With What French Artist Did Neoclassicism Find Its Most Perfect Expression? Power of Art
Literary Theory and Criticism
Analysis of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man
Past the time Alexander Pope chose to publish his An Essay on Human being (1734), he had received thorough and undeserved criticism from the poetasters, or "dunces," whose activities he so frequently correctly lambasted, near notably in The Dunciad (1723). Nevertheless smarting from Pope's satire, his enemies turned the public against his Epistle to Burlington (1731), misrepresenting it equally a personal attack on Burlington, one of Pope's shut friends. A biased public did non take the poem every bit Pope intended, as a satire on the vanity of dignity as a whole. In reaction to that misunderstanding, Pope devised a clever and, as it proved, wildly successful plan to publish An Essay on Homo anonymously, allowing the public and the dunces themselves to render an honest evaluation. Pope published through his known bookseller ii poems in 1733 clearly under his own name, "Epistle to Bathurst" and the Beginning Satire of the 2nd Book of Horace. He and so chose a dissimilar bookseller for An Essay on Man, and because his precise rhymes were then well known, even inserted i weak rhyming couplet to mislead his readers. Pope hoped for a fair reception of a verse form that he knew would draw charges of religious unorthodoxy if printed under his proper noun. His plan worked beautifully, and his usual critics raved near the genius evident in this work past a new poet.
Later critics did not evaluate the poem every bit 1 of Pope's stronger pieces, claiming that Bolingbroke influenced Pope to prefer some of his ain metaphysical views and an ideology of natural theology. The fatalistic and naturalistic themes were the consequence, as they saw Pope reducing man to trivial more than than a puppet with no gratuitous volition. He attempted to consider man and his experience autonomously from Christian revelation, the more familiar and acceptable approach used by poets including John Milton. Thus, he ignores those events of history considered crucial by many, such as the creation, man'due south fall from grace in the Garden of Eden, the birth of Christ, Christ's death and resurrection, and the terminal days as predicted past the biblical book of Revelation. He as well excluded references to myths and their explanations for human being's condition. Pope instead perceived of man as making discoveries through his feel based on reason. He also hoped to demystify some language with which the church had embedded specific symbolic meaning. Every bit Locke did, Pope believed that words but referred to our ideas, not to any hidden essence. Pope would add in 1738 the "Universal Prayer" to the cease of further editions of Essay on Man, but he never escaped that early judgment of religious unorthodoxy in his lifetime.
Later evaluations found the verse form null short of brilliant, with Pope'southward want to challenge the value of what passed for 18th-century "wit" even across what he had in his An Essay on Criticism and to reconcile philosophy with man's perception of "sense." Pope wrote in "The Design" that precedes the poem:
The scientific discipline of Human Nature is, similar all other sciences, reduced to a few clear points: in that location are not many sure truths in this world. Information technology is therefore in the Anatomy of the Mind equally in that of the Body; more adept will accrue to flesh past attending to the large, open and perceptible parts, than by studying too much such finer nerves and vessels, the conformations and uses of which will for ever escape our ascertainment.
Structured in four epistles, the verse form stretches to slightly more 1,300 lines. Pope originally conceived information technology as an introduction to an extended work that would include the moral essays. According to Pope's notes, the additional sections would embrace themes including "Knowledge and its limits," "Regime, both ecclesiastical and civil," and "Morality, in viii or nine of the most concerning branches of information technology; four of which would accept been the 2 extremes to each of the Cardinal Virtues." He eventually gave up the plan, for unknown reasons. Pope provides an "Argument" that precedes each epistle, making clear the various points each will endeavor to make.
The Beginning Epistle clarifies, according to its argument, "the Nature and Country of Man, with respect to the Universe." Major points include the fact that human can only judge other systems, of which he remains ignorant, in relation to his own system. In addition, he should not be considered imperfect, simply suitable to his rank within the full general guild of things. All present happiness depends upon ignorance of the future. Aiming to know more than is possible causes "Man's mistake and misery." Man is part of an order and suborder that extend in a higher place and below him, and if any function is destroyed, the unabridged order disintegrates. If whatsoever individual wished that to take place, it would exist the outcome of pride and madness. Homo must assume his proper place in Providence.
