has turned the latter part of the line thus,
Jusqu'à l'homme, ce chef, ce roi de l'univers.
"Even to man, this head, this king of the universe," which is so sad a
blunder, that it contradicts the poet's peculiar system; who, although
he allows man to be king of this inferior world, yet he thinks it
madness to make him king of the universe. If the philosophy and argument
of the poem could not teach him this, yet methinks the poet's own words,
in this very Epistle, might have prevented his mistake:
So man; who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown.
If the translator imagined that Mr. Pope was speaking ironically where
he talks of man's imperial race, and so would heighten the ridicule of
the original by _ce roi de l'univers_, the mistake is still worse; for
the force of the argument depends upon its being said seriously; the
poet being here speaking of a scale from the highest to the lowest in
the mundane system.
Ver. 224. _For ever separate, &c._] Near, by the similitude of the
operation; separate, by the immense difference in the nature of the
powers.
Ver. 226. _What thin partitions, &c._] So thin, that the atheistic
philosophers, as Protagoras, held that thought was only sense: and from
thence concluded, that every imagination or opinion of every man was
true; Πασα φαντασια εστιν αληθης. But the poet determines more
philosophically that they are really and essentially different, how thin
soever the partition be by which they are divided. Thus (to illustrate
the truth of this observation) when a geometer considers a triangle, in
order to demonstrate the equality of its three angles to two right ones,
he has the picture or image of some sensible triangle in his mind, which
is sense; yet, notwithstanding, he must needs have the notion or idea of
an intellectual triangle likewise, which is thought; for this plain
reason, because every image or picture of a triangle must needs be
obtusangular, or rectangular, or acutangular; but that which, in his
mind, is the subject of his proposition, is the ratio of a triangle,
undetermined to any of these species. On this account it was that
Aristotle said, Νοηματα τινι διοισει, του μη φαντασματα ειναι, η ουδε
ταυτα φαντασματα, αλλ' ουκ ανευ φαντασματων. "The conceptions of the
mind differ somewhat from sensible images; they are not sensible images,
and yet not quite free or disengaged from sensible images."
Ver. 243. _Or in the full creation leave a void, &c._] This is only an
illustrating allusion to the Aristotelian doctrines of _plenum_ and
_vacuum_, the full and void here meant relating not to matter but to
life.
Ver. 247. _And if each system in gradation roll,_] Alluding to the
motion of the planetary bodies of each system, and to the figures
described by that motion.
Ver. 251. _Let earth unbalanced_] _i.e._ Being no longer kept within its
orbit by the different directions of its progressive and attractive
motions,--which, like equal weights in a balance, keep it in an
equilibre.
Ver. 253. _Let ruling angels, &c._] The poet, throughout this work, has,
with great art, used an advantage which his employing a Platonic
principle for the foundation of his Essay, had afforded him; and that
is, the expressing himself, as here, in Platonic language, which,
luckily for his purpose, is highly poetical, at the same time that it
adds a grace to the uniformity of his reasoning.
Ver. 259. _What if the foot, &c._] This fine illustration in defence of
the system of nature, is taken from St. Paul, who employed it to defend
the system of grace.
Ver. 266. _The great directing_ MIND, _&c._] "Veneramur autem et colimus
ob dominium. Deus enim sine dominio, providentiâ, et causis finalibus,
nihil aliud est quam fatum et natura." _Newtoni Princip. Schol. gener.
sub finem._
Ver. 268. _Whose body nature is, &c._] M. de Crousaz remarks, on this
line, that "A Spinozist would express himself in this manner." I believe
he would; for so the infamous Toland has done, in his atheist's liturgy,
called Pantheisticon. But so would St. Paul likewise, who, writing on
this subject, the omnipresence of God in his Providence, and in his
Substance, says, in the words of a pantheistical Greek poet, _In him we
live, and move, and have our being_; _i.e._ we are parts of him, _his
offspring_: And the reason is, because a religious theist and an impious
pantheist both profess to believe the omnipresence of God. But would
Spinoza, as Mr. Pope does, call God the great directing mind of all, who
hath intentionally created a perfect universe? Or would a Spinozist have
told us,
The workman from the work distinct was known?
a line that overturns all Spinozism from its very foundations. But this
sublime description of the Godhead contains not only the divinity of St.
Paul; but, if that will not satisfy the men he writes against, the
philosophy likewise of Sir Isaac Newton. The poet says,
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul; &c.
The philosopher:--"In ipso continentur et moventur universa, sed absque
mutuâ passione. Deus nihil patitur ex corporum motibus; illa nullam
sentiunt resistentiam ex omnipræsentiâ Dei.--Corpore omni et figurâ
corporeâ destituitur.--Omnia regit et omnia cognoscit.--Cum unaquæque
spatii, particula sit semper, et unumquodque durationis indivisibile
momentum, ubique certe rerum omnium Fabricator ac Dominus non erit
nunquam, nusquam."
Mr. Pope:
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:
To him, no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
Sir Isaac Newton:--"Annon ex phænomenis constat esse entem incorporeum,
viventem, intelligentem, omnipræsentem, qui in spatio infinito, tanquam
sensorio suo, res ipsas intime cernat, penitusque perspiciat, totasque
intra se præsens præsentes complectatur?"
But now, admitting there were an ambiguity in these expressions, so
great that a Spinozist might employ them to express his own particular
principles; and such a thing might well be, because the Spinozists, in
order to hide the impiety of their principle, are wont to express the
omnipresence of God in terms that any religious theist might employ; in
this case, I say, how are we to judge of the poet's meaning? Surely by
the whole tenor of his argument. Now, take the words in the sense of the
Spinozists, and he is made, in the conclusion of the epistle, to
overthrow all he had been advancing throughout the body of it: for
Spinozism is the destruction of an universe, where every thing tends, by
a foreseen contrivance in all its parts, to the perfection of the whole.
But allow him to employ the passage in the sense of St. Paul, That we,
and all creatures, live, and move, and have our being in God; and then
it will be seen to be the most logical support of all that had preceded.
For the poet, having, as we say, laboured through his epistle to prove,
that every thing in the universe tends, by a foreseen contrivance, and a
present direction of all its parts, to the perfection of the whole, it
might be objected, that such a disposition of things, implying in God a
painful, operose, and inconceivable extent of Providence, it could not
be supposed that such care extended to all, but was confined to the more
noble parts of the creation. This gross conception of the First Cause
the poet exposes, by showing that God is equally and intimately present
to every particle of matter, to every sort of substance, and in every
instant of being.
Ver. 277. _As full, as perfect, &c._] Which M. du Resnel translates
thus,
Dans un homme ignoré sous une humble chaumière,
Que dans le séraphin, rayonnant de lumière.
_i.e._ "As well in the ignorant man, who inhabits a humble cottage, as
in the seraph encompassed with rays of light." The translator, in good
earnest thought, that a vile man that mourned could be no other than
some poor country cottager. Which has betrayed M. de Crousaz into this
important remark: "For all that, we sometimes find in persons of the
lowest rank, a fund of probity and resignation which preserves them from
contempt; their minds are, indeed, but narrow, yet fitted to their
station," &c. _Comm._ p. 120. But Mr. Pope had no such childish idea in
his head. He was here opposing the human species to the angelic; and so
spoke of the first, when compared to the latter, as vile and
disconsolate. The force and beauty of the reflection depend upon this
sense; and, what is more, the propriety of it.
Ver. 278. _As the rapt seraph, &c._] Alluding to the name seraphim,
signifying burners.
Ver. 294. _One truth is clear, whatever is, is right._] It will be
difficult to think any caviller should have objected to this conclusion;
especially when the author, in this very epistle, has himself thus
explained it:
Respecting man, whatever wrong we call,
May, must be right, as relative to all.
So man, who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown;
Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal:
'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.
But without any regard to the evidence of this illustration, M. de
Crousaz exclaims: "See the general conclusion, All that is, is right. So
that at the sight of Charles the First losing his head on the scaffold,
we must have said, this is right; at the sight too of his judges
condemning him, we must have said, this is right; at the sight of some
of these judges, taken and condemned for the action which he had owned
to be right, we must have cried out, this is doubly right." Never was
any thing more amazing than that the absurdities arising from the sense
in which this critic takes the great principle, of whatever is, is
right, did not show him his mistake. For could any one in his senses
employ a proposition in a meaning from whence such evident absurdities
immediately arise? I have observed, that this conclusion, whatever is,
is right, is a consequence of these premises, that partial evil tends to
universal good; which the author employs as a principle to humble the
pride of man, who would impiously make God accountable for his creation.
What then does common sense teach us to understand by whatever is, is
right? Did the poet mean right with regard to man, or right with regard
to God; right with regard to itself, or right with regard to its
ultimate tendency? Surely with regard to God; for he tells us his design
is to vindicate the ways of God to man. Surely with regard to its
ultimate tendency; for he tells us again, all partial ill is universal
good. Ver. 291. Now is this any encouragement to vice? Or does it take
off from the crime of him who commits it, that God providentially
produces good out of evil? Had Mr. Pope abruptly said in his conclusion,
the result of all is, that whatever is, is right, the objector had even
then been inexcusable for putting so absurd a sense upon the words, when
he might have seen that it was a conclusion from the general principle
above-mentioned; and therefore must necessarily have another meaning.
But what must we think of him, when the poet, to prevent mistakes, had
delivered, in this very place, the principle itself, together with this
conclusion as the consequence of it?
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
He could not have told his reader plainer that his conclusion was the
consequence of that principle, unless he had written therefore in great
church letters.
NOTES ON EPISTLE II.
Ver. 3. _Placed on this isthmus, &c._] As the poet hath given us this
sublime description of man for the very contrary purpose to what
sceptics are wont to employ such kind of paintings, namely, not to deter
men from the search, but to excite them to the discovery of truth; he
hath, with great judgment, represented men as doubting and wavering
between the right and wrong object; from which state it is allowable to
hope he may be relieved by a careful and circumspect use of reason. On
the contrary, had he supposed man so blind as to be busied in choosing,
or doubtful in his choice, between two objects equally wrong, the case
had appeared desperate, and all study of man had been effectually
discouraged. But M. du Resnel, not seeing the reason and beauty of this
conduct, hath run into the very absurdity, which I have here shown Mr.
Pope so artfully avoided. Of which the learned reader may take the
following proofs. The poet says,
Man hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest.
Now he tells us it is man's duty to act, not rest, as the stoics
thought; and, to this their principle, the latter word alludes, whose
virtue, as he says afterwards, is
Fixed as in a frost,
Contracted all, retiring to the breast:
But strength of mind is exercise, not rest.
Now hear the translator, who is not for mincing matters:
Seroit-il en naissant au travail condamné?
Aux douceurs du répos seroit-il destiné?
and these are both wrong, for man is neither condemned to slavish toil
and labour, nor yet indulged in the luxury of repose. The poet says,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or beast.
_i.e._ He doubts, as appears from the very next line, whether his soul
be mortal or immortal; one of which is the truth, namely, its
immortality, as the poet himself teaches, when he speaks of the
omnipresence of God:
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part.--Epist. i. 275.
The translator, as we say, unconscious of the poet's purpose, rambles as
before:
Tantôt de son esprit admirant l'excellence,
Il pense qu'il est Dieu, qu'il en a la puissance;
Et tantôt gémissant des besoins de son corps,
Il croit que de la brute, il n'a que les ressorts.
Here his head, turned to a sceptical view, was running on the different
extravagances of Plato in his theology, and of Descartes in his
physiology. Sometimes, says he, man believes himself a real God; and
sometimes again, a mere machine: things quite out of the poet's thought
in this place. Again, the poet, in a beautiful allusion to Scripture
sentiments, breaks out into this just and moral reflection on man's
condition here,
Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err.
