[988] "Why one reason," says Wakefield, "should be harder than the other

I am unable to discern." The passage is taken, as Warton pointed out,

from Voltaire's remarks on Pascal's Thoughts, but Voltaire put the

questions on the same footing, and did not pretend that the second was

harder to solve than the first. "You are astonished," he says "that God

has made man so contracted, so ignorant, and so unhappy. Why are you not

astonished that he has not made him more contracted, more ignorant, and

more unhappy?" Neither question ought to have presented any difficulty

to Pope, since it was "plain" to him that "the best possible system"

required that "there should be somewhere such a rank as man." All who

admit the attributes of the Deity must allow that every portion of the

world, sentient or insensible, is the consummation of wisdom with

reference to its place in the infinite and eternal scheme. "God," says

Leibnitz, "does not even neglect inanimate things; they are unconscious,

but God is conscious for them. He would reproach himself with the least

real defect in the universe, although no one perceived it."

[989] Wakefield quotes Milton, Par. Lost, iii. 460, where the phrase

"those argent fields" is applied to the heavens.

[990] This word is commonly pronounced in prose with the e mute in the

plural, as in the singular, and is therefore only of three syllables;

but Pope has in the plural continued the Latin form and assigned it

four. I think, improperly.--JOHNSON.

[991] Pope says that we cannot tell why Jupiter's satellites are less

than Jupiter. Any mathematician could have shown him that if Jupiter was

less than his satellites they would not revolve round him.--VOLTAIRE.

Warburton, to evade Voltaire's criticism, put a strained and

paraphrastic interpretation upon Pope's lines. Their natural meaning is,

that man is too ignorant to comprehend why he is not less instead of

greater,--nay, that he cannot even tell why oaks are taller than weeds,

why Jupiter's satellites are less than Jupiter, and all his

investigations into the earth and the heavens will not supply him with

the answer.

[992] Pope did not generally condescend to the artificial inversion

which places the adjective after the substantive. Here, in a passage

where simplicity was an object, we have "systems possible" followed by

"wisdom infinite,"--combinations, too, which have the effect of

producing a disagreeable monotony, occurring in the same part of the

lines to which they respectively belong.--CONINGTON.

[993] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "Since infinite wisdom not only

established the end, but directed the means, the system of the universe

must necessarily be the best of all possible systems."--WAKEFIELD.

[994] There must be no interval, that is, between the parts, or they

will not cohere.

[995] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "It might be determined in the divine

ideas that there should be a gradation of life and intellect throughout

the universe. In this case it was necessary that there should be some

creatures at our pitch of rationality."--WAKEFIELD.

The theory of a chain of beings was adopted by Bolingbroke and Pope from

Archbishop King's Essay on the Origin of Evil. Arguing from the analogy

of our own world, King contended that a universe fully peopled with

superior natures would leave room for an inferior grade, and these for

lower grades still, in a continuously descending scale. There must

either be inferior creatures, or else voids in creation, and we may

presume that the maximum of existence is most conducive to the ends of

benevolence and wisdom.

[996] MS.:

Is but if God has placed his creature wrong.

[997] Bolingbroke, Fragment 50: "The seeming imperfection of the parts

is necessary to the real perfection of the whole."--WAKEFIELD.

The sentence quoted by Wakefield was copied by Bolingbroke from

Leibnitz. Lord Shaftesbury adopted the same hypothesis in his Inquiry

concerning Virtue. If, he says, our earth is a part only of some other

system, and if what is ill in our system makes for the good of the

general system, then there is nothing ill with respect to the whole.

Rousseau, who heartily embraced the doctrine, remarks that "we cannot

give direct proofs for or against, because these proofs depend on a

complete knowledge of the constitution of the universe, and of the ends

of its author."

[998] Bolingbroke, Fragments 43 and 63: "We labour hard, we complicate

various means to bring about some one paltry purpose.--In the works of

men the most complicated schemes produce very hardly and very

uncertainly one single effect: in the works of God one single scheme

produces a multitude of different effects, and answers an immense

variety of purposes."--WAKEFIELD.

How clearly and closely is this sentiment expressed by Pope, and yet how

difficult to render into verse with precision and effect.--BOWLES.

In the first line the phrase "one single," for "one single movement," is

especially inelegant. Bowles might have selected many couplets from the

Essay on Man more deserving of the commendation. The thought which Pope

owed to Bolingbroke, Bolingbroke owed to Leibnitz, who says in his

Théodicée, "Everything in nature is connected, and if a skilful artizan,

engineer, architect, statesman, often makes the same contrivance serve

for several purposes, we may affirm that God, whose wisdom and power are

perfect, does so always." Hence Pope contends that what is defective in

man considered separately, may be advantageous in relation to the hidden

ends he is intended to serve.

[999] Bolingbroke, Fragments 43: "We ought to consider the world no

otherwise than as a little wheel in our solar system; nor our solar

system any otherwise than as a little but larger wheel in the immense

machine of the universe; and both the one and the other necessary

perhaps to the motion of the whole."--WAKEFIELD.

[1000] MS.:

We see but here a part, etc.

[1001] Since the monarchy of the universe is a dominion unlimited in

extent, and everlasting in duration, the general system of it must

necessarily be quite beyond our comprehension. And since there appears

such a subordination, and reference of the several parts to each other,

as to constitute it properly one administration or government, we cannot

have a thorough knowledge of any part without knowing the whole. This

surely should convince us that we are much less competent judges of the

very small part which comes under our notice in this world than we are

apt to imagine.--BISHOP BUTLER.

[1002] MS.:

When the proud steed shall know why man now reins

His stubborn neck, now drives, etc.

[1003] In the former editions,

Now wears a garland an Egyptian god.--WARBURTON.

A bull was kept at Memphis by the Egyptians, and worshipped, under the

name of Apis, as a god. Other oxen were sacrificed to him, which brought

the bovine "victims" and the bovine "god" into direct contrast.

[1004] Pope may mean that we cannot tell with respect to the general

scheme of Providence why we are made what we are, in which case he

unsays what he had said just before, that "it is plain there must be

somewhere such a rank as man." Or he may mean that we cannot tell with

respect to ourselves the use and end of our being and its vicissitudes,

in which case the doctrine would debase every person who received it, by

diverting him from his true end, which is to imitate and adore the

perfections of God.

[1005] The expression, "as he ought," is imperfect for "ought to

be."--WARTON.

[1006] Bolingbroke, Frag. 50: "The nature of every creature is adapted

to his state here, to the place he is to inhabit."

[1007] This line is the application to man of the language which the

schoolmen applied to the Deity,--that his eternity was a moment, and his

immensity a point. The couplet in the MS. was at first as follows:

Lord of a span, and hero of a day,

In one short scene to strut and pass away,

[1008] MS.:

What then, imports it whether here or there?

[1009] Ed. 1:

If to be perfect in a certain state,

What matter here or there, or soon or late?

And he that's bless'd to-day as fully so,

As who began ten thousand years ago.

Omitted in the subsequent editions.--POPE.

This note appeared, 1735, in vol. 2 of the quarto edition of Pope's

Poetical Works. The lines originally followed ver. 98, and when they

re-appeared in the text in 1743 they were shifted to their present

position. They are especially bad,--elliptical and prosaic in

expression, and sophistical in argument. The suffering which matters

nothing when it is over is not unimportant while it lasts. A prolonged

imprisonment in a noisome dungeon does not cease to be a penalty because

the captive will one day be free. The Bible recognises the bitterness of

human misery, but teaches that christians are to be reconciled to it on

account of the moral purposes it subserves, and the endless felicity

which ensues. Pope notes in his MS. that ver. 76 is "reversed from

Lucretius on death," and Wakefield quotes the translation of Dryden

which Pope copied:

The man as much to all intents is dead

Who dies to-day, and will as long be so,

As he who died a thousand years ago.

[1010] See this pursued in Epist. iii. ver. 66, etc., ver. 79,

etc.--POPE.

[1011] This resembles Phædrus, Fab. v. 15:

Ipsi principes

Illam osculantur, quâ sunt oppressi, manum.--WAKEFIELD.

[1012] Matt. x. 29.--WARBURTON.

Pope, in the MS., had expanded the idea, and added this couplet:

No great, no little; 'tis as much decreed

That Virgil's Gnat should die as Cæsar bleed.

It is doubtful whether Virgil was the author of the Culex or Gnat,

which, says Mr. Long, "is a kind of Bucolic poem in 413 hexameters,

often very obscure." Pope's assertion that there is "no great, no

little," is contradicted by the passage in St. Matthew to which

Warburton refers. Our Lord there assures us that "we are of more value

than many sparrows," and the ruin of a world, with its myriad of

sentient beings, must be of infinitely greater moment in the sight of

the Deity than the bursting of a bubble. Pope repeats, ver. 279, a

statement which is repugnant to reason, to revelation, and to his own

system of a scale of beings.

[1013] MS.:

Systems like atoms into ruin hurled.

[1014] Edit. 1. Fol. and Quart.:

What bliss above he gives not thee to know,

But gives that hope to be thy bliss below.

Further opened in Epist. ii. ver. 283. Epist. iii. ver. 74. Epist. iv.

ver. 346, etc.--POPE.

[1015] Pope has frequently contradicted this line, and allowed that men

who place their happiness in right objects, and use the recognised

means, enjoy a present pleasure, in addition to the hope of an equal or

greater pleasure in the future. This hope in turn is constantly

realised, in contradiction to the lively saying ascribed to Lord Bacon,

that "hope makes a good breakfast, but a bad supper."

[1016] All editions till that of 1743 had "at" for "from." The home of

the soul was this world according to the first reading, and the next

world according to the second. The alteration was made under the

auspices of Warburton to get rid of the imputation that Pope doubted or

disbelieved the immortality of the soul.

[1017] MS.:

Seeks God in clouds or on the wings of wind.

The savage, that is, being ignorant of scientific laws, supposes the

wind and the rain to be produced directly by the Deity without the

interposition of secondary causes.

[1018] Dryden, Threnod. August. Stanza 12:

Out of the solar walk and heaven's highway.--HURD.

[1019] The ancient opinion that the souls of the just went thither. See

Tully, Som. Scipion. and Manilius i. [ver. 733-799.]--POPE.

Virtue is in Cicero the title of admission into the milky way, but the

version which Manilius gives of the popular creed assumes that the milky

way is the general receptacle for earthly celebrities, without any

special regard to their morals.

[1020] Shakespeare, Tempest, Act iv. Sc. 1. "The cloud-capped towers."

[1021] Dryden, Æn. vii. 310:

From that dire deluge through the wat'ry waste.--WAKEFIELD.

MS.:

This hope kind nature's flattery has giv'n,

Behind his cloud-topp'd hills he builds a heav'n;

Some happier world which woods on woods infold,

Where never christian pierced for thirst of gold.

Pope must have assumed that the Indian's hope of a blissful immortality

was an unsubstantial dream, or he would not have called it "nature's

_flattery_."

[1022] MS.:

Where gold ne'er grows, and never Spaniards come,

Where trees bear maize, and rivers flow with rum.

