Swift, in verses from which I have already quoted, describes his method of composition, which is characteristic of Pope’s habits of work.
Now backs of letters, though design’d For those who more will need ‘em, Are fill’d with hints and interlined, Himself can scarcely read ‘em.
Each atom by some other struck All turns and motions tries; Till in a lump together stuck Behold a poem rise!
It was strange enough that any poem should arise by such means; but it would have been miraculous if a poem so constructed had been at once a demonstration and an exposition of a harmonious philosophical system. The confession which he made to Warburton will be a sufficient indication of his qualifications as a student. He says (in 1739) that he never in his life read a line of Leibnitz, nor knew, till he found it in a confutation of his Essay, that there was such a term as pre-established harmony. That is almost as if a modern reconciler of faith and science were to say that he had never read a line of Mr. Darwin, or heard of such a phrase as the struggle for existence. It was to pronounce himself absolutely disqualified to speak as a philosopher.
How, then, could Pope obtain even an appearance of success? The problem should puzzle no one at the present day. Every smart essayist knows how to settle the most abstruse metaphysical puzzles after studies limited to the pages of a monthly magazine; and Pope was much in the state of mind of such extemporizing philosophers. He had dipped into the books which everybody read; Locke’s Essay, and Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, and Wollaston’s Religion of Nature, and Clarke on the Attributes, and Archbishop King on the Origin of Evil, had probably amused his spare moments. They were all, we may suppose, in Bolingbroke’s library; and if that passing shower commemorated in Pope’s letter drove them back to the house, Bolingbroke might discourse from the page which happened to be open, and Pope would try to versify it on the back of an envelope. Nor must we forget, like some of his commentators, that after all Pope was an exceedingly clever man. His rapidly perceptive mind was fully qualified to imbibe the crude versions of philosophic theories which float upon the surface of ordinary talk, and are not always so inferior to their prototypes in philosophic qualities, as philosophers would have us believe. He could by snatches seize with admirable quickness the general spirit of a doctrine, though unable to sustain himself at a high intellectual level for any length of time. He was ready with abundance of poetical illustrations, not, perhaps, very closely adapted to the logic, but capable of being elaborated into effective passages; and, finally, Pope had always a certain number of more or less appropriate commonplaces or renderings into verse of some passages which had struck him in Pascal, or Rochefoucauld, or Bacon, all of them favourite authors, and which could be wrought into the structure at a slight cost of coherence. By such means he could put together a poem, which was certainly not an organic whole, but which might contain many striking sayings and passages of great rhetorical effect.
The logical framework was, we may guess, supplied mainly by Bolingbroke. Bathurst told Warton that Bolingbroke had given Pope the essay in prose, and that Pope had only turned it into verse; and Mallet — a friend of both — is said to have seen the very manuscript from which Pope worked. Johnson, on hearing this from Boswell, remarked that it must be an overstatement. Pope might have had from Bolingbroke the “philosophical stamina” of the essay, but he must, at least, have contributed the “poetical imagery,” and have had more independent power than the story implied. It is, indeed, impossible accurately to fix the relations of the teacher and his disciple. Pope acknowledged in the strongest possible terms his dependence upon Bolingbroke, and Bolingbroke claims with equal distinctness the position of instigator and inspirer. His more elaborate philosophical works are in the form of letters to Pope, and profess to be a redaction of the conversations which they had had together. These were not written till after the Essay on Man; but a series of fragments appear to represent what he actually set down for Pope’s guidance. They are professedly addressed to Pope. “I write,” he says (fragment 65), “to you and for you, and you would think yourself little obliged to me if I took the pains of explaining in prose what you would not think it necessary to explain in verse,” — that is, the free-will puzzle. The manuscripts seen by Mallet may probably have been a commonplace book in which Bolingbroke had set down some of these fragments, by way of instructing Pope, and preparing for his own more systematic work. No reader of the fragments can, I think, doubt as to the immediate source of Pope’s inspiration. Most of the ideas expressed were the common property of many contemporary writers, but Pope accepts the particular modification presented by Bolingbroke. Pope’s manipulation of these materials causes much of the Essay on Man to resemble (as Mr. Pattison puts it) an exquisite mosaic work. A detailed examination of his mode of transmutation would be a curious study in the technical secrets of literary execution. A specimen or two will sufficiently indicate the general character of Pope’s method of constructing his essay.
The forty-third fragment of Bolingbroke is virtually a prose version of much of Pope’s poetry. A few phrases will exhibit the relation: —
Through worlds unnumber’d 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 what we are. But of this frame the bearings and the ties, The strong connexions, nice dependencies, Gradations just, has thy pervading soul Looked through, or can a part contain the whole?