The translator turns this fine and sober thought into the most
outrageous scepticism:
Ce n'est que pour mourir, qu'il est né, qu'il respire;
Et toute sa raison n'est presque qu'un délire.
and so make his author directly contradict himself, where he says of
man, that he hath
Too much knowledge for the sceptic side.
Ver. 10. _Born but to die, &c._] The author's meaning is, that as we are
born to die, and yet do enjoy some small portion of life, so, though we
reason to err, yet we comprehend some few truths. This is the weak state
of reason, in which error mixes itself with all its true conclusions
concerning man's nature.
Ver. 11. _Alike in ignorance, &c._] _i.e._ The proper sphere of his
reason is so narrow, and the exercise of it so nice, that the too
immoderate use of it is attended with the same ignorance that proceeds
from the not using it at all. Yet though, in both these cases, he is
abused by himself, he has it still in his own power to disabuse himself,
in making his passions subservient to the means, and regulating his
reason by the end of life.
Ver. 12. _Whether he thinks too little or too much:_] It is so true,
that ignorance arises as well from pushing our inquiries too far, as
from not carrying them far enough, that we may observe, when
speculations, even in science, are carried beyond a certain point,--that
point where use is reasonably supposed to end, and mere curiosity to
begin,--they conclude in the most extravagant and senseless inferences,
such as the unreality of matter; the reality of space; the servility of
the will, &c. The cause of this sudden fall out of full light into utter
darkness, seems not to arise from the natural condition of things, but
to be the arbitrary decree of infinite wisdom and goodness, which
imposed a barrier to the extravagances of its giddy, lawless creature,
always inclined to pursue truths of less importance too far, and to
neglect those which are more necessary for his improvement in his
station here.
Ver. 17. _Sole judge of Truth, in endless error hurled:_] Some have
imagined that the author, by, in endless error hurled, meant, cast into
endless error, or into the regions of endless error, and therefore have
taken notice of it as an incongruity of speech. But they neither
understood the poet's language, nor his sense. To hurl and cast are not
synonymous; but related only as the genus and species; for to hurl
signifies not simply to cast, but to cast backward and forward, and is
taken from the rural game called hurling. So that, into endless error
hurled, as these critics would have it, would have been a barbarism. His
words therefore signify tossed about in endless error; and this he
intended they should signify, as appears from the antithesis, sole judge
of truth. So that the sense of the whole is, "Though, as sole judge of
truth, he is now fixed and stable; yet, as involved in endless error, he
is now again hurled, or tossed up and down in it." This shows us how
cautious we ought to be in censuring the expressions of a writer, one of
whose characteristic qualities was correctness of expression and
propriety of sentiment.
Ver. 20. _Go, measure earth, &c._] Alluding to the noble and useful
labours of the modern mathematicians, in measuring a degree at the
equator and the polar circle, in order to determine the true figure of
the earth; of great importance to astronomy and navigation; and which
proved of equal honour to the wonderful sagacity of Newton.
Ver. 22. _Correct old Time, &c._] This alludes to Newton's Grecian
Chronology, which he reformed on those two sublime conceptions, the
difference between the reigns of kings, and the generations of men; and
the position of the colures of the equinoxes and solstices at the time
of the Argonautic expedition.
Ver. 29, 30. _Go, teach Eternal Wisdom, &c._] These two lines are a
conclusion from all that had been said from ver. 18 to this effect: "Go
now, vain man, elated with thy acquirements in real science, and
imaginary intimacy with God; go, and run into all the extravagances I
have exploded in the first Epistle, where thou pretendest to teach
Providence how to govern; then drop into the obscurities of thy own
nature, and thereby manifest thy ignorance and folly."
Ver. 31. _Superior beings, &c._] In these lines the poet speaks to this
effect: "But to make you fully sensible of the difficulty of this study,
I shall instance in the great Newton himself, whom, when superior
beings, not long since, saw capable of unfolding the whole law of
nature, they were in doubt whether the owner of such prodigious sagacity
should not be reckoned of their order, just as men, when they see the
surprising marks of reason in an ape, are almost tempted to rank him
with their own kind." And yet this wondrous man could go no further in
the knowledge of himself than the generality of his species. M. du
Resnel, who understood nothing of all this, translates these four
celebrated lines thus:
Des célestes esprits la vive intelligence
Regarde avec pitié notre foible science;
Newton, le grand Newton, que nous admirons tous,
Est peut-être pour eux, ce qu'un singe est pour nous.
But it is not the pity, but the admiration of the celestial spirits
which is here spoken of. And it was for no slight cause they admired; it
was, to see a mortal man unfold the whole law of nature. By which we see
it was not Mr. Pope's intention to bring any of the ape's qualities, but
its sagacity, into the comparison. But why the ape's, it may be said,
rather than the sagacity of some more decent animal, particularly the
half-reasoning elephant, as the poet calls it; which, as well on account
of this its excellence, as for its having no ridiculous side, like the
ape, on which it could be viewed, seems better to have deserved this
honour? I reply, because, as a shape resembling human (which only the
ape has) must be joined with great sagacity, to raise a suspicion that
the animal, thus endowed, is related to man, so the spirituality, which
Newton had in common with angels, joined to a penetration superior to
man, made those beings suspect he might be one of their order. On this
ground of relation, we see the whole beauty of the thought depends. And
here let me take notice of a new species of the sublime, of which our
poet may be justly said to be the maker; 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 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; of
which he hath given many examples, both in this Essay, and his other
poems; one of the noblest being the passage in question. This seems to
be the last effort of the imagination to poetical perfection; and in
this compounded excellence, the wit receives a dignity from the sublime,
and the sublime a splendour from the wit, which, in their state of
separate existence, they neither of them had. Yet a late critic, who
writes with the decision of a Lord of Session on Parnassus, thinks
otherwise: "It may be gathered," says he, "from what is said above, that
wit and ridicule make not an agreeable mixture with grandeur. Dissimilar
emotions have a fine effect in a slow succession; but in a rapid
succession which approaches to co-existence, they will not be
relished."[1595] What pity is it, that the poet should here confute the
critic, by doing what the critic, with his rules, teaches us cannot be
done. Boileau, who was both poet and critic, had a clear view of this
excellence in idea; while the mere critic had no idea of what had been
clearly set before his eyes.
On peut être à la fois et pompeux et plaisant;
Et je haïs un sublime ennuyeux et pesant.
Ver. 37. _Who saw its fires here rise, &c._] Sir Isaac Newton, in
calculating the velocity of a comet's motion, and the course it
describes, when it becomes visible in its descent to, and ascent from,
the sun, conjectured, with the highest appearance of truth, that comets
revolve perpetually round the sun, in ellipses vastly eccentrical, and
very nearly approaching to parabolas. In which he was greatly confirmed,
in observing between two comets a coincidence in their perihelions, and
a perfect agreement in their velocities.
Ver. 45. _vanity, or dress,_] These are the first parts of what the
poet, in the preceding line, calls the scholar's equipage of pride. By
vanity, is meant that luxuriancy of thought and expression in which a
writer indulges himself, to show the fruitfulness of his fancy or
invention. By dress, is to be understood a lower degree of that
practice, in amplification of thought and ornamental expression, to give
force to what the writer would convey: but even this, the poet, in a
severe search after truth, condemns; and with great judgment,
conciseness of thought, and simplicity of expression, being as well the
best instruments, as the best vehicles of truth. Shakespeare touches
upon this latter advantage with great force and humour. The flatterer
says to Timon in distress, "I cannot cover the monstrous bulk of their
ingratitude with any size of words." The other replies, "Let it go
naked; men may see't the better."
Ver. 46. _Or learning's luxury, or idleness;_] The luxury of learning
consists in dressing up and disguising old notions in a new way, so as
to make them more fashionable and palatable; instead of examining and
scrutinizing their truth. As this is often done for pomp and show, it is
called luxury; as it is often done too to save pains and labour, it is
called idleness.
Ver. 47. _Or tricks to show the stretch of human brain,_] Such as the
mathematical demonstration concerning the small quantity of matter; the
endless divisibility of it, &c.
Ver. 48. _Mere curious pleasure, or ingenious pain;_] _i.e._ when
admiration has set the mind on the rack.
Ver. 49. _Expunge the whole, or lop th' excrescent parts
Of all our vices have created arts;_]
_i.e._ Those parts of Natural Philosophy, Logic, Rhetoric, Poetry, &c.,
which administer to luxury, deceit, ambition, effeminacy, &c.
Ver. 74. _Reason, the future, &c._] _i.e._ by experience, reason
collects the future; and by argumentation, the consequence.
Ver. 109. _Nor God alone, &c._
The translator turns it thus:
Dieu lui-même, Dieu sort de son profond repos.
And so, makes an epicurean God, of the Governor of the universe. M. de
Crousaz does not spare this expression of God's coming out of his
profound repose. "It is," says he, "excessively poetical, and presents
us with ideas which we ought not to dwell upon," &c. and then, as usual,
blames the author for the blunder of his translator. _Comm._ p. 158.
Ver. 109. _Nor God alone, &c._] These words are only a simple
affirmation in the poetic dress of a similitude, to this purpose: "Good
is not only produced by the subdual of the passions, but by the
turbulent exercise of them,"--a truth conveyed under the most sublime
imagery that poetry could conceive or paint. For the author is here only
showing the providential issue of the passions, and how, by God's
gracious disposition, they are turned away from their natural
destructive bias, to promote the happiness of mankind. As to the method
in which they are to be treated by man, in whom they are found, all that
he contends for, in favour of them, is only this, that they should not
be quite rooted up and destroyed, as the stoics, and their followers, in
all religions, foolishly attempted. For the rest, he constantly repeats
this advice,
The action of the stronger to suspend,
Reason still use, to reason still attend.
Ver. 133. _As man, perhaps, &c._] "Antipater Sidonius Poeta omnibus
annis uno die natali tantum corripiebatur febre, et eo consumptus est
satis longâ senectâ." _Plin._ 1. vii. _N. H._ This Antipater was in the
times of Crassus, and is celebrated for the quickness of his parts by
Cicero.
Ver. 147. _Reason itself, &c._] The Poet, in some other of his epistles,
gives examples of the doctrines and precepts here delivered. Thus, in
that Of the Use of Riches, he has illustrated this truth in the
character of Cotta:
Old Cotta shamed his fortune and his birth,
Yet was not Cotta void of wit or worth.
What though (the use of barb'rous spits forgot)
His kitchen vied in coolness with his grot?
If Cotta lived on pulse, it was no more
Than bramins, saints, and sages did before.
Ver. 149. _We, wretched subjects, &c._] St. Paul himself did not choose
to employ other arguments, when disposed to give us the highest idea of
the usefulness of christianity (Rom. vii.) But it may be, the poet finds
a remedy in natural religion. Far from it. He here leaves reason
unrelieved. What is this, then, but an intimation that we ought to seek
for a cure in that religion, which only dares profess to give it?
Ver. 163. _'Tis hers to rectify, &c._] The meaning of this precept is,
That as the ruling passion is implanted by nature, it is reason's office
to regulate, direct, and restrain, but not to overthrow it. To reform
the passion of avarice, for instance, into a parsimonious dispensation
of the public revenues: to direct the passion of love, whose object is
worth and beauty,
To the first good, first perfect, and first fair,
the το καλον τ' αγαθον, as his master Plato advises; and to restrain
spleen to a contempt and hatred of vice. This is what the poet meant,
and what every unprejudiced man could not but see he must needs mean, by
rectifying the master passion, though he had not confined us to this
sense, in the reason he gives of his precept in these words:
A mightier pow'r the strong direction sends,
And several men impels to several ends;
for what ends are they which God impels to, but the ends of virtue?
