Chapter XXXIV: Appendix (10)

[1179] How, that is, can the stoic succeed in destroying passions which enter into the very composition of man? The stoic made no such pretension. What he laboured to "destroy" were those "perturbations of mind" which Zeno, Tusc. iv. 6, maintained to be "repugnant to reason, and against nature," and for which the stoical remedy, Tusc. iv. 28, was the demonstration that they "were vicious, and had nothing natural or necessary in them." The principle for which Pope contended was the very maxim of the stoics,--they insisted that "reason should keep to nature's road." The real question was, whether they did not sometimes go too far, and condemn natural emotions under the name of prohibited perturbations.

[1180] All he means is, that the intentions of God are manifested in the nature of man.

[1181] Dryden, State of Innocence, Act v.:

With all the num'rous family of death.

Garth, Dispensary, vi. 138:

And all the faded family of care.--WAKEFIELD.

[1182] Warton remarks that the group of allegorical personages are here suddenly changed to things which are to be "mixed with art."

[1183] MS.:

To blend them well, and harmonise their strife
Makes all etc.

[1184] In plain prose thus: "To grasp present pleasures and to find future pleasures is the whole employ of body and mind." Pope's line is rendered intolerable by its elliptical and inverted language, and the unmeaning expletive "still."

[1185] MS.:

Present to seize, or future to obtain
The whole employ of body and of brain.

[1186] MS.:

On stronger senses stronger passions strike.

[1187] MS.:

Hence passions rise, and more or less inflame,
Proportioned to each organ of the frame,
Nor here internal faculties control,
Nor soul on body acts, but that on soul.

Pope derived the notion from Mandeville, who says that the diversity of passions in different men "depend only upon the different frame,--the inward formation of either the solids or the fluids." According to Pope the strongest organ gives rise to some passion of corresponding strength, which finally absorbs all other passions.

[1188] The use of this doctrine, as applied to the knowledge of mankind, is one of the subjects of the second book.--POPE.

Pope refers to Moral Essays, Epist. 1. Of the Knowledge and Characters of Men.

[1189] The metaphor is taken from the casting of metal. The "mind's disease," says Pope, is in the original casting, and is not a defect which arises subsequently.

[1190] Dryden's Juvenal, Sat. x. 489:

One, with cruel art,
Makes Colon suffer for the peccant part.--WAKEFIELD.

[1191] The "faculties" are not a class of powers distinct from "wit, spirit, reason," but these last are among the faculties, and we must understand the passage as if Pope had written that wit and spirit, with all the other faculties, including reason itself, contribute to the growth of the ruling passion.

[1192] By inventing arguments in its justification, as Pope explains at ver. 156.

[1193] Taken from Bacon, De Calore.--WARTON.

This comparison, which might be very proper in philosophy, has a mean effect in poetry.--BOWLES.

In the MS. this couplet is added:

Its own best forces lead the mind astray,
Just as with Teague his own legs ran away.

Two lines, which do not appear in the subsequent editions, were inserted after ver. 148 in the quarto of 1735:

The ruling passion, be it what it will,
The ruling passion conquers reason still.

[1194] MS.:

And we who vainly boast her rightful sway
In our weak etc.

[1195] M.S.:

Can reason more etc.

[1196] From La Rochefoucauld: "Reason frequently puts itself on the side of the strongest passion; there is no violent passion which has not its reason to justify it."--WARTON.

[1197] Pope copied Mandeville: "Man's strong habits and inclinations can only be subdued by passions of greater violence."

[1198] Cowley's poem on the late civil war:

The plague, we know, drives all diseases out.--WAKEFIELD.

Ruffhead and Bowles unite in condemning the colloquial familiarity of Pope's simile.

[1199] MS.:

This bias nature to our temper lends.

The couplet was not in the first edition.

[1200] The particular application of this to the several pursuits of men, and the general good resulting thence, falls also into the succeeding book.--POPE.

The "succeeding book" is the Moral Essays, which are almost entirely made up of satiric sketches. Pope dilated upon the evil resulting from "the mind's disease, the ruling passion," but barely touched upon "the general good."

[1201] Man can only be driven from passion to passion during the infancy of the ruling passion, which continues to grow, Pope tells us, till it has overspread the entire mind, and obliterated every subordinate desire.

[1202] From Rochefoucauld, Maxim 266: "It is a mistake to believe that none but the violent passions, such as ambition and love, are able to triumph over the other passions. Laziness, languid as it is, often gets the mastery of them all, usurps over all the designs and actions of life, and insensibly consumes and destroys both passions and virtues."--WARTON.

[1203] MS.:

Th' Eternal Art that mingles good with ill.

[1204] Caryll's Hypocrite in Dryden's Miscellanies, iv. p. 312:

Hypocrisy at last should enter in,
And fix this floating mercury of sin.--WAKEFIELD.

[1205] MS.:

The noblest fruits the planter's hope may mock,
Which thrive inserted on the savage stock.

[1206] He argues that our primitive tendencies are too various to be steady. Man is mercurial and fickle till his numerous passions are lost in the ruling passion, which converts our changeable propensities into a single desire. Under the government of reason this "savage" and vicious "stock" sends forth a healthy shoot of virtue which is rendered strong and stable by the vigour of the ruling passion, or parent stem. The theory is wrong throughout. People are not composed of only one passion, virtue cannot be the product of a vice, and the simulated virtue which proceeds from a solitary passion will be as contracted as its cause. Pope's catalogue of the ruling passions, and their attendant virtues, exhibits a counterfeit dismembered virtue,--a single false limb in the place of a complete and living body. An unmaimed virtue requires the cultivation of our nature in its complexity, and virtues are grafted on lawful tendencies, and not on lawless passions.

[1207] Ver. 184 is followed by this couplet in the MS.:

As dulcet pippins from the crabtree come,
As sloes' rough juices melt into a plum.

