“The dreaded East is all the wind that blows,”
was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem more truly deserves the
name of a creation than anything Pope ever wrote. The action is confined
to a world of his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own
contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the limitations of the
subject. It ranks by itself as one of the purest works of human fancy;
whether that fancy be strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we
compare it with the “Midsummer-night’s Dream,” an uncomfortable doubt is
suggested. The perfection of form in the “Rape of the Lock” is to me
conclusive evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found fuller
and freer expression than in any other of his poems. The others are
aggregates of brilliant passages rather than harmonious wholes.
It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of human nature, a
more profound satire than Pope himself ever wrote, that his fame should
chiefly rest upon the “Essay on Man.” It has been praised and admired by
men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no belief at all. Bishops
and free-thinkers have met here on a common ground of sympathetic
approval. And, indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll
medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two things beyond a
question,--that Pope was not a great thinker; and that wherever he found
a thought, no matter what, he could express it so tersely, so clearly,
and with such smoothness of versification as to give it an everlasting
currency. Hobbes’s unwieldy Leviathan, left stranded there on the shore
of the last age, and nauseous with the stench of its selfishness,--from
this Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the brilliant
lamps of his philosophy,--lamps like those in the tombs of alchemists,
that go out the moment the healthy air is let in upon them. The only
positive doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set to
music, and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down from mysticism to
commonplace. Nothing can be more absurd than many of the dogmas taught
in this “Essay on Man.” For example, Pope affirms explicitly that
instinct is something better than reason:--
“See him from Nature rising slow to art,
To copy instinct then was reason’s part;
Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake;--
Go, from the creatures thy instructions take;
Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield;
Learn from the birds the physic of the field;
The arts of building from the bee receive;
Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave;
Learn of the little nautilus to sail,
Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale.”
I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general term “nature” is
substituted for God, but how unutterably void of reasonableness is the
theory that Nature would have left her highest product, man, destitute
of that instinct with which she had endowed her other creatures! As if
reason were not the most sublimated form of instinct. The accuracy on
which Pope prided himself, and for which he is commended, was not
accuracy of thought so much as of expression. And he cannot always even
claim this merit, but only that of correct rhyme, as in one of the
passages I have already quoted from the “Rape of the Lock” he talks of
_casting_ shrieks to heaven,--a performance of some difficulty, except
when _cast_ is needed to rhyme with _last_.
But the supposition is that in the “Essay on Man” Pope did not himself
know what he was writing. He was only the condenser and epigrammatizer
of Bolingbroke,--a very fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or, if he
_did_ know, we can account for the contradictions by supposing that he
threw in some of the commonplace moralities to conceal his real drift.
Johnson asserts that Bolingbroke in private laughed at Pope’s having
been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not hold. But this is
hardly probable when we consider the relations between them. It is
giving Pope altogether too little credit for intelligence to suppose
that he did not understand the principles of his intimate friend. The
caution with which he at first concealed the authorship would argue that
he had doubts as to the reception of the poem. When it was attacked on
the score of infidelity, he gladly accepted Warburton’s championship,
and assumed whatever pious interpretation he contrived to thrust upon
it. The beginning of the poem is familiar to everybody:--
“Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings;
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man,
A mighty maze,--but not without a plan”;
To expatiate _o’er_ a mighty maze is rather loose writing but the last
verse, as it stood in the original editions, was,
“A mighty maze of walks without a plan”;
and perhaps this came nearer Pope’s real opinion than the verse he
substituted for it. Warburton is careful not to mention _this_ variation
in his notes. The poem is everywhere as remarkable for its confusion of
logic as it often is for ease of verse and grace of expression. An
instance of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted:--
“Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate;
All but the page prescribed, their present state;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know,
Or who would suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
O, blindness to the future kindly given
That each may fill the circle meant by heaven!
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world!”
Now, if “heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,” why should
not the lamb “skip and play,” if he had the reason of man? Why, because
he would then be able to read the book of fate. But if man himself
cannot, why, then, could the lamb with the reason of man? For, if the
lamb had the reason of man, the book of fate would still be hidden, so
far as himself was concerned. If the inferences we can draw from
appearances are equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the knowing enough
to take an umbrella in cloudy weather might be called so. There is a
manifest confusion between what we know about ourselves and about other
people; the whole point of the passage being that we are always
mercifully blinded to _our own_ future, however much reason we may
possess. There is also inaccuracy as well as inelegance in saying,
“Heaven,
_Who_ sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish or a sparrow fall.”
To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconciling his author with
Scripture, appends a note referring to Matthew x. 29: “Are not two
sparrows sold for one farthing? and one of them shall not fall to the
ground without your Father.” It would not have been safe to have
referred to the thirty-first verse: “Fear ye not, therefore, _ye are of
more value_ than many sparrows.”
To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages in the whole poem is
that familiar one:--
“Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind,
His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way:
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given
Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To _be_ contents his natural desire,
He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire,
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.”