SOURCE: “Fictions of Passion: The Case of Pope,” in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Vol. 20, edited by Leslie Ellen Brown and Patricia Craddock, Colleagues Press, 1990, pp. 43-53.

[In the following essay, Spacks elucidates the function of the “ruling passion” theory in the Epistles to Several Persons by positing it as a corollary of fictional reality.]

Discussing “the Necessity of human Actions,” Captain William Booth, protagonist of Henry Fielding's Amelia (1751), denies that men function “under any blind Impulse or Direction of Fate,” but insists “that every Man acted merely from the Force of that Passion which was uppermost in his Mind, and could do no otherwise.”¹ His commitment to this point of view signals his moral error. Although he recurs to his hypothesis throughout the novel in order to elucidate the behavior of those around him, his ultimate conversion to orthodox Christianity as a result of reading Isaac Barrow's works involves his repudiation of the theory. “I never was a rash Disbeliever,” he explains; “my chief Doubt was founded on this, that as Men appeared to me to act entirely from their Passions, their Actions could have neither Merit nor Demerit” (511). The virtuous clergyman, Dr. Harrison, horrified, postpones discourse on the subject but emphasizes the importance of regard for true religion, which provides objects, he points out, for the powerful passions of hope and fear.

Fielding himself presumably shared Dr. Harrison's view. In characterizing such figures as Colonel James and Colonel Bath, however, he relies heavily on the idea of a ruling passion. The two colonels act always on the basis of passion, and their individual passions show unvarying consistency. Lust dominates James, intense concern for his honor rules Bath. These figures' utility in the plot, like that of the nameless “noble Lord,” depends on the predictability of their motives. Descended from Elizabethan “humour characters,” such monomaniacal personages in their instant recognizability provide authorial conveniences. Their comic or sinister obsessiveness generates action and makes it comprehensible.

Twenty years before Amelia, in the Essay on Man (1733-34) and the Epistles to Several Persons published between 1731 and 1735, Alexander Pope had elaborately explored the fictional possibilities of the ruling passion. Unlike Fielding, Pope in his authorial persona supports the notion for its interpretive power.

Search then the Ruling Passion: There, alone,
The Wild are constant, and the Cunning known;
…
This clue once found, unravels all the rest …

(“To Cobham,” 174-75, 178)²

The interpreter, of course, can make mistakes: (“in this search, the wisest may mistake, / If second qualities for first they take” [“To Cobham,” 210-211]). We never dependably judge ourselves: all too often “Our spring of action to ourselves is lost” (“To Cobham,” 42). The predilections of the observer may distort his or her observations. Nonetheless, these poems claim, both tacitly and explicitly, the validity and the value of the ruling passion as spring of human behavior.

The explanatory power of asserting a single passion's control over the actions of a human being need not correspond to explicit truth-claims for the idea. In Amelia, the finally discredited notion of ruling passions in fact helps to clarify the chaos of competing motives that shape the plot. As long as Booth believes that passion controls action, he demonstrates the point. (When his belief changes, he presumably becomes capable of acting from principle.) Even Amelia in all her virtue appears governed by her praiseworthy connubial and maternal feelings as often as by articulated principle. Dr. Harrison, who speaks for principle, can act on the basis of the moment's passion. And the many characters who consistently diverge from the standard of “goodness” behave as they do because of the passions that control them. The doctrine stated to be false, in other words, frequently appears in practice true—not universally true, but revealing. In fact “false” doctrine serves as an organizing fiction to convey the novel's moral and psychological “truth.”

Despite the speaker's insistence on the ruling passion's force as explanatory hypothesis, Pope's poems, conversely, do not necessarily persuade the reader that the notion altogether elucidates such events as it allegedly interprets. Theoretically unpersuasive in several respects, the doctrine in Pope's verse too works more fruitfully as fiction than as “truth.” All poetry, of course, depends on its fictions. Dubious doctrine produces compelling verse by working as fictions work. The ruling passion, the interpretative concept alleged to make apparent human eccentricity comprehensible to the informed observer, however inadequate as psychology, constitutes a useful controlling fantasy. It allows Pope to convert his contemporaries into phantasms of consistency, to tell coherent stories about them. To think about the ruling passion as facilitating fiction, testable less by its utility in understanding actual people than by its value in generating a poetic text, helps elucidate the moral and dramatic operations of the epistles.