[1208] Pope probably alluded to Swift when he spoke of the "crops of wit and honesty" which were the product of "spleen, obstinacy, and hate." The spleen and hate engendered wit by prompting satiric effusions; but wit is not in itself a virtue, and when Pope inserted it in his catalogue he must have been thinking of the moral ends it might subserve.

[1209] MS.:

Vain-glory, courage, justice can supply.

[1210] MS.:

Envy, in critics and old maids the devil,
Is emulation in the learn'd and civil.

"Emulation," says Bishop Butler, "is merely the desire of equality with, or superiority over others, with whom we compare ourselves. To desire the attainment of this equality, or superiority, by the particular means of others being brought down to our level, or below it, is, I think, the distinct notion of envy." A man who was made up of rivalry, which is Pope's supposition, would be an odious character, even without the additional taint of envy, from which, nevertheless, he could hardly be free.

[1211] Pope speaks after Mandeville, who says that shame and pride are the "two passions in which the seeds of most virtues are contained." Pride he defined to be the faculty by which men overvalued themselves, and were led to do what would win them applause. "There is not," he says, "a duty to others or ourselves that may not be counterfeited by it." No quality, he admits, is more detested, and it would defeat its own end if it did not disguise itself in the garb of virtue.

[1212] As Pope supposes shame to be "a disease of the mind," he could not apply the term to the self-reproaches of an enlightened conscience, but must mean the humiliation produced by censure. This species of shame can only bind us to average decency of conduct, is a feeble protection against secret vice, and often an incentive to baseness. Spurious shame, as Mandeville remarks, induces women to murder their illegitimate children, drives many to tell falsehoods to conceal their faults, changes with the company and public opinion, and begets a degrading compliance with the evil habits of associates, and with the lax customs of the age.

[1213] After ver. 194 in the MS.:

How oft with passion, virtue points her charms!
Then shines the hero, then the patriot warms.
Peleus' great son, or Brutus who had known
Had Lucrece been a whore, or Helen none?
But virtues opposite to make agree,
That, reason, is thy task, and worthy thee.
Hard task, cries Bibulus, and reason weak,
"Make it a point, dear Marquess, or a pique.
Once for a whim, persuade yourself to pay
A debt to reason, like a debt at play.
For right or wrong have mortals suffered more?
B[lount] for his prince, or B** for his whore?
Whose self-denials nature most control?
His who would save a sixpence, or his soul.
Web for his health, a Chartreux for his sin,
Contend they not which soonest shall grow thin?
What we resolve we can: but here's the fault,
We ne'er resolve to do the thing we ought."--WARBURTON.

There is another version of the last couplet but one in the MS.:

Which will become more exemplary thin,
W[eb] for his health, De Rancé for his sin?

Web may have been the General Webb who got considerable reputation for his defeat of the French at Wynendale in 1708. Swift in his Journal to Stella, April 19, 1711, speaks of him as "going with a crutch and a stick." Rancé was born at Paris in 1626, and died in 1700. In 1662 he assumed the government of the monastery of La Trappe, and was noted for the austerities he imposed and practised. Mr. Croker thinks that "B." who "suffered for his prince" was Edward Blount, the Roman Catholic Devonshire squire. He went into voluntary exile after the rebellion of 1715, but did not remain abroad many years.

[1214] Yet in the previous couplet we are informed that there is hardly a virtue which will not grow on the "pride" we are here enjoined to "check."

[1215] MS.:

Thus every ruling passion of the mind
Stands to some virtue and some vice inclined.

[1216] The MS. has two other versions of this line:

Check but its force or compass short of ill.
Turn but the bias from the side of ill.

[1217] But not by grafting temperance and humanity upon his ruling passions--sensuality and cruelty. He must have torn up his evil passions by the roots, and cultivated virtues in their stead.

[1218] Catiline hemmed in by superior forces died fighting with the courage of despair. Unless he was greatly maligned his conspiracies were prompted by profligate selfishness without any mixture of patriotism. Decius, instructed by a vision on the eve of the battle of Vesuvius, B.C. 340, that the general on the one side, and the army on the other was doomed, rushed into the thick of the fight to ensure by his own death the destruction of the enemy. The story of Decius may be fabulous, like that of Pope's next example, Curtius, who when informed, B.C. 362, that a chasm which had opened in the Roman forum could never be filled up till the basis of the Roman greatness had been committed to it, was alleged to have mounted on horseback clad in armour, and to have leaped into the gulf. Courage, the quality common to Catiline, Decius, and Curtius, is never a ruling passion, but is the effect of some antecedent motive, which may be vanity or duty, lofty patriotism or criminal ambition.

[1219] MS.:

And either makes a patriot or a knave.

[1220] MS.:

Divide, before the genius of the mind.

or,

'Tis reason's task to sep'rate in the mind.

The idea expressed in the couplet is an adaptation of a passage in the first chapter of Genesis. As God in the chaos of the world "divided the light from the darkness," so the God within us, which is our reason, does the same with the chaos of the mind. The chaos, on Pope's system, was in the actions, and not in the motives. The sweet water and the bitter flowed from the same tainted fountain,--from ambition, pride, sloth, etc.

[1221] MS.:

Extremes in man concur to gen'ral use.

Pope's meaning seems to be that in all terrestrial things, except man, extremes or contraries produce opposite and uncompounded effects. In man, extremes, in the shape of virtue and vice, join and mix together. There is no force in the distinction. Hot water, for instance, mixes with cold, and a mean temperature is the result.

[1222] "Great purposes," says Warburton in explanation of this passage, "are served by vice and virtue invading each other's bounds, no less than the perfecting the constitution of the whole, as lights and shades, in a well wrought picture, make the harmony and spirit of the composition." By this rule virtue dashed with vice is more "spirited and harmonious" than virtue without alloy. Warburton allowed himself to be deluded by a metaphor. Black paint has no resemblance to black morals,--shadows in a picture to hatred, avarice, and so on.