Pope opens the First Epistle by addressing Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, telling him, "leave all meaner things / to depression ambition, and the pride of Kings." The speaker invites Bolingbroke to join in written report instead of "all this scene of Man / A mighty maze! but not without a programme." He makes clear his belief that we can but reason from what we know; merely God can know all the secrets of the universe. He then references "the great chain" (33), imagery he will return to later. This traditional concept would be familiar to his readers, who shared the vision of man in the most crucial central position on a ladder of creation. At the top is God, followed by other superior ethereal creatures, then humans, and so angels, then "Beast, bird, fish, insect!" and finally, "what no eye tin see" (239). Homo represents a combination of abominable sensual instinct and spiritual intelligence. He needs to resist the temptation of pride to rise above his natural place, and he must resist surrender to animal instinct. Human reflects all parts of his world, resulting in a condition labeled by the ancients concordia discors, or the harmonization of opposites: "Just All subsists past elemental strife; / And Passions are the elements of Life." This First Epistle yields 1 of Pope's almost quoted lines as he writes of hope, encouraging man to nurture that emotion as he awaits expiry and future blessings:
Hope humbly then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Expiry, and God adore!
What futurity bliss, he gives non thee to know,
Just gives that Hope to be thy approving now.
Hope springs eternal in the homo breast:
Man near Is, but always To, be blessed;
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from dwelling,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come. (90–98)
Human's bliss "Is not to act or remember beyond flesh." He lacks "a microscopic eye . . . / For this plain reason, Human is not a Fly." Pope closes the Offset Epistle by inserting a bones precept of philosophy, "All x is y." He includes paradox as he writes:
All Nature is just Art, unknown to thee;
All Run a risk, Direction, which thou canst non see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Proficient:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason'southward spite,
One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, IS RIGHT. (289–294)
The 2d Epistle notes as its statement "Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Himself, as an Private." Points include that homo should study himself, rather than prying into God'south business; that his capacity remains express; and that 2 Principles remain necessary to man: Cocky-love and Reason; Self-love is stronger. He examines the passions and how reason should override them and concludes by noting "the ends of Providence and general Good are answered in our Passions and Imperfections," and they are well distributed and useful.
The epistle opens with some other famous line, as its second, "The proper study of Mankind is Man." The speaker urges man to effort to practice things he supposes he cannot, such as instructing "the planets in what orbs to run" and teaching "Eternal Wisdom how to rule," after which he will "drop into thyself, and exist a fool!" (30). He urges man, "Trace Science then, with Modesty thy guide; / Kickoff strip off all her equipage of Pride" (44– 45). All human being needs to heed are two principles: "Two Principles in human nature reign; / Self-love, to urge and a Reason, to restrain." Neither is good or bad on its own, and both are required in the government of man. Expressing a typical 18th-century thought, Pope writes that habit and experience strengthen Reason and help restrain Self-love. All passion results from Self-love:
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling railroad train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of hurting;
These mix'd with fine art, and to due bounds confin'd
Brand and maintain the balance of the mind. (117–120)
Concordia discors appears once more as "lights and shades," which may cause strife, but that strife "Gives all the strength and colour of our life" (121–122). Reason may even help in overcoming madness. He suggests that each individual nurtures his or her own virtue, which is closest to his or her vice, for "Extremes in Nature equal ends produce, / In Man they join to some mysterious utilise" (205–206). Pope closes past noting the stages of life and including another well-known phrase as a metaphor for death, "Life's poor play is o'er!" (282), drawing on the familiar innuendo since the Renaissance to life as a performance, men the players. The final line offers the condolement "tho' Human being's a fool, yet God is Wise."
The Third Epistle argues "Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Society." Pope discusses the Universe equally a unmarried social organization, "Nothing made wholly for itself, nor yet wholly for some other" and asserts that animals know happiness and that Reason and Instinct operate for the good of each individual and for Club. While Instinct proves proficient for Club, Reason proves ameliorate, the origins of Monarchy, Faith, and Government, all from the Principle of Dearest, and Superstition and Tyrrany from Fright. Finally, he discusses the various forms of government and their true ends.