Pope himself, we know, did not conceive the ruling passion as a fiction, any more than Fielding considered it truth. The poet's serious intellectual claims for his notion, however, like the fact of its honorable genealogy in Renaissance tradition, have little necessary bearing on twentieth-century perceptions of how the theory actually works for readers of the poems. For Pope as for Fielding, the ruling passion functions as a fiction of coherence. F. W. Bateson suggests, acutely, that Pope gets into trouble in the moral epistles—judged as coherent philosophy—because he is interested in so many different things, not only in the theory he purports to illustrate (“Introduction,” Pope, Epistles, xxv). Incoherent philosophy, however, can help to account for coherent poetry. It can even create poetic coherence by serving fiction's purposes. Fiction, to be sure, may be considered a form of truth. As Dr. Johnson was to explain in a notable fable, it originates in truth “dressed and painted by Desire” to create its temporary resemblance to falsehood.³ The unifying fiction of the ruling passion answers to human Desire.

The claim of truth Pope makes is essential to the working of the kind of fiction it inhabits, even if we do not consider the theory of ruling passions persuasive. Within its poetic contexts, that theory must be accepted even by twentieth-century readers—through the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment that constitutes poetic faith—as an “as if” dictum revealing the truth of fiction that Johnson perceived. Preoccupation with the real-world truth-claims of the ruling passion—or, for that matter, the Great Chain of Being—can interfere with our ability to read Pope's poems. For many readers now, the notion of the ruling passion, like that of the flawlessly structured moral universe, registers as fiction in a negative sense (or lie, delusion, error, foolishness). To accept it as imaginative reality can begin to reveal its positive functions.

Detailed examination of how the idea of the ruling passion works in the moral epistles will help to show what I mean. Fielding helps alert us to the organizing power of this notion for presenting character. In its most obvious poetic function for Pope, the idea of a ruling passion supplies the focused simplification necessary to satiric characterization. The “rev'rend sire, whom want of grace / Has made the father of a nameless race,” who “envies ev'ry sparrow that he sees” (“To Cobham,” 228-29, 233); the woman who “Sighs for the shades,” only to weep when she actually possesses her “odious, odious Trees” (“To a Lady,” 38, 40); the hypochondriac female evoked by the rhetorical question about whether riches can “in gems bid pallid Hippia glow” (“To Bathurst,” 89)—such cartoon versions of human perverseness claim little mimetic verisimilitude. They thrive on the freedom of comic invention. A reader's experience of the poems that contain such figures centers on their energetic evocations of richly various forms of human vitality; the reductive notion of the ruling passion, paradoxically, facilitates the imagining of variety.

The opening of “To Cobham,” the epistle that specifies most clearly the theory of the ruling passion, raises a question about the role of individual perception in assessing and comprehending character:

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

(23-26)

The warning about the importance of “The optics seeing” calls attention to the fact that the ruling passion is, precisely, a way of seeing. Its utility for the perceiver exceeds its value for illuminating the object of perception. Belonging to a vision of universal coherence, the notion serves specifically to order psychological impressions. Analogous, the Essay on Man suggests, to “the lurking principle of death” (2:134)⁴ born with each human being, the ruling passion, “The Mind's disease” (2:138), likewise grows through the stages of human development, an unfailing principle of consistency. The asserted presence of the dominating passion makes chaotic experience comprehensible.

The value of the ruling passion as organizing fiction becomes particularly striking in Pope's characterizations of actual people—the duke of Wharton, the Man of Ross, Blount, and the rest. The tour de force presentation of Wharton, in “To Cobham,” provides a vivid instance. The duke had died, at the age of thirty-two, less than three years before the publication of Pope's poem. His short life had been conspicuously, notoriously, chaotic, a manifold tissue of contradictions. Marrying, against his father's will, at sixteen, he deserted his wife soon afterwards. He attached himself to the Pretender, then returned to England, became a member of the Irish House of Peers at the age of nineteen, and spoke ardently in support of the existing English government. A denouncer of vice in public, he was nonetheless—or consequently—president of the Hell-fire Club and involved in other disreputable organizations. Bankrupt in England, he rejoined the Pretender on the Continent, announced his conversion to Catholicism, fought against the English at Gibraltar, was indicted for treason, and ended his life “in a state of beggary, drunkenness, and almost complete destitution.”⁵ With great personal gifts and financial resources, he yet found it impossible to pursue a single course or to achieve lasting distinction. To discover a unifying principle in such a life might challenge any psychologist: the career itself denies unity.

