of God. (89-90 ) 23. Fraenkel, Horace, p. 388.

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Public opinion, like the Queen of Fame herself, is capricious in its distribution of merit, and besides, nothing really "odd" could be very good to a true Augustan. In any one age popular estimates may be idiosyncratic; through time, it is hoped, only what is of enduring value survives. Thus, to Gammer Gurton the "People's Voice" awards "the bays" but rejects, perhaps wisely, Colley Cibber's Careless Husband ( 9 1 - 9 2 ) : Spenser himself affects the obsolete, And Sydney's verse halts ill on Roman feet : Milton's strong pinion now not Heav'n can bound, Now serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground, In Quibbles, Angel and Archangel join, And God the Father turns a School-Divine. Not that I'd lop the Beauties from his book, Like slashing Bentley with his desp'rate Hook. (97-104) Such statements must be construed at once as ironic and critical; likewise, Pope's description of the Caroline and Restoration Wits, the "Mob of Gentlemen who wrote with Ease" (108). That gendemen could form a "Mob" in the first instance might put us on guard : Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more, (Like twinkling Stars the Miscellanies o'er) One Simile, that solitary shines In the dry Desert of a thousand lines, Or lengthen'd Thought that gleams thro' many a page, Has sanctify'd whole Poems for an age.24 (109-114) True as this statement was in Pope's time, it is even more true today to judge from our anthologies. Yet Pope's criticism does not end with the Line of Wit, or Milton, but extends to Shakespeare himself : On Avon's bank, where flow'rs eternal blow, If I but ask, if any weed can grow ? (119-120) 24. Cf. "Mark where a bold expressing Phrase appears, / Bright thro' the rubbish of some hundred years" (Imit. Hör. Ep. II. ii. 165-166).

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Many of the "weeds" were radically pulled up in Pope's own edition of Shakespeare (1725). But Pope does not so much criticize Shakespeare as he rails against an uncritical, bardolatrous public, ready to applaud even his "muster-roll of Names." Yet how often Pope lists a "muster-roll" of his friends. Through the design of the poem there is an implicit teleology : while past poets developed the tradition, they could not help breaking the rules, or falling into idiosyncrasy. Since he himself is the 'latest," the ideal modern poet—that is, himself— rules from the top of a pyramid of which the base is a solid foundation of past authors and critics. Such a teleology invests Pope with the mantle of poetry. One begins by hearing Dryden's sound .· Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join The varying verse, the full resounding line, The long majestic march, and energy divine. Tho' still some traces of our rustic vein And splay-foot verse, remain'd, and will remain. Late, very late, correctness grew our care, When the tir'd nation breath'd from civil war. Exact Racine, and Corneille's noble fire Show'd us that France had something to admire. Not but the Tragic spirit was our own, And full in Shakespear, fair in Otway shone : But Otway fail'd to polish or refine, And fluent Shakespear scarce effac'd a line. Ev'n copious Dryden, wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest Art, the Art to blot. (267-281 ) At first Pope imitates a triplet of Dryden, concluding with another stylistic trait of Dryden's, the alexandrine. Such "copious" verse—though such "copiousness" is but an excess of imagination, not a defect—can only result from abuse of the "greatest Art," self-criticism, both aesthetic and moral. In the familiar antithesis, Racine is held up as a model for correctness, Corneille for passion, as much as Jonson and Shakespeare or Virgil and Homer were contrasted for Art and Nature. "Late, very late, correctness grew our care"; one recalls Walsh's advice to the sixteen-year-old poet that the "one way left of excelling"

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was to be correct. The emphasis on "very late" would imply that only in the present age, and then by Pope himself, did English poetry reach its culmination.

«

Politics and literary criticism form two central themes in the Epistle to Augustus; an ideal of public and private virtue unites them. Increased refinement in the arts, Pope explains, has virtually squeezed didacticism out of verse. Luxury and moral restraint are among the commonest of eighteenth-century antitheses and, just a few years before John Brown's jeremiad Estimate, Pope, Cato-like, watches how "With growing years the pleasing Licence grew" until the present "Times corrupt." Have the poets forgotten their high calling? At length, by wholesom dread of statutes bound, The Poets learn'd to please, and not to wound: Most warp'd to Flatt'ry's side; but some, more nice, Preserv'd the freedom, and forebore the vice. Hence Satire rose, that just the medium hit, And heals with Morals what it hurts with Wit. (257-262) One thinks of Bolingbroke's initial suggestion, that Pope try imitating Horace—"how well that would hit my case."25 The use of satire in the Restoration is not attributed here to the writers' fear that the greater genres of epic and tragedy had been exhausted, but as a response to the decline in morality and taste. England withstood longer than France, but now king and court have succumbed: "Farce once the taste of Mobs, but now of Lords." By the last third of the poem, as fame and honest reputation emerge as major themes, we are not quite sure who is implied in the apostrophe: O you! whom Vanity's light bark conveys On Fame's mad voyage by the wind of Praise; With what a shifting gale your course you ply; For ever sunk too low, or born too high ! 25. Spence, nos. 321 and 321a.

