think a system of ethics, under the title of an Essay on Man, which, if
his letter to Swift of September 14, 1725, be rightly explained by the
commentator,[724] had been eight years under his consideration, and of
which he seems to have desired the success with great solicitude. He had
now many open and doubtless many secret enemies. The dunces were yet
smarting with the war; and the superiority which he publicly arrogated
disposed the world to wish his humiliation. All this he knew, and
against all this he provided. His own name, and that of his friend to
whom the work is inscribed,[725] were in the first editions carefully
suppressed, and the poem, being of a new kind, was ascribed to one or
another, as favour determined or conjecture wandered: it was given, says
Warburton, to every man except him only who could write it. Those who
like only when they like the author, and who are under the dominion of a
name, condemned it, and those admired it who are willing to scatter
praise at random, which while it is unappropriated excites no envy.
Those friends of Pope that were trusted with the secret went about
lavishing honours on the new-born poet, and hinting that Pope was never
so much in danger from any former rival. To those authors whom he had
personally offended, and to those whose opinion the world considered as
decisive, and whom he suspected of envy or malevolence, he sent his
Essay as a present before publication, that they might defeat their own
enmity by praises which they could not afterwards decently retract. With
these precautions, in 1732[3] was published the first part of the Essay
on Man. There had been for some time a report that Pope was busy upon a
system of morality; but this design was not discovered in the new poem,
which had a form and a title with which its readers were unacquainted.
Its reception was not uniform; some thought it a very imperfect piece,
though not without good lines. While the author was unknown, some, as
will always happen, favoured him as an adventurer, and some censured him
as an intruder, but all thought him above neglect: the sale increased,
and editions were multiplied. The second and third Epistles were
published, and Pope was, I believe, more and more suspected of writing
them. At last, in 1734, he avowed the fourth, and claimed the honour of
a moral poet.
In the conclusion it is sufficiently acknowledged that the doctrine of
the Essay on Man was received from Bolingbroke, who is said to have
ridiculed Pope, among those who enjoyed his confidence, as having
adopted and advanced principles of which he did not perceive the
consequence, and as blindly propagating opinions contrary to his own.
That those communications had been consolidated into a scheme regularly
drawn, and delivered to Pope, from whom it returned only transformed
from prose to verse, has been reported, but hardly can be true.[726] The
Essay plainly appears the fabric of a poet: what Bolingbroke supplied
could be only the first principles; the order, illustration, and
embellishments must all be Pope's. These principles it is not my
business to clear from obscurity, dogmatism, or falsehood; but they were
not immediately examined: philosophy and poetry have not often the same
readers, and the Essay abounded in splendid amplifications and sparkling
sentences, which were read and admired with no great attention to their
ultimate purpose; its flowers caught the eye, which did not see what the
gay foliage concealed, and for a time flourished in the sunshine of
universal approbation. So little was any evil tendency discovered, that,
as innocence is unsuspicious, many read it for a manual of piety.
Its reputation soon invited a translator. It was first turned into
French prose, and afterwards by Resnel into verse. Both translations
fell into the hands of Crousaz, who first, when he had the version in
prose, wrote a general censure, and afterwards reprinted Resnel's
version with particular remarks upon every paragraph.[727] Crousaz was a
professor of Switzerland, eminent for his treatise of Logic, and his
Examen de Pyrrhonisme, and, however little known or regarded here, was
no mean antagonist. His mind was one of those in which philosophy and
piety are happily united. He was accustomed to argument and
disquisition, and was perhaps grown too desirous of detecting faults;
but his intentions were always right, his opinions were solid, and his
religion pure. His incessant vigilance for the promotion of piety
disposed him to look with distrust upon all metaphysical systems of
theology, and all schemes of virtue and happiness purely rational; and
therefore it was not long before he was persuaded that the positions of
Pope, as they terminated for the most part in natural religion, were
intended to draw mankind away from revelation, and to represent the
whole course of things as a necessary concatenation of indissoluble
fatality; and it is undeniable that, in many passages, a religious eye
may easily discover expressions not very favourable to morals or
liberty.
About this time Warburton began to make his appearance in the first
ranks of learning. He was a man of vigorous faculties, a mind fervid and
vehement, supplied, by incessant and unlimited inquiry, with wonderful
extent and variety of knowledge, which yet had not oppressed his
imagination nor clouded his perspicacity. To every work he brought a
memory full fraught, together with a fancy fertile of original
combinations, and at once exerted the powers of the scholar, the
reasoner, and the wit. But his knowledge was too multifarious to be
always exact, and his pursuits too eager to be always cautious. His
abilities gave him a haughty confidence, which he disdained to conceal
or mollify; and his impatience of opposition disposed him to treat his
adversaries with such contemptuous superiority as made his readers
commonly his enemies, and excited against the advocate the wishes of
some who favoured the cause. He seems to have adopted the Roman
emperor's determination, "oderint dum metuant;" he used no allurements
of gentle language, but wished to compel rather than persuade. His style
is copious without selection, and forcible without neatness; he took the
words that presented themselves; his diction is coarse and impure, and
his sentences are unmeasured. He had in the early part of his life
pleased himself with the notice of inferior wits, and corresponded with
the enemies of Pope. A letter was produced when he had perhaps himself
forgotten it, in which he tells Concanen, "Dryden, I observe, borrows
for want of leisure, and Pope for want of genius; Milton out of pride,
and Addison out of modesty." And when Theobald published Shakespeare, in
opposition to Pope, the best notes were supplied by Warburton.[728] But
the time was now come when Warburton was to change his opinion, and Pope
was to find a defender in him who had contributed so much to the
exaltation of his rival. The arrogance of Warburton excited against him
every artifice of offence, and therefore it may be supposed that his
union with Pope was censured as hypocritical inconstancy; but surely to
think differently at different times of poetical merit may be easily
allowed. Such opinions are often admitted and dismissed without nice
examination. Who is there that has not found reason for changing his
opinion about questions of greater importance? Warburton, whatever was
his motive, undertook, without solicitation, to rescue Pope from the
talons of Crousaz, by freeing him from the imputation of favouring
fatality or rejecting revelation; and from month to month continued a
vindication of the Essay on Man in the literary journal of that time,
called The Republic of Letters.[729] Pope, who probably began to doubt
the tendency of his own work, was glad that the positions, of which he
perceived himself not to know the full meaning, could by any mode of
interpretation be made to mean well. How much he was pleased with his
gratuitous defender the following letter evidently shows:--
"APRIL 11, 1739.
"SIR,--I have just received from Mr. R[obinson][730] two more of
your letters. It is in the greatest hurry imaginable that I write
this; but I cannot help thanking you in particular for your third
letter, which is so extremely clear, short, and full, that I think
Mr. Crousaz ought never to have another answer, and deserved not
so good an one. I can only say you do him too much honour, and me
too much right, so odd as the expression seems; for you have made
my system as clear as I ought to have done, and could not. It is
indeed the same system as mine, but illustrated with a ray of your
own, as they say our natural body is the same still when it is
glorified. I am sure I like it better than I did before, and so
will every man else. I know I meant just what you explain; but I
did not explain my own meaning so well as you. You understand me
as well as I do myself; but you express me better than I could
express myself. Pray accept the sincerest acknowledgments. I
cannot but wish these letters were put together in one book,[731]
and intend, with your leave, to procure a translation of part, at
least, or of all of them into French; but I shall not proceed a
step without your consent and opinion, etc."
By this fond and eager acceptance of an exculpatory comment, Pope
testified that whatever might be the seeming or real import of the
principles which he had received from Bolingbroke, he had not
intentionally attacked religion; and Bolingbroke, if he meant to make
him, without his own consent, an instrument of mischief, found him now
engaged, with his eyes open, on the side of truth. It is known that
Bolingbroke concealed from Pope his real opinions. He once discovered
them to Mr. Hooke, who related them again to Pope, and was told by him
that he must have mistaken the meaning of what he heard; and
Bolingbroke, when Pope's uneasiness incited him to desire an
explanation, declared that Hooke had misunderstood him. Bolingbroke
hated Warburton, who had drawn his pupil from him; and a little before
Pope's death they had a dispute from which they parted with mutual
aversion.[732] From this time Pope lived in the closest intimacy with
his commentator, and amply rewarded his kindness and his zeal; for he
introduced him to Mr. Murray, by whose interest he became preacher at
Lincoln's Inn, and to Mr. Allen, who gave him his niece and his estate,
and by consequence a bishopric. When he died, he left him the property
of his works, a legacy which may be reasonably estimated at four
thousand pounds.
Pope's fondness for the Essay on Man appeared by his desire of its
propagation. Dobson, who had gained reputation by his version of Prior's
Solomon, was employed by him to translate it into Latin verse, and was
for that purpose some time at Twickenham; but he left his work, whatever
was the reason, unfinished,[733] and, by Benson's invitation, undertook
the longer task of Paradise Lost. Pope then desired his friend[734] to
find a scholar who should turn his Essay into Latin prose, but no such
performance has ever appeared.
The Essay on Man was a work of great labour and long consideration, but
certainly not the happiest of Pope's performances. The subject is
perhaps not very proper for poetry, and the poet was not sufficiently
master of his subject; metaphysical morality was to him a new study, he
was proud of his acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great
secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned. Thus he tells
us, in the first epistle, that from the nature of the Supreme Being may
be deduced an order of beings such as mankind, because infinite
excellence can do only what is best. He finds out that these beings must
be "somewhere," and that "all the question is whether man be in a wrong
place." Surely if, according to the poet's Leibnitzian reasoning, we may
infer that man ought to be, only because he is, we may allow that his
place is the right place because he has it. Supreme Wisdom is not less
infallible in disposing than in creating. But what is meant by
"somewhere," and "place," and "wrong place," it had been vain to ask
Pope, who probably had never asked himself.
Having exalted himself into the chair of wisdom, he tells us much that
every man knows, and much that he does not know himself: that we see
but little, and that the order of the universe is beyond our
comprehension--an opinion not very uncommon; and that there is a chain
of subordinate beings "from infinite to nothing," of which himself and
his readers are equally ignorant. But he gives us one comfort which,
without his help, he supposes unattainable, in the position "that though
we are fools, yet God is wise."
This Essay affords an egregious instance of the predominance of genius,
the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of
eloquence. Never was penury of knowledge, and vulgarity of sentiment, so
happily disguised. The reader feels his mind full, though he learns
nothing, and when he meets it in its new array, no longer knows the talk
of his mother and his nurse. When these wonder-working sounds sink into
sense, and the doctrine of the Essay, disrobed of its ornaments, is left
to the powers of its naked excellence, what shall we discover? That we
are, in comparison with our Creator, very weak and ignorant,--that we do
not uphold the chain of existence--and that we could not make one
another with more skill than we are made. We may learn yet more,--that
the arts of human life were copied from the instinctive operations of
other animals,--that if the world be made for man, it may be said that
man was made for geese.[735] To these profound principles of natural
knowledge are added some moral instructions equally new,--that self
interest, well understood, will produce social concord--that men are
mutual gainers by mutual benefits--that evil is sometimes balanced by
good--that human advantages are unstable and fallacious, of uncertain
duration and doubtful effect--that our true honour is not to have a
great part, but to act it well--that virtue only is our own--and that
happiness is always in our power. Surely a man of no very comprehensive
search may venture to say that he has heard all this before; but it was
never till now recommended by such a blaze of embellishments, or such
sweetness of melody. The vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the
luxuriant amplification of others, the incidental illustrations, and
sometimes the dignity, sometimes the softness of the verse, enchain
philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgment by overpowering
pleasure. This is true of many paragraphs, yet if I had undertaken to
exemplify Pope's felicity of composition before a rigid critic, I should
not select the Essay on Man; for it contains more lines unsuccessfully
laboured, more harshness of diction, more thoughts imperfectly
expressed, more levity without elegance, and more heaviness without
strength, than will easily be found in all his other works.--JOHNSON.
Pope has not wandered into any useless digressions; has employed no
fictions, no tale or story, and has relied chiefly on the poetry of his
style for the purpose of interesting his readers. His style is concise
and figurative, forcible and elegant. He has many metaphors and images,
artfully interspersed in the driest passages, which stood most in need
of such ornaments. Nevertheless there are too many lines, in this
performance, plain and prosaic. If any beauty be uncommonly transcendent
and peculiar, it is brevity of diction, which, in a few instances, and
those perhaps pardonable, has occasioned obscurity. It is hardly to be
imagined how much sense, how much thinking, how much observation on
human life, is condensed together in a small compass.
The late Lord Bathurst repeatedly assured me that he had read the whole
scheme of the Essay on Man, in the handwriting of Bolingbroke, and drawn
up in a series of propositions, which Pope was to amplify, versify, and
illustrate. It has been alleged that Pope did not fully comprehend the
drift of the system communicated to him by Bolingbroke, but the
remarkable words of his intimate friend, Mr. Jonathan Richardson, a man
of known integrity and honour, clearly evince that he did. To the
testimony of Richardson, which is decisive, I will now add that Lord
Lyttelton, with his usual frankness and ingenuity, assured me that he
had frequently talked with Pope on the subject, whose opinions were at
that time conformable to his own, when he and his friends were too much
inclined to deism. Mr. Harte more than once assured me, that he had seen
the pressing letter Dr. Young wrote to Pope, urging him to write
something on the side of revelation, to which he alluded in the first
Night Thought:
O! had he pressed his theme, pursued the track
Which opens out of darkness into day!
O! had he mounted on his wing of fire,
Soared when I sink, and sung immortal man.
And when Harte frequently made the same request, he used to answer, "No,
no! You have already done it," alluding to Harte's Essay on Reason,
which Harte thought a lame apology, and hardly serious.--WARTON.
The ground of the Essay on Man is philosophy, not poetry. The poetry is
only the colouring, if I may say so, and to the colouring the eye is
chiefly attentive. We hardly think of the philosophy whether it is good
or bad; whether it is profound or specious; whether it evinces deep
thinking, or exhibits only in new and pompous array the "babble of the
nurse." Scarcely any one, till a controversy was raised, thought of the
doctrines, but a thousand must have been warmed by the pictures, the
addresses, the sublime interspersions of description, and the nice and
harmonious precision of every word, and of almost every line. Whether,
as a system of philosophy, it inculcated fate or not, no one paused to
inquire;[736] but every eye read a thousand times, and every lip,
perhaps, repeated, "Lo, the poor Indian," "The lamb thy riot," "Oh,
happiness," and many other passages. All these illustrative and
secondary images are painted from the source of genuine poetry; from
nature, not from art. They therefore, independent of powers displayed in
the versification, raise the Essay on Man, considered in the abstract,
into genuine poetry, although the poetical part is subservient to the
philosophical.
It must be confessed, unfair as Johnson's criticism is, it is not
entirely destitute of truth. Many of Pope's conclusions in this Essay,
after a vast deal of fine verbiage and apparent argument, are such as
required very little proof,--"though man's a fool, yet God is
wise,"--and many other axioms equally true. But can we say the whole
exhibits only a train of tritenesses? "Materiam superabat opus," it is
acknowledged; and possibly, had it been more recondite, it could not
have been made the vehicle of so many acknowledged beauties of
expression, of imagery, and of poetic illustration. The more it is read
the more it will be relished, and the more will the nice precision of
every word, and the general beauty of its structure, be acknowledged.