Ver. 175. _Th' eternal art, &c._] The author has, throughout these
epistles, explained his meaning to be that vice is, in its own nature,
the greatest of evils, and produced through the abuse of man's free
will:
What makes all physical and moral ill?
There deviates nature, and here wanders will:
but that God in his infinite goodness, deviously turns the natural bias
of its malignity to the advancement of human happiness. A doctrine very
different from the Fable of the Bees, which impiously and foolishly
supposes it to have that natural tendency.
Ver. 204. _The god within the mind._] A Platonic phrase for conscience;
and here employed with great judgment and propriety. For conscience
either signifies, speculatively, the judgment we pass of things upon
whatever principles we chance to have, and then it is only opinion, a
very unable judge and divider; or else it signifies, practically, the
application of the eternal rule of right (received by us as the law of
God) to the regulation of our actions; and then it is properly
conscience, the god (or the law of God) within the mind, of power to
divide the light from the darkness in this Chaos of the passions.
Ver. 253. _Wants, frailties, passions, closer still ally
The common interest, &c._]
As these lines have been misunderstood, I shall give the reader their
plain and obvious meaning. To these frailties, says he, we owe all the
endearments of private life; yet when we come to that age, which
generally disposes men to think more seriously of the true value of
things, and consequently of their provision for a future state, the
consideration, that the grounds of those joys, loves, and friendships,
are wants, frailties, and passions, proves the best expedient to wean us
from the world; a disengagement so friendly to that provision we are now
making for another state. The observation is new, and would in any place
be extremely beautiful, but has here an infinite grace and propriety, as
it so well confirms, by an instance of great moment, the general thesis,
that God makes ill, at every step, productive of good.
Ver. 270. _the poet in his muse._] The author having said, that no one
could change his own profession or views for those of another, intended
to carry his observations still further, and show that men were
unwilling to exchange their own acquirements even for those of the same
kind, confessedly larger, and infinitely more eminent in another. To
this end he wrote,
What partly pleases, totally will shock:
I question much, if Toland would be Locke.
But wanting another proper instance of this truth, he reserved the lines
above for some following edition of this Essay, which he did not live to
give.
Ver. 280. _And beads and pray'r-books are the toys of age:_] A satire on
what is called, in popery, the _Opus operatum_. As this is a description
of the circle of human life returning into itself by a second childhood,
the poet has with great elegance concluded his description with the same
image with which he set out, "And life's poor play is o'er."
Ver. 286. _And each vacuity of sense by pride:_] An eminent casuist,
Father Francis Garasse, in his Somme Théologique, has drawn a very
charitable conclusion from this principle, which he hath well
illustrated: "Selon la justice," says this equitable divine, "tout
travail honnête doit être recompensé de louange ou de satisfaction.
Quand les bons esprits font un ouvrage excellent, ils sont justement
recompensés par les suffrages du public. Quand un pauvre esprit
travaille beaucoup, pour faire un mauvais ouvrage, il n'est pas juste ni
raisonnable, qu'il attende des louanges publiques; car elles ne lui sont
pas dues. Mais afin que ses travaux ne demeurent pas sans recompense,
Dieu lui donne une satisfaction personelle, que personne ne lui peut
envier sans une injustice plus que barbare; tout ainsi que Dieu, qui est
juste, donne de la satisfaction aux grenouilles de leur chant. Autrement
la blâme public, joint à leur mécontentement, seroit suffisant pour les
réduire au désespoir."
NOTES ON EPISTLE III.
Ver. 3. _superfluous health,_] Immoderate labour and immoderate study
are equally the impairers of health. They whose station sets them above
both, must needs have an abundance of it, which not being employed in
the common service, but wasted in luxury and folly, the post properly
calls a superfluity.
Ver. 4. _impudence of wealth,_] Because wealth pretends to be wisdom,
wit, learning, honesty, and, in short, all the virtues in their turns.
Ver. 3-6.] M. du Resnel, not seeing into the admirable purpose of the
caution contained in these four lines, hath quite dropped the most
material circumstances contained in the last of them; and what is worse,
for the sake of a foolish antithesis, hath destroyed the whole propriety
of the thought in the two first; and so, between both, hath left his
author neither sense nor system.
Dans le sein du bonheur, ou de l'adversité.
Now, of all men, those in adversity have least needs of this caution, as
being least apt to forget, that God consults the good of the whole, and
provides for it by procuring mutual happiness by means of mutual wants;
it being seen that such who yet retain the smart of any fresh calamity,
are most compassionate to others labouring under distresses, and most
prompt and ready to relieve them.
Ver. 9. _See plastic nature, &c._] M. du Resnel mistook this description
of the preservation of the material universe, by the quality of
attraction, for a description of its creation; and so translates it
Vois du sein du Chaos éclater la lumière,
Chaque atome ébranlé courir pour s'embrasser, &c.
This destroys the poet's fine analogical argument, by which he proves,
from the circumstance of mutual attraction in matter, that man, while he
seeks society, and thereby promotes the good of his species, co-operates
with God's general dispensation; whereas the circumstance of a creation
proves nothing but a Creator.
Ver. 12. _Formed and impelled, &c._] Formed and impelled are not words
of a loose, undistinguishable meaning thrown in to fill up the verse.
This is not our author's way; they are full of sense, and of the most
philosophical precision. For to make matter so cohere as to fit it for
the uses intended by its Creator, a proper configuration of its
insensible parts is as necessary as that quality so equally and
universally conferred upon it, called attraction. To express the first
part of this thought, our author says formed; and to express the latter,
impelled.
Ver. 19, 20. _Like bubbles, &c._] M. du Resnel translates these two
lines thus:
Sort du néant, y rentre, et reparoit au jour.
He is here, indeed, consistently wrong: for having, as we said, mistaken
the poet's account of the preservation of matter for the creation of it,
he commits the very same mistake with regard to the vegetable and
animal systems; and so talks now, though with the latest, of the
production of things out of nothing. Indeed, by his speaking of their
returning into nothing, he has subjected his author to M. de Crousaz's
censure: "Mr. Pope descends to the most vulgar prejudices, when he tells
us that each being returns to nothing: the vulgar think that what
disappears is annihilated," &c. _Comm._ p. 221.
Ver. 22. _One all-extending, all-preserving soul,_] Which, in the
language of Sir Isaac Newton, is "Deus omnipræsens est, non per virtutem
solam, sed etiam per substantiam: nam virtus sine substantiâ subsistere
non potest." _Newt. Princ. Schol. gen. sub fin._
Ver. 23. _greatest with the least;_] As acting more strongly and
immediately in beasts, whose instinct is plainly an external reason;
which made an old school-man say, with great elegance, "Deus est anima
brutorum:"
In this 'tis God directs.
Ver. 45. _See all things for my use!_] On the contrary, the wise man
hath said, "The Lord hath made all things for himself." Prov. xvi. 4.
Ver. 50. _Be man the wit and tyrant of the whole:_] Alluding to the
witty system of that philosopher,[1596] which made animals mere
machines, insensible of pain or pleasure; and so encouraged men in the
exercise of that tyranny over their fellow-creatures, consequent on such
a principle.
Ver. 152. _Man walked with beast, joint tenant of the shade;_] The poet
still takes his imagery from Platonic ideas, for the reason given above.
Plato had said, from old tradition, that, during the golden age, and
under the reign of Saturn, the primitive language then in use was common
to man and beasts. Moral instructors took advantage of the popular sense
of this tradition, to convey their precepts under those fables which
gave speech to the whole brute creation. The naturalists understood the
tradition in the contrary sense, to signify, that, in the first ages,
men used inarticulate sounds, like beasts, to express their wants and
sensations; and that it was by slow degrees they came to the use of
speech. This opinion was afterwards held by Lucretius, Diodorus Sic.,
and Gregory of Nyss.
Ver. 156. _All vocal beings, &c._] This may be well explained by a
sublime passage of the Psalmist, who, calling to mind the age of
innocence, and full of the great ideas of those
Chains of love
Combining all below and all above,
Which to one point, and to one centre bring,
Beast, man, or angel, servant, lord, or king;
breaks out into this rapturous and divine apostrophe, to call back the
devious creation to its pristine rectitude; that very state our author
describes above: "Praise the Lord, all his angels; praise ye him, all
his hosts. Praise ye him, sun and moon; praise him, all ye stars of
light," &c. Psalm cxlviii.
Ver. 158. _Unbribed, unbloody, &c._] _i.e._ the state described from
ver. 263 to 269 was not yet arrived. For then, when superstition was
become so extreme as to bribe the gods with human sacrifices, tyranny
became necessitated to woo the priest for a favourable answer.
Ver. 159. _Heav'n's attribute, &c._] The poet supposeth the truth of the
Scripture account, that man was created lord of this inferior world (Ep.
i. ver. 230).
Subjected these to those, and all to thee.
What hath misled some to imagine that our author hath here fallen into a
contradiction, was, I suppose, such passages as these, "Ask for what end
the heav'nly bodies shine," &c.; and again, "Has God, thou fool! worked
solely for thy good," &c. But, in truth, this is so far from
contradicting what he had said of man's prerogative, that it greatly
confirms it, and the Scripture account concerning it. And because the
licentious manner in which this subject has been treated, has made some
readers jealous and mistrustful of the author's sober meaning, I shall
endeavour to explain it. Scripture says, that man was made lord of this
sublunary world. But intoxicated with pride, the common effect of
sovereignty, he erected himself, like little partial monarchs, into a
tyrant. And as tyranny consists in supposing all made for the use of
one, he took those freedoms with all, which are the consequence of such
a principle. He soon began to consider the whole animal creation as his
slaves rather than his subjects, as created for no use of their own, but
for his use only, and therefore treated them with the utmost cruelty;
and not content, to add insult to his cruelty, he endeavoured to
philosophize himself into an opinion that these animals were mere
machines, insensible of pain or pleasure. Thus man affected to be the
wit as well as tyrant of the whole. So that it became one who adhered to
the Scripture account of man's dominion to reprove this abuse of it, and
to show that
Heav'n's attribute was universal care,
And man's prerogative to rule, but spare.
Ver. 171. _Thus then to man, &c._]
M. du Resnel has translated the lines thus:
La nature indignée alors se fit entendre;
Va, malheureux mortel, va, lui dit-elle, apprendre;
One would wonder what should make the translator represent nature in
such a passion with man, and calling him names, at a time when Mr. Pope
supposed her in her best good-humour. But what led him into this mistake
was another as gross. His author having described the state of innocence
which ends at these lines,
Heav'n's attribute was universal care,
And man's prerogative to rule, but spare,
turns from those times, to a view of these latter ages, and breaks out
into this tender and humane complaint,
Ah! how unlike the man of times to come,
Of half that live the butcher and the tomb, &c.
Unluckily, M. du Resnel took this man of times to come for the corrupter
of that first age, and so imagined the poet had introduced nature only
to set things right: he then supposed, of course, she was to be very
angry; and not finding the author had represented her in any great
emotion, he was willing to improve upon his original.
Ver. 174. _Learn from the beasts, &c._] See Pliny's _Nat. Hist._ 1.
viii. c. 27, where several instances are given of animals discovering
the medicinal efficacy of herbs, by their own use of them; and pointing
out to some operations in the art of healing, by their own practice.
Ver. 199. _observant men obeyed;_] The epithet is beautiful, as
signifying both obedience to the voice of nature, and attention to the
lessons of the animal creation. But M. l'Abbé, who has a strange
fatality of contradicting his original, whenever he attempts to
paraphrase, as he calls it, the sense, turns the lines in this manner:
Par ces mots la nature excita l'industrie,
Et de l'homme féroce enchaina la furie.
"Chained up the fury of savage man"; and so contradicts the author's
whole system of benevolence, and goes over to the atheist's, who
supposes the state of nature to be a state of war. What seems to have
misled him was these lines:
What war could ravish, commerce could bestow,
And he returned a friend who came a foe.
