Chapter XXXIII: Appendix (9)

[1025] Bolingbroke, Fragment 25: "This is to weigh his own opinion against Providence." Pope adduces the contented faith of the savage to rebuke the dissatisfaction of certain civilised men. The contrast completely fails. The contentment and dissatisfaction are applied by Pope to different objects, the contentment of the savage being limited to his idea of a future life, whereas the dissatisfaction of civilised man is said to be chiefly with his present condition, about which the savage is often dissatisfied likewise. The imperfect information of missionaries is not even sufficient warrant for asserting that all Indians believed in a future state, and if there were dissentients among them their case did not differ from that of civilised men. Above all the contentment of the Indian is the result of grovelling views, and uninquiring ignorance, and whatever may be the errors of infidels among ourselves they cannot be remedied by an appeal to those blind conceptions of the savage, which Pope supposed to be false. "Our flattering ourselves here," he said to Spence, "with the thoughts of enjoying the company of our friends when in the other world may be but too like the Indians thinking that they shall have their dogs and horses there."

[1026] First edition:

Pronounce He acts too little or too much.

[1027] "Gust," or the relish for anything, is the opposite of "disgust," and is applied by Pope to the pleasures of the palate. The word is found in Dryden, and several other writers, but never came into general use.

[1028] MS.:

Yet if unhappy think tis He's unjust,

which is the reading of the first edition, except that "thou" is substituted for "if."

[1029] The meaning cannot be that the caviller complained that other creatures were made perfect as well as himself, because nobody supposed that either men or animals were perfect. Pope apparently means that these persons complained that man was not an exception to the general law of imperfection and mortality, although he "alone" would then have been "perfect" in this world, and immortal in the next. It follows that the objectors disbelieved in the immortality of the soul, and that Pope thought their demand for immortality unreasonable.

[1030] The "balance" in which qualities are weighed; the "rod" with which offences are chastised.

[1031] Divines maintained that there must be a future state, or that many of the phenomena of this life would be inexplicable. Bolingbroke rejected a future state, and argued that this life was a scheme complete in itself. All who did not concur in his view "joined," he said, "in a clamour against Providence," and "murmured against his justice." Not that they had ever uttered a syllable against Providence, for they were devout and humble adorers of his perfections, but they denied that Bolingbroke's scheme was God's scheme, and Bolingbroke in his arrogance and passion insisted that whoever repudiated his philosophy set himself up against God. Pope versified the declamation of Bolingbroke, without pointing it to the class against whom it was originally directed.

[1032] The first edition reads "In pride, my friend, in pride," and the edition of 1735, "In reas'ning pride, my friend."

[1033] Verbatim from Bolingbroke: "Men would be angels, and we see in Milton that angels would be gods."--WARTON.

Sir Fulk Greville, "Works, 1633, p. 73:

Men would be tyrants, tyrants would be gods."--HURD.

[1034] Lord Bacon's Advancement of Learning, ed. Montagu, p. 267: "Aspiring to be like God in power, the angels transgressed and fell; aspiring to be like God in knowledge, man transgressed and fell."

[1035] Piety must equally answer with grateful adoration that all these things have been created for the use of man. The error of pride is in the assumption that they have been created for man alone, who is only one out of an infinity of creatures on our globe, as our globe again is only a portion of a larger system. Hence Pope intends us to infer, that it is folly for us to test all things by the consequences to ourselves. The language, however, which he puts into the mouth of pride is extravagant, and "can hardly," says M. Crousaz, "have been ever uttered by any one, unless it were in jest."

[1036] MS.:

For me young nature decks her vernal bow'r,
Suckles each bud, and pencils ev'ry flow'r.

[1037] Garth, Dispensary, i. 175:

His couch a trench, his canopy the skies.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope remembered Isaiah lxvi. 1: "Thus saith the Lord, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool." No sane man could ever pretend that "earth was his footstool," and Pope alone is responsible for the unbecoming misapplication of the prophet's language.

[1038] MS.:

or when oceans
When earth quick swallows, inundations sweep.

[1039] "A nation" in the first edition. The expression is hyperbolical. Pope alludes to such catastrophes as the inundation of Jutland when the sea broke down the dykes in 1634, and fifteen thousand people were drowned. Irruptions on a smaller scale have sometimes been occasioned by the rising of the sea during an earthquake. In that of 1783 the inhabitants of Scilla, in the kingdom of Naples, deserted their city to avoid being crushed by the falling houses, and fled to the shore. A mighty wave, which swept three miles inland, carried back with it 2473 persons, and their prince among the number. Cowper, The Task, ii. 117, has recorded the tragedy in his grandest verse:

Where now the throng
That pressed the beach, and hasty to depart,
Looked to the sea for safety? They are gone,
Gone with the refluent wave into the deep,
A prince with half his people.

[1040] Pope says, that "earthquakes swallow towns _to_ one grave, whole nations _to_ the deep," where "to" should be "in." But this would not have suited the phrase "tempests sweep," and the poet preferred brevity to correctness.

[1041] First edition:

Blame we for this the wise Almighty Cause;
No, 'tis replied, he acts by gen'ral laws.

The government by general laws, we are told, has "a few exceptions," which must either refer to the scripture miracles, which Pope did not believe when he wrote the Essay on Man, or to the doctrine of a special providence, which he opposes in the fourth epistle.

[1042] "Some change" for "there has been some change," is bad English. The argument is not superior to the language. Plagues, earthquakes, and tempests, say the vindicators of nature, may in part be explained by the changes which have taken place since the creation of the world. Pope, Epist. iv. ver. 115, repeats that "evil" has been "admitted" through "change." As no reason is assigned for this conversion of physical good into physical evil, the supposition does not diminish the difficulty.

