Imitation and Optimism: The Essays of Alexander Pope

Alexander Pope, whom some critics regard as the most important poet of the early 18th century, set out to comprehensively explain the rules that governed art, poetry, and humanity itself.  And, it turns out, they're all the same rules.

Transcript

And we’re back . . . this is the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives rhyme its reason.  I’ve been gone for a little while because, well, because I felt like it.  But I’ve cooked up another hot supper for you and today we're looking at the neoclassicist’s neoclassicist, the Augustans’ Augustan.  He’s the first purely professional writer in English – by which I mean that he is the first to earn his daily bread entirely by the pen, instead of, say, being a bureaucrat like Chaucer, a theatre-owner like Shakespeare, or a cleric like Swift.  Today, we’re going to start our look at the work of Alexander Pope.

Before we do, I’ve a few thank yous to say.  First, thanks to Terri V., who has become my first monthly supporter on Buy Me a Coffee.  I’ve just set that up so very exciting that someone nibbled my bait.  And thanks to Helen B., who has once again come through with the readies.  And to Nicole in Nashville.  My gratitude to you all.  If you’d like to help support the sterling work done here in my spare room, you can find “Support the Show” and “Buy Me a Coffee” links in the show notes.  Every little bit helps.  Cheers!

Nicole also sent a Fan Mail message – sounds like she’s a teacher who’s using the podcast for a grade 12 English class.  Well, that’s awesome and I’m glad to be of service there.  She also asks if I know of a podcast focusing on American Lit for her grade 11 kids.  Well, Nicole, I don’t, and that’s because I don’t believe in American literature.  It’s an oxymoron, like Christian atheism, jumbo shrimp, and country music.

Ah, just kidding.  Sort of.

But I don’t know of a podcast that does a similar thing with American lit.  When I launched this one, it was because I didn’t see, at the time, any shows that did a deep chronological survey.  There are a lot of poddies that discuss literature, but this particular tack is pretty rare, I think.  If any out there does know of a good fit for Nicole, send me a message and I’ll pass it along.

I mentioned a moment ago that Alexander Pope was the first fully professional English writer.  But he didn’t set out for that distinction.  In fact, I think he would rather have foregone it than to have had to put up with the circumstances that made it possible.  He was born in 1688, the year of the Inglorious Revolution, a Roman Catholic, in a country where Catholicism was subject to various civil penalties.  We’ve mentioned them in other episodes, but if you haven’t heard those, here they are in digest: Catholics could not hold public office, own valuable property, or vote.  Catholics could not live within 10 miles of London and the universities were closed to them.  This forced Pope to educate himself and provided a sharply critical view of the world that would find exercise in his later satires.

In what he called his “double exile,” not only was Pope a religious outcast, he was also a social one.  He suffered from a tuberculosis of the bones called Pott’s Disease, which stunted his growth to 4’6” and dramatically curved his spine.  A painful disease, the isolation it caused forced him into a life of the mind.  All this, understandably, made him a rather irascible character, and he spent a good portion of his life feuding with other public figures.

One might be surprised that such ostracism from the main currents of Georgian society rendered Pope what scholar Norman Callan calls “pre-eminently the poet of his age.”  Pope undertook a translation of Homer, both for the challenge and for the money, which allowed him to buy a Thames villa at Twickenham (Twit’nam?) and develop a beautiful landscape garden, which he connected to the house by his famous Grotto, an underground tunnel that contained a central chamber in which he often wrote.  The translations also cemented in him an admiration for the Ancients, the Greco-Roman classical style, and he spent most of his career in imitation of it.

Now, wait, some might say – how can you be the pre-eminent poet of an age if all you do is copy the style of other poets?  Where’s the originality, the innovation, the freshness?

Well, the simple answer is that it won’t be for another 50 years at least that the Romantic ideal of the unique creative genius gains ascendency in literary thought.  It’s a powerful idea, and one we still labor under: witness the debates about using samples or artificial intelligence in music production. Or the proliferation of fan fiction in recent years.  Is redeploying and recontextualizing the same as creating?  We’ll leave that for philosophers of aesthetics to sort out, but for our purposes, it’s enough to know that originality was not a requisite for greatness until maybe the 1790s.  Pope comes along well before that.

