SOURCE: “The Ideology of Neo-Classical Aesthetics: Epistles to Several Persons (1731-5),” in Alexander Pope, Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 94-127.

[In the following essay, Brown reveals inconsistencies in the rhetorical devices used in Epistles to Several Personsto address questions of morality, gender, and pastoral aesthetics, elucidating the conflicted status of Pope's ethics in the face of emerging capitalism.]

We know from the Advertisement to the ‘death-bed’ edition of the Epistles to Several Persons that Pope saw a direct connection between these poems and the Essay on Man.¹ Together they were to frame Pope's opus magnum, a discursive epic on humankind conceived as a dilated version of the Essay on Man. That longer and evidently uncompletable work was, according to Pope's prospectus, to begin with the four epistles of the Essay on Man, and to move on to a book on reason, science, learning and their misuses, a book on civil government, and a book on private ethics. As Pope himself indicates, this scheme follows the outline of the four epistles of the Essay on Man—beginning with the limits of human reason in respect to the universe and in respect to man himself, and moving to society, and finally to individual virtue. The Epistles to Several Persons, then, along with other similar moral essays, were to constitute that last book on private morality, the conclusion of Pope's major philosophical/poetic effort. These poems, like the Essay on Man, seek to place traditional definitions of character and morality, vice and virtue, in a capitalist context. Their struggle with the status of ethics in an impersonal economic system, with the nature of moral value in the new world of the commodity, reflect the central underlying obsession of Pope's opus magnum: the attempt to provide a cultural, ethical and psychological rationale—both critical and descriptive—for a capitalist mode of production.

We have already begun to see the inherent problems of Pope's project in our examination of the imagistic ambivalences and the dual ethical allegiances of the Essay on Man. The Epistles to Several Persons will offer further evidence of this ‘ethical duet’. They will also provide a perspective on the place of the ‘characters of women’ in the problematic of Pope's poetry, and an indication of the role of pastoral scene-painting in Pope's ethical project. Perhaps this constellation of ruling problems—ethical, sexual and pastoral—will give us some grounds for guessing why Pope's opus magnum could not be written.

I

Epistle I, To Cobham (1734) centres upon the same ambivalent theories of character that we observed in the problematic assertions of the Essay on Man; only here that ambivalence is thematized primarily in the difficulty of knowing and located in the indecision of the observer:

To Observations which ourselves we make,
We grow more partial for th' observer's sake.

(11-12)

From the opening lines of the poem, the attempt to construct a system for understanding and defining character is entangled with the problem of the status of man's knowledge of his fellow men, and this complexity itself is seen as a result of the elusiveness of character:

… the diff'rence is as great between
The optics seeing, as the objects seen.
All Manners take a tincture from our own,
Or some discolour'd thro' our Passions shown.

(23-6)

In other words, if the complexity and inaccessibility of motives make human character difficult to determine, those very qualities in the observer's character necessarily compound the problem. And indeed the first section of the poem, which elaborates the uncertain state of our knowledge about human character, systematically conflates observer and observed: ‘you’ and ‘he’ are merged in ‘us’—‘our depths’, ‘our shallows’, ‘our spring of action’ (29, 42).

From this opening declaration of the problem of knowing, the poem goes on to reject the judgement of character based on the congruence of action and motive:

In vain the Sage, with retrospective eye,
Would from th'apparent What conclude the Why,
Infer the Motive from the Deed, and shew,
That what we chanc'd was what we meant to do.

(51-4)

What we do, good or bad, may in fact be motivated by some form of self-interest:

Not always Actions shew the man: we find
Who does a kindness, is not therefore kind,
Perhaps Prosperity becalm'd his breast,
Perhaps the Wind just shifted from the east:
Not therefore humble he who seeks retreat,
Pride guides his steps, and bids him shun the great:
Who combats bravely is not therefore brave,
He dreads a death-bed like the meanest slave:
Who reasons wisely is not therefore wise,
His pride in Reas'ning, not in Acting lies.

(61-70)

This poem does not go as far as the Essay on Man towards suggesting explicitly that traditional ‘vice’ produces social ‘virtue’ and public welfare, but these examples accord with that argument. The man who ‘does a kindness’ may be motivated by private ‘Prosperity’, which is the source of public peace in Windsor-Forest and one of the period's strongest rationalizations for mercantile expansion. And if prosperity can make man kind, pride can make him humble and cowardice can make him brave. In fact, self-interest seems to reign supreme in the tone and the specific examples of this poem. There are no strong images of disinterested behaviour in the epistle, no ‘nobler aims’. A ‘Hero’ may ‘turn a crafty Knave’ because he ‘was sick, in love, or had not din'd’ (78-80). All of us are, according to ‘honest Nature’, ‘Consistent in our follies and our sins’ (226-7).

How can we understand character if we have no access to motive except the general assumption of self-interest? Only through observing men's actions in the world, only, that is, by granting the proto-utilitarian premise ‘that Actions best discover man’ (72). But this premise too is conditional. Pope goes on to argue that actions are, in practice, too varied or too dependent upon context to provide firm evidence in judging human character: deeds may be disparate and inconsistent, rank and education may affect inherent qualities, context may shape men's responses. His conclusion about the possibility of firm judgement is not hopeful:

Judge we by Nature? Habit can efface,
Int'rest o'ercome, or Policy take place:
By Actions? those Uncertainty divides:
By Passions? these Dissimulation hides:
Opinions? they still take a wider range:
Find, if you can, in what you cannot change.

(168-73)

All that remains is change, in observer and observed. The opening survey of the possibilities for understanding the characters of men leaves the poem with little to go on. The sage's failure to infer motives from actions signals the irrelevance of categorical morality, and the variability of human actions makes them useless for the understanding of character. At this point, the poem is asking a question that, on its own terms, cannot be answered: the question of how to supply a determinate and static definition of character, based on traditional abstract principles of inherent vice and virtue, to a world where the underlying motivation of all acts is implicitly located in private and self-interested passions. Indeed, this is a deliberate dilemma, staged by Pope to exemplify the poem's dominant premise of the inadequacy of human knowledge.

The conclusion of To Cobham unconsciously echoes the ethical indeterminacies that we have been tracing in the first half of the poem, tying them to the paradigmatic case of patriotism. The epistle ends with a list of examples of self-interest—significantly, a list made up primarily of Christian vices: lust in the ‘rev'rend sire’, Helluo's comic gluttony, miserliness in the ‘frugal Crone’, vanity, flattery, avarice and, finally, Cobham's passion of patriotism:

‘I give and I devise, (old Euclio said,
And sigh'd) ‘My lands and tenements to Ned.’
Your money, Sir; ‘My money, Sir, what all?
‘Why,—if I must—(then wept) I give it Paul.’
The Manor, Sir?—‘The Manor! hold,’ he cry'd,
‘Not that,—I cannot part with that’—and dy'd.
And you! brave cobham, to the latest
breath
Shall feel your ruling passion strong in death:
Such in those moments as in all the past,
‘Oh, save my Country, Heav'n!’ shall be your last.