[1043] On a cursory reading we might understand Pope to mean that nature sometimes deviates from her stated course for the purpose of promoting human happiness. This sense does not agree with the context, and the true interpretation is, that if the great end of terrestrial creation is allowed to be human happiness, then it is clear that nature sometimes deviates from that end, as in the instance of plagues and earthquakes.

[1044] The assertion is monstrous that we cannot be expected to control our evil passions because nature has her storms, diseases, and earthquakes. This is not to justify the ways of God, but the ways of wicked men. The physical evil ordained by the ruler of the world, cannot be put upon the same foundation with the moral evil which reason and revelation condemn. Sin is permitted because it is better that offences should exist than that free will should be destroyed, but it is lamentable that we should will to do evil in preference to good. The justification of the abuses of free will is a distinct proposition from the argument into which Pope glides, that it is not harder to understand why man should be allowed to be a scourge to man than why suffering should be inflicted through the agency of earthquakes and pestilence.

[1045] To draw a parallel between things of a nature entirely different is mere sophistry. A continual spring would be fatal to the earth and its inhabitants, but how would the world suffer if men were always wise, calm, and temperate?--CROUSAZ.

[1046] Shortly after his father, Alexander VI., ascended the papal throne in 1492, Cæsar Borgia commenced the career of war, massacre, and murder which made him the scourge and terror of Italy. He was killed by a musket-ball at a petty siege in 1507. The conspiracy of Catiline against the Roman government was terminated by his death at the head of his banditti, B.C. 62, but from his depraved and desperate character there was every reason to believe that he would have used a victory to plunder with insatiable greediness, and to destroy with remorseless cruelty.

[1047] God does not "pour ambition into Cæsar's mind," or the all-perfect being would be the author of sin. The aberrations of ambition are the acts of the ambitious man.

[1048] Alexander the Great. He made a pilgrimage to the temple of Jupiter Ammon, in Africa, and the priests styled him son of their god. Upon the faith of the oracle his flatterers believed, or affected to believe, that he was of divine descent.

[1049] The four lines, ver. 157-160, first appeared in the edition of 1743.

[1050] MS.:

From whence all physical or moral ill?
'Tis nature wand'ring from the eternal will.

Pope plainly avows that physical evil is the disobedience of inanimate nature to the Creator, as moral evil arose from the disobedience of man. The couplet, in an altered form, was transferred to Epist. iv. ver. 111, where the context confirms the interpretation which the present version appears to require.

[1051] See this subject extended in Epist. ii. from ver. 100 to ver. 122; ver. 165, etc.--POPE.

Pope is answering the objections to moral evil. The passions for which he has undertaken to account are vicious in kind or in degree--they are the passions which are contrary to "virtue," ver. 166,--the passions of Borgia, Catiline, Cæsar, and Alexander,--and these are not elements essential to human life.

[1052] Pope uses almost the very words of Bolingbroke: "To think worthily of God we must think that the natural order of things has been always the same; and that a being of infinite wisdom and knowledge, to whom the past and the future are like the present, and who wants no experience to inform him, can have no reason to alter what infinite wisdom and knowledge have once done."--WARTON.

In saying that the "general order" had been "kept," Pope did not mean that there were no exceptions, for he held that there had been "some change" since the beginning of things, which was to reject the fanciful principle of Bolingbroke. Infinite wisdom cannot err, but change is not necessarily the reparation of error, and a progressive may be preferable to a stationary system.

[1053] This is Pope's summary of his weak defence of moral evil. Moral and physical irregularities, he says in effect, have always prevailed, and both are indispensable. He denies this in his third epistle, and asserts that universal innocence endured for several generations to the great advantage of man.

[1054] Psalm viii. 5: "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour."--WARBURTON.

[1055] MS.: "Brawn."

[1056] Pope, in these lines, diverts himself with drawing the picture of a fool, that he may remark upon him, and extend the remarks to mankind in general. But such fools are rarely to be met with, and I question whether one can be found infatuated to a degree like this.--CROUSAZ.

Bishop Butler, like Crousaz, did not believe that such "fools" existed. "Who," he asked, "ever felt uneasiness upon observing any of the advantages brute creatures have over us?" Pope's authority was The Moralists of Lord Shaftesbury. "Why, says one, was I not made by nature strong as a horse? Why not hardy and robust as this brute creature? or nimble and active as that other?"

[1057] The inversion is harsh; and when the words are ranged in their proper order, "If he call all creatures made for his use," is but uncouth English.

[1058] Shaftesbury's Moralists, Part ii. Sect. 4: "Nature has managed all for the best, with perfect frugality and just reserve; profuse to none, but bountiful to all."

[1059] It is a certain axiom in the anatomy of creatures, that in proportion as they are formed for strength their swiftness is lessened; or as they are formed for swiftness their strength is abated.--POPE.

This is an error. The most powerful race-horses are often the fleetest.

[1060] First edition:

So justly all proportioned to each state.

[1061] Vid. Epist. iii. ver. 79, etc., and ver. 109, etc.--POPE.

[1062] That is, in its own state or condition.

[1063] First edition:

Each beast, each insect, happy as it can,
Is heav'n unkind to nothing but to man?
Shall man, shall reasonable man alone
Be or endowed with all, or pleased with none?

[1064] First edition:

No self-confounding faculties to share,
No senses stronger than his brain can bear.

This rejected couplet embodied a fancy from Lord Shaftesbury's Moralists that the leading qualities in any being are always provided at the expense of other organs, and that if man had been endowed with greater and more numerous bodily capacities his brain would have been starved.