[1223] Too nice, that is, to permit us to distinguish where ends, etc. The ellipse goes beyond any poetical licence which is consistent with writing English.

[1224] The lines from ver. 207 to 214 are versified from Clarke's Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion, 10th ed., p. 184: "As in painting two very different colours may, from the highest intenseness in either extreme, terminate in the midst insensibly, so that it shall not be possible to determine exactly where the one ends, and the other begins, and yet the colours may differ as much as can be, not in degree only but in kind, so, though it may, perhaps, be very difficult in some nice cases to define exactly the bounds of right and wrong, yet right and wrong are totally different, even altogether as much as white and black, light and darkness." The argument of Clarke was directed against Hobbes, and his disciples, who denied that there was any inherent difference between good and evil, and supported their paradox by pleading the impossibility of drawing a line between the two.

[1225] Here follows in the MS.:

To strangle in its birth each rising crime
Requires but little,--just to think in time.
In ev'ry vice, at first, in some degree
We see some virtue, or we think we see.
Our vices thus are virtues in disguise,
Wicked but by degrees, or by surprise.

Of the last couplet there is a second version:

Thus spite of all the Frenchman's witty lies
Most vices are but virtues in disguise.

The witty Frenchman was La Rochefoucauld. Pope's counter-maxim is only a form of La Rochefoucald's principle, converted into an apparent contradiction by an equivocal use of the phrase "virtues in disguise." Those who pursue vicious objects are reluctant to allow that they are the slaves of vice. "Hence," says Hutcheson, in a passage quoted by Warton, "the basest actions are dressed in some tolerable mask. What others call avarice, appears to the agent a prudent care of a family or friends; fraud, artful conduct; malice and revenge, a just sense of honour; fire and sword and desolation among enemies, a just defence of our country; persecution, a zeal for truth." Pope assumes that the vice is inspired by genuine virtue, whereas the virtue is a pretence, a flimsy pretext to excuse wrong-doing. The vice is real, the virtue fictitious, and this is the principle of La Rochefoucauld.

[1226] Dryden's Hind and Panther, Part i.:

For truth has such a face and such a mien,
As to be loved needs only to be seen.--WAKEFIELD.

The lines from ver. 217 to 221 are thus varied in the MS.:

Vice all abhor, the monster is too foul;
Naked, indeed, she shocks us to the soul;
But dressed too well, with tempting time and place,
That but to pity her is to embrace.
Where art thou, Vice? 'twas never yet agreed, etc.

[1227] The word is inappropriate. Men do not become sensual out of pity to the miseries of sensuality, or envious from compassion for the pangs of envy. Pity may be felt for the evils which vice entails, but this is not pity for the vice, nor a temptation to practise it.

[1228] After ver. 220 in ed. 1:

A cheat, a whore, who starts not at the name,
In all the Inns of Court, or Drury Lane?

These two omitted in the subsequent editions.--POPE.

The dishonest lawyer, and woman of the town, applied soft names to their vices, and were startled to be called by their proper appellations. The couplet was followed in the MS. by some further illustrations:--

B[lun]t but does
K---- brings matters on;
Rogues but do business; spies but serve the crown;
Sid has the secret, Chartres
H[e]r[ve]y the court, and Huggins knows the town;
Kind-hearted Peter helps the rich in want,
Nero's a wag, and Messaline gallant.

The last couplet assumed a second form:

Nero's a wag, Faustina some suspect
Of gallantry, and Sutton of neglect.

Sutton, Peter Walter, Hervey, Huggins, Chartres, and Blunt will reappear in connection with the offences for which they are satirised here. Sid was Lord Godophin, who was lampooned under the name of Sid Hamet by Swift. Pope, in his Moral Essays, Epist. 1, ver. 86, speaks of his

Newmarket fame, and judgment in a bet;

and the phrase, "Sid has the secret" is an insinuation that his "judgment in a bet" sometimes arose from his being privy to the tricks of the turf.

[1229] After ver. 226 in the MS.:

The Col'nel swears the agent is a dog;
The scriv'ner vows th' attorney is a rogue;
Against the thief th' attorney loud inveighs,
For whose ten pound the county twenty pays;
The thief damns judges, and the knaves of state,
And dying mourns small villains hanged by great.--WARBURTON.

The agent of whom the Colonel complained was the army agent. The scrivener, who drew contracts, and invested money, hated the attorneys because they were in part competitors for the same class of business. Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, says, that Mr. Ellis, who died in 1791, aged 93, was the last of the scriveners. Their occupation had gradually lapsed to other professions, legal or monetary. Pope's remaining instances are forced. The attorney did not pay more than his neighbours to the county expenditure for prosecuting thieves, and as the trials were much to his own profit, he was the last person who had an interest in inveighing against thievery. As little did the thief at his execution denounce "the knaves of state," of whom he commonly knew nothing. Pope has put the satire of the Beggar's Opera into the mouth of the veritable pick-pockets and highwaymen.

[1230] MS.:

Ev'n those who dwell in Vice's very zone.

[1231] From moral insensibility, that is, they are either unconscious of their vice, or, being conscious, pretend ignorance.

[1232] Pope goes too far. The worst men acknowledge that some things are crimes.

[1233] Addison, Spectator, No. 183: "There was no person so vicious who had not some good in him, nor any person so virtuous who had not in him some evil."

[1234] This couplet follows ver. 234 in the MS.:

Some virtue in a lawyer has been known,
Nay in a minister, or on a throne.

[1235] Complete virtue, and complete vice, says Pope, are both hostile to self-interest, a plain confession that his selfish system was incompatible with thorough virtue. He assures us, Epist. iv. ver. 310, that "virtue alone is happiness below," but to be consistent he must have meant virtue seasoned with vice.