Pope, however, declares as Wharton's ruling passion “the Lust of Praise” (180), recapitulates, at least allusively, many salient facts of his biography, and insists that all exemplify the same emotional bias. If one responds to the poet's assertions as literal explication of a life, the ruling passion theory seems reductive, arbitrary, and as obsessive as the character it describes. As a poetic characterization, on the other hand, the brilliant account of Wharton depends on its obsessive scheme. Pope uses the idea of a passion for praise to reveal the self-cancelling nature of all Wharton's experience. With innate abilities qualifying him to win approval from the wise, the young man seeks instead the admiration of “Women and Fools” (183). He wants to shine both as a Cicero and as a Rochester, to be hailed alike by dignified senates and frivolous clubs, to win the applause of whores and of priests. Like Tithonus's insufficiently imagined desire—for immortality but not for eternal youth—Wharton's indiscriminate yearning constitutes hubris, the failure to acknowledge innate limitation, and guarantees destruction.

By a crucial paradoxical link, Wharton's “Passion” opposes his “Life”:

His Passion still, to covet gen'ral praise,
His Life, to forfeit it a thousand ways.

(196-97)

In other words, experience frustrates desire. The man who covets praise must forfeit it because, as the cited individual instances indicate, the desire's intensity and scope forbid its fulfillment. “Passion” characterizes a longing untamable by experience; “Life” designates the repetitive, chastening process that thwarts longing. The same oppositional pattern, repeated until death, will mark all avatars of the ruling passion. Thus Wharton, bizarre in his individuality, can function also as a poetic type of the universalized vanity of human wishes.

The climax of Pope's account of Wharton develops through an extraordinary suspended sentence, fourteen lines long, full of elaborate qualifiers and dependent clauses, describing a man of bitter paradox, and ending in his death. It begins with its subject's gifts “of nature and of art” (192), nullified by his lack of “an honest heart” (193): the hunger for praise necessarily compromises integrity. Then, with increasing speed and emphasis, it evokes the futility of the gifted man's life, demonstrating the moral inadequacy and the structural inconsistency implicit in Wharton's dependence on others' evaluations:

A Fool, with more of Wit than half mankind,
Too quick for Thought, for Action too refin'd:
A Tyrant to the wife his heart approves;
A Rebel to the very king he loves …

(200-203)

Only in a dependent clause (“he loves”) does the duke figure as subject of an active verb. The sentence's main verb explodes in the line immediately following: “He dies. …” This ultimate action, unwilled and uncontrollable, concludes Wharton's career. In the perspective of the inevitable dénouement, one understands that all actions of the man compelled by lust for praise take place equally without his control.

Once incorporated into a poem, Wharton's life itself becomes a fiction. Disunified experience, given the hypothesis of the ruling passion, generates unified poetry. When Swift (probably) wrote of Pope's dunces, “The Poem was not made for these Authors, but these Authors for the Poem,”⁶ he called attention to the process of conversion by which living human beings become fictional constructs enacting the artist's will. The character of the duke of Wharton too is “made … for the Poem”—made into something for the poem (presumably with hints from Dryden's portrait of Zimri).

As the conversion of Wharton into fiction illustrates, the concept of the ruling passion generates forms of fiction beyond itself. In the moral epistles, it makes possible the narrating of life stories. The miniature biographies that energize the poems—narratives about such wholly or partly invented characters as Balaam, Atossa, Timon—depend on the simplicity and the complexity of the ruling passion as idea.

Balaam, “Religious, punctual, frugal, and so forth” (“To Bathurst,” 343), who shares with other characters in the third moral epistle a strongly acquisitive nature, inhabits a small didactic “tale” which gains not only coherence but poetic power from its constant implicit reference to the ruling passion. Here as in the Wharton story, the fiction of the ruling passion constitutes what the Jesuit thinker William Lynch calls, in quite another connection, “an activating paradigm.”⁷ Provoking the imagination, the concept makes things happen, in the mind and on the page. Balaam values everything in concrete terms; his passion for wealth makes dreadful things happen. The ostensibly neutral narrator does not directly challenge Balaam's system, which converts even the members of his family into property, claimed by Satan, whose rhetorical association with the king suggests intense political overtones of Pope's fable:

Wife, son, and daughter, Satan, are thy own,
His wealth, yet dearer, forfeit to the Crown:
The Devil and the King divide the prize.