[1065] First edition:

What the advantage if his finer eyes
Study a mite, not comprehend the skies.

The second edition has some further variations:

Why has not man a microscopic sight?
For this plain reason, man is not a mite:
Say what th' advantage of so fine an eye?
T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the sky.

Pope owed the thought, and the expression "microscopic eye" to Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 23, sect. 12: "If by the help of microscopical eyes, a man could penetrate into the secret composition of bodies, he would not make any great advantage by the change if he could not see things he was to avoid at a convenient distance."

[1066] The abbreviated language of the last four lines, which are not legitimate composition, makes it difficult to follow the construction: "Say what the use were finer touch given if, trembingly alive all o'er, we were to smart and agonise at ev'ry pore? Or what the use of quick effluvia darting through the brain, if we were to die of a rose in aromatic pain?"

[1067] Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, bk. ii. chap. 23, sect. 12: "If our sense of hearing were but one thousand times quicker than it is, how would a perpetual noise distract us. And we should in the quietest retirement be less able to sleep or meditate than in the middle of a sea-fight."--WARTON.

Butler, Hudibras, ii. 1, 617.

Her voice, the music of the spheres,
So loud, it deafens mortal ears.--WAKEFIELD.

It was an ancient fancy that the planets rolled along spheres, emitting music as they went. Pope's supposition that the music would stun us, alludes to the remarks of Cicero, Somnium Scipionis, that the crash of harmony is so tremendous that human ears cannot receive it, just as human eyes cannot gaze at the sun. Warburton remarks that Pope should not have illustrated a philosophical argument by the example of an unreal sound.

[1068] First edition:

Through gen'ral life, behold the scale arise
Of sensual and of mental faculties!
Vast range of sense from man's imperial race
To the green myriads, etc.

A very little observation would have satisfied Pope that "green" is not the prevailing hue of the "myriads in the peopled grass." Wakefield says that the expression "man's imperial race," in ver. 209, is from Dryden's Virg. Geo. iii. 377, and that the general argument is from Bolingbroke's Fragments: "There is a gradation of sense and intelligence here from animal beings imperceptible to us for their minuteness, without the help of microscopes, and even with them, up to man." This is what Leibnitz called "the law of continuity." "Nature," he said, "never proceeds by leaps."

[1069] The manner of the lions hunting their prey in the deserts of Africa is this; at their first going out in the night-time they set up a loud roar, and then listen to the noise made by the beasts in their flight, pursuing them by the ear, and not by the nostril. It is probable, the story of the jackal's hunting for the lion was occasioned by observation of this defect of scent in that terrible animal.--POPE.

Pope was mistaken in his notion that the lion hunted by ear alone, and that his sense of smell was obtuse. His scenting powers are very acute. The account which Pope gives would not, if it were true, explain why the jackal should have been singled out for the office of lion's provider. The real reason is told by Livingstone. When the lion is devouring his prey, "the jackal comes sniffing about, and sometimes suffers for his temerity by a stroke from the lion's paw laying him dead." The persevering attempt of the lesser animal to share the spoils with the greater, led to the belief that the two worked in concert--that the jackal was the pioneer, and the lion the executioner. There are two other readings of ver. 213 in the MS.:

smell the stupid ass
Degrees of scent the vulgar brute between.

All the versions are deformed by the license of putting the preposition "between" after its noun.

[1070] It was formerly a common belief that fish were deaf; but Pope ascribes to them some capacity of hearing, and this is now known to be correct.

[1071] Dryden, Marriage-a-la-mode, Act ii.:

And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such,
That, spider-like, we feel the tender'st touch.--WAKEFIELD.

These lines are admirable patterns of forcible diction. The peculiar and discriminating expressiveness of the epithets ought to be particularly regarded. Perhaps we have no image in the language more lively than that of ver. 218. "To live along the line," is equally bold and beautiful. In this part of the epistle the poet seems to have remarkably laboured his style, which abounds in various figures, and is much elevated. Pope has practised the great secret of Virgil's art, which was to discover the very single epithet that precisely suited each occasion. If Pope must yield to other poets in point of fertility of fancy, or harmony of numbers, yet in point of propriety, closeness, and elegance of diction, he can yield to none.--WARTON.

[1072] The house-spider conceals itself in a cell, which is constructed below the web, and at a distance from it. The threads which are spun from the edge of the web to the spider's lurking-hole, vibrate when a fly comes in contact with the web, and are at once a telegraph to give information to the spider, and a bridge along which it can rush forward to secure its prey.

[1073] When the nectar of flowers is poisonous, the bee has not the power of separating its noxious from its wholesome properties, nor do bees always avoid the flowers which are hurtful to them. Some honey which is fatal to man may not be injurious to the insects collecting it.

[1074] At first it ran,

How instinct varies! What a hog may want
Compared with thine, half-reasoning elephant.--WARTON.

[1075] Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:

Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

Pope is illustrating his proposition that there must be grades of capacity for animal to be subject to animal, and all animals to man. The application of the couplet to his argument is obscure, and the couplet itself very vague. The "remembrance" closely "allied to reflection" appears to be the effort of attention by which we recall the dormant stores of memory. "Thought" is a dubious term, but seems to be put by Pope for the acts of mind which take their rise in the mind itself, as willing, imagining, reasoning, etc., in contradistinction to seeing, feeling, taste, etc., which are produced by the operation of external things upon the senses.

[1076] A two-fold or mixed nature was sometimes in old language called a "middle nature," such as a compound of mind and matter, or an amphibious animal, and Pope perhaps meant that the double nature "longs to join" in a more intimate union. Or he may have meant by "middle," an intermediate nature, such as any creature which has an order of beings above and below it, but then to satisfy Pope's phraseology there must be two of these middle natures which are longing to unite with each other, and the higher would not desire to be "joined" to the lower. The couplet seems at best to be mere mystical jargon.