Though the treasures of knowledge within be not, perhaps, either very
rich or rare, yet, to say it contains no striking sentiments, no truths
placed in a more advanced as well as a more pleasing light, would be a
manifest and palpable injustice. After all, poetry is not a good vehicle
for philosophy, but as a philosophical poem, take it altogether, it
would not be very easy, with the exception of Lucretius, to find its
equal.--BOWLES.
Bolingbroke amused his unwelcome leisure during his exile in studying
the infidel philosophy which prevailed in France. The vices of his
nature are conspicuous in his metaphysical writings. He pretends to
abstruse learning, and it is apparent that he has done little more than
pick up fragments of systems at second-hand. He assumes a commanding
superiority over his illustrious predecessors, of whom he commonly
speaks with insane contempt, and he has not enunciated a single new
doctrine, or put one old doctrine in a novel light. He affects to soar
above sinister motives and prejudices, and writes with the rancour of a
bitter partisan who is the creature of passion. He denounces the
dishonesty of christian apologists, and perpetually misrepresents them;
he inveighs against their inconsistencies, and falls himself into
repeated contradictions. The characteristics of the old political
debater are preserved intact in the philosopher. He kept his
parliamentary style with the rest,--the diffuse rhetoric, the constant
repetitions, the lengthy preparation for ideas not worth the prelude.
The mind droops over the pretentious verbiage, and the magnificent
promise of results which never come. "Who," said Burke, "now reads
Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through?"[737] The cheat once detected,
no one wearies himself in the pursuit of a flying phantom.
In 1723 Bolingbroke was permitted to return to England. After a short
visit he went back to France, and did not settle here till October,
1724. He soon contracted an intimacy with Pope, and imparted to him his
irreligious metaphysics. Bolingbroke's knowledge of philosophy, though
not profound, was respectable, and with the uninformed he could disguise
his want of depth by a flux of specious language. Pope, ignorant of
mental, moral, and theological science, mistook his oracular arrogance
for real supremacy, his discordant sophisms for demonstrations, his
hackneyed plagiarisms for originality. He thought him by much the
greatest man he had ever known, and of all his titles to fame the chief
he imagined was as a "writer and philosopher."[738] He ranked him among
the metaphysical luminaries of the world, and never suspected that the
moment his disquisitions were communicated to the public they would be
tossed aside with disdain, and consigned to lasting neglect.
Bolingbroke persuaded Pope to versify portions of the philosophy he
admired so extravagantly.[739] A large scheme was drawn up, the outline
of which Pope repeated to Spence. "The first book, you know, of my ethic
work is on the Nature of Man. The second would have been on knowledge
and its limits. Here would have come in an essay on education, part of
which I have inserted in the Dunciad. The third was to have treated of
government, both ecclesiastical and civil. The fourth would have been on
morality in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of it, four of
which would have been the two extremes to each of the cardinal
virtues."[740] These four cardinal virtues,--justice, temperance,
prudence, and fortitude--would alone have required twelve epistles,
since every virtue was to be treated on the Aristotelian plan, and
divided into rational medium, deficiency, and excess. The cardinal
virtues were either to be again subdivided, or else supplemented by
subordinate virtues, and all were to be presented under the triple form.
"Each class," said Pope, speaking of the "eight or nine most concerning
branches" of morality, "may take up three epistles: one, for instance,
against Avarice; another against Prodigality: and the third on the
moderate use of Riches, and so of the rest."[741] A short trial
convinced Pope that the scheme was too vast for a slow composer. When
the first book, which forms the Essay on Man, was completed, he told
Spence that "he had drawn in the plan much narrower than it was at
first," and he attached to some copies of the Essay, which he circulated
among his particular friends, a table of this diminished frame-work.
"INDEX TO THE ETHIC EPISTLES.
BOOK I.--OF THE NATURE AND STATE OF MAN.
Epistle 1.--With respect to the Universe.
" 2.--As an Individual.
" 3.--With respect to Society.
" 4.--With respect to Happiness.
BOOK II.--OF THE USE OF THINGS.
Of the Limits of Human Reason.
Of the Use of Learning.
Of the Use of Wit.
Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men.
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."[742]
The cardinal virtues, with nearly all "the most concerning branches of
morality," were omitted from the abbreviated plan, which was still too
large for Pope's patience, and he left much of the work unexecuted.
He commenced with some of the topics enumerated in the second book of
his "index." "Bid Pope talk to you of the work he is about," wrote
Bolingbroke to Swift, Nov. 19, 1729. "It is a fine one, and will be, in
his hands, an original. His sole complaint is that he finds it too easy
in the execution. This flatters his laziness. It flatters my judgment
who always thought that, universal as his talents are, this is
eminently and peculiarly his above all the writers I know, living or
dead. I do not except Horace." "The work," adds Pope, "which Lord
Bolingbroke speaks of with such abundant partiality is a system of
ethics in the Horatian way." Bolingbroke's comparison of the work to
Horace, and Pope's phrase "the Horatian way," show that they spoke of
the Moral Essays, which, with the Essay on Man, were at first included
under the general title of Ethic Epistles. The resemblance to Horace
would not apply to the Essay on Man in substance or style,--not in
style, for Pope says himself that the Essay was modelled on "the grave
march of Lucretius" in contradistinction to the familiar "gaieties of
Horace,"[743]; not in substance, for Horace did not write a
philosophical poem on natural religion, nor could he have been placed by
Bolingbroke at the head of a class of philosophical poets to which he in
no way belonged. Neither could Bolingbroke have said of Pope that "the
talent eminently and peculiarly his, above all writers living or dead,"
was the power of sounding the depths of philosophy. The praise was
intended for the satiric sketches of men and manners which make up the
Moral Essays. These are truly in the "Horatian way," and in a vein
characteristic of the bent of Pope's mind.
Bolingbroke furnished little or nothing to the Horatian epistles. His
services commenced with the Essay on Man. Pope was revolving this part
of the scheme in May, 1730, when he said to Spence, "The first epistle
is to be to the whole work what a scale is to a book of maps; and in
this, I reckon, lies my greatest difficulty: not only in settling and
ranging the parts of it aright, but in making them agreeable enough to
be read with pleasure."[744] A few months later Bolingbroke writes to
Lord Bathurst, Oct. 8, 1730, that he and Pope "are at present deep in
metaphysics." The matter intended for the first epistle was expanded
into four epistles as the work proceeded, and in August, 1731,
Bolingbroke announced to Swift that three of them were completed, and
that the fourth was in hand. Eighteen months more elapsed before any
portion of the poem was published; and Pope doubtless spent the interval
in repeated revisions. It was not his habit to go straight forward in
regular order, and leave no gaps or flaws as he went along. When he told
Caryll in December, 1730, that he was "writing on life and manners, not
exclusive of religious regards," he adds, "I have many fragments which I
am beginning to put together, but nothing perfect or finished, nor in
any condition to be shown, except to a friend at a fire-side." This
system of composing disjointed fragments, and methodising them
afterwards, was unfavourable to continuity and comprehension of thought,
and did not help to diminish the want of connection in his arguments,
and of consistency in his opinions.
The project of the Essay on Man was kept a secret from all but a few of
Pope's friends. To others he only spoke of his ethic epistles in the
"Horatian way." Caryll, on hearing from him that he had taken to
religion and morals, recommended Pascal's Thoughts, and Pope answered,
Feb. 6, 1731, "I have been beforehand with you in it, but he will be of
little use to my design, which is rather to ridicule ill men than to
preach to them. I fear our age is past all other correction." The Essay
on Man was then in full progress, and Pope sent a false report that the
style and tenor of the work might not betray him when it was published.
The first epistle appeared anonymously in February, 1733, and to divert
suspicion, the poet put forth in January, with his name, his Epistle on
the Use of Riches, and a week or two afterwards one of his Imitations of
Horace. He had a subtler contrivance for misleading the public. He made
"lane" rhyme to "name" in his second epistle, and told Harte the bad
rhyme was a disguise to escape detection. "Harte remembered," says
Warton, "to have often heard it urged in enquiries about the author,
whilst he was unknown, that it was impossible it could be Pope's on
account of this very passage."[745] Along with "lane" and "name," the
first and second epistles contained the rhymes which follow: "here,
refer--pierce, universe,--above, Jove--plain, man--fault, ought--food,
blood--home, come--abodes, gods--appears, bears--alone, none--race,
grass--flood, wood--want, elephant--join, line--alone, one--mourns,
burns--sphere, bear--rest, beast--sphere, fair--boast, frost--road,
God--preferred, guard--tossed, coast--joined, mind--caprice, vice."
There must have been some strange peculiarity in the ears of a
generation which could be revolted by "lane" and "name," and welcome
such rhymes as these. The anecdote cannot be correct. A liberal
admixture of faulty rhymes is a common characteristic of Pope, and the
disguise would have been greater if all the rhymes had been good.[746]
Johnson has told Pope's motive for publishing the Essay anonymously,
and the manœuvres he practised to secure commendation. He had
previously, when speaking to Swift of the Essay, professed his usual
indifference to praise. "I agree with you," he said, Dec. 1, 1731, "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 will be convinced I
would please but a few, and, if I could, make mankind less admirers and
greater reasoners." After the little plot had been played out, he still
kept up the false pretence in a letter to Duncombe, Oct. 20, 1734.
"Truly, I had not the least thought of stealing applause by suppressing
my name to that Essay. I wanted only to hear truth, and was more afraid
of my partial friends than enemies."[747] He lifted up the mask with
Swift, and avowed that his object was to get his philosophy approved.
"The design of concealing myself was good," he said, Sept. 15, 1734,
"and had its full effect; I was thought a divine, a philosopher, and
what not, and my doctrine had a sanction I could not have given to it."
He knew that friend and foe were aware that philosophy and divinity were
not his strength, and he wished to obtain a fictitious authority for his
work. He said to Caryll, March 8, 1733, "It is attributed, I think with
reason, to a divine," and the poet had probably circulated the report he
affected to believe. "I perceive the divines have no objection to it,"
he wrote again on March 20, "though now it is agreed not to be written
by one,--Dr. Croxall, Dr. Secker, and some others having solemnly denied
it." The first reports decided the popular judgment. The orthodoxy of
the poem was taken upon trust, and when Pope owned the work in 1734, no
one cared to commence a fresh inquisition.
An infidel who hated divines and divinity with all his heart, had
dictated the doctrines of the Essay on Man. "He mentioned then, and at
several other times," says Spence, in his record of Pope's conversation
during the years 1734-36, "how much, or rather how wholly he was obliged
to Lord Bolingbroke for the thoughts and reasonings in his moral work;
and once in particular said, that beside their frequent talking over
that subject together, he had received, I think, seven or eight sheets
from Lord Bolingbroke in relation to it (as I apprehended by way of
letters), both to direct the plan in general, and to supply the matter
for the particular epistles."[748] Pope frankly informed the world, in
the Essay itself, that he echoed the lessons of Bolingbroke, who was his
"guide and philosopher,"--the "master of the poet and the song." The
prose sketch of the "master" was seen by Lord Bathurst at the time, and
he testified to Warton and Blair from personal knowledge, that Pope
versified the arguments set down for him by Bolingbroke.
Warburton reversed the parts. The "seven or eight sheets," which
contained Bolingbroke's prose draught of the Essay on Man, have not been
preserved in their original form, and he did not reduce his published
philosophy to writing till after the poem was commenced. "If," said
Warburton, in allusion to the latter circumstance, "you will take his
lordship's word, or, indeed, attend to his argument, you will find that
Pope was so far from putting his prose into verse that he has put Pope's
verse into prose."[749] But when Bolingbroke mentioned that the Essay on
Man was begun before his published disquisitions were committed to
paper, he added that they were "nothing more than repetitions of
conversations" with Pope.[750] This statement Warburton was dishonest
enough to suppress, and deliberately turned a half truth into a
falsehood. The ungarbled expressions of Bolingbroke confirm the
assurances of Pope and Bathurst, that he was the principal author of the
philosophy in the Essay on Man. Warburton could not keep to his
misrepresentation. When it was convenient for his purpose he changed his
story, and Pope became "a pupil who had to be reasoned out of
Bolingbroke's hands,"--a dupe who adopted Bolingbroke's insidious
doctrines without perceiving the infidelity, and who had to thank his
deliverer that "the poem was put on the side of religion."[751]
Mrs. Mallet told General Grimouard that Pope, Bolingbroke, and their
friends, who frequented her house, were "a society of pure deists."[752]
Bolingbroke was more of an infidel than Pope, for though he admitted
that a future state could not be disproved, he laboured passionately to
discredit the arguments in its favour. Pope held to the immortality of
the soul. "He was a deist," says Lord Chesterfield, "believing in a
future state; this he has often owned himself to me."[753] He frequently
avowed his deism to Lyttelton, and acquiesced in the deistical
interpretations which the Richardsons put on the Essay on Man.
Revelation he rejected entirely. Lord Chesterfield relates that he once
saw a bible on his table, and adds, "As I knew his way of thinking upon
that book, I asked him jocosely if he was going to write an answer to
it?" The evidence that he had renounced Christianity comes to us from
various independent sources, and some of the witnesses are above the
suspicion of misunderstanding or misrepresenting him.
One of the articles of Bolingbroke's deistical creed is said by
Warburton to have been concealed from Pope. "A few days before his
death," says Warburton, in the statement he drew up for Ruffhead, "he
would be carried to London to dine with Mr. Murray in Lincoln's Inn
Fields, whom he loved with the fondness of a father. He was solicitous
that Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Warburton should be of the party. Some
time before Mr. Warburton being with Mr. Pope at Twickenham, Mr. Hooke
came in, and told us he had supped the night before at Battersea with
Lord Bolingbroke, when his lordship in conversation advanced the
strangest notions concerning the moral attributes of the Deity, which
amounted to an express denial of them. This account gave Mr. Pope much
uneasiness, and he told Mr. Hooke with much peevish heat that he was
sure he was mistaken. The other replied as warmly that he thought he had
sense enough not to mistake a man who spoke plainly, and in a language
he understood. Here the matter dropped. But Mr. Pope was not easy till
he had seen Lord Bolingbroke, and told him what Mr. Hooke said of a late
conversation. Lord Bolingbroke assured him that Mr. Hooke misunderstood
him. This assurance Mr. Pope with great pleasure acquainted Mr.
Warburton with the next time he saw him. But Lord Bolingbroke and Mr.
Pope were both so full of this matter that at this dinner at Mr.
Murray's, the conversation, amongst other things, naturally turned on
this subject, when, from a very suspicious remark of his lordship, Mr.
Warburton took occasion to speak of the clearness of our notions
concerning the moral attributes. This occasioned some debate, which
ended in some warmth on his lordship's side. This anecdote is not
improper to be told in vindication of Mr. Pope's religious sentiments,
and the reflections on Mr. Warburton, as if he had not attacked his
lordship's impiety till after his death."[754] Warburton had previously
told the story in his View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy, and there
he related that Bolingbroke "denied God's moral attributes as they are
commonly understood."[755] In the narrative he wrote for Ruffhead,
Warburton reports Hooke to have said, that Bolingbroke's "notions
concerning the moral attributes amounted to an express denial of
them."[756] The first statement Bolingbroke would have allowed to be
correct; the second he would have repudiated. The two versions are
treated by Warburton as one, and his charge against Bolingbroke, and his
"vindication of Mr. Pope's religious sentiments," are based upon this
presumed identity of propositions which were quite distinct to Pope and
Bolingbroke.
Bolingbroke's views on the moral attributes of the Deity were the
result of his mania to get rid of the arguments for a future state.