Exiled or chained he lets you understand

Death but returns him to his native land;

Or firm as martyrs, smiling yields the ghost,

Rich of a life that is not to be lost.

But does he say the Maker is not good,

Till he's exalted to what state he would:

Himself alone high heav'n's peculiar care,

Alone made happy when he will and where?

There is an earlier form of the last couplet:

He waits for bliss in a remoter sphere

Nor proudly claims it when he will and where.

[1023] So in Homer, at the funeral of Patroclus, xxiii. 212, of our

poet's translation:

Of nine large dogs, domestic at his board,

Fall two, selected to attend their lord.--WAKEFIELD.

[1024] "Sense" is put for "the senses," and Pope exclaims against the

folly of censuring the government of God on the strength of the

imperfect information which the senses supply.

[1025] Bolingbroke, Fragment 25: "This is to weigh his own opinion

against Providence." Pope adduces the contented faith of the savage to

rebuke the dissatisfaction of certain civilised men. The contrast

completely fails. The contentment and dissatisfaction are applied by

Pope to different objects, the contentment of the savage being limited

to his idea of a future life, whereas the dissatisfaction of civilised

man is said to be chiefly with his present condition, about which the

savage is often dissatisfied likewise. The imperfect information of

missionaries is not even sufficient warrant for asserting that all

Indians believed in a future state, and if there were dissentients among

them their case did not differ from that of civilised men. Above all the

contentment of the Indian is the result of grovelling views, and

uninquiring ignorance, and whatever may be the errors of infidels among

ourselves they cannot be remedied by an appeal to those blind

conceptions of the savage, which Pope supposed to be false. "Our

flattering ourselves here," he said to Spence, "with the thoughts of

enjoying the company of our friends when in the other world may be but

too like the Indians thinking that they shall have their dogs and horses

there."

[1026] First edition:

Pronounce He acts too little or too much.

[1027] "Gust," or the relish for anything, is the opposite of "disgust,"

and is applied by Pope to the pleasures of the palate. The word is found

in Dryden, and several other writers, but never came into general use.

[1028] MS.:

Yet if unhappy think tis He's unjust,

which is the reading of the first edition, except that "thou" is

substituted for "if."

[1029] The meaning cannot be that the caviller complained that other

creatures were made perfect as well as himself, because nobody supposed

that either men or animals were perfect. Pope apparently means that

these persons complained that man was not an exception to the general

law of imperfection and mortality, although he "alone" would then have

been "perfect" in this world, and immortal in the next. It follows that

the objectors disbelieved in the immortality of the soul, and that Pope

thought their demand for immortality unreasonable.

[1030] The "balance" in which qualities are weighed; the "rod" with

which offences are chastised.

[1031] Divines maintained that there must be a future state, or that

many of the phenomena of this life would be inexplicable. Bolingbroke

rejected a future state, and argued that this life was a scheme complete

in itself. All who did not concur in his view "joined," he said, "in a

clamour against Providence," and "murmured against his justice." Not

that they had ever uttered a syllable against Providence, for they were

devout and humble adorers of his perfections, but they denied that

Bolingbroke's scheme was God's scheme, and Bolingbroke in his arrogance

and passion insisted that whoever repudiated his philosophy set himself

up against God. Pope versified the declamation of Bolingbroke, without

pointing it to the class against whom it was originally directed.

[1032] The first edition reads "In pride, my friend, in pride," and the

edition of 1735, "In reas'ning pride, my friend."

[1033] Verbatim from Bolingbroke: "Men would be angels, and we see in

Milton that angels would be gods."--WARTON.

Sir Fulk Greville, "Works, 1633, p. 73:

Men would be tyrants, tyrants would be gods."--HURD.

[1034] Lord Bacon's Advancement of Learning, ed. Montagu, p. 267:

"Aspiring to be like God in power, the angels transgressed and fell;

aspiring to be like God in knowledge, man transgressed and fell."

[1035] Piety must equally answer with grateful adoration that all these

things have been created for the use of man. The error of pride is in

the assumption that they have been created for man alone, who is only

one out of an infinity of creatures on our globe, as our globe again is

only a portion of a larger system. Hence Pope intends us to infer, that

it is folly for us to test all things by the consequences to ourselves.

The language, however, which he puts into the mouth of pride is

extravagant, and "can hardly," says M. Crousaz, "have been ever uttered

by any one, unless it were in jest."

[1036] MS.:

For me young nature decks her vernal bow'r,

Suckles each bud, and pencils ev'ry flow'r.

[1037] Garth, Dispensary, i. 175:

His couch a trench, his canopy the skies.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope remembered Isaiah lxvi. 1: "Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is my

throne, and the earth is my footstool." No sane man could ever pretend

that "earth was his footstool," and Pope alone is responsible for the

unbecoming misapplication of the prophet's language.

[1038] MS.:

or when oceans

When earth quick swallows, inundations sweep.

[1039] "A nation" in the first edition. The expression is hyperbolical.

Pope alludes to such catastrophes as the inundation of Jutland when the

sea broke down the dykes in 1634, and fifteen thousand people were

drowned. Irruptions on a smaller scale have sometimes been occasioned by

the rising of the sea during an earthquake. In that of 1783 the

inhabitants of Scilla, in the kingdom of Naples, deserted their city to

avoid being crushed by the falling houses, and fled to the shore. A

mighty wave, which swept three miles inland, carried back with it 2473

persons, and their prince among the number. Cowper, The Task, ii. 117,

has recorded the tragedy in his grandest verse:

Where now the throng

That pressed the beach, and hasty to depart,

Looked to the sea for safety? They are gone,

Gone with the refluent wave into the deep,

A prince with half his people.

[1040] Pope says, that "earthquakes swallow towns _to_ one grave, whole

nations _to_ the deep," where "to" should be "in." But this would not

have suited the phrase "tempests sweep," and the poet preferred brevity

to correctness.

[1041] First edition:

Blame we for this the wise Almighty Cause;

No, 'tis replied, he acts by gen'ral laws.

The government by general laws, we are told, has "a few exceptions,"

which must either refer to the scripture miracles, which Pope did not

believe when he wrote the Essay on Man, or to the doctrine of a special

providence, which he opposes in the fourth epistle.

[1042] "Some change" for "there has been some change," is bad English.

The argument is not superior to the language. Plagues, earthquakes, and

tempests, say the vindicators of nature, may in part be explained by the

changes which have taken place since the creation of the world. Pope,

Epist. iv. ver. 115, repeats that "evil" has been "admitted" through

"change." As no reason is assigned for this conversion of physical good

into physical evil, the supposition does not diminish the difficulty.

[1043] On a cursory reading we might understand Pope to mean that nature

sometimes deviates from her stated course for the purpose of promoting

human happiness. This sense does not agree with the context, and the

true interpretation is, that if the great end of terrestrial creation is

allowed to be human happiness, then it is clear that nature sometimes

deviates from that end, as in the instance of plagues and earthquakes.

[1044] The assertion is monstrous that we cannot be expected to control

our evil passions because nature has her storms, diseases, and

earthquakes. This is not to justify the ways of God, but the ways of

wicked men. The physical evil ordained by the ruler of the world, cannot

be put upon the same foundation with the moral evil which reason and

revelation condemn. Sin is permitted because it is better that offences

should exist than that free will should be destroyed, but it is

lamentable that we should will to do evil in preference to good. The

justification of the abuses of free will is a distinct proposition from

the argument into which Pope glides, that it is not harder to understand

why man should be allowed to be a scourge to man than why suffering

should be inflicted through the agency of earthquakes and pestilence.

[1045] To draw a parallel between things of a nature entirely different

is mere sophistry. A continual spring would be fatal to the earth and

its inhabitants, but how would the world suffer if men were always wise,

calm, and temperate?--CROUSAZ.

[1046] Shortly after his father, Alexander VI., ascended the papal

throne in 1492, Cæsar Borgia commenced the career of war, massacre, and

murder which made him the scourge and terror of Italy. He was killed by

a musket-ball at a petty siege in 1507. The conspiracy of Catiline

against the Roman government was terminated by his death at the head of

his banditti, B.C. 62, but from his depraved and desperate character

there was every reason to believe that he would have used a victory to

plunder with insatiable greediness, and to destroy with remorseless

cruelty.

[1047] God does not "pour ambition into Cæsar's mind," or the

all-perfect being would be the author of sin. The aberrations of

ambition are the acts of the ambitious man.

[1048] Alexander the Great. He made a pilgrimage to the temple of

Jupiter Ammon, in Africa, and the priests styled him son of their god.

Upon the faith of the oracle his flatterers believed, or affected to

believe, that he was of divine descent.

[1049] The four lines, ver. 157-160, first appeared in the edition of

1743.

[1050] MS.:

From whence all physical or moral ill?

'Tis nature wand'ring from the eternal will.

Pope plainly avows that physical evil is the disobedience of inanimate

nature to the Creator, as moral evil arose from the disobedience of man.

The couplet, in an altered form, was transferred to Epist. iv. ver. 111,

where the context confirms the interpretation which the present version

appears to require.

[1051] See this subject extended in Epist. ii. from ver. 100 to ver.

122; ver. 165, etc.--POPE.

Pope is answering the objections to moral evil. The passions for which

he has undertaken to account are vicious in kind or in degree--they are

the passions which are contrary to "virtue," ver. 166,--the passions of

Borgia, Catiline, Cæsar, and Alexander,--and these are not elements

essential to human life.

[1052] Pope uses almost the very words of Bolingbroke: "To think

worthily of God we must think that the natural order of things has been

always the same; and that a being of infinite wisdom and knowledge, to

whom the past and the future are like the present, and who wants no

experience to inform him, can have no reason to alter what infinite

wisdom and knowledge have once done."--WARTON.

In saying that the "general order" had been "kept," Pope did not mean

that there were no exceptions, for he held that there had been "some

change" since the beginning of things, which was to reject the fanciful

principle of Bolingbroke. Infinite wisdom cannot err, but change is not

necessarily the reparation of error, and a progressive may be preferable

to a stationary system.

[1053] This is Pope's summary of his weak defence of moral evil. Moral

and physical irregularities, he says in effect, have always prevailed,

and both are indispensable. He denies this in his third epistle, and

asserts that universal innocence endured for several generations to the

great advantage of man.

[1054] Psalm viii. 5: "Thou hast made him a little lower than the

angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour."--WARBURTON.

[1055] MS.: "Brawn."

[1056] Pope, in these lines, diverts himself with drawing the picture of

a fool, that he may remark upon him, and extend the remarks to mankind

in general. But such fools are rarely to be met with, and I question

whether one can be found infatuated to a degree like this.--CROUSAZ.

Bishop Butler, like Crousaz, did not believe that such "fools" existed.

"Who," he asked, "ever felt uneasiness upon observing any of the

advantages brute creatures have over us?" Pope's authority was The

Moralists of Lord Shaftesbury. "Why, says one, was I not made by nature

strong as a horse? Why not hardy and robust as this brute creature? or

nimble and active as that other?"

[1057] The inversion is harsh; and when the words are ranged in their

proper order, "If he call all creatures made for his use," is but

uncouth English.