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Is it addressed to the dunces or the dramatist Cibber mentioned in lines immediately preceding? Is it a veiled reference to George Augustus, just returned from an inglorious sojourn in Hanover? Horace had used a stage metaphor to express the vanity of human wishes; Pope's choice of a voyage may well point to George.26 The metaphor of wind had earlier sufficed to describe Rumour in The Temple of Fame; now it shows the emptiness of fame in an ignoble age. A covert allusion to George may lurk in "For ever sunk too low, or born too high"; and while he "pants for glory" and finds "short repose" in Hanover in his mistress's arms, Pope will shortly be promising George "your Repose to sing I"—"What seas you travers'd!" (395-396). The line "A breath revives him, or a breath o'erthrows" will be touchingly echoed later in the century by Goldsmith in The Deserted Village: Princes and lords mayflourish,or may fade ; A breath can make them, as a breath has made. But George Augustus is unwilling to consult literature—the literature of the genuine Augustans—and Pope tries to excuse him, leveling at himself an innocent bit of mockery : "We Poets are (upon a Poet's word) / Of all mankind, the creatures most absurd" (358-359). Poets never know when "To sing, or cease to sing"; they "recite nine hours in ten" like those poetasters who "Rave, recite, and madden round the land" in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot; they quarrel with friends over "a single verse," "Expect a Place, or Pension from the Crown," hope "T'enroll your triumphs o'er the sea and land" or "Be call'd to Court, to plan some work divine." These definitions are meant to include nearly every contemporary poet—except Pope himself. If poets are 26. For several points here I am indebted to John M. Aden, "Pope's Mad Voyager in 'Fame's mad voyage,' " Papers on Language and. Literature 5 ( 1 9 6 9 ) , 197-199.

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absurd, kings are more so. And since kings usually find poets appropriate to express their virtues, Pope ironically praises the laureate's art of sinking to George's level : Or chuse at least some Minister of Grace, Fit to bestow the Laureat's weighty place.

(378-379)

The mood of the final verse-paragraph is of a higher strain. Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian wing, Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing! What seas you travers'd! and what fields you fought! Your Country's Peace, how oft, how dearly bought! (394-397) Pope mounts on a very "un-Maeonian" wing, as one critic notes, and the exclamations treble as nowhere else in the poem. "Repose" is ever an insult to a hero when Vice is regnant; besides, the Walpole foreign policy has cost England too great a price— "how dearly bought." "Peace stole her wing" when George "nodded," and "wrapt the world in sleep," Pope writes, prefiguring that final, eternal sleep at the end of the fourth book of The Dunciad. But the direction of the poem now swerves toward the poet, "Mr. Pope" himself. The repetition of the "I" emphasizes the personal animus pressing more closely than ever behind the lines : But Verse alas! your Majesty disdains; And I'm not us'd to Panegyric strains : The Zeal of Fools offends at any time, But most of all, the Zeal of Fools in ryme. Besides, a fate attends on all I write, That when I aim at praise, they say I bite. A vile Encomium doubly ridicules; There's nothing blackens like the ink of fools. (404-411) Horace could not violate the code of urbanitas and, even while satiric, maintained a cultivated and graceful tone. Yet to end his poem he moved from the height of Augustus Caesar's maiestas to the local color of the Forum's vicus Tuscus. Pope follows

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the direction of this movement, but the descent from George to madness and licentiousness, "Bedlam and Sohoe," is no great distance. Proud of the value of his poetry and scornful of praise from a tainted source, Pope concludes his verse-epistle with the grim and grotesque humor of a Beethoven scherzo: If true, a woful likeness, and if lyes, "Praise undeserv'd is scandal in disguise : " Well may he blush, who gives it, or receives; And when I flatter, let my dirty leaves (Like Journals, Odes, and such forgotten things As Eusden, Philips, Settle, writ of Rings) Cloath spice, line trunks, or flutt'ring in a row, Befringe the rails of Bedlam and Sohoe. (412-419)