But M. du Resnel should have considered, that though the author holds a
state of nature to be a state of peace, yet he never imagined it
impossible that there should be quarrels in it. He had said,
So drives self-love through just and through unjust.
He pushes no system to an extravagance, but steers (as he says in his
preface) through doctrines seemingly opposite, or, in other words,
follows truth uniformly throughout.
Ver. 208. _When love was liberty,_] _i.e._ When men had no need to guard
their native liberty from their governors by civil pactions, the love
which each master of a family had for those under his care being their
best security.
Ver. 211. _'Twas virtue only, &c._] Our author hath good authority for
this account of the origin of kingship. Aristotle assures us, that it
was virtue only, or in arts or arms: Καθισταται βασιλευς εκ των επιεικων
καθ' ὑπεροχην αρετης, η πραξεων των απο της αρετης, η καθ' ὑπεροχην
τοιουτου γενους.
Ver. 219. _He from the wond'ring furrow, &c._] _i.e._ He subdued the
intractability of all the four elements, and made them subservient to
the use of man.
Ver. 225. _Then, looking up, &c._] The poet here maketh their more
serious attention to religion to have arisen, not from their gratitude
amidst abundance, but from their inability in distress, by showing that,
in prosperity, they rested in second causes, the immediate authors of
their blessings, whom they revered as God; but that, in adversity, they
reasoned up to the First:
Then, looking up from sire to sire, &c.
This, I am afraid, is but too true a representation of humanity.
Ver. 225 to 240.] M. du Resnel, not apprehending that the poet was here
returned to finish his description of the state of nature, has fallen
into one of the grossest errors that ever was committed. He has mistaken
this account of true religion for an account of the origin of idolatry,
and thus he fatally embellishes his own blunder:
Jaloux d'en conserver les traits et la figure,
Leur zèle industrieux inventa la peinture.
Leurs neveux, attentifs à ces hommes fameux,
Qui par le droit du sang avoient régné sur eux,
Trouvent-ils dans leur suite un grand, un premier père,
Leur aveugle respect l'adore et le révère.
Here you have one of the finest pieces of reasoning turned at once into
a heap of nonsense. The unlucky term of "Great first Father," was
mistaken by our translator to signify a "great grandfather." But he
should have considered, that Mr. Pope always represents God under the
idea of a Father. He should have observed, that the poet is here
describing those men who
To virtue, in the paths of pleasure trod,
And owned a father, where they own'd a God!
Ver. 231. _Ere wit oblique, &c._] A beautiful allusion to the effects of
the prismatic glass on the rays of light.
Ver. 242. _Th' enormous faith, &c._] In this Aristotle placeth the
difference between a king and a tyrant, that the first supposeth himself
made for the people; the other, that the people are made for him:
Βουλεται δ' ὁ βασιλευς ειναι φυλαξ, ὁπως ὁι μεν κεκτημενοι τας ουσιας
μηθεν αδικον πασχωσιν, ὁ δε δημος μη hυβριζηται μηθεν· ἡ δε τυραννις
προς ουδεν αποβλεπει κοινον, ει μη της ιδιας ωφελειας χαριν. Pol. lib.
V. cap. 10.
Ver. 245. _Force first made conquest, &c._] All this is agreeable to
fact, and shows our author's knowledge of human nature. For that
impotency of mind, as the Latin writers call it, which gives birth to
the enormous crimes necessary to support a tyranny, naturally subjects
its owner to all the vain, as well as real, terrors of conscience. Hence
the whole machinery of superstition. It is true, the poet observes, that
afterwards, when the tyrant's fright was over, he had cunning enough,
from the experience of the effect of superstition upon himself, to turn
it, by the assistance of the priest (who for his reward went shares with
him in the tyranny) against the justly dreaded resentment of his
subjects. For a tyrant naturally and reasonably supposeth all his slaves
to be his enemies. Having given the causes of superstition, he next
describeth its objects:
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, &c.
The ancient pagan gods are here very exactly described. This fact
evinceth the truth of that original, which the poet gives to
superstition; for if these phantasms were first raised in the
imagination of tyrants, they must needs have the qualities here assigned
to them. For force being the tyrant's virtue, and luxury his happiness,
the attributes of his god would of course be revenge and lust; in a
word, the antitype of himself. But there was another, and more
substantial cause, of the resemblance between a tyrant and a pagan god;
and that was the making gods of conquerors, as the poet says, and so
canonizing a tyrant's vices with his person. That these gods should suit
a people humbled to the stroke of a master will be no wonder, if we
recollect a generous saying of the ancients,--"that day which sees a man
a slave takes away half his virtue."
Ver. 262. _and heav'n on pride._] This might be very well said of those
times when no one was content to go to heaven without being received
there on the footing of a god, with a ceremony of an Αποθεωσις.
Ver. 283. _'Twas then, the studious head, &c._] The poet seemeth here to
mean the polite and nourishing age of Greece; and those benefactors to
mankind, which he had principally in view, were Socrates and Aristotle;
who, of all the pagan world, spoke best of God, and wrote best of
government.
Ver. 295. _Such is the world's great harmony, &c._] A harmony very
different from the pre-established harmony of the celebrated Leibnitz,
which introduceth a fatality destructive of all religion and morality.
Yet hath the learned M. de Crousaz ventured to accuse our poet of
espousing that dangerous whimsy. The pre-established harmony was built
upon, and is an outrageous extension of a conception of Plato, who,
combating the atheistical objections about the origin of evil, employs
this argument in defence of Providence: "That amongst an infinite number
of possible worlds in God's idea, this which he hath created and brought
into being, and which admits of a mixture of evil, is the best. But if
the best, then evil consequently is partial, comparatively small, and
tendeth to the greater perfection of the whole." This principle is
espoused and supported by Mr. Pope with all the power of reason and
poetry. But neither was Plato a fatalist, nor is there any fatalism in
the argument. As to the truth of the notion, that is another question;
and how far it cleareth up the very difficult controversy about the
origin of evil, is still another. That it is a full solution of the
difficulty, I cannot think, for reasons too long to be given in this
place. Perhaps we shall never have a full solution here, and it may be
no great matter though we have not, as we are demonstrably certain of
the moral attributes of the Deity. Yet this will never hinder writers
from exposing themselves on this subject. A late author[1597] thinks he
can account for the origin of evil, and therefore he will write: he
thinks too, that the clearing up this difficulty is necessary to secure
the foundation of religion, and therefore he will print. But he is
doubly mistaken: he must know little of philosophy to fancy that he has
found the solution; and still less of religion, to imagine that the want
of his solution can affect our belief in God. Such writers
Amuse th' unlearn'd, and make the learned smile.
However, Mr. Pope may be justified in receiving and enforcing this
Platonic notion, as it hath been adopted by the most celebrated and
orthodox divines both of the ancient and modern church. This doctrine
was taken up by Leibnitz; but it was to ingraft upon it a most
pernicious fatalism. Plato said, God chose the best: Leibnitz said, he
could not but choose the best, as he could not act without, what this
philosopher called, a sufficient reason. Plato supposed freedom in God
to choose one of two things equally good: Leibnitz held the supposition
to be absurd: but, however, admitting the case, he still held that God
could not choose one of two things equally good. Thus it appears, the
first went on the system of freedom; and that the latter,
notwithstanding the most artful disguises of his principles, in his
Theodicée, was a thorough fatalist: for we cannot well suppose he would
give that freedom to man which he had taken away from God. The truth of
the matter seems to be this: he saw, on the one hand, the monstrous
absurdity of supposing, with Spinoza, that blind fate was the author of
a coherent universe; but yet, on the other, he could not conceive with
Plato, how God could foresee and conduct, according to an archetypal
idea, a world, of all possible worlds the best, inhabited by free
agents. This difficulty, therefore, which made the socinians take
prescience from God, disposed Leibnitz to take free-will from man: and
thus he fashioned his fantastical hypothesis; he supposed that when God
made the body, he impressed on his new-created machine a certain series
or suite of motions; and that when he made the fellow soul, he impressed
a correspondent series of ideas; whose operations, throughout the whole
duration of the union, were so exactly timed, that whenever an idea was
excited, a correspondent motion was ever ready to satisfy the volition.
Thus, for instance, when the mind had the will to raise the arm to the
head, the body was so pre-contrived, as to raise, at that very moment,
the part required. This he called the pre-established harmony; and with
this he promised to do wonders. "Yet after all," says an excellent
philosopher and best interpreter of Newton, "he owned to his friends,
that this extraordinary notion was only a lusus ingenii (un jeu
d'esprit) to try his parts, and laugh at the credulity of philosophers;
who are as fond of a new paradox, as enthusiasts of a new light. If at
other times he was so pleased with his own notions in his Theodicée, as
to defend them seriously against the learned Dr. Clarke, that shows only
that he angled for two different sorts of reputation, from the same
performance; and unluckily he lost both. The subject was too serious to
pass for a romance; and the principles too absurd to be admitted for
truth." _Mr. Baxter's Appendix to the Inquiry into the Nature of the
Human Soul_, p. 162. As this was the case, none would have thought it
amiss in M. Voltaire to oppose one romance to another, had he rested
there. But his tale of Candide, which professes to ridicule the optimism
of Leibnitz, was apparently composed in favour of an irreligious
naturalism, which he makes the solution of all the difficulties in the
story.
Ver. 303. _For forms of government, &c._] Such as Harrington, Wildman,
Neville,[1598] &c. about the several forms of a legitimate policy. These
fine lines have been strangely misunderstood. The author, against his
own express words, against the plain sense of his system, hath been
conceived to mean, that all governments and all religions were, as to
their forms and objects, indifferent. But as this wrong judgment
proceeded from ignorance of the reason of the reproof, as explained
above,[1599] that explanation is alone sufficient to rectify the
mistake. However, not to leave him under the least suspicion in a matter
of so much importance, I shall justify the sense here given to this
passage, more at large:
I. And first, as to society: Let us consider the words themselves; and
then compare this mistaken sense with the context. The poet, we may
observe, is here speaking, not of civil society at large, but of a just
legitimate policy:
Th' according music of a well-mixed state.
Now mixed states are of various kinds; in some of which the democratic,
in others the aristocratic, and in others the monarchic form prevails.
Now, as each of these mixed forms is equally legitimate, as being
founded on the principles of natural liberty, that man is guilty of the
highest folly, who chooseth rather to employ himself in a speculative
contest for the superior excellence of one of these forms to the rest,
than in promoting the good administration of that settled form to which
he is subject. And yet most of our warm disputes about government have
been of this kind. Again, if by forms of government must needs be meant
legitimate government, because that is the subject under debate, then by
modes of faith, which is the correspondent idea, must needs be meant the
modes or explanations of the true faith, because the author is here too
on the subject of true religion:
Relumed her ancient light, not kindled new.
Besides, the very expression (than which nothing can be more precise)
confineth us to understand by modes of faith, those human explanations
of christian mysteries, in contending about which zeal and ignorance
have so perpetually violated charity. Secondly, If we consider the
context; to suppose him to mean, that all forms of government are
indifferent, is making him directly contradict the preceding paragraph,
where he extols the patriot for discriminating the true from the false
modes of government. He, says the poet,
Taught pow'r's due use to people and to kings,
Taught not to slack, nor strain its tender strings;
The less, or greater, set so justly true,
That touching one must strike the other too;
Till jarring interests of themselves create
Th' according music of a well mixed state.
Here he recommendeth the true form of government, which is the mixed. In
another place he as strongly condemneth the false, or the absolute _jure
divino_ form:
For nature knew no right divine in men.
But the reader will not be displeased to see the poet's own apology, as
I find it written in the year 1740, in his own hand, in the margin of a
pamphlet, where he found these two celebrated lines very much
misapplied: "The author of these lines 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."