(256-65)

There is no doubt that Pope intended the conclusion of the poem as a compliment, or that he meant Cobham to stand as an emblem of moral virtue. Cobham wrote to thank Pope for the ‘publick testimony of your esteem and friendship’.² And after his death his widow had these last two couplets inscribed on a memorial pillar at Stowe. But how do we know Cobham from the ‘rev'rend sire’, Helluo or ‘old Euclio’? How do we distinguish the inherent moral value of one passion over the next, especially when all actions are generated by universal self-interest?³ In placing the good patriot Cobham at the end of that catalogue, the poem formally conflates him with the examples of vice that so vividly go before. Indeed this concluding list enacts the earlier thesis that all acts derive from passions and that all passions are evaluatively equivalent, neither virtuous nor vicious except in terms of their benefit to society. The results of Cobham's particular passion may be more beneficial, but its inherent worth and Cobham's inherent virtue, at least on the basis of Pope's previous argument, are no different from the rest. The issue of the passion of patriotism arises again in the Epistle to Bathurst (1733), written earlier than To Cobham and perhaps influential upon the composition of that poem, especially in its concluding satiric portraits.⁴ One of the prominent characters in To Bathurst is young Cotta, the patriot who gives his whole estate for ‘his Country's love’ (212) and receives no reward. This example is offered not as an indication of inherent virtue, but as a signal of the amoral operations of heaven's law, by which extremes in human passions produce a general welfare. Cotta's amorality suggests that Cobham too cannot be seen as a pure and simple example of traditional virtue, the cornerstone of a determinate definition of character. Indeed, patriotism, as the prototype of a stable individual ethics, seems to have a special prominence in the moral problematic of the opus magnum: it serves as the emblem both of private virtue and, sometimes simultaneously, of the beneficial public effects of the passions. It plays this pivotal role in To Cobham. Though Pope claims in the last lines of that poem to have rediscovered categorical morality, the structure of his conclusion says that no such categories can be distinguished.⁵

Pope's attempt to justify a categorical morality is initiated at the turning point of the epistle with the line ‘Search then the Ruling Passion’ (174). The ruling passion supplies a systematic means of tying motives to actions, granting the predominance of self-interest. Thus Wharton's ‘Lust of Praise’ generates both his public eloquence and his private profligacy. And Caesar's ambition even explains the secondary passion of lust that caused him to make ‘a noble dame a whore’ (213). The ruling passion repudiates the paradox of the first half of the epistle, and consequently the thematization of the doubtful role of the observer in judging human character fades from the poem when this claim to resolution is made. Now we can know all:

… There, alone,
The Wild are constant, and the Cunning known;
The Fool consistent, and the False sincere;
Priests, Princes, Women, no dissemblers here.

(174-7)

In fact all we can do is discriminate among kinds of self-interest. But Pope passes off this discrimination as a determination of abstract principles of vice and virtue, as a means to an absolute ethical judgment of character. In other words, though the ruling passion may solve the problem of evaluating the relation between action and motive, it does not warrant the assumption that we can designate one passion virtuous and one vicious; indeed it directly opposes that assumption in its systematic levelling of moral distinctions. The failure of the ruling passion to provide a means of moral evaluation, and especially the peculiar parallelism of Cobham with the figures of vice in the poem's conclusion, all counter Pope's attempt to supply a neat moral resolution.

The ‘ethical duet’ that we found in the Essay on Man is thus even more of a duet in To Cobham, where it finds its focus in the problem of determinate character and personal morality. J.G.A. Pocock has suggested that the social thinking of the eighteenth century is characterized by a major implicit debate ‘between virtue and passion, land and commerce, republic and empire, value and history’. One of the consequences of this debate, according to Pocock, was that ‘social morality was becoming divorced from personal morality, and from the ego's confidence in its own integrity and reality.’⁶ We can situate To Cobham—and indeed all of these Epistles—at the centre of this ideological paradox. In different ways, each of them moves between the poles of virtue and passion, calling into question the foundations of personality itself, repeatedly staging the irresolvable contradiction between a cognitively stable, ethically absolute valuation and a contingent social and historical dynamic.

II

Epistle II, To a Lady (1735), the last published of the Epistles to Several Persons, has been read as a systematic parallel to the Epistle to Cobham.⁷ It begins, like To Cobham, by introducing the premise of the changeableness of human character, which it proceeds to elaborate in its long central section. It turns near its conclusion to the efficacious category of the ruling passion, which serves as the basis for a final generalization. And it ends with a predictable but in some respects extraneous tribute to the exemplary character to whom the epistle is addressed. These structural similarities might lead us to expect to read the poems in the same way, but strangely enough, as we shall find, their effects and assumptions are substantially different. The failure of the parallelism is sex-linked. In applying his paradoxical theory of human character to the ‘softer Man’ (272), Pope makes women the scapegoats of his ideological dilemma. The misogyny of the poem can be directly linked to this problematic.

Though the Epistle to a Lady emphasizes change, it does not take the position of uncertainty and indeterminacy that we found in the Epistle to Cobham. In that poem human changeableness renders the sage incapable of judgment. In To a Lady female changeability is the basis for extended satiric condemnation. This epistle begins with an assertion of its own access to truth:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
‘Most Women have no Characters at all.’

(1-2)

And it repeats this claim in the succeeding lines:

How many Pictures of one Nymph we view,
All how unlike each other, all how true!

(5-6)

This poem has no self-doubt. Exhaustively certain of its judgements, it will ‘Catch’ and ‘paint’ (20, 16) the changing faces of womanking despite their shifting appearance. Where To Cobham generates contradiction, To a Lady remains, at least on its own terms, coherent. In To Cobham the introduction of the theory of the ruling passion repudiates the indeterminacy that the poem proposes in its first half. In To a Lady the ruling passion is ill-prepared for by the demonstration of changeability that occupies the body of the poem, but once asserted, it fits smoothly with the confident attack on female character that precedes it. In other words, To a Lady readily accommodates itself to the application of a nation of systematic moral and characterological discrimination, while To Cobham cannot ever fully reconcile its position of uncertainty with the sudden advocacy of absolute judgment.

How can poems with such similar premises produce such different effects? It is tempting, and only somewhat unjust, to argue that To a Lady is less incoherent and more secure in its judgments than To Cobham because the one thing Pope knows in a changeable world is that women are contemptible.⁸ But we can go much further in accounting for Pope's misogyny. First, we can discover connections between the attack on women in this poem and Pope's ideological allegiance to classical authority. Second, we can understand the poem as an inverted consequence of the Mandevillian ethic with which Pope struggles in To Cobham as well as the Essay on Man. And third, we can even link the poem to the representation of commodity fetishism that we found most fully developed in The Rape of the Lock.