The other answer is that our prejudice against imitation rather limits our perspective of it.  For Pope and his contemporaries, imitation was not merely copying, it was, as Callan has it, “the art of re-creating in strictly contemporary form something that had been written by a poet of an earlier age.”  For them, they were the stewards and propellers of a tradition, and they did so by re-energizing ancient forms in modern contexts, thus granting them new significance.

One can argue that all Pope’s poetry – his didactic poems, mock epic satires, pastorals, and elegies – they’re all imitations under this rubric.  I want to look at the most famous of the didactic poems today: 1711’s An Essay on Criticism and 1734’s An Essay on Man.

Pope uses the term “essay” in much the same way Montaigne used it: from the French verb meaning “to attempt,” an essay is a tentative exploration of a complex subject, an attempt to explain or make sense of it.  The essay on criticism is Pope’s first major original smash on the poetry scene.  Joseph Addison, whom we discussed in an earlier episode, reviewed the work in Spectator as “the most known and most received observations on the subject of literature and criticism.”  In some ways, what Pope does in this poem (and it is an essay in verse) is collate and combine the traditional values and parameters of literature.  Horace did the same for Rome in his Art of Poetry, and Pope will update this contribution for the world’s new empire: England.  He’s not offering anything new – he still advocates for the classical virtues of wit, nature, rules, and genius – but in the context of another language, and how to render expression in that language memorable and pleasing.

Let’s look at a passage from part one as an example:

Nature to all things fix'd the limits fit,

And wisely curb'd proud man's pretending wit.

Pretty famous heroic couplet – that is, a pair of rhyming iambic pentameter lines.  Pope is generally regarded as the formal master of this line, its balance and cadence just feels so Augustan.  But that general appraisal of Pope’s versification does him a disservice: he is quite subtle and sensitive in his rhythms, and deftly avoids the hypnotic, metronomic repetition that can make heroic couplets rather dull after a while.

So, check it.  The first foot of the first line is not an iamb at all – it’s a trochee: the stress lands on the first syllable and falls in the second.  It’s a down beat and produces a sense of subservience or reverence, which elegantly emphasizes the poet’s position to nature.  And the third foot of the second line – proud man’s – is a spondee: two stressed syllables.  The weight of the emphasis here slows the line down, and ironically positions the arrogance of man as something to be chastised, for, as Pope writes a few lines later: “One science only will one genius fit; So vast is art, so narrow human wit.”  

In this poem, Pope uses the word “wit” in several ways.  It can be, as we’ve seen in many of the Restoration comedies we read, simply a well-turned or clever remark.  Too, it can be the person who makes such a remark.  It can signify inventiveness and creativity, fantasy or metaphor, genius, even poetry itself.  Nothing new for regular listeners here.  But “Nature,” as Pope means it, is not just what granola-crunching Subaru drivers escape to on the weekends.  It’s something much deeper than just “the great outdoors.”  For Pope, it seems to mean something like intuitive understanding or inherent knowledge.  Early in the essay, he writes of poets “we shall find

Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind; / Nature affords at least a glimm'ring light.”  Then, a couple dozen lines later, we get something more cosmic, that couplet we looked at a minute ago: “Nature to all things fix'd the limits fit.”  Here, he personifies Nature as some transcendental creative force that establishes eternal and inviolate rules for beauty and art.  So, naturally, imitation is the only avenue available to artists, for innovation defies immutable standards established by Nature.  He advises writers to 

First follow NATURE, and your judgment frame

By her just standard, which is still the same:

Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,

One clear, unchang'd, and universal light,

Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart,

At once the source, and end, and test of art.