“The universe,” I quote only a few phrases from Bolingbroke, “is an immense aggregate of systems. Every one of these, if we may judge by our own, contains several, and every one of these again, if we may judge by our own, is made up of a multitude of different modes of being, animated and inanimated, thinking and unthinking ... but all concurring in one common system.... Just so it is with respect to the various systems and systems of systems that compose the universe. As distant as they are, and as different as we may imagine them to be, they are all tied together by relations and connexions, gradations, and dependencies.” The verbal coincidence is here as marked as the coincidence in argument. Warton refers to an eloquent passage in Shaftesbury, which contains a similar thought; but one can hardly doubt that Bolingbroke was in this case the immediate source. A quaint passage a little farther on, in which Pope represents man as complaining because he has not “the strength of bulls or the fur of bears,” may be traced with equal plausibility to Shaftesbury or to Sir Thomas Browne; but I have not noticed it in Bolingbroke.
One more passage will be sufficient. Pope asks whether we are to demand the suspension of laws of nature whenever they might produce a mischievous result? Is Etna to cease an eruption to spare a sage, or should “new motions be impressed upon sea and air” for the advantage of blameless Bethel?
When the loose mountain trembles from on high Shall gravitation cease, if you go by? Or some old temple, nodding to its fall, For Chartres’ head reserve the hanging-wall?
Chartres is Pope’s typical villain. This is a terse version, with concrete cases, of Bolingbroke’s vaguer generalities. “The laws of gravitation,” he says, “must sometimes be suspended (if special Providence be admitted), and sometimes their effect must be precipitated. The tottering edifice must be kept miraculously from falling, whilst innocent men lived in it or passed under it, and the fall of it must be as miraculously determined to crush the guilty inhabitant or passenger.” Here, again, we have the alternative of Wollaston, who uses a similar illustration, and in one phrase comes nearer to Pope. He speaks of “new motions being impressed upon the atmosphere.” We may suppose that the two friends had been dipping into Wollaston together. Elsewhere Pope seems to have stolen for himself. In the beginning of the second epistle, Pope, in describing man as “the glory, jest, and riddle of the world,” is simply versifying Pascal; and a little farther on, when he speaks of reason as the wind and pass
ion as the gale on life’s vast ocean, he is adapting his comparison from Locke’s treatise on government.
If all such cases were adduced, we should have nearly picked the argumentative part of the essay to pieces; but Bolingbroke supplies throughout the most characteristic element. The fragments cohere by external cement, not by an internal unity of thought; and Pope too often descends to the level of mere satire, or indulges in a quaint conceit or palpable sophistry. Yet it would be very unjust to ignore the high qualities which are to be found in this incongruous whole. The style is often admirable. When Pope is at his best every word tells. His precision and firmness of touch enables him to get the greatest possible meaning into a narrow compass. He uses only one epithet, but it is the right one, and never boggles and patches or, in his own phrase, “blunders round about a meaning.” Warton gives, as a specimen of this power, the lines: —
But errs not nature from this gracious end, From burning suns when livid deaths descend, When earthquakes swallow or when tempests sweep Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep?
And Mr. Pattison reinforces the criticism by quoting Voltaire’s feeble imitation: —
Quand des vents du midi les funestes haleines De semence de mort ont inondé nos plaines, Direz-vous que jamais le ciel en son courroux Ne laissa la santé séjourner parmi nous?
It is true that in the effort to be compressed, Pope has here and there cut to the quick and suppressed essential parts of speech, till the lines can only be construed by our independent knowledge of their meaning. The famous line —
Man never is but always to be blest,
is an example of defective construction, though his language is often tortured by more elliptical phrases. This power of charging lines with great fulness of meaning enables Pope to soar for brief periods into genuine and impressive poetry. Whatever his philosophical weakness and his moral obliquity, he is often moved by genuine emotion. He has a vein of generous sympathy for human sufferings and of righteous indignation against bigots, and if he only half understands his own optimism, that “whatever is is right,” the vision, rather poetical than philosophical, of a harmonious universe lifts him at times into a region loftier than that of frigid and pedantic platitude. The most popular passages were certain purple patches, not arising very spontaneously or with much relevance, but also showing something more than the practised rhetorician. The “poor Indian” in one of the most highly-polished paragraphs —
Who thinks, admitted to that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company,
intrudes rather at the expense of logic, and is a decidedly conventional person. But this passage has a certain glow of fine humanity and is touched with real pathos. A further passage or two may sufficiently indicate his higher qualities. In the end of the third epistle Pope is discussing the origin of government and the state of nature, and discussing them in such a way as to show conclusively that he does not in the least understand the theories in question or their application. His state of Nature is a sham reproduction of the golden age of poets, made to do duty in a scientific speculation. A flimsy hypothesis learnt from Bolingbroke is not improved when overlaid with Pope’s conventional ornamentation. The imaginary history proceeds to relate the growth of superstition, which destroys the primeval innocence; but why or when does not very clearly appear; yet, though the general theory is incoherent, he catches a distinct view of one aspect of the question and expresses a tolerably trite view of the question with singular terseness. Who, he asks, —
First taught souls enslaved and realms undone, The enormous faith of many made for one?