Pope offers a theory in his first few lines based on a "concatenation of Love" that all men can observe. They can meet "The unmarried atoms each to other tend" and can see that "All forms that perish other forms supply." In other words, he concludes, "Parts relate to whole" (21), a line critics suggest relates to the various parts of the poem relating to its whole. As he describes monarchs, wits, and tyrants, he describes 2 types of discord. One is warlike and violent, the other chivalrous and creating peace; neither is good on its own. Instinct causes men to feel compassion for others and results in service, an aspect that Reason, "absurd at best" (85), ignores. God sets the proper bounds of each and "On common Wants built mutual Happiness" (112), linking all creatures and all men. The speaker notes that left to his instincts, man might allow his greed to lead to destruction and savagery, and that he tin learn control by observing nature. The bees tin teach arts of edifice, "the mole to plow, the worm to weave" (176). Such statements depict from classical sources, in which efficient creatures were posed every bit examples for human society to imitate.
The speaker states that men never possessed any divine right (236) and supplies various examples of the effect of fear on others. Pope returns to what at kickoff seems to be a paradox, writing,
So drives Cocky-dearest, thro' just and thro'unjust
To 1 Man'south pow'r, ambition, lucre, animalism:
The same Self-love, in all, becomes the cause
Of what restrains him, Government and Laws. (269–272)
However, as Pope critics later explained, what he writes contains no true contradiction. The sharing of self-interest makes for proper government. In the end, "Self-love forsook the path it showtime pursu'd, / And establish the private in the public good" (281–282). The final couplet reads, "Thus God and Nature link'd the gen'ral frame, / And bade Self-love and Social exist the same."
In the 4th and final Epistle Pope'due south focus is happiness, including false notions of happiness; that happiness is the finish of and attainable by all men; that God intends happiness to be bachelor to all; thus, it must be social, governed by general laws. Happiness does not consist in external goods; is kept fifty-fifty by providence, through Hope and Fearfulness; and the skilful man will have an advantage. Nosotros should not judge who is good, and external goods are oftentimes inconsistent with or destructive of virtue. He also deals with the dignity, with superior talents, with fame, and concludes that "the perfection of Virtue and Happiness consists in a conformity to the Society of Providence hither, and a Resignation to information technology here and hereafter."
The reader has no uncertainty regarding Pope'south major topic after reading the first line, which declares, "Oh Happiness! Our being's finish and aim!" Line 3 describes that state of being as "That something still which prompts thursday'eternal sigh, / For which we bear to alive, or cartel to die" (4–5). Discussion with others regarding the location of bliss volition evoke varied responses. Some believe information technology exists "in action, some in ease, / Those phone call it Pleasure, and Delectation these" (22–23), every bit Pope makes the point that we cannot learn of bliss; we must experience it for ourselves in order to recognize it. Most importantly, happiness must "Subsist not in the good of i, but all" (38). Because of order, some will savor more happiness, or bliss, than others; however, "Condition, circumstance is not the matter; / Bliss is the same in discipline or in king" (57–58). The speaker notes unequivocally that "all the good that individuals find" (77) "Lie in 3 words, Health, Peace, and Competence" (fourscore). These elements are equanimous of, and supported by, farther elements and the consideration of all results in the truth that he "Who sees and follows that dandy scheme the best, / Best knows the blessing, and volition nearly be blest" (95–97). He and so makes clear that those who are virtuous and just may die too soon, only their deaths are not caused by their virtue.