t

Though leaves are many, the root is one; Through all the lying days of my youth I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun; Now I may wither into the truth. 27 ("The Coming of Wisdom with Time") The arc of a poet's life that Yeats symbolizes in these natural images, carrying us from spring to winter, youth to age, is most explicitly followed in the careers of Spenser, Milton, and Pope. They were following the career of Virgil, abandoning the descriptive pastoral genre for the didactic, and then for the heroic genre. Whether a poet admits it so self-consciously or not, it is still the ordinary path for him to follow—from image to belief, or as Newman wrote for his epitaph, Ex umbris et imaginibus ad veritatem. Experience tends more and more to demand interpretation, and then interpretation itself must be reinterpreted. Pope, too, referred to the "lying days" of his youth, berating that time when "pure Description held the place of Sense" (Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 148): That not in Fancy's Maze he wander'd long, But stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his Song. (340-341) 27. Copyright 1924 by the Macmillan Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Geòrgie Yeats. Reprinted with permission of the Macmillan Company ( N e w York) from Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats, and with permission of Mr. M. B. Yeats and Macmillan & Co. Ltd. (London).

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However much Pope's truth differed from Yeats's truth, neither withered poetically in any way. The late work of each has a dread seriousness and power : Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.28 ("The Second Coming," 3 - 8 ) Lo ! thy dread Empire, CHAOS ! is restor'd; Light dies before thy uncreating word : Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And Universal Darkness buries All. (The Dunciad IV, 6 5 3 - 6 5 6 ) The infamous names scattered through Pope's late satires and epistles are as legion as Milton's devils. For them Pope envisaged a Pandemonium and a temple of infamy. The city is not of God but is Westminster. Christ is not regnant, yet there is an "AntiChrist of Wit" in the laureate Cibber. There is a goddess in Dulness, an ethos, Night. Instead of offering meaning to life, the "poet" uses words to "uncreate" whatever they point toward; instead of public responsibility, there is private interest; instead of culture, there is anarchy. While the Empire of Chaos was being restored on earth, Pope prepared to do battle. In 1742, after several years respite from poetry and in failing health, he visited the kindly Ralph Allen, the model for Fielding's Squire Allworthy in Torre Jones, in Bath, from which he writes : I little thought 3 months ago to have drawn the whole poh te world upon me, (as I formerly did the Dunces of a lower Species) as I certainly shall whenever I publish this poem [the fourth book of The Dunciad]. An Army of Virtuosi, Medalists, Ciceronis, Royal-Society men, Schools, 28. Copyright 1924 by the Macmillan Company, renewed 1952 by Bertha Geòrgie Yeats. Reprinted with permission of the Macmillan Company (New York) from Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats, and with permission of Mr. M. B. Yeats and Macmillan & Co. Ltd. (London).

230

Alexander Pope Universities, even Florists, Free thinkers & Free masons, will incompass me with fury: It will be once more, Concurrere Bellum atque Virum. But a good Conscience a bold Spirit, & Zeal for Truth, at whatsoever Expence, of whatever Pretenders to Science, or of all Imposition either Literary, Moral, or Political; these animated me, & these will Support me.29

"Once more . . . War." Pope was true to his word, for into the final book of The Dunciad, published in March 1742, follow one after another symbol of evil and mindlessness in infinite variety. It was not granted Pope to have a serene close to a career that began serenely with the Pastorals and Windsor-Forest: Yet, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night! Of darkness visible so much be lent, As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent. Ye Pow'rs ! whose Mysteries restor'd I sing, To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing, Suspend a while your Force inertly strong, Then take at once the Poet and the Song. (Dunciad IV, 1 - 8 ) The premonition of death that lurks behind the lines, in the hellish "darkness visible" borrowed from Paradise Lost (I, 63), in the malevolent apostrophe, the allusion to Time's racing flight, rise out of Pope's anguish. Does he betray, then, in the fourth Dunciad the wish for death? There is no joyful wisdom in leaving the world not a jot better than when one arrived in it. In a playful footnote to the sixth line, Pope's imaginary pedant Scriblerus glosses : Fair and softly, good Poet! . . . For sure in spite of his unusual modesty, he shall not travel so fast toward Oblivion, as divers others of more Confidence have done : For when I revolve in my mind the Catalogue of those who have the most boldly promised to themselves Immortality, viz. Pindar, Luis Gongora, Ronsard, Oldham, Lyrics; Lycophron, Statius, Chapman, Blackmore, Heroics; I find the one half to be already dead, the other in utter darkness. But it be29. Corr., IV, 377 (to Hugh Bethel, 1 January 1742).

