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.
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