Pope's misogyny does not spring fully grown from his own personal antagonisms. Classical attacks on women, especially Juvenal's misogynist satires, serve as authority and justification for much of the anti-female literature of Pope's period. In the case of To a Lady, classical precedent provides not a specific model, but a context or series of customary tropes through which the criticism of women can be expressed. Ancient Roman misogyny emphasizes dressing, cosmetics, luxury and the implicit relationship of such forms of duplicity and concupiscence to sexuality. These are the themes that we identified in a much less hostile version in Belinda's connection with the products of mercantile expansion in The Rape of the Lock. For Pope, as for Juvenal, women embody the material consequences of commodification much more directly than men. Dress and make-up are the outward signs of female falseness derived from a commodified culture, but the direct association of women with the commodity and all its corollaries of indiscriminacy and acquisition also serves to attach an abstract imputation of moral indiscriminacy and deceit to female character. In other words, the capriciousness and inconstancy of women in satiric convention has the same source as their addiction to make-up and appearance. As the privileged locus for the display of the products of accumulation, women dress themselves in the commodities that expansionist culture provides; their duplicity—in To a Lady their changeableness—is simply an abstraction from this basic cultural tenet. Thus, as we observed in our discussion of the anthropocentric imperialist trope ‘for me’, the period's obsession with acquisition, luxury and accumulation is systematically displaced onto women, private figures technically unconnected with the public enterprises of trade and business, who thus become the displaced focus of the attack on a commodified society. It is no coincidence, then, that Pope's misogyny should have such a clear precedent in classical Latin literature. The precedent supplies Pope with an authoritative origin; it supplies us with an initial indication of this poem's ideological connection with mercantile capitalism.

In To Cobham, as in the Essay on Man, the problem of the determination of character arises for Pope with the positing of a separation between inner motives and outer actions, between private and public realms. The impossibility of probing true motives, the evaluative disjunction of motives and actions, the Mandevillian vision of a social utility produced by the self-centred effects of the passions, and the implicit attack on a coherent theory of virtue, all are part of the developing notion of a private sphere discontinuous with and therefore separate from public life. The theory of the characters of men in the Essay on Man and the Epistle to Cobham is contradictory because, as we have seen, both those poems begin to acknowledge but ultimately refuse to accept the division of private from public virtue. Significantly, To a Lady does not confront this problem:

But grant, in Public Men sometimes are shown,
A Woman's seen in Private life alone:
Our bolder Talents in full light display'd;
Your Virtues open fairest in the shade.
Bred to disguise, in Public 'tis you hide;
There, none distinguish 'twixt your Shame or Pride,
Weakness or Delicacy: all so nice,
That each may seem a Virtue, or a Vice.

(199-206)

Although the public manners of women may be as impenetrable as those of men, women have so little public exposure or significance that any resulting obscurity is trivial at best.

Indeed, just as Pope's lines suggest, all but working-class women were progressively excluded from participation in the economy in these early stages in the development of English capitalism. The increase in large-scale manufacturing and in the employment of wage labour, and the growing prosperity of shopkeepers and retailers, combined to make urban middle-class women consumers rather than producers. This is the period when wives lose connection with their husbands' business, when ‘spinster’ becomes a term of opprobium for a useless female dependent rather than the description of a productive participant in domestic manufacture and when the leisured lady who takes no note of business becomes a sign of status and gentility for well-off tradesmen. Thus, To a Lady registers an important social trend, a trend that—like the Mandevillian public-private paradox—is clearly a consequence of the new capitalist mode of production, but in this case an inverted and gender-specific consequence. To a Lady, like To Cobham, ultimately derives its central premises from the social changes attendant on the early growth of capitalism. But here the effect of early capitalism's tendency to devalue women's public role enables Pope to skirt the paradox of judgement and to assess the characters of women without contradiction. The unqualified misogyny of the poem, then, results from its escape from the anxiety of the failure of judgement, and its vehemence derives at least in part from the relief and enthusiasm with which it reinstitutes the categories of knowledge and morality that seem—at other moments and in other poems—to be seriously in question. The attack on women frees Pope from moral ambiguity and formal incoherence; it enables him to write a strong and uncompromising poem on human character. In this respect, we could say that Pope needs to hate women in order to forestall the contradictions associated with the new economic system; his misogyny has the same source as his ‘ethical duet’.

These private women, however, are described in a strangely public manner. Though they have no actual public valuation, they are given a public title and function in a series of metaphors initiated by the famous ‘Queen portrait’, the ironic description of Queen Caroline (181-98) that concludes the tour of female characters in the poem's portrait gallery. After this, women are repeatedly ‘Queens’: ‘Toasts live a scorn, and Queens may die a jest’ (282), ‘Yet mark the fate of a whole Sex of Queens’ (219), ‘But ev'ry Lady would be Queen for life’ (218). These last verse paragraphs of the epistle render women almost exclusively through images of power, subjection, tyranny, conquest, retreats, ‘foreign glory’ and domestic peace (220-43). The irony here works in two ways: to disparage the desire for power in so insignificant and powerless a creature, and, conversely, to create a public identity for a private being. In their direct accessibility to moral judgement, these private women represent Pope's closest approximation to a public male world in which the knowledge and definition of character is secure and unshakeable. In other words, the women in To a Lady serve to shore up the notion of a stable, morally determinate identity for men—the primary obsession of Pope's Epistles—by their eminently transparent, clearly despicable characterlessness. A strong judgement against women creates the possibility of a similar judgement in the public world of men. Perhaps this need to use women as surrogates for male stability explains the strange incorporeality of their appearance in the poem's most disturbing passage:

As Hags hold Sabbaths, less for joy than spight,
So these their merry, miserable Night;
Still round and round the Ghosts of Beauty glide,
And haunt the places where their Honour dy'd.

(239-42)

The women haunting the last section of To a Lady are truly ghosts, the ghosts of men from a lost moral system.

If women stand for men in this poem, then where are the ‘real’ women to be found? Not in the admirable ‘Lady’ to whom the epistle is addressed. Martha Blount is either ‘a softer Man’ (272) or an androgyne, mingling the virtues of both sexes. To form her, Heaven

Picks from each sex, to make the Fav'rite blest,
Your love of Pleasure, our desire of Rest,
Blends, in exception to all gen'ral rules,
Your Taste of Follies, with our Scorn of Fools,
Reserve with Frankness, Art with Truth ally'd,
Courage with Softness, Modesty with Pride,
Fix'd Principles, with Fancy never new;
Shakes all together, and produces—You.

(273-80)

Indeed, there are no substantial women in To a Lady. The various women described in the body of the poem are not ‘real’ women in the way that Wharton in To Cobham is a ‘real’ man, but either ghosts of men or simply pictures of women from the walls of a portrait gallery. As Carole Fabricant has suggested, this kind of portraiture, like landscape-painting and like the verbal pastoral scene-painting of Windsor-Forest, reflects an assertion of mastery, a representation of power and possession by which the painter, as well as the viewer/reader, makes the woman or feminized landscape his own.⁹ John Berger describes this process as ‘the metaphorical act of appropriation’ characteristic of the art of this period, an act that could ‘render all that is depicted into the hands of the owner-spectator’.¹⁰ Here we have appropriation in its most absolute form. ‘Woman’ is purely emblematic in the Epistle to a Lady. A painting without a model, a sign without a referent, ‘woman’ holds a place for male fantasy to fill. In The Rape of the Lock Belinda creates her identity through her dressing—her connection with the commodities of trade. The representation of ‘woman’ in To a Lady can be seen as the next step in that process of fetishization. Belinda seems to become the products with which she decks herself. The ‘characters of women’ in To a Lady become not products but the reified embodiment of an assertion of moral stability: they stand for a fantasy of unproblematic knowledge and uncontingent judgement, and in that sense they are the most complexly mystified of Pope's poetic creations, pointing toward the historical forces that distort and undermine the philosophical system of the opus magnum.

III

Near the conclusion of Epistle III, To Bathurst (1733), the speaker asks a ‘knotty’ (337) question:

Say, for such worth are other worlds prepared?
Or are they both, in this their own reward?