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cometh not us, who have taken upon us the office of Commentator, to suffer our Poet thus prodigally to cast away his Life; contrariwise, the more hidden and abstruse is his work, and the more remote its beauties from common Understanding, the more is it our duty to draw forth and exalt the same, in the face of Men and Angels.30 "One dim Ray of Light" is all we are afforded; surely, Yeats would say, some revelation is at hand : Now flam'd the Dog-star's unpropitious ray, Smote ev'ry Brain, and wither'd ev'ry Bay; Sick was the Sun, the Owl forsook his bow'r, The moon-struck Prophet felt the madding hour: Then rose the Seed of Chaos, and of Night, To blot out Order, and extinguish Light, Of dull and venal a new World to mold, And bring Saturnian days of Lead and Gold. (9-16) Pope drew on the farces of a younger writer, Henry Fielding, for the dramatic structure of the last book of The Dunciad. It is fitting that at the end of Pope's life he could recognize the genius in the tradition younger than himself. In both Fielding and Pope, a fake queen serves as the "focal point about which farcical episodes may loosely revolve." 31 The drama of the last book bears some similarity to Pope's early Temple of Fame. The occasion for both is a royal levee when awards and fame are meted out : She mounts the Throne: her head a Cloud conceal'd, In broad Effulgence all below reveal'd, ( 'Tis thus aspiring Dulness ever shines ) Soft on her lap her Laureat son reclines. Beneath her foot-stool, Science groans in Chains, And Wit dreads Exile, Penalties and Pains. There foam'd rebellious Logic, gagg'd and bound, There, stript, fair Rhet'ríc languish'd on the ground. (17-24) 30. TE, V, 339-340. 31. George Sherburn, "The Dunciad, Book IV," University of Texas Studies in English, 24 (1944), 179. See also Aubrey Williams, Pope's Dunciad: A Study of Its Meaning (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1955), chapter 4.

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Later, in a Swiftian image, Fame is awarded to the worthless recipients at the Queen's signal : And now had Fame's posterior Trumpet blown, And all the Nations summon'd to the Throne. The young, the old, who feel her inward sway, One instinct seizes, and transports away. 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. Not closer, orb in orb, conglob'd are seen The buzzing Bees about their dusky Queen. ( 71-80) The pseudoscientifie jargon that Pope employs recalls the language in which the movement of Rumour was described in The Temple of Fame ( 4 2 8 - 4 4 7 ) . Then, as now, the triumph of unReason is illustrated by mechanical metaphor, and in a footnote Scriblerus makes clear the point that when madness and method conjoin, a h u m a n being will resemble a machine: 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. Not those alone who passive own her laws, But who, weak rebels, more advance her cause. Whate'er of dunce in College or in Town Sneers at another, in toupee or gown; Whate'er of mungril no one class admits, A wit with dunces, and a dunce with wits. (81-90) Then marching past the Queen go the students and the townies; the statesmen follow after, then the patronized and the patron, "bard and blockhead, side by side, / Who rhym'd for hire, and patroniz'd for pride," courtiers, patriots, and mountebanks. Such a conglomerate, infamous populace are best not remembered, but forgot. One thinks back to those lines from the Epistle to a Lady that describe the faded courtesans and their useless lives, unheroic veterans of the wars of sex and libertinism. They evoke a vision of life without meaning such as Baudelaire would have :

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See how the World its Veterans rewards ! A Youth of frolicks, an old Age of Cards, Fair to no purpose, artful to no end, Young without Lovers, old without a Friend, A Fop their Passion, but their Prize a Sot, Alive, ridiculous, and dead, forgot! (243-248) Forgot! the very antithesis of fame. Or they should be remembered, in Johnson's phrase, "to point a moral, or adorn a tale." Images of forgetfulness, sleep, and death are prominent in Pope's late poetry. In the "dread Empire" the hero is fighting a losing battle, but such images help him strike at his opponent's core—an opponent led by the Queen of Dulness, her Field Marshall Theobald, his Aide-de-Camp Cibber and their wretched mercenaries "Light-arm'd with Points, Antitheses, and Puns," the whole "dread Empire" that Pope had exposed, and contested, in his satire.

Index

Active life. See Heroic life Addison, Joseph, 8, 163, 179 Aden, John Μ., 216n, 226n Ancients, the, 9, 11, 50, 153; identity of Ρ and, 5 - 6 , 20, 144—145, 202; language and, 143-144 Antithesis, 21, 130, 203. See also Concordia discors Aquinas, Thomas, 158 Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 2, 94, 175 Aristophanes, 178 Aristotle, 8, 153; on fame, 165166 Arnold, Matthew: on tradition, 8; on translating Homer, 113; on the heroic life, 117, 121, 142; on posterity, 132 Atterbury, Bishop Francis, 51, 129; and Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, 7, 30; Ρ writes to, 78 Audra, Ε., 26n, 61n, 136n Auerbach, Erich, 101 Augustus, Caesar, 123, 207, 208, 217 Ault, Norman, 54n, 56 Aurelius, Marcus, 152, 173 Baker, Herschel, 6 Bate, Walter Jackson, 12-13