[1058] Shaftesbury's Moralists, Part ii. Sect. 4: "Nature has managed

all for the best, with perfect frugality and just reserve; profuse to

none, but bountiful to all."

[1059] It is a certain axiom in the anatomy of creatures, that in

proportion as they are formed for strength their swiftness is lessened;

or as they are formed for swiftness their strength is abated.--POPE.

This is an error. The most powerful race-horses are often the fleetest.

[1060] First edition:

So justly all proportioned to each state.

[1061] Vid. Epist. iii. ver. 79, etc., and ver. 109, etc.--POPE.

[1062] That is, in its own state or condition.

[1063] First edition:

Each beast, each insect, happy as it can,

Is heav'n unkind to nothing but to man?

Shall man, shall reasonable man alone

Be or endowed with all, or pleased with none?

[1064] First edition:

No self-confounding faculties to share,

No senses stronger than his brain can bear.

This rejected couplet embodied a fancy from Lord Shaftesbury's Moralists

that the leading qualities in any being are always provided at the

expense of other organs, and that if man had been endowed with greater

and more numerous bodily capacities his brain would have been starved.

[1065] First edition:

What the advantage if his finer eyes

Study a mite, not comprehend the skies.

The second edition has some further variations:

Why has not man a microscopic sight?

For this plain reason, man is not a mite:

Say what th' advantage of so fine an eye?

T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the sky.

Pope owed the thought, and the expression "microscopic eye" to Locke,

Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 23, sect. 12: "If by the

help of microscopical eyes, a man could penetrate into the secret

composition of bodies, he would not make any great advantage by the

change if he could not see things he was to avoid at a convenient

distance."

[1066] The abbreviated language of the last four lines, which are not

legitimate composition, makes it difficult to follow the construction:

"Say what the use were finer touch given if, trembingly alive all o'er,

we were to smart and agonise at ev'ry pore? Or what the use of quick

effluvia darting through the brain, if we were to die of a rose in

aromatic pain?"

[1067] Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 23, sect.

12: "If our sense of hearing were but one thousand times quicker than it

is, how would a perpetual noise distract us. And we should in the

quietest retirement be less able to sleep or meditate than in the middle

of a sea-fight."--WARTON.

Butler, Hudibras, ii. 1, 617.

Her voice, the music of the spheres,

So loud, it deafens mortal ears.--WAKEFIELD.

It was an ancient fancy that the planets rolled along spheres, emitting

music as they went. Pope's supposition that the music would stun us,

alludes to the remarks of Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, that the crash of

harmony is so tremendous that human ears cannot receive it, just as

human eyes cannot gaze at the sun. Warburton remarks that Pope should

not have illustrated a philosophical argument by the example of an

unreal sound.

[1068] First edition:

Through gen'ral life, behold the scale arise

Of sensual and of mental faculties!

Vast range of sense from man's imperial race

To the green myriads, etc.

A very little observation would have satisfied Pope that "green" is not

the prevailing hue of the "myriads in the peopled grass." Wakefield says

that the expression "man's imperial race," in ver. 209, is from Dryden's

Virg. Geo. iii. 377, and that the general argument is from Bolingbroke's

Fragments: "There is a gradation of sense and intelligence here from

animal beings imperceptible to us for their minuteness, without the help

of microscopes, and even with them, up to man." This is what Leibnitz

called "the law of continuity." "Nature," he said, "never proceeds by

leaps."

[1069] The manner of the lions hunting their prey in the deserts of

Africa is this; at their first going out in the night-time they set up a

loud roar, and then listen to the noise made by the beasts in their

flight, pursuing them by the ear, and not by the nostril. It is

probable, the story of the jackal's hunting for the lion was occasioned

by observation of this defect of scent in that terrible animal.--POPE.

Pope was mistaken in his notion that the lion hunted by ear alone, and

that his sense of smell was obtuse. His scenting powers are very acute.

The account which Pope gives would not, if it were true, explain why the

jackal should have been singled out for the office of lion's provider.

The real reason is told by Livingstone. When the lion is devouring his

prey, "the jackal comes sniffing about, and sometimes suffers for his

temerity by a stroke from the lion's paw laying him dead." The

persevering attempt of the lesser animal to share the spoils with the

greater, led to the belief that the two worked in concert--that the

jackal was the pioneer, and the lion the executioner. There are two

other readings of ver. 213 in the MS.:

smell the stupid ass

Degrees of scent the vulgar brute between.

All the versions are deformed by the license of putting the preposition

"between" after its noun.

[1070] It was formerly a common belief that fish were deaf; but Pope

ascribes to them some capacity of hearing, and this is now known to be

correct.

[1071] Dryden, Marriage-a-la-mode, Act ii.:

And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such,

That, spider-like, we feel the tender'st touch.--WAKEFIELD.

These lines are admirable patterns of forcible diction. The peculiar and

discriminating expressiveness of the epithets ought to be particularly

regarded. Perhaps we have no image in the language more lively than that

of ver. 218. "To live along the line," is equally bold and beautiful. In

this part of the epistle the poet seems to have remarkably laboured his

style, which abounds in various figures, and is much elevated. Pope has

practised the great secret of Virgil's art, which was to discover the

very single epithet that precisely suited each occasion. If Pope must

yield to other poets in point of fertility of fancy, or harmony of

numbers, yet in point of propriety, closeness, and elegance of diction,

he can yield to none.--WARTON.

[1072] The house-spider conceals itself in a cell, which is constructed

below the web, and at a distance from it. The threads which are spun

from the edge of the web to the spider's lurking-hole, vibrate when a

fly comes in contact with the web, and are at once a telegraph to give

information to the spider, and a bridge along which it can rush forward

to secure its prey.

[1073] When the nectar of flowers is poisonous, the bee has not the

power of separating its noxious from its wholesome properties, nor do

bees always avoid the flowers which are hurtful to them. Some honey

which is fatal to man may not be injurious to the insects collecting it.

[1074] At first it ran,

How instinct varies! What a hog may want

Compared with thine, half-reasoning elephant.--WARTON.

[1075] Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:

Great wits are sure to madness near allied

And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Pope is illustrating his proposition that there must be grades of

capacity for animal to be subject to animal, and all animals to man. The

application of the couplet to his argument is obscure, and the couplet

itself very vague. The "remembrance" closely "allied to reflection"

appears to be the effort of attention by which we recall the dormant

stores of memory. "Thought" is a dubious term, but seems to be put by

Pope for the acts of mind which take their rise in the mind itself, as

willing, imagining, reasoning, etc., in contradistinction to seeing,

feeling, taste, etc., which are produced by the operation of external

things upon the senses.

[1076] A two-fold or mixed nature was sometimes in old language called a

"middle nature," such as a compound of mind and matter, or an amphibious

animal, and Pope perhaps meant that the double nature "longs to join" in

a more intimate union. Or he may have meant by "middle," an intermediate

nature, such as any creature which has an order of beings above and

below it, but then to satisfy Pope's phraseology there must be two of

these middle natures which are longing to unite with each other, and the

higher would not desire to be "joined" to the lower. The couplet seems

at best to be mere mystical jargon.

[1077] The idea is in Locke's Essay, bk. iii. chap. 6, sect. 12, which

Warton quotes. Bolingbroke, Fragment 49, copied Locke and others, and

Pope copied Bolingbroke.

[1078] Ed. 1st:

Ethereal essence, spirit, substance, man.--POPE.

[1079] This is a magnificent passage. Thomson had before said in Summer,

ver. 333:

Has any seen

The mighty chain of beings, lessening down

From infinite perfection, to the brink

Of dreary nothing.--WARTON.

Kennet's Pascal, p. 166: "He will find himself hanging, in the material

scale, between the two vast abysses of infinite and nothing."

[1080] All that can be said of a scale of beings is to be found in the

third chapter of King's Origin of Evil, and in a note ending with these

emphatic words: "Whatever system God had chosen, there could have been

but a determinate multitude of the most perfect creatures, and when that

was completed there would have been a station for creatures less

perfect, and it would still have been an instance of goodness to give

them a being as well as others."--WARTON.

[1081] Suffer men, says Pope, to encroach upon superior powers, and

either inferior powers must rise to the rank we have vacated, or by not

moving forward into the gap, they will leave a void in creation.

[1082] MS.:

in nature what it hates, a void;

Or leave a gap in the creation void;

The scale is broken if a step destroyed.

[1083] Dryden, Love Triumphant, Act iv. Sc. 1:

Great nature, break thy chain, that links together

The fabric of this globe, and make a chaos.

[1084] MS.:

Yet more ev'n systems in gradation roll.

[1085] Bolingbroke, Fragment 42: "We cannot doubt that numberless

worlds, and systems of worlds, compose this amazing whole, the

universe."

[1086] Milton, Par. Lost, vii. 242:

And earth self-balanced on her centre hung.

The tendency of the earth to move in a straight line is balanced by the

attraction of the sun, and Pope supposes this attraction to cease.

[1087] I like the reading of earlier editions better;

Planets and suns _rush_ lawless through the sky.--WAKEFIELD.

[1088] After Pope's death "tremble" was misprinted "trembles," and the

error has been retained in most editions. The construction is, "Let

planets and suns run lawless through the sky, let being be wrecked on

being, world on world, let heaven's whole foundations nod to their

centre, and let nature tremble to the throne of God!"

[1089] These six lines, ver. 251-256, are added since the first

edition.--POPE.

Ruffhead says "there is no reading these lines without being struck with

a momentary apprehension." Without quite allowing this, we cannot but

feel their great beauty and force. Line rises upon line, with greater

effect and nobler imagery, and in the conclusion the poet has touched

the idea with propriety, as well as dignity and sublimity. If he had

been more particular, the passage would have been unworthy the grandeur

of the subject; had he been less it would have been obscure. He has at

once evinced judgment and poetry. If there be a word or two not quite

suitable, perhaps it is "run," and "foundations nod." I could have

wished such a word as "rushed lawless," or "flamed lawless through the

sky."--BOWLES.

[1090] The chief problem which Pope undertook to solve was the existence

of moral evil. Yet, if man, in obedience to God's commands, became

morally perfect, none of the disastrous effects the poet describes would

ensue. Angels would not be hurled from their spheres; worlds would not

be wrecked; nor would heaven's foundations nod to their centre. Reason

and revelation unite in the conclusion that moral perfection would, on

the contrary, be an unmitigated blessing. Consequently Pope's hypothesis

explains nothing unless he had shown how it is that a system which

rendered evil impossible would be inferior to our own.

[1091] Plotinus, translated by Cudworth, Intellectual System, ed.

Harrison, vol. iii., p. 479: "Some things in me partake only of being,

some of life also, some of sense, some of reason, and some of intellect

above reason. But no man ought to require equal things from unequal; nor

that the finger should see, but the eye; it being enough for the finger

to be a finger, and to perform its own office."--WARTON.

[1092] Bolingbroke, Fragment 66: "Nothing can be more absurd than the

complaints of creatures who are in one of these orders, that they are

not in another."

[1093] Vid. the prosecution and application of this in Epist. iv. ver.