(399-401)

But the narrative does not just demonstrate how the ruling passion can explain an imagined career. It also shows how such an explanation, for all its unifying power, provides a surface gloss over chaos (a point implicit also in the duke of Wharton story). Like Freud's fiction of the unconscious mind as composed of id, ego, and superego, the notion of the ruling passion carries hierarchical implications. Just as the putative control of the superego implies the insubordination of the id, Pope's theory of a ruling passion, insistent on the ordered subservience of many to one, contains anxiety about the unruly. The idea of rule implies the possibility of misrule, and of rebellion. Pope's adroit manipulation of its poetic possibilities exploits tensions implicit in the concept. Thus the helter skelter of Balaam's life course infuses the poetic text with its rush of energy and reveals itself as fearsome moral disorder, while the explanatory hypothesis continues to control its presentation:

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.

(395-98)

Two couplets can contain a multifarious sequence of events because Balaam's story has established its own laws of cause and effect. The course of disaster, from the point of view of the knowing narrator (whose “neutrality” comes to seem increasingly stern) and the audience he has instructed, is inevitable. From Balaam's point of view, on the other hand, senseless misfortune has overtaken his life. Unlike Job, he has not been persuaded of divine wisdom: he can only curse God and die. The victim of a ruling passion suffers that passion as disease; only the spectator can employ it as rationalizing structure. The ruling passion provides the analyst of character with an illusion of order, but it also enables the poet to present narratives of dramatic disorder, disorder that can be imagined as threatening the entire social fabric.

Occasionally in the moral epistles Pope depicts a character whose asserted ruling passion functions as virtue. On the whole, such characters seem relatively unpersuasive as imagined figures. Cobham, for instance, gets rather perfunctory attention at the end of the poem addressed to him:

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.

(262-65)

The poet does not bother to imagine or to report evidence of characterological consistency; he only asserts it, in a spirit of compliment. Cobham seems hardly more than a rhetorical device. (As Hannah More points out, Pope did not prove a good prophet with this particular fiction. In Cobham's last moments, she reports, “not being able to carry a glass of jelly to his mouth, he was in such a passion, feeling his own weakness, that he threw jelly, glass and all, into Lady Chatham's face, and expired.”⁸)

A more fully realized virtuous exemplar of the ruling passion is the Man of Ross. Twentieth-century research has fully supported Pope's claim of his actual existence and has documented the facts to which the poem alludes,⁹ yet (at least for twentieth-century readers) he lacks the vitality of such imaginary personages as Balaam. Although his ruling passion, like Atossa's, is never explicitly identified, it manifests itself as benevolence. He exemplifies an eighteenth-century ideal of active sympathy, subordinating self-interest to concern with others' good. Pope saw him as a ready-made “Good Example” and proclaimed, in a letter to Hugh Bethel, that everything he had written about the man's “Good Works … is to a Tittle true.”¹⁰

To a Tittle true: yet despite his literal authenticity the Man of Ross as poetic character possesses less fictional authority, less “truth” on the page, than do his more reprehensible counterparts in Pope's poems—not because good is inherently less persuasive than evil but because this idealized figure, unlike Atossa, say, is rendered entirely by means of reported action rather than dramatized emotion. The narrator implicitly deduces a ruling passion from its effects. The notion's theoretical status thus becomes all too vividly apparent; the inherent artifice of fictionmaking, corresponding to the manifest artifice of the rhetoric of religiosity and sentimentality used to evoke the moral grandeur of the generous man, may begin to trouble the reader.