Bathurst, Allen, Earl, 40, 202 Baudelaire, Charles, 203 Bénichou, Paul, 64 Berkeley, Bishop George, 79 Betterton, Thomas, 47 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 3 1 - 4 2 Blackwell, Thomas, 101 Blount, Martha, 54, 68; friendship with, 58-59; birthday poem to, 69-70; in Epistle to a Lady, 70-72; and P's will, 72 Blount, Teresa, 54 Boethius, 9 Boileau Despréaux, Nicolas, 47 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 8, 20, 24, 48, 129, 189; Ρ writes to, 36; P's praise of, 51, 206; P's dedications to, 204; on Ρ and Horace, 225 Borges, Jorge Luis, 12, 18 Boswell, James, 137 Bowra, C. M., 116 Bridges, Ralph, 87 Broome, William, 122, 123n, 124, 221 Brower, Reuben Α., 63n, 128, 215n; on Temple of Fame, 148

235

236

Index

Brown, John, 225 Buckingham, Edmund, Duke of, 173 Buckingham, John Sheffield, Duke of. See Sheffield Buckingham, Katherine, Duchess of, 174 Burkhardt, Jacob, 131, 134n Bush, Douglas, 5 Butt, John, 7, 16, 136: on relation of P's life and works, 17, 18 Byles, Mather, 136 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 15 Callimachus, 88 Carruthers, Robert, 56 Caryll, John, 1, 21, 57, 59, 96, 97 Cassirer, Ernst, 145, 150 Castiglione, Baidassare, 164 Catholicism, Roman, 24, 27, 72-82 Chapman, George, 88, 105-106 Chapman, Gerald W., 130n Chaucer, Geoffrey, 3, 9, 32, 43n ; P's imitation of, 11-12, 138-139; P's opinion of, 221 Chénier, André, 10 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of, 15, 23n; on P's death, 82 Cibber, Colley, 56, 223, 233 Cicero, 123, 153, 158; on emulation, 4; "Pro Archia," 30n, 164 Clarendon Code, 72-73 Claudian, 7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 15, 83n, 176, 206 Colet, John, 6, 214 Concordia discors, 23, 52, 80, 112-113; defined, 2 1 - 2 2 ; and politics, 182; in Essay on Man, 203-204; in Imit. H or. Ep. Li, 2 0 4 - 2 0 7 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de, 201 Condorcet, J.-A.-N. Caritat, Marquis de, 166

Congreve, William, 3, 4, 48, 129, 136; on P's early writings, 22-23, 51; P's praise of, 193 Contemplative life. See Retirement Correctness, 121, 133, 221; neoclassic ideal of, 14-15, 2 1 3 214; Walsh advises Ρ on, 14, 49; overcorrectness, 15, 122n; P's care over, 95, 112-113 Courthope, W. C., 16 Cowley, Abraham, 9, 30n, 32; style imitated, 7 Cromwell, Henry, 55-56, 6 5 , 1 2 9 Curii, Edmund, 56 D'Alembert, Jean le Rond, 201 Dante Alighieri, 1, 12, 95, 166; on fame, 133-134 Deane, Rev. Thomas, 27 Denham, Sir John, 50, 103 Dennis, John, 23, 84n, 183 De Quincey, Thomas, 15 Dickey, James, 85 Disease. See Health Donne, John, 11, 194; style imitated, 2 1 0 - 2 1 1 Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 9, 138; P's epitaph on, 170-171 Dryden, John: P's admiration of, 1; Ρ introduced to, 3; and tradition, 14; on Walsh, 49; and P's early benefactors, 53; influence on P, 53; and translation of Virgil and Homer, 82, 88, 174-175; in Epistle to Augustus, 2 2 4 - 2 2 5 Du Bellay, Joachim, 6, 143, 159 Elegance. See Correctness Eliot, George, 129 Eliot, T. S.: and tradition, 11; Four Quartets, 186 Elwin, Whitwell, 16 Emulation: Ρ on, 1, 8; Pericles on, 4; Cicero on, 4; neoclassic ideal of, 4—7; Homer on, 106; Longinus on, 113