[1236] He is far from saying that good effects naturally rise from vice or folly, and affirms nothing but that God superintends the world in such a manner that they do not produce all those destructive consequences that might reasonably be expected from them.--JOHNSON.

MS.:

That draws a virtue out of ev'ry vice.

Or,

And public good extracts from private vice.

The last version is taken from the title of Mandeville's work, "The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits." Johnson's interpretation of the text does not agree with Pope's assertion, that "imperfections are usefully distributed to all orders of men."

[1237] MS.:

Each frailty wisely to each rank applied.

The line is disfigured by the clumsy transition from the present tense to the past for the sake of the rhyme, which is a trifle in comparison with the doctrine that "heaven applies happy frailties to all ranks." If the "frailties" specified by Pope are "happy," fear must be a recommendation in a statesman, rashness in a general, presumption in a king, and a credulous faith in the presumption the best condition for the people.

[1238] The sense of shame in virgins is not a frailty to be ranked with pride, rashness, and presumption.

[1239] There is another side to the picture. The ends of vice are also raised from vanity, which begets wastefulness, debt, slander, and a multitude of evils.

[1240] That is, "heaven can build," the "can" being supplied from "can raise," ver. 245.

[1241] Shaftesbury's Moralists: "Is not both conjugal affection and natural affection to parents, love of a common city, community, or country, with the other duties and social parts of life, founded in these very wants?"--WARTON.

[1242] Men, says Pope, are reconciled to death from growing weary of the "wants, frailties, and passions" of life. "The observation," says Warburton, "is new, and would in any place be extremely beautiful, but has here an _infinite_ grace and propriety." This is one of the stock forms of Warburton's adulation. Pope's remark was stale, and from the nature of the case could not be new if, as he asserted, it was generally true, since all men in their declining years could not, through all time, have left unexpressed the feeling which made them all willing to die. What all men think many men will say.

[1243] The MS. adds this couplet:

What partly pleases, totally will shock;
Nor Ross would be Argyle, nor Toland
I question much if Toland would be Locke.

The Duke of Argyle and General Ross were both soldiers, both politicians, and both Scotchmen. Ross was a member of the House of Commons. Toland introduced metaphysics into his infidel works, and Pope signifies by his couplet that the inferior in a particular department would not desire on the whole to change characters with a superior in the same department.

[1244] MS.:

The learn'd are blessed such wonders to explore.

[1245] Buoyed up by the expectation that he would hit upon the secret of transmuting the baser metals into gold.

[1246] MS.:

The chemist's happy in his golden views,
Payn in his madness, Welsted in his muse.

[1247] From La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 36: "Nature seems to have bestowed pride on us, on purpose to save us the pain of knowing our own imperfections."--WARTON.

[1248] Bolingbroke, Frag. 50: "Hope, that cordial drop, which sweetens every bitter potion, even the last."--WAKEFIELD.

MS.:

With ev'ry age of man new passions rise,
Hope travels through nor quits him when he dies.

[1249] The lines, ver. 275-282, first appeared in the edition of 1743. They were evidently suggested by a passage in Garth's Dispensary, Canto v.:

Children at toys as men at titles aim,
And in effect both covet but the same,
This Philip's son proved in revolving years,
And first for rattles, then for worlds shed tears.

[1250] When Pope used the phrase "a little louder," he was thinking of the "rattle," and forgot the "straw."

[1251] The "garters" refer to the badge of the order of the garter. "Scarf," in the sense of a badge of honour, was in Pope's day appropriated to the nobleman's chaplain. "His sister," says Swift, speaking of a clerical time-server in his Essay on the Fates of Clergymen, "procured him a scarf from my lord." Addison in the Spectator, No. 21, compares bishops, deans, and archdeacons to generals; doctors of divinity, prebendaries, and "all that wear scarves" to field-officers; and the rest of the clergy to subalterns. "There has been," he says, "a great exceeding of late years in the second division, several brevets having been granted for the converting of subalterns into scarf-officers, insomuch that within my memory the price of lute-string"--the material of which the scarf was made--"is raised above twopence in a yard." The number of chaplains a nobleman could "qualify" varied with his rank. A duke might nominate six, a baron three. The distinction, when Pope wrote his Essay, was too slight to be fitly classed with orders of knighthood.

[1252] The infant's pleasure in trifles may be the kindly work of nature providing for the enjoyments of an age incapable of better things; but the maturer delight in the "scarfs, garters, gold," is not the work of nature, but of folly. The first is a harmless instinct; the other a culpable vanity.--CROLY.

[1253] Small balls of glass or pearl, or other substance, strung upon a thread, and used by the Romanists to count their prayers; from whence the phrase "to tell beads," or to be at one's "beads," is, to be at prayer.--JOHNSON.

[1254] MS.:

At last he sleeps, and all the care is o'er.

[1255] MS.: "Till then."

[1256] MS.:

Observant then, how from defects of mind
Spring half the bliss, or rest of humankind!
How pride rebuilds what reason can destroy, &c.

[1257] MS.:

Of certainty by faith, of sense by pride.

[1258] MS.:

These still repair what wisdom would destroy.

[1259] MS.:

Through life's long dream new prospects entertain.

[1260] MS.:

Life's prospects alter ev'ry step we gain,
And Nature gives no vanity in vain.

[1261] See further of the use of this principle in man, Epist. 3, ver. 121, 124, 133, 143, 199, etc., 269, etc., 316, etc. And Epist. 4, ver. 353 and 363.--POPE.

[1262] MS.:

Confess one comfort ever will arise.

[1263] Bolingbroke, Fragment 53: "God is wise and man a fool."

[1264] In several editions in quarto,

Learn, Dulness, learn! "The Universal Cause," etc.--WARBURTON.

