An Essay on Man
An Essay on ManINTRODUCTION.POPE’S POEMS.THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER.MORAL ESSAYS,SATIRES.EPISTLE TO DR. ARBUTHNOTSATIRES AND EPISTLES OF HORACE IMITATED.THE FIRST EPISTLE OF THE FIRST BOOK OF HORACE.THE SATIRES OF DR. JOHN DONNE, DEAN OF ST. PAUL’S.IN TWO DIALOGUES.Copyright
An Essay on Man
Alexander Pope
INTRODUCTION.
Pope’s life as a writer falls into three periods, answering
fairly enough to the three reigns in which he worked. Under
Queen Anne he was an original poet, but made little money by his
verses; under George I. he was chiefly a translator, and made much
money by satisfying the French-classical taste with versions of the
“Iliad” and “Odyssey.” Under George I. he also edited
Shakespeare, but with little profit to himself; for Shakespeare was
but a Philistine in the eyes of the French-classical critics.
But as the eighteenth century grew slowly to its work, signs of a
deepening interest in the real issues of life distracted men’s
attention from the culture of the snuff-box and the fan. As
Pope’s genius ripened, the best part of the world in which he
worked was pressing forward, as a mariner who will no longer hug
the coast but crowds all sail to cross the storms of a wide unknown
sea. Pope’s poetry thus deepened with the course of time, and
the third period of his life, which fell within the reign of George
II., was that in which he produced the “Essay on Man,” the “Moral
Essays,” and the “Satires.” These deal wholly with aspects of
human life and the great questions they raise, according throughout
with the doctrine of the poet, and of the reasoning world about him
in his latter day, that “the proper study of mankind is
Man.”Wrongs in high places, and the private infamy of many who
enforced the doctrines of the Church, had produced in earnest men a
vigorous antagonism. Tyranny and unreason of low-minded
advocates had brought religion itself into question; and profligacy
of courtiers, each worshipping the golden calf seen in his mirror,
had spread another form of scepticism. The intellectual
scepticism, based upon an honest search for truth, could end only
in making truth the surer by its questionings. The other form
of scepticism, which might be traced in England from the low-minded
frivolities of the court of Charles the Second, was widely spread
among the weak, whose minds flinched from all earnest
thought. They swelled the number of the army of bold
questioners upon the ways of God to Man, but they were an idle rout
of camp-followers, not combatants; they simply ate, and drank, and
died.In 1697, Pierre Bayle published at Rotterdam, his “Historical
and Critical Dictionary,” in which the lives of men were associated
with a comment that suggested, from the ills of life, the absence
of divine care in the shaping of the world. Doubt was born of
the corruption of society; Nature and Man were said to be against
faith in the rule of a God, wise, just, and merciful. In
1710, after Bayle’s death, Leibnitz, a German philosopher then
resident in Paris, wrote in French a book, with a title formed from
Greek words meaning Justice of God, Theodicee, in which he met
Bayle’s argument by reasoning that what we cannot understand
confuses us, because we see only the parts of a great whole.
Bayle, he said, is now in Heaven, and from his place by the throne
of God, he sees the harmony of the great Universe, and doubts no
more. We see only a little part in which are many details
that have purposes beyond our ken. The argument of Leibnitz’s
Theodicee was widely used; and although Pope said that he had never
read the Theodicee, his “Essay on Man” has a like argument.
When any book has a wide influence upon opinion, its general ideas
pass into the minds of many people who have never read it.