Index Erasmus, 4, 6; symbol of religious toleration, 24, 75-76, 81 Erikson, Erik H., 3n Fame: and indentity, 131-132; and P's character, 133-134, 139-140; and P's European audience, 136-137; as challenge, 138-139; and Preface to Works ( 1 7 1 7 ) , 139-147; and Temple of Fame, 147158; and To Mr. Addison, 159-164; and On the Statue of Cleopatra . . ., 164-166; and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, 164— 168; and Rape of the Lock, 168-169; and Epistle to Mr. Jervas, 169-170; and epitaphs, 170-175; and Epistle to Augustus, 215-228; and Dunciad IV, 230-232; and infamy, 232-233 Fenton, Elijah, 197 Fielding, Henry, 231 Fitzgerald, Robert, 85 Foucault, Michel, l l n , 98 Fountaine, Sir Andrew, 161 Fraenkel, Eduard, 218, 219, 222 Freedom, 207-208; Donne and Ρ on, 210-211, 216 Freud, Sigmund, 52 Frye, Northrop, 100η Fussell, Paul, 47n, 97 Garth, Samuel, 47, 48, 50 Gautier, Théophile, 160 Gay, John, 89, 175, 176, 190, 207 George II, 217-218, 225-226 Gibbon, Edward, 159 Gildon, Charles, 54, 183 Gribelin, Simon, 136 Griffith, R. H„ 74 Guardian, The, 41 Health, P's, 32-42, 45, 131 Heraclitus, 203 Heroic life: Homer on, 105-107, 114-118; Ρ on, 120-130; and fame, 138-139, 142, 174, 205 Hervey, John, Baron, 21, 40

237

Hill, Aaron, 183 Hobbes, Thomas, 105 Homer: style imitated, 7, 8 3 132; earnings from translation of, 73; P's praise of, 85; image in Essay on Criticism, 99; Odyssey, 6, 119, 124; Iliad: P's play from, 29; difficulty of translating, 91-98; and heroism, 116-119; scenes of pathos in, 119n Horace, 8, 9, 47, 123, 134, 153; on retirement, 30n, 209-212; motto cited, 111; and fame, 146; on admiration, 151; ethical system of, 200; and Augustus, 207-208; and politics, 213-214; and praise, 219-220 Humanism: as Renaissance ideal, 5 - 7 , 9 - 1 0 ; and Montaigne, 5; decay of, 6; and Cicero, 30n; and fame, 158164, 165-166; Krutch's definition, 177; Ρ and Swift on, 182-188 Hume, David, 142n Identity, 53, 54, 73, 127-129, 132, 175; defined, 2 - 3 , 11-14 Iliad. See Homer Imitation: neoclassic ideal of, 98-101. See also Nature; Emulation Invention, 101-104 James, Henry, 21 Jervas, Charles, 85, 92, 170 Job, 130, 141 Johnson, Samuel, 2n, 16, 131; on Ρ and neoclassic tradition of poetry, 15; and correctness, 15; on Ρ and foods, 28; on Ρ as houseguest, 39; on Ρ and deism, 79; on P's Homer translations, 83, 122; on P's scorn of great writers, 112, 218; on fame, 137, 138, 142n; on Temple of Fame, 147; on P's epitaphs, 171-174 Jonson, Ben, 222

238

Index

Kallich, Martín, 99η Kant, Immanuel, 137 Keats, John, 1, 7, 12, 27, 45n, 90, 127, 163 Kent, William, 34 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 58, 136, 172 Knight, G. Wilson, 151 Kramnick, Irving, 19n Lansdowne, George Granville, Lord, 47, 48, 50 La Rochefoucauld, François de Marcillac, Duc de, 63, 97 Lattimore, Richmond, 85 Lintot, Bernard, 90 Locke, John, 102, 104; on toleration, 81-82 Longinus: on the past, 13; on invention, 103; on metaphor, 104-105; on emulation, 113 Lovejoy, Arthur Ο., 22n, 165n Lowell, Robert, 84, 133 Lucan, 134 Lucretius, 79 Lyttleton, George, Baron, 129 Mack, Maynard, In, 93, 131, 211; on Ρ as subject of own poetry, 17; on retirement, 199-200 MacLeish, Archibald, 137 Malherbe, François de, 9, 63 Mann, Thomas, 203 Mansfield, Jr., Harvey C., 183n Marchmont, Hugh Hume, Earl of, 129 Maresca, Thomas Ε., 45n, 51, 205n, 215n Mill, J. S., 125 Miller, J. Hillis, l l n Milton, John, 105, l l l n , 151, 157, 214; P's admiration of, 1; on emulation, 4—5; style imitated, 7; on the heroic life, 19, 142; on fame, 150, 163164 Moderns, the, 8, 212 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 53, 60, 98, 170; letters to, 57-