Virtue is frequently oppressed and suffering in this world, and vice
prosperous; the wicked defraud, supplant, and persecute the upright; and
in manifold ways the felicities of life are not proportioned to the
behaviour of men. A righteous Deity, we may be sure, would not ordain a
constitution of things in which the good should repeatedly fare worse
than the bad, often in consequence of their persistence in goodness, and
then perish unrewarded in the midst of their self-denial. The inference
is plain that they will be finally compensated in a kingdom to come. The
struggle between sin and rectitude in good men continues all their days,
and when the battle has been fought out, and the victory won, they are
removed from the world. It is incredible that a benevolent ruler should
set us to maintain a painful conflict with evil, and when we are
disciplined to holiness should consign us to annihilation. The hope that
well-doing will not go unrewarded, the apprehension that wickedness will
not go unpunished, are sentiments engrained in the heart of man, and we
may be confident that the source of all truth would not direct us to
govern our conduct by false anticipations. The supposition that there is
no future life is therefore inconsistent with the moral attributes of
God, and to avoid this deduction Bolingbroke took up the theory of one
of the worst class of deists, and contended that the moral attributes of
the Creator were not the same as in our ideas, and could not be judged
by our notions. He said he "ascribed all conceivable perfections to
God," and that he was as "far from denying his justice and goodness as
his wisdom and power," but insisted that his justice and goodness
differed from ours in kind as well as in degree.[757] Wherever this
hypothesis was brought in, the epithets "just and good" either ceased to
have any meaning for us, or they meant exactly the reverse of "just and
good." The object of the theory was, indeed, to set up the maxim that
conduct which would be thought immoral among men might be the morality
of God. Bolingbroke's philosophic vision was limited to a single point
at a time. He abounds in astounding contradictions from his inability to
keep his most emphatic principles before his mind, and he might be
answered, without a word of comment, by ranging in parallel columns the
passages of his writings which are mutually destructive. His hypothesis
on the moral attributes of the Deity shared the usual fate of his
dogmas. He denounced the doctrine of predestination, and called it
"blasphemous," "impious," "devilish," because it was "scandalously
repugnant to our ideas of God's moral perfections," and supposed "a God
such as no one could acknowledge."[758] The moment he had to deal with
an opinion he disliked, he thought it impious to imagine that the
morality of God was not in conformity with our ideas, and he loudly
appealed to the immutability of those innate moral convictions which
alike defy the corrupt morality of libertines who labour to justify
evil, and the artificial morality of metaphysicians who strive to prop
up fanciful systems.
Warburton might fairly argue, that the theory which maintained that the
morality of the Deity was radically different in kind from the moral
conceptions of men, "amounted to an express denial of God's moral
attributes." He was not entitled to charge upon Bolingbroke an inference
he had vehemently disclaimed in his writings, and which was so far from
seeming necessary to all pious thinkers that some distinguished
christian divines had held the obnoxious hypothesis. No two of them
might have been of a mind in the application of a principle the limits
of which they could none of them pretend to define, but they would all
have concurred with Bolingbroke that to deny the moral attributes of
God, and to assert that they were not the same as in our ideas, were
distinct propositions. The false turn which Warburton gave to his story
is clear from the sequel of his narrative. Pope brought him and
Bolingbroke together. The philosopher and his pupil, full of Hooke's
accusation, introduced the subject of their own accord. Bolingbroke
advanced opinions on the moral attributes which Warburton combated, and
the debate ended, as it began, in a total disagreement. The views which
Bolingbroke volunteered could not, for shame, be those which he had just
disclaimed to Pope, and they were notwithstanding quite unorthodox in
the estimation of Warburton. The case is simple. Bolingbroke protested
to Pope, what he had protested all along, that he did not deny the moral
attributes of God, and he maintained against Warburton in Pope's
presence, what he had all along avowed, that they were not the same as
in our ideas.
There is more, and conclusive evidence, that Bolingbroke had not
concealed his hypothesis from Pope. The incidents narrated by Warburton
occurred a few days before the poet's death. The philosophical papers of
Bolingbroke were "all communicated to him in scraps as they were
occasionally written,"[759] and the whole must already have passed
through his hands. In these disquisitions Bolingbroke enforced his view
of the divine attributes with tedious diffuseness, incessant
reiteration, and unmeasured warmth. No opinion is brought out into
stronger relief. A glance at the manuscript must have revealed the
hypothesis to Pope, and the Essay on Man proves that he had actually
adopted it. All who believed that justice, goodness, and truth were
immutable, thought that our primary duty was to contemplate them in the
Deity, and endeavour to imitate his perfections. Pope followed
Bolingbroke in rejecting the idea. Man, he said, could "just find a
God" and nothing more; consequently man was to be the only study of
man.[760] Master and pupil agreed that every perfection was to be
ascribed to God, and that he was to be loved, worshipped, and obeyed.
But the pupil, like the master, held that "God did not show his own
nature in his laws, because though they proceed from the divine
intelligence they are adapted to the human,"[761] and the last line of
the Essay on Man, the emphatic summary of a leading article in Pope's
creed, is that "all our knowledge is ourselves to know."
In a subsequent passage Warburton extended his assertion, and alleged
that Bolingbroke concealed the whole purpose of his theology from Pope.
"The poet," says Warburton, "directs his argument against atheists and
libertines in support of religion; the philosopher against divines in
support of naturalism. But his lordship thought fit to keep this a
secret from his friend as well as from the public."[762] The poet and
the philosopher were both deists. The philosopher, Warburton tells us,
communicated his principles to associates "who gave him to understand
how much they detested them."[763] The poet professed deism before
Chesterfield, Lyttelton, the Richardsons and the Mallets. Yet Warburton
would have us believe that Bolingbroke disclosed his infidelity to
unsympathising friends, and kept it a secret from his chief
philosophical intimate, who frankly avowed his own deism in the
Bolingbroke circle. The statement, incredible in itself, is opposed to
the positive testimony of Bolingbroke when he says that all his written
opinions were only the record of his conversations with Pope, and is
even contradicted by the unconscious testimony of Warburton. He tells us
that when Pope took refuge under his shield the circumstance which most
exasperated Bolingbroke was that "he saw a great number of lines appear
which, out of complaisance, had been struck out of the MS., and which,
at the commentator's request, being now restored to their places, no
longer left the religious sentiments of the poet equivocal."[764] The
restored lines which modified any "religious sentiment" were barely half
a dozen, and were confined to the single tenet of a future state. When
Pope allowed his belief in a future state to seem "equivocal, out of
complaisance" to his "guide," the infidelity of Bolingbroke could not
have been unknown to him.
Still the plea of Warburton remains, that Bolingbroke was for deism and
Pope for Christianity. Bolingbroke, says Warburton, argued for natural
religion in opposition to revealed; Pope for revealed religion as a
necessary supplement to natural. Warburton refuted his own position in
the attempt to establish it. He appealed to three passages in the Essay
on Man. The first, which he calls the chief, is Epist. ii. ver. 149-160,
where Pope terms "reason a weak queen," which obeys the ruling passion.
"The poet," says Warburton, "leaves reason unrelieved. What is this but
an intimation that we ought to seek for a cure in that religion, which
only dares profess to give it?"[765] The poet, on the contrary,
immediately proceeds to show how reason can "rectify" the ruling
passion, and finally concludes, ver. 197, that "reason the bias turns to
good from ill." He insists that there is not a virtue under heaven which
"pride" or "shame," rectified by reason, will not produce, ver. 193, and
he informs us, ver. 183, that they are the "surest virtues" known to
man. The second passage is Epist. iii. ver. 287, where, "speaking," says
Warburton, "of the great restorers of the religion of nature, the poet
intimates that they could only draw God's shadow, not his image:
Relumed her ancient light, not kindled new,
If not God's image, yet his shadow drew:
as reverencing that truth which telleth us this discovery was reserved
for the 'glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God.'"[766] Pope
was careful to show in his poem that his meaning was the reverse of what
Warburton pretends. He conceives that God's image was hidden from our
view, and that man, not God, was our proper study:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.
He did not believe that the religion of nature, in this particular, was
under any disadvantage, for he said, Epist. iii. ver. 148, that "the
state of nature was the reign of God," and to "relume the ancient light"
was, to his apprehension, the perfection of theology. The third passage
is Epist. iv. 341-344, where Pope says, that "hope lengthened on to
faith pours the bliss that fills up all the mind." "But natural
religion," says Warburton, "never lengthened hope on to faith, nor did
any religion, but the christian, ever conceive that faith could fill the
mind with happiness."[767] Pope was of a different opinion. Hope and
faith, according to his creed, and that of many deists, were part of the
religion of nature.[768] He could not think otherwise when he "was a
deist believing in a future state," and he was so far from supposing
that the christian's faith had any superiority over the deist's in
filling the mind with bliss, that all who "fought for modes of faith"
were, in his estimation, "graceless zealots."[769] The searching acumen
of Warburton, who never had his equal in forcing false meanings from his
text, could not discover another allusion to christianity. His
interpretations, strained at best, are directly opposed to the context,
and this failure to detect one word which could honestly support his
construction, leaves no doubt that the Essay on Man was intended for a
system of natural religion to the exclusion of revealed.
The poet and his "guide" agreed in repudiating christianity. They
differed on the question of a future state, but Pope, while rejecting
Bolingbroke's conclusion, adopted his premises. "The fourth epistle he
is now intent upon," wrote Bolingbroke to Swift, Aug. 2, 1731. "It is a
noble subject. He pleads the cause of God, I use Seneca's expression,
against that famous charge which atheists in all ages have brought, the
supposed unequal dispensations of Providence,--a charge which I cannot
heartily forgive your divines for admitting. You admit it, indeed, for
an extreme good purpose, and you build on this admission the necessity
of a future state of rewards and punishments. But what if you should
find that this future state will not account, in opposition to the
atheist, for God's justice in the present state which you give up? Would
it not have been better to defend God's justice in this world, against
these daring men, by irrefragable reasons, and to have rested the proof
of the other point on revelation? You will not understand by what I have
said that Pope will go so deep into the argument, or carry it so far as
I have hinted." To rest the proof of a future state on revelation, was
in Bolingbroke's estimation to build upon a fable. To abandon the proof
from reason was therefore with him to relinquish the doctrine. Pope, who
had accepted the theory that the justice of God could not be judged by
our ideas, embraced the second and superfluous paradox, that the
dispensations of God in this world were never unequal. On either ground,
said Bolingbroke, the justice of God did not require a future state. The
poet had rejected the witness of revelation to the immortality of the
soul, and, under the pretext of "pleading the cause of God against
atheists," his "guide" had persuaded him to give up the popular proof
from reason. He stopped short of the inference that reason did not
countenance a future state, or, in Bolingbroke's phrase, "he did not go
so deep into the argument." His "guide" laughed at his inconsequence,
and "could not," says Warburton, "forbear making the poet, then alive
and at his devotion, the frequent topic of his ridicule amongst their
common acquaintance as a man who understood nothing of his own
principles, nor saw to what they naturally tended."[770]
Bolingbroke was not entitled to ridicule Pope. The docile pupil was not
more blind to the reach of the principles instilled into him than was
the arrogant master who imposed them. He said the notion that a future
world could be essential to vindicate this world was not only needless,
but blasphemous. He was never weary of railing at the impiety of the
doctrine, and he pretended that the divines who held it "renounced God
as much as the rankest of the atheistical tribe."[771] He did not see
that the alleged impiety was the identical principle he adopted for the
foundation of his philosophy, when, admitting the evils on our globe, he
contended that they were linked to a larger scheme which would explain
and justify them. "The universe," he said, "is an immense aggregate of
systems. Atheists and divines cannot, or will not conceive, that the
seeming imperfection of the parts is necessary to the real perfection of
the whole."[772] He wronged the divines. They could, and did "conceive
that the fitness of the particular portions of a scheme must depend upon
their relation to the entire plan," and it was precisely because they
argued that the justice of God in this world would be incomprehensible
unless we extended our view to the world to come, that Bolingbroke
charged them with accusing the Deity of injustice, and ranked them with
atheists. The incapacity to understand his own principles could not be
carried further.
Pope did not intend to proclaim openly to the world the deism he
disclosed to his sceptical companions. "I know," wrote Bolingbroke,
"your precaution enough to know that you will screen yourself against
any direct charge of heterodoxy."[773] His plan was to put forth a
scheme of natural religion without repudiating christianity in terms,
that he might be able to give his poem any interpretation he pleased. He
soon manifested his double design. Before he avowed himself the author
of the Essay on Man, he was anxious that Caryll should be convinced of
its orthodoxy. "Out of complaisance" to Bolingbroke, he had left
undecided the question of the immortality of the soul:
_If_ to be perfect in a certain state,
What matter, here or there, or soon or late?
He feared that this dubious language would be distasteful to Caryll, and
thus wrote to him on March 8, 1733. "The town is now very full of a new
poem, entitled an Essay on Man. It has merit, in my opinion, but not so
much as they give it. At least, it is incorrect, and has some
inaccuracies in the expressions,--one or two of an unhappy kind, for
they may cause the author's sense to be turned, contrary to what I think
his intention, a little unorthodoxically. Nothing is so plain, as that
he quits his proper subject, this present world, to assert his belief of
a future state, and, yet there is an _if_ instead of a _since_ that
would overthrow his meaning."[774] Pope several times reprinted the poem
with corrections, but never altered the word which misrepresented his
creed on the question whether death was annihilation or immortality. He
had a public version, which he adopted "out of complaisance to
Bolingbroke," overborne by his showy rhetoric and imperious dogmatism,
and a private version for his pious friend, to whom he professed that
his conditional language was an "inaccuracy of expression which
overthrew his meaning."
Pope's private profession of his belief in a future state was his real
conviction. He proceeded to belie his true opinions, by standing up for
the christianity of the Essay on Man. "The author," he says, "uses the
words 'God the soul of the world,' which, at the first glance, may be
taken for heathenism, while his whole paragraph proves him quite
christian in his system, from man up to seraphim." Caryll was not
convinced, and on October 23 Pope wrote to reassure him. "I believe the
author of the Essay on Man will end his poem in such a manner as will
satisfy your scruple. I think it impossible for him, with any congruity
to his confined and strictly philosophical subject, to mention our
Saviour directly; but he may magnify the christian doctrine as the
perfection of all moral; nay, and even, I fancy, quote the very words of
the Gospel precept, that includes all the law and the precepts, _Thou
shalt love God above all things_, &c., and I conclude that will remove
all possible occasion of scandal." He wrote again to the same effect on
January 1, 1734:--"To the best of my judgment the author shows himself a
christian at last in the assertion, that all earthly happiness, as well
as future felicity, depends upon the doctrine of the Gospel,--love of
God and man,--and that the whole aim of our being is to attain happiness
here and hereafter by the practice of universal charity to man, and
entire resignation to God. More particular than this he could not be
with any regard to the subject, or manner in which he treated it." From
the next letter of the poet, on February 28, it would appear that the
"scruple" of Caryll was removed, influenced, perhaps, by the discovery
that the work was Pope's own production. "Your candid opinion," says
Pope, "not only on the Essay on Man, but its author, pleases me truly. I
think verily he is as honest, and as religious a man as myself, and one
that will never forfeit justly your kind character of him. It is not
directly owned, and I do assure you never was whilst you were kept in
ignorance of it."[775] The explanations which satisfied Caryll should
have increased his suspicions, for Pope's language was plainly evasive.