[1265] The "one end" is the good of the whole.

[1266] MS.:

Must act by gen'ral not by partial laws.

[1267] That is, those who are rich in temporal blessings should remember that the world is not made for them alone.

[1268] MS.:

Look nature through, and see the chain of love.

[1269] Ed. 1.:

See lifeless matter moving to one end.--POPE.

"Plastic," or as Bolingbroke called it, "fashioning nature," was in its etymological and popular sense, the power in nature which gave things their shape or figure. This seems to be the meaning in Pope. The philosophic sense of the phrase was more extensive. The laws of matter may have been made self-acting, or they may be maintained by the direct and constant interposition of God. Cudworth, and some other writers, who held the first of these opinions, called "plastic nature" the inward energy, the operative principle which is as a sort of life to the laws. The "plastic nature" of Cudworth is, in reality, nothing more than the laws of matter, with the proviso that they work by an inherent virtue infused into them by the Creator once for all.

[1270] "Embrace" is an inappropriate word. The particles of matter do not clasp. They are not even in contact, but only contiguous.

[1271] MS.:

Press to one centre of commutual good.

As the inorganic, or lifeless matter, of which he had previously spoken, gravitates to a centre, so the "matter" which is "endued with life" also "presses" to a "centre"--"the general good." The comparison of the general good to the centre of gravity is inaccurate. The centre of gravity is a point; the general good is diffused good.

[1272] Shaftesbury's Moralists, Part i. Sect. 3: "The vegetables by their death sustain the animals, and animal bodies dissolved enrich the earth, and raise again the vegetable world."--WARTON.

[1273] Pope is speaking in the context of plants and animals, which are the "they" of ver. 20. He threw ver. 18 into a parenthesis, and said, "_we_ catch," because the interjected remark relates to men. The power displayed in the transmission of life from parents to progeny is happily illustrated by Fénelon, in his Traité de l'Existence de Dieu: "What should we think of a watchmaker who could make watches which would produce other watches to infinity, insomuch that the two first watches would be sufficient to propagate and perpetuate the species over all the earth? What should we say of an architect who had the art to construct houses which generated fresh houses to replace our dwellings before they began to fall into ruin?"

[1274] "Connects," that is, "the greatest with the least." Pope, in his free use of elliptical expressions, having omitted "the," Warburton interprets the phrase according to the strict language, and supposes the meaning to be that the greatness of the Deity is manifested most in the creatures which are least.

[1275] Another couplet follows in the MS.:

More pow'rful each as needful to the rest,
Each in proportion as he blesses blessed.

[1276] The passage is indebted to Fenton, in his Epistle to Southerne:

Who winged the winds, and gave the streams to flow,
And raised the rocks, and spread the lawns below.--WAKEFIELD.

MS.:

Think'st thou for thee he feeds the wanton fawn
And not as kindly spreads for him the lawn?
Think'st thou for thee the sky-lark mounts and sings?

[1277] Apart from the metre the proper order of the words would be, "loves and raptures of his own swell the note."

[1278] MS.: "gracefully." The reading Pope substituted is not much better, for the generality of men are not absurd enough to ride "pompously."

[1279] This description of the hog as living on the labours of the lord of creation, without ploughing, or obeying his call, gives the idea of some untamed depredator, and not of a domestic animal kept to be eaten. The lord lives on the hog.

[1280] MS.: "Sir Gilbert," which meant Sir Gilbert Heathcote, a rich London alderman, who had been lord mayor. The fur was a part of his official robes.

[1281] MS.:

Know, Nature's children with one care are nursed;
What warms a monarch, warmed an ermine first.

[1282] After ver. 46 in the former editions:

What care to tend, to lodge, to cram, to treat him!
All this he knew; but not that 'twas to eat him,
As far as goose could judge he reasoned right;
But as to man, mistook the matter quite.--WARBURTON.

Cowley, in his Plagues of Egypt, stanza 1:

All creatures the Creator said were thine:
No creature but might since say, "Man is mine."

Gay, Fable 49:

The snail looks round on flow'r and tree,
And cries, "All these were made for me."--WAKEFIELD.

The goose is taken from Peter Charron; but such a familiar and burlesque image is improperly introduced among such solid and serious reflections.--WARTON.

Pope copied Charron's predecessor, Montaigne, Book ii. Chap. 12: "For why may not a goose say thus, 'The earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me. I am the darling of nature. Is it not man that keeps, lodges, and serves me? It is for me that he both sows and grinds.'" "The pampered goose," says Southey, "must have been forgetful of plucking time, as well as ignorant of the rites that are celebrated in all old-fashioned families on St. Michael's Day." The goose's ignorance of his future fate was part of Pope's argument, and he contended that the men who exclaimed, "See all things for my use," were equally blind to the purposes for which they were destined. The illustration is poor both poetically and philosophically.

[1283] Bolingbroke, Fragment 43: "The hypothesis that assumes the world made for man is not founded in reason."--WAKEFIELD.

[1284] That is, "Let it be granted that man is the intellectual lord;" for "wit" is here used in its extended sense of intellect in general.

[1285] MS.:

'Tis true the strong the weaker still control,
And pow'rful man is master of the whole:
Him therefore nature checks; he only knows, etc.

[1286] What an exquisite assemblage is here, down to ver. 70, of deep reflection, humane sentiments, and poetic imagery. It is finely observed that compassion is exclusively the property of man alone.--WARTON.

[1287] That is, varying with her position, and the different angles in which the reflected light strikes upon the eye.--WAKEFIELD.

[1288] MS.:

Turns he his ear when Philomela sings?
Admires her eye the insect's gilded wings?