In lodge to savor a truthful kingdom on earth, everyone must cooperate, even though "What shocks ane function will edify the residuum, / Nor with one system can they all be blest" (147–148). Again, discord may evoke harmony, as evidenced by the fact that "sometimes virtue starves, while Vice is fed" (149). Humility, Justice, Truth, and Public Spirit deserve to article of clothing a Crown, and they will, merely one must wait to receive the rewards of possessing such traits. In the meantime, "Laurels and shame from no Status rising; / Act well your office, at that place all the honour lies" (193–194). Pope assembles an honor code for all to follow, equally he attempts to convince individuals non to feel jealousy toward others who seem to take more possessions, as these do non lead to bliss. One should also avoid a want for fame, which Pope defines as "a fancy'd life in others breath" (237). Rather, "An honest Homo's the noblest work of God" (248), and " 'Virtue alone is Happiness below' " (310). Pope has managed, through various examples, to lead from his opening request for a definition of happiness to the decision that virtue equates to that country, and, because virtue is available to all, everyone tin enjoy happiness. He echoes his previous sentiments, including that selflove must be pushed from the private to the public, or social level, and that "God loves from Whole to Parts; but human being soul / Must ascent from Private to the Whole" (361–362). As any worthy lesson does, this one bears repeating, and Pope closes with that emphasis:
That REASON, PASSION, respond one bang-up aim;
That truthful SELF-Love and SOCIAL are the same;
That VIRTUE just makes our Bliss below;
And all our Knowledge is, OURSELVES TO KNOW. (395–398)
COMMENTARY
In the opening lines of the Essay on Man [34, 37], Pope proposes to 'vindicate the ways of God to Homo' in a sweeping survey of God'due south 'mighty maze', and thus conspicuously picks up the mantle of poetic and theological authority from Milton, whose Paradise Lost sought to 'justify the ways of God to Man' (references to 'A. Wild, where weeds and flow'rs promiscuous shoot,/Or Garden, tempting with forbidden fruit', EM, I: 7– 8, make the 'target' verse form still more obvious); but the context has inverse from Milton'south apocalyptic and fundamentalist account of the archetypal human Fall to a far more than diagrammatic view of the universe, in which all forms of life, from flies to humans to angels, have an allotted, correct place. Pope'due south cosmos functions as an expression of complementary forces; Milton'southward dynamic narrative of war in heaven is replaced past a organisation of balances; ending and redemption become stasis and resignation. No doubt Milton's poem derives some of its energies from the conflicts of the Civil War, while Pope's was written in an era of greater political stability, at least nominally. Notwithstanding, despite the monumental (and sometimes couplet-like) symmetry of Pope'south 4-function 'Essay', the poem is perhaps not all-time read every bit a systematic treatise, but as a looser, more flexible handling of the earth in relation to some abiding concerns. The 'Epistles' which make up the poem were published separately and have the course of a serious quasi-letter of the alphabet to a friend: 'Essay' in the sense of 'A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition' (Samuel Johnson'south definition).
Pope describes his Essay as 'steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly contrary … forming a temperate yet non inconsistent, and a curt yet not imperfect system of Ideals' (TE 3.i: seven). The primary gravamen of the Essay is thus an attack on pride, on the aspiration of flesh to get higher up its station, browse the mysteries of heaven, promote itself to the fundamental place in the universe. Pope's manner is non bardic or prophetic like Milton's, just information technology does cast itself every bit having authority: 'Know so thyself, assume not God to scan…', an mental attitude borrowed from Milton's Raphael, who counsels Adam not to seek higher knowledge than is advisable. But at that place is something agonizing virtually this assumption of say-so. Milton's angel warns Adam against seeking heavenly knowledge in a voice scripted for him by the earthbound poet Milton in a poem whose vision of the cosmos from Hell, through Chaos, Eden and on upward to Heaven is one of its main readerly pleasures. Similarly, Pope counsels concentration on the man scale in what is, notwithstanding, his cosmological testament. Milton aspires to exist the poet of God, and so indeed does Pope; if the latter is seeking to stifle adventurous mental journeys, he can only practice so by giving them a certain amount of weight and interest.
The vision which is offered the reader after the opening invocation to the philosopher-friend to 'Awake!' is not withal either but satirical or straightforwardly didactic. Despite the continual use of imperative verbs such as See, Look, Mark, Note, which make information technology evident that it is part of the poem's didactic design to brand visible the program of the maze, the theological defense of God'due south providence depends on the assertion that nosotros cannot know more than our own very limited identify in the pattern. Pope seeks a way out of this paradox by contrasting visions: human vision is limited to its own state, but can reason and infer other states from that position.
Thro' worlds unnumber'd tho' the God be known,
'Tis ours to trace him only in our ain.
He, who thro' vast immensity can pierce,
Run into worlds on worlds etch one universe,
Observe how system into organisation runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What vary'd being peoples ev'ry star,
May tell why Heav'n has made us equally nosotros are. (EM, I: 21–8)
Pope instantly oversteps the limits he places on human cognition (''Tis ours to trace him only in our own'), by imagining an infinity of parallel universes, the knowledge of which is only available to the unidentified 'He' who is the subject of the long-delayed primary verb 'May' at line 28; the 'He' ought to be God, but he seems oddly separated from his bureau as Creator. But the delay between subject and object here actually makes the passage read the other mode, and gives us for the elapsing of the sentence the sensation that we are in the position of the nameless 'He', envisaging other systems running into each other, watching other planets circling round other suns, imagining lives in other worlds.