He rested the whole of his christianity on the doctrines which were held
by a large class of deists. He neither avowed his faith in Christ, nor
declared his belief that the Gospels were a revelation from God. He had
drawn upon Wollaston's admirable work, The Religion of Nature
Delineated, and there he had seen how inevitably a christian, who
presses the arguments for natural religion, must sometimes refer to the
fuller evidence of Scripture, and adopt a tone which would make it
impossible that he could be mistaken for a deist. With this model under
his eyes, and with the professed desire "to show himself a christian,"
and "remove all possible occasion of scandal," the ingenuity of the poet
was insufficient to devise a single phrase which the majority of English
deists would not have subscribed. Even the bare term "christian," which
he flourished before Caryll, did not appear in the poem. He kept the
word for the ear of the simple country squire, and imposed upon him by
the transparent artifice of privately calling the doctrines of deism
christianity. The "address," which he told Spence he had "written to our
Saviour," would not have contributed to vindicate his orthodoxy, as we
may judge from his statement, that it was "imitated from Lucretius's
compliment to Epicurus, and omitted by the advice of Berkeley."[776] The
application to our Lord of the compliment to Epicurus must have been
shocking to Berkeley, and could never have entered into the mind of any
one who believed that Jesus Christ was "God manifest in the flesh."
A few persons, not in the secret of Pope's deism, had the discernment to
share the first impressions of Caryll. The celebrated David Hartley is
said, by his son, to have "regarded the Essay on Man as tending to
insinuate that the Divine revelation of the christian religion was
superfluous," and to substitute for it "the plagiarisms of modern ethics
from christian doctrines." But readers in general were more attentive to
the poetry than the philosophy, and did not detect the lurking heresies
of the poem till Crousaz published his _Examen de l'Essai de Mr. Pope_
in 1737, which he enforced by his more elaborate _Commentaire_ in the
following year. "Mr. Pope's name, and not his own, spread them," says
Dr. Middleton, "into everybody's hands."[777] Hitherto the poet had not
been far wrong in his calculation, that his deism would pass
unsuspected, because not directly professed, and the tenets he taught
explicitly he believed to be so unanswerable, that, in a suppressed
passage of the fourth Epistle, he raised a shout of triumph over the
"scattered fools who would fly trembling from the heels" of his Pegasus.
The comments of Crousaz, often founded upon mistranslations and
misconceptions, laid bare sufficient sophistries, inconsistencies, and
irreligion, to open the eyes of the public. Pope's confidence
immediately changed to fright. "He took terror," says Richardson, "about
the clergy, and Warburton himself, at the general alarm of its fatalism
and deistical tendency." The poet had a dread of incurring the obloquy
of any class or profession. "I know," Bolingbroke wrote to him, "how
desirous you are to keep fair with orders, whatever liberties you take
with particular men,"[778] and he confessed that this motive "was what
chiefly stopped his going on" with his ethical scheme. "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."[779] He had never intended at any time to risk an attack from
the clergy, and when the danger came unexpectedly, it was he himself
that "fled trembling from the heels" of threatening foes.
His special fear of Warburton was not without cause. Warburton was the
friend of Pope's enemies, Concannen and Theobald, and held Pope cheap
both as a man and a poet. Of the poet he wrote to Concannen, Jan. 2,
1727, that Pope "borrowed for want of genius."[780] Of the man he wrote
to Hurd, Jan. 2, 1757, "Till his letters were published, I had as
indifferent an opinion of his morals as the gentlemen of the Dunciad
pretended to have. Mr. Pope knew this, and had the justice to own to me
that I fairly followed appearances when I thought well of them, and ill
of him."[781] The Essay on Man was especially obnoxious to Warburton. He
said that it was collected "from the worst passages of the worst
authors,"[782] and that the doctrines were "rank atheism."[783] He did
not confine his denunciation of the poem to conversation, but refuted
its vicious principles in some formal dissertations which he read at a
literary club in Newark.[784] The Dunciad faction, we may be certain,
were careful to circulate his asperities, and Pope assisted the
malignity of the Dunces by keeping his ears open to all the ill they
reported. Warburton had now shown his quality by his treatise on the
Alliance between Church and State, and the first books of the Divine
Legation. The poet, who was quailing under the assaults of Crousaz,
might well be alarmed lest a more formidable enemy should speak to the
world the criticisms he propagated in conversation, and in his addresses
to the Newark Club. In theology and metaphysics he was far beyond
Pope's "philosopher and guide." He was even more dictatorial and
abusive, more over-bearing and contemptuous, more ingenious in his
sophistries, and not more scrupulous in the use of his weapons. His
moral obliquities, which have half-ruined his reputation with posterity,
were of a kind to increase the apprehensions of Pope, who must have
submitted in helpless silence to the sweeping, haughty, scornful
exposure of the Essay on Man.
When the storm had begun to burst on the defenceless head of Pope,
Warburton saw reason to go over to his side, and in December, 1738,
commenced an anonymous reply to Crousaz in a monthly publication called
the Works of the Learned. An equitable judgment was not among the merits
of Warburton. His dogmatic violence could not brook the least concession
to an opposing view, and he was always in extremes. While he herded with
"the gentlemen of the Dunciad" he was uncompromising in his censure of
Pope. He suddenly transferred his advocacy to the enemy, and indulged,
with a daring defiance of consistency, in a wild exaggeration of Pope's
powers, and a hardy denial of his errors and defects. The man who
"borrowed for want of genius," became "the last of the poetic line
amongst us, on whom, the large patrimony of his whole race is
devolved."[785] He had not only inherited the entire gifts of all poets
of all times, "he was the maker of a new species of the sublime, so new
that we have yet no name for it, though of a nature distinct from every
other known beauty of poetry." "The two great perfections in works of
genius," Warburton goes on, "are wit and sublimity. Many writers have
been witty; some have been sublime; and a few have even possessed both
these qualities separately. But none, that I know of, besides our poet,
hath had the art to incorporate them. This seems to be the last effort
of the imagination to poetical perfection."[786] A single example of
Pope's witty sublime is specified by Warburton,--the comparison of
Newton to the ape. Unfortunately, this instance of the "new species of
the sublime,"--"so new that we have yet no name for it,"--was copied
from a Latin poet of the sixteenth century, and was a false conceit
without a spark of sublimity or wit.
With the change in his view of Pope's genius, there was a complete
revolution in Warburton's estimate of the Essay on Man. The work ceased
to be made up "from the worst passages of the worst authors." A
superlative originality took the place of ignorant plagiarism, and "he
uttered heavy menaces," says Bishop Law, "against those who presumed to
insinuate that Pope borrowed anything from any man whatsoever."[787] The
"rank atheism," in like manner, was converted into the purest
orthodoxy, and every line breathed forth piety and sound philosophy. "He
follows truth," said his advocate, "uniformly throughout."[788] The
strain of sickening adulation in which Warburton conveyed his newly-born
admiration showed that arrogance was not more congenial to his nature
than servility, and both were rivalled by the effrontery with which he
spoke of those who shared his old opinions. He and the "gentlemen of the
Dunciad" had agreed in thinking ill of Pope's morals, but the conviction
was genuine with Warburton, and "pretence" in them.[789] He declaimed
against the "rank atheism" of the Essay on Man, but the freethinkers who
had believed that Pope was of "their party" had "affectedly embraced the
delusion."[790]
Warburton's accusations of insincerity were the more unblushing that his
recantation was partly feigned. When he published his defence of three
epistles of the Essay on Man, he said that Pope's "strong and delicate
reasoning ran equally through all" the poem, but that "the turn of the
fourth epistle being more popular seemed to need no comment."[791] His
real motive for passing over the fourth epistle was very different, and
comes out in a letter to Dr. Birch, Oct. 25, 1739. "I have been looking
over, _inter nos_, the fourth epistle of the Essay on Man; for I have a
great inclination to make an analysis of that to complete the whole. I
find this part of my defence of Mr. Pope as difficult as a confutation
of Mr. Crousaz's nonsense, and a detection of the translator's blunders,
are easy. I do not know whether I can do it to my mind, or whether I
shall do it at all, so beg you would keep it secret."[792] He left the
fourth epistle undefended because it was almost beyond his powers of
sophistry to devise a defence, and professed to the world that "the
strong and delicate reasoning was too popular to need a comment." Having
undertaken the "difficult" task, he kept up the dissimulation, justified
every doctrine the epistle contained, and lauded it, in common with the
rest of the work, for its "exact reasoning," and for "a precision,
force, and closeness of connection rarely to be met with, even in the
most formal treatises of philosophy."[793] His want of sincerity would
be self-evident without the contradiction between his confidential
confessions, and his public praise. No one, with his knowledge of
philosophical divinity, could possibly have magnified Pope in good faith
for the qualities in which he was deplorably deficient.
Dodsley, the bookseller, was present at the first interview between
Pope and Warburton, and was astonished at the compliments the poet paid
to his commentator.[794] There was no occasion for astonishment. Pope's
despiser had turned idolater, "the gentlemen of the Dunciad" had lost
their ablest ally, the thrust of Crousaz had been parried, and the
champion was the dreaded man who was expected to be a fatal foe. The
sensitive novice in philosophy, who was incompetent to fight, and could
not endure defeat, was relieved from future as well as present fears. He
would not henceforward be answerable to theological and metaphysical
assailants. Warburton had assumed the responsibility of the poem, and
his irascible, pugnacious vanity was a pledge that he would defend his
certificate of orthodoxy with his usual violence, disdain, and ability.
The relief to the mind of the anxious poet was immense, and fully
explains his headlong gratitude. He immediately renounced his deistical
interpretation of the Essay, and adopted all the views of his thundering
advocate. "I know I meant just what you explain," wrote the obsequious
poet, April 11, 1739, "but I did not explain my own meaning as well as
you." He was too eager to live under Warburton's protection to retain a
particle of independence. No matter how incredible might be the
interpretations which his commentator often fathered upon him, he
hastened to accept every one of them without reserve. The public were
not deluded, and a letter of Dr. Middleton to Warburton, Jan. 7, 1740,
is a fair specimen, expressed in friendly terms, of the common opinion.
"You have evinced the orthodoxy of Mr. Pope's principles, but, like the
old commentators on his Homer, will be thought, perhaps, in some places
to have provided a meaning for him that he himself never dreamed of.
However, if you did not find him a philosopher, you will make him one,
for he will be wise enough to take the benefit of your reading, and make
his future essays more clear and consistent." Pope's moral laxity was
not the only cause of the facility with which he changed his creed. The
shallowness of his convictions had a share in the event. He had no real
insight into theology, natural or revealed. He rejected christianity
because his associates sneered at it, and because the age was
irreligious. Ignorant of the right road, he was sometimes persuaded that
all roads led to a common goal, or he adopted the road which was pointed
out to him by his guides. The Essay on Man would never have been written
unless Bolingbroke had dictated the subject, and supplied the materials,
and Pope was subdued by his dogmatism rather than enlightened by his
arguments. The speculations the poet versified had not proceeded from
his own mind; he believed as he was prompted; and he had not any rooted
convictions to sacrifice when a second dogmatist provided him with more
convenient opinions.
Pope would have been glad "to dwell in ambiguities for ever." In
accepting the advocacy of Warburton he was obliged to abandon his
equivocal attitude, and disavow the deistical creed. "The infidels and
libertines," Warburton wrote to Dr. Stukeley, January 1, 1740, "prided
themselves in thinking Mr. Pope of their party. I thought it of use to
religion to show so noble a genius was not; and I can have the pleasure
of telling you (and have Mr. Pope's own authority for it), that he is
not."[795] His chief difficulty must have been to cast off his
allegiance to his "philosopher and guide, the master of the poet and the
song." But his reputation was at stake, and he did not hesitate. His
anxiety to disclaim all sympathy with the theology of the teacher who
had furnished the arguments of his poem was shown by one of his habitual
frauds. He published, in 1741, his correspondence with Swift, and in the
printed letter of December, 1725, he says, "Lord B. is above trifling;
when he writes of anything in this world, he is more than mortal: if
ever he trifles it must be when he turns a divine." A copy of the letter
is among the Oxford papers at Longleat, and there we find that the words
he really used were, "Lord B. is above trifling; he is grown a great
divine." Pope reversed the language of the original passage that he
might seem to the world to have contemned the divinity of Bolingbroke
long before the Essay on Man appeared. The fraud had the intended effect
with Pope's friends. Lord Mansfield inferred from the fabricated version
that "Pope not only condemned but despised the futility of Bolingbroke's
reasoning against revelation;" and Warburton quoted the sentence for an
evidence of Pope's opinion "that no subject but religion could have sunk
his lordship so far below the class of reputable authors."[796]
Bolingbroke, ignorant of the trick, remained upon cordial terms with
Pope, and did not outwardly resent his defection. The discarded master
had a double motive for his forbearance. No man was more vulnerable, and
he would have feared to provoke the malignity of the satirist. He was
anxious in his life-time to conceal his infidelity from the outer world,
and he could not expose the inconsistencies of the poet without
revealing his own unbelief. "I have been a martyr of faction in
politics," he once wrote to Pope, "and have no vocation to be so in
philosophy."[797] Inwardly he was deeply mortified that "the song" he
had inspired should be wrested to a meaning he disowned, that his
admiring scholar should bow down no longer to his sceptical sophistries,
and that the idol who supplanted him should belong to that priestly
order of which he never spoke without scorn. His suppressed indignation,
inflamed by fresh offences, broke out after Pope was dead.
When the orthodox meaning imposed on the Essay had once been accepted
by the poet, he was anxious to use the new interpretation to silence or
conciliate his opponents abroad. He immediately got Warburton's reply to
Crousaz translated into French,[798] and employed Ramsay, a Scotchman,
who had been Fénelon's secretary, to write to Louis Racine, April 28,
1742, and assure him that he was mistaken when he said in his poem _La
Religion_,
Sans doute qu'à ces mots, des bords de la Tamise,
Quelque abstrait raisonneur, qui ne se plaint de rien,
Dans son flegme anglican répondra, "Tout est bien."
Ramsay told the French poet that Pope did not think all was "right" in
mankind. He believed them fallen from their primitive condition, and his
life-long faith was evidence of his real convictions. "He is a very good
catholic," says his apologist, "and has always kept to the religion of
his forefathers in a country where he had many temptations to abandon
it." A letter addressed by Pope to Racine in the following September
upholds the statement that he was a "good catholic," for he declares
that his views are "conformable to those of Pascal and Fénelon, the
latter of whom," says he, "I would most readily imitate in submitting
all my opinions to the decision of the church."[799] His sincerity may
be doubted when he professed his readiness to accept the decisions of
the romish church for a law. The Essay on Man was already completed, or
far advanced, when Bolingbroke wrote to him, "I do not expect from you
the answer I should be sure to have from persons more orthodox than I
know you to be in the faith of the pretended catholic church. Such
persons would insist on the authority of the church."[800] Pope could
not, indeed, be a romanist when he had not yet emerged from deism, and
he was not a romanist some twelvemonth after his letter to Racine, when
he said to Warburton, "that he was convinced that the church of Rome had
all the marks of the anti-christian power predicted in the New
Testament." Warburton enquired why he did not publicly renounce a church
he allowed to be corrupt. "There were," he replied, "but two reasons
that kept him from it: one, that the doing so would make him a great
many enemies, and the other that it would do nobody else any good."[801]
Either his persuasion that an unconditional submission was due to the
decisions of the romish church, must have been a transitory belief which
commenced a short time before his letter to Racine, and ceased a short
time after, or else he used deceptive language in his letter that he
might convince Racine of his orthodoxy. His explanations did not alter
the French poet's opinion on the infidel tendency of the Essay on Man.