162.--POPE.

[1094] "Soul," says Samuel Clarke, "signifies a part of a whole, whereof

body is the other part, and they, being united, mutually affect each

other as parts of the same whole. But God is present to every part of

the universe, not as a soul, but as a governor, so as to act upon

everything in what manner he pleases, himself being acted upon by

nothing." Warburton quotes some passages from Sir Isaac Newton asserting

the omnipresence of the Deity, and the commentator affirms that the poet

expressed the identical doctrine of the philosopher. This is a

misrepresentation. The extracts of Warbuton are from the scholium to the

Principia, where Newton adds, "God governs all things, not as a soul of

the world, but as the Lord of the universe. The Godhead of God is his

dominion, a dominion not like that of a soul over its own body, but that

of a Lord over his servants." The doctrine which Pope held in common

with Sir Isaac Newton was the omnipresence of the Deity. The doctrine

which Sir Isaac Newton repudiated, and which Pope maintained, was that

the world was the body of God as the human frame is of man. The world in

this sense was not the work of the Deity, but a portion of him. Pope

abandoned his present creed, Epist. iii. ver. 229, where he says,

The worker from the work distinct was known.

[1095] Every ear must feel the ill effect of the monotony in these

lines. The cause is obvious. When the pause falls on the fourth

syllable, we shall find that we pronounce the six last in the same time

that we do the four first, so that the couplet is not only divided into

two equal lines, but each line, with respect to time, is divided into

two equal parts.--WEBB.

[1096] Our poet is certainly indebted to the following verses of Mrs.

Chandler on Solitude:

He's all in all: his wisdom, goodness, pow'r,

Spring in each blade, and bloom in ev'ry flow'r;

Smile o'er the meads, and bend in ev'ry hill, }

Glide in the stream, and murmur in the rill: }

All nature moves obedient to his will. }

Dryden, in the State of Innocence, Act v., was probably also in our

poet's recollection:

Where'er thou art, he is: th' eternal mind

Acts through all places, is to none confined;

Fills ocean, earth, and air, and all above,

And through the universal mass does move.--WAKEFIELD.

[1097] "Our mortal part," is put in opposition to "soul," and the

antithesis is a recognition of the soul's immortality. The allusion was

too slight to offend Bolingbroke, or, perhaps, to attract his notice.

[1098] Dugald Stewart observes that everyone must be displeased with

this line, because the triviality of the alliteration is at variance

with the sublimity of the subject.

[1099] First edition:

As the rapt Seraphim that sings and burns.

The name Seraphim, says Warburton, signifies burners, and Wakefield

quotes, in illustration, from Spenser's Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, stanza

14:

And those eternal burning Seraphims

Which from their faces dart out fiery light.

[1100] These are lines of a marvellous energy and closeness of

expression.--WARTON.

The concluding lines appear to be a false jingle of words which

neutralise the whole of Pope's argument. If there is to Providence "no

high, no low, no great, no small," the gradation of beings is a

delusion. What things are in the sight of God, that they are in reality,

and since no one thing in creation is superior or inferior to any other

thing, Pope's language throughout this epistle is unmeaning. The final

phrase of the couplet is bathos. God is not only the "equal" of "all"

his works, he is immeasurably beyond them.

[1101] The "order" is the gradation of beings, and "what we blame" is

our own rank in the scale of creation, whereas, says Pope, our "proper

bliss depends upon it."

[1102] MS.:

Cease then, nor order imperfection call

On which depends the happiness of all.

Reason, to think of God when she pretends,

Begins a censor, an adorer ends.

See and confess, this just, this kind degree

Of blindness, etc.

[1103] Pope would not express a "sure and certain hope in a blessed

resurrection." He used the same equivocal language as his "guide," who

had no faith that "another sphere" existed for man. "Let the

tranquillity of my mind," said Bolingbroke, Frag. 51, "rest on this

immovable rock, that my future, as well as my present state, are ordered

by an almighty and all-wise Creator."

[1104] MS.:

In the same hand, the same all-plastic pow'r.

[1105] "Nature is the art whereby God governs the world," says

Hobbes.--WARTON.

Sir T. Browne, Relig. Med. Part i. 16: "In brief all things are

artificial; for nature is the art of God."

[1106] Art, in the sense of design, is manifest in nature, and has been

traced in endless particulars. Pope must mean by "unknown art" the

ultimate principles to which the laws of nature owe their efficiency.

[1107] From Fontenelle: "Everything is chance, provided we give this

name to an order unknown to us."--WARTON.

[1108] Feltham's Resolves: "The world is kept in order by discord, and

every part of it is but a more particular composed jar. And in all these

it makes greatly for the Maker's glory that such an admirable harmony

should be produced out of such an infinite discord."--WARTON.

[1109] This line ran thus in the first edition:

And spite of pride, and in thy reason's spite.

Pope afterwards, says Johnson, discovered, or was shown, that the

"truth" which subsisted "in spite of reason" could not be very "clear."

[1110] MS.:

Learn we ourselves, not God presume to scan,

But know the study, etc.

[1111] Ed. 1.:

The only science of mankind is man.

Ed. 2.:

The proper study, etc.--POPE.

"The true science and true study of man is man," says Charron in his

treatise on Wisdom; and Pascal, in his thoughts translated by Dr.

Kennet, 1727, p. 248, says, "The study of man is the proper employment

and exercise of mankind." But Pascal is maintaining that man should

study himself in preference to mathematics, and not to the exclusion of

God, which is a doctrine that would have filled him with horror.

[1112] From Cowley, who says of life, in his ode on Life and Fame:

Vain, weak-built isthmus, which dost proudly rise

Up betwixt two eternities.--WARTON.

[1113] Kennet's Pascal, p. 160: "We have an idea of truth, not to be

effaced by all the wiles of the sceptic."

[1114] The stoic took his stand upon virtue, and with a stern faith in

the all-sufficiency of moral excellence he calmly defied the trials of

life.

[1115] Johnson, in his translation of Crousaz, says he cannot determine

whether any one has discovered the true meaning of the words "in doubt

to act or rest." The language is vague, and incapable of an

interpretation which is generally true; but the probable sense seems to

be that man is in doubt whether to embrace an active belief, or whether

to resign himself to a passive, inert scepticism.

[1116] First edition:

To deem himself a part of God or beast.

Kennet's Pascal, p. 30, furnished the hint for the line: "What, then, is

to be the fate of man? Shall he be equal to God, or shall he not be

superior to the beasts?"

[1117] Man is not born only to die, but death has the present life on

one side of it, and immortality on the other. Man does not reason only

to err, but to establish a multitude of mighty truths.

[1118] "Such is the reason of man that he is equally ignorant whether,

etc."

[1119] From Kennet's Pascal, p. 180: "If we think too little of a thing

or too much, our head turns giddy, and we are at a loss to find out our

way to truth."

[1120] Kennet's Pascal, p. 162: "What a chimæra then is man! What a

confused chaos! What a subject of contradiction!"

[1121] "Abused" here means "deceived," a sense of the word which was

once common. Lord Bacon, Essay on Cunning: "Some build upon the abusing

of others, and, as we now say, putting tricks upon them." Bishop Hall,

Contemplations upon the New Testament, bk. ii. cont. 6: "Crafty men and

lying spirits agreed to abuse the credulous world."

[1122] Kennet's Pascal, p. 162: "If he is too aspiring we can lower him;

if too mean we can raise him."

[1123] From Kennet's Pascal, p. 162: "A professed judge of all things,

and yet a feeble worm of the earth; the great depositary and guardian of

truth, and yet a mere huddle of uncertainty; the glory and the scandal

of the universe."

[1124] After ver. 18 in the MS.:

For more perfection than this state can bear

In vain we sigh; heav'n made us as we are.

[If gods we _must_ because we _would_ be, then

Pray hard ye monkies, and ye may be men.]

As wisely sure a modest ape might aim

To be like man, whose faculties and frame

He sees, he feels, as you or I to be

An angel thing we neither know nor see.

Observe how near he edges on our race;

What human tricks! how risible of face!

"It must be so--why else have I the sense

Of more than monkey charms and excellence?

Why else to walk on two so oft essayed?

And why this ardent longing for a maid?"

So Pug might plead, and call his gods unkind,

Till set on end, and married to his mind.

Go, reas'ning thing! assume the Doctor's chair,

As Plato deep, as Seneca severe:

Fix moral fitness, and to God give rule,

Then drop, etc.--WARBURTON.

The couplet between brackets was omitted by Warburton. There is still

another reading in the MS. of the couplet, "Observe how near," etc.

Observe his love of tricks, his laughing face;

An elder brother, too, to human race.

[1125] MS.:

Go, reas'ning man, go mount, etc.

[1126] MS.:

Instruct erratic planets where to run.

[1127] Warburton says that the phrase "correct old Time" refers to Sir

Isaac Newton's Chronology of Antient Kingdoms Amended, in which one of

the main positions was based upon astronomical science. More probably

Pope alluded to the familiar fact of the Gregorian reformation of the

calendar by substituting new style for old. The change was adopted

towards the close of the sixteenth century through the greater part of

Europe, but the old style was retained in England till 1752. By

"regulate the sun," Wakefield understands the use of equal mean for

unequal apparent time.

[1128] Ed. 4, 5.:

Show by what rules the wand'ring planets stray,

Correct old Time, and teach the sun his way.--POPE.

"Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule," exclaims Pope, ver. 29, and

Warburton correctly remarks that the sarcastic summary is "a conclusion

from all that had been said before from ver. 18 to this effect." The

illustrations which go before should consequently be examples of the

wild attempts to show how the world might have been better contrived,

and Pope points to such schemes when he says, "_Instruct_ the planets in

what orbs to run." But he has perplexed his meaning by improperly mixing

up with instances of ignorant presumption, those real discoveries in

science, which are the result of a patient investigation of God's works,

and have no connection with the pretence of "teaching Eternal Wisdom how

to rule."

[1129] Bolingbroke, Fragment 58: "They soar up on Platonic wings to the

first good and the first just." Plato taught that there was a good in

itself, a just in itself, a beautiful in itself, etc. These ideas, as he

called them, these faultless archetypes of earthly qualities, were not

mere abstractions of the mind. They had a real existence, and all that

was good, beautiful, and just in this world, was derived from them. The

"empyreal sphere" was the outermost of the nine fictitious spheres of

the ancients, and is "inhabited," says Cicero in his Vision of Scipio,

"by that all-powerful God who controls the other spheres." Pope learned

his contempt of Plato from Bolingbroke, who said of him with his usual

intemperance, and more than his usual ignorance, that he was the "father

of philosophical lying, and treated every subject like a bombast poet,

and a mad theologian."

[1130] MS.:

And proudly rave of imitating God.

Bolingbroke, Fragment 2: "I dare not use theological familiarity and

talk of imitating God." Frag. 4: "I hold it to be worse than absurd to

assert that man can imitate God." The Platonists taught that if we would

know and imitate God we must withdraw the mind from the things of sense,

and contemplate the spiritual and the perfect. Pope's object was to

ridicule those who thought that the perfections of the Deity were to be

the model for the imperfect efforts of man. The notion, he says, is not

less preposterous than the Eastern absurdity of twisting in a circle to

imitate the apparent revolution of the sun.

