SOURCE: “Augustan Literary Tenets,” in A Preface to Pope, Longman Group Ltd., 1976, pp. 86-108.

[In the following essay, Gordon explains common eighteenth-century literary conventions in the context of Pope's poetry, highlighting his Essay on Criticism.]

A perfect Judge will read
each Work of Wit
With the same Spirit that its Author writ,

An Essay On Criticism, 1711, (233-4)

Any age makes certain intellectual and cultural assumptions about itself which seem dated, and sometimes totally foreign, to succeeding ages, but which come almost unconsciously to the age itself. Any twentieth-century writer, for example, assumes that his audience is familiar with Freudian or Marxist ideas. He refers to the Oedipus complex or to the class struggle without having to explain what he means. Such ideas form an area of allusion from which a modern writer freely draws, and about which he is sure of his reader's familiarity. But in two hundred years time such allusions may well need footnotes to explain them, just as eighteenth-century allusions to the concepts of concordia discors and the scala naturae need them today. The aim of this chapter is to explain some of the critical assumptions that underlay Augustan expectations about literature, and to show how an understanding of such assumptions helps one to see better what Pope was trying to do in his poetry, and to judge more fairly the degree to which he succeeded in doing it.

One of the most important and helpful documents for an understanding of Augustan literary principles is Pope's Essay on Criticism. Although most of this poem was written when he was only twenty or twenty-one, it hardly deserves the scorn poured on it by De Quincey who called it ‘the feeblest and least interesting of Pope's writings, being substantially a mere versification, like a metrical multiplication table, of commonplaces the most mouldy with which criticism has baited its rat-traps’. It is true that there is nothing especially new in what Pope says, but that is also its merit. It is an extremely thorough and often memorable account of the Augustan critical position, and, preferring Dr Johnson's words to those of De Quincey, ‘exhibits every mode of excellence that can embellish or dignity didactic composition—selection of matter, novelty of arrangement, justness of precepts, splendour of illustration, and propriety of digression’. Part of our difficulty with the poem, if we find one, is due to our lack of familiarity with didactic poetry. In the twentieth century we tend to feel that this is not quite the right subject matter for poetry. But the eighteenth century laid down no such limitations on what was or was not the right subject for poetry. Indeed it is not until one tries to extract a prose meaning from the lines that one realizes how poetically charged they in fact are.

THE KINDS

When we first read a new poem today we tend to come to it with certain accepted ideas concerning what is and is not good poetry. We expect, for example, that a good poem will be fresh and striking in its imagery, will use everyday colloquial language, and will offer a full expression of the poet's own feelings. But these are peculiarly post-Romantic criteria, and although an eighteenth-century reader also judged poetry according to certain preconceived criteria, he would not have approached a new poem with anything like so narrow a set of preconceptions. He would have a different set of criteria for different kinds of poems. He would have read a new poem much as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers had done before him, and when they read a new poem the first question they would have asked would have been ‘What kind of a poem is this?’

So far as the Renaissance was concerned particular kinds of poetry demanded particular kinds of subject matter. The epic, for example, required an elevated subject of a grand scope, while the epistle required a familiar subject of a more parochial scope. There was a wide variety of possible kinds of poetry, just as there was a wide variety of possible kinds of subject matter, but each kind made its own special rules and demands on the poet. What was appropriate for one kind of poetry might be totally inappropriate for another. This is what is meant by the concept of decorum.

The different kinds of poetry had different degrees of importance. Just as the Renaissance world fell into an ordered hierarchy, the Great Chain of Being (see chapter 5) in which all existence from the human to the inanimate had its fit place, so the literary kinds, ideally, fell into an ordered hierarchy in which each kind had its fit place. In practice, however, the order was never as strict or as clearcut as this comparison suggests, and there was considerable difference of opinion about the correct ordering of the kinds. In the sixteenth century we find the kinds ordered, in such works as Julius Caesar Scaliger's Poetics, 1561, or George Puttenham's Art of English Poesie, 1589, so that hymns and paeans are the highest kind of poetry, because of their divine subject matter, while incantations, epigrams and ditties are the lowest. What matters for us of course is not Scaliger or Puttenham's ordering of the kinds, but that of the eighteenth century. I have begun by mentioning the sixteenth-century belief in the doctrine of the kinds because it shows us that Pope in his acceptance of the doctrine was, as in so many other things, faithful to the past. Furthermore we know that he was familiar with Scaliger's work in particular, for he told Spence in 1739 that ‘Scaliger's Poetics is an exceeding useful book of its kind, and extremely well collected’.