"After the letter he wrote me," says Racine, "I am far from suspecting
him of designing to preach deism, but I am obliged to confess that we
seem to detect it in the midst of all his abstract reasonings, and that
it even presents itself so naturally that we may attribute to it the
rapid spread of the poem in France."[802]
Pope's letter was forwarded to Racine by Ramsay, who accompanied it with
a second letter of his own, in which he again dwelt on his friend's
continuous and disinterested adherence to romanism. "I am assured that a
princess who admired his works, wished, when she ruled over England, to
induce him not to abandon, but to dissimulate his religion. She was
desirous of procuring him considerable appointments, and promised that
the customary oaths should be dispensed with. He refused these offers
with immoveable firmness. Such a sacrifice was not the act of a sceptic
or a deist."[803] Ramsay does not say that he received the anecdote from
Pope, but he was writing in concert with him, and on his behalf, and
there is a strong presumption that the poet had sanctioned the fable. To
dispense with the customary oaths would have been a breach of the act of
settlement, and the assertion of the power would have cost Anne her
crown, and Pope his office. This immense and abortive sacrifice was to
have been made in the interests of a man whom the queen had never seen,
who was politically insignificant, and whose moderate wants she could
have supplied from her private purse. The ludicrous invention, which
could only pass current with a foreigner ignorant of the English
constitution, was a magnified version of Lord Oxford's hollow talk. "He
used often," said Pope, "to express his concern for my continuing
incapable of a place, which I could not make myself capable of without
giving a great deal of pain to my parents, such pain, indeed, as I would
not have given to either of them for all the places he could have
bestowed upon me."[804] Lord Oxford, who trusted chiefly to duplicity
and petty artifices for obtaining support, was accustomed to amuse every
one who came near him with hopes, and evade their fulfilment by paltry
excuses. His cheap lamentation that Pope was disqualified for an office
is a sad downfall from the magnanimous offer of the Queen to provide him
with a place in defiance of law, and at the risk of her throne. If the
anecdote had been true, Ramsay's inference that Pope was an orthodox
romanist would have been wrong. His reason for not "making himself
capable of a place" was the pain his abjuration of romanism would have
given his parents. He did not pretend to plead conscience.
The system of philosophy set forth in the poem is now to be considered.
Few persons could have been less qualified than Bolingbroke and Pope to
write on natural religion. The desultory superficial investigations of
Bolingbroke were under the dominion of his passions, and Pope had barely
thought upon the subject at all. They both took for their motto a
sentence from Foster, a dissenting minister,--"Where mystery begins
religion ends,"[805]--and it did not occur to them that no mystery could
be greater than the first article of their own deistical creed,--the
necessary existence of God. Atheism magnifies the mystery, which is an
inherent ingredient in every system, religious or infidel. The least
reflection forces this fact upon the mind, and the blindness of Pope and
Bolingbroke to a truth which met them at the threshold of their
speculations, and recurred at every turn, is not an unjust measure of
their general incapacity for religious philosophy.
The Essay on Man was framed on the old and obvious division of ethics,
which treated of man in his relation to God, his fellow-creatures, and
himself. Pope, who thought it presumption to study God,[806] passed over
the first of the three heads, and substituted an epistle on man in
relation to the universe. The leading arguments in this opening epistle
were taken from the Théodicée of Leibnitz, the Moralists of Shaftesbury,
and the Origin of Evil, by Archbishop King. The poet had read the essay
of Shaftesbury, and had possibly looked into King; but of Leibnitz he
was entirely ignorant. In reply to the charge of having adopted the
alleged fatalism of the illustrious German, he wrote to Warburton, Feb.
2, 1739, "It cannot be unpleasant to you to know that I never in my life
read a line of Leibnitz, nor understood there was such a term as
pre-established harmony till I found it in M. Crousaz's book."
Bolingbroke had instructed Pope that Leibnitz was "one of the vainest
and most chimerical men that ever got a name in philosophy, and that he
was so often unintelligible that no man ought to believe he understood
himself."[807] Naturally Pope had not the least suspicion that some of
the principal tenets instilled into him by his "guide" were filched
without acknowledgment from this vain, chimerical, unintelligible man.
The optimism of Leibnitz has been a thousand times misrepresented, not
because his Théodicée is obscure, but because the scoffers had never
read the system they decried. He was supposed to have maintained that
our little globe, taken separately, was the best which could be
conceived, and that all the trials and crimes of men were in their own
independent nature a good. Voltaire was among the ignorant, and to
refute the doctrine that everything was good, he concocted a licentious
tale, in which everything is vice, injustice, and misery. His satire has
a double flaw. He gives a false representation of human life, and of the
optimism of Leibnitz. The world of Leibnitz is not our earth in its
present state, but the universe, unlimited in extent, and eternal in
duration. The final purpose of the Deity in his stupendous scheme is the
best that can be, and the means are the best for their end. The fitness
of the several parts can only be estimated in their relation to the
whole, and the whole is not creation at any moment of time, but the
evolution of the universe from everlasting to everlasting. It would be
folly to judge the evils of the hour in their isolation, when they are
incidents in an illimitable plan, and have reference to the greatest
ultimate good. To show in detail how all the evils we experience are
subservient to the best conceivable scheme of the universe, would
require that we should know the infinite design of God, that we should
be able to picture the infinity of other possible worlds, and to
institute a comparison between these infinite infinities. A morsel of
flesh, or a splinter of bone, bears an immeasurably larger proportion to
our frame than our existing globe to the existing universe, which is
itself but a link in the eternal chain, and yet a person ignorant of the
human structure would in vain attempt to explain the purpose and fitness
of some diminutive fragment of man.[808]
Leibnitz took for granted, in their greatest latitude, the power,
wisdom, and goodness of God. Upon this supposition, Hume, personating
the character of a sceptic, allowed that there "might, perhaps, be a
plausible solution of the ill phenomena." But the sceptic objects that
"the Deity is known to us solely in his productions, that the universe
shows only a particular degree of wisdom and goodness, and that we can
never be authorised to infer a further degree of these attributes, which
would be adding something to the attributes of the cause beyond what
appears in the effects."[809] The objection would be sound if the whole
series of effects were unfolded to our view. They extend, on the
contrary, indefinitely beyond our capacity to follow them, and the
question is, whether the defects appertain to the attributes of God, or
whether the appearance of imperfection is the consequence of our
ignorance. The answer is not doubtful. There is superabundant proof that
our globe is framed upon a plan in which animals and things have a
mutual dependence. Our globe itself, again, is a portion of a larger
system, and we have an irresistible conviction that the boundless
universe is the work of one Author, and that a definite purpose pervades
the whole. With this first fact we couple a second, that the
appropriateness of the details in a complicated contrivance cannot be
understood, unless we comprehend the general principle of the
contrivance, and the relation of its parts. The optimism of Leibnitz is
the only just inference from these facts. A speck of creation is
submitted to our examination, and the evidences of power, wisdom, and
goodness are vast and overwhelming. Other parts seem defective, as
inevitably happens when our knowledge is miserably inadequate; and, in
accordance with experience, we conclude that our enormous ignorance is
at fault, and not that the superlative workman is inconsistent. The
explanation of the optimist is rational, while that of the sceptic
involves a gratuitous contradiction, and is wild, improbable, and
unsupported.
Hume's spokesman enforces his view by an instance which was the
favourite argument of Bolingbroke. "A more impartial distribution of
rewards and punishments," says the sceptic, in allusion to a future
state, "must proceed from a greater regard to justice and equity."[810]
Admit that the justice of God's government on earth is, in a single
instance, imperfect, and it follows that the argument for the perfection
of His attributes is at an end. The fallacy is in the assumed fact, that
a greater regard would be shown to equity, if rewards in this life were
exactly proportioned to merits. The chief purpose of the present life is
clearly not happiness but excellence. The characters of good men are
disciplined and purified here to fit them for happiness hereafter, and
the trials which best prepare them for eternal felicity cannot be a
deviation from equity. "Every branch," says our Lord, "that beareth
fruit, my father purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit,"[811]
which is a stronger evidence of fatherly care than an injurious
distribution of rewards and punishments on the sceptical plan. Physical
evils become a blessing when they are the lasting corrective of sin.
The moral evil itself can in part be explained. The mind and body of
human beings, and the world in which we live, have been fixed for us by
the Creator. The will alone is free, and it is the will which really
constitutes the man. Without freedom of will there could be no morality,
any more than a tree is moral when it flourishes, and immoral when it
withers. Freedom pre-supposes a power to do wrong, and without this
liberty there could be no individual worth. The frailty of man grows out
of his supremacy. Warburton denied that there was any force in the
explanation, since if "God had only brought those creatures into being
who would not have abused their freedom, evil had been prevented without
intrenching upon free will."[812] Two principles are here assumed to be
indisputable, neither of which are self-evident, or capable of proof.
Warburton supposes it to be intuitively certain that a picked race of
moral agents, who must be limited in their perfections because they are
inferior to God, may all be gifted with an infallible power of defying
sin, which for aught we know may be impossible. A christian divine must
admit that some of the angels fell, and for anything we can tell the
steadfast angels might have sinned without the warning example of their
apostate brethren. Warburton further supposes it to be intuitively
certain, that if perchance there may be a hierarchy too lofty to have
ever erred, the non-existence of the multitudinous lesser beings would
be preferable to their existence with an admixture of evil, which is not
the sentiment raised in human minds by the contemplation of the living
creatures of our globe. On the contrary, the deepest philosophers and
simplest peasants are alike lost in admiration at the spectacle, and
feel impotent to rise to a fitting height of love and praise. As the
latent premises of Warburton are not manifest facts, he has failed to
make good his position, that to all appearance God could have framed a
better world from which every semblance of evil might have been
excluded. The moral nature of man goes far to account for the evil of
man, and for his present probation. The comparative innocence of
children is lovely, but it is innocence which has not been tried, and
when it is tested it fails. The innocence of saints is the innocence
which has passed through the terrible experience of sin, which knows the
degradation of iniquity, which has fought against it and triumphed, and
hence it is the second and acquired innocence which endures. The
innocence of Adam in Paradise may have resembled the inexperience of the
child, and the only road to permanent victory may be through defeat.
Heaven itself may be a place of temptation unless an energy of
conquering will has been first developed, and we have grown strong by an
inherent homage to righteousness. In our world, at least, felicity is
not the securest situation for untried virtue. This is enough to justify
to our understandings the state of man upon earth, though much is
mysterious in the details from our imperfect knowledge of the ultimate
effect upon aggregate humanity of the discipline of life, and our
ignorance of the part which our race is to play in the eternal universe.
Leibnitz divided evil into moral evil or sin, physical evil or
suffering, and metaphysical evil or the limitation of our endowments. He
addressed men who were satisfied from the evidence of their internal
nature and the external world that God was absolute in power, wisdom,
and goodness. Hence, whatever is, is right. "We judge," says Leibnitz,
"by the event; since God has so done it would not be possible to do
better."[813] Pope starts from the premise of Leibnitz. He assumes the
infinite wisdom of the Deity, and concludes that this wisdom must have
formed the best possible system. But to a great extent he differed from
Leibnitz with regard to the cause of the several kinds of evil, and his
optimism was of an adulterate, untenable kind. He did not allow that
moral evil was the pernicious abuse of a free will, with which we are
endowed because men are preferable to automatons, moral agents to
passive machines. He held that moral evil was in itself a good, and that
God was the author of it. He it is who "pours fierce ambition into
Cæsar's mind," and nature no more requires "men for ever temperate,
calm, and wise," than "eternal springs and cloudless skies."[814] Since
the sin of men is imposed upon them by God they must be machines after
all, and of a debased and often devilish species. An inexorable fatalism
becomes the law of humanity, and Borgias, Catilines, and Cæsars are
destructive wheels which simply obey the motion impressed upon them by
the omnipotent architect. God can do no wrong; man is the puppet of God;
and whatever is, is consequently right, the villanies of miscreants
included. The Essay swarms with contradictions, and in other passages
Pope treats man as an accountable being who departs from the commands of
his Maker.
Of physical evil, or suffering, Pope notices only "plagues, earthquakes,
and tempests," which he justifies by the remark that God "acts not by
partial, but by general laws."[815] Bolingbroke gave the same
explanation. Either, he said, such visitations are "rational
chastisements," or they are "the mere effects, natural though
contingent, of matter and motion in a material system, put into motion
under certain general laws."[816] Individuals, that is, must suffer that
the laws of matter may not be infringed. Leibnitz rejected the
principle. "That which is an evil," he said, "for me would not cease to
be an evil because it would be good for some one else. The good which
pervades the universe consists, among other things, in this, that the
general good is the particular good of every one who loves the author of
all good." So, he says again, "we suffer often from the misdeeds of
others, but when we have no share in the crime we may hold it for
certain that the sufferings procure us a greater happiness."[817] The
system of Pope subordinates moral agents to physical, and he finds it a
sufficient vindication that the mechanical law is general, and the
injury to men only occasional. Whatever may be the worth of particular
persons, he believes that they are properly sacrificed to the regularity
of material laws, which roll on with undistinguishing, terrific might,
crushing any thinking, sentient, virtuous being who may happen to cross
their path. He supposes, nevertheless, that these unbending,
undiscerning laws have undergone a "change," and, what is singular, the
alteration has been from better to worse, whereby he accounts for a
portion of the prevalent physical evil.[818] Another portion he at one
time ascribed to "chance," which had intruded itself into the
arrangements of the Almighty, and overruled his designs.[819] The
optimism which represented man to be the sport of mechanical laws, of
deteriorating changes in the physical system, and of blind, ungovernable
chance, was not an optimism to clear away difficulties, and silence
objections.
Metaphysical evil, or the limitation of endowments, is inevitable in
every being below the Godhead, and Pope contends that the best system
must manifestly consist in an infinite series of creatures, from the
greatest to the least. The notion is found in Locke and Leibnitz. There
are beings, said the latter, above and below us, or there would be a
void in the order of species.[820] The idea was more fully developed by
Archbishop King, and is simply an extension to the universe of the
terrestrial system, where a gradation of beings on a connected plan is
the law. Pope carried the principle to extravagance. He contends that
the omission of the smallest creature would break the chain, would throw
the universe into confusion, and involve all creation in a common
ruin.[821] To keep the universe from tumbling to pieces, "it is plain,"
according to him, that "there must be somewhere such a rank as
man,"[822] and the rule holds equally of the minutest animalcule on the
globe. There is a flaw in his premises. It is not apparent that the
extinction of the flea would upset the universe, nor that the scale of
beings must necessarily be the same which at present prevails. The facts
are against the "must be" of Pope. There was a time when other creatures
were, and man was not, and when animated nature was able to dispense
with the human race. Infinite wisdom must form the best possible system
and a gradation of beings, which now includes man, is an actual part of
the scheme. Pope's argument breaks down when, to justify the creation
of man, he supposes that a chain of beings and an orderly universe could
not have existed unless man had been a link in the series. His argument
is equally weak when he maintains that the infinite wisdom of God is a
guarantee that there will not be a gap in the endless chain of
existences, but that it is a question whether infinite wisdom may not
have made a mistake with respect to man's proper place in the series,
and erred in the after sorting of the gradations which it had previously
conceived and created on an infallible plan.[823] The poet was
inconsistent to childishness. Johnson believed that when Pope talked of
man's place he did not attach any meaning to the term. The words would
seem to imply that it was a question whether man was placed in the
circumstances which were best adapted to his moral, mental, and physical
nature. But if Pope had thoroughly comprehended his borrowed phrases, he
would not have proposed the enquiry under a form which stultified his
premises.