Many now talk about evolution and natural selection, who have never
read a line of Darwin.In the reign of George the Second, questionings did spread
that went to the roots of all religious faith, and many earnest
minds were busying themselves with problems of the state of Man,
and of the evidence of God in the life of man, and in the course of
Nature. Out of this came, nearly at the same time, two works
wholly different in method and in tone—so different, that at first
sight it may seem absurd to speak of them together. They were
Pope’s “Essay on Man,” and Butler’s “Analogy of Religion, Natural
and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of
Nature.”Butler’s “Analogy” was published in 1736; of the “Essay on
Man,” the first two Epistles appeared in 1732, the Third Epistle in
1733, the Fourth in 1734, and the closing Universal Hymn in
1738. It may seem even more absurd to name Pope’s “Essay on
Man” in the same breath with Milton’s “Paradise Lost;” but to the
best of his knowledge and power, in his smaller way, according to
his nature and the questions of his time, Pope was, like Milton,
endeavouring “to justify the ways of God to Man.” He even
borrowed Milton’s line for his own poem, only weakening the verb,
and said that he sought to “vindicate the ways of God to
Man.” In Milton’s day the questioning all centred in the
doctrine of the “Fall of Man,” and questions of God’s Justice were
associated with debate on fate, fore-knowledge, and free
will. In Pope’s day the question was not theological, but
went to the root of all faith in existence of a God, by declaring
that the state of Man and of the world about him met such faith
with an absolute denial. Pope’s argument, good or bad, had
nothing to do with questions of theology. Like Butler’s, it
sought for grounds of faith in the conditions on which doubt was
rested. Milton sought to set forth the story of the Fall in
such way as to show that God was love. Pope dealt with the
question of God in Nature, and the world of Man.Pope’s argument was attacked with violence my M. de Crousaz,
Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics in the University of
Lausanne, and defended by Warburton, then chaplain to the Prince of
Wales, in six letters published in 1739, and a seventh in 1740, for
which Pope (who died in 1744) was deeply grateful. His
offence in the eyes of de Crousaz was that he had left out of
account all doctrines of orthodox theology. But if he had
been orthodox of the orthodox, his argument obviously could have
been directed only to the form of doubt it sought to
overcome. And when his closing hymn was condemned as the
freethinker’s hymn, its censurers surely forgot that their
arguments against it would equally apply to the Lord’s Prayer, of
which it is, in some degree, a paraphrase.The first design of the Essay on Man arranged it into four
books, each consisting of a distinct group of Epistles. The
First Book, in four Epistles, was to treat of man in the abstract,
and of his relation to the Universe. That is the whole work
as we have it now. The Second Book was to treat of Man
Intellectual; the Third Book, of Man Social, including ties to
Church and State; the Fourth Book, of Man Moral, was to illustrate
abstract truth by sketches of character. This part of the
design is represented by the Moral Essays, of which four were
written, to which was added, as a fifth, the Epistle to Addison
which had been written much earlier, in 1715, and first published
in 1720. The four Moral essays are two pairs. One pair
is upon the Characters of Men and on the Characters of Women, which
would have formed the opening of the subject of the Fourth Book of
the Essay: the other pair shows character expressed through a right
or a wrong use of Riches: in fact, Money and Morals. The four
Epistles were published separately. The fourth (to the Earl
of Burlington) was first published in 1731, its title then being
“Of Taste;” the third (to Lord Bathurst) followed in 1732, the year
of the publication of the first two Epistles on the “Essay on
Man.” In 1733, the year of publication of the Third Epistle
of the “Essay on Man,” Pope published his Moral Essay of the
“Characters of Men.” In 1734 followed the Fourth Epistle of
the “Essay on Man;” and in 1735 the “Characters of Women,”
addressed to Martha Blount, the woman whom Pope loved, though he
was withheld by a frail body from marriage. Thus the two
works were, in fact, produced together, parts of one
design.Pope’s Satires, which still deal with characters of men,
followed immediately, some appearing in a folio in January,
1735. That part of the epistle to Arbuthnot forming the
Prologue, which gives a character of Addison, as Atticus, had been
sketched more than twelve years before, and earlier sketches of
some smaller critics were introduced; but the beginning and the
end, the parts in which Pope spoke of himself and of his father and
mother, and his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, were written in 1733 and
1734. Then follows an imitation of the first Epistle of the
Second Book of the Satires of Horace, concerning which Pope told a
friend, “When I had a fever one winter in town that confined me to
my room for five or six days, Lord Bolingbroke, who came to see me,
happened to take up a Horace that lay on the table, and, turning it
over, dropped on the first satire in the Second Book, which begins,
‘Sunt, quibus in satira.’ He observed how well that would
suit my case if I were to imitate it in English. After he was
gone, I read it over, translated it in a morning or two, and sent
it to press in a week or a fortnight after” (February, 1733).
“And this was the occasion of my imitating some others of the
Satires and Epistles.” The two dialogues finally used as the
Epilogue to the Satires were first published in the year 1738, with
the name of the year, “Seventeen Hundred and Thirty-eight.”