[1131] MS.:

So Eastern madmen in a circle run.

[1132] Plutarch tells us, in his Life of Numa, that the followers of

Pythagoras were enjoined to turn themselves round during the performance

of their religious worship; and that this circumrotation was intended to

imitate the revolution of the world. Pliny, in his Natural History,

xxviii. 5, mentions the same practice.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope referred to the sacred dance of the Mahometan monks. "They turn on

their left foot," says Thevenot, "like a wind-mill driven by a strong

wind," and Lady Mary W. Montagu, who witnessed the ceremony, states that

they whirled round with an amazing swiftness for above an hour without

any of them showing the least appearance of giddiness, which, she adds,

is not to be wondered at when it is considered they are all used to it

from their infancy.

[1133] MS.:

Of moral fitness fix th' unerring rule.

[1134] MS.:

Angels themselves, I grant it, when they saw

One mighty man, etc.

[1135] MS.:

Admired an angel in a human shape.

[1136] From the Zodiac of Palingenius:

Simia cœlicolum, risusque jocusque deorum est

Tunc homo, cum temerè ingenio confidit, et audet

Abdita naturæ scrutari, arcanaque divum.--WARTON.

This image gives an air of burlesque to the passage, notwithstanding all

that can be said. It is degrading to the subject, to the idea of the

"superior beings," and to the character on whom it is meant as a

panegyric.--BOWLES.

The author of a Letter to Mr. Pope, 1735, says that the lines on Newton

had been "generally admired and repeated." From this praise he justly

dissents. Either the angels could not have "admired" Newton in the

proper sense of the word, or they could not have "shown him as we show

an ape," when he would have appeared a grotesque and ludicrous object.

The idea is altogether a poor conceit, and was not worth borrowing. In

the MS. an additional couplet followed ver. 34:

Ah, turn the glass! it shows thee all along

As weak in conduct, as in science strong.

[1137] Ed. 4: The whirling comet.--POPE.

[1138] Ed. 1:

Could he who taught each planet where to roll,

Describe or fix one movement of the soul?

Who marked their points to rise or to descend,

Explain his own beginning or his end?--POPE.

[1139] Sir Isaac Newton showed the probability, converted into certainty

by later observations, that comets travelled in elongated curves, and

were subjected to the identical law of attraction which governed the

motions of the planets. The laws of gravitation were the "rules" which

"bound" the comets, and Pope contrasts these definite laws of matter

with the variable "movements" of the human mind, which cannot be "fixed"

or reduced to rule. The mind, however, has also its laws, which,

notwithstanding the disturbing force of free-will, are sufficiently

understood for the practical purposes of life.

[1140] Ed. 4:

Who saw the stars here rise, and here descend?--POPE.

[1141] The comparison is pointless. Newton knew far more of his end,--of

his mission and ultimate destiny,--than of the purpose and fate of

comets, and did not know less of his own beginning than of the origin of

the heavenly bodies. Man is incapable of conceiving the mode by which a

single atom of the universe was called into being, nor can he penetrate

to the essence of a single law or particle of matter any better than to

the essence of mind. After ver. 38 there is this couplet in the MS.:

Or more of God, or more of man can find,

Than this that one is good, and one is blind?

There is a kindred antithesis in the last verse of the Epistle, but the

exaggeration of the statement is less strongly marked.

[1142] "Alas," says Pope, "what wonder" that Newton should be unable to

"explain his own beginning and end," since "what reason weaves is undone

by passion." But this cannot be the cause of our inability to unfold the

creative process, for when passion is not permitted to interfere with

reason we make no advance towards an explanation of our "own beginning."

Passion does often interfere with the just perception of our proper

"end," and with the practice of the duties we perceive, only Pope should

have known that to rise superior to passion is the daily discipline of

hosts of men. "It seems," says Pascal, "to be the divine intention to

perfect the will rather than the understanding," and of the two we can

approximate nearer to moral perfection than to universal science.

[1143] MS.:

Unchecked may mount thy intellectual part

From whim to whim,--at best from art to art.

[1144] MS.:

Joins truth to truth, or mounts

There mounts unchecked, and soars from art to art.

[1145] An allusion to the web of Penelope in Homer's

Odyssey.--WAKEFIELD.

[1146] That is, of all the studies which are dictated by the vices of

pride and vanity. He followed Bolingbroke, who wrote long tirades

against moralists, divines, and metaphysicians, for indulging, from hope

of fame, in barren, chimerical speculations.

[1147] This paragraph first appeared in the edition of 1743. In the

preceding paragraph, we are told that, in physical science, man "may

rise unchecked from art to art." Unless, therefore, Pope reckoned

physical science among the worthless departments of knowledge, there

was, by his own statement, one vast and important scientific region

which was destined to unlimited extension, and of which it was not

correct to say that a "little sum" must serve the future, as it had

served the past.

[1148] MS.:

Two different principles our nature move;

One spurs, one reins; this reason, that self-love.

Cicero's Offices, i. 28: "The powers of the mind are twofold; one

consists in appetite, by the Greeks called ὁρμη (impulse), which hurries

man hither and thither; the other in reason, which teaches and explains

what we are to do, and what we are to avoid."

[1149] The MS. goes on thus:

Of good and evil gods what frighted fools,

Of good and evil, reason puzzled schools,

Deceived, deceiving taught, to these refer;

Know both must operate, or both must err.--WARBURTON.

[1150] "Still" is thrust in to supply a rhyme. "Ascribe" is "we ascribe"

carried on from "we call" at ver. 55.

[1151] "Acts," in the signification of "incites to action" was formerly

common. "Most men," says Barrow, "are greatly tainted with self-love;

some are wholly possessed and _acted_ by it."

[1152] MS.:

Self-love the spring of action lends the force;

Reason's comparing balance states the course:

The primal impulse, and controlling weight

To give the motion, and to regulate.

Bolingbroke, Fragment 3, says that "appetite and passion are the spring

of human nature; reason the balance to control and regulate it." The

image is borrowed from the works of the watch, where the spring is the

moving power, and the balance regulates the motion.

[1153] Without self-love, that is, man would be like "a plant," and

without reason like "a meteor,"--the slave of destructive passions. The

first comparison is inconsiderate. The man who had no self-love, which

means no moving principle, no affections or desires, would not even

"draw nutrition, and propagate." The appetite for food, the sexual

appetite, and the care for life, would all be wanting, and he would

"rot" at once. Or if reason, without desires, could induce him to foster

an existence to which he was totally indifferent, reason might equally

impel him to other acts besides the preservation of himself, and the

perpetuation of his race.

[1154] Meteors may flame lawless through empty space, but man could not

be flaming through a "void" when he was "destroying others."

[1155] The objects, that is, of reason lie at a distance. MS.:

Self-love yet stronger as its objects near;

Reason's diminished as remote appear.

[1156] From Lord Bacon: "The affections carry ever an appetite to good

as reason doth. The difference is, that the affection beholdeth merely

the present, reason beholdeth the future and sum of time."--RUFFHEAD.

"The sensual man," says Crousaz in illustration of the principle,

"indulges in the pleasures of a luxurious table regardless of the

diseases that may be the consequence of his gluttony, but the reasoner

prefers a lasting tranquillity to transient enjoyment."

[1157] Bolingbroke, Fragment 6: "Self-love is the original spring of

human actions. Experience and observation require time; and reason that

collects from them comes slowly to our assistance." Experience

enlightens reason by showing us what is hurtful in practice, and what

beneficial. Pope's line is badly expressed. "Attention gains habit," for

"habits are acquired by attention," is barely English.

[1158] MS.: "nature." "Grace" here signifies the Divine assistance

vouchsafed to the natural powers of man in his efforts after goodness.

Pope's original reading,--"grace and nature"--was a censure of the

attempts to define the respective influences exerted by the nature of

man, and the grace or intervention of God. The substitute of "virtue"

for "nature," obscures the meaning, but the poet apparently had still in

his mind the long controversies on the share which appertained to

"grace" in the production of "virtue." He may have thought that it was

needless to try and settle the precise part which belonged to grace,

since nature and grace are both gifts of the same Almighty Being.

[1159] Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato divided the faculties into "sense

and reason," and the classification passed from the ancients to the

schoolmen. "Sense" comprised the five senses, with every act of the mind

which was supposed to depend on bodily sensations. Under this head were

included the passions and desires, and "sense," in its moral

signification, was the equivalent of what Pope calls "self-love."

[1160] MS.:

Let metaphysics common reason split.

[1161] In the MS. this couplet follows:

Too nice distinctions honest sense will shun,

Know pleasure, good, and happiness are one.

[1162] MS.:

Both fly from pain, to pleasure both aspire,

With one aversion, and with one desire.

Pope charges the schoolmen with being at war about a name when they

distinguished between "sense" and "reason," and the distinction is a

capital article in his own moral creed. He charges them with maintaining

that sense and reason were not merely separate, but contending powers,

and he too has insisted on the universality of the strife. "Sense," or,

in his language, "self-love," "looks," ver. 73, to "immediate," "reason"

to "future good," and in this difference of view the "temptations" of

self-love "throng thicker than the arguments" of reason. The contest is

the subject of a long disquisition further on, and Pope laments, ver.

149-160, that passion should conquer in the fight. When he interjected

the paragraph, in which he contradicted himself, he rested his case on

the proposition that reason, which pursues interest well-understood, and

self-love, which gratifies present passion, "aspire to one

end,--pleasure." But the pleasure sought by reason and self-love

respectively is not the same pleasure, and so incompatible were the two

pleasures in his estimation that he calls one, ver. 92, "our greatest

evil," the other "our greatest good."

[1163] MS.:

Reason itself more nicely shares in all.

[1164] MS.:

Passions whose ends are honest, means are fair.

[1165] "List," which would probably now be thought a vulgarism, was in

Pope's day the established word. Our form, "enlist," was apparently

unknown to Johnson, who did not insert it in his Dictionary.

[1166] "Passions that court an aim" is surely a strange

expression.--WARTON.

For "court" Pope had at first written "boast."

[1167] The "imparted" or sympathetic passions are the benevolent

impulses and affections. As to their "kind," or nature, they are, says

Pope, "modes of self-love," but when the self-love assumes the form of

loving others the passion is "exalted, and takes the name of some

virtue." He passes the affections over here with this slight allusion,

and returns to them at ver. 255, and more at length in Epistle iii.

[1168] What says old Epictetus, who knew stoicism better than these men?

"I am not to be apathetic or void of passions, like a statue. I am to

discharge all the relations of a social and friendly life,--the parent,

the husband, the brother, the magistrate." The stoic apathy was no more

than a freedom from irrational and excessive agitations of the

soul.--JAMES HARRIS.

[1169] That is, in cold insensibility. Lady Chudleigh's dialogue on the

death of her daughter:

Honour is ever the reward of pain:

A lazy virtue no applause will gain.--WAKEFIELD.