[1077] The idea is in Locke's Essay, bk. iii. chap. 6, sect. 12, which Warton quotes. Bolingbroke, Fragment 49, copied Locke and others, and Pope copied Bolingbroke.

[1078] Ed. 1st:

Ethereal essence, spirit, substance, man.--POPE.

[1079] This is a magnificent passage. Thomson had before said in Summer, ver. 333:

Has any seen
The mighty chain of beings, lessening down
From infinite perfection, to the brink
Of dreary nothing.--WARTON.

Kennet's Pascal, p. 166: "He will find himself hanging, in the material scale, between the two vast abysses of infinite and nothing."

[1080] All that can be said of a scale of beings is to be found in the third chapter of King's Origin of Evil, and in a note ending with these emphatic words: "Whatever system God had chosen, there could have been but a determinate multitude of the most perfect creatures, and when that was completed there would have been a station for creatures less perfect, and it would still have been an instance of goodness to give them a being as well as others."--WARTON.

[1081] Suffer men, says Pope, to encroach upon superior powers, and either inferior powers must rise to the rank we have vacated, or by not moving forward into the gap, they will leave a void in creation.

[1082] MS.:

in nature what it hates, a void;
Or leave a gap in the creation void;
The scale is broken if a step destroyed.

[1083] Dryden, Love Triumphant, Act iv. Sc. 1:

Great nature, break thy chain, that links together
The fabric of this globe, and make a chaos.

[1084] MS.:

Yet more ev'n systems in gradation roll.

[1085] Bolingbroke, Fragment 42: "We cannot doubt that numberless worlds, and systems of worlds, compose this amazing whole, the universe."

[1086] Milton, Par. Lost, vii. 242:

And earth self-balanced on her centre hung.

The tendency of the earth to move in a straight line is balanced by the attraction of the sun, and Pope supposes this attraction to cease.

[1087] I like the reading of earlier editions better;

Planets and suns _rush_ lawless through the sky.--WAKEFIELD.

[1088] After Pope's death "tremble" was misprinted "trembles," and the error has been retained in most editions. The construction is, "Let planets and suns run lawless through the sky, let being be wrecked on being, world on world, let heaven's whole foundations nod to their centre, and let nature tremble to the throne of God!"

[1089] These six lines, ver. 251-256, are added since the first edition.--POPE.

Ruffhead says "there is no reading these lines without being struck with a momentary apprehension." Without quite allowing this, we cannot but feel their great beauty and force. Line rises upon line, with greater effect and nobler imagery, and in the conclusion the poet has touched the idea with propriety, as well as dignity and sublimity. If he had been more particular, the passage would have been unworthy the grandeur of the subject; had he been less it would have been obscure. He has at once evinced judgment and poetry. If there be a word or two not quite suitable, perhaps it is "run," and "foundations nod." I could have wished such a word as "rushed lawless," or "flamed lawless through the sky."--BOWLES.

[1090] The chief problem which Pope undertook to solve was the existence of moral evil. Yet, if man, in obedience to God's commands, became morally perfect, none of the disastrous effects the poet describes would ensue. Angels would not be hurled from their spheres; worlds would not be wrecked; nor would heaven's foundations nod to their centre. Reason and revelation unite in the conclusion that moral perfection would, on the contrary, be an unmitigated blessing. Consequently Pope's hypothesis explains nothing unless he had shown how it is that a system which rendered evil impossible would be inferior to our own.

[1091] Plotinus, translated by Cudworth, Intellectual System, ed. Harrison, vol. iii., p. 479: "Some things in me partake only of being, some of life also, some of sense, some of reason, and some of intellect above reason. But no man ought to require equal things from unequal; nor that the finger should see, but the eye; it being enough for the finger to be a finger, and to perform its own office."--WARTON.

[1092] Bolingbroke, Fragment 66: "Nothing can be more absurd than the complaints of creatures who are in one of these orders, that they are not in another."

[1093] Vid. the prosecution and application of this in Epist. iv. ver. 162.--POPE.

[1094] "Soul," says Samuel Clarke, "signifies a part of a whole, whereof body is the other part, and they, being united, mutually affect each other as parts of the same whole. But God is present to every part of the universe, not as a soul, but as a governor, so as to act upon everything in what manner he pleases, himself being acted upon by nothing." Warburton quotes some passages from Sir Isaac Newton asserting the omnipresence of the Deity, and the commentator affirms that the poet expressed the identical doctrine of the philosopher. This is a misrepresentation. The extracts of Warbuton are from the scholium to the Principia, where Newton adds, "God governs all things, not as a soul of the world, but as the Lord of the universe. The Godhead of God is his dominion, a dominion not like that of a soul over its own body, but that of a Lord over his servants." The doctrine which Pope held in common with Sir Isaac Newton was the omnipresence of the Deity. The doctrine which Sir Isaac Newton repudiated, and which Pope maintained, was that the world was the body of God as the human frame is of man. The world in this sense was not the work of the Deity, but a portion of him. Pope abandoned his present creed, Epist. iii. ver. 229, where he says,

The worker from the work distinct was known.

[1095] Every ear must feel the ill effect of the monotony in these lines. The cause is obvious. When the pause falls on the fourth syllable, we shall find that we pronounce the six last in the same time that we do the four first, so that the couplet is not only divided into two equal lines, but each line, with respect to time, is divided into two equal parts.--WEBB.