Samuel Johnson’s “London,” his first bid for recognition, appeared
in the same week, and excited in Pope not admiration only, but some
active endeavour to be useful to its author.The reader of Pope, as of every author, is advised to begin
by letting him say what he has to say, in his own manner to an open
mind that seeks only to receive the impressions which the writer
wishes to convey. First let the mind and spirit of the writer
come into free, full contact with the mind and spirit of the
reader, whose attitude at the first reading should be simply
receptive. Such reading is the condition precedent to all
true judgment of a writer’s work. All criticism that is not
so grounded spreads as fog over a poet’s page. Read, reader,
for yourself, without once pausing to remember what you have been
told to think.H.M.
POPE’S POEMS.
AN ESSAY ON MAN.TO H. ST. JOHN LORD
BOLINGBROKE.THE DESIGN.Having proposed to write some pieces of Human Life and
Manners, such as (to use my Lord Bacon’s expression) come home to
Men’s Business and Bosoms, I thought it more satisfactory to begin
with considering Man in the abstract, his Nature and his State;
since, to prove any moral duty, to enforce any moral precept, or to
examine the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever,
it is necessary first to know what condition and relation it is
placed in, and what is the proper end and purpose of its
being.The science of Human Nature is, like all other sciences,
reduced to a few clear points: there are not many certain truths in
this world. It is therefore in the anatomy of the Mind as in
that of the Body; more good will accrue to mankind by attending to
the large, open, and perceptible parts, than by studying too much
such finer nerves and vessels, the conformations and uses of which
will for ever escape our observation. The disputes are all
upon these last, and, I will venture to say, they have less
sharpened the wits than the hearts of men against each other, and
have diminished the practice more than advanced the theory of
Morality. If I could flatter myself that this Essay has any
merit, it is in steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines
seemingly opposite, in passing over terms utterly unintelligible,
and in forming a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet
not imperfect system of Ethics.This I might have done in prose, but I chose verse, and even
rhyme, for two reasons. The one will appear obvious; that
principles, maxims, or precepts so written, both strike the reader
more strongly at first, and are more easily retained by him
afterwards: the other may seem odd, but is true, I found I could
express them more shortly this way than in prose itself; and
nothing is more certain, than that much of the force as well as
grace of arguments or instructions depends on their
conciseness. I was unable to treat this part of my subject
more in detail, without becoming dry and tedious; or more
poetically, without sacrificing perspicuity to ornament, without
wandering from the precision, or breaking the chain of reasoning:
if any man can unite all these without diminution of any of them I
freely confess he will compass a thing above my
capacity.What is now published is only to be considered as a general
Map of Man, marking out no more than the greater parts, their
extent, their limits, and their connection, and leaving the
particular to be more fully delineated in the charts which are to
follow. Consequently, these Epistles in their progress (if I
have health and leisure to make any progress) will be less dry, and
more susceptible of poetical ornament. I am here only opening
the fountains, and clearing the passage. To deduce the
rivers, to follow them in their course, and to observe their
effects, may be a task more agreeable. P.ARGUMENT OF EPISTLE I.Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to the
Universe.Of Man in the abstract. I. That we can judge only with
regard to our own system, being ignorant of the relations of
systems and things, v.17, etc. II. That Man is not to be
deemed imperfect, but a being suited to his place and rank in the
Creation, agreeable to the general Order of Things, and conformable
to Ends and Relations to him unknown, v.35, etc. III. That it
is partly upon his ignorance of future events, and partly upon the
hope of future state, that all his happiness in the present
depends, v.77, etc. IV. The pride of aiming at more
knowledge, and pretending to more Perfection, the cause of Man’s
error and misery. The impiety of putting himself in the place
of God, and judging of the fitness or unfitness, perfection or
imperfection, justice or injustice of His dispensations, v.109,
etc. V. The absurdity of conceiting himself the final cause
of the Creation, or expecting that perfection in the moral world,
which is not in the natural, v.131, etc. VI. The
unreasonableness of his complaints against Providence, while on the
one hand he demands the Perfections of the Angels, and on the other
the bodily qualifications of the Brutes; though to possess any of
the sensitive faculties in a higher degree would render him
miserable, v.173, etc. VII. That throughout the whole visible
world, an universal order and gradation in the sensual and mental
faculties is observed, which cause is a subordination of creature
to creature, and of all creatures to Man. The gradations of
sense, instinct, thought, reflection, reason; that Reason alone
countervails all the other faculties, v.207. VIII. How much
