ver. 77-98, to prove that death has been beneficently disarmed of its
terrors. Unthinking animals cannot be troubled at the prospect, for they
have no knowledge, he says, of their end, which is more than we can
tell; and thinking beings, according to him, have, in addition to the
hope which mingles with their dread, the unfailing belief that death,
though always drawing nearer, is never near. Such an irrational delusion
in a "thinking thing" is, in Pope's estimation, a "standing miracle."
The ostensible miracle is deduced from his exaggeration of the truth.
The conviction that death is distant usually yields when appearances are
against the supposition. Hale men often rush consciously upon certain
destruction; old and sick men have constantly the genuine belief that
their end is at hand; and dying men expect each day or hour to be their
last. The false expectation of prolonged life does not enter into their
minds, and can have nothing to do with their resignation, peace, or joy.
[1295] This is the true principle from which Pope immediately departs,
and exalts instinct above reason. "Man," says Aristotle, "has sometimes
more, sometimes less than the beast;" for they are adapted to different
functions, and man excels in his sphere, and beasts in theirs. The
sphere of man is the highest, and his faculties are proportionate. He
cannot do the work of the bee, but he can do his own work, which is
greater.
[1296] The roman catholic council, which claims to be infallible.
Instinct, says Pope, being infallible does not need the guidance of any
other infallible authority. When he speaks of "full instinct," he
probably means that instinct is always complete within its own limited
domain, for if he intended to put "full instinct" in opposition to the
instinct which is defective and misleads, he would contradict ver. 94,
in which he states that instinct "must go right."
[1297] After ver. 84 in the MS.:
While man with op'ning views of various ways
Confounded, by the aid of knowledge strays:
Too weak to choose, yet choosing still in haste,
One moment gives the pleasure and distaste.--WARBURTON.
[1298] In Pope's wide sense of the term, reason adapts means to ends,
and distinguishes between truth and falsehood, right and wrong. The
faculty operates in part spontaneously, and in part with effort. In an
endless number of ordinary circumstances man cannot help observing,
comparing, and inferring, and his reason is itself an instinct which
"comes a volunteer." The distinction is, that man does not stop with the
unconstrained exercise of his powers. He aspires to progress, and
laboriously pushes forward, while animals turn round, generation after
generation, in the same narrow circle. What Pope supposed was a mark of
man's inferiority is just the ground of his superiority. His conquests
begin with his difficulties and exertions.
[1299] Pope says, ver. 79, that whether blessed with reason or instinct
"all enjoy the power that tends to bliss,--all find the means
proportioned to the end." He now contradicts himself with regard to
reason, and says that, in the effort to determine which of our impulses
are beneficial and which injurious, it never hits the mark, but labours
in vain after happiness. The wisdom he denies to reason he erroneously
ascribes to instinct, which has no superiority in securing an immunity
from ill. Through want of foresight, and the limitation of their powers
of contrivance, myriads of creatures die of hunger and cold. Those which
come off with life suffer frequently from scarcity and inclement
seasons. Their defective sagacity makes them a prey to each other and to
man, and often when they escape death they receive torturing injuries.
The young are exposed to wholesale destruction, and in many instances
the parents manifest a grief which if short is at least acute. Creatures
of the same species have their intestine enmities, and engage in combats
attended by wounds and death. They have their fears, jealousies, and
tempers, their alternations of contentment and dissatisfaction, and upon
the whole the instinct conferred upon animals seems a less protection
from present evils than a moderate use of reason in man. What
alleviation there may be to animals in their inevitable trials cannot be
known to us, but no one will imagine that they can be supported by
sublimer hopes than our own.
[1300] This is a mistake. Instinct is often imperfect with reference to
its own special ends. Misled by the odour of the African carrion flower,
the flesh-flies lay their eggs in it, and the progeny, not being
vegetable feeders, are starved. Here the injury is to the offspring. In
other cases the erring individuals suffer for their own mistake. Pope,
in this Epistle, magnifies instinct, and disparages reason. In Epist.
i., ver. 232, he took the opposite side, and said that the reason of man
was all the "powers" of animals "in one."
[1301] MS.:
One in their act to think and to pursue,
Sure to will right, and what they will to do.
Pope's meaning is, that there is no conflict in animals, as in man,
between passion and reason, between desire and judgment, that there is
not in the operations of animals, as in man's contrivances, a studied
adaptation of means to ends, nor a balancing of method against method,
and of end against end, but that animals are endowed with singleness of
purpose, know instinctively what to do, and how to do it.
[1302] MS.:
Reason prefer to instinct if you can.
[1303] Addison, Spectator, No. 121; "To me instinct seems the immediate
direction of Providence. A modern philosopher delivers the same opinion
where he says, God himself is the soul of brutes." Upon the theory that
brutes act from the immediate impulse of their Maker, there is a
difficulty in explaining the cases of misdirected instinct, as when a
jackdaw drops cart-loads of sticks down a chimney, in the vain endeavour
to obtain a basis for its nest. Some animals, again, profit by
experience, as foxes which improve in cunning, and we must infer that
the assistance afforded by the Deity increases with the experience of
the animals, though the experience is in nowise concerned in the result.
A viciousness of temper, which resembles the evil passions of men,
sometimes dominates in brutes, as we may see in horses and dogs, and we
cannot ascribe these propensities to the immediate instigation of the
Creator, unless we accept Pope's doctrine that God "pours fierce
ambition into Cæsar's mind."
[1304] "Wood" in all editions, though designated as an erratum by Pope
in his small edition of 1736. The mention of "tides" and "waves" in the
next couplet should have called attention to a mistake, which seems
obvious enough even without any special notice.--CROKER.
[1305] This instinct is not invariable. Animals eat food poisoned
artificially, and sometimes feed greedily upon poisonous natural
products. Yew is a poison to cows and horses, and yet with an abundance
of wholesome herbage they will sometimes eat the yew.
[1306] Every verb and epithet has here a descriptive force. We find more
imagery from these lines to the end of the Epistle, than in any other
parts of this Essay. The origin of the connections in social life, the
account of the state of nature, the rise and effects of superstition and
tyranny, and the restoration of true religion and just government, all
these ought to be mentioned as passages that deserve high applause, nay,
as some of the most exalted pieces of English poetry.--WARTON.
[1307] The halcyon or king-fisher was reputed by the ancients "to build
upon the wave," and the entrance to the floating nest was supposed to be
contrived in a manner to admit the bird, and exclude the water of the
sea. Either Pope believed the fable, or he thought himself at liberty to
illustrate the marvels of instinct by fictitious examples. The couplet
was originally thus in the MS.:
The cramp-fish, remora what secret charm
To stop the bark, arrest the distant arm?
The cramp-fish is the torpedo. "She has the quality," says Montaigne,
"not only to benumb all the members that touch her, but even through the
nets transmits a heavy dullness into the hands of those that move them;
nay, it is further said, that if one pour water upon her, he will feel
this numbness mount up the water to the hand, and stupify the feeling
through the water." The remora, or sucking-fish, sticks by the disc on
the top of its head, to ships and other fishes, and "renders
immoveable," says Pliny, "the vessels which no chain could stay, no
weighty anchor moor." The mighty prowess ascribed to the remora is
imaginary, and the electrical capacity of the torpedo greatly
exaggerated. The story of halcyon, cramp-fish, and remora are all in
Book ii. chap. 12 of Montaigne's Essays.
[1308] The geometric, or garden-spider, makes a web of concentric
circles, but the house-spider, which used to have credit for weaving a
web of parallel longitudinal lines crossed by parallel transverse lines,
observes no such regularity in the construction of her toils.
[1309] An eminent mathematician.--POPE.
He was born in France in 1667. Driven from his native country in 1685 by
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he settled in London, and died
there in 1754. He got his living mainly by teaching mathematics, in
which his skill was consummate, and his publications on the subject
attest the acuteness and originality of his genius. He was on terms of
friendship with Newton.
[1310] The poet probably took the hint of this passage from Lord Bacon's
De augmentis scientiarum: "Who taught the raven in a drought to throw
pebbles into an hollow tree where she espied water, that the water might
rise so as she might come to it? Who taught the bee to sail through such
a vast sea of air, and to find a way from the field in flower, a great
way off to her hive?"--RUFFHEAD.
[1311] MS.:
Through air's vast oceans see the storks explore,
Columbus-like, a world unknown before.
[1312] From Le Spectacle de la Nature of the Abbé Pluche: "Who informed
their young that it would be requisite to travel into a foreign country?
What particular bird takes the charge upon him of assembling their grand
council, and fixing the day of their departure?"
[1313] The MS. has the lines which follow:
Boast we of arts? a bee can better hit
The squares than Gibbs, the bearings than Sir Kit.
To poise his dome a martin has the knack,
While bold Bernini lets St. Peter's crack.
Gibbs was born about 1674 and died in 1754. He designed St. Martin's
church in London, and the Radcliffe library at Oxford. Sir Kit is Sir
Christopher Wren. A century after the dome of St. Peter's was erected,
Bernini inserted staircases in the hollow piers which support the
cupola, and the cracks in the dome were falsely ascribed to his
operations. The martins are not more infallible than man, and, unlike
man, they do not profit by experience. White of Selborne relates that
they built in the window corners of a house in his neighbourhood, where
the recess was too shallow to protect their work, which was washed down
with every hard rain, and yet year after year they persevered through
the summer in their useless drudgery.
[1314] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "We are designed to be social, not
solitary creatures. Mutual wants unite us, and natural benevolence and
political order, on which our happiness depends, are founded in
them."--WAKEFIELD.
[1315] Ether was reputed to be an element finer than air, and to fill
the regions beyond our atmosphere. Some of the stoics believed that
ether was the animating principle of all things, and Pope adopted the
doctrine. Hence he calls ether "all-quickening," and says that "one
nature feeds the vital flame" in all the creatures of earth, air, and
water.
[1316] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "As our parents loved themselves in us,
so we love ourselves in our children."--WAKEFIELD.
Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:
Our fond begetters who would never die,
Love but themselves in their posterity.
The lines from ver. 115 to ver. 124 are varied in the MS.:
Quick with this spirit new-born nature moved,
Itself each creature in its species loved;
Each sought a pleasure not possessed alone,
Each sex desired alike till two were one.
This impulse animates; one nature feeds
The vital lamp, and swells the genial seeds:
All spread their image with like ardour stung,
All love themselves, reflected in their young.
Dr. George Campbell remarks, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, that to talk
of creatures loving themselves in their progeny is nonsensical rant. Of
many fathers and mothers it would be nearer the truth to say that they
love their children almost to the exclusion of themselves. Neither Pope
nor Bolingbroke had children, and not having experienced, they
misapprehended, the parental feeling.
[1317] Pope's division of duties is not the law of creation. In a
multiplicity of cases both parents feed, and both defend their young.
When the sire is of no use in providing food, as with grass-eating
animals, he equally abandons his defending function, and does not even
recognise his offspring.
[1318] MS.:
Till taught to range the wood, or wing the air,
There instinct ends its passion and its care.
[1319] Locke, Civil Government, book ii. chap. vii. sect. 79: "The
conjunction between male and female ought to last so long as is
necessary to the support of the young ones. And herein, I think, lies
the chief, if not the only reason, why the male and female in mankind
are tied to a longer conjunction than other creatures, whose young being
able to subsist of themselves before the time of procreation returns
again, the conjugal bond dissolves of itself."