“Fictions are for finding things out,” Frank Kermode has written, “and they change as the needs of sense-making change.”¹¹ Obviously a means of sense-making, like the paradigms of science, the fiction of the ruling passion, applied to an Atossa or a Wharton, serves to change our perceptions of character. It directs attention to irrational components of human action, demands that we take the irrational seriously, insists that the sum total of an individual's experience makes sense, often, only from the perspective of an outside observer equipped with a theory. The ruling passion as a fiction provides a way to acknowledge—even to delight in—ominous emotional forces, and a way artistically to contain them. Applied to the Man of Ross, the concept of the ruling passion seems more literally plausible than it does in relation to, say, the duke of Wharton. The works this Christian hero left behind him indeed testify to the unity of his life. Yet the notion of a controlling passion here calls attention to no powerful irrational impulse. It becomes a mechanical device for reiterating conventional pieties.

On the whole, though, the moral epistles present themselves as poems of discovery: thus of change. Their fictions operate dynamically, through large narratives as well as miniaturized stories. They tell the story of “the optics seeing” as well as of “the objects seen”—a story not of literal but of metaphoric “optics”: of consciousness. In this story, the speaker plays an important part. The different voices, vocabularies, tonalities he adopts, his range of social registers and references, dramatize the diversity of individual personality. The implied character of the speaker in its complexity counterpoints the proclaimed unity of those figures who supply the nominal subjects of the poems. The dialogic richness Bakhtin considers typical of the novel—“the internal stratification of language, … its social heteroglossia and the variety of individual voices in it”—and which he finds ordinarily missing from poetry animates the moral epistles.¹² Dialogue takes place not only between speakers, implicitly and explicitly, but among the various voices of the single speaker controlling the textual representations of character. “To Bathurst,” for instance, opens in a bantering tone, moves to satiric indignation expressed partly through Biblical allusion (“Yet, to be just to these poor men of pelf, / Each does but hate his Neighbor as himself” [109-10]), then high seriousness (“Ask we what makes one keep, and one bestow? / That pow'r who bids the Ocean ebb and flow” [165-66]). With the Man of Ross, Pope takes an excursion into sentimental religiosity:

Who taught that heav'n-directed spire to rise?
The man of ross, each lisping babe replies.

(261-62)

With his accounts of Buckingham and Cutler, he returns to the energies of satire. The story of Balaam proceeds from comic casualness to ostensibly non-judgmental reportage. And my cavalier summary ignores several tonal modulations along the way.

This account of dialogical diversity does not reiterate the view that Pope utilizes various personae in constructing a satiric poem. Voices are not personae, though they convey personhood. Inasmuch as the poet figures as a character in his poem, his voices, expressing a range of social and personal possibilities, remind us that a human being need not survive only in his or her obsessions. The obsessional simplifies personality, making it possible for a poet—a maker of fictions—to claim the comprehensibility of character. But the more covert dialogic aspects of the moral epistles, the rendered awareness of different levels and tones of discourse, dramatize the liberating potential of attention to a world (predominantly a human world) outside the self. The narrator as character demonstrates a saving alternative to obsession. The fiction of the ruling passion calls attention to the universal presence of obsessiveness; the fiction of the wisely (but not unemotionally) observant self, the self that speaks in and through many voices, reminds us of fuller potentialities. Pope manipulates both to generate the rich texture of the moral epistles.

He thus takes his place with Fielding and the other novelists of the eighteenth century as one who understands an important fiction of character—the fiction of unity conveyed by the idea of a ruling passion—and understands its poetic workings. His deft deployment of shifting tonal registers, changing strategies of speech, in the voices of his speakers throughout the moral epistles provides a more ambiguous way of rendering complexity. Unity may be hard to find, these poems suggest. Hard to find: but we need its reassurance.¹³

Notes

1. Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1983), 32.

2. All references to the Epistles are taken from Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), ed. F. W. Bateson, vol. 3:2 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London: Methuen, 1951).

3. Rambler 96 (16 Feb. 1751), The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. 4 of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969).

4. An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack, vol. 3:1 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London: Methuen, 1950).

5. The Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Wharton, Philip, duke of Wharton.”

6. “PREFACE prefix'd to the five imperfect Editions,” The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, vol. 5 of The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope (London: Methuen, 1943), 205.

7. William F. Lynch, S. J., Images of Faith: An Exploration of the Ironic Imagination (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 19.

8. Letter to an unspecified sister, 1780, in William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 3 vols. (London, 1834), 1:175.

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

10. 8 Sept. 1731, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1956), 3:227.

11. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), 39.

12. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 264.

13. I am indebted to Howard Erskine-Hill and Aubrey Williams, whose comments helped me greatly in revising this essay.