There were errors enough in Pope's doctrine without the
misinterpretations of Voltaire, who has falsified the views of the poet,
as he had previously misstated the profounder system of Leibnitz.
"Those," says Voltaire, "who exclaim that all is good are charlatans.
Shaftesbury, who brought the fable into fashion, was a very unhappy man.
I have seen Bolingbroke devoured with chagrin and rage, and Pope, whom
he induced to put the mockery into verse, was as much to be pitied as
any man I have ever known,--deformed in body, unequal in his temper,
always ill, a burthen to himself, and harassed by a hundred enemies to
his dying hour. Quote me at least some happy men who say that all is
good. Any one who had seen the beautiful Ann Boleyn, and the still more
beautiful Mary Stuart, in their youth, would have said that is good, but
would he have said it when he saw them perish by the hand of the
executioner? would he have said it when he saw the grandson of the
beautiful Mary die the same death in the midst of his capital? would he
have said it when he saw the great-grandson more unfortunate still,
since he lived longer?"[824] Pope, in his imperfect theory, did not deny
the existence of sorrow, but asserted, or implied, that the sorrow was
an advantage either to the sufferer or others. Voltaire looked singly at
the misery without heeding the gain. Mary Queen of Scots at the block
was superior to the radiant beauty who was starting on a profligate
career. Charles I., penitent for his murderous abandonment of Strafford,
and, perhaps, for his creed that duplicity is a virtue when employed by
kings to circumvent subjects, was a vastly better man on the scaffold
than on the throne. James II. was in a more advantageous position with
the inducement to repentance which his long exile supplied than if he
had succeeded in his fraudulent attempts to subvert the English church
and constitution. The rage of Bolingbroke, and Pope's fretful temper,
were certainly inexplicable on the pretence that they were poured into
the mind by the Deity. They did not militate against the truer optimism
which saw in them self-imposed vice and pain, rendered possible by the
free-will which is a privilege to mankind.
Pope filled up the outline of his system with declamatory invectives
against objectors, and with reflections intended to prove that the
imperfections of man befitted his position in the universe. There is
little force in the poet's reasoning. He passes over difficulties, and
replies to cavils which no one worth answering ever urged. Some of his
remarks are obscure, some erroneous, some common-place. Such as they are
they have not been woven into a consecutive argument. M. Crousaz says he
knew persons who were persuaded that Pope had tacked together a number
of fragments he had composed at different times, before he had the idea
of an Essay on Man, which was a contrivance to work up his collection of
odds and ends. He understood, in fact, little beyond the separate
thoughts, and was insensible to the want of coherence, consistency and
purpose. It would be lost labour to search, like Warburton, for a
strength and closeness of reasoning which were not in the mind of the
author.
The second epistle treats of man "with respect to himself as an
individual." The Bible is a revelation of God, and a perpetual summons
to mankind "to know and understand" him. "Thus saith the Lord, Let not
the wise man glory in his wisdom, but let him that glorieth glory in
this, that he understandeth and knoweth me."[825] The divinity at last
descended upon earth, and lived our life, acting and speaking under our
circumstances, that God might be clearly manifested to the world. "He
that hath seen me," says our Lord, "hath seen the Father."[826] The
divine light appeared darkness and imposture to Pope. He was even blind
to the light which his natural understanding would have furnished, and,
taught by Bolingbroke, he abjured all pretension to a knowledge of the
Almighty under the plea of reverencing his inscrutable grandeur. Man
must not venture to scan God; his only proper study is to learn to know
himself.[827] This second epistle exhibits the kind of self-knowledge to
which Pope attained, when, renouncing the knowledge of God, he
determined to limit his investigations to man.
He draws a desolate picture. Man is in doubt whether he is a god or a
beast; whether he ought to prefer his body or his mind. He is a confused
chaos of thought and passion, he reasons only to err, and is only born
to die.[828] The general incapacity, we are told, extended to Newton,
and it might have occurred to the poet that it was a useless task to
study our nature when the deductions of reason in its highest estate are
uniformly wrong. He committed the oversight from his habit of borrowing
fragments he was not at the pains to understand. His caricature was a
partial and distorted copy from Pascal, who with wonderful energy of
language, amplified the helplessness of fallen man that he might insist
the more strongly on the necessity of his restoration through the
Gospel. He overcharged the evil to exalt the remedy. Pope had not any
remedy to suggest. He leaves the "confused chaos" in its primitive
impotence, and calls upon mankind to embark in a deceptive study, with
the warning that they will wander from error to error.
Without tying Pope down to the rhetorical exaggerations in the opening
paragraph of his second epistle, we find from a passage in the first
epistle that he reduced to insignificance the self-knowledge attainable
by mankind. He said that when the proud horse and dull ox knew why man
put them to this use or that, then would proud and dull man comprehend
the end and use of his being, passions, sufferings, and actions.[829]
The amount of knowledge possessed by the horse and ox is not
discoverable by us. The only nature adequately known to man is his own,
and his nature reveals his end. The ideas which ought to govern him
proceed from his Maker. They are the voice of God speaking to him, and
telling him the purpose for which he lives. He learns, above all, that
he is the servant of the Almighty, that his passions are to be ruled by
his conscience, that duty is supreme, that his sufferings are the
discipline to perfect his character, that earth is the school for a
higher existence. He may be negligent and perverse; he may refuse to
look into his nature, and may, in part, defy it; may thence arrive at
false conclusions, and adopt a false course of conduct, which are the
abuses of a free-will that can sink or soar, but the grand outlines of
his nature are plain to every honest and earnest enquirer, and blank
ignorance on the end of his being, passions, sufferings, and actions is
not the inevitable condition of man.
The conviction that we are ignorant of the use of our being and actions
did not keep Pope from acknowledging that "good" is the end to which we
aspire.[830] The nature of this good, and the means of obtaining it, is
the main subject of the second epistle, "which contains," says
Warburton, "the truest, clearest, shortest, and consequently the best
system of ethics that is anywhere to be met with."[831] The system which
Warburton thought "true and clear" appears to be eminently false and
contradictory.
Man has certain implanted tendencies, physical, intellectual, and
sympathetic,--the craving for food, for knowledge, for society, etc.
None of our primitive endowments can be termed moral, since they are
bestowed upon us independently of our will, and it is not till will
interposes that morality begins, but in their purity they are all
advantageous, and many of them are directed to the identical end which
morality prescribes. They are part of the stock-in-trade with which man
starts in his career, and he is charged with the wise administration of
them. A brief experience teaches him that an instinctive tendency may be
carried to excess. His craving for food and drink may turn to gluttony
and drunkenness; his passion for knowledge may convert him into a
solitary student without any care for his kind; his love of society and
affection may unfit him for the business and drudgery of life. Or he may
yield to a propensity till satiety succeeds, and he is left listless and
jaded. Or he may indulge a lawful propensity by lawless methods. Or he
may be hurried away by successive impulses, and be too unstable to put
his gifts to a profitable use. In any of these ways his proper nature
becomes mutilated and degraded. His reason informs him that to enjoy the
full advantage of his tendencies he must not consent to be drifted along
by the current which is strongest for the moment. He must curb the lower
propensities, and foster the higher; he must regulate the several
unities in a manner to derive the greatest benefit from the whole; he
must substitute for the reign of impulse what moralists call his
interest well understood. He does not stop at self-interest. He rises
above his personal good into the impersonal sphere of good in itself. He
perceives that there is a law superior to his individual interests, a
law of universal obligation, and which is immutable and eternal.
Of these three motives, the instinctive, the prudential, and the law of
independent morality, Pope rejects the last. He believes that self is
the single spring of action in men, and he seriously adopts the old
sarcastic saying, "Every man for himself, and God for us all."[832] He
divides this selfish nature into two parts,--self-love, which designates
the impulsive propensities, and reason, which governs them on the behalf
of interest well-understood.[833] Already there is an inconsistency in
his phraseology when he puts self-love in direct opposition to reason.
Reason in his theory is simply the selfishness of calculation; self-love
the selfishness of impulse. Self-love is absolute in both, and is not
the less self-love because we deliberate upon the means which are best
adapted to secure the selfish end.
The erroneous phraseology signifies little. The important point is the
radical falsity of the system. The three grand duties of man,--his duty
to God, his neighbour, and himself,--are resolved by Pope into the
single duty of man to himself. In the first epistle the poet rebuked the
pride which supposed the heavens and the earth to be created for its
use.[834] In his second epistle he teaches us that they are totally
indifferent to us under any other aspect. He will tell us that the way
to promote our personal interest is to love God and our neighbour, but
the end and motive of the love must on his system be our individual
interest still. The gospel precepts must be set aside; for in place of
loving our neighbour equally with ourselves we are to love him simply
for the sake of ourselves; and in place of loving God with all our
hearts, and minds, and souls, we are to love him solely as a tributary
who ministers to our absorbing love of self. When we practically think
and act as though we were the centre of the universe; when, horrible to
say, we view the Deity merely as an instrument to promote our
selfishness; when we discover nothing in the Creator to adore, nothing
in his creation to admire, apart from their fitness to advance the
interests of one puny mortal, we invert the actual constitution of
things, we base our morality upon a lie, and we only cheat ourselves
with delusive terms when we talk of our duty to God and our neighbour.
The test of the system is in the phenomena of consciousness which are
open to universal observation. When our moral principle is an unalloyed
selfishness we seek our private good alone, and there can be no
obligation to consult the interests of our neighbours. I pay a debt
because it is to my advantage, and not from any sense of what is due to
my debtor. I forbear to kill, and maim, and torture, not in the least
because I am bound to consider the rights and feelings of my
fellow-creatures, but because it would be present or future pain to
myself. Owning no law, except the law of selfishness, I should be
dishonest and cruel if I could believe that the balance of personal
pleasure was on the side of inhumanity and roguery. When I blame
murderers and thieves, I inconsiderately distinguish between the guilt
and folly of the crime, which is a vulgar mistake. The selfishness which
respects nothing beyond the requirements of self is the law of our race,
and the miscalled criminal has obeyed the governing principle of
mankind. He owed no duty to others, and his sole fault was not to have
judged wisely for his interests. I talk of patriotism and public spirit,
of sacrifice and disinterestedness, but they are words which convey a
false impression. Sacrifice and disinterestedness do not exist, and the
apparent devotion to country and public is at bottom a complete devotion
to self.
Common experience is too powerful for bad philosophy, and it is plain
that this is not a true description of the moral man. Pope puts a part
for the whole. The Creator has endowed us with a desire for happiness,
which is inseparable from our being. The individual is a portion of the
universe, and though he is only an atom, his interests are cared for in
common with the rest. But he has a consciousness that the good of others
must be cared for likewise, that Providence has enjoined him to
contribute to the result, and that his refusal to recognise the duty he
owes to his neighbour would be guilt. He has a conviction that the great
source of all being and all good is to be adored for his infinite
perfections, and that to love him solely for the sake of the blessings
he communicates to ourselves is a maimed, derogatory, and impious idea.
Man has been constructed to perceive things as they are, and to act in
conformity with his knowledge. He is the creature of his Maker, a unit
in a multitude, and could not be permitted to consider Maker and
multitude subordinate to the creature and unit, without a complete
perversion of the facts. With the desire for our own good there has been
instilled into us that law of good in itself which embraces the
universe,--a law which, while it includes our individual concerns,
extends infinitely beyond them, and to which we do homage under its
aspect of good in itself, as well as under its aspect that it is good
for me. Our personal pleasure is not therefore, as Pope asserts, "the
whole employ of body and mind."[835] Happiness in the long run is
dependent upon well-doing, and we consult our interest when we adhere to
duty. But our rule of duty must not be bounded by our self-interest,
which, reducing our motives to a petty egotism, corrupts the nature of
man, and contaminates duty at its source.
The prevalent habit of abandoning duty for personal pleasure begets the
mistaken idea that where there is pleasure there is absolute
selfishness. The degree of selfishness must be determined by our
motives, and not by the feelings which accompany our acts. Whatever is
done for self-gratification is selfish; and everything in which our end
is external to ourselves is disinterested, in so far as the accompanying
gratification is not the motive to the deed. Although the benevolent man
has a satisfaction in reflecting that the sufferings of the needy are
removed, his predominant motive to benevolence is the relief of the
wretched, and not his own personal pleasure. His intention terminates in
the objects of his charity, with little return upon himself, and unless
his sympathy with them was real the gratification would not be felt.
Happiness is the proper effect of pure goodness, and if the junction of
perfect happiness and perfect goodness was incompatible with
disinterestedness, the celestial spirits would be more selfish than men.
Men, in turn, would grow selfish in the same proportion that
perseverance in well-doing rendered duty delightful. "I find a pleasure
in serving my friends," said Schiller in refutation of the doctrine; "it
is agreeable to me to fulfil my duties. This troubles me, for then I am
no longer virtuous."[836] The love which is capable of the utmost
sacrifice is not less generous because no sacrifice may chance to be
required, any more than a man who is proof against all temptations to
steal, is less honest because he is not exposed to temptation. From our
proneness to self-deceit we are accustomed to estimate disinterestedness
by actual sacrifices, which both test our motives, and inure us to
self-denying love, but disinterestedness is the cause of self-denial and
must precede it, and the disposition remains when the call for
self-denial may have ceased. Qualities are what they are, whatever may
happen to be the surrounding circumstances. Grant that a man can love
his neighbour and himself with an equal love, and the same proportion
will be preserved whether his love procures him unadulterated pleasure,
or entails on him a vast amount of pain. Happiness and disinterestedness
are not in their essence mutually destructive; they co-exist and
coalesce.
A close scrutiny into the motives of moral men will satisfy us that the
love of our neighbour is not wholly or chiefly a disguised love of self;
that we love God for what he is, transcendent in goodness and wisdom, as
well as for what he is to us; that we do not bow down to duty solely
because it is our interest well understood, but much more because it has
an illimitable authority independent of our individual interests, and
binds the conscience by its right to supreme dominion. God, man, duty
are external objects which, over and above the consideration of
self-interest, are served by morality as an end. Bishop Butler even
maintained that all our instinctive impulses "are particular movements
towards particular external objects," and cannot be ascribed to
self-love. He instances the desire produced by hunger, of which "the
object and end," he says, "is merely food."[837] But there is a further
object for which alone the food is desired,--the removal of painful
sensations, or the gratification of the palate, or the prolongation of
life. All these objects are often purely selfish, and always in their
ordinary unreflecting state.[838] The uneasy sensation of hunger begins
and ends with the individual; the single purpose for which he covets the
food is to allay his particular physical craving; outside self there is
no object left to attract the mind,--no over-plus to which our thoughts
can be directed. There is not, as in the case of God, man, and law, an
object which has a claim upon our hearts and understandings distinct
from the special benefit to ourselves. The desire for food is a
selfish, but not an evil instinct, for self-love is part of the duty and
constitution of man. Pope's error was in putting a fragment for the
whole, and merging duty in selfishness.