[1320] Bolingbroke, Fragment 3: "Reason improved sociability, extended
it to relations more remote, and united several families into one
community, as instinct had united several individuals into one family."
"Interest" in Pope's line signifies "advantage." Reason, he says,
teaches man to improve on the ties of instinct, and form connections
beyond his immediate family, whereby he at once extends his love, and
the advantages derived from it.
[1321] That is, man becomes constant from choice.
[1322] MS.:
And ev'ry tender passion takes its turn.
The line in the text alludes to Pope's hypothesis that every virtue is
grafted upon a ruling passion.
[1323] "Charity" is used in the antiquated sense of "love." "New needs,"
says Pope, give rise to "new helps," and the virtue "benevolence" is
grafted upon the natural affections.
[1324] He means that the latest brood, being young children, love their
parents by nature, while the previous brood, being grown up, only love
parents from habit.
[1325] MS.:
Scarce had the last the parents' care outgrown
Before they saw those parents want their own.
Dryden, Palamon and Arcite, Book iii.:
and issuing into man,
Grudges their life from whence his own began.
[1326] MS.:
Stretch the long interest, and support the line.
[1327] The MS. goes on thus:
She spake, and man her high behests obeyed;
Harmless amidst his fellow-beasts he strayed;
For pride was not; joint tenant of the shade
He shared with beasts his table and his bed;
No murder etc.
"He speaks," says M. Crousaz, "of what passed in the earliest ages of
the world no less positively than an eye-witness." Pope followed the
ancient fable which he may have read, among other places, in Montaigne's
Essays, Book ii. Chap. 12: "Plato, in his picture of the golden age
under Saturn, reckons, among the chief advantages that a man then had,
his communications with beasts, by which he acquired a very perfect
intelligence and prudence, and led his life more happily than we could
do."
[1328] "Her birth" is the birth of nature. The personification of nature
in the phrase "the state of nature," or "the natural state," is so
forced, that we do not at once perceive that "nature" is the noun to
which "her" refers.
[1329] "Union" is put for voluntary union, the union of social
affection, in contrast to the bonds of fear, coercion, and the
necessities of life, which are large elements in the present condition
of mankind. The beasts were included in the common league, and animals
of prey unknown in Pope's state of nature. But he did not keep steady to
his first account.
[1330] So Hall, Satires, Book iii. Sat. 1:
Then crept in pride, and peevish covetise,
And man grew greedy, discordous, and nice.
Now man that erst hail-fellow was with beast,
Woxe on to ween himself a god at least.--WAKEFIELD.
[1331] Dryden, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book xv.:
The woolly fleece that clothed her murderer.
[1332] Virgil, Ecl. x. 58: "lucos sonantes;" Dryden, "sounding
woods."--WAKEFIELD.
[1333] MS.:
He called on heav'n for blessing, they for food.
[1334] MS.:
Unstained with gore the grassy altar grew,
Priests yet were temperate, yet no passions knew;
Nor yet would glutton zeal devoutly eat,
Nor faithful av'rice hugged his god in plate.
The pagans feasted upon the meat they offered to idols, which is what we
are to understand by the "glutton zeal" that "devoutly eats."
[1335] Dryden, Virg. Æn. ix. 640:
Ah how unlike the living is the dead.--WAKEFIELD.
[1336] MS.:
Of half that live himself the living tomb.
[1337] MS.:
Who, foe to nature, other kinds o'erthrown
Restless he seeks dominion o'er his own.
Or,
Who deaf to nature's universal groan,
Murders all other kinds, betrays his own.
This is the same amiable being who is celebrated, ver. 51, for "helping
the wants and woes of other creatures," and sparing singing-birds and
gilded insects out of pure compassion.
[1338] Pope probably meant that man was a "fiercer savage" than the
animals of which he shed the blood, but as the "blood" only is
mentioned, there is no proper positive to the comparative.
[1339] Dryden in his version of the speech of Pythagoras in Ovid, Met.
Book xv., which our poet doubtless had in view through this whole
delineation:
Th' essay of bloody feasts on brutes began,
And after forged the sword to murder man.--WAKEFIELD.
MS.:
While nature, strict the injury to scan,
Left man the only beast to prey on man.
[1340] MS.:
In early times when man aspired to art.
The lines from ver. 161 to 168 are parenthetical, and Pope now goes back
to the primitive age in which uncorrupted man associated freely with the
beasts, and profited by their teaching.
[1341] MS.:
'Twas then the voice of mighty nature spake.
[1342] It is a caution commonly practised amongst navigators, when
thrown upon a desert coast, and in want of refreshments, to observe what
fruits have been touched by the birds, and to venture on these without
further hesitation.--WARBURTON.
[1343] See Pliny's Nat. Hist. Lib. viii. cap. 27, where several
instances are given of animals discovering the medicinal efficacy of
herbs by their own use of them, and pointing to some operations in the
art of healing by their own practice.--WARBURTON.
The instances are all fanciful or fabulous.
[1344] Montaigne, Essays, Book ii. Chap. 12: "Democritus held and
proved, that most of the arts we have were taught us by other animals,
as by the spider to weave and sew, by the swallow to build, by the swan
and nightingale music, and by several animals to make medicines."
[1345] The MS. adds:
Behold the rabbit's fortress in the sands,
The beaver's storied house not made with hands.
A rabbit-burrow has no resemblance to a military fortress, and Pope
prudently omitted the incongruous comparison. Martial, Lib. xiii. Ep.
60, had used the illustration in a directly opposite sense, and said
that rabbits, by teaching the art of mining, had shown the enemy how
fortresses could be taken.
[1346] Oppian, Halicut. Lib. i., describes this fish in the following
manner: "They swim on the surface of the sea, on the back of their
shells, which exactly resemble the hulk of a ship. They raise two feet
like masts, and extend a membrane between, which serves as a sail; the
other two feet they employ as oars at the side. They are usually seen in
the Mediterranean."---POPE.
The paper-nautilus, or Argonauta Argo, has eight arms. The first pair in
the female expand at their extremities, so that each of the two arms
terminates in a broad thin membrane. These broad membranes do not exist
in the male, and modern naturalists reject the idea that they are used
for sails.
[1347] MS.:
There, too, each form of social commerce find,
So late by reason taught to human kind.
Behold th' embodied locust rushing forth
In sabled millions from th' inclement north;
In herds the wolves, invasive robbers, roam,
In flocks, the sheep pacific, race at home.
What warlike discipline the cranes display,
How leagued their squadron, how direct their way.
[1348] The Guardian, No. 157: "Everything is common among ants."
[1349] "Anarchy without confusion" is a contradiction in terms,
according to the meaning which is now universally attached to the word
anarchy. Pope understands by it the mere absence of all inequality of
station.
[1350] The Guardian, No. 157: "Bees have each of them a hole in their
hives; their honey is their own; every bee minds her own concerns." The
natural history of former times abounded in fables, and among the number
was the fancy that each bee had its separate cell, and private store of
honey.
[1351] An adaptation of the Latin proverb, mentioned by Cicero, Off. i.
10, and Terence, Heaut. iv. 5, that over-strained law is often
unrestrained injustice. The letter contravenes the spirit.
[1352] The imagery of the passage is derived from an observation of a
Greek philosopher, who compared laws to spiders' webs,--too fragile to
hold fast great offenders, and too strong to suffer trivial culprits to
escape.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope upbraids men for enacting laws too strong for the weak instead of
following the laws of bees, which are "wise as nature, and as fixed as
fate." Such is their superior consideration for the weak that the
workers kill the drones when they become burthensome to them, and so far
are we behind them in our poor law legislation that we are compelled to
maintain the useless members of society,--the old, the crippled, the
hopelessly sick, the insane, the idiotic--all of whom, if we would only
learn mercy and wisdom of the bee, we should immediately put to death.
The doctrine of Pope is altogether childish. The contracted routine of a
bee's existence has too little in common with the complicated relations
of human life for bee-hive usages to displace the statutes of the realm.
[1353] Till ed. 5:
Who for those arts they learned of brutes before,
As kings shall crown them, or as gods adore.--POPE.
[1354] Roscommon's version of Horace's Art of Poetry:
Cities were built, and useful laws were made.--WAKEFIELD.
[1355] In the MS. thus:
The neighbours leagued to guard their common spot,
And love was nature's dictate, murder not.
For want alone each animal contends;
Tigers with tigers, that removed, are friends.
Plain nature's wants the common mother crowned,
She poured her acorns, herbs, and streams around.
No treasure then for rapine to invade,
What need to fight for sunshine, or for shade?
And half the cause of contest was removed,
When beauty could be kind to all who loved.--WARBURTON.
Of the first couplet there are two other versions in the MS.:
Fear would forbid th' unpractised to engage,
And nature's dictate love, not blood and rage.
Or,
Unpractised man, that knew no murd'ring skill,
And nature's dictate was to love, not kill.
[1356] MS.:
Commerce, convenience, change might strongly draw.
[1357] These two lines added since the first edition.--POPE.
The second line of the couplet had already appeared in the Epistle of
Eloisa to Abelard, ver. 92, in connection with sentiments which leave no
doubt of Pope's meaning. In the primitive and golden age he held that
love had full liberty to obey its inclinations, or, as he expressed it
in the passage of the MS. quoted by Warburton, "beauty could then be
kind to all who loved." In other words there was a community of women
regulated by no other law than natural impulse.
[1358] MS.:
These states had lords 'tis true, but each its own,
Not all subjected to the rule of one,
Unless where from one lineage all began,
And swelled into a nation from a man.
The nature of the distinction which Pope draws between the lordship over
the early states, and kingly rule, is clear from ver. 215, where he says
that till monarchy was established patriarchal government prevailed, and
each state was only a collection of relations who obeyed the family
chief. In a monarchy two or more states were joined together, and the
national began to take the place of the family tie. The effect of the
change would be great. The social bond between the governor and the
governed would be weakened, and the official dignity, the harsh
authority, and selfish impulses of the ruler would be quickly increased.
[1359] "Sons," that is, "obeyed a sire" on account of his "virtue," and
not on account of his parental authority. Pope had in his mind the
remarks of Locke. A mature understanding is necessary for the right
direction of the will, and parents must govern the will of the child
till he is competent to govern his own. He is then responsible to
himself. He owes his parents lasting honour, gratitude, and assistance,
but ceases to be under their command, and if, in primitive times, the
children, who had arrived at years of discretion, accepted a father for
their ruler, his "virtue," says Pope, was the cause.
[1360] Locke, Civil Government, bk. ii. chap. vi. sect. 74: "It is
obvious to conceive how easy it was in the first ages of the world for
the father of the family to become the prince of it." The right order of
Pope's distorted language is that "virtue made the father of a people a
prince." He was raised to be a prince because he had manifested a
fatherly care for the people.
[1361] Hooker, Eccles. Polity, bk. i. chap. x. sect. 4: "The chiefest
person in every household was always as it were a king, and fathers did
at the first exercise the office of priests."
[1362] A finer example can perhaps scarce be given of a compact and
comprehensive style. The manner in which the four elements were subdued
is comprised in these four lines alone. There is not an useless word in
this passage. There are but three epithets,--"wond'ring, profound,
aerial"--and they are placed precisely with the very substantive that is
of most consequence. If there had been epithets joined with the other
substantives, it would have weakened the nervousness of the sentence.
This was a secret of versification Pope well understood, and hath often
practised with peculiar success.--WARTON.