Pope draws on Renaissance images of a 'slap-up concatenation' (EM, I: 33) by which all creatures from microscopic organisms to angels are like links in a graded series which cannot be broken without destroying the hierarchical pattern; thus aspiration to see higher up the concatenation is conflated with aspiration to be higher upward it. Over again the proposition is that our limited vision cannot see simply the limitations of our place in the concatenation, and not its active dynamism:
So Man, who here seems chief solitary,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown,
Touches some bike, or verges to some goal;
'Tis merely a part we see, and not a whole. (EM, I: 57–60)
Our cosmological position is as well express temporally by our blindness to the future, and Pope reminds united states of america of our superiority of cognition over other creatures on earth, to indicate our ain inferiority to creatures we cannot (merely once again, do) imagine (I: 81–half-dozen). We might imagine, for example, a Heaven
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow autumn,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd,
And now a bubble flare-up, and at present a world. (EM, I: 87–90)
But in doing so Pope has again opened a syntactic window for the reader express to seeing simply a office, to imagine what information technology would be like to run across the whole, to exist the person 'Who sees … as God of all' the role of all disasters from miniscule to catholic in some functionally perfect arrangement. In some means, Pope is giving room to that restless want for advancement and knowledge which the poem's overall task is to stifle.
Pope discovers this intellectual pride to operate at more or less every level of homo experience, including the bodily senses.
Why has non Man a microscopic center
For this manifestly reason, Human is not a Fly.
Say what the utilise, were effectively optics giv'n,
T' inspect a mite, non comprehend the heav'n
Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er,
To smart and agonize at ev'ry pore
Or quick effluvia darting thro' the brain,
Dice of a rose in aromatic pain (EM, I: 193–200)
Pope is resisting the imaginative world opened up by improved microscopic technology, only as his catholic vision ambivalently absorbs the epochal discoveries in physics made past Newton; his moral bespeak is that Man has the right amount of perception for his land and position in the system, no more and no less. And notwithstanding the intensification of feel offered by shifting one's sense of 1's senses (so to speak), has attracted him into one of the most memorable pieces of imagining in the entire poem. These lines on human senses open up a new vista of creation in which the differences in perception ('The mole's dim mantle, and the lynx'sbeam', deaf fish against hyper-alert birds, stupid grunter against thoughtful elephant) are seen as fascinatingly complementary. If we renounce inappropriate intensities of sensual experience, as Pope says we must, we can notwithstanding celebrate them vicariously in other, notionally lesser creatures: 'The spider's touch, how exquisitely fine!/ Feels at each thread, and lives along the line' (EM, I: 217–8). Pope's 'line' becomes the line for this feeling to alive along, an exquisite model of his theory of connection betwixt self and outside, animal and fauna.
It is tempting (for Pope tempts us) to imagine what it would be like to dissolve the boundaries betwixt reason and sensation, betwixt the listen of the 'half-reas'ning elephant' and human reason – 'For e'er sep'rate, withal for ever near!' (EM, I: 224). The reason nosotros cannot, and should not seek to, break this jump or modify our identify on the ladder, is correspondingly huge in its theological overtones. Since the system which Pope has imagined is cosmological, if anything steps out of line the unabridged cosmos is ruined:
Let Earth unbalanc'd from her orbit fly,
Planets and Suns runs lawless thro' the sky,
Let ruling Angels from their spheres exist hurl'd,
Being on being wreck'd, and world on world,
Heav'n'southward whole foundations to their middle nod,
And Nature tremble to the throne of God: (EM, I: 251–6)
This is the over-reaching imagination turned Satanic, with the verb 'Permit' ambiguously placed between a sort of ironic command to those who would aspire beyond their station, and a more internalised tertiary person imperative, suggesting the poet as God-substitute could actually conjure such an impiety. As if to suppress that suggestion, poetry is so turned to the service of discovering the immanence of God not at the top of the scale, but in every part of 'one stupendous whole', as the soul of that torso which is nature (EM, I: 267–eighty). This is a kind of sleight of hand whereby the scale becomes nullified equally a organisation of differences and hierarchies, because God is in fact present in equal measure everywhere: 'As total, as perfect, in a hair as heart' (EM, I: 276). No point, so, but to 'Submit – In this, or any other sphere' (EM, I: 285), since all the angles are covered by God:
All Nature is simply Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Management, 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 articulate, 'Whatever IS, is RIGHT.' (EM, I: 289–94)
Pope works upward this dominating, pacifying rhetoric partly out of a sense of his own poetic audacity and its closeness to the aspirations of reason and pride. The last crowning hyperbole, 'Any IS, is Correct', is based on an assumed power of poetic faux of God and a suppressed identification with that voice which might find much of what IS, to be Incorrect.
