Pope's contempt

A guest post

Today I am delighted to bring you a guest post from Jane Cooper. Jane is an Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, where she is writing a PhD thesis, working on the pre-Burkean sublime with an interest in the poetry of Abraham Cowley. Here she is on Twitter. I can also tell you that Jane is a splendid conversationalist about all matters literary.

There have previously been guest posts from the academics Anna McCullough, Brad Skow, and Edward McLaren.

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Alexander Pope’s best-known poem is An Essay on Man (1733), a four-part epistle to the great Tory philosopher Bolingbroke, written in unremitting heroic couplets. Though many will admire his magisterial mock-heroics The Rape of the Lock (1714) and The Dunciad (1727), the latter, as John Mullan said, might be the greatest unread poem in the language. An Essay on Man is still (unconsciously) quoted in a way the others are not.

An Essay on Man is a defence of the thesis that the known world is the best possible of all worlds, a theodicy expounded by Gottfried Leibniz in his 1710 Essais de Théodicée. Pope sought to “vindicate the ways of God to man”, alluding to Milton’s famous claim to “justify the ways of God to man” in Paradise Lost. Pope’s composition is stunning. But in spite of its metrical integrity and aphoristic self-assurance, An Essay on Man buckles under its own philosophical ambition. In the words of Dr Johnson: “Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised”. Voltaire’s dismissal of the poem was equally scathing: ‘““All is well” — absurd thesis that Pope and Leibniz maintain”.

How can we read the following, taken from the poem’s first epistle, without sympathising with this criticism?

Cease, then, nor order imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee.
Submit. In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing Power,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
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.

Maynard Mack chimed with Johnson in 1935: “Pope’s attempt to reconcile Christian theology with Enlightenment rationalism results in a poem that pleases aesthetically but falters philosophically”. Still, it is perhaps the most quotable text of the 18th century: “Our proper bliss depends on what we blame”, like that evergreen line from the same epistle, “Hope springs eternal in the human breast”, etches itself into the mind.

It sometimes strikes me as a shame that Pope’s Scriblerian and Horatian satires (the former composed in the voice of the philistine persona Martinus Scriblerus by Pope, Swift, and others in the Scriblerus Club) are now rarely read. Much Scriblerian satire shared the preoccupations of Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711), another long epistle in heroic couplets, an attack on critics and their poor poetic ability. An Essay on Criticism shows Pope at his best, while An Essay on Man is full of indelible closed couplets but smothers the reader with its quasi-philosophical message, vexing to those not already convinced of theodicy. Artful construction cannot make more convincing any attempt to solve the paradox of a God who is characterised as both omnipotent and omnibenevolent while presiding over a world full of evil.

In An Essay on Criticism, Pope’s task is easier and the result more satisfying. The young Pope attacks critics like his long-standing rival, John Dennis, who could not compose good poetry (an eternal preoccupation in the world of the fine arts): “Let such teach others who themselves excel,/ And censure freely, who have written well”. Dennis, known for his interest in Longinus and the sublime (for him, an instructive experience of supremely great art catalysed by Christian revelation), is cast as the chief critic who censures freely without having written well. Drawing on the classical idea of furor poeticus, the poetic fire of the likes of Pindar and Homer which inspires and moves listeners to a frenzy, Pope appeals to Homer:

Oh may some spark of your celestial fire,
The last, the meanest of your sons inspire,
(That, on weak wings, from far pursues your flights,
Glows while he reads, but trembles as he writes),
To teach vain wits a science little known,
To admire superior sense, and doubt their own!

But, like the “enthusiastic” Puritan with his Bible, readers who “tremble” with inspiration are apt to be deceived by their own receptive skill. To be so emotionally moved by literature that you believe you possess a certain interpretative genius is a risk that the Greeks warned about, including Longinus, the Athenian rhetorician and author of Peri Hypsos (“On the Sublime”, more literally “on height”).

The early 18th century idea of the sublime, as theorised by Pope’s rival Dennis, is the impetus for Pope’s Scriblerian satire Peri Bathous: Or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry. The title is an inversion of Peri Hypsos, and the text sarcastically (through the sincere voice of the hack writer Scriblerus) advises its readership on the importance of middlebrow literature. In this now-obscure satire, Pope coined the term “bathos” to mean the disappointing and ridiculous effect of failed attempts at sublime art. More figuratively, in attempting to fly to the heights of sublimity, the majority of poets end up sinking and falling into bathos. Peri Bathous is an instruction manual in how to fall (and, perhaps by accident, a kind of apophasis: it is easier to say what the sublime is not).

The satire begins at the foot of Mount Parnassus, classically the home of the Muses and a symbol of the fine arts. Martinus Scriblerus addresses his countrymen from the “lowlands of Parnassus”, accusing the poets and Muses at the top of the Mount of envying the common water and mud at the bottom — though it is of a lesser quality, is it more abundant. Scriblerus’s aim is merely to proliferate: implicitly, it is the age of print which allows him and his mediocre peers to publish with impunity.

Then Scriblerus praises the efforts of long-winded poets. Pope’s chief target is Richard Blackmore, a physician and poet known for his exceptionally mawkish and purple heroic poem Prince Arthur (1695) and its sequel King Arthur (1697). Pope does not need to do more than simply quote Blackmore for the reader to laugh. “How pretty and how genteel is the following?” Scriblerus asks of the following rhymes:

Nature’s Confectioner ——
Whose suckets are moist alchimy;
The still of his refining mold
Minting the garden into gold.