[1096] Our poet is certainly indebted to the following verses of Mrs. Chandler on Solitude:

He's all in all: his wisdom, goodness, pow'r,
Spring in each blade, and bloom in ev'ry flow'r;
Smile o'er the meads, and bend in ev'ry hill, }
Glide in the stream, and murmur in the rill: }
All nature moves obedient to his will. }

Dryden, in the State of Innocence, Act v., was probably also in our poet's recollection:

Where'er thou art, he is: th' eternal mind
Acts through all places, is to none confined;
Fills ocean, earth, and air, and all above,
And through the universal mass does move.--WAKEFIELD.

[1097] "Our mortal part," is put in opposition to "soul," and the antithesis is a recognition of the soul's immortality. The allusion was too slight to offend Bolingbroke, or, perhaps, to attract his notice.

[1098] Dugald Stewart observes that everyone must be displeased with this line, because the triviality of the alliteration is at variance with the sublimity of the subject.

[1099] First edition:

As the rapt Seraphim that sings and burns.

The name Seraphim, says Warburton, signifies burners, and Wakefield quotes, in illustration, from Spenser's Hymn of Heavenly Beauty, stanza 14:

And those eternal burning Seraphims
Which from their faces dart out fiery light.

[1100] These are lines of a marvellous energy and closeness of expression.--WARTON.

The concluding lines appear to be a false jingle of words which neutralise the whole of Pope's argument. If there is to Providence "no high, no low, no great, no small," the gradation of beings is a delusion. What things are in the sight of God, that they are in reality, and since no one thing in creation is superior or inferior to any other thing, Pope's language throughout this epistle is unmeaning. The final phrase of the couplet is bathos. God is not only the "equal" of "all" his works, he is immeasurably beyond them.

[1101] The "order" is the gradation of beings, and "what we blame" is our own rank in the scale of creation, whereas, says Pope, our "proper bliss depends upon it."

[1102] MS.:

Cease then, nor order imperfection call
On which depends the happiness of all.
Reason, to think of God when she pretends,
Begins a censor, an adorer ends.
See and confess, this just, this kind degree
Of blindness, etc.

[1103] Pope would not express a "sure and certain hope in a blessed resurrection." He used the same equivocal language as his "guide," who had no faith that "another sphere" existed for man. "Let the tranquillity of my mind," said Bolingbroke, Frag. 51, "rest on this immovable rock, that my future, as well as my present state, are ordered by an almighty and all-wise Creator."

[1104] MS.:

In the same hand, the same all-plastic pow'r.

[1105] "Nature is the art whereby God governs the world," says Hobbes.--WARTON.

Sir T. Browne, Relig. Med. Part i. 16: "In brief all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God."

[1106] Art, in the sense of design, is manifest in nature, and has been traced in endless particulars. Pope must mean by "unknown art" the ultimate principles to which the laws of nature owe their efficiency.

[1107] From Fontenelle: "Everything is chance, provided we give this name to an order unknown to us."--WARTON.

[1108] Feltham's Resolves: "The world is kept in order by discord, and every part of it is but a more particular composed jar. And in all these it makes greatly for the Maker's glory that such an admirable harmony should be produced out of such an infinite discord."--WARTON.

[1109] This line ran thus in the first edition:

And spite of pride, and in thy reason's spite.

Pope afterwards, says Johnson, discovered, or was shown, that the "truth" which subsisted "in spite of reason" could not be very "clear."

[1110] MS.:

Learn we ourselves, not God presume to scan,
But know the study, etc.

[1111] Ed. 1.:

The only science of mankind is man.

Ed. 2.:

The proper study, etc.--POPE.

"The true science and true study of man is man," says Charron in his treatise on Wisdom; and Pascal, in his thoughts translated by Dr. Kennet, 1727, p. 248, says, "The study of man is the proper employment and exercise of mankind." But Pascal is maintaining that man should study himself in preference to mathematics, and not to the exclusion of God, which is a doctrine that would have filled him with horror.

[1112] From Cowley, who says of life, in his ode on Life and Fame:

Vain, weak-built isthmus, which dost proudly rise
Up betwixt two eternities.--WARTON.

[1113] Kennet's Pascal, p. 160: "We have an idea of truth, not to be effaced by all the wiles of the sceptic."

[1114] The stoic took his stand upon virtue, and with a stern faith in the all-sufficiency of moral excellence he calmly defied the trials of life.

[1115] Johnson, in his translation of Crousaz, says he cannot determine whether any one has discovered the true meaning of the words "in doubt to act or rest." The language is vague, and incapable of an interpretation which is generally true; but the probable sense seems to be that man is in doubt whether to embrace an active belief, or whether to resign himself to a passive, inert scepticism.

[1116] First edition:

To deem himself a part of God or beast.

Kennet's Pascal, p. 30, furnished the hint for the line: "What, then, is to be the fate of man? Shall he be equal to God, or shall he not be superior to the beasts?"

[1117] Man is not born only to die, but death has the present life on one side of it, and immortality on the other. Man does not reason only to err, but to establish a multitude of mighty truths.

[1118] "Such is the reason of man that he is equally ignorant whether, etc."

[1119] From Kennet's Pascal, p. 180: "If we think too little of a thing or too much, our head turns giddy, and we are at a loss to find out our way to truth."

[1120] Kennet's Pascal, p. 162: "What a chimæra then is man! What a confused chaos! What a subject of contradiction!"

[1121] "Abused" here means "deceived," a sense of the word which was once common. Lord Bacon, Essay on Cunning: "Some build upon the abusing of others, and, as we now say, putting tricks upon them." Bishop Hall, Contemplations upon the New Testament, bk. ii. cont. 6: "Crafty men and lying spirits agreed to abuse the credulous world."