The superior mercy with which Pope accredits men is of an unreflecting description, since he implies that it is regulated by gaiety of colour, and sweetness of song, and not by the capacities of creatures for pleasure and pain. The claim itself is unfounded under the circumstances of his comparison. The falcon and the jay must eat their natural prey or starve, and when hunger or gratification solicits him, man never hesitates to kill the animals which are needful for his support or delicious to his palate. If he had a taste for "insects with gilded wings," the gilding on their wings would not restrain him. Martial, Lib. xiii. Ep. 70, says of the peacock, "You admire him every time he displays his jewelled wings, and can you, hard-hearted man, deliver him to the cruel cook?" and Pope in his celebrated lines on the pheasant had commemorated the impotence of brilliant plumage to touch the compassion of the sportsman. The poet, in this Epistle, forgot that in Epist. i. ver. 117, he had accused man of "destroying all creatures for his sport or gust," which is to place him below the animals. He is undoubtedly without an equal in his destructive propensities, and too often abuses his power over the sentient world.

[1289] Pope starts with the intimation that mankind extend their protection to animals from commiseration for their "wants and woes," and ends with declaring that the motive is "interest, pleasure, and pride."

[1290] Borrowed from Milton's Samson Agonistes, ver. 549:

Wherever fountain or fresh current flowed
Against the eastern ray, translucent, pure
With touch ethereal of heav'n's fiery rod,
I drank.--WAKEFIELD.

[1291] Several of the ancients, and many of the Orientals since, esteemed those who were struck by lightning as sacred persons, and the particular favourites of heaven.--POPE.

Plutarch mentions that persons struck with lightning were held in honour, which did not accord with the concurrent belief that lightning was the instrument of Jove's vengeance. Superstitions often clash.

[1292] "View" is "prospect,"--a vision of future bliss.

[1293] Sir W. Temple, Works, vol. iii. p. 539: "Man is a thinking thing, whether he will or no."

[1294] Pope repeats in this paragraph the argument he uses Epist. i. ver. 77-98, to prove that death has been beneficently disarmed of its terrors. Unthinking animals cannot be troubled at the prospect, for they have no knowledge, he says, of their end, which is more than we can tell; and thinking beings, according to him, have, in addition to the hope which mingles with their dread, the unfailing belief that death, though always drawing nearer, is never near. Such an irrational delusion in a "thinking thing" is, in Pope's estimation, a "standing miracle." The ostensible miracle is deduced from his exaggeration of the truth. The conviction that death is distant usually yields when appearances are against the supposition. Hale men often rush consciously upon certain destruction; old and sick men have constantly the genuine belief that their end is at hand; and dying men expect each day or hour to be their last. The false expectation of prolonged life does not enter into their minds, and can have nothing to do with their resignation, peace, or joy.

[1295] This is the true principle from which Pope immediately departs, and exalts instinct above reason. "Man," says Aristotle, "has sometimes more, sometimes less than the beast;" for they are adapted to different functions, and man excels in his sphere, and beasts in theirs. The sphere of man is the highest, and his faculties are proportionate. He cannot do the work of the bee, but he can do his own work, which is greater.

[1296] The roman catholic council, which claims to be infallible. Instinct, says Pope, being infallible does not need the guidance of any other infallible authority. When he speaks of "full instinct," he probably means that instinct is always complete within its own limited domain, for if he intended to put "full instinct" in opposition to the instinct which is defective and misleads, he would contradict ver. 94, in which he states that instinct "must go right."

[1297] After ver. 84 in the MS.:

While man with op'ning views of various ways
Confounded, by the aid of knowledge strays:
Too weak to choose, yet choosing still in haste,
One moment gives the pleasure and distaste.--WARBURTON.

[1298] In Pope's wide sense of the term, reason adapts means to ends, and distinguishes between truth and falsehood, right and wrong. The faculty operates in part spontaneously, and in part with effort. In an endless number of ordinary circumstances man cannot help observing, comparing, and inferring, and his reason is itself an instinct which "comes a volunteer." The distinction is, that man does not stop with the unconstrained exercise of his powers. He aspires to progress, and laboriously pushes forward, while animals turn round, generation after generation, in the same narrow circle. What Pope supposed was a mark of man's inferiority is just the ground of his superiority. His conquests begin with his difficulties and exertions.

[1299] Pope says, ver. 79, that whether blessed with reason or instinct "all enjoy the power that tends to bliss,--all find the means proportioned to the end." He now contradicts himself with regard to reason, and says that, in the effort to determine which of our impulses are beneficial and which injurious, it never hits the mark, but labours in vain after happiness. The wisdom he denies to reason he erroneously ascribes to instinct, which has no superiority in securing an immunity from ill. Through want of foresight, and the limitation of their powers of contrivance, myriads of creatures die of hunger and cold. Those which come off with life suffer frequently from scarcity and inclement seasons. Their defective sagacity makes them a prey to each other and to man, and often when they escape death they receive torturing injuries. The young are exposed to wholesale destruction, and in many instances the parents manifest a grief which if short is at least acute. Creatures of the same species have their intestine enmities, and engage in combats attended by wounds and death. They have their fears, jealousies, and tempers, their alternations of contentment and dissatisfaction, and upon the whole the instinct conferred upon animals seems a less protection from present evils than a moderate use of reason in man. What alleviation there may be to animals in their inevitable trials cannot be known to us, but no one will imagine that they can be supported by sublimer hopes than our own.

[1300] This is a mistake. Instinct is often imperfect with reference to its own special ends. Misled by the odour of the African carrion flower, the flesh-flies lay their eggs in it, and the progeny, not being vegetable feeders, are starved. Here the injury is to the offspring. In other cases the erring individuals suffer for their own mistake. Pope, in this Epistle, magnifies instinct, and disparages reason. In Epist. i., ver. 232, he took the opposite side, and said that the reason of man was all the "powers" of animals "in one."

[1301] MS.:

One in their act to think and to pursue,
Sure to will right, and what they will to do.