[1170] The stoic aimed at inner perfection, and trusted to the serenity

of virtue to sustain him in all the trials of life. Pope erroneously

imagined that stoics were selfish and inactive because they were calm

and self-contained. Seneca, De Ot. i. 4, says, they insisted that we

must never cease labouring for the common good, and Cicero, De Fin. iii.

19, says they placed their force of character at the service of mankind,

and thought it their duty to live, and if need were to die, for the

benefit of the public.

[1171] A couplet is added in the MS.:

Virtue dispassioned naked meets the fight,

Comes without arms, and conquers but by flight.

[1172] MS.:

Passions like tempests put in act the soul.

[1173] Spectator, June 18, 1712. No. 408: "Passions are to the mind as

winds to a ship; they only can move it, and they too often destroy it.

Reason must then take the place of pilot, and can never fail of securing

her charge if she be not wanting to herself."

[1174] Tate's paraphrase from Simonides, Dryden's Miscellanies, vol. v.

p. 55:

On life's wide ocean diversely launched out,

Our minds alike are tossed on waves of doubt,

Holding no steady course, or constant sail,

But shift and tack with ev'ry veering gale.--WAKEFIELD.

[1175] In the mariner's compass the paper on which the points of the

compass are marked is called "the card."

[1176] Carew's Poems:

A troop of deities came down to guide

Our steerless barks in passion's swelling tide,

By virtue's card.--WAKEFIELD.

After ver. 108 in the MS.:

A tedious voyage! where how useless lies

The compass, if no pow'rful gusts arise!--WARBURTON.

[1177] Psalm civ. 3: "Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the

waters, and walketh upon the wings of the wind."--BOWLES.

Dryden's Ceyx and Alcyone:

And now sublime she rides upon the wind.--WARTON.

Pope held that "fierce ambition" was instigated by the Almighty, Epist.

i. ver. 159, and compared his inspiration of such tumultuous passions to

his "heaving old ocean, and winging the storm." The poet must be

understood as upholding the same extended and licentious doctrine when

he returns to the comparison, and talks of "God mounting the storm" of

the passions, and "walking upon the wind."

[1178] After ver. 112 in the MS.:

The soft, reward the virtuous or invite;

The fierce, the vicious punish or affright.--WARBURTON.

[1179] How, that is, can the stoic succeed in destroying passions which

enter into the very composition of man? The stoic made no such

pretension. What he laboured to "destroy" were those "perturbations of

mind" which Zeno, Tusc. iv. 6, maintained to be "repugnant to reason,

and against nature," and for which the stoical remedy, Tusc. iv. 28, was

the demonstration that they "were vicious, and had nothing natural or

necessary in them." The principle for which Pope contended was the very

maxim of the stoics,--they insisted that "reason should keep to nature's

road." The real question was, whether they did not sometimes go too far,

and condemn natural emotions under the name of prohibited perturbations.

[1180] All he means is, that the intentions of God are manifested in the

nature of man.

[1181] Dryden, State of Innocence, Act v.:

With all the num'rous family of death.

Garth, Dispensary, vi. 138:

And all the faded family of care.--WAKEFIELD.

[1182] Warton remarks that the group of allegorical personages are here

suddenly changed to things which are to be "mixed with art."

[1183] MS.:

To blend them well, and harmonise their strife

Makes all etc.

[1184] In plain prose thus: "To grasp present pleasures and to find

future pleasures is the whole employ of body and mind." Pope's line is

rendered intolerable by its elliptical and inverted language, and the

unmeaning expletive "still."

[1185] MS.:

Present to seize, or future to obtain

The whole employ of body and of brain.

[1186] MS.:

On stronger senses stronger passions strike.

[1187] MS.:

Hence passions rise, and more or less inflame,

Proportioned to each organ of the frame,

Nor here internal faculties control,

Nor soul on body acts, but that on soul.

Pope derived the notion from Mandeville, who says that the diversity of

passions in different men "depend only upon the different frame,--the

inward formation of either the solids or the fluids." According to Pope

the strongest organ gives rise to some passion of corresponding

strength, which finally absorbs all other passions.

[1188] The use of this doctrine, as applied to the knowledge of mankind,

is one of the subjects of the second book.--POPE.

Pope refers to Moral Essays, Epist. 1. Of the Knowledge and Characters

of Men.

[1189] The metaphor is taken from the casting of metal. The "mind's

disease," says Pope, is in the original casting, and is not a defect

which arises subsequently.

[1190] Dryden's Juvenal, Sat. x. 489:

One, with cruel art,

Makes Colon suffer for the peccant part.--WAKEFIELD.

[1191] The "faculties" are not a class of powers distinct from "wit,

spirit, reason," but these last are among the faculties, and we must

understand the passage as if Pope had written that wit and spirit, with

all the other faculties, including reason itself, contribute to the

growth of the ruling passion.

[1192] By inventing arguments in its justification, as Pope explains at

ver. 156.

[1193] Taken from Bacon, De Calore.--WARTON.

This comparison, which might be very proper in philosophy, has a mean

effect in poetry.--BOWLES.

In the MS. this couplet is added:

Its own best forces lead the mind astray,

Just as with Teague his own legs ran away.

Two lines, which do not appear in the subsequent editions, were inserted

after ver. 148 in the quarto of 1735:

The ruling passion, be it what it will,

The ruling passion conquers reason still.

[1194] MS.:

And we who vainly boast her rightful sway

In our weak etc.

[1195] M.S.:

Can reason more etc.

[1196] From La Rochefoucauld: "Reason frequently puts itself on the side

of the strongest passion; there is no violent passion which has not its

reason to justify it."--WARTON.

[1197] Pope copied Mandeville: "Man's strong habits and inclinations can

only be subdued by passions of greater violence."

[1198] Cowley's poem on the late civil war:

The plague, we know, drives all diseases out.--WAKEFIELD.

Ruffhead and Bowles unite in condemning the colloquial familiarity of

Pope's simile.

[1199] MS.:

This bias nature to our temper lends.

The couplet was not in the first edition.

[1200] The particular application of this to the several pursuits of

men, and the general good resulting thence, falls also into the

succeeding book.--POPE.

The "succeeding book" is the Moral Essays, which are almost entirely

made up of satiric sketches. Pope dilated upon the evil resulting from

"the mind's disease, the ruling passion," but barely touched upon "the

general good."

[1201] Man can only be driven from passion to passion during the infancy

of the ruling passion, which continues to grow, Pope tells us, till it

has overspread the entire mind, and obliterated every subordinate

desire.

[1202] From Rochefoucauld, Maxim 266: "It is a mistake to believe that

none but the violent passions, such as ambition and love, are able to

triumph over the other passions. Laziness, languid as it is, often gets

the mastery of them all, usurps over all the designs and actions of

life, and insensibly consumes and destroys both passions and

virtues."--WARTON.

[1203] MS.:

Th' Eternal Art that mingles good with ill.

[1204] Caryll's Hypocrite in Dryden's Miscellanies, iv. p. 312:

Hypocrisy at last should enter in,

And fix this floating mercury of sin.--WAKEFIELD.

[1205] MS.:

The noblest fruits the planter's hope may mock,

Which thrive inserted on the savage stock.

[1206] He argues that our primitive tendencies are too various to be

steady. Man is mercurial and fickle till his numerous passions are lost

in the ruling passion, which converts our changeable propensities into a

single desire. Under the government of reason this "savage" and vicious

"stock" sends forth a healthy shoot of virtue which is rendered strong

and stable by the vigour of the ruling passion, or parent stem. The

theory is wrong throughout. People are not composed of only one passion,

virtue cannot be the product of a vice, and the simulated virtue which

proceeds from a solitary passion will be as contracted as its cause.

Pope's catalogue of the ruling passions, and their attendant virtues,

exhibits a counterfeit dismembered virtue,--a single false limb in the

place of a complete and living body. An unmaimed virtue requires the

cultivation of our nature in its complexity, and virtues are grafted on

lawful tendencies, and not on lawless passions.

[1207] Ver. 184 is followed by this couplet in the MS.:

As dulcet pippins from the crabtree come,

As sloes' rough juices melt into a plum.

[1208] Pope probably alluded to Swift when he spoke of the "crops of wit

and honesty" which were the product of "spleen, obstinacy, and hate."

The spleen and hate engendered wit by prompting satiric effusions; but

wit is not in itself a virtue, and when Pope inserted it in his

catalogue he must have been thinking of the moral ends it might

subserve.

[1209] MS.:

Vain-glory, courage, justice can supply.

[1210] MS.:

Envy, in critics and old maids the devil,

Is emulation in the learn'd and civil.

"Emulation," says Bishop Butler, "is merely the desire of equality with,

or superiority over others, with whom we compare ourselves. To desire

the attainment of this equality, or superiority, by the particular means

of others being brought down to our level, or below it, is, I think, the

distinct notion of envy." A man who was made up of rivalry, which is

Pope's supposition, would be an odious character, even without the

additional taint of envy, from which, nevertheless, he could hardly be

free.

[1211] Pope speaks after Mandeville, who says that shame and pride are

the "two passions in which the seeds of most virtues are contained."

Pride he defined to be the faculty by which men overvalued themselves,

and were led to do what would win them applause. "There is not," he

says, "a duty to others or ourselves that may not be counterfeited by

it." No quality, he admits, is more detested, and it would defeat its

own end if it did not disguise itself in the garb of virtue.

[1212] As Pope supposes shame to be "a disease of the mind," he could

not apply the term to the self-reproaches of an enlightened conscience,

but must mean the humiliation produced by censure. This species of shame

can only bind us to average decency of conduct, is a feeble protection

against secret vice, and often an incentive to baseness. Spurious shame,

as Mandeville remarks, induces women to murder their illegitimate

children, drives many to tell falsehoods to conceal their faults,

changes with the company and public opinion, and begets a degrading

compliance with the evil habits of associates, and with the lax customs

of the age.

[1213] After ver. 194 in the MS.:

How oft with passion, virtue points her charms!

Then shines the hero, then the patriot warms.

Peleus' great son, or Brutus who had known

Had Lucrece been a whore, or Helen none?

But virtues opposite to make agree,

That, reason, is thy task, and worthy thee.

Hard task, cries Bibulus, and reason weak,

"Make it a point, dear Marquess, or a pique.

Once for a whim, persuade yourself to pay

A debt to reason, like a debt at play.

For right or wrong have mortals suffered more?

B[lount] for his prince, or B** for his whore?

Whose self-denials nature most control?

His who would save a sixpence, or his soul.

Web for his health, a Chartreux for his sin,

Contend they not which soonest shall grow thin?

What we resolve we can: but here's the fault,

We ne'er resolve to do the thing we ought."--WARBURTON.

There is another version of the last couplet but one in the MS.:

Which will become more exemplary thin,

W[eb] for his health, De Rancé for his sin?

Web may have been the General Webb who got considerable reputation for

his defeat of the French at Wynendale in 1708. Swift in his Journal to

Stella, April 19, 1711, speaks of him as "going with a crutch and a

stick." Rancé was born at Paris in 1626, and died in 1700. In 1662 he

assumed the government of the monastery of La Trappe, and was noted for

the austerities he imposed and practised. Mr. Croker thinks that "B."

who "suffered for his prince" was Edward Blount, the Roman Catholic

Devonshire squire. He went into voluntary exile after the rebellion of

1715, but did not remain abroad many years.