(335-6)

He refers most immediately to those who pursue the vice of avarice, and the answer is provided by the career of Sir Balaam, who accumulates riches through a combination of luck, plunder and thievery, rises to a position of wealth and power, and then receives a rapid and concrete earthly punishment:

My lady falls to play; so bad her chance,
He must repair it; takes a bribe from France;
The House impeach him; Coningsby harangues;
The Court forsake him, and Sir Balaam hangs:
Wife, son, and daughter, Satan, are thy own,
His wealth, yet dearer, forfeit to the Crown:
The Devil and the King divide the prize,
And sad Sir Balaam curses God and dies.

(395-402)

The poem ends on this note. But several lines earlier the parallel story of the fate of profusion has an outcome whose affect is very different from the approving narration of Sir Balaam's just deserts. Young Cotta, who ‘mistook reverse of wrong for right’ (200) and, to counter the avarice of his father, spent his fortune, selling his timber, his wool and his lands, which go to equip the English navy and further the imperial cause, finally faces bankruptcy:

And shall not Britain now reward his toils,
Britain, that pays her Patriots with her Spoils?
In vain at Court the Bankrupt pleads his cause,
His thankless Country leaves him to her Laws.

(215-18)

Young Cotta's punishment is presented rather bitterly as something of an injustice, an ironic reflection upon the nation's gratitude to its patriots, while that of Sir Balaam is unambiguously just, and that of young Cotta's cousin in profligacy from the second half of the poem, ‘Great Villiers’ (305), is also graphically appropriate. Young Cotta himself, though an emblem of vice, seems at least partially sympathetic. He wasted his estate from ‘no mean motive’ (205), and his patriotism, as we have seen, is, at least in terms of its benefits to the nation, comparable to Cobham's. Indeed, throughout his poetry Pope cannot represent the suffering of a patriot without some measure of sympathy. The ‘knotty’ question of the workings of justice is treated in two distinct ways, ways that indicate a familiar incoherence in Pope's philosophical tenets. In fact, To Bathurst contains two separate ethical systems, which we can trace through the whole of the poem.

The epistle opens by asserting the premise that the ‘use of riches’ takes two forms—avarice and profusion:

Then careful Heav'n supply'd two sorts of Men,
To squander these, and those to hide agen.

(13-14)

Significantly, these are also Mandeville's key vices, the passions that he sees as most necessary to a successful capitalist economy. Though the society that depends on these passions is treated ironically by Pope, its smooth functioning nevertheless illustrates Heaven's special care for human prosperity. Echoing Epistle II of the Essay on Man, Pope describes how the interaction of avarice and profusion ultimately conduces to the public welfare:

Hear then the truth: ‘'Tis Heav'n each Passion
sends,
‘And diff'rent men directs to diff'rent ends.
‘Extremes in Nature equal good produce,
‘Extremes in Man concur to gen'ral use.’
Ask we what makes one keep, and one bestow?
That pow'r who bids the Ocean
ebb and flow,
Bids seed-time, harvest, equal course maintain,
Thro' reconcil'd extremes of drought and rain,
Builds Life on Death, on Change Duration founds,
And gives th' eternal wheels to know their rounds.

(161-70)

We can find the same argument for the ‘gen'ral use’ of avarice and profusion in Mandeville: ‘I look upon Avarice and Prodigality in the Society as I do upon two contrary Poisons in Physick, of which it is certain that the noxious Qualities being by mutual Mischief corrected in both, they may assist each other, and often make a good Medicine between them.’¹¹ Mandeville also argues in support of the specifically beneficial economic effects of luxury that we have seen implicit in Pope's ambiguously sympathetic privileging of young Cotta's vice:

But let us be Just, what Benefit can these things [virtuous moderation] be of, or what earthly Good can they do, to promote the Wealth, the Glory and wordly Greatness of Nations? It is the sensual Courtier that sets no Limits to his Luxury; the Fickle Strumpet that invents new Fashions every Week; the haughty Dutchess that in Equipage, Entertainments, and all her Behavior would imitate a Princess; the profuse Rake and lavish Heir, that scatter about their Money without Wit or Judgment, buy every thing they see, and either destroy or give it away the next Day. … It is these that are the Prey and proper Food of a full grown Leviathan; or in other words, such is the calamitous Condition of Human Affairs that we stand in need of the Plagues and Monsters I named to have all the Variety of Labour perform'd, which the Skill of Men is capable of inventing in order to procure an honest Livelihood to the vast Multitudes of working poor, that are required to make a large Society.¹²

The context for Pope's account of ‘That pow'r who bids the Ocean ebb and flow' in this epistle is the financial revolution. To Bathurst is about city wealth, paper credit and South Sea year (119). The first literary account of a stock-market crash, it describes the South Sea Bubble, when the boom in inflated South Sea Company stocks collapsed, many investors were ruined and a few corrupt company officials made fortunes.¹³ The poem is peopled with the major figures of the world of finance: John Blunt, a director of the South Sea Company; Gilbert Heathcote, one of the founders of the Bank of England; John Ward, a member of Parliament implicated in the South Sea scheme; and Joseph Gage, a famous stock speculator.¹⁴ Pope even praises paper credit for its efficiency in comparison with the clumsy and ridiculous exchanges of oxen, coals or hogs:

Blest paper-credit! last and best supply!
That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly!
Gold imp'd by thee, can compass hardest things,
Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings;
A single leaf shall waft an Army o'er,
Or ship off Senates to a distant Shore;
A leaf, like Sibyl's, scatter to and fro
Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow:
Pregnant with thousands flits the Scrap unseen,
And silent sells a King or buys a Queen.

(69-78)

Though this passage is clearly ironic, and though Pope's treatment of the heroes of finance characterizes them as figures of vice, the epistle's philosophy of concurring extremes accepts and even celebrates the system that the poem locally satirizes. The natural and biblical imagery of ‘ebbing’ and ‘flowing’, ‘seed-time’ and ‘harvest’, ‘keeping’ and ‘bestowing’, refers, at least in the context of this poem, to the ‘natural’ financial cycles by which ‘blest paper-credit’ maintains economic balance and prosperity.¹⁵ The analogy is essential to the structure of the poem, but at the same time it is elusive, hidden, never explicitly admitted, as if the source of economic and financial order could be affirmed without ever being acknowledged. From this perspective the satiric encomium to paper credit is a real tribute that cannot admit its seriousness, and the account of John Blunt's financial manipulations during South Sea year is both sympathetic and ironic: ‘Much injur'd Blunt! why bears he Britain's hate?’ (135). Howard Erskine-Hill's account of Pope's treatment of Blunt finds ‘ambiguity somewhere in the passage’, ‘moral involvement’ and an indication of Pope's consciousness of Blunt's alliance with many of Pope's own friends.¹⁶ Certainly every surface and explicit aspect of the poem's language attacks the corruptions of modern finance, but the system of order that the epistle constructs leads in another direction.

The Cottas belong to this proto-utilitarian system. Old Cotta is avarice. He hosts no feasts, slights his tenants and turns away ‘Benighted wanderers’ (195). But in the longer perspective, his avarice serves the vital positive function of a ‘reservoir’ for the profusion of later generations:

Who sees pale Mammon pine amidst his store,
Sees but a backward steward for the Poor;
This year a Reservoir, to keep and spare,
The next a Fountain, spouting thro' his Heir,
In lavish streams to quench a Country's thirst,
And men and dogs shall drink him 'till they burst.