[1122] Kennet's Pascal, p. 162: "If he is too aspiring we can lower him; if too mean we can raise him."

[1123] From Kennet's Pascal, p. 162: "A professed judge of all things, and yet a feeble worm of the earth; the great depositary and guardian of truth, and yet a mere huddle of uncertainty; the glory and the scandal of the universe."

[1124] After ver. 18 in the MS.:

For more perfection than this state can bear
In vain we sigh; heav'n made us as we are.
[If gods we _must_ because we _would_ be, then
Pray hard ye monkies, and ye may be men.]
As wisely sure a modest ape might aim
To be like man, whose faculties and frame
He sees, he feels, as you or I to be
An angel thing we neither know nor see.
Observe how near he edges on our race;
What human tricks! how risible of face!
"It must be so--why else have I the sense
Of more than monkey charms and excellence?
Why else to walk on two so oft essayed?
And why this ardent longing for a maid?"
So Pug might plead, and call his gods unkind,
Till set on end, and married to his mind.
Go, reas'ning thing! assume the Doctor's chair,
As Plato deep, as Seneca severe:
Fix moral fitness, and to God give rule,
Then drop, etc.--WARBURTON.

The couplet between brackets was omitted by Warburton. There is still another reading in the MS. of the couplet, "Observe how near," etc.

Observe his love of tricks, his laughing face;
An elder brother, too, to human race.

[1125] MS.:

Go, reas'ning man, go mount, etc.

[1126] MS.:

Instruct erratic planets where to run.

[1127] Warburton says that the phrase "correct old Time" refers to Sir Isaac Newton's Chronology of Antient Kingdoms Amended, in which one of the main positions was based upon astronomical science. More probably Pope alluded to the familiar fact of the Gregorian reformation of the calendar by substituting new style for old. The change was adopted towards the close of the sixteenth century through the greater part of Europe, but the old style was retained in England till 1752. By "regulate the sun," Wakefield understands the use of equal mean for unequal apparent time.

[1128] Ed. 4, 5.:

Show by what rules the wand'ring planets stray,
Correct old Time, and teach the sun his way.--POPE.

"Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule," exclaims Pope, ver. 29, and Warburton correctly remarks that the sarcastic summary is "a conclusion from all that had been said before from ver. 18 to this effect." The illustrations which go before should consequently be examples of the wild attempts to show how the world might have been better contrived, and Pope points to such schemes when he says, "_Instruct_ the planets in what orbs to run." But he has perplexed his meaning by improperly mixing up with instances of ignorant presumption, those real discoveries in science, which are the result of a patient investigation of God's works, and have no connection with the pretence of "teaching Eternal Wisdom how to rule."

[1129] Bolingbroke, Fragment 58: "They soar up on Platonic wings to the first good and the first just." Plato taught that there was a good in itself, a just in itself, a beautiful in itself, etc. These ideas, as he called them, these faultless archetypes of earthly qualities, were not mere abstractions of the mind. They had a real existence, and all that was good, beautiful, and just in this world, was derived from them. The "empyreal sphere" was the outermost of the nine fictitious spheres of the ancients, and is "inhabited," says Cicero in his Vision of Scipio, "by that all-powerful God who controls the other spheres." Pope learned his contempt of Plato from Bolingbroke, who said of him with his usual intemperance, and more than his usual ignorance, that he was the "father of philosophical lying, and treated every subject like a bombast poet, and a mad theologian."

[1130] MS.:

And proudly rave of imitating God.

Bolingbroke, Fragment 2: "I dare not use theological familiarity and talk of imitating God." Frag. 4: "I hold it to be worse than absurd to assert that man can imitate God." The Platonists taught that if we would know and imitate God we must withdraw the mind from the things of sense, and contemplate the spiritual and the perfect. Pope's object was to ridicule those who thought that the perfections of the Deity were to be the model for the imperfect efforts of man. The notion, he says, is not less preposterous than the Eastern absurdity of twisting in a circle to imitate the apparent revolution of the sun.

[1131] MS.:

So Eastern madmen in a circle run.

[1132] Plutarch tells us, in his Life of Numa, that the followers of Pythagoras were enjoined to turn themselves round during the performance of their religious worship; and that this circumrotation was intended to imitate the revolution of the world. Pliny, in his Natural History, xxviii. 5, mentions the same practice.--WAKEFIELD.

Pope referred to the sacred dance of the Mahometan monks. "They turn on their left foot," says Thevenot, "like a wind-mill driven by a strong wind," and Lady Mary W. Montagu, who witnessed the ceremony, states that they whirled round with an amazing swiftness for above an hour without any of them showing the least appearance of giddiness, which, she adds, is not to be wondered at when it is considered they are all used to it from their infancy.

[1133] MS.:

Of moral fitness fix th' unerring rule.

[1134] MS.:

Angels themselves, I grant it, when they saw
One mighty man, etc.

[1135] MS.:

Admired an angel in a human shape.

[1136] From the Zodiac of Palingenius:

Simia cœlicolum, risusque jocusque deorum est
Tunc homo, cum temerè ingenio confidit, et audet
Abdita naturæ scrutari, arcanaque divum.--WARTON.

This image gives an air of burlesque to the passage, notwithstanding all that can be said. It is degrading to the subject, to the idea of the "superior beings," and to the character on whom it is meant as a panegyric.--BOWLES.

The author of a Letter to Mr. Pope, 1735, says that the lines on Newton had been "generally admired and repeated." From this praise he justly dissents. Either the angels could not have "admired" Newton in the proper sense of the word, or they could not have "shown him as we show an ape," when he would have appeared a grotesque and ludicrous object. The idea is altogether a poor conceit, and was not worth borrowing. In the MS. an additional couplet followed ver. 34:

Ah, turn the glass! it shows thee all along
As weak in conduct, as in science strong.