[1214] Yet in the previous couplet we are informed that there is hardly

a virtue which will not grow on the "pride" we are here enjoined to

"check."

[1215] MS.:

Thus every ruling passion of the mind

Stands to some virtue and some vice inclined.

[1216] The MS. has two other versions of this line:

Check but its force or compass short of ill.

Turn but the bias from the side of ill.

[1217] But not by grafting temperance and humanity upon his ruling

passions--sensuality and cruelty. He must have torn up his evil passions

by the roots, and cultivated virtues in their stead.

[1218] Catiline hemmed in by superior forces died fighting with the

courage of despair. Unless he was greatly maligned his conspiracies were

prompted by profligate selfishness without any mixture of patriotism.

Decius, instructed by a vision on the eve of the battle of Vesuvius,

B.C. 340, that the general on the one side, and the army on the other

was doomed, rushed into the thick of the fight to ensure by his own

death the destruction of the enemy. The story of Decius may be fabulous,

like that of Pope's next example, Curtius, who when informed, B.C. 362,

that a chasm which had opened in the Roman forum could never be filled

up till the basis of the Roman greatness had been committed to it, was

alleged to have mounted on horseback clad in armour, and to have leaped

into the gulf. Courage, the quality common to Catiline, Decius, and

Curtius, is never a ruling passion, but is the effect of some antecedent

motive, which may be vanity or duty, lofty patriotism or criminal

ambition.

[1219] MS.:

And either makes a patriot or a knave.

[1220] MS.:

Divide, before the genius of the mind.

or,

'Tis reason's task to sep'rate in the mind.

The idea expressed in the couplet is an adaptation of a passage in the

first chapter of Genesis. As God in the chaos of the world "divided the

light from the darkness," so the God within us, which is our reason,

does the same with the chaos of the mind. The chaos, on Pope's system,

was in the actions, and not in the motives. The sweet water and the

bitter flowed from the same tainted fountain,--from ambition, pride,

sloth, etc.

[1221] MS.:

Extremes in man concur to gen'ral use.

Pope's meaning seems to be that in all terrestrial things, except man,

extremes or contraries produce opposite and uncompounded effects. In

man, extremes, in the shape of virtue and vice, join and mix together.

There is no force in the distinction. Hot water, for instance, mixes

with cold, and a mean temperature is the result.

[1222] "Great purposes," says Warburton in explanation of this passage,

"are served by vice and virtue invading each other's bounds, no less

than the perfecting the constitution of the whole, as lights and shades,

in a well wrought picture, make the harmony and spirit of the

composition." By this rule virtue dashed with vice is more "spirited and

harmonious" than virtue without alloy. Warburton allowed himself to be

deluded by a metaphor. Black paint has no resemblance to black

morals,--shadows in a picture to hatred, avarice, and so on.

[1223] Too nice, that is, to permit us to distinguish where ends, etc.

The ellipse goes beyond any poetical licence which is consistent with

writing English.

[1224] The lines from ver. 207 to 214 are versified from Clarke's

Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion, 10th ed., p. 184: "As in

painting two very different colours may, from the highest intenseness in

either extreme, terminate in the midst insensibly, so that it shall not

be possible to determine exactly where the one ends, and the other

begins, and yet the colours may differ as much as can be, not in degree

only but in kind, so, though it may, perhaps, be very difficult in some

nice cases to define exactly the bounds of right and wrong, yet right

and wrong are totally different, even altogether as much as white and

black, light and darkness." The argument of Clarke was directed against

Hobbes, and his disciples, who denied that there was any inherent

difference between good and evil, and supported their paradox by

pleading the impossibility of drawing a line between the two.

[1225] Here follows in the MS.:

To strangle in its birth each rising crime

Requires but little,--just to think in time.

In ev'ry vice, at first, in some degree

We see some virtue, or we think we see.

Our vices thus are virtues in disguise,

Wicked but by degrees, or by surprise.

Of the last couplet there is a second version:

Thus spite of all the Frenchman's witty lies

Most vices are but virtues in disguise.

The witty Frenchman was La Rochefoucauld. Pope's counter-maxim is only a

form of La Rochefoucald's principle, converted into an apparent

contradiction by an equivocal use of the phrase "virtues in disguise."

Those who pursue vicious objects are reluctant to allow that they are

the slaves of vice. "Hence," says Hutcheson, in a passage quoted by

Warton, "the basest actions are dressed in some tolerable mask. What

others call avarice, appears to the agent a prudent care of a family or

friends; fraud, artful conduct; malice and revenge, a just sense of

honour; fire and sword and desolation among enemies, a just defence of

our country; persecution, a zeal for truth." Pope assumes that the vice

is inspired by genuine virtue, whereas the virtue is a pretence, a

flimsy pretext to excuse wrong-doing. The vice is real, the virtue

fictitious, and this is the principle of La Rochefoucauld.

[1226] Dryden's Hind and Panther, Part i.:

For truth has such a face and such a mien,

As to be loved needs only to be seen.--WAKEFIELD.

The lines from ver. 217 to 221 are thus varied in the MS.:

Vice all abhor, the monster is too foul;

Naked, indeed, she shocks us to the soul;

But dressed too well, with tempting time and place,

That but to pity her is to embrace.

Where art thou, Vice? 'twas never yet agreed, etc.

[1227] The word is inappropriate. Men do not become sensual out of pity

to the miseries of sensuality, or envious from compassion for the pangs

of envy. Pity may be felt for the evils which vice entails, but this is

not pity for the vice, nor a temptation to practise it.

[1228] After ver. 220 in ed. 1:

A cheat, a whore, who starts not at the name,

In all the Inns of Court, or Drury Lane?

These two omitted in the subsequent editions.--POPE.

The dishonest lawyer, and woman of the town, applied soft names to their

vices, and were startled to be called by their proper appellations. The

couplet was followed in the MS. by some further illustrations:--

B[lun]t but does

K---- brings matters on;

Rogues but do business; spies but serve the crown;

Sid has the secret, Chartres

H[e]r[ve]y the court, and Huggins knows the town;

Kind-hearted Peter helps the rich in want,

Nero's a wag, and Messaline gallant.

The last couplet assumed a second form:

Nero's a wag, Faustina some suspect

Of gallantry, and Sutton of neglect.

Sutton, Peter Walter, Hervey, Huggins, Chartres, and Blunt will reappear

in connection with the offences for which they are satirised here. Sid

was Lord Godophin, who was lampooned under the name of Sid Hamet by

Swift. Pope, in his Moral Essays, Epist. 1, ver. 86, speaks of his

Newmarket fame, and judgment in a bet;

and the phrase, "Sid has the secret" is an insinuation that his

"judgment in a bet" sometimes arose from his being privy to the tricks

of the turf.

[1229] After ver. 226 in the MS.:

The Col'nel swears the agent is a dog;

The scriv'ner vows th' attorney is a rogue;

Against the thief th' attorney loud inveighs,

For whose ten pound the county twenty pays;

The thief damns judges, and the knaves of state,

And dying mourns small villains hanged by great.--WARBURTON.

The agent of whom the Colonel complained was the army agent. The

scrivener, who drew contracts, and invested money, hated the attorneys

because they were in part competitors for the same class of business.

Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, says, that Mr. Ellis, who died in 1791,

aged 93, was the last of the scriveners. Their occupation had gradually

lapsed to other professions, legal or monetary. Pope's remaining

instances are forced. The attorney did not pay more than his neighbours

to the county expenditure for prosecuting thieves, and as the trials

were much to his own profit, he was the last person who had an interest

in inveighing against thievery. As little did the thief at his execution

denounce "the knaves of state," of whom he commonly knew nothing. Pope

has put the satire of the Beggar's Opera into the mouth of the veritable

pick-pockets and highwaymen.

[1230] MS.:

Ev'n those who dwell in Vice's very zone.

[1231] From moral insensibility, that is, they are either unconscious of

their vice, or, being conscious, pretend ignorance.

[1232] Pope goes too far. The worst men acknowledge that some things are

crimes.

[1233] Addison, Spectator, No. 183: "There was no person so vicious who

had not some good in him, nor any person so virtuous who had not in him

some evil."

[1234] This couplet follows ver. 234 in the MS.:

Some virtue in a lawyer has been known,

Nay in a minister, or on a throne.

[1235] Complete virtue, and complete vice, says Pope, are both hostile

to self-interest, a plain confession that his selfish system was

incompatible with thorough virtue. He assures us, Epist. iv. ver. 310,

that "virtue alone is happiness below," but to be consistent he must

have meant virtue seasoned with vice.

[1236] He is far from saying that good effects naturally rise from vice

or folly, and affirms nothing but that God superintends the world in

such a manner that they do not produce all those destructive

consequences that might reasonably be expected from them.--JOHNSON.

MS.:

That draws a virtue out of ev'ry vice.

Or,

And public good extracts from private vice.

The last version is taken from the title of Mandeville's work, "The

Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits." Johnson's

interpretation of the text does not agree with Pope's assertion, that

"imperfections are usefully distributed to all orders of men."

[1237] MS.:

Each frailty wisely to each rank applied.

The line is disfigured by the clumsy transition from the present tense

to the past for the sake of the rhyme, which is a trifle in comparison

with the doctrine that "heaven applies happy frailties to all ranks." If

the "frailties" specified by Pope are "happy," fear must be a

recommendation in a statesman, rashness in a general, presumption in a

king, and a credulous faith in the presumption the best condition for

the people.

[1238] The sense of shame in virgins is not a frailty to be ranked with

pride, rashness, and presumption.

[1239] There is another side to the picture. The ends of vice are also

raised from vanity, which begets wastefulness, debt, slander, and a

multitude of evils.

[1240] That is, "heaven can build," the "can" being supplied from "can

raise," ver. 245.

[1241] Shaftesbury's Moralists: "Is not both conjugal affection and

natural affection to parents, love of a common city, community, or

country, with the other duties and social parts of life, founded in

these very wants?"--WARTON.

[1242] Men, says Pope, are reconciled to death from growing weary of the

"wants, frailties, and passions" of life. "The observation," says

Warburton, "is new, and would in any place be extremely beautiful, but

has here an _infinite_ grace and propriety." This is one of the stock

forms of Warburton's adulation. Pope's remark was stale, and from the

nature of the case could not be new if, as he asserted, it was generally

true, since all men in their declining years could not, through all

time, have left unexpressed the feeling which made them all willing to

die. What all men think many men will say.

[1243] The MS. adds this couplet:

What partly pleases, totally will shock;

Nor Ross would be Argyle, nor Toland

I question much if Toland would be Locke.

The Duke of Argyle and General Ross were both soldiers, both

politicians, and both Scotchmen. Ross was a member of the House of

Commons. Toland introduced metaphysics into his infidel works, and Pope

signifies by his couplet that the inferior in a particular department

would not desire on the whole to change characters with a superior in

the same department.

