INTRODUCTION.
POPE’S POEMS.
THE UNIVERSAL PRAYER.
SATIRES.
EPISTLE TO DR. ARBUTHNOT
SATIRES 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.
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.