So, the idea of the creative genius, for Pope, is not the Romantic conception, but rather one who preserves and perpetuates an established tradition.  We’re kind of back to the battle between the ancients and moderns that has cropped up in the last few episodes.  The only question for Pope and his peers was not which was superior, but rather to what extent did the ancients’ influence extend – that is, are the moderns bound to a slavish, almost plagiaristic imitation, or should they be seen as guides toward the continuing vigor of literature?

Pope argues thus: “Those RULES of old discover'd, not devis'd, /Are Nature still, but Nature methodis'd.”  The rules of art laid down by, say, Aristotle, were not invented by him – they are not the product of individual taste or caprice.  Rather, they have discovered, since aesthetics pre-exists aesthetes.  What the ancients have done, then, is organize Nature’s prescriptions into a rational, orderly, and permanent structure.  Within those bounds, the artist may do as he or she pleases.

There’s kind of an amusing “those who can’t do” moment following this part of the discourse.  Pope begins to address the field, or profession, of literary criticism itself, and it's clear he’s not terribly impressed by what he sees.

Then criticism the Muse's handmaid prov'd,

To dress her charms, and make her more belov'd;

But following wits from that intention stray'd;

Who could not win the mistress, woo'd the maid;

Against the poets their own arms they turn'd,

Sure to hate most the men from whom they learn'd.

Critics began in earnest, he says, to support the work of gifted poets: they are handmaids to the Muse.  But later critics, of diminished integrity and talent, turned from appreciation to venom, with the strong hint that envy of poets was the prime mover.  There’s a line later on that might make one wonder if Pope is being slyly self-deprecating.  He speaks of critics who

on the leaves of ancient authors prey,

Nor time nor moths e'er spoil'd so much as they:

Some drily plain, without invention's aid,

Write dull receipts how poems may be made.

This is, of course, exactly what the Essay on Criticism does – preys upon Aristotle and Horace to make up a recipe for good poetry.  I suspect, however, that Pope doesn’t really see himself as one of these vile predators and offers the joke to emphasize the quality of his own project.

There’s a rather famous couplet at lines 179-180 that do well to encapsulate Pope’s regard for Nature’s immutable aesthetic laws and the ancients who discovered them.  In Horace’s Ars Poetica, the Roman master says that even the greatest writers have sometimes missed the mark, have not fully realized their aspirations: “quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus” – which literally means "even the good Homer sometimes sleeps."  Right, even Homer didn’t bat 1000, he flubbed some lines here and there, right?  Didn’t quite get the effect he was going for?

Bollocks, says Pope.  That is the hubris of poor critics.  It’s not that Homer has failed in his writing; it is we who have failed in our reading.  We are not sensitive enough to see what Homer was up to: “Those oft are stratagems which errors seem, Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream.”

This sentiment leads nicely to the second part of the Essay on Criticism, which opens with an exhortation to intellectual humility:

Of all the causes which conspire to blind

Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind,

What the weak head with strongest bias rules,

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

He says that where Nature has withheld talent, she overcompensates with an abundance of foolishness.  Boosh!  And it seems to me that foolishness means “not seeing the whole for its parts.”  That fools don’t see the elegant harmony of the artistic whole – the organic unity as Aristotle would call it – but focus only on the constituent elements.  They can’t see the beauty of a face because they’re so focused on the lip or the eye.  That’s kind of what that famous line means – “A little learning is a dangerous thing.”  You know just enough to get yourself in trouble.  

My wife and I really like art museums – not galleries, we are terminally unhip and fuddy-duddy – but we really like the Old Masters and such.  Anyway, there’s almost nothing more annoying in an art museum than a 3rd year art major wandering around pontificating on all the paintings he just read about in a survey course.  Sometimes the enthusiasm of youth needs a good stifling.  Anyway, that’s what Pope’s bellyaching about, too, the dilettantish expert.

Back to that old recipe for a good poem, Pope says that, well, everything you English teachers bang on about since Adam was a lad: expression is the dress of thought, the sound must seem an echo to the sense, avoid extremes.  But what it all adds up to is this:

True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd,

Something, whose truth convinc'd at sight we find,

That gives us back the image of our mind.