The second Epistle sets about redeploying those energies of enquiry into the microcosmos of the homo mind. Human being is situated amid warring conceptions of his own nature: 'A beingness darkly wise, and rudely great', 'In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast', 'Created half to ascension, and half to fall' (EM, II: 3–xviii). Using his favourite device of the telling oxymoron, Man becomes a miniature cosmology which has internalised that war which Milton turns into narrative: he is both Adam and Satan, peak and lesser of the scale. Merely the solution to the 'riddle' cannot be Newtonian science, which (Pope implies) insensibly slides from describing the universe to imagining that information technology controls it (EM, Two: nineteen–thirty). Pope acknowledges Newton's genius as a scientist but limitations as a philosopher:
Could he, whose rules the rapid Comet demark,
Describe or fix one motility of his Listen
Who saw its fires hither rise, and there descend,
Explain his ain beginning, or his end (EM, II: 35–8)
The real mystery is the man heed, Pope declares, and later on a further lofty dismissal of the new learning (II: 43–52), he offers a theory which does announced to attempt to fix 'the Mercury of Human being', under the direction of 'Eternal Art' (EM, Two: 175–7) – a kind of thermodynamics of the self: 'Two Principles in human nature reign;/Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain' (EM, II: 53–4). This opposition is dynamic, functional – it is non that reason is skilful and self-love bad, but that both function according to 'their proper operation' within the human system.
Self-love is a kind of id, appetitive, desiring, urging, instigating action; reason is an ego which judges, guides, advises, makes purposeful theenergies of self-beloved. Without these complementary forces human being nature would be either ineffectual or destructive (this is the true catholic drama):
Human being, but for that, no activity could attend,
And, merely for this, were active to no end;
Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot,
To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot;
Or, meteor-like, flame lawless thro' the void,
Destroying others, by himself destroy'd. (EM, II: 61–half dozen)
Pope is conspicuously fascinated by the energies of this self-honey, which might 'flame lawless thro' the void', and is considerably less moralistic almost it than one might expect. In his subsequent give-and-take, self-honey is a strong, active 'moving principle', and reason appears rather tame and distant. Pope wants to strengthen reason's merits gradually; by the cease of the passage nosotros notice 'Attention, habit and feel gains,/ Each strengthen Reason, and Self-love restrain' (EM, Two: 79–80), allying each element with its opposite quality in a characteristic pattern. Pope gives weight to what moralists oft shun: contending that 'strength of listen is Exercise, not Rest' (EM, II: 104), Pope wants to relish the tempestuous nature of this internal creation: 'Nor God alone in the yet calm we find,/He mounts the storm, and walks upon the current of air' (EM, II: 109–10).
Pope must notice something resulting from this elemental strife, yet, which explains differences in human characters, and he does this with the theory of the 'ruling passion', a kind of debased, dark version of cocky-love which Pope initially characterises every bit the 'Heed'southward affliction' which is inherent from nativity in the fashion death is (EM, II: 133-60). 'Passions, like Elements, tho' born to fight,/Yet, mix'd and soften'd, in his work unite' (EM, Ii: 111– 12), Pope contends, to some extent converting an innate psychomachia into a dynamic 'well accorded strife' which 'Gives all the forcefulness and color of our life' (EM, Ii: 121–22). The middle section of the epistle actually posits a far more than negative theory of the mind, in which a baneful 'ruling passion', aligned from birth with a kind of death instinct, dominates the private in an nearly toxic fashion (II: 141–4); a kind of internal fall, in which the mind'due south energies are all poisoned by some dominant characteristic (envy, hatred, greed). Reason can negotiate with this force (II: 162–4), but only 'Th' Eternal Art' (of God), tin reclaim the disastrous energy of the ruling passion past grafting onto it some matching virtue: ''Tis thus the Mercury of Homo is fix'd,/Strong grows the Virtue with his nature mix'd' (EM, 2: 177–8). Nosotros are on a pocketknife-edge between lust and dearest,forehandedness and prudence, anger and fortitude, with simply 'The God within the heed' (EM, 2: 204) to distinguish and prioritise the opposite energies.