II. Again, to suppose the poet to mean, that all religions are
indifferent, is an equally wrong, as well as uncharitable suspicion. Mr.
Pope, though his subject, in this Essay on Man, confineth him to natural
religion, his purpose being to vindicate God's natural dispensations to
mankind against the atheist, yet he giveth frequent intimations of a
more sublime dispensation, and even of the necessity of it, particularly
in his second Epistle, ver. 149, &c., where he confesseth the weakness
and insufficiency of human reason. And likewise in his fourth Epistle,
where, speaking of the good man, the favourite of heaven, he saith,
For him alone, hope leads from goal to goal,
And opens still, and opens on his soul:
Till, lengthened on to faith, and unconfined,
It pours the bliss that fills up all the mind.
But natural religion never lengthened hope on to faith; nor did any
religion, but the christian, ever conceive that faith could fill the
mind with happiness. Lastly, In this very Epistle, and in this very
place, speaking of the great restorers of the religion of nature, he
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." 2 Cor. iv.
4.
Ver. 305. _For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;_] These
latter ages have seen so many scandalous contentions for modes of faith,
to the violation of Christian charity, and dishonour of sacred
Scripture, that it is not at all strange they should become the object
of so benevolent and wise an author's resentment. But that which he here
seemed to have more particularly in his eye, was the long and
mischievous squabble between Waterland and Jackson,[1600] on a point
confessedly above reason, and amongst those adorable mysteries, which it
is the honour of our religion to find unfathomable. In this, by the
weight of answers and replies, redoubled upon one another without mercy,
they made so profound a progress, that the one proved, nothing hindered
in nature, but that the Son might have been the Father; and the other,
that nothing hindered in grace, but that the Son may be a mere creature.
But if, instead of throwing so many Greek Fathers at one another's
heads, they had but chanced to reflect on the sense of one Greek word,
απειρια, that it signifies both infinity and ignorance, this single
equivocation might have saved them ten thousand, which they expended in
carrying on the controversy. However, those mists that magnified the
scene enlarged the character of the combatants, and nobody expecting
common sense on a subject where we have no ideas, the defects of dulness
disappeared, and its advantages (for, advantages it has) were all
provided for. The worst is, such kind of writers seldom know when to
have done. For writing themselves up into the same delusion with their
readers, they are apt to venture out into the more open paths of
literature, where their reputation, made out of that stuff which Lucian
calls σκοτος ὁλοχροος, presently falls from them, and their nakedness
appears. And thus it fared with our two worthies. The world, which must
have always something to amuse it, was now, and it was time, grown weary
of its playthings; and catched at a new object, that promised them more
agreeable entertainment. Tindal, a kind of bastard Socrates, had brought
our speculations from heaven to earth, and, under the pretence of
advancing the antiquity of christianity, laboured to undermine its
original. This was a controversy that required another management. Clear
sense, severe reasoning, a thorough knowledge of prophane and sacred
antiquity, and an intimate acquaintance with human nature, were the
qualities proper for such as engaged in this subject. A very unpromising
adventure for these metaphysical nurslings, bred up under the shade of
chimeras. Yet they would needs venture out.[1601] What they got by it
was only to be once well laughed at, and then, forgotten.
But one odd circumstance deserves to be remembered; though they wrote
not, we may be sure, in concert, yet each attacked his adversary at the
same time; fastened upon him in the same place; and mumbled him with
just the same toothless rage. But the ill success of this escape soon
brought them to themselves. The one made a fruitless effort to revive
the old game, in a discourse on The Importance of the Doctrine of the
Trinity; and the other has been ever since rambling in Space and
Time.[1602] This short history, as insignificant as the subjects of it
are, may not be altogether unuseful to posterity. Divines may learn by
these examples to avoid the mischiefs done to religion and literature,
through the affectation of being wise above what is written, and knowing
beyond what can be understood.
Ver. 318. _And bade self-love and social be the same._] True self-love
is an appetite for that proper good, for the enjoyment of which we were
made as we are. Now that good is commensurate with all other good, and a
part and portion of universal good: it is, therefore, the same with
social, which hath these properties.
NOTES ON EPISTLE IV.
Ver. 6. _O'erlooked, seen double, &c._] O'erlooked by those who place
happiness in any thing exclusive of virtue; seen double by those who
admit any thing else to have a share with virtue in procuring happiness,
these being the two general mistakes which this Epistle is employed to
confute.
Ver. 21, 23. _Some place the bliss in action,--
Some sunk to beasts, &c._]
1. Those who place happiness, or the _summum bonum_, in pleasure, Ἡδονη;
such as the Cyrenaic sect, called, on that account, the Hedonic. 2.
Those who place it in a certain tranquillity or calmness of mind, which
they call Ευθυμια; such as the Democritic sect. 3. The Epicurean. 4. The
Stoic. 5. The Protagorean, which held that Man was παντων χρηματων
μετρον, the measure of all things; for that all things which appear to
him, are, and those things which appear not to any man, are not; so that
every imagination or opinion of every man was true. 6. The Sceptic;
whose absolute doubt is, with great judgment, said to be the effect of
indolence, as well as the absolute trust of the Protagorean. For the
same dread of labour attending the search of truth, which makes the
Protagorean presume it is always at hand, makes the Sceptic conclude it
is never to be found. The only difference is, that the laziness of the
one is desponding, and the laziness of the other sanguine; yet both can
give it a good name, and call it happiness.
Ver. 23. _Some sunk to beasts, &c._] These four lines added in the last
edition, as necessary to complete the summary of the false pursuits
after happiness among the Greek philosophers.
Ver. 35. _Remember, man, "the Universal Cause
"Acts not by partial, but by gen'ral laws:"_]
I reckon it for nothing that M. du Resnel saw none of the fine reasoning
from these two lines to ver. 73, in which the poet confutes both the
philosophic and popular errors concerning happiness. What I can least
bear is his perverting these two lines to a horrid and senseless
fatalism, foreign to the argument in hand, and directly contrary to the
poet's general principles:
Une loi générale
Détermine toujours la cause principale;
_i.e._ a general law always determines the first cause: which is the
very Fate of the ancient pagans; who supposed that the destinies gave
law to the father of gods and men. The poet says again, soon after, ver.
49, "Order is heaven's first law," _i. e._ the first law made by God
relates to order, which is a beautiful allusion to the Scripture history
of the creation, when God first appeased the disorders of chaos, and
separated the light from the darkness. Let us now hear his translator:
L'ordre, cet inflexible et grand législateur,
Qui des décrets du ciel est le premier auteur.
Order, that inflexible and grand legislator, who is the first author of
the law of heaven. A proposition abominable in most senses; absurd in
all.
Ver. 79. _Reason's whole pleasure, &c._] This is a beautiful periphrasis
for happiness; for all we feel of good is by sensation and reflection.
But the translator, who seemed little to concern himself with the poet's
philosophy or argument, mistook this description of happiness for a
description of the intellectual and sensitive faculties, opposed to one
another, and therefore turns it thus,
Le charme séducteur, dont s'enivrant les sens,
Les plaisirs de l'esprit, encore plus ravissans;
And so, with the highest absurdity, not only makes the poet constitute
_sensual excesses_ a part of human happiness, but likewise the product
of virtue.
Ver. 82. _And peace, &c._] Conscious innocence, says the poet, is the
only source of internal peace; and known innocence, of external;
therefore, peace is the sole issue of virtue, or, in his own emphatic
words, peace is all thy own; a conclusive observation in his argument;
which stands thus: Is happiness rightly placed in externals? No; for it
consists in health, peace, and competence; health and competence are the
product of temperance; and peace, of perfect innocence.
Ver. 100. _See god-like Turenne_] This epithet has a peculiar justness,
the great man to whom it is applied not being distinguished from other
generals, for any of his superior qualities, so much as for his
providential care of those whom he led to war, in which he was so
intent, that his chief purpose in taking on himself the command of
armies, seems to have been the preservation of mankind. In this god-like
care he was more remarkably employed throughout the whole course of that
famous campaign in which he lost his life.
Ver. 110. _Lent heav'n a parent, &c._] This last instance of the poet's
illustration of the ways of Providence, the reader sees has a peculiar
elegance, where a tribute of piety to a parent is paid in return of
thanks to, and made subservient of his vindication of, the great Giver
and Father of all things. The mother of the author, a person of great
piety and charity, died the year this poem was finished, viz. 1733.
Ver. 121. _Think we, like some weak prince, &c._] Agreeable hereunto,
Holy Scripture, in its account of things under the common Providence of
heaven, never represents miracles as wrought for the sake of him who is
the object of them, but in order to give credit to some of God's
extraordinary dispensations to mankind.
Ver. 123. _Shall burning Etna, &c._] Alluding to the fate of those two
great naturalists, Empedocles and Pliny, who both perished by too near
an approach to Etna and Vesuvius, while they were exploring the cause of
their eruptions.
Ver. 142. After ver. 142 in some editions:
Give each a system, all must be at strife;
What different systems for a man and wife!
The joke, though lively, was ill placed, and therefore struck out of the
text.
Ver. 177. _Go, like the Indian, &c._] Alluding to the example of the
Indian, in Epist. i. ver. 99, which shows, that that example was not
given to discredit any rational hopes of future happiness, but only to
reprove the folly of separating them from charity, as when
Zeal, not charity, became the guide,
And hell was built on spite, and heav'n on pride.
Ver. 219. _Heroes are much the same, &c._] This character might have
been drawn with greater force; and deserved the poet's care. But Milton
supplies what is here wanting.
They err who count it glorious to subdue
By conquest far and wide, to over-run
Large countries, and in field great battles win,
Great cities by assault. What do these worthies,
But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave
Peaceable nations, neighb'ring or remote,
Made captive, yet deserving freedom more
Than those their conqu'rors; who leave behind
Nothing but ruin wheresoe'er they rove,
And all the flourishing works of peace destroy?
Then swell with pride, and must be titled gods;
Till conqu'ror death discovers them scarce men,
Rolling in brutish vices and deformed,
Violent or shameful death their due reward.--Par. Reg. b. iii.
Ver. 222. _an enemy of all mankind!_] Had all nations, with regard to
their heroes, been of the humour with the Normans, who called Robert
II., the greatest of their Dukes, by the name of Robert the Devil, the
races of heroes might have been less numerous, or, however, less
mischievous.
Ver. 267. _Painful pre-eminence, &c._] This, to his friend, nor does it
at all contradict what he had said to him concerning happiness, in the
beginning of the Epistle:
'Tis never to be bought, but always free,
And fled from monarchs, St. John! dwells with thee.
For there he compliments his virtue; here he estimates the value of his
politics, which he calls wisdom. He is now proving that nothing either
external to man, or what is not in man's power, and of his own
acquirement, can make him happy here. The most plausible rival of
virtue is human wisdom: yet even this is so far from giving any degree
of real happiness, that it deprives us of those common comforts of life,
which are a kind of support, under the want of happiness. Such as the
more innocent of those delusions which he speaks of in the second
Epistle,
Those painted clouds that beautify our days, &c.
Now knowledge destroyeth all those comforts, by setting man above life's
weaknesses; so that in him, who thinketh to attain happiness by
knowledge alone, independent of virtue, the fable is reversed, and in a
preposterous attempt to gain the substance, he loseth even the shadow.
This I take to be the sense of this fine stroke of satire on the wrong
pursuits after happiness.