Warton's criticism appears to be wrong throughout. He says the lines
describe "the manner in which the four elements were subdued;" but we
learn nothing of "the manner" by being told that "fire" was "commanded,"
and water "controlled." He says "there is not an useless word;" but as
either "command" or "control" would apply with equal propriety to both
fire and water, the second verb is added solely to eke out the line, and
the adjective "profound," when joined to "abyss," is weak tautology for
the sake of the rhyme. He says that the epithets "are placed precisely
with the very substantive that is of most consequence;" but why is the
"fire" less important than the "abyss?" The verses might pass without
comment if Warton had not extolled them for imaginary merits. The first
line is an example of the sacrifice of truth and picturesqueness to
hyperbolical, affected forms of speech. To talk of "calling food from
the wond'ring furrow" conveys a false idea of agricultural processes.
[1363] MS.:
He crowned the wond'ring earth with golden grain,
Taught to command the fire, control the main,
Drew from the secret deep the finny drove,
And fetched the soaring eagle from above.
The first couplet is again varied:
He taught the arts of life, the means of food,
To pierce the forest, and to stem the flood.
[1364] MS.:
Till weak, and old, and dying they began.
This couplet is followed in the MS. by a second which Pope omitted:
Saw his shrunk arms, pale cheeks, and faded eye,
Beheld him bend, and droop, and sink, and die.
[1365] Men are said by the poet to have been awakened by the death of
the patriarch to reflection upon his original, and to have advanced
upwards from father to father, that is, from cause to cause, till their
enquiries terminated in one original Father, one first, independent,
uncreated cause.--JOHNSON.
At ver. 148 we are told that "the state of nature was the reign of God,"
and at ver. 156 that "all vocal beings"--man, bird, and beast--joined
then in "hymning" their Creator. This condition of things, we learn from
ver. 149, dated from the "birth" of nature, which is contrary to Pope's
present conjecture that the primitive families may, perhaps, have had no
conception of a Deity. The poet's language is irrational. If God did not
reveal himself to them in any direct way, they might yet be supposed
capable of inferring from their own existence and that of the universe,
a truth which their posterity deduced from the death of patriarch after
patriarch.
[1366] Pope ought to have written "began." He has improperly put the
participle for the past tense. The meaning of the couplet is, that men
may possibly have learned from tradition that, "this all," did not exist
from eternity, but had a beginning, and therefore a Creator.
[1367] A belief, that is, in the unity of God was the original faith,
and polytheism a later corruption.
[1368] Warburton says that the allusion is to the refraction of light in
passing through the oblique sides of the glass prism.
[1369] It was before the fall that God pronounced that all was good. But
our author never adverts to any lapsed condition of man.--WARTON.
He adverts to it in this passage, where he contrasts primitive virtue
with subsequent license.
[1370] This couplet follows in the MS.:
'Twas simple worship in the native grove,
Religion, morals, had no name but love.
[1371] The divine right of kings to their throne, and the unlawfulness
of deposing them, however much they might oppress the people for whose
benefit they were appointed to rule, was a doctrine first taught in the
time of the Stuarts. "It was never heard of among mankind," says Locke
writing in 1690, "till it was revealed to us by the divinity of this
last age." In opposition to the slavish theory which would subject
nations to despots, Pope says that when government was instituted
allegiance was the voluntary homage of love.
[1372] Mr. Pope told us that of the number that had read these Epistles,
he knew of no one that took the elegance, or even the true meaning of
the word "enormous," except Lord Bolingbroke alone. I wonder at it. I am
sure I never understood it otherwise than as "out of all rule," and I do
not know how anybody could that had read Horace's "abnormis sapiens,"
and Milton's "enormous bliss." Mr. Pope added for that reason, against
his rule of brevity, the two next lines to explain it, and accordingly I
since saw them interlined in the original MS.--RICHARDSON.
Milton's "enormous bliss" was bliss "wild, above rule or art." The
persons who misunderstood the epithet in Pope's poem must have been
those who read the MS.; for the explanatory couplet appeared in the
first edition of the Epistle. He obviously meant by "enormous faith"
that the faith was an enormity, and it is difficult to conjecture what
other sense could be attached to his phrase.
[1373] The "cause" here signifies the purpose or motive manifested in
the constitution of the world, and this purpose is "inverted" by the
doctrine that "many are made for one." The one is made for the
many,--the prince for the people.
[1374] Wicked rulers, terrified by an evil conscience, became the dupe
of impostors who professed to speak in the name of the invisible powers.
[1375] MS.:
Split the huge oak, and rocked the rending ground.
Wakefield points out that the lines, ver. 249-252, are from Lucretius,
v. 1217.
[1376] MS.:
From op'ning earth showed fiends infernal nigh,
And gods supernal from the bursting sky.
[1377] Horace, Ode iii. bk. iii., translated by Addison:
An umpire, partial, and unjust,
And a lewd woman's impious lust.
[1378] Bolingbroke, Fragment 22: "Men made the Supreme Being after their
own image. Fierce and cruel themselves they represented him hating
without reason, revenging without provocation, and punishing without
measure." Pope says that tyrants would believe such gods as were formed
like tyrants. He meant that the tyrants would believe _in_ the gods, but
probably found the "in" unmanageable.
[1379] MS.:
The native wood seemed sacred now no more.
People no longer held sacred the natural temple in which, ver. 155, men
and beasts formerly "hymned their God," but it was thought necessary to
worship in costly buildings, and sacrifice animals on "marble altars."
[1380] Bolingbroke, Fragment 24: "God was appeased provided his altars
reeked with gore." A sentence of the same Fragment furnished Pope with
his view of heathen sacrifices: "The Supreme Being was represented so
vindictive and cruel, that nothing less than acts of the utmost cruelty
could appease his anger, and his priests were so many butchers of men
and other animals."
[1381] The "flamen" was a priest attached exclusively to the service of
some particular god.
[1382] MS.:
The glutton priest first tasted living food.
Bolingbroke, Fragment 24: "As if God was appeased whenever the priest
was glutted with roast meat." Wakefield remarks that Pope followed
Pythagoras in calling food "living," because it had once been alive. A
meat diet is said, ver. 167, to have been the origin of wars, and here
we are told that the "flamen first tasted living food" after war and
tyranny had over-spread the earth, which is an inconsistency, unless
Pope believed that his "glutton priests" were more abstemious than the
rest of mankind till animals were sacrificed in the name of religion.
The poet, in this Epistle, is loud in denouncing the practice of eating
animal food, but he ate it without scruple himself.
[1383] Milton, Par. Lost, i. 392:
First Moloch, horrid king, besmeared with blood
Of human sacrifice, and parent's tears,
Though for the noise of drums and timbrels loud
Their children's cries unheard, that passed through fire
To his grim idol.
Many of Pope's writings are strewed with Miltonic phrases, though they
need not be pointed out, and certainly do not detract from his general
merit. Such interweavings of significant and forcible expressions have
often a striking effect.--BOWLES.
[1384] The image is derived from the old engines of war, such as the
catapult which threw stones. The Flamen made an engine of his god, and
assailed foes by threatening them with chastisement from heaven.
[1385] Hooker, Eccles. Polity, bk. i. chap. x. sect. 5: "At the first,
it may be, that all was permitted unto their discretion which were to
rule, till they saw that to live by one man's became the cause of all
men's misery. This constrained them to unto laws."--WARTON.
In the MS. there is this couplet after ver. 272:
For say what makes the liberty of man?
'Tis not in doing what he would but can.
The lines were intended to give the reason why law is not an
infringement of liberty, and were probably cancelled because the reason
was as applicable to cruel as to salutary laws. Upon Pope's principle
the worst despotism would not interfere with the liberty of the subject,
provided only that resistance was hopeless.
[1386] When the proprietor is asleep the weak rob him by stealth, and
when he is awake the strong rob him by violence.
[1387] Bolingbroke, Fragment 6: "Private good depends on the public."
[1388] The inspired strains of the Hebrew Scriptures are the only
instance in which poetry has "restored faith and morals." The heathen
poets adopted the absurd and profligate fables current in their day, and
christian poets have never done more than reflect the prevalent
christianity. The term "patriot" is commonly applied to political
benefactors, and not to the preachers and disseminators of
righteousness. Pope fell back on the fiction of regenerating poets and
patriots to avoid all mention of the saints and martyrs who really
performed the mighty work. Bolingbroke hated the apostles of genuine
religion, and his pupil had no reverence for them.
[1389] Pope breaks down in his comparison of a mixed government to a
stringed instrument. An instrument would not be "set justly true," but
rendered worthless, when in "touching one" string the musician "must
strike the other too."
[1390] This is the very same illustration that Tully uses, De Republica:
"Quæ harmonia a musicis dicitur in cantu, ea est in civitate
concordia."--WARTON.
[1391] The deduction and application of the foregoing principles, with
the use or abuse of civil and ecclesiastical policy, was intended for
the subject of the third book.--POPE.
[1392] "Consent" is now limited to mental consent, and the word is
obsolete in the sense of "consent of things."
[1393] From Denham's Cooper's Hill:
Wisely she knew the harmony of things,
As well as that of sounds, from discord springs.--HURD.
[1394] "Where the small and weak" are "made to serve, not suffer," "the
great and mighty to strengthen, not invade."
[1395] This couplet is at variance with ver. 289-294, where a mixed form
of government is lauded for its superiority.
[1396] Cowley's verses on the death of Crashaw:
His path, perhaps, in some nice tenets might
Be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was in the right.
The position is demonstrably absurd in both poets. All conduct
originates in principles. Where the principles, therefore, are not
strictly pure, and accurately true, the conduct must deviate from the
line of perfect rectitude.--WAKEFIELD.
"I prefer a bad action to a bad principle," says Rousseau, somewhere,
and Rousseau was right. A bad action may remain isolated; a bad
principle is always prolific, because, after all, it is the mind which
governs, and man acts according to his thoughts much oftener than he
himself imagines.--GUIZOT.
He whose life is in the right cannot, says Pope, in any sense calling
for blame, have a wrong faith. But the answer is that his life cannot be
in the right unless in so far as it bends to the influences of a true
faith. How feeble a conception must that man have of the infinity which
lurks in a human spirit, who can persuade himself that its total
capacities of life are exhaustible by the few gross acts incident to
social relations, or open to human valuation? The true internal acts of
moral man are his thoughts, his yearnings, his aspirations, his
sympathies or repulsions of heart. This is the life of man as it is
appreciable by heavenly eyes.--DE QUINCEY.
[1397] MS.:
Prefer we then the greater to the less,
For charity is all men's happiness.
[1398] MS.:
But charity the greatest of the three.
1 Cor. xiii. 13: "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but
the greatest of these is charity."
[1399] The MS. adds this couplet:
Th' extended earth is but one sphere of bliss
To him, who makes another's blessing his.
[1400] At the same time.
[1401] From the Spectator, No. 588, said to be written by Mr. Grove: "Is
benevolence inconsistent with self-love? Are their motions contrary? No
more than the diurnal rotation of the earth is opposed to its annual; or
its motion round its own centre, which might be improved as an
illustration of self-love, to that which whirls it about the common
centre of the world, answering to universal benevolence."--WARTON.
[1402] "Nature" is not a power coordinate with God, but only the means
by which he acts.
[1403] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "A due use of our reason makes
self-love and social coincide, or even become in effect the
same."--WAKEFIELD.
[1404] Happiness is with Pope the sole end of life, and virtue is only a
means. The means cannot be more binding than the end, and happiness is
not obligatory and virtue is. A certain contempt, again, for pain and
privation is heroic, but indifference to moral worth is degradation.