Thus committed to a view of the psyche as functioning according to some 'mysterious apply' which combines moral opposites in an aesthetic procedure adamant past God, Pope can open up the case for a social patterning required past inherent weaknesses in mental life: 'Each individual seeks a sev'ral goal;/Only HEAV'North'south nifty view is One, and that the Whole' (EM, II: 237–8). Enlightened of the multiplicity of shades of character between the tidy oppositions of Virtue and Vice (EM, Ii: 210), Pope offers in the last fifty lines of the epistle vignettes which reject to bear witness lives, however clearly defined individually, operating in isolation; each condition has its unexpected compensations ('Meet some strange comfort ev'ry land attend', EM, Ii: 271); but only in social interaction is the plan of God really existence enacted. Across the structure of the epistle, Sky has replaced science as the artist of the heed, with social club as the identify in which psychomachic forces operate to a benign ratio.
Epistle 3 opens with a bravura brandish of the 'concatenation of dearest', finding fifty-fifty in the almost basic matter the tendency to unite:
Run across plastic Nature working to this cease,
The single atoms to each other tend,
Attract, attracted to, the next in identify
Form'd and impell'd its neighbour to embrace. (EM, III: 9–12)
Sociality is the basic blueprint of all nature; life-cycles provide a chronological sequencing of the same principle, i which should remind us of our own place in the scheme, a mutual dependency of created things (Iii: 21–6).
In Pope's imagination, everything works past analogy with something else; relations betwixt wildlife and human beings are transformed into visions of power relations betwixt animals and other animals, wild and tame, domestic and feral (3: 49–70). The psychology which in Epistle II contrasted self-love and reason inside the man mind now contrasts brute instinct with human reason, providing a dissimilar set of conflicts and analogies. Again, 'honest Instinct' is valued surprisingly highly – 'Sure never to o'er-shoot, but only to hit,/While still too wide or short is man Wit' (EM, 3: 89–xc). Pope finds art in the spider's web, 'Columbus-like' courage to explore in the stork (EM, 3: 103–vi); he contends that instinct is God'due south direction, reason merely man'south. Wresting the garden of Eden from Milton's narrative of Adam led astray by inferiorEve, Pope posits a 'land of nature' of undivided unity betwixt homo and animal, in which man Reason is instructed to acquire from creature Instinct to notice food, medicine, the arts of building, ploughing and sailing; fifty-fifty politics. Animals evidence the arts of club before flesh has them (III: 183–eight).
Pope is in somewhat dangerous h2o here, and deliberately maintains absolute residual between 2 types of political system: a communitarian republic (the Ants), and a property-owning monarchy (the Bees). In discovering these 'subterranean works and cities' (EM, III: 181) to the center, Pope is privileging the role of naturally-ordered society, of whichever kind, over any sort of individualism. How Pope gets from here to modern political systems is a skilful deal more than vexed, though information technology has been plausibly suggested that in playing off 'patriarchal' theories of the origins of government (based on the potency of the father) against 'contractual' ones (based on mutual understanding), Pope finally has 'something for the contractualists, and something more for the patriarchalists' (Erskine-Hill 1988, 79–93). By secularising and naturalising the mythic origins of government, Pope adapts patriarchalism for civil society. From a state of nature in which gender divisions play no part at all except in providing the object of mutual desire, Patriarchs suddenly announced, 'past Nature crown'd … Rex, priest, and parent of his growing state' (EM, 3: 215–16). The patriarch becomes a type of God, and information technology is by illustration with such a god, Pope suggests, that people discover 'Ane great first father, and that starting time ador'd' (EM, Three: 226). Thus hierarchical monarchy, and the conventionalities system which underpins it, emerge along patriarchal lines. But Pope draws on both sides to celebrate a modern system which reconciles competing energies:
'Till jarring int'rests of themselves create
Th'according music of a well-mix'd State.