Ver. 281, 283. _If parts allure thee,--
Or ravished with the whistling of a name,_]
These two instances are chosen with great judgment. The world, perhaps,
doth not afford two such other. Bacon discovered and laid down those
true principles of science, by whose assistance Newton was enabled to
unfold the whole law of nature. He was no less eminent for the creative
power of his imagination, the brightness of his conceptions, and the
force of his expression; yet being convicted on his own confession for
bribery and corruption in the administration of justice, while he
presided in the supreme court of equity, he endeavoured to repair his
ruined fortunes by the most profligate flattery to the court, which,
indeed, from his very first entrance into it, he had accustomed himself
to practise with a prostitution that disgraceth the very profession of
letters or of science.
Cromwell seemeth to be distinguished in the most eminent manner, with
regard to his abilities, from all other great and wicked men, who have
overturned the liberties of their country. The times in which others
have succeeded in this attempt, were such as saw the spirit of liberty
suppressed and stifled by a general luxury and venality; but Cromwell
subdued his country, when this spirit was at its height, by a successful
struggle against court-oppression; and while it was conducted and
supported by a set of the greatest geniuses for government the world
ever saw embarked together in one common cause.
Ver. 283. _Or ravished with the whistling of a name,_] And even this
fantastic glory sometimes sutlers a terrible reverse. Sacheverel, in his
Voyage to Icolm-kill, describing the church there, tells us, that "in
one corner is a peculiar enclosure, in which were the monuments of the
kings of many different nations, as Scotland, Ireland, Norway, and the
Isle of Man. This (said the person who showed me the place, pointing to
a plain stone) was the monument of the great Teague, king of Ireland. I
had never heard of him, and could not but reflect of how little value is
greatness, that has barely left a name scandalous to a nation, and a
grave which the meanest of mankind would never envy."
Ver. 309. _Know then this truth, enough for man to know,
"Virtue alone is happiness below."_]
M. du Resnel translates the line thus:
Apprend donc, qu'il n'est point ici bas de bonheur,
Si la vertu no règle et l'esprit et le cœur.
_i.e._ Learn then, that there is no happiness here below, unless virtue
regulates the heart and the understanding, which destroys all the force
of his author's conclusion. He had proved, that happiness consists
neither in external goods, as the vulgar imagined, nor yet in the
visions of the philosophers: he concludes, therefore, that it consists
in virtue alone. His translator says, that without virtue, there can be
no happiness. And so say the men whom his author is here confuting. For
though they supposed external goods requisite to happiness, it was when
in conjunction with virtue. Mr. Pope says,
Virtue alone is happiness below:
And so ought a faithful translator to have said after him.
Ver. 316. After ver. 316, in the MS.
Ev'n while it seems unequal to dispose,
And chequers all the good man's joys with woes,
'Tis but to teach him to support each state,
With patience this, with moderation that;
And raise his base on that one solid joy,
Which conscience gives, and nothing can destroy.
These lines are extremely finished. In which there is such a soothing
sweetness in the melancholy harmony of the versification, as if the poet
was then in that tender office in which he was most officious, and in
which all his soul came out, the condoling with some good man in
affliction.
Ver. 341. _For him alone, hope leads from goal to goal, &c._] Plato, in
his first book of a Republic, hath a remarkable passage to this purpose:
"He whose conscience does not reproach him, has cheerful hope for his
companion, and the support and comfort of his old age, according to
Pindar. For this great poet, O Socrates, very elegantly says, That he
who leads a just and holy life, has always amiable hope for his
companion, which fills his heart with joy, and is the support and
comfort of his old age. Hope, the most powerful of the divinities, in
governing the ever-changing and inconstant temper of mortal men." In the
same manner Euripides speaks in his Hercules Furens: "He is the good man
in whose breast hope springs eternally. But to be without hope in the
world, is the portion of the wicked."
Ver. 373. _Come then, my friend! &c._] This noble apostrophe, by which
the poet concludes the Essay in an address to his friend, will furnish a
critic with examples of every one of those five species of elocution,
from which, as from its sources, Longinus deduceth the sublime.
1. The first and chief is a grandeur and sublimity of conception:
Come then, my friend! my genius! come along;
O master of the poet, and the song!
And while the muse now stoops, and now ascends,
To man's low passions, or their glorious ends.
2. The second, that pathetic enthusiasm, which, at the same time, melts
and inflames:
Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise,
To fall with dignity, with temper rise;
Formed by thy converse, happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe;
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease,
Intent to reason, or polite to please.
3. A certain elegant formation and ordonance of figures:
Oh! while along the stream of time thy name
Expanded flies, and gathers all its fame,
Say, shall my little bark attendant sail,
Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale?
4. A splendid diction:
When statesmen, heroes, kings, in dust repose
Whose sons shall blush their fathers were thy foes,
Shall then this verse to future age pretend
Thou wert my guide, philosopher, and friend?
That urged by thee, I turned the tuneful art,
From sounds to things, from fancy to the heart;
For wit's false mirror held up nature's light.
5. And fifthly, which includes in itself all the rest, a weight and
dignity in the composition:
Shew'd erring pride, whatever is, is right;
That reason, passion, answer one great aim;
That true self-love and social are the same;
That virtue only makes our bliss below;
And all our knowledge is, ourselves to know.[1603]
NOTES OF W. WARBURTON ON THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER.
_Universal Prayer._] It may be proper to observe, that some passages in
the preceding Essay, having been unjustly suspected of a tendency
towards fate and naturalism, the author composed this prayer as the sum
of all, to show that his system was founded in free-will, and terminated
in piety; that the First Cause was as well the Lord and Governor of the
Universe as the Creator of it; and that, by submission to his will (the
great principle enforced throughout the Essay), was not meant suffering
ourselves to be carried along by a blind determination, but resting in a
religious acquiescence, and confidence full of hope and immortality. To
give all this the greater weight, the poet chose for his model the
Lord's Prayer, which, of all others, best deserves the title prefixed to
his paraphrase.
Ver. 29. _If I am right, thy grace impart,--
I am wrong, O teach my heart_]
As the imparting of grace, on the Christian system, is a stronger
exertion of the divine power than the natural illumination of the heart,
one would expect that right and wrong should change places, more aid
being required to restore men to right, than to keep them in it. But as
it was the poet's purpose to insinuate that revelation was the right,
nothing could better express his purpose, than making the right secured
by the guards of grace.
END OF VOL. II.
BRADBURY, EVANS, AND CO., PRINTERS, WHITEFRIARS.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This language, held by Warton in his Essay on the Genius of Pope,
was subsequently reversed by him in his edition of Pope's Works. He then
acknowledged that the notion of "a methodical regularity" in the Essay
on Criticism was a "groundless opinion."
[2] Singer's Spence, p. 107.
[3] Johnson's Works, ed. Murphy, vol. ii. p. 354.
[4] Spence, p. 128.
[5] Spence, p. 147.
[6] Spence, p. 205.
[7] Warton's Pope, vol. i. p. xviii.
[8] Dennis's Reflections, Critical and Satyrical, upon a late Rhapsody
called An Essay upon Criticism, was advertised as "this day published"
in _The Daily Courant_ of June 20, 1711. Pope sent the pamphlet to
Caryll on June 25, and in a letter to Cromwell of the same date, he says
"Mr. Lintot favoured me with a sight of Mr. Dennis's piece of fine
satire before it was published."
[9] Remarks upon Mr. Pope's Dunciad, p. 39.
[10] Ver. 147.
[11] Dennis's Reflections, p. 29.
[12] Pope to Caryll, June 25, 1711.
[13] Spence, p. 208.
[14] Ver. 158.
[15] Imitations of Horace, bk. ii. Sat. 1, ver. 75.
[16] Dennis's Reflections, p. 22.
[17] Pope to Caryll, June 25, 1711; Pope to Trumbull, Aug. 10, 1711.
[18] Biographia Literaria, ed. 1847, vol. i. p. 3.
[19] Wakefield's Works of Pope, p. 168.
[20] Spectator, No. 253, Dec. 20, 1711.
[21] Pope to Steele, Dec. 30, 1711.
[22] Essay on the Genius of Pope, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 108.
[23] Lectures on the English Poets, 3rd ed. p. 142.
[24] De Quincey's Works, ed. 1862, vol. vii. p. 64; xv. p. 142.
[25] Spence, p. 176.
[26] Spence, p. 147, 211.
[27] Dryden's Virgil, ed. Carey, vol. ii. p. xxxii., lxxxviii.
[28] Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe, 5th ed. vol. iv.
p. 228.
[29] Pope's Poetical Works, ed. Elwin, vol. i. p. 9.
[30] Ver. 68, 130-140, 146-157, 161-166.
[31] Ver. 715-730.
[32] Spence, p. 195.
[33] Ver. 719.
[34] Poetical Works of Dryden, ed. Robert Bell, vol. i. p. 75.
[35] Ver. 395, 406.
[36] Ver. 480.
[37] Temple of Fame, ver. 505.
[38] Jortin's Works, vol. xiii. p. 124.
[39] Ver. 511, 514, 100, 629-644, 107.
[40] Ver. 524, 526.
[41] Ver. 596-610.
[42] Religio Laici.
[43] Ver. 600-603.
[44] Spence, p. 212.
[45] Essay on the Genius of Pope, vol. i. p. 195.
[46] Works of Edward Young, ed. Doran, vol. ii. p. 578.
[47] Moore's Life of Byron, 1 vol. ed., p. 699.
[48] Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets, p. 145.
[49] De Quincey's Works, vol. xv. p. 141: xii. p. 58.
[50] De Quincey's Works, vol. xv. p. 142.
[51] De Quincey's Works, vol. viii. p. 14.
[52] De Quincey's Works, vol. viii. p. 15-17.
[53] Pope's Poetical Works, ed. Elwin, vol. i. p. 7.
[54] Dryden's Epilogue to All for Love:
This difference grows,
Betwixt our fools in verse, and yours in prose.
[55] An extravagant assertion. Those who can appreciate, are beyond
comparison more numerous than those who can produce, a work of genius.
[56] Qui scribit artificiose, ab aliis commode scripta facile
intelligere proterit. Cic. ad Herenn. lib. iv. De pictore, sculptore,
fictore, nisi artifex, judicare non potest. Pliny.--POPE.
Poets and painters must appeal to the world at large. Wretched indeed
would be their fate, if their merits were to be decided only by their
rivals. It is on the general opinion of persons of taste that their
individual estimation must ultimately rest, and if the public were
excluded from judging, poets might write and painters paint for each
other.--ROSCOE.
The execution of a work and the appreciation of it when executed are
separate operations, and all experience has shown that numbers pronounce
justly upon literature, architecture, and pictures, though they may not
be able to write like Shakespeare, design like Wren, or paint like
Reynolds. Taste is acquired by studying good models as well as by
emulating them. Pope, perhaps, copied Addison, Tatler, Oct. 19, 1710:
"It is ridiculous for any man to criticise on the works of another who
has not distinguished himself by his own performances."
[57] Omnes tacito quodam sensu, sine ulla arte aut ratione, quæ sint in
artibus ac rationibus, recta et prava dijudicant. Cic. de Orat. lib.
iii.--POPE.
[58] The phrase "_more_ disgraced" implies that slight sketches "justly
traced" are a disgrace at best, whereas they have often a high degree of
merit.
[59] Plus sine doctrina prudentia, quam sine prudentia valet doctrina.
Quint.--POPE.
[60] Between ver. 25 and 26 were these lines, since omitted by the
author:
Many are spoiled by that pedantic throng,
Who with great pains teach youth to reason wrong.
Tutors, like virtuosos, oft inclined
By strange transfusion to improve the mind,
Draw off the sense we have, to pour in new;
Which yet, with all their skill, they ne'er could do.--POPE.
The transfusion spoken of in the fourth verse of this variation is the
transfusion of one animal's blood into another.--WAKEFIELD.
[61] "Nature," it is said in the Spectator, No. 404, "has sometimes made
a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making, by applying his
talents otherwise than nature designed." The idea is expressed more
happily by Dryden in his Hind and Panther:
For fools are doubly fools endeav'ring to be wise.