(173-8)

This positive view of the passions has the same ambiguous irony as the encomium to paper credit. The fountain is an image of life and fertility but at the same time a grotesque extreme, evoking a kind of levelling where men and dogs together ‘burst’ with excessive consumption. Young Cotta, the fountain, matches his father's avarice with an equivalent profusion. As we saw, his passion serves not simply the general welfare, but the specific cause of imperialist expansion. That is, his profusion directly supports the economic system that defines his vice as a public virtue; we don't even have to wait, like Mandeville, for his luxury eventually to employ the ‘working poor’.

Significantly and characteristically, Pope's definition of public benefits is located in the economic role of the rural gentry rather than in the contributions of the urban ‘Ministers of Industry’ that Mandeville tends more frequently to cite. This preference for the country illustrates Pope's personal connection with the landed upper classes, but it also reflects an accurate estimate of a major locus of capitalist transformation, at least in the early eighteenth century. Old landowners were the largest consolidators of new wealth in the period, though new fortunes were accumulated by other sources as well. Mandeville may have been more prescient, in that his theories seem almost to predict the operations of a fully industrialized society, but Pope's focus on the capitalist landlords accurately reflects the great movements of rural ‘improvement’ that served as the precursors of industrialization. As instruments of this kind of public benefit, neither of the Cottas receives a just reward. Indeed, justice is irrelevant to their role in the poem, just as moral judgement is irrelevant to the proto-utilitarian category of ‘gen'ral use’ within which their avarice and profusion function.

So when Pope turns a few lines later to the advocacy of the ‘golden Mean’ (246), he is subscribing to a different system. In this scheme, the Man of Ross is the ideal because of his altruism, his selfless attention to the poor, the aged and the sick, and his unqualified and absolute virtue:

Who builds a Church to God, and not to Fame,
Will never mark the marble with his Name:
Go, search it there, where to be born and die,
Of rich and poor makes all the history;
Enough, that Virtue fill'd the space between;
Prov'd, by the ends of being, to have been.

(285-90)

The Man of Ross stands in the same relation to the Cottas of this poem as the virtuous ideal of Epistle IV of the Essay on Man stands to the proto-utilitarian argument of Epistle II. In both cases, Pope asserts a norm of traditional virtue in a context that at least partly or conditionally invalidates the category of abstract morality itself. Naturally, under the system of the golden mean and the virtuous ideal, the issue of justice—in this world or the next—is an important one. The parable of Sir Balaam illustrates the significance that Pope attaches, at this point in the epistle, to the distinction between vice and virtue. Like the appearance of Cobham at the end of that poem, the vignette of Sir Balaam helps to reinstate by assertion a security of assessment that the body of the epistle tends to erode.¹⁷

We have been engaged so far in the task of dividing this poem in half, of seeing in the epistle two separate and irreconcilable ethical models: one, the opening private vices/public benefits position, which leads to the assertion of ‘gen'ral use’ and finally to the examples of the Cottas; the other, the rigoristic moral position that begins with the introduction of the ideal of the golden mean and includes the altruistic career of the Man of Ross and the condign punishment of Sir Balaam. But the poem's position is even more complicated than this. Young Cotta, as we have seen, serves as a metaphorical ‘fountain’ for the capitalist economic system. The Man of Ross, or John Kyrle, our touchstone of pastoral altruism, is celebrated for his construction of a real fountain and waterworks near the river Wye, providing the town of Ross with its first water supply, as well as a public causeway for the use of foot travellers and a new spire on the town church:¹⁸

Who hung with woods yon mountain's sultry brow?
From the dry rock who bade the waters flow?
Not to the skies in useless columns tost,
Or in proud falls magnificently lost,
But clear and artless, pouring thro' the plain
Health to the sick, and solace to the swain.
Whose Cause-way parts the vale with shady rows?
Whose Seats the weary Traveller repose?
Who taught that heav'n-directed spire to rise?
The man of ross, each lisping babe replies.

(253-62)

These projects, interestingly enough, far from being unique to John Kyrle or to the traditional country-house ideal upon which Pope's portrait of the Man of Ross draws, are typical of a major movement for domestic improvement that arose out of the economic prosperity and cultural optimism of the early decades of the eighteenth century.¹⁹ In fact the image of the fountain and waterworks that recurs in To Bathurst is one of the tropes of this ideology of public works. Richard Savage in Of Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works (1737) echoes Pope's description:

What though no Streams, in fruitless Pomp display'd,
Rise a proud Column, fall a grand Cascade;
Through nether Pipes, which nobler Use renowns,
Here ductile Riv'lets visit distant Towns!(20)

Aside from land and agricultural improvement schemes, characteristic public projects included inland waterways, turnpikes and churches. Daniel Defoe, the age's most prolific advocate and recorder of such projects, summarizes the situation this way:

'tis more than probable, that our Posterity may see the Roads all over England restor'd in their Time to such a Perfection, that Travelling and Carriage of Goods will be much more easy both to Man and Horse, than ever it was since the Romans lost this Island … as for Trade, it will be encourag'd by it every Way. … Another Benefit of these new measures for repairing the Roads by Turnpikes, is the opening of Drains and Watercourses, and Building Bridges. … [‘if an Account of Great Britain was to be written every Year’] every New View … would require a New Description; the Improvements that encrease, the New Buildings erected, the Old Buildings taken down: New Discoveries in Metals, Mines, Minerals; new Undertakings in Trade; Inventions, Engines, Manufactures, in a Nation, pushing and improving as we are: These Things open new Scenes every Day, and make England especially shew a new and differing Face in many Places, on every Occasion of Surveying it.²¹

Almost inadvertently, it seems, Pope makes his main exemplar of traditional rigoristic morality also a representative of the concrete works of capitalist prosperity. The Man of Ross would clearly be out of place in a Mandevillian system—in fact, it is the men like Ross with their high moral aims who ruin the prosperous hive in The Fable of the Bees. To the extent that Pope sees prosperity in proto-utilitarian terms, the Man of Ross's altruism is inexplicable and anomalous. To the extent that Pope sees an absolute and secure differentiation of vice and virtue as the basic premise of philosophy, young Cotta's ‘fountain’ of prosperity must be judged and condemned like Sir Balaam's avarice. In the image of the Man of Ross, these two positions are superimposed: that character combines altruism with the projects of an expanding commercial prosperity.

Again, we can apply Pocock's dichotomy between virtue and passion to the incompatible perspectives that we have noted in this poem. For Pocock, as for Pope, the problem of personal morality is closely tied to the rise of a money economy, to the spread of credit and to the substitution of a contingent, local valuation for a static ethical authority. The effect of this contingency, this new conditionality of the terms of moral assessment, was felt in the period as corruption, a theme to which Pope's late satires repeatedly return. Pocock outlines the constellation of issues that we have been treating here:

Once property was seen to have a symbolic value, expressed in coin or credit, the foundations of personality themselves appeared imaginary or at best consensual: the individual could exist, even in his own sight, only at the fluctuating value imposed upon him by his fellows, and these evaluations, though constant and public, were too irrationally performed to be seen as acts of political decision or virtue … the individual engaged in exchange could discern only particular values—that of the commodity which was his, that of the commodity for which he exchanged it. His activity did not oblige or even permit him to contemplate the universal good as he acted upon it, and he consequently continued to lack classical rationality. … Techniques certainly existed—of which Addison [and, we might add, Pope] was a literary master—of elevating his motivation to at least the lower forms of rationality and morality; opinion, prudence, confidence, sympathy, even charity; but behind all this lay the ancient problem of showing how society might operate rationally and beneficially when the individuals composing it were denied full rationality and virtue.