Such is the Globe'southward cracking harmony, that springs
From Gild, Union, full Consent of things! (EM, III: 293–6)
The 'mixed monarchy' for which Great britain deemed itself famous is registered in the motility of Pope's verse as a series of checks and balances in which no i element predominates, merely as the eatables, the lords and the monarch were supposed to make up a political system which avoided the extremes of chaos and tyranny (3: 297–302). In the end, Pope argues, the social nature of human interaction can exist viewed by analogy with wider cosmology:
On their own Centrality as the Planets run,
Yet make at once their circle round the Sun:
And then two consequent motions human action the Soul;
And one regards Itself, and one the Whole. (EM, III: 313–16)
'Regarding the whole' and so became Pope'southward chief poetic problem.
Epistle Four was published somewhat apart from the earlier epistles, in 1734 [37], and in many ways it is the least in keeping with the others, showing a pronounced tendency to dissolve its polished sense of society into a more than stridently satirical account of man folly. Lodge is withal 'Heav'n'due south first police' in Pope'due south scheme (EM, IV: 49), and human disparities still piece of work in harmonious formation: 'All Nature's unequal'rence keeps all Nature's peace' (EM, 4: 56). Merely the epistle shows Pope searching for a ways of addressing the multivalence of man experience, and social inequalities in item, without entirely being able to rely on the format of the vertical chain of being or the horizontal analogy from physics; in what is largely a catalogue of human errors on the subject field of happiness, and a educational activity of contempt for material good, Pope begins to quote some of his own earlier formulations in newly problematic contexts. So 'All fractional Evil, universal Proficient' (EM, I: 292) is rephrased at Four: 114 as one of a range of possibilities for explaining the presence of 'III' in the world; 'Whatever IS, is Correct', the triumphantly confident punchline of Epistle I (EM, I: 294), appears now to need further qualification (4: 145). Pope'south answer to these bug – the presence of evil, inequalities of fortune, potential for happiness non being realised – is in the end located in a retreat from the world into personal Virtue. The public globe is presented as increasingly corrupt and unstable, with fame intangible and misleading (IV: 217–58); the simply universally available and reliable happiness is an inner conviction of virtuous life. At that place is path and design attached to the life of Virtue, for he who is 'Slave to no sect, who takes no private road' (EM, 4: 331) tin perceive 'that Chain which links th'immense design' (EM, 4: 333), and acts his function in it. Pope's privileging of virtue is non however an isolating status but a sort of precondition for outward-directed action. Inner virtue leads to borough virtue, charity, benevolence, but it must be that style round:
God loves from Whole to Parts: but human soul
Must rising from Individual to the Whole.
Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
Equally the small-scale pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov'd, a circle strait succeeds,
Some other still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race,
Wide and more broad, th'o'erflowings of the mind
Take ev'ry creature in, of ev'ry kind;
World smiles around, with boundless bounty blessed,
And Heav'n beholds its image in his breast. (EM, Four: 361–72) T
he physical metaphor of the mind rippling and flood into wider contexts itself oversteps its ostensible purpose here and reminds us of several of the physics-derived images in earlier epistles; this is the ecological system of mind, world and universe as it is supposed to work at the end of the argument.
Simply the actual cease of the work is curious. Pope onece more than addresses Bolingbroke, his 'guide, philosopher, and friend' (EM, IV: 390), according him as an exile from worldly political success the sort of inner virtue already established every bit God's true template and suggesting that Bolingbroke's futurity fame might preserve Pope's as well. So much is placed in the form of a question (IV: 383–xc). However, as Pope comments on the truth-value of his work, and moves finally into recalling the summaries of each earlier epistles so equally to provide belligerent closure (4: 391–8), the question mark, though grammatically required because the statement depends on the question to Bolingbroke, is lost, and the apparent certainties of Pope's ain commentary on what he has achieved in his fearsomely disciplined endeavour to systematise chaos are haunted by a ghostly sense of query.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hammond, Brean Due south. Pope and Bolingbroke: A Written report of Friendship and Influence. Columbia: Academy of Missouri Press, 1984.
Morris, David P. Alexander Pope, the Genius of Sense. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Printing, 1984.
Source: Baines, Paul. The Complete Critical Guide to Alexander Pope. London: New York, 2001.
Categories: Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, Poetry
Source: https://literariness.org/2020/07/08/analysis-of-alexander-popes-an-essay-on-man/
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