58; P's poem on portrait of, 58 Montaigne, Michel de: on education, 5-6; on the inconstancy of our actions, 130131; on fame and rumor, 156-158; on retirement, 205, 211 Murray, William, Earl of Mansfield, 129 Nature : neoclassic ideal of, 9 8 101; Ρ and Arnold on, 8; Homer as poet of, 101-104 Neoclassicism : Ρ as poet of, 10; and originality, 11-12; and classicism, 12; and ideal of nature, 98-101 Newman, J. H., 228 Nicolson, Μ. Η., 23n Oderisi of Gubbio, 134 Odyssey. See Homer Ogilby, John, 86, 87, 88, 105, 141n Originality, 11-12, 83-84. See also Invention Osborn, James M., 48 Ovid, 2, 4, 8, 47; style imitated, 7, 54-55, 133, 134 Oxford, Robert Harley, Earl of, 20, 37, 38, 129, 175; commendatory verses of to P's Works (1717), 136; and P's translating, 184 Paradox, 21. See also Concordia discors Parnell, Thomas, 83, 92, 124, 136 Paul, St., 205-206 Pericles, 4 Petrarch, 4,133 Pindar, 82, 153,193 Piranesi, G. B., 159 Plutarch, 4n Pope, Sr., Alexander (father), 25-26, 45, 98 Pope, Alexander, works of: Alcander, Prince of Rhodes, 7, 30, 31, 32; Dunciad: origins

Index of, 177, 186, 190, 202; dedication to Swift, 192-193; other references, 3, 5, 6, 91, 128, 161, 162; Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, 83, 136, 166-168; Eloisa to Abelard, 59-63, 83, 136; Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogues I and II, 44, 109-110, 120121, 126, 127, 135; Episode of Sarpedon, 114; Epistle to a Lady, Of the Characters of Women, 70-72, 174, 201, 232-233; Epistle to Augustus: fame and politics in, 2 1 5 220; literary history and, 220-225; ideal of virtue in, 225-228; other references, 67, 113; Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot: and P's coining to be a writer, 4 4 - 4 7 ; and P's early advocates, 4 7 - 5 2 ; and P's image of his parents, 26; other references, 2, 9, 111-112, 126, 143, 226; Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation, 18, 77; Epistle to Miss Blount, with the Works of Voiture, 63-69; Epistle to Mr. Jervas, with Dryden's Translation of Fresnoy's Art of Painting, 112, 135, 169170; Epistle to Robert Earl of Oxford, 18, 83, 194; Epitaph on Charles Earl of Dorset, 170-171 ; Epitaph on Edmund Duke of Buckingham, 173174; Epitaph on Himself, 171-172; Epitaph on Lord John Caryll, 171; Epitaph on Mrs. Corbet, 172-173; Epitaph on Sir Godfrey Kneller, 172; Essay on Criticism: Pope attacked for, 74-76; nature in, 98-101; and rules, 101; earnings from, 89; written fast, 90; and language, 144; and fame, 134, 141; other references, 2, 8, 9, 14, 49, 64; Essay on Man: Ρ ac-

239

cused of deism, 78-80; nature in, 98-99; fame of in Europe, 137; early plan of, 199-201; and concordia discors, 203-204; other references, 17, 19, 129, 184, 202; Farewell to London. In the year 1715, 94-95; First Epistle of the First Book of Horace, Imitated, 21, 22, 33, 110-112, 120, 128; on concordia discors, 204-207; First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, 24, 108109, 111, 126, 127-128; First Ode of the Fourth Book of Horace: To Venus, 23; Fourth Satire of Dr. John Donne, 210-211; Messiah, 9; PopeSwift Miscellanies, 70, 176; Ode on Solitude, 30, 42; On the Statue of Cleopatra, made into a Fountain by Leo the Tenth, 164-166; Pastorals, 2, 43, 136; Preface to Works ( 1 7 1 7 ) , 8, 11 In, 139-147; ( 1 7 3 5 ) , l l n , 147; Prologue to Mr. Addison's Tragedy of Cato, 8; Rape of the Lock: Garth's influence on, 50; earnings from, 89; Clarissa's speech, 68-69, 115-116; battle in, 108; written fast, 90; and rumor, 156n; and fame, 168-169; other references, 17, 136, 170; Rondeau to Phillis, 35; Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, 86, 135, 138, 144n, 211, 212; Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Paraphrased, 27-28, 209210; Sixth Epistle of the First Book of Horace, Imitated, 154; Temple of Fame, 11-12, 13, 135, 136, 139, 140, 147158, 173, 232; To Mr. Addison, Occasioned by his Dialogues on Medals, 159-164; To Mr. Gay, 18; To Mrs. M. B. on her Birth-day, 18, 69-76,