There is a second part to Pope's system. He has told us that the
function of reason is to "advise and check" the instinctive impulses;
that she "mixes the passions with art, and confines them to due bounds;"
that she "compounds and subjects, tempers and employs them;" and that
her "well-accorded" combination of jarring elements "gives all the
strength and colour to our life."[839] The instant after he lays down a
directly opposite theory. He says that every man brings into the world a
"ruling passion," which is "cast and mingled with his very frame;" that
this master passion "grows with our growth," and "swallows up" all the
other passions; that whatever "warms the heart or fills the head" goes
to feed the one despotic desire. When we fancy we curb a passion we are
deceived; we have only resigned a lesser passion in favour of a
greater.[840] Reason, which lately mixed the passions in their proper
proportions, and confined them to due bounds, is suddenly stripped of
her prerogative, and becomes the slave of the master passion.
The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still.
Reason in this new theory is worse than helpless; she deserts to the
side of her enemy, gives the monster propensity "edge and power," and
exerts herself to exasperate the "mind's disease."[841] Such
contradictions were the natural consequence of the perfunctory manner in
which Pope had picked up his scraps of philosophy.
The slightest acquaintance with the world is fatal to the hypothesis
that an exclusive ruling passion is the universal characteristic of
mankind. Each person has various appetites, desires, and affections, and
it is rare to see a man in whom "one master passion has swallowed up the
rest." Propensities intermingle and take their turn. Characters are
notoriously complex, and every individual is not the incarnation of a
single unattended passion. A desire for power may be joined with
sensuality, a love of fame with covetousness, an eagerness for knowledge
with affection. In the play of passions one may preponderate, but all
the rest are not reduced to nullity. Allow the existence of the ruling
passion, and Pope's account of its origin could not be correct. A
passion which is cast in our frame from our birth, and continues
thenceforward to grow with our growth, must be permanent and
unalterable. The individual must be governed by the same passion in
childhood and age, in the season of thoughtlessness and of wisdom, in
dissoluteness and virtue, in all the possible changes of condition. This
is not the scene which life presents. "Every observer," says Johnson,
"has remarked, that in many men the love of pleasure is the ruling
passion of their youth, and the love of money that of their advanced
years."[842]
With an inherited ruling passion, and reason helpless to restrain it, we
should be altogether the creatures of fate on Pope's hypothesis, if he
had not furnished reason with a last resource, which, as is evident from
several parallel passages, was chiefly suggested to him by the works of
his contemporary, Mandeville. This shallow thinker put forth a system of
morality and political economy in his Fable of the Bees, or Private
Vices, Public Benefits. The book, which was philosophically weak,
attracted much notice at the time from the liveliness of his coarse
illustrations, the vigorous ease of his inaccurate style, and the
cynical parade of his licentious doctrines. He had the folly to imagine
that commerce could only flourish when the wealth of a nation was
consumed by the idle, the sensual, the luxurious. Hence, he argued that
their wasteful vices were a national gain. This was his political
economy. His morality consisted in denying the reality of virtue. He
held that every apparent virtue was prompted by an underlying frailty,
and that all ostensible goodness was the false mask worn over inward
weaknesses. The indignation his system provoked induced him subsequently
to throw in some qualifying phrases, but his faint, and always equivocal
concessions, are forms of speech, and did not prevent his repeated
avowal that genuine virtue had no existence on earth. "I often," he
says, "compare the virtues of good men to your large China jars; they
make a fine show, but look into a thousand of them, and you will find
nothing in them but dust and cobwebs."[843]
Pope, like Mandeville, founds virtue upon vice. The ruling passion is
evil, but reason gives it a bias towards good.[844] "Spleen, obstinacy,
hate, and fear," each produce "crops of wit and honesty;" "anger" is the
parent of "zeal and fortitude;" "avarice" of "prudence;" "sloth" of
"philosophy;" and every virtue under heaven may issue from "pride or
shame."[845] The ruling passion having engulphed the whole family of
affections and desires, this individual is a personification of anger,
that individual of hate; a third of fear; a fourth of sloth; a fifth of
pride. The sole moving principle of man is his giant passion.[846] The
function of reason is only to foster it,[847] and select the means for
its gratification. Whatever these means may be, the motive of the
incarnate monster lust, is to feed sensuality; of the monster sloth to
secure ease; of the monster pride to inflate self-importance. "The same
ambition," says Pope, "may make a patriot, as it makes a knave."[848]
But the incarnation of an all-pervading ambition can be only a patriot
in appearance, and uses patriotism to serve the ends of ambition. Let
the two diverge, and by the law of his nature he must fling the
patriotism to the winds. "Either," says our Lord, "make the tree good,
and his fruit good; or else, make the tree corrupt and his fruit
corrupt."[849] On Pope's theory, to make the tree good is impossible.
Man has no escape from the ruling passion he brings into the world. He
must be angry, avaricious, or slothful, according to the seed which was
sown in him at his birth, and the tree must remain corrupt to the last.
The fruit would inevitably betray the taint of its origin, and Pope was
mistaken in supposing that a vitiated motive could keep steady to
outward virtue. "Hate," to which Pope ascribes the singular power of
producing "crops of wit and honesty," must repudiate love, or whatever
else did not subserve the one unamiable passion; and a man all hate,--a
frantic enemy to every kind and tender emotion,--would be hateful,
however honest and witty. "Anger" would renounce the meek and
charitable, "pride" the humble virtues, together with any other virtue
which did not minister to inordinate anger and pride. Neither passion
would assume a moral aspect. "I observe," says Baxter, "that almost all
men, good and bad, do loathe the proud, and love the humble." "Zeal" is
the prerogative ascribed to "anger," and the zealot who was urged on by
fierce unflagging anger would be a terror and a scourge. Pope himself
has drawn a horrible picture of the miseries inflicted upon humanity
when "zeal, not charity, became the guide" of the teachers of
religion.[850] "Sloth" supplies us with "philosophy," or the apathetic
submission to evils we are too lazy to correct, which is the virtue that
induces thousands to live in dirt and ignorance, because cleanliness and
knowledge are not to be had without industry. "Avarice" is credited with
the faculty of "supplying prudence," which is as true as to say that a
burning fever supplies a moderate, healthy temperature. The moral system
which confines man to the counterfeit "virtue nearest allied to his
vice," or ruling passion, is an extravagant libel upon the virtuous, and
outrageous flattery of the vicious.[851]
Mandeville took his morality from La Rochefoucauld, and Pope took hints
from both. The principle common to the three is the motto which La
Rochefoucauld placed at the head of his Maxims, "Our virtues are usually
vices in disguise." The doctrine, when expressed in La Rochefoucauld's
language, was condemned by Pope.
"As L'Esprit," he said, "La Rochefoucauld, and that sort of people,
prove that all virtues are disguised vices, I would engage to prove all
vices to be disguised virtues. Neither, indeed, is true: but this would
be a more agreeable subject; and would overturn their whole
scheme."[852] He repeated the criticism in a suppressed passage of the
Essay on Man,[853] with a complete unconsciousness that the "scheme" he
fancied he could "overturn," was the very soul of his system. "Heaven,"
he said, "can raise virtue's ends from the vanity which seeks no reward
but praise,"[854] and for man to be virtuous solely out of vanity was
exactly the virtue which La Rochefoucauld called "vice in disguise." He
who feeds the hungry from vanity alone is not moved by sympathy for
suffering. Charity is merely the pretence which his vanity pleads. Each
of the other ruling passions acts according to its own exclusive nature,
and the virtue which is adopted to humour anger, hate, sloth, and
avarice, is by general consent called delusion or imposture. La
Rochefoucauld has the advantage over Pope. The succession of selfish
passions he discovered too uniformly in man is less odious than the
concentrated anger, hate, or sloth which never pauses or turns aside;
and the satirist who lashes the deceptive vices of mankind is to be
preferred to the moralist who teaches that vice in disguise is virtue.
The contradictions are not at an end. Pride, folly, "even mean
self-love," have all, says Pope, some good in them.[855] He forgot that
self-love is, with him, the principle of every virtue and vice, their
essence and life, their origin and end, and to call self-love meaner
than pride and folly is either to assert that self-love is meaner than
itself, or to abandon the foundation of his moral systems. He goes on to
ascribe an influence to self-love which is incompatible with his second
system, or theory of the ruling passion. "Self-love," he says, "is the
scale to measure others' wants by thine," or, as he remarked to Spence,
"self-love would be a necessary principle in every one, if it were only
to serve each as a scale for his love to his neighbour."[856] On Pope's
second system this love of each for his neighbour must be extinct,
unless love chanced to be the ruling passion. Unmixed anger, hate, and
sloth retain no trace of affection. When we are reduced to a single
passion, and for selfish purposes "measure others' wants by our own,"
anger can but have an intellectual, unsympathising perception of rival
passions, and will only assist them in the degree which will serve its
irritable instincts. Sloth, anger, hate, and the rest will act according
to their kind, and to call upon them to love their neighbours as
themselves is to enjoin the deaf to hear, and the blind to see.
An evil fatalism, therefore, remains the leading principle of Pope's
second system. A man must be avaricious, slothful, or angry as nature
appoints. He cannot select his passion, or divert, or repress it. The
sole power reserved to his will is a certain latitude in choosing the
diet upon which the passion feeds. This meagre and polluted freedom
dwindles to nothing with such passions as sloth and avarice, and if
there was room for prayer, when our nature is fixed for us by an
irreversible decree, we ought to petition for the "pride and vainglory"
against which we pray in the Litany, since, if Pope is right, they
permit more variety of specious virtue than the griping prudence of
avarice, and the corrupting philosophy of sloth.
The poet passes from his review of individual man to the designs of God,
and his degenerate morality sinks lower as he proceeds. "The ends of
Providence," he says, "and general good are answered in our passions and
imperfections," and he goes on to show "how usefully" the Deity, acting
in the interests of the "whole,"[857] has "distributed" imperfections to
"orders of men, to individuals, and to every state and age of
life."[858] Pope refuses to ascribe our evil passions to the abuse of
that freedom of will which is inseparable from the idea of a moral
being. He retains the doctrine laid down in his first epistle, and
involved in his ruling-passion hypothesis, that our evil passions are
the immediate gift of God. "Heaven applies" what Pope calls "happy
frailties to all ranks,--fear to statesmen, rashness to commanders, and
presumption to kings."[859] "Pride is bestowed on all, a common
friend,"[860] which overthrows his theory that the ruling is our only
passion, and pride incompatible with avarice, sloth, &c. The blessing he
imputes to pride is that it takes possession of the "vacuities of
sense," and prevents self-knowledge.[861] "The proper study of mankind
is man," but the desirable effect of the study is that man should be
self-deceived,--that he should be soothed into complacency by ignorance
of his individual defects, and by a conceited dream of imaginary
excellence. The "bubble joy" is ordained by Providence "to laugh in the
cup of folly," that folly may be cheered in its career, and fast as "one
prospect is lost" may be lured on by "another."[862] The poet had
already furnished an illustration of his doctrine, in the consolatory
fact that "the sot" fancies himself "a hero!"[863] "Pleasure," says
Pope, is "our greatest evil or our greatest good," and these were among
his good pleasures,--the contrivances of a beneficent Deity for the
comfort and encouragement of vice and folly. Bolingbroke was better
informed. "The man," he says, "who neglects the duties of natural
religion, and the obligations of morality, acts against his nature, and
lives in open defiance to the author of it. God declares for one order
of things, he for another. God blends together the duty and interest of
his creature; his creature separates them, despises the duty, and
proposes to himself another interest."[864]
Pope is not satisfied with applauding moral imperfections. He degrades
and ridicules religious aspirations. Every period, he says, of life is
provided with "some fit passion,"[865] and as a "rattle, by nature's
kindly law," is the "plaything" of the "child," so "beads and
prayer-books are the toys of age." The new toy, like the old, is but a
"bauble," which "pleases," as the rattle had done before, till "tired"
of the game we "sleep, and life's poor play is over."[866] The whole is
an idle entertainment arranged by the Deity, who has "usefully
distributed" the "fit" and frivolous passions which amuse our hollow
existence. The worst writer has never given a more debased description
of the moral government of God, and of the nature and ends of rational
man. Ignorant of our Creator, presumptuous when we dare to study him,
involved in a whirl of endless error when we study ourselves, the
victims of a pre-ordained and irresistible passion, prayer is but a
beguiling "toy," and not the reasonable, elevated language of belief,
trust, and repentance. The goal of morality is the discovery that "life
is a poor play," a paltry mimic scene, which leaves us only this barren
consolation--that though we, the actors, are "fools," "God," who has
cast our empty part for us, "is wise."[867] The wisdom is not apparent
in Pope's deplorable travestie of man's moral nature. Happily, true
morality teaches that life is a grand school in which, knowing the
adorable perfections of God, we learn to imitate his goodness. The moral
man is occupied with noble realities, and not with mimic shows. He
fights against destroying passions, struggles to conform to immutable
verities, and finds, amid many bitter failures, that human weakness and
littleness can continuously approximate to the divine exemplar. The
life, which seemed to Pope a "poor play," is to the moral and religious
man a mighty privilege, an awful responsibility, a sublime
preparation,--the prelude to a holy and happy eternity.
The third epistle treats "of the nature and state of man with respect to
society." The details of our duty to our neighbour were kept for the
portion of the Essay which was never written. In the present epistle
Pope discusses the general relation of man to man, or the foundation of
society and government. A third of his dissertation is a renewal of the
argument in the previous epistles that all things have a mutual
dependence, that every creature is made both for others and for itself.
This desultory introduction is succeeded by the remark that "self-love
and social love began with the state of nature,"[868] which is an
allusion to the argument of Hobbes, much canvassed in Pope's day, that
"the state of nature was a state of war." Pope and Hobbes agreed that
human motives were entirely selfish. They differed in their opinion of
the direction which the selfishness took. Hobbes contended that each
would desire all things for himself, and would endeavour to despoil his
neighbour; Pope, that self-love would seek its gratification in social
love. But the poet says and unsays, and is soon involved in a labyrinth
of inconsistencies. He tells us that in the patriarchal period, "before
the name of king was known,"[869] "man, like his Maker, saw that all was
right;" "trod to virtue in the paths of pleasure;" and recognised no
"allegiance" or "policy" except "love."[870] A few lines earlier he
asserted that in the same patriarchal period, before monarchy was known,
and when all was love and virtue, some states were compelled to join
others through "fear;" and "foes," tempted by trees laden with fruit,
went forth "to ravish" the orchards of their neighbours. And when the
robbers desisted from their intended spoliation, it was not out of love
or compassion, but only because they were persuaded by the proprietors
that "commerce" would prove as profitable as "war."[871]
Both these clashing theories are espoused by Pope with equal confidence,
but the greatest prominence is given to the theory that social love was
perfect in the patriarchal times. The whole of the sentient world was
included in the happy brotherhood. The human race were the companions of
the beasts, and walked, fed, and slept with them. The disastrous
circumstance which broke up the reign of universal love was the craving
of man for animal food. He yielded to the temptation to eat flesh, and
from a meek, was changed into a pugnacious, sanguinary creature. The
inflammatory diet generated the "fury passions," till then unknown, and
"turned man on man."[872] "Force" was now employed to make "conquests,"
and war and rapine were introduced.[873] Pope once more lapses into his
habitual contradictions. He represents the patriarchs as teaching their
families to "draw monsters from the abyss," and "fetch the eagle to the
ground" during the innocent era when the lives of beasts were held
sacred.[874] He has thus adopted two opposite versions of the
patriarchal treatment of the animal creation, and the later version,
which teaches that the slaughter of animals was prevalent under the
reign of love and virtue, is inconsistent with his genealogy of the
"fury passions." He has likewise two opposite opinions on the
destruction of brutes,--the one, that to take their lives was murder;
the other, that the art of killing them was among the laudable
discoveries which entitled the patriarchs to be esteemed "a second
Providence" by their children.[875] Pope has not done with his
contradictions. "It might, perhaps," he says in his first epistle,
"appear better for us that all were harmony and virtue, and that never
passion discomposed the mind." "But all," he replies, "subsists by
elemental strife, and passions are the elements of life," which, he
urges to show the necessity for the "fierce ambition" of Cæsar, and the
misdeeds of Borgia and Catiline.[876] In the third epistle we are told
that "the virtue and harmony" actually lasted for many generations, that
the strife of bad passions was not in the slightest degree requisite for
sustaining the system established on earth, and that the aggressive
vices of Cæsars, Catilines, and Borgias were only the pernicious
consequence of eating meat.