further this order and subordination of living creatures may
extend, above and below us; were any part of which broken, not that
part only, but the whole connected creation, must be destroyed,
v.233. IX. The extravagance, madness, and pride of such
a desire, v.250. X. The consequence of all, the absolute
submission due to Providence, both as to our present and future
state, v.281, etc., to the end.EPISTLE I.Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner thingsTo low ambition, and the pride of kings.Let us (since life can little more supplyThan 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;A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous
shoot;Or garden tempting with forbidden fruit.Together let us beat this ample field,Try what the open, what the covert yield;The latent tracts, the giddy heights, exploreOf all who blindly creep, or sightless soar;Eye Nature’s walks, shoot Folly as it flies,And catch the manners living as they rise;Laugh where we must, be candid where we can;But vindicate the ways of God to man.I. Say first, of God above, or man belowWhat can we reason, but from what we know?Of man, what see we but his station here,From which to reason, or to which refer?Through worlds unnumbered though the God be
known,’Tis ours to trace Him only in our own.He, who through vast immensity can pierce,See worlds on worlds compose one universe,Observe how system into system runs,What other planets circle other suns,What varied being peoples every star,May tell why Heaven has made us as we are.But of this frame, the bearings, and the ties,The strong connections, nice dependencies,Gradations just, has thy pervading soulLooked through? or can a part contain the whole? Is the great chain, that draws all to
agree,And drawn supports, upheld by God, or thee?II. Presumptuous man! the reason wouldst thou
find,Why formed so weak, so little, and so blind?First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess,Why formed no weaker, blinder, and no less;Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are madeTaller or stronger than the weeds they shade?Or ask of yonder argent fields above,Why Jove’s satellites are less than Jove? Of systems possible, if ’tis
confestThat wisdom infinite must form the best,Where all must full or not coherent be,And all that rises, rise in due degree;Then in the scale of reasoning life, ’tis plain,There must be, somewhere, such a rank as man:And all the question (wrangle e’er so long)Is only this, if God has placed him wrong? Respecting man, whatever wrong we
call,May, must be right, as relative to all.In human works, though laboured on with pain,A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain;In God’s one single can its end produce;Yet serves to second too some other use.So man, who here seems principal alone,Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal;’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole. When the proud steed shall know why man
restrainsHis fiery course, or drives him o’er the plains:When the dull ox, why now he breaks the clod,Is now a victim, and now Egypt’s god:Then shall man’s pride and dulness comprehendHis actions’, passions’, being’s, use and end;Why doing, suffering, checked, impelled; and whyThis hour a slave, the next a deity. Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in
fault;Say rather man’s as perfect as he ought:His knowledge measured to his state and place;His time a moment, and a point his space.If to be perfect in a certain sphere,What matter, soon or late, or here or there?The blest to-day is as completely so,As who began a thousand years ago.III. 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 could 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.Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,That each may fill the circle, marked 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. Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions
soar;Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.Hope springs eternal in the human breast:Man never is, but always to be blest:The soul, uneasy and confined from home,Rests and expatiates in a life to come. Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored
mindSees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;His soul, proud science never taught to strayFar as the solar walk, or milky way;Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,Behind the cloud-topped hill, an 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.IV. Go, wiser thou! and, in thy scale of
sense,Weigh thy opinion against providence;Call imperfection what thou fanciest such,Say, here He gives too little, there too much;Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust,Yet cry, if man’s unhappy, God’s unjust;If man alone engross not Heaven’s high care,Alone made perfect here, immortal there:Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod,Re-judge His justice, be the God of God.In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies;All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,Men would be angels, angels would be gods.Aspiring to be gods, if angels fell,Aspiring to be angels, men rebel:And who but wishes to invert the lawsOf order, sins against the Eternal Cause.V. Ask for what end the heavenly bodies
shine,Earth for whose use? Pride answers, “’Tis for