Solutions were of course to be found in seeking to depict society as an economic mechanism, in which the exchange of goods and the division of labor operated to turn universal selfishness to universal benefit. … But there was a certain sense in which all this was either beside the point or the admission of a necessary evil.²²

This summary of the dilemma of the period places in clear conjunction the main points raised by our reading of Pope's opus magnum: the uncomfortable superimposition of virtue and self-interest, the incongruous alternation between an attack on capitalism and the acceptance of the amoral rule of public benefit and the anxiety-producing elusiveness of a stable character and identity. The figure of the fountain—at once a grotesque and sentimental emblem of capitalist prosperity—illustrates the poetic subtlety with which To Bathurst joins this debate.

IV

Epistle IV, To Burlington (1731), is even more explicit than To Bathurst in specifying the ‘improvements’ by which prosperity will be spread to the countryside. In the celebratory conclusion of this poem, Pope's friend Burlington is presented as the ideal capitalist landowner, a more fully developed and ambitious version of the Man of Ross, who will build roads, bridges, dams and canals:

Bid Harbors open, public Ways extend,
Bid Temples, worthier of the God, ascend;
Bid the broad Arch the dang'rous Flood contain,
The Mole projected break the roaring Main;
Back to his bounds the subject Sea command,
And roll obedient Rivers thro' the Land.

(197-202)

He will participate, that is, in the essential work of domestic expansion, opening up the country to communication, travel and trade. These patriotic projects are indistinguishable from a corollary contribution to imperialist expansion. The true ‘improve[rs of] the Soil’ (177) are those, like young Cotta, whose lands directly support the English navy:

Whose rising Forests, not for pride or show,
But future Buildings, future Navies grow:
Let his plantations stretch from down to down,
First shade a Country, and then raise a Town.

(187-90)

Here Pope joins imperialism with an allusion to the domestic phenomenon of urbanization—the substantial growth of cities and towns in the eighteenth century—which was spurred by the agricultural improvements and enclosures of the capitalist landowners, and which served as an essential precondition of industrialization. No wonder, then, that Pope's celebration of the peace of domestic prosperity at the end of To Burlington is perfectly coincident with his evocation of the pax Britannica:

These Honours, Peace to happy Britain brings,
These are Imperial Works, and worthy Kings.

(203-4)

Like the imagery of the Essay on Man, the ‘future Navies’ and the imperial peace of this poem recollect the language of Windsor-Forest.

To Burlington is not only the most explicitly imperialist work in what we have of Pope's opus magnum, however. Like To Bathurst this epistle is often cited as an example of Pope's debt to Mandeville's proto-utilitarian ethic.²³ The extended satiric account of the visit to Timon's villa, where false magnificence and real discomfort vie for preeminence, ends with a familiar passage on the ultimately beneficial effects of even such a grotesque misuse of riches.

Yet hence the Poor are cloth'd, the Hungry fed;
Health to himself, and to his Infants bread
The Lab'rer bears: What his hard Heart denies,
His charitable Vanity supplies.

(169-72)

The adversative ‘yet’ that begins this passage almost overturns the satire that precedes it. Again we encounter the problem of the coexistence of moral judgment and proto-utilitarian valuation. Burlington is commended for his good works, even though the system of private vices/public benefits would seem to be conducive enough to prosperity in itself. Likewise, Timon is condemned as immoral, and yet he serves the general good as well as any altruist. Indeed better. Pope's note to this passage on the poor and hungry suggests, ironically for his moral argument, that Timon is economically preferable to Burlington: ‘The Moral of the whole, where providence is justified in giving Wealth to those who squander it in this manner. A bad Taste employs more hands and diffuses Expence more than a good one’ (169n.).

In short, To Burlington joins a proto-utilitarian economic ethic with the most exact list of plans for capitalist prosperity that we have yet seen in Pope's works. Combined, these two positions give the epistle a programmatic effect, as if it sought to provide a concrete summary of the constituents of capitalist economic prosperity. But, typically, the two routes to this ideal prosperity are strictly incompatible. Timon's method is unconscious and amoral; he serves the general good despite himself, by acting upon his private vice. Burlington's is built upon a set of traditional moral standards and their conventional literary manifestations, upon the trope of the admirable patron of the country house and the perfect reciprocity between his motives and the good taste everywhere evident in his estate. If we turn to that latter notion, we begin to see how Pope obscures the formal contradiction of To Burlington by introducing the notions of balance, order and unity that we have already found to be central to the standard of taste derived from neo-classical aesthetics.

Good taste is defined for us in detail in the first part of the epistle. It is connected above all with utility—‘things of use’ like Ross's waterworks—and accordingly it is not ‘profuse’, ‘proud’ or ‘grand’. It is not a product of mere ‘glory’ or pure ‘expence’. Taste derives from ‘Good Sense’, a ‘gift of Heav'n’ that reflects a sensitivity to decency, moderation, pleasing variety and a balance by which parts are made to ‘slide into a whole’ (23-70). To possess good taste means first to follow nature—that neo-classical ‘Nature’ which must be so carefully and tactfully ‘dressed’ like the female emblems of displaced cultural expansion:

In all, let Nature never be forgot.
But treat the Goddess like a modest fair,
Nor over-dress, nor leave her wholly bare;
Let not each beauty ev'ry where be spy'd,
Where half the skill is decently to hide.

(50-4)

How does this poem demonstrate the proper dressing of nature, the concrete enactment of its theory of taste? Belinda dresses in the spoils of English mercantilism, the sylvan creatures of Windsor-Forest dress in the glowing colours of imperialist fantasy, and true wit in the Essay on Criticism dresses in the categories of bourgeois civic order and expansionist foreign policy. In the last epistle of the opus magnum, nature is dressed by the ordering power of Burlington's ‘Imperial Works’, the projects of the patriotic aristocrat at home and abroad—towns, bridges, water-works, public roads, navies and, above all, the ominous ‘Peace’ of imperialist ideology.

These patriotic projects take a distinctive poetic form in the ‘Bid Harbors’ passage that we have already examined, a form very close to that which represents the ordering power of nature in the central verses of To Bathurst:

Ask we what makes one keep, and one bestow?
That pow'r who bids the Ocean
ebb and flow,
Bids seed-time, harvest, equal course maintain.