I so like this passage.  One, he finally brings together his two great subjects – wit and Nature – into a single aphorism.  Nicely managed.  But the second couplet is such a clever observation of one of my favorite feelings in the world.  Have you ever had this?  You’re having a conversation, or listening to a lecture, or watching a documentary, and someone offers an insight in language so expressive, and makes that insight seem so accessibly true, that you feel like you’ve known it your whole life, even though it’s brand new to you?  Like, that person’s idea is your idea, too.  I love that – it kind of feels like you got a momentary glimpse into that eternal and transcendental pool of knowledge.  

Which brings me to the end of our discussion on this first major poem from Alexander Pope.  I don’t think I mentioned this earlier, but I’ve heard that after Shakespeare, Pope is the most quoted poet in English.  You know, the kind of quotes that have ceased to be quotations and have become idioms.  We’ve already mentioned a few, but this couplet should ring at least a faint bell with everybody listening:

Good nature and good sense must ever join;

To err is human; to forgive, divine.

Right, you’ve all heard that one?  He argues that a reader who has "good sense,” like intellectual ability and aesthetic taste, but lacks "good nature," a generous disposition, cannot be a great critic.  He could only be pedantic and mean.  On the other hand, a reader with "good nature" but no "sense" cannot judge art effectively.  A great critic must overlook minor flaws in the moderns, must show mercy to those bearing the weight of tradition.  It’s like divine forgiveness, for we have all erred on our way to God.

It’s a testament, I suppose, to Pope’s consistent belief in a consistent Nature that his other major didactic poem, An Essay on Man, from some two decades after the Essay on Criticism, 

feels so much like a logical extension of the latter’s paradigm.  The poem is divided into four epistles, ostensibly addressed to Lord Bolingbroke – a Tory politician who had been attainted of treason at the accession of George I, but returned from French exile in 1723 and took up residence near Pope.  The two struck up a friendship and together they developed their philosophy of optimism.

Now, let’s pause here, because that term does not exactly mean what we might think.  For us, optimism is a sort of upbeat attitude, a belief that things will all work out, that the best is possible, even probable.  It’s a Pollyanna-ish approach to life.

OK, so here’s a joke about optimism that I like: An Englishman sees the glass half full, the Scotsman sees the glass half empty, and the Irishman says, “You gonna finish that?”

OK, don’t @ me, bro.  I know the punchline relies upon a toxic stereotype of the drunken Irish person,  and, as an Irish-American, I’ve long endured the negative consequences of such lazy assumptions, that Irish people only ever drink and fight.  I’m tired of it, and, as soon as I finish my beer, I’m gonna kick some ass.

Where was I?  Oh, optimism.  Yes, well, what optimism meant in Enlightenment philosophy was that the universe, created by an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God, must necessarily be ordered for the best.  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz is the philosopher most associated with optimism of this kind – the famous phrase is “this is the best of all possible worlds” (the character Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide satirizes Leibniz).  So, despite temporary suffering and the apparent evidence of evil in the world, all of it is in service to some higher order of good.  This is a theodicy, which we’ve spoken of before – a solution to the problem of evil.

And like John Milton, whose Paradise Lost attempted to “justify the ways of God to Man,” Pope consciously echoes that line saying he intends to “vindicate the ways of God to Man.”  There’s an interesting connotational nuance, though, with the different verb.  Justify is often used when the goal is to demonstrate the rationality or appropriateness of an action. In contrast, vindicate typically relates to the restoration of one's reputation or the validation of a viewpoint.  Pope seems to be standing athwart the Enlightenment’s attack on faith.

Near the start, the poet establishes some first principles: “Say first, of God above, or man below, What can we reason, but from what we know?”  Right, remember when we talked about John Locke and empiricism a couple of episodes ago?  Did I talk about empiricism then?  Pretty sure I did.  Anyway, Pope’s resting his optimism on an empirical foundation: he dismisses abstract a priori idealism by arguing we can only reason from what we know – that is, from what we have experienced, a posteriori, in our lives.  This is real world stuff.