Pope contradicts himself when he says in the text that the men made
coxcombs by study were meant by nature but for fools, since they are
among his instances of persons upon whom nature had bestowed the "seeds
of judgment," and who possessed "good sense" till it was "defaced by
false learning."
[62] Dryden's Medal:
The wretch turned loyal in his own defence.
[63] The couplet ran thus in the first edition, with less neatness and
perspicuity:
Those hate as rivals all that write; and others
But envy wits as eunuchs envy lovers.
The inaccuracy of the rhymes excited him to alteration, which occasioned
a fresh inconvenience, that of similar rhymes in the next couplet but
one.--WAKEFIELD.
Dryden's Prologue to the Second Part of the Conquest of Granada:
They who write ill, and they who ne'er durst write,
Turn critics out of mere revenge and spite.
[64] In the manuscript there are two more lines, of which the second was
afterwards introduced into the Dunciad:
Though such with reason men of sense abhor;
Fool against fool is barb'rous civil war.
Though Mævius scribble and the city knight, &c.
The city knight was Sir Richard Blackmore, who resided in Cheapside. "In
the early part of Blackmore's time," says Johnson, "a citizen was a term
of reproach, and his place of abode was a topic to which his adversaries
had recourse in the penury of scandal."
[65] Dryden's Persius, Sat. i. 100:
Who would be poets in Apollo's spite.
[66] "The simile of the mule," says Warton, "heightens the satire, and
is new," but the comparison fails in the essential point. Pope's
"half-learn'd witlings," who aim at being wit and critic, are inferior
to both, whereas the mule, to which he likens the literary pretender, is
in speed and strength superior to the ass.
[67] "I am confident," says Dryden in the dedication of his Virgil,
"that you will look on those half-lines hereafter as the imperfect
products of a hasty muse, like the frogs and serpents in the Nile, part
of them kindled into life, and part a lump of unformed, unanimated mud."
[68] The diction of this line is coarse, and the construction
defective.--WAKEFIELD.
The omission of "them" after "call" exceeds the bounds of poetic
licence.
[69] Equivocal generation is the production of animals without parents.
Many of the creatures on the Nile were supposed to be of this class, and
it was believed that they were fashioned by the action of the sun upon
the slime. The notion was purely fanciful, as was the idea that the
insects were half-formed--a compound of mud and organisation.
[70] Dryden's Persius, v. 36:
For this a hundred voices I desire
To tell thee what an hundred tongues would tire.
"I have often thought," says the author of the Supplement to the
Profound, speaking of Pope's couplet, "that one pert fellow's tongue
might tire a hundred pair of attending ears; but I never conceived that
it could communicate any lassitude to the tongues of the bystanders
before." The evident meaning of Pope is that it would tire a hundred
ordinary tongues to talk as much as one vain wit, but the construction
is faulty.
[71] This is a palpable imitation of Horace's Art of Poetry, 38:
Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquam
Viribus; et versate diu, quid ferre recusent,
Quid valeant humeri.--WAKEFIELD.
[72] Pope is unfortunate in his selection of instances to illustrate his
position that the various mental faculties are never concentrated in the
same individual. Men of great intellect have sometimes bad memories, and
a good memory is sometimes found in persons of a feeble intellect; but
it is a monstrous paradox to assert that a retentive memory and a
powerful understanding cannot go together. No one will deny that Dr.
Johnson and Lord Macaulay were gifted with vigorous, brilliant minds;
yet the memory of the first was extraordinary, and that of the second
prodigious. In general, men of transcendent abilities have been
remarkable for their knowledge.
[73] Dryden, in his Character of a Good Parson:
But when the milder beams of mercy play.--WAKEFIELD.
[74] From the second couplet, apparently meant to be the converse of the
first, one would suppose that he considered the understanding and
imagination as the same faculty, else the counterpart is
defective.--WARTON.
The structure of the passage requires the interpretation put upon it by
Warton, in which case the language is incorrect. The statement is not
even true of the imagination proper, as the example of Milton would
alone suffice to prove. His imagination was grand, and the numberless
phrases he adopted from preceding writers evince that it was combined
with a memory unusually tenacious.
[75] This position seems formed from the well-known maxim of
Hippocrates, which is found at the entrance of his aphorisms, "Life is
short, but art is long."--WAKEFIELD.
The standard of excellence in any art or science, must always be that
which is attained by the persons who follow it with the greatest
success; and those who give themselves up to a particular pursuit will,
with equal talents, eclipse the rivals who devote to it only fragments
of time. For this reason men can rarely attain to the highest skill in
more than one department, however many accomplishments they may possess
in a minor degree. The native power to shine in various callings may
exist, but the practice which can alone make perfect, is wanting.
[76] These are the words of Lord Shaftesbury in his Advice to an Author:
"Frame taste by the just standard of nature." The principle is as old as
poetry, and has been laid down by multitudes of writers; but the
difficulty, as Bowles remarks, is to determine what is "nature," and
what is "her just standard." "Nature" with Pope meant Homer.
[77] Roscommon's Essay:
Truth still is one: Truth is divinely bright;
No cloudy doubts obscure her native light.--WAKEFIELD.
[78] Translation of Boileau's Art of Poetry by Sir William Soame and
Dryden, canto i.
Love reason then, and let whate'er you write
Borrow from her its beauty, force, and light.
[79] In the early editions,
That art is best which most resembles her,
Which still presides, yet never does appear.
[80] Dryden's Virgil, Æn. vi. 982:
------one common soul
Inspires, and feeds, and animates the whole.--WAKEFIELD.
[81] So Ovid, exactly, Metam. iv. 287:
causa latet; vis est notissima.--WAKEFIELD.
Duke of Buckingham's Essay on Poetry:
A spirit which inspires the work throughout,
As that of nature moves the world about;
Itself unseen, yet all things by it shown.
[82] In all editions before the quarto of 1743, it was,
There are whom heav'n has blest with store of wit,
Yet want as much again to manage it.
The idea was suggested by a sentence in Sprat's Account of Cowley: "His
fancy flowed with great speed, and therefore it was very fortunate to
him that his judgment was equal to manage it." Pope gave a false sparkle
to his couplet by first using "wit" in one sense and then in another.
"Wit to manage wit," says the author of the Supplement to the Profound,
"is full as good as one tongue's tiring another. Any one may perceive
that the writer meant that judgment should manage wit; but as it stands
it is pert." Warburton observes that Pope's later version magnified the
contradiction; for he who had already "a profusion of wit," was the last
person to need more.
[83] "Ever are at strife," was the reading till the quarto of 1743.
[84] We shall destroy the beauty of the passage by introducing a most
insipid parallel of perfect sameness, if we understand the word "like"
as introducing a simile. It is merely as if he had said: "Pegasus, as a
generous horse is accustomed to do, shows his spirit most under
restraint." Our author might have in view a couplet of Waller's, in his
verses on Roscommon's Poetry:
Direct us how to back the winged horse,
Favour his flight, and moderate his force.--WAKEFIELD.
[85] Dryden's preface to Troilus and Cressida: "If the rules be well
considered, we shall find them to be made only to reduce nature into
method."
[86] It was "monarchy" until the edition of 1743.
[87] Translation of Boileau's Art of Poetry, by Dryden and Soame:
And afar off hold up the glorious prize.--WAKEFIELD.
[88] Nec enim artibus editis factum est ut argumenta inveniremus, sed
dicta sunt omnia antequam præciperentur; mox ea scriptores observata et
collecta ediderunt. Quintil.--POPE.
[89] This seems to have been suggested by a couplet in the Court
Prospect of Hopkins:
How are these blessings thus dispensed and giv'n?
To us from William, and to him from heav'n.
[90] After this verse followed another, to complete the triplet, in the
first impressions:
Set up themselves, and drove a sep'rate trade.--WAKEFIELD.
[91] A feeble line of monosyllables, consisting of ten low
words.--WARTON.
The entire passage seems to be constructed on some remarks of Dryden in
his Dedication to Ovid: "Formerly the critics were quite another species
of men. They were defenders of poets, and commentators on their works,
to illustrate obscure beauties, to place some passages in a better
light, to redeem others from malicious interpretations. Are our
auxiliary forces turned our enemies? Are they from our seconds become
principals against us?" The truth of Pope's assertion, as to the matter
of fact, will not bear a rigorous inquisition, as I believe these
critical persecutors of good poets to have been extremely few, both in
ancient and modern times.--WAKEFIELD.
[92] The prescription of the physician was formerly called his bill.
Johnson, in his Dictionary, quotes from L'Estrange, "The medicine was
prepared according to the bill," and Butler, in Hudibras, speaks of
him who took the doctor's bill,
And swallowed it instead of the pill.
The story ran that a physician handed a prescription to his patient,
saying, "Take this," and the man immediately swallowed it.
[93] This is a quibble. Time and moths spoil books by destroying them.
The commentators only spoiled them by explaining them badly. The editors
were so far from spoiling books in the same sense as time, that by
multiplying copies they assisted to preserve them.
[94] Soame and Dryden's Translation of Boileau's Art of Poetry:
Keep to each man his proper character;
Of countries and of times the humours know;
From diff'rent climates diff'ring customs grow.
The principle here is general. Pope, in terms and in fact, applied it
only to the ancients. Had he extended the precept to modern literature
he would have been cured of his delusion that every deviation from the
antique type arose from unlettered tastelessness.
[95] In the first edition,
You may confound, but never criticise,
which was an adaptation of a line from Lord Roscommon:
You may confound, but never can translate.
[96] The author, after this verse, originally inserted the following,
which he has however omitted in all the editions:
Zoilus, had these been known, without a name
Had died, and Perrault ne'er been damned to fame;
The sense of sound antiquity had reigned,
And sacred Homer yet been unprophaned.
None e'er had thought his comprehensive mind }
To modern customs, modern rules confined;}
Who for all ages writ, and all mankind. }
Be his great works, &c.--POPE.
Perrault, in his Parallel between the ancients and the moderns, carped
at Homer in the same spirit that Zoilus had done of old.
[97] Horace, Ars Poet., ver. 268:
vos exemplaria Græca
Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna.
Tate and Brady's version of the first psalm:
But makes the perfect law of God
His business and delight;
Devoutly reads therein by day,
And meditates by night.--WAKEFIELD.
[98] Dryden, Virg. Geor. iv. 408:
And upward follow Fame's immortal spring.--WAKEFIELD.
[99] Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse:
Consult your author with himself compared.
[100] The word outlast is improper; for Virgil, like a true Roman, never
dreamt of the mortality of the city.--WAKEFIELD.
[101] Variation:
When first young Maro sung of kings and wars,
Ere warning Phœbus touched his trembling ears.
Cum canerem reges et prælia, Cynthius aurem
Vellit. Virg. Ecl. vi. 3.
It is a tradition preserved by Servius, that Virgil began with writing a
poem of the Alban and Roman affairs, which he found above his years, and
descended, first to imitate Theocritus on rural subjects, and afterwards
to copy Homer in heroic poetry.--POPE.
The second line of the couplet in the note was copied, as Mr. Carruthers
points out, from Milton's Lycidas:
Phœbus replied, and touched my trembling ears.
The couplet in the text, with the variation of "great Maro" for "young
Maro," was Pope's original version, but Dennis having asked whether he
intended "to put that figure called a bull upon Virgil" by saying that
he designed a work "to outlast immortality," the poet wrote in the
margin of his manuscript "alter the seeming inconsistency," which he
did, by substituting the lines in the note. In the last edition, he
reinstated the "bull." The objection of Dennis was hypercritical. The
phrase only expresses the double fact that the city was destroyed, and
that its fame was durable. The manuscript supplies another various
reading, which avoids both the alleged bull in the text, and the bad
rhyme of the couplet in the note:
When first his voice the youthful Maro tried,
Ere Phœbus touched his ear and checked his pride.