Thus virtue is plainly an end in itself, and is superior, not
subordinate, to happiness.
[1405] Overlooked in the things which would yield it, and in other
things magnified by the imagination, as is happily expressed by Young,
when he says, Universal Passion, Sat. i., 238:
None think the great unhappy but the great.
[1406] Pope personified happiness at the beginning, but seems to have
dropped that idea in the seventh line, where the deity is suddenly
transformed into a plant, from whence this metaphor of a vegetable is
carried on through the eleven succeeding lines till he suddenly returns
to consider happiness again as a person, in the eighteenth
line.--WARTON.
The change from a person to a thing commences at the third verse, where
Pope calls happiness "that something," and he changes back to the person
in the eighth verse, where he addresses happiness as "thou."
[1407] MS.:
O happiness! to which we all aspire,
Winged with strong hope, and borne with full desire;
That good, we still mistake, and still pursue,
Still out of reach, yet ever in our view;
That ease, for which in want, in wealth we sigh,
That ease, for which we labour and we die;
Tell me, ye sages, (sure 'tis yours to know),
Tell in what mortal soul this ease may grow.
[1408] "Is there," asks Mr. Croker, "any other authority for shine as a
noun?" The noun is found in Milton, and Locke, and in much earlier
writers, but Johnson says, "it is a word, though not unanalogical, yet
ungraceful, and little used."
[1409] "Flaming" is not an appropriate epithet for mines. The line calls
up a false idea of splendour, and not a vision of subterranean gloom and
desolation.
[1410] Dryden, Æn. xii. 963:
An iron harvest mounts, and still remains to mow.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope's image is not sufficiently distinctive. There is only one word,
the epithet "iron," to indicate that he is speaking of military renown,
and this epithet, drawn from the material of which swords are made, is
also applicable to the sickle.
[1411] "Say in what mortal soil thou deign'st to grow," is the
invocation addressed by Pope to Happiness. He now strangely answers his
own inquiry in a tone of rebuke, as though it were preposterous to ask
the question. "Where grows! where grows it not?"
[1412] These lines follow in the MS.:
Heav'n plants no vain desire in human kind,
But what it prompts to seek, directs to find,
From whom, so strongly pointing at the end,
To hide the means it never could intend.
Now since, whatever happiness we call,
Subsists not in the good of one, but all,
And whosoever would be blessed must bless,
Virtue alone can form that happiness.
A sentence in Hooker's Eccl. Pol., Book i. Chap. viii. Sect. 7, will
explain Pope's idea in the last four lines: "If I cannot but wish to
receive all good at every man's hand, how should I look to have any part
of my desire satisfied, unless myself be careful to satisfy the like
desire in other men?"
[1413] "Sincere" in its present use is the opposite of "disingenuous,"
"deceptive," and has always a moral signification. Formerly it had the
sense, which Pope gives it here, of "pure," "unadulterated," without any
necessary ethical meaning. Thus Dryden, Palamon and Arcite, Bk. iii.
And none can boast sincere felicity.
Philemon Holland talks of "sincere vermillion," Arbuthnot of "sincere
acid," and Hooker speaks of keeping the Scriptures "entire and sincere."
[1414] This was flattery. Bolingbroke was notoriously a prey to factious
rancour, and the pangs of disappointed ambition.
[1415] Epicureans.--POPE.
[1416] Stoics.--POPE.
Pope's account of the epicureans is the exact opposite of the truth. He
says they "placed bliss in action," whereas Seneca tells us, Benef. iv.
4: "Quæ maxima Epicure felicitas videtur, nihil agit." The poet's
account of the stoics is equally wrong. Instead of placing "bliss in
ease" they inculcated the sternest self-denial, and untiring efforts to
fulfil all virtue.
[1417] Epicureans.--POPE.
[1418] Stoics.--POPE.
The true stoic did not, as Pope asserts, "confess virtue vain." He
contended that it was all-sufficient. Till the edition of 1743 this
couplet was as follows:
One grants his pleasure is but rest from pain;
One doubts of all; one owns ev'n virtue vain.
The two lines which conclude the paragraph, and which first appeared in
the edition of 1743, were written at Warburton's suggestion. The object
of the addition was to represent the credulous man who trusted
everything as equally deceived with the sceptic who trusted in nothing.
Of the last line there is a second version:
One trusts the senses, and one doubts of all.
[1419] Sceptics.--POPE.
Pyrrho and his followers held that we can only know things as they
appear, and not as they are. Thence they maintained that appearances
must be absolutely indifferent, and that we could be equally happy in
all conditions,--in sickness, for instance, Cicero, Fin. ii. 13, as in
health. The one reality which Pyrrho admitted was virtue, and this he
said (Cicero, Fin. iv. 16), was the supreme good which he who possessed
had nothing left to desire.
[1420] Pope's complaint, that the directions of the ancient moralists
amounted to no more than that "happiness is happiness," arose from his
ignorance of their tenets. The stoics and sceptics placed the supreme
good in unconditional virtue, and the epicureans taught the precise
doctrine of Pope himself, that pleasure is the goal, and virtue the
road. The admonition, "take nature's path," which Pope would substitute
for the teaching of these sects, was the maxim on which they all
insisted.
[1421] Pope has here adopted the sentiments of the Grecian sage who
said, "That if we live according to nature we shall never be poor, and
if we live according to opinion we shall never be rich."--RUFFHEAD.
For opinion creates the fantastic wants of fashion and luxury.
[1422] He means that happiness does not "dwell" in any "extreme" of
wealth, rank, talent, etc., but that all "states," or classes of men
"can reach it."
[1423] MS.:
True happiness, 'tis sacred truth I tell,
Lies but in thinking, &c.
The man who always "thinks right" is infallible in wisdom, and if he
always "means well" he must act in obedience to his infallible
convictions, when he will also be impeccable. There needs but this, says
Pope, to secure happiness. He scoffs at the vague definitions of
philosophers, and substitutes the luminous direction that we should be
infallible in our views, and impeccable in our conduct.
[1424] "The common sense" and "common ease" of which all the world have
an equal share, cannot exceed the measure of sense and ease which falls
to the lot of the most foolish and suffering of mankind. This is the
same sort of equality that there is between the income of a pauper and a
millionaire, since both have half-a-crown a week.
[1425] The MS. adds:
In no extreme lies real happiness,
Not ev'n of good or wisdom in excess.
"Good" and "wisdom" in the last line might be supposed to mean something
that was not true wisdom and goodness if Pope had not argued, ver.
259-268, that real wisdom was injurious to happiness. He would have the
"right thinking" alloyed with error, and the "meaning well" with evil.
[1426] That is, all which can "justly" or rightly be termed happiness.
[1427] The image is drawn from a person leaning towards another, and
listening to what he says. Pope took the expression from the simile of
the compasses in Donne's Songs and Sonnets:
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
[1428] The MS. goes on thus:
'Tis not in self it can begin and end,
The bliss of one must with another blend:
The strongest, noblest pleasures of the mind
All hold of mutual converse with the kind.
Can sensual lust, or selfish rapine, know
Such as from bounty, love, or mercy flow?
Of human nature wit its worst may write,
We all revere it in our own despite.
[1429] This couplet follows in the MS.:
To rob another's is to lose our own,
And the just bound once passed the whole is gone.
[1430] MS.:
inference if you make,
That such are happier, 'tis a gross mistake.
Say not, "Heav'n's here profuse, there poorly saves,
And for one monarch makes a thousand slaves;"
You'll find when causes and their ends are known,
'Twas for the thousand heav'n has made that one.
Ev'n mutual want to common blessings tends,
One labours, one directs, and one defends,
While double pay benevolence receives,
Is blessed in what it takes, and what it gives.
In what (heav'n's hand impartial to confess)
Need men be equal but in happiness.
The bliss of all, if heav'n's indulgent aim,
He could not place in riches, pow'r or fame.
In these suppose it placed, one greatly blessed,
Others were hurt, impoverished, or oppressed;
Or did they equally on all descend,
If all were equal must not all contend?
[1431] After ver. 66 in the MS.
Tis peace of mind alone is at a stay:
The rest mad fortune gives or takes away:
All other bliss by accident's debarred,
But virtue's, in the instant, a reward;
In hardest trials operates the best,
And more is relished as the more distressed.--WARBURTON.
There is still another couplet in the MS.:
Virtue's plain consequence is happiness,
Or virtue makes the disappointment less.
[1432] The exemplification of this truth, by a view of the equality of
happiness in the several particular stations of life, was designed for
the subject of a future Epistle.--POPE.
"Heaven's just balance" is made "equal," says this writer, because men
are harassed with fears in proportion to their elevation, and amused
with hopes in a state of distress. But a man may be good either in high
or low rank; and God does not, to make the happiness of mankind equal,
fill the heart of one with idle fears, and of the other with chimerical
hopes.--CROUSAZ.
[1433] Sir W. Temple, Works, vol. iii. p. 531: "Whether a good
condition with fear of being ill, or an ill with hope of being well,
pleases or displeases most." Pope's MS. goes on thus:
How widely then at happiness we aim
By selfish pleasures, riches, pow'r or fame!
Increase of these is but increase of pain,
Wrong the materials, and the labour vain.
[1434] He had in his mind Virgil's description, borrowed from Homer, of
the attempt made by the giants, in their war against the gods, to scale
the heavens by heaping Ossa upon Pelion, and Olympus upon Ossa. Pope
took the expressions "sons of earth," and "mountains piled on
mountains," from Dryden's translation, Geor. i. 374.
[1435] "Still" is repeated to give force to the remonstrance. "Attempt
still to rise, and Heaven will still survey your vain toil with
laughter."
[1436] An allusion to Psalm ii. 1, 4: "Why do the heathen rage, and the
people imagine a vain thing? He that sitteth in the heavens shall
laugh."--WAKEFIELD.
[1437] MS.:
The gods with laughter on the labour gaze,
And bury such in the mad heaps they raise.
[1438] "Nature" is a name for the second causes, or instruments, by
which God works. Pope speaks as if nature's meaning was distinct from
the meaning of God.
[1439] By "mere mankind" Pope means man in his present earthly
condition, and not the generality of mankind as distinguished from
favoured mortals, for he says, ver. 77, that individuals can no more
attain to any greater good than mankind at large.
[1440] From Bolingbroke, Fragment 52: "Agreeable sensations, the series
whereof constitutes happiness, must arise from health of body,
tranquillity of mind, and a competency of wealth."
[1441] The MS. adds,
Behold the blessing then to none denied
But through our vice, by error or by pride;
Which nothing but excess can render vain,
And then lost only when too much we gain.
[1442] The sense of this ill-expressed line is, that bad men taste the
gifts of fortune less than good men, in proportion as they obtain them
by worse means. The couplet was originally thus in the MS.:
The good, the bad may fortune's gifts possess;
The bad acquire them worse, enjoy them less.
[1443] "That" is put improperly for "those that."
[1444] MS.:
Secure to find, ev'n from the very worst,
If vice and virtue want, compassion first.
[1445] But are not the one frequently mistaken for the other? How many
profligate hypocrites have passed for good?--WARTON.
Men not intrinsically virtuous have often had the good opinion of the
world; the happiness they want is a good conscience.
[1446] After ver. 92 in the MS.:
Let sober moralists correct their speech,
No bad man's happy: he is great, or rich.--WARBURTON.