The hypothesis is puerile, that force, conquest, and rapine originated
in a meat diet. Equally puerile is the theory that the arts of
government, navigation, agriculture, and manufactures were copied from
animals.[877] Man is specially distinguished by his inventive capacity.
Through this gift the arts and sciences are continuously progressive,
and there is no plausibility in the supposition that his characteristic
power was originally in abeyance. The gratuitous fancy that the arts of
human civilisation were acquired from the brutes, could not be supported
by less appropriate examples. Mankind are said by Pope to have been
pre-eminently social, and he would have us believe that neither
sociality nor convenience could teach them to construct their dwellings
in proximity, till "reason late" suggested to them the reflection, that
some birds, such as rooks, built their nests in clusters.[878] He
acknowledges that a community of families perceived it would be for
their interest to have a single ruler; but the principle that the
subjects under a monarchy should retain their right to their houses and
property, was discovered by observing that every bee in a hive had its
separate cell, and separate honey,[879] which was a fiction of some
unobservant naturalist, who credited bees with our usages. From the
silk-worm we learn to "weave," and from, the mole to "plough,"
notwithstanding that the silk-worm only spins silk, and never weaves it,
and that the subterranean scratchings of the mole have no resemblance to
our contrivance, the plough. The remaining instances cited by Pope are
just as absurd. He strung together fragments of ancient fables, which,
in a modern copy, are neither poetry nor philosophy.
When families spread, patriarchal government is said by Pope to have
been invariably merged in monarchical. He makes no mention of another
elementary system which prevailed among the ancient Germans, and which
was too natural to have been unfrequent. The tribe was composed of
contiguous families, or clans, each of which had its separate territory.
The head of every clan was ruler within his own domain, and the affairs
which concerned the entire tribe were managed by a general assembly of
the heads of clans. Under this arrangement the representative of the
clan preserved his patriarchal power, and had an equal voice with his
brother chiefs in regulating the common interests of the tribe. Pope
completed his single genealogical principle of government by a rapid
summary of the transitions through which monarchy passed. Conquest led
to tyranny. An ambitious priesthood first threatened the despot with
spiritual terrors, then went shares with him, and the double yoke of
secular and ecclesiastical tyranny was fastened on the necks of mankind.
The oppressed subjects at last rebelled against their rulers, kings were
"forced into virtue by self-defence," and the world returned to the
dominant principle of the state of nature, that "self-love and social
are the same." These meagre doctrines were derived from Bolingbroke,
whose political philosophy was hardly more profound than his moral and
metaphysical; but Pope shows, here and there, that he had read Locke's
treatise on Civil Government, and the passages from Hooker which Locke
quoted, and with such masters to guide him the flimsiness of his views
is without excuse.
The investigations of Pope conducted him to the final conclusion that
"the true end of all government" is unity among mankind, and he
prescribes the methods by which harmony is to be preserved both in
politics and religion. The panacea which was to cure political divisions
is contained in the couplet,
For forms of government let fools contest,
Whate'er is best administered is best.[880]
Good government, that is, depends on good administration; the form of
government is immaterial, and those who battle for one form in
preference to another, are fools. The accusation of folly was thrown
back upon the poet, who grew ashamed of his maxim, and in 1740 he gave
an interpretation to his verses which they cannot be made to bear. "The
author of these lines," he said, "was far from meaning that no one form
of government is, in itself, better than another (as that mixed or
limited monarchy, for example, is not preferable to absolute), but that
no form of government, however excellent or preferable in itself, can be
sufficient to make a people happy unless it be administered with
integrity. On the contrary, the best sort of government, when the form
of it is preserved, and the administration corrupt, is most dangerous."
The concord which was to have been produced by indifference to forms of
government, vanishes with the admission that the form is important. The
qualifying remark, that forms are insufficient when their spirit is
violated, was a truism denied by no one. A corrupt legislature, a
corrupt executive, and corrupt tribunals, would neutralise the benefit
of any constitution with which they could subsist.
Pope retracted his maxim under the pretence of explaining it. His new
version showed that he did not yet understand the value of forms of
government, or he would not have said that when the administration is
corrupt the best form of government is the most detrimental to the
public. A slight reflection on the History of England, and the nature of
man, must have convinced him that a chief virtue of good forms of
government is the security they afford for the prevention, limitation,
and cure of corruption,--for the subordination of private selfishness to
the common weal. His own epistle would have informed him that when
governors have absolute dominion they "drive through just and unjust" to
gratify their "ambition, lust, and lucre;" and when the power is with
the governed, they will not suffer their rights to be extensively
invaded, but will oblige kings and ministers to "learn justice."[881]
There was a stage of feudalism when the territorial, legislative, and
judicial functions were centered in the lord of the fief. He taxed and
punished his serfs and vassals at pleasure. His covetousness, his
cruelty, his passionate caprices, all developed by uncontrolled habit
and the spirit of the age, could only be resisted by rebellion, and
rebellions he quenched in blood. The sufferings of his people were
atrocious. Pope lived under a vastly superior constitution, which he
believed was corruptly administered, and the detriment to the public
should have been greater, on his principle, than the despotism of feudal
times. The fact was signally the other way. The mediæval enormities were
no longer possible; person and property were safe, and loyal citizens
lived in peace and security. Laws were not always just, religious and
civil liberty was incomplete, purity in ministers and legislators was
often defective. But there was a limit to corruption, or ministers and
legislators would have been indignantly discarded. They were compelled
in the main to consult the supposed interests of the country, that they
might preserve the power to gratify their private aims. Many of the
evils which existed kept their ground through remaining imperfections in
the constitution. The popular element was too restricted, and the abuses
were diminished when the form of government was improved.
Pope's receipt for putting an end to political rancour was that the
public should accept his assurance that only fools troubled their heads
about forms of government. His remedy for religious discord was that the
world should receive his dictum that only bad men could attach
importance to religious beliefs:
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right.[882]
Since no one, he says, can have a wrong faith whose life is in the
right, all who fight for modes of faith must be graceless zealots. Two
conclusions are involved in his principle,--the first, that religious
belief and worship are not any necessary part of a life in the right;
the second, that the mode of faith has not the faintest influence upon
moral practice. Without stopping to consider the first point, we have
only to glance at the history of christianity for a decisive refutation
of the second. Thousands upon thousands of "graceless zealots"
contended, at the cost of their lives, for a mode of faith which changed
the face of the world. Pope must have argued that the effect would have
been equal, nay, superior, if christian ethics had been divorced from
christian theology. Apostles and martyrs, then martyrs no more, should
have said to pagans, "Accept our moral precepts, and it matters not
whether you believe that there is one god, or many gods, or no god. It
does not signify whether you believe that the divine nature, and divine
mission of Jesus Christ, was a truth or a pretence, his resurrection a
fact or a fable. It does not even signify whether you believe that there
is any resurrection at all, whether you are convinced that there is an
everlasting reward for the righteous, or are persuaded that wicked and
righteous will both be annihilated. These are only 'modes of faith'
which do not affect morality, and we should be 'graceless zealots' to
insist upon them." Pope produces an additional reason in support of his
principle. "The world," he says, "will disagree in their religious hopes
and faith, but charity is the concern of everybody. Everything which
thwarts this charity must be false, and all things must be of God which
bless or mend mankind."[883] Consequently, Pope's idea of charity was
never to struggle for a doctrine which would provoke disagreement; and
whoever roused opposition by warring against ignorance and error,
proclaimed himself a false teacher by his very zeal to disseminate the
truth. The christian who exposed polytheism could not be a minister of
God, nor could any doctrine "bless and mend" heathens which did not
leave their idolatrous superstitions undisturbed. The principle cannot
be limited to religion. The world disagree in their conceptions of a
"life in the right;" the charity which is "all mankind's concern," would
be violated by questioning the lax ideas which abound; and the
moralists who "fight" for a pure system of ethics, must be classed, in
turn, with "graceless zealots." The triumph of Pope's system would be
the destruction of morality, religion, and charity; for religion and
morality must be dead already when it is acknowledged that zeal for
their purity and propagation is a sin, and the check of religion and
morality being withdrawn, the charity which remained would be that of
the savage and felon.
Pope set at nought his own maxims. In the name of charity he demanded
that men should not contend for their faith, and he declined to exercise
the charity he enjoined. Everyone with him was a "graceless zealot" who
ventured to dissent from his private decree. This decree, which was to
bind the rest of the world, was not to bind Bolingbroke and himself.
They were both privileged to "fight for modes of faith." Bolingbroke, a
scurrilous deist, whose writings are stuffed with frenzied invectives
against the religious "faith and hope" of the vast majority of the
English people, and who was the true type, in the worst sense, of a
"graceless zealot," is lauded by Pope to the skies for his philosophic
wisdom. Pope, on his own part, maintained in the Essay a controversial
discussion on the origin of evil, and other mysterious topics, which
most of the "zealots" he upbraided were content to leave undetermined.
He laid down the law with dictatorial self-sufficiency, treated the
difficulties of humbler inquirers with scorn, and denounced, in
taunting, contumelious language, the impugners of the government of God.
He offered no reason for excepting the deistical "mode of faith" from
his law, unless we suppose him to have tacitly relied on his assertion
that those who shared his deism were "slaves to no sect, took no private
road, but looked through Nature up to Nature's God."[884] The plea
avails nothing. All who are honest in their opinions believe that they
hold the truth, and that they are not bigoted slaves to private
delusions. Few men could urge the claim with less plausibility than
Pope. His tenets discredited his pretensions. If he looked up to
Nature's God, he, nevertheless, stigmatised those who presumed to study
the God they adored. He believed that God infused wicked passions into
men, that his physical laws were deteriorated by change, and overruled
by chance.[885] He held that the same wicked passions which God poured
into the human mind were originally generated by animal food; his theory
of morals was licentious and contradictory; his opinions in general
incoherent and irreconcileable. He had little cause to boast that he
"took no private road" when there probably did not live a second person
who would have subscribed to his creed.
The fourth epistle treats of Happiness, and was a supplement imposed on
the poet by Bolingbroke. The professed object was to refute the atheist,
who maintained that the condition of mankind was not regulated by the
rules of justice, and thence inferred that there could be no
superintending Providence. The real intention of the "guide,
philosopher, and friend" was to deprive divines of the argument for the
immortality of the soul which they built upon the want of proportion
between men's conduct and happiness. Pope was partly the dupe of
Bolingbroke, and partly his accomplice. He may not have seen the full
scope of his instructor's lessons, but he knew that they favoured
annihilation, and, to please "the master of the poet and the song," the
poet forbore to assert the opposite belief. His orthodox friends
complained of the omission, and Pope was driven to deny that there was
any connection between the purpose of his Essay and the doctrine of a
future state. After mentioning to Spence that he had omitted the address
to our Saviour by the advice of Berkeley, he added, "One of our priests,
who are more narrow-minded than yours, made a less sensible objection to
the epistle on Happiness. He was very angry that there was nothing said
in it of our eternal happiness hereafter, though my subject was
expressly to treat only of the state of man here."[886] He subsequently
extended the remark to the entire poem. "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."[887] When Pope told Spence that he could not
discuss the fall of man in his Essay, because the "past state" of man
was foreign to his subject, he had forgotten the contents of his third
epistle, which treats of primitive man, the age of innocence, and the
depravation of mankind through eating meat. When he said that a future
state "lay out of his subject," he did not perceive the true bearings of
his promise to "vindicate the ways of God to man,"[888] nor the force of
his own admission that to pronounce upon the fitness of man's nature, to
judge "the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is
necessary first to know what relation it is placed in, and what is the
proper end and purpose of its being."[889] This is the language of
common sense. Man's condition on earth is adapted to his destiny, which
can alone explain and justify his position in the world. The justice and
goodness of the Deity wear a totally different aspect according as we
discover evidence that life is a discipline for immortality, or a
sorrowful transit to annihilation. The first epistle, again, is on the
"nature and state of man with respect to the universe;" and in this
relation of man to the universe, the one inquiry which gives importance
to the rest, is whether we are to have a share in the eternal system of
things, or whether, as the poet says of vegetables, we are mere "bubbles
which rise from the sea of matter, break, and return to it."[890] The
destiny of man was at the root of Pope's subject, and he could not have
thought otherwise unless he had been bent upon accommodating his
philosophy to the infidelity of Bolingbroke.
The weak attempt to use language which would fit both infidelity and
belief, led to sorry conclusions. Pope allowed that it was God who
instilled into man a hope of immortality, with the object of soothing
him during his earthly career; but the poet was careful to employ
expressions which implied that the hope might be a delusion.[891] He
thus vindicated the ways of God by acknowledging that the Creator of the
universe might be a deceiver. As the hope, which he confessed to be a
promise engraved on the heart of man by the finger of God, might be
false, the fears of future punishment imprinted on the conscience could
not be more trustworthy. The christian who died, exulting, at the stake,
in the flower of his age, a martyr to conscience, and the miscreant, who
went terrified to execution, oppressed by the sense of his crimes, might
both be mocked by the lying voice which spoke through the nature
bestowed on them by their Maker. The poet could see no objection to the
supposition that the Governor of the world might rule by promises he
never intended to keep, and by threats he never intended to enforce.
The more we look into the nature which the Deity has conferred upon man,
the more untenable Pope's alternative appears. All our best aims,--the
efforts after holiness, love, knowledge, and rational happiness,--are a
progressive work in which the mind is increasingly fitted for the
enjoyment of its aspirations, without once attaining to a satisfactory
realisation of its desires. Especially the Deity is hidden from our
sight; and devout souls would be baulked of the primary purpose of their
existence unless they were to behold him at last. The legitimate
deduction is strengthened when we consider the afflictive methods by
which we advance towards the appointed ends of our being. The toils of
virtuous men, their pangs of body, their anguish of mind, their
sacrifices to duty, their heroic martyrdoms, are irreconcileable with
the wisdom and goodness of the Deity if total extinction is the meed of
victory to the suffering soldier. The painful education of the soul,
which is unintelligible as an abortive preliminary to annihilation,
becomes plain as a preparation to a higher state, in which the purified
spirit enters upon the enjoyment of its regenerated faculties. Pope
disregarded the fundamental principle of his Essay. The burthen of his
argument in his first epistle is that the evils of the world are
explained by the hypothesis that they have an ulterior end. The moral
life of man is the sphere in which we can best perceive the necessity
for the principle, and follow its wise operation; and it was just this
instance of a clear exemplification of his law which Pope was willing to
reject. He admitted that the life of the saint upon earth might require
no sequel, that his brief and self-denying history might properly begin
and end with his passage from the cradle to the grave, that his
implanted hopes and fears might be a deception, the objects proposed to
his faculties a vain enticement, his sufferings a fruitless discipline,
his conquest over sin a barren triumph, his growth in holiness the
signal for resolving him into dust.