[102]
And did his work to rules as strict confine.--POPE.
[103] Aristotle, born at _Stagyra_, B.C. 384.--CROKER.
[104] In the manuscript a couplet follows which was added by Pope in the
margin, when he erased the expression "a work t' outlast immortal Rome:"
"Arms and the Man," then rung the world around,
And Rome commenced immortal at the sound
[105] When Pope supposes Virgil to have properly "checked in his bold
design of drawing from nature's fountain," and in consequence to have
confined his work within rules as strict,
As if the Stagyrite o'erlooked each line,
how can he avoid the force of his own ridicule, where a little further,
in this very piece, he laughs at Dennis for
Concluding all were desp'rate sots and fools,
Who durst depart from Aristotle's rules.--DR. AIKIN.
The argument of Pope is sophistical and inconsistent. It is
inconsistent, because if Virgil found Homer and nature the same, his
work would not have been confined within stricter rules when he copied
Homer than when he copied nature. It is sophistical, because though
Homer may be always natural, all nature is not contained in his works.
[106] Rapin's Critical Works, vol. ii. p. 173: "There are no precepts to
teach the hidden graces, and all that secret power of poetry which
passes to the heart."
[107] Neque enim rogationibus plebisve scitis sancta sunt ista præcepta,
sed hoc, quicquid est, utilitas excogitavit. Non negabo autem sic utile
esse plerumque; verum si eadem illa nobis aliud suadebit utilitas, hanc,
relictis magistrorum auctoritatibus, sequemur. Quintil. lib. ii. cap.
13.--POPE.
[108] Dryden's Aurengzebe:
Mean soul, and dar'st not gloriously offend!--STEEVENS.
[109] This couplet, in the quarto of 1743, was for the first time placed
immediately after the triplet which ends at ver. 160. The effect of this
arrangement was that "Pegasus," instead of the "great wits," became the
antecedent to the lines, "From vulgar bounds," &c., and the poetic steed
was said to "snatch a grace." Warton commented upon the absurdity of
using such language of a horse, and since it is evident that Pope must
have overlooked the incongruity, when he adopted the transposition, the
lines were restored to their original order in the editions of Warton,
Bowles, and Roscoe.
[110] So Soame and Dryden of the Ode, in the Translation of Boileau's
Art of Poetry:
Her generous style at random oft will part,
And by a brave disorder shows her art.
And again:
A generous Muse,
When too much fettered with the rules of art,
May from her stricter bounds and limits part.--WAKEFIELD.
[111] This allusion is perhaps inaccurate. The shapeless rock, and
hanging precipice do not rise out of nature's common order. These
objects are characteristic of some of the features of nature, of those
especially that are picturesque. If he had said that amid cultivated
scenery we are pleased with a hanging rock, the allusion would have been
accurate.--BOWLES.
The criticism of Bowles does not apply to the passage in Sprat's Account
of Cowley, from which Pope borrowed his comparison: "He knew that in
diverting men's minds there should be the same variety observed as in
the prospects of their eyes, where a rock, a precipice, or a rising wave
is often more delightful than a smooth even ground, or a calm sea."
[112] Another couplet originally followed here:
But care in poetry must still be had;
It asks discretion ev'n in running mad:
And though, &c.
which is the _insanire cum ratione_ taken from Terence by Horace, at
Sat. ii. 3, 271.--WAKEFIELD.
[113] "Their" means "their own."--WARTON.
[114] Dryden in his dedication to the Æneis: "Virgil might make this
anachronism by superseding the mechanic rules of poetry, for the same
reason that a monarch may dispense with or suspend his own laws."
[115] Pope's manuscript supplies two omitted lines:
The boldest strokes of art we may despise,
Viewed in false lights with undiscerning eyes.
[116] A violation of grammatical propriety, into which many of our first
and most accurate writers have fallen. "Mishapen" is doubtless the true
participle.--WAKEFIELD.
[117] Pope took his imagery from Horace, Ars Poet., 361:
Ut pictura, poesis erit: quæ, si propiùs stes,
Te capiat magis; et quædam, si longiùs abstes:
Hæc amat obscurum; volet hæc sub luce videri.
He was also indebted to the translation of Boileau's Art of Poetry by
Dryden and Soame:
Each object must be fixed in the due place,
And diff'ring parts have corresponding grace.
[118] Οιυν τι ποιουσιν οι φρονιμοι στρατηλαται κατα τας ταζεις των
στρατευματων. Dion. Hal. De Struct. Orat.--WARBURTON.
[119] It may be pertinent to subjoin Roscommon's remark on the same
subject:
----Far the greatest part
Of what some call neglect is studied art.
When Virgil seems to trifle in a line,
'Tis but a warning piece which gives the sign,
To wake your fancy and prepare your sight
To reach the noble height of some unusual flight.--WARTON.
Variety and contrast are necessary, and it is impossible all parts
should be equally excellent. Yet it would be too much to recommend
introducing trivial or dull passages to enhance the merit of those in
which the whole effort of genius might be employed.--BOWLES.
[120] Modeste, et circumspecto judicio de tantis viris pronunciandum
est, ne (quod plerisque accidit) damnent quod non intelligunt. Ac si
necesse est in alteram errare partem, omnia eorum legentibus placere,
quam multa displicere maluerim. Quint.--POPE.
Lord Roscommon was not disposed to be so diffident in those excellent
verses of his Essay:
For who, without a qualm, hath ever looked
On holy garbage, though by Homer cooked?
Whose railing heroes, and whose wounded gods,
Make some suspect he snores as well as nods.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope originally wrote in his manuscript,
Nor Homer nods so often as we dream,
which was followed by this couplet:
In sacred writ where difficulties rise,
'Tis safer far to fear than criticise.
[121] So Roscommon's epilogue to Alexander the Great:
Secured by higher pow'rs exalted stands
Above the reach of sacrilegious hands.--WAKEFIELD.
[122] The poet here alludes to the four great causes of the ravage
amongst ancient writings. The destruction of the Alexandrine and
Palatine libraries by fire; the fiercer rage of Zoilus, Mævius, and
their followers, against wit; the irruption of the barbarians into the
empire; and the long reign of ignorance and superstition in the
cloisters.--WARBURTON.
I like the original verse better--
Destructive war, and all-devouring age,--
as a metaphor much more perspicuous and specific.--WAKEFIELD.
In his epistle to Addison, Pope has "all-devouring age," but the epithet
here is more original and striking, and admirably suited to the subject.
This shows a nice discrimination. "All-involving" would be as improper
in the Essay on Medals as "all-devouring" would be in this
place.--BOWLES.
A couplet in Cooper's Hill suggested the couplet of Pope:
Now shalt thou stand, though sword, or time, or fire,
Or zeal more fierce than they, thy fall conspire.
[123] Thus in a poem on the Fear of Death, ascribed to the Duke of
Wharton:
----There rival chiefs combine
To fill the gen'ral chorus of her reign.--WAKEFIELD.
[124] Cowley on the death of Crashaw:
Hail, bard triumphant.
Virg. Æn. vi. 649:
Magnanimi heroes! nati melioribus annis.--WAKEFIELD.
Dryden's Religio Laici:
Those giant wits in happier ages born.
From Pope's manuscript it appears that he had originally written:
Hail, happy heroes, born in better days.
In a note he gave the line from Virgil of which his own was a
translation.
[125] An imitation of Cowley, David. ii. 833:
Round the whole earth his dreaded name shall sound
And reach to worlds that must not yet be found.--WAKEFIELD.
[126] Oldham's Elegies:
What nature has in bulk to me denied.
[127] "Everybody allows," says Malebranche, "that the animal spirits are
the most subtle and agitated parts of the blood. These spirits are
carried with the rest of the blood to the brain, and are there separated
by some organ destined to the purpose." Pope adopted the doctrine
"allowed by everybody," but which consisted of assumptions without
proof. The very existence of these fluid spirits had never been
ascertained. The remaining physiology of Pope's couplet was erroneous.
When there is a deficiency of blood, its place is not supplied by wind.
The grammatical construction, again, is vicious, and ascribes "blood and
spirits" to souls as well as to bodies. The moral reflection illustrated
by the simile is but little more correct. Men in general are not proud
in proportion as they have nothing to be proud of.
[128] Pope is commonly considered to have laid down the general
proposition that total ignorance was preferable to imperfect knowledge.
The context shows that he was speaking only of conceited critics, who
were presumptuous because they were ill-informed. He tells such persons
that the more enlightened they become the humbler they will grow.
[129] In the early editions,
Fired with the charms fair science does impart.
Though "does" is removed, "with what" is less dignified and graceful
than "with the charms." The diction of the couplet is prosaic and devoid
of elegance.--WAKEFIELD.
[130] Dryden, in the State of Innocence, Act i. Sc. i.:
Nor need we tempt those heights which angels keep.--WAKEFIELD.
[131] The proper word would have been "beyond."
[132]
[Much we begin to doubt and much to fear
Our sight less trusting as we see more clear.]
So pleased at first the tow'ring Alps to try,
Filled with ideas of fair Italy,
The traveller beholds with cheerful eyes
The less'ning vales, and seems to tread the skies.--POPE.
The couplet between brackets is from the manuscript. The next couplet,
with a variation in the first line, was transferred to the epistle to
Jervas.
[133] This is, perhaps, the best simile in our language--that in which
the most exact resemblance is traced between things in appearance
utterly unrelated to each other.--JOHNSON.
I will own I am not of this opinion. The simile appears evidently to
have been suggested by the following one in the works of Drummond:
All as a pilgrim who the Alps doth pass,
Or Atlas' temples crowned with winter's glass,
The airy Caucasus, the Apennine,
Pyrene's cliffs where sun doth never shine,
When he some heaps of hills hath overwent,
Begins to think on rest, his journey spent,
Till mounting some tall mountain he doth find
More heights before him than he left behind.--WARTON.
The simile is undoubtedly appropriate, illustrative, and eminently
beautiful, but evidently copied.--BOWLES.
[134] Diligenter legendum est ac pæne ad scribendi solicitudinem: nec
per partes modo scrutanda sunt omnia, sed perlectus liber utique ex
integro resumendus. Quint.--POPE.
[135] The Bible never descends to the mean colloquial preterites of
"chid" for "did chide," or "writ" for "did write," but always uses the
full-dress word "chode" and "wrote." Pope might have been happier had he
read his Bible more, but assuredly he would have improved his
English.--DE QUINCEY.
[136] Boileau's Art of Poetry by Dryden and Soame, canto i.:
A frozen style, that neither ebbs or flows,
Instead of pleasing makes us gape and doze.
[137] Much in the same strain Garth's Dispensary, iv. 24:
So nicely tasteless, so correctly dull.--WAKEFIELD.
[138] This is an adaptation of a couplet in Dryden's Eleonora:
Nor this part musk, or civet can we call,
Or amber, but a rich result of all.
[139] It is impossible to determine whether he refers to St. Peter's or
the Pantheon.
[140] An impropriety of the grossest kind is here committed. Grammar
requires "appears."--WAKEFIELD.
[141] Dryden's translation of Ovid's Met. book xv.
Greater than whate'er was, or is, or e'er shall be.--HOLT WHITE.
Epilogue to Suckling's Goblins:
Things that ne'er were, nor are, nor ne'er will be.--ISAAC REED.
[142] Horace, Ars Poet. 351:
Verum ubi plura nitent in carmine, non ego paucis
Offendar maculis.
[143] _Lays_ for _lays down_, but, as Warton remarks, the word thus used
is very objectionable.
[144] To the same effect Quintilian, lib. i. Ex quo mihi inter virtutes
grammatici habebitur, aliqua nescire.--WAKEFIELD.