[1244] MS.:

The learn'd are blessed such wonders to explore.

[1245] Buoyed up by the expectation that he would hit upon the secret of

transmuting the baser metals into gold.

[1246] MS.:

The chemist's happy in his golden views,

Payn in his madness, Welsted in his muse.

[1247] From La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 36: "Nature seems to have bestowed

pride on us, on purpose to save us the pain of knowing our own

imperfections."--WARTON.

[1248] Bolingbroke, Frag. 50: "Hope, that cordial drop, which sweetens

every bitter potion, even the last."--WAKEFIELD.

MS.:

With ev'ry age of man new passions rise,

Hope travels through nor quits him when he dies.

[1249] The lines, ver. 275-282, first appeared in the edition of 1743.

They were evidently suggested by a passage in Garth's Dispensary, Canto

v.:

Children at toys as men at titles aim,

And in effect both covet but the same,

This Philip's son proved in revolving years,

And first for rattles, then for worlds shed tears.

[1250] When Pope used the phrase "a little louder," he was thinking of

the "rattle," and forgot the "straw."

[1251] The "garters" refer to the badge of the order of the garter.

"Scarf," in the sense of a badge of honour, was in Pope's day

appropriated to the nobleman's chaplain. "His sister," says Swift,

speaking of a clerical time-server in his Essay on the Fates of

Clergymen, "procured him a scarf from my lord." Addison in the

Spectator, No. 21, compares bishops, deans, and archdeacons to generals;

doctors of divinity, prebendaries, and "all that wear scarves" to

field-officers; and the rest of the clergy to subalterns. "There has

been," he says, "a great exceeding of late years in the second division,

several brevets having been granted for the converting of subalterns

into scarf-officers, insomuch that within my memory the price of

lute-string"--the material of which the scarf was made--"is raised above

twopence in a yard." The number of chaplains a nobleman could "qualify"

varied with his rank. A duke might nominate six, a baron three. The

distinction, when Pope wrote his Essay, was too slight to be fitly

classed with orders of knighthood.

[1252] The infant's pleasure in trifles may be the kindly work of nature

providing for the enjoyments of an age incapable of better things; but

the maturer delight in the "scarfs, garters, gold," is not the work of

nature, but of folly. The first is a harmless instinct; the other a

culpable vanity.--CROLY.

[1253] Small balls of glass or pearl, or other substance, strung upon a

thread, and used by the Romanists to count their prayers; from whence

the phrase "to tell beads," or to be at one's "beads," is, to be at

prayer.--JOHNSON.

[1254] MS.:

At last he sleeps, and all the care is o'er.

[1255] MS.: "Till then."

[1256] MS.:

Observant then, how from defects of mind

Spring half the bliss, or rest of humankind!

How pride rebuilds what reason can destroy, &c.

[1257] MS.:

Of certainty by faith, of sense by pride.

[1258] MS.:

These still repair what wisdom would destroy.

[1259] MS.:

Through life's long dream new prospects entertain.

[1260] MS.:

Life's prospects alter ev'ry step we gain,

And Nature gives no vanity in vain.

[1261] See further of the use of this principle in man, Epist. 3, ver.

121, 124, 133, 143, 199, etc., 269, etc., 316, etc. And Epist. 4, ver.

353 and 363.--POPE.

[1262] MS.:

Confess one comfort ever will arise.

[1263] Bolingbroke, Fragment 53: "God is wise and man a fool."

[1264] In several editions in quarto,

Learn, Dulness, learn! "The Universal Cause," etc.--WARBURTON.

[1265] The "one end" is the good of the whole.

[1266] MS.:

Must act by gen'ral not by partial laws.

[1267] That is, those who are rich in temporal blessings should remember

that the world is not made for them alone.

[1268] MS.:

Look nature through, and see the chain of love.

[1269] Ed. 1.:

See lifeless matter moving to one end.--POPE.

"Plastic," or as Bolingbroke called it, "fashioning nature," was in its

etymological and popular sense, the power in nature which gave things

their shape or figure. This seems to be the meaning in Pope. The

philosophic sense of the phrase was more extensive. The laws of matter

may have been made self-acting, or they may be maintained by the direct

and constant interposition of God. Cudworth, and some other writers, who

held the first of these opinions, called "plastic nature" the inward

energy, the operative principle which is as a sort of life to the laws.

The "plastic nature" of Cudworth is, in reality, nothing more than the

laws of matter, with the proviso that they work by an inherent virtue

infused into them by the Creator once for all.

[1270] "Embrace" is an inappropriate word. The particles of matter do

not clasp. They are not even in contact, but only contiguous.

[1271] MS.:

Press to one centre of commutual good.

As the inorganic, or lifeless matter, of which he had previously spoken,

gravitates to a centre, so the "matter" which is "endued with life" also

"presses" to a "centre"--"the general good." The comparison of the

general good to the centre of gravity is inaccurate. The centre of

gravity is a point; the general good is diffused good.

[1272] Shaftesbury's Moralists, Part i. Sect. 3: "The vegetables by

their death sustain the animals, and animal bodies dissolved enrich the

earth, and raise again the vegetable world."--WARTON.

[1273] Pope is speaking in the context of plants and animals, which are

the "they" of ver. 20. He threw ver. 18 into a parenthesis, and said,

"_we_ catch," because the interjected remark relates to men. The power

displayed in the transmission of life from parents to progeny is happily

illustrated by Fénelon, in his Traité de l'Existence de Dieu: "What

should we think of a watchmaker who could make watches which would

produce other watches to infinity, insomuch that the two first watches

would be sufficient to propagate and perpetuate the species over all the

earth? What should we say of an architect who had the art to construct

houses which generated fresh houses to replace our dwellings before they

began to fall into ruin?"

[1274] "Connects," that is, "the greatest with the least." Pope, in his

free use of elliptical expressions, having omitted "the," Warburton

interprets the phrase according to the strict language, and supposes the

meaning to be that the greatness of the Deity is manifested most in the

creatures which are least.

[1275] Another couplet follows in the MS.:

More pow'rful each as needful to the rest,

Each in proportion as he blesses blessed.

[1276] The passage is indebted to Fenton, in his Epistle to Southerne:

Who winged the winds, and gave the streams to flow,

And raised the rocks, and spread the lawns below.--WAKEFIELD.

MS.:

Think'st thou for thee he feeds the wanton fawn

And not as kindly spreads for him the lawn?

Think'st thou for thee the sky-lark mounts and sings?

[1277] Apart from the metre the proper order of the words would be,

"loves and raptures of his own swell the note."

[1278] MS.: "gracefully." The reading Pope substituted is not much

better, for the generality of men are not absurd enough to ride

"pompously."

[1279] This description of the hog as living on the labours of the lord

of creation, without ploughing, or obeying his call, gives the idea of

some untamed depredator, and not of a domestic animal kept to be eaten.

The lord lives on the hog.

[1280] MS.: "Sir Gilbert," which meant Sir Gilbert Heathcote, a rich

London alderman, who had been lord mayor. The fur was a part of his

official robes.

[1281] MS.:

Know, Nature's children with one care are nursed;

What warms a monarch, warmed an ermine first.

[1282] After ver. 46 in the former editions:

What care to tend, to lodge, to cram, to treat him!

All this he knew; but not that 'twas to eat him,

As far as goose could judge he reasoned right;

But as to man, mistook the matter quite.--WARBURTON.

Cowley, in his Plagues of Egypt, stanza 1:

All creatures the Creator said were thine:

No creature but might since say, "Man is mine."

Gay, Fable 49:

The snail looks round on flow'r and tree,

And cries, "All these were made for me."--WAKEFIELD.

The goose is taken from Peter Charron; but such a familiar and burlesque

image is improperly introduced among such solid and serious

reflections.--WARTON.

Pope copied Charron's predecessor, Montaigne, Book ii. Chap. 12: "For

why may not a goose say thus, 'The earth serves me to walk upon, the sun

to light me. I am the darling of nature. Is it not man that keeps,

lodges, and serves me? It is for me that he both sows and grinds.'" "The

pampered goose," says Southey, "must have been forgetful of plucking

time, as well as ignorant of the rites that are celebrated in all

old-fashioned families on St. Michael's Day." The goose's ignorance of

his future fate was part of Pope's argument, and he contended that the

men who exclaimed, "See all things for my use," were equally blind to

the purposes for which they were destined. The illustration is poor both

poetically and philosophically.

[1283] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "The hypothesis that assumes the world

made for man is not founded in reason."--WAKEFIELD.

[1284] That is, "Let it be granted that man is the intellectual lord;"

for "wit" is here used in its extended sense of intellect in general.

[1285] MS.:

'Tis true the strong the weaker still control,

And pow'rful man is master of the whole:

Him therefore nature checks; he only knows, etc.

[1286] What an exquisite assemblage is here, down to ver. 70, of deep

reflection, humane sentiments, and poetic imagery. It is finely observed

that compassion is exclusively the property of man alone.--WARTON.

[1287] That is, varying with her position, and the different angles in

which the reflected light strikes upon the eye.--WAKEFIELD.

[1288] MS.:

Turns he his ear when Philomela sings?

Admires her eye the insect's gilded wings?

The superior mercy with which Pope accredits men is of an unreflecting

description, since he implies that it is regulated by gaiety of colour,

and sweetness of song, and not by the capacities of creatures for

pleasure and pain. The claim itself is unfounded under the circumstances

of his comparison. The falcon and the jay must eat their natural prey or

starve, and when hunger or gratification solicits him, man never

hesitates to kill the animals which are needful for his support or

delicious to his palate. If he had a taste for "insects with gilded

wings," the gilding on their wings would not restrain him. Martial, Lib.

xiii. Ep. 70, says of the peacock, "You admire him every time he

displays his jewelled wings, and can you, hard-hearted man, deliver him

to the cruel cook?" and Pope in his celebrated lines on the pheasant had

commemorated the impotence of brilliant plumage to touch the compassion

of the sportsman. The poet, in this Epistle, forgot that in Epist. i.

ver. 117, he had accused man of "destroying all creatures for his sport

or gust," which is to place him below the animals. He is undoubtedly

without an equal in his destructive propensities, and too often abuses

his power over the sentient world.

[1289] Pope starts with the intimation that mankind extend their

protection to animals from commiseration for their "wants and woes," and

ends with declaring that the motive is "interest, pleasure, and pride."

[1290] Borrowed from Milton's Samson Agonistes, ver. 549:

Wherever fountain or fresh current flowed

Against the eastern ray, translucent, pure

With touch ethereal of heav'n's fiery rod,

I drank.--WAKEFIELD.

[1291] Several of the ancients, and many of the Orientals since,

esteemed those who were struck by lightning as sacred persons, and the

particular favourites of heaven.--POPE.

Plutarch mentions that persons struck with lightning were held in

honour, which did not accord with the concurrent belief that lightning

was the instrument of Jove's vengeance. Superstitions often clash.

[1292] "View" is "prospect,"--a vision of future bliss.

[1293] Sir W. Temple, Works, vol. iii. p. 539: "Man is a thinking thing,

whether he will or no."