He replies, —
Force first made conquest and that conquest law; Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe, Then shared the tyranny, then lent it aid, And gods of conquerors, slaves of subjects made; She, ‘mid the lightning’s blaze and thunder’s sound, When rock’d the mountains and when groan’d the ground — She taught the weak to trust, the proud to pray To Power unseen and mightier far than they; She from the rending earth and bursting skies Saw gods descend and fiends infernal rise; There fix’d the dreadful, there the blest abodes; Fear made her devils, and weak hope her gods; Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust, Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust; Such as the souls of cowards might conceive, And, framed like tyrants, tyrants would believe.
If the test of poetry were the power of expressing a theory more closely and pointedly than prose, such writing would take a very high place. Some popular philosophers would make a sounding chapter out of those sixteen lines.
The Essay on Man brought Pope into difficulties. The central thesis, “whatever is is right,” might be understood in various senses, and in some sense it would be accepted by every theist. But, in Bolingbroke’s teaching, it received a heterodox application, and in Pope’s imperfect version of Bolingbroke the taint was not removed. The logical outcome of the rationalistic theory of the time was some form of pantheism, and the tendency is still more marked in a poetical statement, where it was difficult to state the refined distinctions by which the conclusion is averted. When theology is regarded as demonstrable by reason, the need of a revelation ceases to be obvious. The optimistic view which sees the proof of divine order in the vast harmony of the whole visible world, throws into the background the darker side of the universe reflected in the theological doctrines of human corruption, and the consequent need of a future judgment in separation of good from evil. I need not inquire whether any optimistic theory is really tenable; but the popular version of the creed involved the attempt to ignore the evils under which all creation groans, and produced in different minds the powerful retort of Butler’s Analogy, and the biting sarcasm of Voltaire’s Candide. Pope, accepting the doctrine without any perception of these difficulties, unintentionally fell into sheer pantheism. He was not yielding to the logical instinct which carries out a theory to its legitimate development; but obeying the imaginative impulse which cannot stop to listen to the usual qualifications and safeguards of the orthodox reasoner. The best passages in the essay are those in which he is frankly pantheistic, and is swept, like Shaftesbury, into enthusiastic assertion of the universal harmony of things.
All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul; That changed thro’ all and yet in all the same, Great in the earth as in the ethereal frame; Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees; Lives thro’ all life, extends thro’ all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent; Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart; As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns, As the rapt seraph that adores and burns; To him, no high, no low, no great, no small, He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
In spite of some awkward phrases (hair and heart is a vile antithesis!), the passage is eloquent but can hardly be called orthodox. And it was still worse when Pope undertook to show that even evil passions and vices were part of the harmony; that “a Borgia and a Cataline” were as much a part of the divine order as a plague or an earthquake, and that self-love and lust were essential to social welfare.
Pope’s own religious position is characteristic and easily definable. If it is not quite defensible on the strictest principles of plain speaking, it is also certain that we could not condemn him without condemning many of the best and most catholic-spirited of men. The dogmatic system in which he had presumably been educated had softened under the influence of the cultivated thought of the day. Pope, as the member of a persecuted sect, had learnt to share that righteous hatred of bigotry which is the honourable characteristic of his best contemporaries. He considered the persecuting spirit of his own church to be its worst fault. In the early Essay on Criticism he offended some of his own sect by a vigorous denunciation of the doctrine which promotes persecution by limiting salvation to a particular creed. His charitable conviction that a divine element is to be found in all creeds, from that of the “poor Indian” upwards, animates the highest p
assages in his works. But though he sympathizes with a generous toleration, and the specific dogmas of his creed sat very loosely on his mind, he did not consider that an open secession was necessary or even honourable. He called himself a true Catholic, though rather as respectfully sympathizing with the spirit of Fénelon than as holding to any dogmatic system. The most dignified letter that he ever wrote was in answer to a suggestion from Atterbury (1717), that he might change his religion upon the death of his father. Pope replies that his worldly interests would be promoted by such a step; and, in fact, it cannot be doubted that Pope might have had a share in the good things then obtainable by successful writers, if he had qualified by taking the oaths. But he adds, that such a change would hurt his mother’s feelings, and that he was more certain of his duty to promote her happiness than of any speculative tenet whatever. He was sure that he could mean as well in the religion he now professed as in any other; and that being so, he thought that a change even to an equally good religion could not be justified. A similar statement appears in a letter to Swift, in 1729. “I am of the religion of Erasmus, a Catholic. So I live, so shall I die, and hope one day to meet you, Bishop Atterbury, the younger Craggs, Dr. Garth, Dean Berkeley, and Mr. Hutchison in that place to which God of his infinite mercy bring us and everybody.” To these Protestants he would doubtless have joined the freethinking Bolingbroke. At a later period he told Warburton, in less elevated language, that the change of his creed would bring him many enemies and do no good to any one.
Alexander Pope - Delphi Poets Series Page 169