Pope's meaning is, that there is no conflict in animals, as in man, between passion and reason, between desire and judgment, that there is not in the operations of animals, as in man's contrivances, a studied adaptation of means to ends, nor a balancing of method against method, and of end against end, but that animals are endowed with singleness of purpose, know instinctively what to do, and how to do it.

[1302] MS.:

Reason prefer to instinct if you can.

[1303] Addison, Spectator, No. 121; "To me instinct seems the immediate direction of Providence. A modern philosopher delivers the same opinion where he says, God himself is the soul of brutes." Upon the theory that brutes act from the immediate impulse of their Maker, there is a difficulty in explaining the cases of misdirected instinct, as when a jackdaw drops cart-loads of sticks down a chimney, in the vain endeavour to obtain a basis for its nest. Some animals, again, profit by experience, as foxes which improve in cunning, and we must infer that the assistance afforded by the Deity increases with the experience of the animals, though the experience is in nowise concerned in the result. A viciousness of temper, which resembles the evil passions of men, sometimes dominates in brutes, as we may see in horses and dogs, and we cannot ascribe these propensities to the immediate instigation of the Creator, unless we accept Pope's doctrine that God "pours fierce ambition into Cæsar's mind."

[1304] "Wood" in all editions, though designated as an erratum by Pope in his small edition of 1736. The mention of "tides" and "waves" in the next couplet should have called attention to a mistake, which seems obvious enough even without any special notice.--CROKER.

[1305] This instinct is not invariable. Animals eat food poisoned artificially, and sometimes feed greedily upon poisonous natural products. Yew is a poison to cows and horses, and yet with an abundance of wholesome herbage they will sometimes eat the yew.

[1306] Every verb and epithet has here a descriptive force. We find more imagery from these lines to the end of the Epistle, than in any other parts of this Essay. The origin of the connections in social life, the account of the state of nature, the rise and effects of superstition and tyranny, and the restoration of true religion and just government, all these ought to be mentioned as passages that deserve high applause, nay, as some of the most exalted pieces of English poetry.--WARTON.

[1307] The halcyon or king-fisher was reputed by the ancients "to build upon the wave," and the entrance to the floating nest was supposed to be contrived in a manner to admit the bird, and exclude the water of the sea. Either Pope believed the fable, or he thought himself at liberty to illustrate the marvels of instinct by fictitious examples. The couplet was originally thus in the MS.:

The cramp-fish, remora what secret charm
To stop the bark, arrest the distant arm?

The cramp-fish is the torpedo. "She has the quality," says Montaigne, "not only to benumb all the members that touch her, but even through the nets transmits a heavy dullness into the hands of those that move them; nay, it is further said, that if one pour water upon her, he will feel this numbness mount up the water to the hand, and stupify the feeling through the water." The remora, or sucking-fish, sticks by the disc on the top of its head, to ships and other fishes, and "renders immoveable," says Pliny, "the vessels which no chain could stay, no weighty anchor moor." The mighty prowess ascribed to the remora is imaginary, and the electrical capacity of the torpedo greatly exaggerated. The story of halcyon, cramp-fish, and remora are all in Book ii. chap. 12 of Montaigne's Essays.

[1308] The geometric, or garden-spider, makes a web of concentric circles, but the house-spider, which used to have credit for weaving a web of parallel longitudinal lines crossed by parallel transverse lines, observes no such regularity in the construction of her toils.

[1309] An eminent mathematician.--POPE.

He was born in France in 1667. Driven from his native country in 1685 by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, he settled in London, and died there in 1754. He got his living mainly by teaching mathematics, in which his skill was consummate, and his publications on the subject attest the acuteness and originality of his genius. He was on terms of friendship with Newton.

[1310] The poet probably took the hint of this passage from Lord Bacon's De augmentis scientiarum: "Who taught the raven in a drought to throw pebbles into an hollow tree where she espied water, that the water might rise so as she might come to it? Who taught the bee to sail through such a vast sea of air, and to find a way from the field in flower, a great way off to her hive?"--RUFFHEAD.

[1311] MS.:

Through air's vast oceans see the storks explore,
Columbus-like, a world unknown before.

[1312] From Le Spectacle de la Nature of the Abbé Pluche: "Who informed their young that it would be requisite to travel into a foreign country? What particular bird takes the charge upon him of assembling their grand council, and fixing the day of their departure?"

[1313] The MS. has the lines which follow:

Boast we of arts? a bee can better hit
The squares than Gibbs, the bearings than Sir Kit.
To poise his dome a martin has the knack,
While bold Bernini lets St. Peter's crack.

Gibbs was born about 1674 and died in 1754. He designed St. Martin's church in London, and the Radcliffe library at Oxford. Sir Kit is Sir Christopher Wren. A century after the dome of St. Peter's was erected, Bernini inserted staircases in the hollow piers which support the cupola, and the cracks in the dome were falsely ascribed to his operations. The martins are not more infallible than man, and, unlike man, they do not profit by experience. White of Selborne relates that they built in the window corners of a house in his neighbourhood, where the recess was too shallow to protect their work, which was washed down with every hard rain, and yet year after year they persevered through the summer in their useless drudgery.

[1314] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "We are designed to be social, not solitary creatures. Mutual wants unite us, and natural benevolence and political order, on which our happiness depends, are founded in them."--WAKEFIELD.

[1315] Ether was reputed to be an element finer than air, and to fill the regions beyond our atmosphere. Some of the stoics believed that ether was the animating principle of all things, and Pope adopted the doctrine. Hence he calls ether "all-quickening," and says that "one nature feeds the vital flame" in all the creatures of earth, air, and water.

[1316] Bolingbroke, Fragment 51: "As our parents loved themselves in us, so we love ourselves in our children."--WAKEFIELD.

Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel:

Our fond begetters who would never die,
Love but themselves in their posterity.

The lines from ver. 115 to ver. 124 are varied in the MS.:

Quick with this spirit new-born nature moved,
Itself each creature in its species loved;
Each sought a pleasure not possessed alone,
Each sex desired alike till two were one.
This impulse animates; one nature feeds
The vital lamp, and swells the genial seeds:
All spread their image with like ardour stung,
All love themselves, reflected in their young.

Dr. George Campbell remarks, in his Philosophy of Rhetoric, that to talk of creatures loving themselves in their progeny is nonsensical rant. Of many fathers and mothers it would be nearer the truth to say that they love their children almost to the exclusion of themselves. Neither Pope nor Bolingbroke had children, and not having experienced, they misapprehended, the parental feeling.

[1317] Pope's division of duties is not the law of creation. In a multiplicity of cases both parents feed, and both defend their young. When the sire is of no use in providing food, as with grass-eating animals, he equally abandons his defending function, and does not even recognise his offspring.

[1318] MS.:

Till taught to range the wood, or wing the air,
There instinct ends its passion and its care.

[1319] Locke, Civil Government, book ii. chap. vii. sect. 79: "The conjunction between male and female ought to last so long as is necessary to the support of the young ones. And herein, I think, lies the chief, if not the only reason, why the male and female in mankind are tied to a longer conjunction than other creatures, whose young being able to subsist of themselves before the time of procreation returns again, the conjugal bond dissolves of itself."

[1320] Bolingbroke, Fragment 3: "Reason improved sociability, extended it to relations more remote, and united several families into one community, as instinct had united several individuals into one family." "Interest" in Pope's line signifies "advantage." Reason, he says, teaches man to improve on the ties of instinct, and form connections beyond his immediate family, whereby he at once extends his love, and the advantages derived from it.

[1321] That is, man becomes constant from choice.

[1322] MS.:

And ev'ry tender passion takes its turn.

The line in the text alludes to Pope's hypothesis that every virtue is grafted upon a ruling passion.

[1323] "Charity" is used in the antiquated sense of "love." "New needs," says Pope, give rise to "new helps," and the virtue "benevolence" is grafted upon the natural affections.

[1324] He means that the latest brood, being young children, love their parents by nature, while the previous brood, being grown up, only love parents from habit.

[1325] MS.:

Scarce had the last the parents' care outgrown
Before they saw those parents want their own.

Dryden, Palamon and Arcite, Book iii.:

and issuing into man,
Grudges their life from whence his own began.

[1326] MS.:

Stretch the long interest, and support the line.

[1327] The MS. goes on thus:

She spake, and man her high behests obeyed;
Harmless amidst his fellow-beasts he strayed;
For pride was not; joint tenant of the shade
He shared with beasts his table and his bed;
No murder etc.

"He speaks," says M. Crousaz, "of what passed in the earliest ages of the world no less positively than an eye-witness." Pope followed the ancient fable which he may have read, among other places, in Montaigne's Essays, Book ii. Chap. 12: "Plato, in his picture of the golden age under Saturn, reckons, among the chief advantages that a man then had, his communications with beasts, by which he acquired a very perfect intelligence and prudence, and led his life more happily than we could do."

[1328] "Her birth" is the birth of nature. The personification of nature in the phrase "the state of nature," or "the natural state," is so forced, that we do not at once perceive that "nature" is the noun to which "her" refers.

[1329] "Union" is put for voluntary union, the union of social affection, in contrast to the bonds of fear, coercion, and the necessities of life, which are large elements in the present condition of mankind. The beasts were included in the common league, and animals of prey unknown in Pope's state of nature. But he did not keep steady to his first account.

[1330] So Hall, Satires, Book iii. Sat. 1:

Then crept in pride, and peevish covetise,
And man grew greedy, discordous, and nice.
Now man that erst hail-fellow was with beast,
Woxe on to ween himself a god at least.--WAKEFIELD.

[1331] Dryden, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book xv.:

The woolly fleece that clothed her murderer.

[1332] Virgil, Ecl. x. 58: "lucos sonantes;" Dryden, "sounding woods."--WAKEFIELD.

[1333] MS.:

He called on heav'n for blessing, they for food.

[1334] MS.:

Unstained with gore the grassy altar grew,
Priests yet were temperate, yet no passions knew;
Nor yet would glutton zeal devoutly eat,
Nor faithful av'rice hugged his god in plate.

The pagans feasted upon the meat they offered to idols, which is what we are to understand by the "glutton zeal" that "devoutly eats."

[1335] Dryden, Virg. Æn. ix. 640:

Ah how unlike the living is the dead.--WAKEFIELD.

[1336] MS.:

Of half that live himself the living tomb.

[1337] MS.:

Who, foe to nature, other kinds o'erthrown
Restless he seeks dominion o'er his own.

Or,

Who deaf to nature's universal groan,
Murders all other kinds, betrays his own.

This is the same amiable being who is celebrated, ver. 51, for "helping the wants and woes of other creatures," and sparing singing-birds and gilded insects out of pure compassion.

[1338] Pope probably meant that man was a "fiercer savage" than the animals of which he shed the blood, but as the "blood" only is mentioned, there is no proper positive to the comparative.

[1339] Dryden in his version of the speech of Pythagoras in Ovid, Met. Book xv., which our poet doubtless had in view through this whole delineation:

Th' essay of bloody feasts on brutes began,
And after forged the sword to murder man.--WAKEFIELD.

MS.:

While nature, strict the injury to scan,
Left man the only beast to prey on man.

[1340] MS.:

In early times when man aspired to art.

The lines from ver. 161 to 168 are parenthetical, and Pope now goes back to the primitive age in which uncorrupted man associated freely with the beasts, and profited by their teaching.

[1341] MS.:

'Twas then the voice of mighty nature spake.