[1447] That is, "who fancy bliss allotted to vice."
[1448] Lord Falkland was killed by a musket ball at the battle of
Newbury, Sept. 20, 1643. Turenne was killed by a cannon ball, near
Sassback, July 26, 1675. Sir Philip Sidney was mortally wounded by a
bullet at Zutphen, Sept. 22, 1586, and died a few days afterwards.
Sidney was 32 years of age at his death, Falkland 33, and Turenne 64.
[1449] The Hon. Robert Digby, who died, aged 40, April 19, 1726. Pope
wrote his epitaph.
[1450] MS.:
Brave Sidney falls amid the martial strife,
Not that he's virtuous, but profuse of life.
Not virtue snatched Arbuthnot's hopeful bloom,
And sent thee, Craggs, untimely to the tomb.
Say not 'tis virtue, but too soft a frame,
That Walsh his race, and Scud'more ends her name.
Think not their virtues, more though heav'n ne'er gave,
Unites so many Digbys in a grave.
Fierce love, not virtue, Falkland, was thy doom,
Her grief, not virtue, nipped Louisa's bloom.
The Arbuthnot mentioned here was Charles, a clergyman, and son of the
celebrated physician. His death in 1732 was supposed to have been
occasioned by the lingering effects of a wound he received in a duel he
fought while at Oxford with a fellow-collegian, his rival in love. James
Craggs died of the small-pox Feb. 14, 1721, aged 35. Virtue had
certainly no share in his death, for he was licentious in private life,
and in his public capacity accepted a bribe from the South Sea
directors. Walsh died in 1708, at the age of 49. His virtue may be
estimated by his confession that he had committed every folly in love,
except matrimony. Lady Scudamore, widow of Sir James Scudamore, and
daughter of the fourth Lord Digby, died of the small-pox, May 3, 1729,
aged 44. She left only a daughter, who married, and hence Pope's
expression, "Scud'more ends her name." The many Digbys united in one
grave were the children of the fifth Lord, the father of the poet's
friend, Robert. I do not know what is meant by the "fierce love" which
was Falkland's "doom," nor can I identify the Louisa who died of grief.
[1451] William, fifth Lord Digby, was 74 when this fourth Epistle was
published in 1734, and he lived to be 92. He died December 1752.
[1452] M. de Belsunce, was made bishop of Marseilles in 1709. In the
plague of that city in 1720 he distinguished himself by his activity. He
died at a very advanced age in 1755.--WARTON.
[1453] Some anonymous verses in Dryden's Miscellanies, vi. p. 76:
When nature sickens, and with fainting breath
Struggles beneath the bitter pangs of death.--WAKEFIELD.
[1454] Dryden, Virg. x. 1231:
O Rhœbus! we have lived too long for me,
If life and long were terms that could agree.--WAKEFIELD.
[1455] MS.:
Yet hemmed with plagues, and breathing deathful air,
Marseilles' good bishop still possess the chair;
And long kind chance, or heav'n's more kind decree,
Lends an old parent, etc.
Pope's mother died June 7, 1733. She was said by the poet to be 93, but
was only 91, if the register of her baptism, June 18, 1642, gives the
year of her birth, which is doubtless the case, since an elder sister
was baptised in 1641, and a younger in 1643.
[1456] How change can admit, or nature let fall any evil, however short
and rare it may be, under the government of an all-wise, powerful, and
benevolent Creator, is hardly to be understood. These six lines are
perhaps the most exceptionable in the whole poem in point both of
sentiment and expression.--WARTON.
Pope's justification of the partial ill which is not a general good is,
in substance, that Providence has not supreme dominion over his physical
laws, that change and nature act independently of him, and vitiate his
work. In place of ver. 113-16 the earlier editions have this couplet:
God sends not ill, 'tis nature lets it fall,
Or chance escape, and man improves it all.
The notion that the disturbing operations of "chance" could explain the
existence of evil was intrinsically absurd, and inconsistent with Ep.
i., ver. 290, where Pope says that "all chance is direction." Chance is,
in strictness, a nonentity, and merely signifies that the cause of an
effect is unknown to us, or beyond our control. Neither supposition
could apply to the Almighty. Warburton quotes a couplet from the MS.,
which could not be retained without a glaring contradiction, when Pope
had discovered two other evil-doers besides man,--nature and chance:
Of every evil, since the world began
The real source is not in God, but man.
[1457] This comparison of the favourites of the Almighty to the
favourites of a weak prince is fallacious and revolting. Weak princes
select their favourites from weak or vicious motives. The favourites of
heaven are the righteous.
[1458] Warburton says that Pope alluded to Empedocles. The story ran
that he pretended to be a divinity, and threw himself into the crater of
Ætna, that nobody might know what had become of him, and might conclude
that he had been carried up into heaven. All the circumstances of his
death are doubtful, and whether he was a calumniated sage, or a
conceited madman, legends are not a proper illustration of God's
dealings with mankind. Pope had originally written,
T' explore Vesuvius if great Pliny aims,
Shall the loud mountain call back all its flames?
At the eruption of Vesuvius in 79, Pliny, the naturalist, was commanding
the Roman fleet in the Gulf of Naples. He made for the coast in the
neighbourhood of the volcano, till checked by the falling stones and
ashes, he sailed to Stabiæ, and landed. In a few hours the tottering of
the houses, shaken by the earthquake, warned him to fly, and according
to his nephew he was overtaken by flames and sulphurous vapours, and
suffocated. Stabiæ is ten miles from Vesuvius, and the flame and vapour
could hardly have been propelled from the mountain.
[1459] The forgetfulness to thunder supposes unconscious obliviousness,
the recalling the fires conscious activity. The mountain would not at
the same moment forget to keep up the irruption, and remember to
restrain it.
[1460] Wollaston, Religion of Nature, sect. v. prop. 18: "If a man's
safety should depend upon winds or rains, must new motions be impressed
upon the atmosphere?"
[1461] Warton tells us in a note on one of Pope's letters to Bethel,
that the latter was "celebrated in two fine lines in the Essay on Man on
account of an asthma with which he was afflicted." I find in Ruffhead's
Life a quotation from a letter of Pope's to Bethel, "then in Italy," and
we may conclude that Bethel, being troubled with an asthma, visited
Italy for relief, but that in crossing the sea the "motions of the sea
and air" disagreed with him, as they do with most people.--CROKER.
[1462] "You," is Bolingbroke, to whom the epistle is addressed. A writer
in the Adventurer, No. 63, quotes Wollaston, Religion of Nature, sect.
v. prop. 18: "If a good man be passing by an infirm building, just in
the article of falling, can it be expected that God should suspend the
force of gravitation till he is gone by, in order to his deliverance?"
The illustrations and language Pope copied from Wollaston are the
objections of those who deny a special Providence, and Wollaston only
stated the arguments to refute them.
[1463] MS.:
Or shall some ruin, as it nods to fall,
For Chartres' brains reserve the hanging wall?
No,--in a scene far higher heav'n imparts
Rewards for spotless hands, and honest hearts.
The last couplet is a direct acknowledgment of a future state, and was
probably omitted to avoid contradicting the infidel tenets of
Bolingbroke.
[1464] Christians have never raised the objection. They only say that
since this world is not a kingdom of the just, reason, as well as
revelation, teaches that there must be a kingdom to come.
[1465] Bolingbroke, Fragment 57: "Christian divines complain that good
men are often unhappy, and bad men happy. They establish a rule, and are
not agreed about the application of it; for who are to be reputed good
christians? Go to Rome, they are papists. Go to Geneva, they are
calvinists. If particular providences are favourable to those of your
communion they will be deemed unjust by every good protestant, and God
will be taxed with encouraging idolatry and superstition. If they are
favourable to those of any of our communions they will be deemed unjust
by every good papist, and God will be taxed with nursing up heresy and
schism."
[1466] MS.:
This way, I fear, your project too must fall,
Will just what serves one good man serve 'em all?
[1467] After ver. 142 in some editions:
Give each a system, all must be at strife;
What diff'rent systems for a man and wife?--WARBURTON.
[1468] Young, Universal Passion, Sat. iii. 61.
The very best ambitiously advise.
MS.:
The best in habits variously incline.
[1469] MS.:
E'en leave it as it is; this world, etc.
[1470] He alludes to the complaint of Cato in Addison's tragedy, Act iv.
Sc. 4:
Justice gives way to force: the conquered world
Is Cæsar's; Cato has no business in it.
And Act v. Sc. 1:
This world was made for Cæsar.
"If," says Pope, "the world is made for ambitious men, such as Cæsar, it
is also made for good men, like Titus." Extreme cases test principles,
and to establish his position, that the virtuous in this life have
always a larger share of enjoyments than the worldly, Pope should have
dealt with some of the numerous instances in which the good have been
condemned to tortures in consequence of their goodness.
[1471] Remembering one evening that he had given nothing during the day,
Titus exclaimed, "My friends, I have lost a day."
[1472] Unquestionably it must be one of the rewards if Pope is right in
maintaining that present happiness is proportioned to virtue. No more
cruel mockery could be conceived than to act on his doctrine, and tell a
virtuous mother, surrounded by starving children, that she and her
little ones were quite as happy as the families who lived in abundance.
[1473] MS.:
Can God be just if virtue be unfed?
Why, fool, is the reward of virtue bread?
'Tis his who labours, his who sows the plain,
'Tis his who threshes, or who grinds the grain.
[1474] The MS. has two readings:
Where madness fights for tyrants or for gain.
Where folly fights for kings or drowns for gain.
In the early editions Pope adopted the first version; in the later the
second, with the change of "dives" for "drowns."
[1475] "Why no king?" is equivalent to "why is he not any king?" The
proper form would be "why not a king?"
[1476] MS.:
Then give him this, and that, and everything:
Still the complaint subsists; he is no king.
Outward rewards for inward worth are odd:
Why then complain not that he is no god?
Ver. 162 in the text is inconsistent with ver. 161. Pope supposes the
good to rise in their demands until they rebel against receiving
external rewards for internal merits, and insist that man should be a
god, and earth a heaven, which heaven is one of the externals they have
just indignantly repudiated.
[1477] Pope is speaking of the good, and what good man ever did "ask and
reason" according to Pope's representation?
[1478] In a work of so serious a cast surely such strokes of levity, of
satire, of ridicule, as also lines 204, 223, 276, however poignant and
witty, are ill-placed and disgusting, are violations of that propriety
which Pope in general so strictly observed.--WARTON.
[1479] MS.:
But come, for virtue the just payment fix,
For humble merit say a coach and six,
For justice a Lord Chancellor's awful gown, &c.
Pope showed his consciousness of the weakness of his cause by raising
false issues. Virtue would not be rewarded by swords, gowns, and
coaches, but is it rewarded by the cross, the stake, the rack, and the
dungeon?
[1480] This sarcasm was directed against George II. When Prince of Wales
he quarrelled with his father, and patronised the opposition. On his
accession to the throne he abandoned the opposition, to which Pope's
friends belonged, and retained the ministers of George I.
[1481] After ver. 172 in the MS.:
Say, what rewards this idle world imparts,
Or fit for searching heads or honest hearts.--WARBURTON.
[1482] Heaven in this line has either improperly the double sense of a
person and a place,--the God of heaven, and the kingdom of the
blessed--or else "there" is a clumsy tautological excrescence to furnish
a rhyme.
[1483] These eight succeeding lines were not in former editions; and
indeed none of them, especially lines 177 and 179, do any credit to the
author.--WARTON.