[1137] Ed. 4: The whirling comet.--POPE.

[1138] Ed. 1:

Could he who taught each planet where to roll,
Describe or fix one movement of the soul?
Who marked their points to rise or to descend,
Explain his own beginning or his end?--POPE.

[1139] Sir Isaac Newton showed the probability, converted into certainty by later observations, that comets travelled in elongated curves, and were subjected to the identical law of attraction which governed the motions of the planets. The laws of gravitation were the "rules" which "bound" the comets, and Pope contrasts these definite laws of matter with the variable "movements" of the human mind, which cannot be "fixed" or reduced to rule. The mind, however, has also its laws, which, notwithstanding the disturbing force of free-will, are sufficiently understood for the practical purposes of life.

[1140] Ed. 4:

Who saw the stars here rise, and here descend?--POPE.

[1141] The comparison is pointless. Newton knew far more of his end,--of his mission and ultimate destiny,--than of the purpose and fate of comets, and did not know less of his own beginning than of the origin of the heavenly bodies. Man is incapable of conceiving the mode by which a single atom of the universe was called into being, nor can he penetrate to the essence of a single law or particle of matter any better than to the essence of mind. After ver. 38 there is this couplet in the MS.:

Or more of God, or more of man can find,
Than this that one is good, and one is blind?

There is a kindred antithesis in the last verse of the Epistle, but the exaggeration of the statement is less strongly marked.

[1142] "Alas," says Pope, "what wonder" that Newton should be unable to "explain his own beginning and end," since "what reason weaves is undone by passion." But this cannot be the cause of our inability to unfold the creative process, for when passion is not permitted to interfere with reason we make no advance towards an explanation of our "own beginning." Passion does often interfere with the just perception of our proper "end," and with the practice of the duties we perceive, only Pope should have known that to rise superior to passion is the daily discipline of hosts of men. "It seems," says Pascal, "to be the divine intention to perfect the will rather than the understanding," and of the two we can approximate nearer to moral perfection than to universal science.

[1143] MS.:

Unchecked may mount thy intellectual part
From whim to whim,--at best from art to art.

[1144] MS.:

Joins truth to truth, or mounts
There mounts unchecked, and soars from art to art.

[1145] An allusion to the web of Penelope in Homer's Odyssey.--WAKEFIELD.

[1146] That is, of all the studies which are dictated by the vices of pride and vanity. He followed Bolingbroke, who wrote long tirades against moralists, divines, and metaphysicians, for indulging, from hope of fame, in barren, chimerical speculations.

[1147] This paragraph first appeared in the edition of 1743. In the preceding paragraph, we are told that, in physical science, man "may rise unchecked from art to art." Unless, therefore, Pope reckoned physical science among the worthless departments of knowledge, there was, by his own statement, one vast and important scientific region which was destined to unlimited extension, and of which it was not correct to say that a "little sum" must serve the future, as it had served the past.

[1148] MS.:

Two different principles our nature move;
One spurs, one reins; this reason, that self-love.

Cicero's Offices, i. 28: "The powers of the mind are twofold; one consists in appetite, by the Greeks called ὁρμη (impulse), which hurries man hither and thither; the other in reason, which teaches and explains what we are to do, and what we are to avoid."

[1149] The MS. goes on thus:

Of good and evil gods what frighted fools,
Of good and evil, reason puzzled schools,
Deceived, deceiving taught, to these refer;
Know both must operate, or both must err.--WARBURTON.

[1150] "Still" is thrust in to supply a rhyme. "Ascribe" is "we ascribe" carried on from "we call" at ver. 55.

[1151] "Acts," in the signification of "incites to action" was formerly common. "Most men," says Barrow, "are greatly tainted with self-love; some are wholly possessed and _acted_ by it."

[1152] MS.:

Self-love the spring of action lends the force;
Reason's comparing balance states the course:
The primal impulse, and controlling weight
To give the motion, and to regulate.

Bolingbroke, Fragment 3, says that "appetite and passion are the spring of human nature; reason the balance to control and regulate it." The image is borrowed from the works of the watch, where the spring is the moving power, and the balance regulates the motion.

[1153] Without self-love, that is, man would be like "a plant," and without reason like "a meteor,"--the slave of destructive passions. The first comparison is inconsiderate. The man who had no self-love, which means no moving principle, no affections or desires, would not even "draw nutrition, and propagate." The appetite for food, the sexual appetite, and the care for life, would all be wanting, and he would "rot" at once. Or if reason, without desires, could induce him to foster an existence to which he was totally indifferent, reason might equally impel him to other acts besides the preservation of himself, and the perpetuation of his race.

[1154] Meteors may flame lawless through empty space, but man could not be flaming through a "void" when he was "destroying others."

[1155] The objects, that is, of reason lie at a distance. MS.:

Self-love yet stronger as its objects near;
Reason's diminished as remote appear.

[1156] From Lord Bacon: "The affections carry ever an appetite to good as reason doth. The difference is, that the affection beholdeth merely the present, reason beholdeth the future and sum of time."--RUFFHEAD.

"The sensual man," says Crousaz in illustration of the principle, "indulges in the pleasures of a luxurious table regardless of the diseases that may be the consequence of his gluttony, but the reasoner prefers a lasting tranquillity to transient enjoyment."

