In the fourth Epistle his object is to prove that Virtue alone is happiness below; and he says that the virtuous man Learns from the union of the rising whole while, on the contrary, when looking for an explanation of the expansion of society, he ascribes everything to the operation of self-love and the ruling passion, and seems to adapt the hypothesis of Mandeville, that the diversity of passions in men is the result of difference in organisation Hence different passions more or less inflame, But if the Essay be regarded, as indeed by the critic it ought to be regarded, primarily in its poetical aspect, it must undoubtedly be ranked among the classical didactic poems of the world. The aim of the poet, as of the orator, is to persuade, not to convince; and Bolingbroke indicated with lucidity to Pope the nature of the task before him : Should the poet (he says in one of his letters to him) make syllogisms in verse, or pursue a long process of reasoning in the didactic style, he would be sure to tire his reader on the whole like Lucretius, though he reasoned better than the Roman, and put into some parts of his work the same poetical fire. He must contract, he may shadow, he has a right to omit whatever will not be cast in the poetic mould, and when he cannot instruct he may hope to please. In short, it seems to me that the business of the philosopher is to dilate, to press, to prove, to convince, and that of the poet to hint, to touch his subject with short and spirited strokes, to warm the affections, and to speak to the heart.1 1 Bolingbroke's Works (1841), vol. iii. p. 44. Pope was no doubt at the outset inclined to think of himself mainly as a philosopher, and had formed in his mind a gigantic framework for an "ethic work on the Nature of Man." But he soon perceived the wisdom of Bolingbroke's advice, and with excellent judgment contracted his scheme in such a way as to suit the taste of the large and mixed audience that he hoped to attract. The Essay on Man is divided into four Epistles; (1) Of the Nature and State of Man with respect to the Universe; (2) Of the Nature and State of Man with respect to himself as an Individual; (3) Of the Nature and State of Man with respect to Society; (4) Of the Nature and State of Man with respect to Happiness. Under each head instinct prompted the poet to seize on the points which would be most likely to strike the imagination, when put forward in an argumentative form, and each point being fortified by at least the appearance of reason, and illustrated by a blaze of wit and imagery, the mind of the reader, like that of an audience listening to a great orator, is carried forward from one stage to another, without being allowed time for analytical reflection. Though, on the philosophic side, a person mainly occupied with the pursuit of truth can never be satisfied with the reasoning of the Essay, he is forced by it to think, and the æsthetic pleasure it produces, through the skilful arrangement of thoughts and images round a central theme, must always be felt by every genuine lover of the art of poetry. With regard to the form of the poem Pope justifies it in the prefatory notice to the Essay2: As the epistolary way of writing hath prevailed much of late, we have ventured to publish this piece, composed some time since, and whose author chose this manner, notwithstanding his subject was high and of dignity, because of its being mixed with argument which of its nature approacheth to prose. He thus inevitably challenged comparison with the work of Dryden, who had declared in his Religio Laici :-- 1 Spence, Anecdotes, pp. 238, 36. 103. 2 This appeared before the First Epistle, when separately published in 1733. And this unpolished rugged form I chose, As fittest for discourse, and nearest prose. In native vigour of thought, as well as in lucidity and purity of expression, Dryden, of the two poets, is greatly the superior. He was a practised dialectician, and the mastery of the familiar style, shown in his treatment of the couplet, both in his Religio Laici and his Hind and Panther, is admirable. On the other hand, it is to be remembered that his aim in each of these poems was far less elevated than that of Pope in the Essay on Man. Dryden's argument was concentrated on a single issue, which afforded little opening for illustration or imagery. The poet, in an easy conversational vein, contracted or expanded, as he chose, the few points which it was his object to labour. But in the Essay on Man the thought is so pregnant, so condensed, that almost every word is of importance, and Pope constantly encounters the difficulty which Horace notices as inherent in the philosophical style of verse: "brevis esse laboro; obscurus fio." The gravest defect in the diction of the Essay is incorrectness of grammar, caused by repeated ellipses. The following are examples of a fault, the more vexatious because it often occurs in the midst of passages which otherwise show an almost miraculous skill of expression : Of man what see we but his station here, Then say not man's imperfect, heaven in fault ; And oft so mix the difference is too nice, Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole; The good or bad the gifts of fortune gain, But these less taste them as they worse obtain. 1 Pope having omitted "the" before "greatest," Warburton pretended that he had meant that the greatness of God was most manifest in the least of His creatures. But grant him riches, your demand is o'er? "No-shall the good want health, the good want power?" Add health, and power, and every earthly thing: 'Why bounded power? why private? why no King?" Pope fell so much into the habit of contenting himself with elliptical forms of expression, that he sometimes adopted an imperfect construction easily capable of improvement, as in the lines: In human works, though laboured on with pain, Yet serves to second to some other use; where he might have written with perfect correctness "one singly." The second great blot on the diction of the Essay is the frequency of inversion which, if sometimes employed for the purpose of emphasis, seems to be more often the result of the difficulty of reasoning in rhyme. lines like And quitting sense call imitating God. Pleasures are ever in our hands or eyes, Nor virtue male or female can we name, We have But what will grow on pride, or grow on shame. When, however, all deductions are made, much remains. To rest as Byron did-Pope's chief claim to poetical greatness upon the Essay on Man because “the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth,"-is a fatal mistake in criticism. Many persons in the eighteenth century thought, with Marmontel, that "the end of the didactic poem is to instruct";1 whereas the true end of all poetry is to please. The rank of a poem depends on the kind of pleasure it produces, and no instructed judge would 1 See Pope's Works, vol. ii. p. 335. maintain, on reflection, that the imaginative pleasure produced by ethical compositions like Horace's Satires and Epistles can compare in quality with the pleasure arising out of simple narratives of action, such as Homer's Iliad. Hence the test of excellence applied by De Quincey is fallacious : If the question (he says) were asked, What ought to have. been the best among Pope's poems? most people would answer, the Essay on Man. Why should they answer so? They could not tell a priori in what way the subject ought to be organically treated, or what kind of materials the poet should use for his architecture. He might conceive of his theme from the Christian's, the Deist's, or the Atheist's standing-ground : the merit of his performance depended entirely on the effect he was able to create in the imagination. And upon this point De Quincey decides dogmatically : If the question were asked, What is the worst? all people of judgment would say, the Essay on Man. While yet in its rudiments, this poem claimed the first place by the promise of its subject; when finished, by the utter failure of its execution, it fell into the last.1 This is sufficiently arrogant, for it not only implicitly sets down Voltaire, Dugald Stewart, Bowles, and Joseph Warton-all of them great admirers of the Essayas men of no judgment, but takes no account of the enduring popularity of popularity of the poem. As to Pope's execution of his design, I have shown that he acted on the excellent advice of Bolingbroke. His back-bone of thought was Bolingbroke's scheme of Deism, just as Epicurus' philosophy formed the main subject of the De Rerum Natura. But from his master's laboured system Pope selected only those leading points which gave him the fullest opportunities for the exposition of the illustrations and epigrams in which he himself excelled. The diamond-like brilliance of the successive passages in 1 Pope's Works, vol. ii. p. 333. |