240

Index

Pope, Alexander (Coni.) 83, 172; Universal Prayer, 80; Verses on a Grotto, 110; Windsor-Forest, 43,136 Pope, Mrs. Edith (mother), 26 Plato, 165; on correctness, 14 Pulteney, William, Earl of Bath, 189 Pythagoras, 203

Racine, Louis, 78 Rackett, Mrs. Magdalen (halfsister), 26, 32-33 Ramboüillet, Hotel de, 63, 64 Raphael, 172 Refinement. See Correctness Reputation. See Fame Retirement: P's plans of, 98, 196-200; P's ideal of, 117, 122-126, 182-183; Montaigne and, 205; in poetry, 210-213 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 34 Richards, I. Α., 216 Richardson, Jonathan, 33, 47, 190n Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 43n, 46, 138 Rogers, Robert W., 215n Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Root, Robert K., 147 Rosso, Corrado, 158n Russell, Bertrand, 132

Shaw, George Bernard, 12; on identity, 3, 21 Sheffield, John, Earl of Mulgrave and Duke of Buckingham, 47, 48, 83,124,136 Sherburn, George, 43n, 231n; on P's father, 25-26; on P's religious views, 78-79; on P's travels, 96 Sibley, Agnes Marie, 137n Sidney, Sir Philip, 214 Skelton, John, 221 Socrates, 135, 213 Solitude. See Retirement Somers, John, Baron, 47, 48, 51 Spence, Joseph, 3, 7, 8; at Twickenham, 33 Spenser, Edmund, 9, 32, 43n, 159; style imitated, 7; P's opinion of, 221-222 Statius, 9, 86; style imitated, 7 Stephen, Leslie, 16, 147 Sternhold, Thomas, 78 Suetonius, 207 Swift, Jonathan, 8, 9, 19, 20, 37, 43n, 48, 64, 90, 124, 129; and suggested trip, 40; and P's poetry, 50-51; on primitive Christianity, 76; on fame, 139-140, 142, 146; friendship with P, 177-181; years of separation, 181-183; and P's translations, 184; letters of autumn 1725, 183-188; visits P, 188-191; on heroic image in P's poetry, 192-196; and P's praise, 196

Saint-Evremond, Charles seigneur de, 63 Schmitz, Robert Μ., 75η Scriblerus Club, 180-181 Seneca, 124 Shakespeare, William, 83, 11 In, 124, 166, 219; P's admiration of, 1; P's edition of, 83; imagination of characterized, 105; compared with Homer, 105; on rumor, 157; on time, 160; P's criticism of, 219

Talbot, Charles, Baron, 47,48,51 Temple, Sir William, 123 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 32 Theocritus, 167 Thomas à Kempis, 32 Thomson, James, 131 Tillotson, Geoffrey, 16-17 Tonson, Jacob, 88 Tradition, 9, 52, 131-132; defined, 2-3, 11-14; neoclassic ideal of, 99-100 Trumbull, Sir William, 3, 4, 46, 129; tutors P, 45; on Ρ and

Quasimodo, Salvatore, 199 Quintilian, 4

Index Homer, 87 Turgot, A. R. J., Baron de l'Aulne, 165 Twickenham villa, 98; and retirement, 199-200 Virgil, 3, 4, 86, 105, 134, 153; style imitated, 7, 8; Eclogues, 7, 162; image of in Essay on Criticism, 99-100; on fame and rumor, 154, 157; on Marcellus, 173 Voiture, Vincent, 63, 171 Voltaire, 26, 136 Waller, Edmund, 9, 13, 32, 43n, 144 Walpole, Sir Robert, 19-20, 24, 125 Walsh, William, 47, 129, 133; P's early mentor, 14; on correctness, 14-15, 49; as critic, 49 Warburton, William, 43, 79, 173, 184,205 Warton, Joseph, 89n, 147, 153 Warton, Thomas, 13,147

241

Wasserman, Earl R. : on concordia discors in P's verse, 21-22; on imagery in Rape of the Lock, 169n Watson, C. B., 165 Welsted, Leonard, 183 White, D. H„ 79 Whitehead, Alfred North, 137 Whitman, Cedric Η., 82n, 107108 Wilde, Oscar, 16 Williams, Aubrey, 231n Wilson, Thomas, 4 Winchelsea, Anne Finch, Countess of, 136 Wordsworth, William, 17, 117; on epitaphs, 172 Worringer, Wilhelm, 150 Wycherley, William, 3, 4, 36, 129; "The Various Mix'd Life," 23, 30, 46; commendatory verses on P, 136 Wyndham, Sir William, 129 Yeats, William Butler, 149, 228, 229 Young, Edward, 3