From Warton's note it would appear that the lines were first printed in
his own edition in 1797, whereas they were published in Pope's edition
of 1743. The poet had then renounced Bolingbroke for Warburton, and
ventured to admit that there was a heaven reserved for man.
[1484] The "boy and man makes an individual" is not grammar.
[1485] Thus till the edition of 1743:
For riches, can they give, but to the just,
His own contentment, or another's trust?
[1486] We see in the world, alas! too many examples of riches giving
repute and trust, content and pleasure to the worthless and
profligate.--WARTON.
[1487] Dryden:
Let honour and preferment go for gold,
But glorious beauty isn't to be sold.
The MS. adds:
Were health of mind and body purchased here,
'Twere worth the cost; all else is bought too dear.
[1488] The man, that is, who is the lover of human kind, and the object
of their love.
[1489] No rational believer in Providence ever did suppose that to have
less than a thousand a year was a mark of God's hatred, or ever doubted
that the sufferings of good men in this life were consistent with the
dispensations of wisdom and mercy. Pope began by undertaking to prove
that happiness was independent of externals, and drops into the separate
and indubitable proposition that earthly happiness and the blessing of
God are not dependent upon the possession of a thousand a year.
[1490] This seems not to be proper; the words "flaunt" and "flutter"
might with more propriety have changed places.--JOHNSON.
The satirical aggravation here is conducted with great dexterity by an
interchange of terms: the gaudy word "flaunt" properly belongs to the
sumptuous dress, and that of "flutter" to the tattered
garment.--WAKEFIELD.
Wakefield did not perceive that the language no longer fitted the facts;
for though flimsy rags flutter, the stiff brocade did not. Pope avoided
the inconsistency in his first draught:
Oft of two brothers one shall be surveyed
Flutt'ring in rags, one flaunting in brocade.
[1491] This must be understood as if Pope had written, "The cobbler is
aproned."
[1492] MS.:
What differs more, you cry, than gown and hood?
A wise man and a fool, a bad and good.
The miserable rhyme in the text had the authority of a pun in
Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI. Act v. Sc. 6:
Why what a peevish fool was that of Crete
That taught his son the office of a fowl?
And yet, for all his wings, the fool was drowned.
[1493] He alluded to Philip V. of Spain, who resigned his crown to his
son, Jan. 10, 1724, and retired to a monastery. The son died in August,
and on Sept. 5, 1724, Philip reascended the throne. Weak-minded,
hard-hearted, superstitious, and melancholy mad, he was a just instance
of a man who owed all his consideration to the trappings of royalty.
[1494] That is, the rest is mere outside appearance,--the leather of the
cobbler's apron, or the prunella of the clergyman's gown. Prunella was a
species of woollen stuff.
[1495] _Cordon_ is the French term for the ribbon of the orders of
knighthood; but in England the ribbons are never called "strings," nor
would Pope have used the term unless he had wanted a rhyme for "kings."
The concluding phrase of the couplet was aimed at the supposed influence
of the mistresses of George II.
[1496] Cowley, Translation of Hor. Epist. i. 10:
To kings or to the favourites of kings.--HURD.
[1497] In the MS. thus:
The richest blood, right-honourably old,
Down from Lucretia to Lucretia rolled,
May swell thy heart and gallop in thy breast,
Without one dash of usher or of priest:
Thy pride as much despise all other pride
As Christ-church once all colleges beside.--WARBURTON.
[1498] A bad rhyme to the preceding word "race." It is taken from
Boileau, Sat. v.:
Et si leur sang tout pur, ainsi que leur noblesse,
Est passé jusqu'à vous de Lucrèce en Lucrèce.--WARTON.
The bad rhyme did not appear till the edition of 1743. The couplet had
previously stood as follows:
Thy boasted blood, a thousand years or so
May from Lucretia to Lucretia flow.
[1499] Hall, Sat. iii.:
Or tedious bead rolls of descended blood,
From father Japhet since Deucalion's flood.--WAKEFIELD.
[1500] There are two other versions of this couplet in the MS.:
But to make wits of fools, and chiefs of cowards,
What can? not all the pride of all the Howards.
And,
But make one wise, or loved, or happy man,
Not all the pride of all the Howards can.
[1501] Pope took the phrase from Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, vol. i.,
p. 26: "Who can forbear laughing when he thinks on all the great men
that have been so serious on the subject of that Macedonian madman?"
Warton protests against the application of the term to Alexander the
Great, and adds that Charles XII. of Sweden "deserved not to be joined
with him." The objection is well-founded, for Pope not only compared
them in their rage for war, but said that neither "looked further than
his nose," which was true of Charles XII., and false of Alexander, who
mingled grand schemes of civilisation with his selfish lust of dominion.
[1502] "To find an enemy of all mankind," signifies to find some one who
is an enemy of all mankind, whereas Pope means to say that heroes desire
to find all mankind their enemies. He exaggerated the "strangeness" of
the conqueror's "purpose." The making enemies is incidental to the
purpose, but is not itself the end.
[1503] The idea expressed in this line is put more clearly by Johnson in
his description of Charles XII:
Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain,
"Think nothing gained," he cries, "till nought remain."
[1504] There is something so familiar, nay even vulgar, in these two
lines as renders them very unworthy of our author.--RUFFHEAD.
[1505] That is, "the politic and wise" are "no less alike" than the
heroes, of whom he had said, ver. 219, that they had all the same
characteristics.
[1506] Shakespeare, Richard II. Act i. Sc. 3: "The sly, slow hours."
[1507] "'Tis phrase absurd" is one of those departures from pure English
which would only be endurable in familiar poetry.
[1508] The pronunciation of "great" was not uniform in Pope's day. "When
I published," says Johnson, "the plan for my Dictionary, Lord
Chesterfield told me that the word 'great' should be pronounced so as to
rhyme to 'state,' and Sir William Yonge sent me word that it should be
pronounced so as to rhyme to 'seat,' and that none but an Irishman would
pronounce it 'grait.'" Pope, in this epistle, and elsewhere, has made
"great" rhyme to both sounds.
[1509] Marcus Aurelius, who regulated his life by the lofty principles
of the Stoics, was born A.D. 121 and died 180. The man, says Pope, who
aims at noble ends by noble means is great, whether he attains his end
or fails, whether he reigns like Aurelius or perishes like Socrates.
[1510] Considering the manner in which Socrates was put to death, the
word "bleed" seems to be improperly used.--WARTON.
[1511] Wollaston, Religion of Nature, sect. v. prop. 19: "Fame lives but
in the breath of the people."
[1512] Is depreciating the passion for fame consistent with the doctrine
before advanced, Epist. ii. ver. 290, that "not a vanity is giv'n in
vain?"--WARTON.
[1513] This is said to Bolingbroke.
[1514] Celebrated men are aware that their reputation spreads wide, and
whether fame is valuable or worthless, "all that is felt of it" does not
"begin and end in the small circle of friends and foes."
[1515] The men of renown,--the Shakespeares, Bacons, and Newtons,--can
never be "empty shades" while we have the works which were the fruit of
their prodigious intellects. When the wealth of a great mind is
preserved to posterity we possess a principal part of the man, and if in
the next world he takes no cognisance of his fame in this, it is we that
are the empty shades to him; he is a substance and a power to us.
[1516] Wakefield says that "but for his political bias Pope would have
written, 'A Marlb'rough living.'" But Marlborough died in 1722, and the
point of Pope's line consisted in opposing the example of a living man
to a dead.
[1517] The "wit" is not to be taken here in its narrow modern sense of a
jester. Pope is deriding fame in general, and divides famous men into
two classes,--"heroes and the wise." The wise, such as Shakespeare,
Bacon, and Newton, are compared to feathers, which are flimsy and showy;
and the heroes, who are the scourges of mankind, are compared to rods.
[1518] "Honest" was formerly used in a less confined sense than at
present, but the word has never been adequate to designate "the noblest
work of God."
[1519] Pope has hitherto spoken of all fame. He now speaks of bad fame,
and this was never supposed to be an element of happiness.
[1520] He alludes to the disinterment of the bodies of Cromwell,
Bradshaw, and Ireton on Jan. 30, 1661, the anniversary of the execution
of Charles I. The putrid corpses were hung for the day upon a gibbet at
Tyburn, were decapitated at night, and the heads fixed on the front of
Westminster Hall. The trunks were buried in a hole dug near the gibbet.
[1521] Marcellus was an opponent of Cæsar, and a partisan of Pompey.
After the battle of Pharsalia he retired to Mitylene, was pardoned by
Cæsar at the request of the senate, and assassinated by an attendant on
his way back to Rome. His moral superiority over Cæsar is conjecture.
Warton mentions that "by Marcellus Pope was said to mean the Duke of
Ormond," a man of small abilities, and a tool of Bolingbroke and Oxford.
He fled from England at the death of Queen Anne, joined the court of the
Pretender, and being attainted had to pass the rest of his life abroad.
He died at Madrid, Nov. 16, 1745, aged 94. One version of the couplet in
the MS. has the names of Walpole, and the jacobite member of parliament,
Shippen:
And more contentment honest Sh[ippen] feels
Than W[alpole] with a senate at his heels.
[1522] So Lord Lansdowne of Cato:
More loved, more praised, more envied in his doom,
Than Cæsar trampling on the rights of Rome.--WAKEFIELD.
[1523] "Superior parts" are ranked by Pope among "external goods," which
is a palpable error. Nothing can be less external to a man than his
mind.
[1524] Which does not hinder our advancing with delight from truth to
truth, nor are we depressed because, to quote Pope's language, Epist. i.
ver. 71, "our knowledge is measured to our state and place."
[1525] In the interests of charity, humility, and self-improvement, it
were to be wished that this was the universal result of superior
intelligence.
[1526] Pope objects that wise men are "condemned to drudge," which is
not an evil peculiar to the tasks of wise men, and so immensely does the
pleasure of mental exercise preponderate over the weariness, that a
taste for philosophy, letters, and science is one of the surest
preservatives against the tedium of life. He objects that the wise have
no one to second or judge them rightly, which never happens. The most
neglected genius wins disciples from the beginning, who make up in
weight what they want in number, and were the adherents fewer, the
capacity which conceives important truths would be self-sustained from
the consciousness that truth is mighty and will prevail.
[1527] The allusion is to Bolingbroke's patriotic pretensions, and
political impotence. The cause of his want of success is reversed by
Pope. He was understood well enough, and nobody trusted him in
consequence. His selfish, unprincipled ambition was too transparent.
[1528] To a person that was praising Dr. Balguy's admirable discourses
on the Vanity and Vexation of our Pursuits after Knowledge, he replied,
"I borrowed the whole from ten lines of the Essay on Man, ver. 259-268,
and I only enlarged upon what the poet had expressed with such
marvellous conciseness, penetration, and precision." He particularly
admired ver. 266.--WARTON.
The exclamation "painful pre-eminence," is from Addison's Cato, Act iii.
Sc. 5, where Cato applies the phrase to his own situation.
[1529] This line is inconsistent with ver. 261-2. A man who feels
painfully his own ignorance and faults is not "above life's weakness."
The line is also inconsistent with ver. 310. No one can be above life's
weakness who is not transcendent in virtue, and then he cannot be above
"life's comfort," since Pope says, that "virtue alone is happiness
below." The melancholy picture, again, which the passage presents of the
species of martyrdom endured by Bolingbroke from his intellectual
pre-eminence, is inconsistent with ver. 18, where Pope says that perfect
happiness has fled from kings to dwell with St. John.