[1157] Bolingbroke, Fragment 6: "Self-love is the original spring of human actions. Experience and observation require time; and reason that collects from them comes slowly to our assistance." Experience enlightens reason by showing us what is hurtful in practice, and what beneficial. Pope's line is badly expressed. "Attention gains habit," for "habits are acquired by attention," is barely English.

[1158] MS.: "nature." "Grace" here signifies the Divine assistance vouchsafed to the natural powers of man in his efforts after goodness. Pope's original reading,--"grace and nature"--was a censure of the attempts to define the respective influences exerted by the nature of man, and the grace or intervention of God. The substitute of "virtue" for "nature," obscures the meaning, but the poet apparently had still in his mind the long controversies on the share which appertained to "grace" in the production of "virtue." He may have thought that it was needless to try and settle the precise part which belonged to grace, since nature and grace are both gifts of the same Almighty Being.

[1159] Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato divided the faculties into "sense and reason," and the classification passed from the ancients to the schoolmen. "Sense" comprised the five senses, with every act of the mind which was supposed to depend on bodily sensations. Under this head were included the passions and desires, and "sense," in its moral signification, was the equivalent of what Pope calls "self-love."

[1160] MS.:

Let metaphysics common reason split.

[1161] In the MS. this couplet follows:

Too nice distinctions honest sense will shun,
Know pleasure, good, and happiness are one.

[1162] MS.:

Both fly from pain, to pleasure both aspire,
With one aversion, and with one desire.

Pope charges the schoolmen with being at war about a name when they distinguished between "sense" and "reason," and the distinction is a capital article in his own moral creed. He charges them with maintaining that sense and reason were not merely separate, but contending powers, and he too has insisted on the universality of the strife. "Sense," or, in his language, "self-love," "looks," ver. 73, to "immediate," "reason" to "future good," and in this difference of view the "temptations" of self-love "throng thicker than the arguments" of reason. The contest is the subject of a long disquisition further on, and Pope laments, ver. 149-160, that passion should conquer in the fight. When he interjected the paragraph, in which he contradicted himself, he rested his case on the proposition that reason, which pursues interest well-understood, and self-love, which gratifies present passion, "aspire to one end,--pleasure." But the pleasure sought by reason and self-love respectively is not the same pleasure, and so incompatible were the two pleasures in his estimation that he calls one, ver. 92, "our greatest evil," the other "our greatest good."

[1163] MS.:

Reason itself more nicely shares in all.

[1164] MS.:

Passions whose ends are honest, means are fair.

[1165] "List," which would probably now be thought a vulgarism, was in Pope's day the established word. Our form, "enlist," was apparently unknown to Johnson, who did not insert it in his Dictionary.

[1166] "Passions that court an aim" is surely a strange expression.--WARTON.

For "court" Pope had at first written "boast."

[1167] The "imparted" or sympathetic passions are the benevolent impulses and affections. As to their "kind," or nature, they are, says Pope, "modes of self-love," but when the self-love assumes the form of loving others the passion is "exalted, and takes the name of some virtue." He passes the affections over here with this slight allusion, and returns to them at ver. 255, and more at length in Epistle iii.

[1168] What says old Epictetus, who knew stoicism better than these men? "I am not to be apathetic or void of passions, like a statue. I am to discharge all the relations of a social and friendly life,--the parent, the husband, the brother, the magistrate." The stoic apathy was no more than a freedom from irrational and excessive agitations of the soul.--JAMES HARRIS.

[1169] That is, in cold insensibility. Lady Chudleigh's dialogue on the death of her daughter:

Honour is ever the reward of pain:
A lazy virtue no applause will gain.--WAKEFIELD.

[1170] The stoic aimed at inner perfection, and trusted to the serenity of virtue to sustain him in all the trials of life. Pope erroneously imagined that stoics were selfish and inactive because they were calm and self-contained. Seneca, De Ot. i. 4, says, they insisted that we must never cease labouring for the common good, and Cicero, De Fin. iii. 19, says they placed their force of character at the service of mankind, and thought it their duty to live, and if need were to die, for the benefit of the public.

[1171] A couplet is added in the MS.:

Virtue dispassioned naked meets the fight,
Comes without arms, and conquers but by flight.

[1172] MS.:

Passions like tempests put in act the soul.

[1173] Spectator, June 18, 1712. No. 408: "Passions are to the mind as winds to a ship; they only can move it, and they too often destroy it. Reason must then take the place of pilot, and can never fail of securing her charge if she be not wanting to herself."

[1174] Tate's paraphrase from Simonides, Dryden's Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 55:

On life's wide ocean diversely launched out,
Our minds alike are tossed on waves of doubt,
Holding no steady course, or constant sail,
But shift and tack with ev'ry veering gale.--WAKEFIELD.

[1175] In the mariner's compass the paper on which the points of the compass are marked is called "the card."

[1176] Carew's Poems:

A troop of deities came down to guide
Our steerless barks in passion's swelling tide,
By virtue's card.--WAKEFIELD.

After ver. 108 in the MS.:

A tedious voyage! where how useless lies
The compass, if no pow'rful gusts arise!--WARBURTON.

[1177] Psalm civ. 3: "Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters, and walketh upon the wings of the wind."--BOWLES.

Dryden's Ceyx and Alcyone:

And now sublime she rides upon the wind.--WARTON.

Pope held that "fierce ambition" was instigated by the Almighty, Epist. i. ver. 159, and compared his inspiration of such tumultuous passions to his "heaving old ocean, and winging the storm." The poet must be understood as upholding the same extended and licentious doctrine when he returns to the comparison, and talks of "God mounting the storm" of the passions, and "walking upon the wind."

[1178] After ver. 112 in the MS.:

The soft, reward the virtuous or invite;
The fierce, the vicious punish or affright.--WARBURTON.