(165-7)

In each of these passages the prominent rhetorical effect is balanced antithesis. Burlington's constructions will both ‘open’ and ‘contain’, just as the concurring extremes in nature ‘keep’ and ‘bestow’. The concordia discors here seems dependent on the image of waters or seas; the lines from To Burlington juxtapose and reconcile the ‘roaring Main’ and the ‘subject Sea’, the ‘dang'rous Flood’ and ‘obedient Rivers’, like To Bathurst's concern with the ‘ebb and flow’ of the ocean. But more interesting and perhaps less obvious is the strange dual agency embodied in the lines. Both Burlington and his works act: like God at the creation, Burlington ‘bids’ and his harbors ‘open’, his public ways ‘extend’, his temples ‘ascend’, and his bridges ‘contain’; nature ‘bids’ and the seasons ‘maintain’ their course. The lines in these passages are typically framed by verbs, one expressing the agency of the ordering power and the other that of the obedient subject in a reciprocal arrangement of perfect control and perfect co-operation where one slides into the other.

We have seen this kind of verbal reciprocity elsewhere. The pastoral good works of the Man of Ross, for instance, illustrate the same structure in an interrogative mode:

Who hung with woods yon mountain's sultry brow?
From the dry rock who bade the waters flow?
…
Whose Cause-way parts the vale with shady rows?
…
Who taught the heav'n-directed spire to rise?

(253-61)

Again, the spire rises and the waters seem to flow by themselves, autonomously, though under Ross's command. The same simultaneity of control and concession characterizes an earlier passage in To Burlington describing the task of the landscape gardener who dresses the female countryside:

Consult the Genius of the Place in all;
That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall,
Or helps th' ambitious Hill the heav'ns to scale,
Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale,
Calls in the Country, catches opening glades,
Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
Now breaks or now directs, th' intending Lines;
Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

(57-64)

In fact the agency is tripled here: the passage superimposes the gardener who ‘plants’ and ‘works’ upon the ‘Genius of the Place’, which ‘tells’ the waters what to do, ‘scoops’ the valleys, and ‘joins’ the woods. And both are simultaneously aided by the ‘willing’ landscape itself, the waters rising, the glades opening, and the hills scaling the heavens to provide a setting of aesthetic perfection. We can even find a version of this rhetoric in the opening pastoral scene of Windsor-Forest:

Here in full light the russet Plains extend;
There wraps in Clouds the blueish Hills ascend.

(23-4)

Though there is no opening verb here, like the ‘bidding’ or ‘calling’ or ‘teaching’ of the prior examples, the hills ascend and the plains extend at the implicit command of the poet's ordering vision and with the same rhyming words as To Burlington's extend/ascend couplet (197-8). Both Pope and Burlington shape a willing setting: but where Windsor-Forest paints pastoral plains and hills, Burlington builds imperial harbours, roads, temples and moles. In To Burlington as in Windsor-Forest, there is more to Pope's landscape than meets the eye. Both poems enact a characteristic convergence of the pastoral and the imperial, in which the natural world is ‘charmed’, transformed, magically made over in the mirror of ideology. When we read the poems together, we can see both versions of each landscape; we can discover the balanced vistas of Windsor's pastoral behind Burlington's imperial projects, and reciprocally, we can glimpse the harbours and moles of rural improvement in the hills and woods of the ‘natural’ setting of Windsor Forest.

The rhetoric of reciprocal command and concession that marks the concluding ‘Bid Harbors’ passage of To Burlington uncovers a rich complex of related ideological structures: from pastoral and patriotism to misogyny and neo-classical aesthetics. The collaboration that Burlington imposes upon his setting is the prototypical neo-classical act, the ‘True Wit’ that ‘gives us back the Image of our Mind’, the ultimate form of expansionist appropriation. Burlington's language of collaboration recalls the ‘poor Indian’ of the Essay on Man, who is made to testify to the inevitability of power and oppression. Here the countryside of England is made to ‘extend’ and ‘ascend’ in enthusiastic anticipation of the commands of the imperialist. But this is also an act of the fullest possible patriotism. In pursuing good taste and shaping his landscape as he does, Burlington serves as a figure of public virtue, a source of national prosperity. Likewise, in thus contributing to the economic welfare and peace of the empire, he fulfils an aesthetic ideal. The structure of command and concession embodied in that ideal reproduces the process of appropriation by which the goddess of the natural scene is dressed to advantage, possessed, mastered and maintained. The image of the woman lies hidden behind the pastoral landscape, the rhetoric of collaboration and the neo-classical trope of the ‘dressing’ of nature by true wit. In this sense the private figure of the woman can be said to stand for the whole constellation of ideological structures that the poem elaborates.²⁴

To Burlington is an appropriate summary statement for the opus magnum, a compendium of the ideological constituents of Pope's major poetry. Its aim is the formation of an ideology which we have come to call ‘Augustan humanism’—the definition of a cultural ideal for the ruling class, an ideal constructed from the superimposition of an abstract and neo-classical system of aesthetic valuation upon a concrete programme for mercantile capitalist economic expansion.²⁵ It is this superimposition that provides the poem with a thematic coherence—in the notion of taste—to weigh against the evaluative incoherence between Timon's vice and Burlington's virtue. Though both are efficacious in the new economy, that contradiction is obscured in the unifying concern with taste. But taste means even more to the poem than a nominal formal unity. Burlington's tasteful projects have been described as the epitome of Pope's vision of ‘Augustan humanism’.²⁶ This reading substantiates that claim, but it also calls such a humanism into question. My questions are not new ones, however. They were already being asked, in a different manner, by the poets of the mid-eighteenth century. Burlington's ‘Imperial Works’ are predominantly waterworks: harbours, bridges to contain the ‘dang'rous ‘Flood’, the ‘Mole’ to command the ocean and the ‘obedient Rivers’ carrying commerce ‘thro' the Land’. We have seen these waters before: in the Thames that runs ‘strong without rage’ in Denham's famous couplet; in the seas that bear the forests of the English navy to the New World in Windsor-Forest, and in the fountain and the reservoir that guarantee economic prosperity in To Bathurst—in short, throughout the major imagery of mercantile expansion. These are the prototypical waters of the neo-classical concordia discors. But they flow with a different effect in another major poem of the period, a poem written almost a half-century after Pope's:

And thou, sweet Poetry, …
… with thy persuasive strain
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;
Teach him that states of native strength possessed,
Though very poor, may still be very blest;
That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the labour'd mole away.(27)

The graphic overturning of the mole, which is swept away in Goldsmith's and Johnson's lines by the very seas that it commanded in Pope's poem, marks the ideological shift in literature and especially poetry that accompanies the close of England's first imperial period in the second half of the eighteenth century. The formal failure and obsolescence of the concordia discors, the attitude of lament and loss, and the images of destruction and decay that replace Pope's hopeful landscapes of extension and ascension, all indicate a repudiation of imperialist apologia. The Deserted Village, with its indictment of the social costs of mercantile expansion, commercial prosperity and the transformation of English culture by urbanization, enclosure and agricultural modernization, anticipates the romantic critique of industrialization, and it grounds that critique in one of Pope's strongest images of imperial power.