[1530] "Call" for "call forth."
[1531] Lord Umbra may have stood for a dozen insignificant peers who had
the ribbon of some order. Sir Billy was Sir William Yonge, who was made
a Knight of the Bath when the order was revived in May, 1725. "Without
having done anything," says Lord Hervey, "out of the common track of a
ductile courtier, and a parliamentary tool, his name was proverbially
used to express everything pitiful, corrupt, and contemptible." His one
talent was a fluency which sounded like eloquence, and meant nothing,
and this ready flow of specious language, unaccompanied by solid
reasoning or conviction, and always exerted on behalf of his patron,
Walpole, rendered his unconditional subserviency conspicuous.
[1532] Mr. Croker suggests that Gripus and his wife may be Mr. Wortley
Montagu and Lady Mary. Pope accused them both of greed for money.
[1533] Oldham:
The greatest, bravest, wittiest of mankind.--BOWLES.
[1534] From Cowley, Translation of Virgil:
Charmed with the foolish whistlings of a name.--HURD.
[1535] This resembles some lines in Roscommon's Essay:
That wretch, in spite of his forgotten rhymes,
Condemned to live to all succeeding times.--WAKEFIELD.
Pope's examples would not bear out his language unless Bacon and
Cromwell were generally reprobated, whereas both have distinguished
champions and innumerable adherents.
[1536] MS.:
In one man's fortune, mark and scorn them all.
The "ancient story" was a pretence which Pope inserted when he turned
the invective against the Duke of Marlborough into a general satire upon
a class.
[1537] Mr. Croker asks "who was happy to ruin and betray?--the favourite
or the sovereign?" The language is confused, but "their" in the next
line refers to those who "ruin" and "betray," and shows that the
favourites were meant. They were happy to ruin those--the kings, to
betray these--the queens. The couplet made part of the attack upon the
Duke of Marlborough, and the words of ver. 290 were borrowed from
Burnet, who said in his defence of the Duke, "that he was in no
contrivance to ruin or betray" James II. While, however, he was a
trusted officer in the army of James he entered into a secret league
with the Prince of Orange, and deserted to him on his landing. The
accusation of lying in the arms of a queen, and afterwards betraying
her, alludes, says Wakefield, to Marlborough's youthful intrigue with
the Duchess of Cleveland, the mistress of Charles II., and we need not
reject the interpretation because the mistress of a king is not a queen,
or because there is no ground for believing that Marlborough betrayed
her. Pope constantly sacrificed accuracy of language to glitter of
style, and historic truth to satirical venom.
[1538] In the MS. "great * * grows," that is, great Churchill or
Marlbro'.--CROKER.
[1539] MS.:
One equal course how guilt and greatness ran.
[1540] This couplet and the next have a view to his supposed peculation
as commander-in-chief, and his prolongation of the war on this
account.--WAKEFIELD.
The charges were the calumnies of an infuriated faction. His military
career while he was commander-in-chief was free from reproach. He was
never known to sanction an act of wanton harshness, or to exceed the
recognised usages of war. The pretence that he prolonged the contest for
the sake of gain does not require a refutation, for his accusers could
never produce a fragment of colourable evidence in support of the
allegation. The Duke of Wellington ridiculed the notion, and said that
however much Marlborough might have loved money he must have loved his
military reputation more. The poet, who denounced him as a man "stained
with blood," and "infamous for plundered provinces," could, at ver. 100,
call Turenne "god-like," though he gave the atrocious command to pillage
and burn the Palatinate, and turned it into a smouldering desert.
"Habit," says Sismondi, "had rendered him insensible to the sufferings
of the people, and he subjected them to the most cruel inflictions."
[1541] MS.:
Let gathered nations next their chief behold,
How blessed with conquest, yet more blessed with gold:
Go then, and steep thy age in wealth and ease,
Stretched on the spoils of plundered provinces.
[1542] "Acts of fame" are not the best means of "sanctifying" wealth.
True charity is unostentatious.
[1543] Wakefield quotes Horace, Od. ii. 2, or, as Creech puts it in his
translation, silver has no brightness,
Unless a moderate use refine,
A value give, and make it shine.
[1544] Dryden, Virg. Æn. iv. 250:
But called it marriage, by that specious name
To veil the crime, and sanctify the shame.--WAKEFIELD.
[1545] Originally, "Ambition, avarice, and th' imperious" etc., for
Marlborough was never the dupe of a "greedy minion."
[1546] "Storied halls" are halls painted with stories or histories, as
in Milton, Il Penseroso, ver. 159:
And storied windows richly dight
Casting a dim religious light.
The walls and ceiling of the saloon at Blenheim are painted with figures
and trophies, and some rooms are hung with tapestry commemorating the
great sieges and battles of the Duke. The tapestry, which was
manufactured in the Netherlands, and was a present from the Dutch, is
described by Dyer in The Fleece, Book iii. ver. 499-517.
[1547] Addison's Verses on the Play-House:
A lofty fabric does the sight invade,
And stretches o'er the waves a pompous shade.--WAKEFIELD.
[1548] Pope may mean that nothing affords happiness which infringes
virtue, and this would contradict the conclusion of the second epistle,
where he dwells upon the continuous happiness we derive from follies and
vanities. Or he may mean that virtue is by itself complete happiness,
whatever else may be our circumstances, which would contradict ver. 119,
where he says that the "virtuous son is ill at ease" when he inherits a
"dire disease" from his profligate father.
[1549] The allusion here seems to be to the pole, or central point, of a
spherical body, which, during the rotatory motion of every other part,
continues immoveable and at rest.--WAKEFIELD.
The "human bliss" does not "stand still," unless we believe that the
virtuous man suffers nothing when his virtue subjects him to scorn,
persecution, and tortures.
[1550] "It" in this couplet and the next stands for virtuous "merit."
[1551] Merchant of Venice, Act iv. Sc. 1:
it is twice blessed;
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
[1552] Immortality must be the "end" which it will be "unequalled joy to
gain," and yet "no pain to lose," since the annihilated will not be
conscious of the loss. Lord Byron expressed the same idea in a letter,
Dec 8, 1821: "Indisputably, the believers in the gospel have a advantage
over all others,--for this simple reason, that, if true, they will have
their reward hereafter, and if there be no hereafter, they can be but
with the infidel in his eternal sleep, having had the assistance of an
exalted hope through life." Pope and Byron leave out of their reckoning
the sufferings to which christians are constantly exposed through their
homage to christianity.
[1553] After ver. 316 in the MS.:
Ev'n while it seems unequal to dispose,
And chequers all the good man's joys with woes,
'Tis but to teach him to support each state,
With patience this, with moderation that;
And raise his base on that one solid joy,
Which conscience gives, and nothing can destroy.--WARBURTON.
The sense in the first line is not completed. Virtue "seems unequal to
dispose" something, but we are not told what.
[1554] This is the Greek expression, πλατυς γελως, broad or wide
laughter, derived, I presume, from the greater aperture of the mouth in
loud laughter.--WAKEFIELD.
[1555] MS.:
More pleasing, then, humanity's soft tears
Than all the mirth unfeeling folly wears.
There are numerous grades of character between "unfeeling folly" and
christian excellence, and many gratifications of the earthly-minded are
assuredly more pleasant for the time than the sharp and ennobling pangs
of suffering virtue.
[1556] MS.:
Which not by starts, and from without acquired,
Is all ways exercised, and never tired.
[1557] Is it so impossible that a "wish" should "remain" when Pope has
just said that virtue is "never elated while one oppressed man" exists?
Or has virtue in tears, ver. 320, no wish for that happiness which Pope
says, ver. 1, is "our being's end and aim?" Or is the "wish" for "more
virtue" fulfilled by the act of wishing, without frequent failure, and
perpetual conflict, and prolonged self-denial?
[1558] "The good" is singular, and stands for "the good man," as is
required by the verbs "takes," "looks," "pursues," etc., up to the end
of the paragraph.
[1559] Creech's Horace, Epist. i. 1, ver. 23:
But if you ask me now what sect I own,
I swear a blind obedience unto none.--WAKEFIELD.
[1560] Bolingbroke's Letters to Pope: "The modest enquirer follows
nature, and nature's God."--WAKEFIELD.
[1561] MS.:
Let us, my S[t. John], this plain truth confess,
Good nature makes, and keeps our happiness;
And faith and morals end as they began,
All in the love of God, and love of man.
In his second epistle Pope maintains that we are born with the germ of
an unalterable ruling passion which grows with our growth, and swallows
up every other passion. Among these ruling passions he specifies spleen,
hate, fear, anger, etc., which are dispensed by fate, absorb the entire
man, and of necessity exclude love. Here, on the contrary, we are told,
ver. 327-340, that "the sole bliss heaven could on _all_ bestow," is the
virtue which "ends in love of God and love of man."
[1562] He hopes, indeed, for another life, but he does not from hence
infer the absolute necessity of it, in order to vindicate the justice
and goodness of God.--WARTON.
[1563] The "other kind" is the animal creation, which, says Pope, has
not been given any abortive instinct. Nature, which furnishes the
impulse, never fails to provide appropriate objects for its
gratification.
[1564] The meaning of this couplet comes out clearer in the prose
explanation which Pope has written on his MS.: "God implants a desire of
immortality, which at least proves he would have us think of, and expect
it, and he gives no appetite in vain to any creature. As God plainly
gave this hope, or instinct, it is plain man should entertain it. Hence
flows his greatest hope, and greatest incentive to virtue."
[1565] "His greatest virtue" is benevolence; "his greatest bliss" the
hope of a happy eternity. Nature connects the two, for the bliss depends
on the virtue.
[1566] Pope exalts the duty of "benevolence," which, ver. 371, causes
"earth to smile with boundless bounty blessed." But bounty cannot
benefit the recipients, if the poet is right in maintaining that
happiness is independent of externals.
[1567] Warton remarks that this simile, which is copied from Chaucer,
was used by Pope in two other places,--The Temple of Fame, ver. 436, and
the Dunciad, ii. ver. 407.
[1568] Waller, Divine Love, Canto v.:
A love so unconfined
With arms extended would embrace mankind.
Self-love would cease, or be dilated, when
We should behold as many selfs as men.--WAKEFIELD.
[1569] MS.:
To rise from individuals to the whole
Is the true progress of the god-like soul.
The first impression the soft passions make,
Like the small pebble in the limpid lake,
Begets a greater and a greater still,
The circle widening till the whole it fill;
Till God and man, and brute and reptile kind
All wake, all move, all agitate his mind;
Earth with his bounteous overflows is blessed;
Heav'n pleased beholds its image in his breast.
Parent or friend first touch the virtuous mind,
His country next, and next all human kind.
[1570] In the MS. thus:
And now transported o'er so vast a plain,
While the winged courser flies with all her rein,
While heav'n-ward now her mounting wing she feels,
Now scattered fools fly trembling from her heels,
Wilt thou, my St. John! keep her course in sight,
Confine her fury, and assist her flight?--WARBURTON.
The exaggerated estimate which Pope had formed of the Essay on Man is
apparent from this passage. With respect to the poetry, "the winged
courser flew with all her rein;" with respect to the argument,
"scattered fools flew trembling" from its crushing power.
[1571] "Stoops to man's low passions or ascends to the glorious ends"
for which those passions have been given.
[1572] "Did he rise with temper," asks the writer of A Letter to Mr.