We also have the postulate of a maximally-perfect God whose perception is infinitely beyond ours:

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 ev'ry star,

May tell why Heav'n has made us as we are.

So, by observation we can infer God’s existence and his purpose in creating us as we are, where we are.  Therefore, it is rational to surrender to that which is beyond our comprehension: “to reason right is to submit.”

It’s worth noting that, though Pope was a devout Catholic, he seldom, if ever, invokes any doctrinal positions.  He does not address the so-called “God of the Prophets,” the highly contestable object of faith, but rather the “God of the Philosophers.”  In Aristotelian terms, he mentions the Great Chain of Being, calls God “The Eternal Cause” or the “First Almighty Cause” and he presumes Aristotle’s postulate that happiness is the ultimate goal of the universe – its great telos.

So, he concludes “Epistle 1” with a quite elegant crystallization of the optimistic theodicy:

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;

All discord, harmony, not understood;

All partial evil, universal good:

And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,

One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.

Of course, those stately, cerebral heroic couplets.  But note something else, something almost invisible until you see it, and then you can’t unsee it.  Pope crowns this part of his rational argument for the compatibility of a maximally-perfect God and the existence of evil in a mathematical – almost algebraic – formulation.  Look at each half line and you’ll see that it’s contradicted by the second half-line in a regular substitution: Nature is actually art (meaning artificial – made by hand, not random and wild); chance is direction, discord is harmony, partial evil is universal good.  It’s a formula: for x, substitute y, where x is fallible human perception and y is the divine order.  It feels to me like the most Enlightenment, Age of Reason scrap of verse ever: a mathematical proof!

I want to finish out by looking at the opening couplet of “Epistle 2,” because it’s an excellent summation of Pope’s didactic project.  The epistle begins: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan / The proper study of mankind is Man.”  

Oddly, it begins with a conclusion – like a “therefore” statement at the end of a syllogism.  He pitches the argument before the premises.  Well, if you see the second epistle as a separate poem from the first – and, of course, you both should and shouldn’t.  The first half of the first line inserts the “then” into the famous inscription found at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi – “Know thyself.”  It’s often misattributed to Socrates, but it means "know your limits" or "know your place as a mortal.”  It’s an admonition to examine one's soul, values, and beliefs in order to live a wise life.  And again, the line begins with the humbling trochaic foot.  And the second line is pretty accessible – though I think the choice of the adjective proper is very precise and intentional.  Proper means suitable or appropriate, sure.  That fits with the sense of the line.  But the word comes from Latin through French meaning “belonging or pertaining to oneself; intrinsic." It also means "pertaining to a person or thing in particular.”  So not only is it appropriate for mankind to study Man, it is in fact our particular, intrinsic, and delineated purpose.  

Now, if you didn’t twig it, it means that the human brain should stay in its lane.  Don’t bother with things beyond your scope.  And that’s kind of what the second half of line one means – you notice I skipped it for a second?  Yeah, because "presume not God to scan” is a strangely ambiguous line.  It’s most germane reading is: don’t presume to scan – or investigate – the mind of God.  You can’t do it, dummy.  Stay in your lane.  This reading has an implied “you” as the subject, “presume to scan” as the verb phrase, and “God” as the object.

Of course, regular listeners know that when I start diagramming sentences, I’ve got something slippery in mind.  Bravo, litterbugs.  Because you could read it as though “God” was the subject, he’s the one doing the scanning, and we should not presume God’s going to spill the tea to us.  We need to sort this world out for ourselves.  We just got to have faith that it’s solvable, that it’s the best of all possible worlds.  We’re not dealing with an impossible one, yeah?

Thanks for listening, everyone.  I’m very glad to have you and I hope you feel that your time was well spent.  Please take a moment to hit the like and subscribe buttons.  If you’ve got a couple of seconds, it’d be more helpful than you know to post a 5 star review on your podcaster.  I’d be very grateful.  Next time, we’ll look at Pope’s satirical poems.  Till then, don’t take any wooden nickels!