V

At this point in our discussion of the four Epistles to Several Persons, the question of why Pope's opus magnum could not be written may seem a little less ‘knotty’. We have confronted, after all, a series of incoherent or contradictory poems, embodying all the extremes of inconsistency, mystification and appropriation in Pope's commodious repertory. Indeed the problem could perhaps more effectively be restated as the question of why Pope wrote as much of the opus magnum as he did, why he persisted beyond the Essay on Man in rephrasing the contradictions that he obviously could not escape or resolve. To Burlington gives us our best answer to this question. Pope's advocacy of rural ‘improvements’ in that poem is sometimes taken as anomalous, inconsistent with the political disillusionment of this period in his career.²⁸ In our reading of Pope's corpus, however, these ‘Imperial Works’ are a sign of his continued allegiance to the new mode of production despite his specific quarrels with its implementation, a benchmark of his formal and ideological implication in capitalism. The opus magnum could not be written because it takes this implication as a problem to be resolved. As we have seen in our reading of the Epistles and the Essay on Man, Pope's problem engages a major historical transition in a way that allows for no resolution. The formal incoherence, the imagistic ambivalence and the ideological complexity that we have uncovered in these poems demonstrate the extent to which they live out the paradoxes of their historical moment. But in fact the very failure of this poetry to move beyond its time is also its enabling ‘advantage’, the constraint that assures its significance. The futility of Pope's struggle to assert a noncontingent and absolute standard of judgement generates that famous adversary stance of his late poetry, the stance of the virtuous satirist, the privileged arbiter whose vehement defiance takes on history itself:

Ask you what Provocation I have had?
The strong Antipathy of Good to Bad.
When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
Th'Affront is mine, my Friend, and should be yours.
…
Mine, as a Friend to ev'ry worthy mind;
And mine as Man, who feel for all mankind.

(Epilogue to the Satires [1738], Dialogue II, 197-204)

Pope's own ‘True Wit’, then, derives its ‘advantage’ from the contradictions and contingencies of its context, much as Belinda makes her beauty from the materials of a commodified culture.

Notes

1. The ‘Advertisement’ is reprinted in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. III, ii, Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays),ed. F.W. Bateson (London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1951) pp. xviii-xx.

2. Twickenham, vol. III, ii, p. 36n.

3. This problem is also described by Peter Dixon: in the last lines of the poem Pope ‘is unable to make the usual sharp contrast between his satiric victims and the entirely worthy recipient of his verse-letter, for each individual, without exception, is controlled by his Ruling Passion.’ See The World of Pope's Satires: An Introduction to the ‘Epistles’ and ‘Imitations of Horace’ (London: Methuen, 1968), pp. 26-7.

4. See Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope's ‘Opus Magnum’, 1729-1744 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 75-81.

5. John E. Sitter defines the same phenomenon, though he does not read the poem as therefore incoherent, when he describes the epistle as primarily a lesson in humility and self-knowledge at the expense of the assertions of determinacy in the short ruling passion passage. See ‘The argument of Pope's Epistle to Cobham’, Studies in English Literature, 17 (1977), pp. 435-49.

6. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 462 and 465.

7. Leranbaum, Alexander Pope's ‘Opus Magnum’, pp. 71-5.

8. Male readers have not always registered this contempt. Surprisingly many critics have commended Pope for the ‘compassion’, the ‘pathos’ or the ‘fundamental[ly] human’ value of his treatment of women in the poem. See, for example, Thomas R. Edwards, Jr., This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1963), pp. 74-5; Sitter, ‘The argument of Pope's Epistle to Cobham’, p. 78; and Maynard Mack, ‘“Wit and poetry and Pope”: some observations on his imagery’, in Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays presented to George Sherburn, ed. James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), p. 35.

9. Carole Fabricant, ‘Binding and Dressing Nature's Loose Tresses: the ideology of Augustan landscape design’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 8 (1979), pp. 109-35.

10. John Berger, ‘Past seen from a possible future’, in The Look of Things: Essays by John Berger, ed. Nikos Stangos (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 215. Also cited in Fabricant, ‘Binding and Dressing Nature's Loose Tresses’, pp. 114-15.

11. The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. F.B Kaye (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), vol. I, p. 106.

12. The Fable of the Bees, vol. I, pp. 355-6. Two notable readings of To Bathurst reject the notion of Mandevillianism. Earl R. Wasserman sees a theological unity in the poem by which the ‘extremes in man’ are reconciled according to a providential purpose: Mandeville's concern is the material good of society, Pope's the eternal good of mankind; see Pope's ‘Epistle to Bathurst’: A Critical Reading with an Edition of the Manuscripts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1960), pp. 33-40. Paul J. Alpers similarly argues that the poem is anti-Mandevillian in ‘insisting on non-economic, moral criteria to judge the state’; see ‘Pope's To Bathurst and the Mandevillian state’, ELH, 25 (1958), pp. 23-42. Reprinted in Essential Articles for the study of Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, rev. edn (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1968), pp. 476-97; the quoted passage appears on p. 489. Both of these readings emphasize that rigoristic force of the poem, in opposition to earlier arguments that assign to it a relatively simply utilitarianism. Clearly any adequate analysis of To Bathurst must account for the dynamic tension between these two aspects.

13. For the poem's many connections with the South Sea Bubble, see Vincent Carretta, ‘Pope's Epistle to Bathurst and the South Sea Bubble’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 77 (1978), pp. 212-31.

14. For a full account of the poem's connection with the financial revolution, see Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Pope and the financial revolution’, in Writers and their Background: Alexander Pope, ed. Peter Dixon (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 200-29.

15. For this point, see Dixon, The World of Pope's Satires, pp. 195-6.

16. Erskine-Hill, ‘Pope and the financial revolution’, p. 224.

17. Reuben Arthur Brower describes the problem of the poem this way: ‘we must admire Pope for an instinctive common-sense inconsistency, for insisting that moral effort was still necessary in spite of the logic of his philosophic position. In a world where nature's laws work without fail to balance waste with miserliness, there would of course be little point in exhorting men to imitate the Man of Ross, or to adopt the golden mean in managing their wealth’ (Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959], pp. 259-60).

18. Howard Erskine-Hill, The Social Milieu of Alexander Pope: Lives, Example and the Poetic Response (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 15-41.

19. See Dixon, The World of Pope's Satires, pp. 61-2.

20. Richard Savage, Of Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works, second version (1737), in The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962,), pp. 224-5, lines 15-18. This poem plays upon Pope's imperialist and capitalist panegyrics in a variety of interesting ways.

21. Daniel Defoe, A Tour Thro' the whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), introd. G.D.H. Cole (London: Peter Davies, 1927), vol. II, pp. 527, 528, 535, and vol. I, p. 252.

22. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, pp. 464-5.

23. See Twickenham, vol. III, ii, pp. 148-9.

24. For a discussion of the significance of woman as the central figure of ‘a system in which sex, land, morality, and their economic substructure combine in such a way that … each can only be understood in combination with the others’, see James G. Turner, ‘The sexual politics of landscape: images of Venus in eighteenth-century English poetry and landscape gardening’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 11 (1982), pp. 343-66. The quoted passage appears on p. 360.

25. Pope's note to the last lines of the conclusion shows that he was aware of current public works projects, and critical of their shoddy and corrupt execution. Burlington is the ideal alternative to these misconceived projects. See Twickenham, vol. III, ii, pp. 150-1n.

26. ‘This vision of useful art is perhaps the most “Augustan” passage Pope ever wrote. … We respond not to “fact” but to the intelligent courage that rises above the merely factual to assert imaginatively the permanent possibility of goodness in the human condition’ (Edwards, This Dark Estate, pp. 71-2).

27. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, in The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London: Longman, 1969), pp. 693-4, lines 407-28. The last couplet here is attributed to Samuel Johnson.

28. Dixon, The World of Pope's Satires, p. 61.