mine:For me kind Nature wakes her genial power,Suckles each herb, and spreads out every flower;Annual for me, the grape, the rose renewThe juice nectareous, and the balmy dew;For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings;For me, health gushes from a thousand springs;Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;My footstool earth, my canopy the skies.” But errs not Nature from this gracious
end,From burning suns when livid deaths descend,When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweepTowns to one grave, whole nations to the deep?“No, (’tis replied) the first Almighty CauseActs not by partial, but by general laws;The exceptions few; some change since all began;And what created perfect?”—Why then man?If the great end be human happiness,Then Nature deviates; and can man do less?As much that end a constant course requiresOf showers and sunshine, as of man’s desires;As much eternal springs and cloudless skies,As men for ever temperate, calm, and wise.If plagues or earthquakes break not Heaven’s
design,Why then a Borgia, or a Catiline?Who knows but He, whose hand the lightning
forms,Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms;Pours fierce ambition in a Cæsar’s mind,Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind?From pride, from pride, our very reasoning
springs;Account for moral, as for natural things:Why charge we heaven in those, in these acquit?In both, to reason right is to submit. Better for us, perhaps, it might
appear,Were there all harmony, all virtue here;That never air or ocean felt the wind;That never passion discomposed the mind.But all subsists by elemental strife;And passions are the elements of life.The general order, since the whole began,Is kept in nature, and is kept in man.VI. What would this man? Now upward will he
soar,And little less than angel, would be more;Now looking downwards, just as grieved appearsTo want the strength of bulls, the fur of bearsMade for his use all creatures if he call,Say what their use, had he the powers of all?Nature to these, without profusion, kind,The proper organs, proper powers assigned;Each seeming want compensated of course,Here with degrees of swiftness, there of force;All in exact proportion to the state;Nothing to add, and nothing to abate.Each beast, each insect, happy in its own:Is Heaven unkind to man, and man alone?Shall he alone, whom rational we call,Be pleased with nothing, if not blessed with
all? The bliss of man (could pride that blessing
find)Is not to act or think beyond mankind;No powers of body or of soul to share,But what his nature and his state can bear.Why has not man a microscopic eye?For this plain reason, man is not a fly.Say what the use, were finer optics given,To inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven?Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o’er,To smart and agonize at every pore?Or quick effluvia darting through the brain,Die of a rose in aromatic pain?If Nature thundered in his opening ears,And stunned him with the music of the spheres,How would he wish that Heaven had left him stillThe whispering zephyr, and the purling rill?Who finds not Providence all good and wise,Alike in what it gives, and what denies?VII. Far as Creation’s ample range
extends,The scale of sensual, mental powers ascends:Mark how it mounts, to man’s imperial race,From the green myriads in the peopled grass:What modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam:Of smell, the headlong lioness between,And hound sagacious on the tainted green:Of hearing, from the life that fills the flood,To that which warbles through the vernal wood:The spider’s touch, how exquisitely fine!Feels at each thread, and lives along the line:In the nice bee, what sense so subtly trueFrom poisonous herbs extracts the healing dew?How instinct varies in the grovelling swine,Compared, half-reasoning elephant, with thine!’Twixt that, and reason, what a nice barrier,For ever separate, yet for ever near!Remembrance and reflection how allayed;What thin partitions sense from thought divide:And middle natures, how they long to join,Yet never passed the insuperable line!Without this just gradation, could they beSubjected, these to those, or all to thee?The powers of all subdued by thee alone,Is not thy reason all these powers in one?VIII. See, through this air, this ocean, and this
earth,All matter quick, and bursting into birth.Above, how high, progressive life may go!Around, how wide! how deep extend below?Vast chain of being! which from God began,Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,From thee to nothing. On superior powersWere we to press, inferior might on ours:Or in the full creation leave a void,Where, one step broken, the great scale’s
destroyed:From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike. And, if each system in gradation
rollAlike essential to the amazing whole,The least confusion but in one, not allThat system only, but the whole must fall.Let earth unbalanced from her orbit fly,Planets and suns run lawless through the sky;Let ruling angels from their spheres be hurled,Being on being wrecked, and world on world;Heaven’s whole foundations to their centre nod,And nature tremble to the throne of God.All this dread order break—for whom? for thee?Vile worm!—Oh, madness! pride! impiety!IX. What if the foot, ordained the dust to
tread,Or hand, to toil, aspired to be the head?What if the head, the eye, or ear repinedTo serve mere engines to the ruling mind?Just as absurd for any part to claimTo be another, in this general frame:Just as absurd, to mourn the tasks or pains,The great directing Mind of All ordains. All are but parts of one stupendous
whole,Whose body Nature is, and God the soul;