Pope, 1735, "when he drove furiously out of the kingdom the Duke of
Marlborough? or did he fall with dignity when he fled from justice, and
joined the Pretender?" Lord Hervey asserts, and many circumstances
confirm his testimony, that Bolingbroke "was elate and insolent in
power, dejected and servile in disgrace."
[1573] Boileau's Art of Poetry, translated by Soame and Dryden, Cantos
i.:
Happy, who in his verse can gently steer
From grave to light, from pleasant to severe.--WAKEFIELD.
[1574] MS.:
And while the muse transported, unconfined,
Soars to the sky, or stoops among mankind,
Teach her like thee, through various fortune wise,
With dignity to sink, with temper rise;
Formed by thy converse, steer an equal flight
From grave to gay, from profit to delight
Artful with grace, and natural to please,
Intent in business, elegant in ease.
[1575] From Statius, Silv. Lib. i. Carm. iv. 120:
immensæ veluti connexa carinæ
Cymba minor, cum sævit hyems, pro parte, furentes
Parva receptat aquas, et eodem volvitur austro.--HURD.
Mr. Pope forgot while he wrote ver. 383-6, the censures he had so justly
cast, ver. 237, upon that vain desire of an useless
immortality--CROUSAZ.
[1576] An unfortunate prophecy. Posterity has more than confirmed the
contempt in which Bolingbroke's character was held by his
contemporaries.
[1577] "Pretend" is used in the old and literal sense "to stretch out
before any one." Its exact synonym in Pope's line is "proclaim."
[1578] Pope professes to believe that all his poetry up to the Essay on
Man was made up of "sounds" to the exclusion of "things," and was
addressed as little "to the heart" as to the understanding. His change
of subject, and his panegyrics on virtue, had at least not taught him
that the manly simplicity of truth was to be preferred to insincere
hyperboles.
[1579] In the MS. thus:
That just to find a God is all we can,
And all the study of mankind is man.--WARBURTON.
The MS. has another version of the couplet in the text:
And all our knowledge, all our bliss below,
To love our neighbour, and ourselves to know.
[1580] The rule of Horace and Warton for testing poetry was to divest it
of metre by changing the order of the words. The language of Bowles
would give the idea that the change was to be from one measure and set
of rhymes to another.
[1581] Voltaire, Œuvres, tom. xiv. p. 169.
[1582] Epist. iv. ver. 112.
[1583] Epist. iv. ver. 111-113.
[1584] Epist. iv. ver. 121.
[1585] Archbishop Whately, Bacon's Essays, p. 145, quotes this stanza,
and says that it is strange that Pope, and those who use similar
language, should have "failed to perceive that the pagan nations were in
reality atheists. For by the word God we understand an Eternal Being,
who made and who governs all things. And so far were the ancient pagans
from believing that 'in the beginning God made the heavens and the
earth,' that, on the contrary, the heavens, and the earth, and the sea,
and many other natural objects, were among the very gods they adored.
Accordingly, the apostle Paul expressly calls the ancient pagans,
atheists, Ephes. ii. 12, though he well knew that they worshipped
certain supposed superior beings which they called gods. But he says in
the Epistle to the Romans that 'they worshipped the creature more than,
that is, instead of the Creator.' And at Lystra, when the people were
going to do sacrifice to him and Barnabas, mistaking them for two of
their gods, he told them to 'turn from those vanities to serve the
living God, who made heaven and earth.'" The pagans were equally
ignorant of the holiness of the Supreme Being; and Pope himself,
describing the heathen divinities, Essay on Man, Epist. iii. 257, calls
them
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust.
Such a divinity was Jupiter, and to worship an abominable phantom,
conspicuous for "rage, revenge, and lust," was not to adore "Jehovah."
[1586] It ought to be "confinedst" or "didst confine," and afterwards
"gavedst" or "didst give" in the second person.--WARTON.
[1587] This may mean that the Deity was beneficent, or holy, or both,
but whatever sense Pope attached to the word, he held with Bolingbroke
that the attributes of the Divine Being were not the qualities which
passed by the same name among us, and the present stanza is a
re-assertion of the doctrine of the Essay on Man, Epist. ii. 1, that we
must not "presume to scan God," or think to know more than the bare fact
that he is "good."
[1588] First edition:
Left conscience free and will.
Here followed, if it is genuine, a suppressed stanza, which Mrs. Thrale
repeated to Dr. Johnson, and which she said a clergyman of their
acquaintance had discovered:
Can sins of moments claim the rod
Of everlasting fires?
And that offend great nature's God
Which nature's self inspires
Mrs. Thrale called the stanza "licentious," Johnson observed that it was
borrowed from the Pastor Fido of Guarini, and Boswell pointed out that a
"rod of fires" was an incongruous metaphor. "I warrant you, however,"
said Johnson, "Pope wrote this stanza, and some friend struck it out."
The folly of the lines is transparent. The "sins" with which "nature's
self inspires" man, "conscience warns him not to do," ver. 14, and Pope
assumes that God will never be "offended" if we disregard conscience,
and yield to temptation.
[1589] This stanza was evidently directed against the ascetic acts which
were rated high among virtues by the papists.
[1590] There is something elevated in the idea and expression,
Or think Thee Lord alone of man,
When thousand worlds are round;
but the conclusion is a contrast of littleness,
And deal damnation round the land.--BOWLES.
[1591] Unquestionably no man of right judgment will pronounce the holder
of any opinion to be beyond the limits of divine mercy; but he may
justly pronounce the opinion itself to be ruinous in the highest degree.
Nothing can be more false than the spurious liberality which presumes
all opinions to be equally innocent, or affects to conceive that man is
answerable only for the sincerity of his convictions. He is accountable
for his opportunities, his understanding, and his knowledge, and if he
espouses error through negligence, prejudice, or presumption, he
involves himself in the full criminality of his error.--CROLY.
[1592] I have often wondered that the same poet who wrote the Dunciad
should have written these lines. Alas for Pope, if the mercy he showed
to others was the measure of the mercy he received.--COWPER.
[1593] Lucan, ix. 578:
Estne Dei sedes, nisi terra, et pontus, et aer,
Et cœlum, et virtus?--WAKEFIELD.
[1594] Erudition and acuteness are not the only requisites of a good
commentator. That conformity of sentiment which enables him fully to
enter into the intention of his author, and that fairness of disposition
which places him above every wish of disguising or misrepresenting it,
are qualifications not less essential. In these points it is no breach
of candour to affirm, since the public voice has awarded the sentence,
that Dr. Warburton has, in various of his critical labours, shown
himself extremely defective, and perhaps in none more than in those he
has expended upon this performance, his manifest purposes in which, have
been to give it a systematic perfection that it does not possess, to
conceal as much as possible the suspicious source whence the author
derived his leading ideas, and to reduce the whole to the standard of
moral orthodoxy. So much is the sense of the poet strained and warped by
these processes of his commentator, that it is scarcely possible in many
places to enter into his real meaning, without laying aside the
commentary, and letting the text speak for itself--AIKIN.
[1595] Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. i. p. 377.
[1596] Descartes.
[1597] Soame Jenyns, who published in 1757 a Free Enquiry into the
Nature and Origin of Evil.
[1598] All three were republicans who flourished at the period of the
Great Rebellion. Harrington published his political work, Oceana, in
1656, and Neville his Plato Redivivus, or A Dialogue concerning
Government, in 1681. Burnet says of Wildman that he "had been a constant
meddler on all occasions in everything that looked like sedition, and
seemed inclined to oppose everything that was uppermost." He served in
the Parliamentary army, and proved troublesome to Cromwell, who
imprisoned him. His restless republicanism was thought dangerous at the
Restoration, and the government kept him under lock and key for some
years. He survived to take a share in the Revolution of 1688, and was as
hard to please as in his younger days. Pepys says in 1667, that he had
been "a false fellow to everybody."
[1599] In the Commentary on ver. 303.
[1600] A false pretence. Waterland expressed his disapproval of
Warburton's Divine Legation, and Jackson wrote a formal refutation.
Warburton, as sensitive as he was abusive, never forgave them, and to
revenge his wounded vanity, he thrust this forced digression into the
middle of Pope's works under the hollow plea that Pope seemed to have
had in his mind the controversy between Jackson and Waterland on the
Trinity. Jackson was an Arian clergyman, who defended the views of
Samuel Clarke.
[1601] Tindal, who was a deist, published in 1730 his well-known work,
Christianity as old as the Creation. Waterland wrote an answer called
Scripture Vindicated, and Jackson, his Remarks on a book entitled, etc.
[1602] Waterland published a sermon called, A familiar discourse upon
the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and the use and importance of it; and
Jackson, after publishing in 1734 his treatise On the Existence and
Unity of God, followed it up in 1735, with A Defence of the book
entitled, On the Existence, etc., in answer to Law's Enquiry into the
Ideas of Space, Time, etc. Warburton, in his discreditable note, has not
the candour to allude to the real ground of his rancour against Jackson
and Waterland.
[1603] Nothing was ever more unfortunate than these five examples of
sublimity, all of which, as Dr. Warton observes, prove the
contrary.--BOWLES.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES
Except as noted below, obvious punctuation inconsistencies and
typographical errors and spelling errors have been corrected.
Except as noted below, spelling and capitalization inconsistencies have
been retained.
Pope often wrote names with dashes replacing part of the name, as in
'Sw--y'. The dashes look like em-dashes in the original, but they have
been changed to long dashes; thus, 'Sw----y'.
On the title page, in the phrase "RT. HON. JOHN WILSON CROKER.", the
"T." in "RT." appears as a superscript.
On p. 60, the first footnote (footnote 195) ('This couplet is succeeded
by two...') has nothing in the text pointing to it; however the couplet
on lines 426 and 427 is marked in pen at the side. This could be the
couplet referred to in footnote 195.
On p. 126, the second footnote (footnote 318) ('Spence, p. 178.') has
nothing in the text pointing to it; however it seems likely that it
refers to the quote ending 'He has an appetite to satire.'
On p. 127, 'terrestial' (in the phrase 'Whose shapes seemed not like to
terrestial boys,') was changed to 'terrestrial'.
On the unnumbered page between p. 144 and p. 146, the line in the third
footnote (footnote 369), 'If any muse assists the poet's lays' had
'asists' in the original.
On p. 146, in the fourth footnote (footnote 375) the phrase 'I myself,
about the year 1790' was 'I myself, about the year year 1790' in the
original.
On the unnumbered page before p. 186, the line 'Launched on the bosom
of the silver Thames' had 'bosm' in the original.
On p. 231, the third footnote (footnote 576) ('Introduction to the
Literature of Europe, 5th ed. vol. i. p. 33....') has nothing in the
text pointing to it.
On p. 254, the first footnote (footnote 697) ('The combination
"heavenly-fair"...') had nothing in the text pointing to it; a pointer
has been added after the first line on the page, which starts 'Oh grace
serene!'
On p. 263, in the phrase 'With these precautions, in 1732[3] was
published...', the '[3]' does not indicate a footnote. Other footnote
indicators in the original were superscripts; this '[3]' was not.
On p. 274, the word 'beforehand' was broken across two lines; it was
arbitrarily made 'beforehand' rather than 'before-hand'.
On p. 388, the line 'Through life 'tis followed, ev'en at life's
expense' had 'expence' in the original.
On p. 513, the phrase 'He subdued the intractability of all the four
elements' had 'intractibility' in the original.