He also targets Whig poets like Leonard Welsted and Ambrose Philips, quoting some of their worst stanzas and citing the lines “Blest as the Immortal Gods is he/ The Youth, who fondly sits by thee” as a “Rendezvous of all Passions”. For Pope, passion without reason is the essence of bad art. It also characterises mainstream poetry loved by the muddy Scriblerian masses.

Pope was not always so sarcastic. One of his finest classical imitations is his first epistle of Horace’s second satire, which he described as

an apology for the poets, in order to render Augustus more their Patron. Horace here pleads the cause of his contemporaries, first against the taste of the town, whose humour it was to magnify the authors of the preceding age; secondly against the court and nobility, who encouraged only the writers for the theatre; and lastly against the emperor himself, who had conceived them of little use to the government.

In the reign of George II, (not a king well-known for his poetic taste), Pope reappropriated Horace’s cause, aiming his contempt at those who blindly champion canonical poetry without appreciating either the flaws or the true strengths of great poets. (Dennis similarly attacked the common critic’s attitude of blind deference to old poetry out of respect for ancientness alone, in various writings including his influential essay The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1704); in their literary war, Pope and his friends drew on this aspect of Dennis’ work to dub him a philistine with knowledge only of Aristotle and Longinus. It’s my view that Pope and his nemesis agreed on a great deal more than they would admit; perhaps their war was a case of the narcissism of small differences!).

Pope’s imitation of Horace’s epistle to Augustus is littered with the names of other English poets whose reputations, at the time of writing, stood firm. “Who now reads Cowley? If he pleases yet,/ His moral pleases, not his pointed wit”, has asks of the once-lauded Civil War poet and father of the English Pindaric ode. The public says “our fathers never broke a rule”: “Why then, I say, the public is a fool”. Pope elegantly sums up the satire’s central argument:

I lose my patience, and I own it too,
When works are censur’d, not as bad, but new;
While if our elders break all reason’s laws,
These fools demand not pardon, but applause.

In criticising certain errors, Pope would not “lop the beauties from [Milton’s] book” or “damn all Shakespeare, like th’ affected fool/ At court, who hates whate’er he read at school”. Instead, he would simply remind readers that no poet is infallible.

Pope’s measured tone carefully reflects that of Horace, the notoriously ambiguous Roman poet whose career under the Imperium was one of paranoid self-protection and skilful mediation between interests. He draws on Horace’s humble admission that “poets doubtless hurt our own cause (let me hack at my own vines!)/ Multa quidem nobis facimus mala saepe poetae (ut vineta egomet caedam mea)”, since many complain that their own critics are simply too unlearned to appreciate the finest points of their poetic arguments:

We poets are (upon a poet’s word)
Of all mankind, the creatures most absurd:
The season, when to come, and when to go,
To sing, or cease to sing, we never know;
And if we will recite nine hours in ten,
You lose your patience, just like other men.
Then too we hurt ourselves, when to defend
A single verse, we quarrel with a friend;
Repeat unask’d; lament, the wit’s too fine
For vulgar eyes, and point out ev’ry line.

Pope criticises poets’ defensive fastidiousness, a flaw he shared with Dennis and the rest of the Dunces; it is an apt sentiment of Horace’s to describe the culture of the so-called Augustan age of the early 18th century. Here, Pope’s contempt for others is constrained by his self-implication. Then, in a supremely Popean move, he immediately scorns Blackmore as an example of a poet who was commissioned by kings who lacked the taste to know that their poets’ efforts would be wasted on ridiculous pomp:

But kings in wit may want discerning spirit.
The hero William, and the martyr Charles,
One knighted Blackmore, and one pension’d Quarles;
Which made old Ben, and surly Dennis swear,
“No Lord’s anointed, but a Russian bear.”

Even Dennis would have the judgement to scorn a king who commissioned Blackmore! This makes the case for a king’s good taste even more urgent: what could be worse than such a remark from the mouth of Dennis, whom Pope lampooned in various places as “Sir Tremendous”? Towards the end of the satire, he adds a considerable measure of spite to Horace’s claim to be insufficiently skilled to sing the praises of Augustus:

But verse, alas! your Majesty disdains;
And I’m not us’d to panegyric strains: […]
A vile encomium doubly ridicules:
There’s nothing blackens like the ink of fools.

Pope noticeably neglects to imitate Horace’s closing remark that “men more quickly learn and more gladly remember what they disdain than what they approve and admire/ discit enim citius meminitque libentius illudquod quis deridet, quam quod probat et veneratur”. Instead, he regrets that “a fate attends on all I write,/ That when I aim at praise, they say I bite”. A colloquial summary of this final stanza might read: “my haters are my motivators”.

Horace’s remark couldn’t be better applied than to Pope. In life, he was a reputed hater; Dr Johnson remarked that

Pope was from his birth of a constitution tender and delicate; but is said to have shewn remarkable gentleness and sweetness of disposition. The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood.

Pope was at his best criticising others; by comparison with his satires, An Essay on Man leaves us wanting. Some might think this is a shame — are even the best poets constrained by the fact that it is easier to tear things down than to build them up? The sublime is Icarus’ sun; approaching it would scorch anyone’s wings. But Pope, in tearing others down, employed such an exquisite poetic diction and so perfected the heroic couplet that there’s no need to worry. Enjoy his contempt.