The main difference between the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ordering of the kinds and that of the Renaissance concerns the much higher valuation that the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave to the epic. The epic was pre-eminently the major literary kind, and any poet aspiring to greatness should have written one. For this reason, if no other, Spenser and Milton were accepted as the great English poets, and although Dryden and Pope, who were accounted the next greatest, failed to write their planned epics (Dryden's was to be on King Arthur, and Pope's on Brutus, the legendary founder of Britain) they did the next best thing by writing translations of the two greatest epics in any language. The more one reads of post-Restoration poetry the more one becomes aware of the very great degree to which the epic shaped and formed it. Without the idea of the epic in the background MacFlecknoe, Absalom and Achitopel, The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad would have been impossible. Each of these poems constantly alludes to, quotes from, imitates, parodies or mocks specific lines and incidents from the great epics of Homer, Virgil and Milton. One can only fully appreciate the satiric wit of the poems when one has a knowledge of the epics on which they are based.

This is no place to discuss the separate traditions lying behind all the different kinds of poetry that Pope attempted, for he tried his hand, not always with equal success, at a great number—the mock epic, the georgic, the pastoral, the dream vision, the didactic, the heroic epistle, the elegy, the familiar epistle, the formal verse satire, the moral epistle, the prologue, the epilogue, the ode, the epigram and the epitaph. What matters is that the reader should be aware that each kind of poem Pope writes has a different tradition behind it, and therefore a different framework in which it needs to be viewed. This is important because Pope expects the reader to recognize the tradition in which he is writing and then to admire the way in which he gives it a new turn. Where the nineteenth- or twentieth-century poet hopes the reader will think his poem original and new, the eighteenth-century poet considers that he has failed if he ignores tradition by being too original.

At the same time as the doctrine of the kinds created certain formal expectations it also allowed an inventive poet to create surprise by breaking those expectations in unusual ways. This, of course, is the basis of the mock epic where the poet uses an elevated form for unsuitable subject matter. In The Rape of the Lock a trivial event is treated with a mock seriousness that is totally inappropriate to its importance. The same sort of deliberate unrelatedness between form and subject lies behind many Augustan satiric writings. Gay's ‘Newgate Pastoral, The Beggar's Opera, and Swift's mock aubade, A Description of the Morning, are two cases in point. In both these works the success of the satire depends not only on the reader's recognizing the fact that form and subject are at odds with one another, but also in his implicitly knowing how the literary kinds of the pastoral and the aubade would be correctly handled. The reader's appreciation of the poem is increased through his self-esteem in recognizing the distortion that has taken place.

One other way in which an awareness of the doctrine of the kinds helps in an appreciation of Pope's poetry concerns the reader's being responsive to the possibility of a shift in kinds, even within a single poem. Pope never allows the kinds, to become so mixed that the overall effect is one of confusion, but he does frequently move into a style that is appropriate to a kind other than that in which he is writing. For instance, in his Imitation of Horace, II, vi, which tells the famous story of the town and country mice, Pope writes in the familiar and colloquial language appropriate to the formal verse satire. Then, suddenly, in describing the home of the town mouse he shifts into a mock epic language that is strictly inappropriate to the kind of poem he is writing:

                    Behold the place, where if a Poet
Shin'd in Description, he might show it,
Tell how the Moon-beam trembling falls
And tips with silver all the walls:
Palladian walls, Venetian doors,
Grotesco roofs, and Stucco floors:
But let it (in a word) be said,
The Moon was up, and Men a-bed,
The Napkins white, the Carpet red:
The Guests withdrawn had left the Treat,
And down the Mice sate, tête à
tête.

(189-99)

The transition from the elegant pictorial language of the trembling moonbeams that tip the walls with silver in the first six lines to the curt and clipped telegrammatic language, that so perfectly captures the style of Swift, in the last five lines, shows a wonderfully urbane turn of wit.

DECORUM

The Augustan concept of decorum is directly connected with the doctrine of the kinds just discussed. In the same way as there is an appropriate kind of poetry for a certain subject matter, so there is an appropriate language for each kind of poetry. Decorum is another word for propriety, and the literary concept of decorum involves proper words in proper places. The language must be suited to the purpose, or as Ian Jack puts it in his book Augustan Satire, the idiom must be level with the intention.

Pope expresses the doctrine clearly enough in the Essay on Criticism:

Expression is the Dress of Thought, and still
Appears more decent as more suitable;
A vile Conceit in pompous Words exprest,
Is like a Clown in regal Purple drest;
For diff'rent Styles with diff'rent Subjects sort,
As several Garbs with Country, Town, and Court.

(318-23)

The analogy between literary decorum and civilized behaviour is a crucial one. Just as there is an art in doing certain things well—dressing, eating, courting—so there is an art in expressing them well. One dresses according to the occasion. It would be ridiculous to wear one's best suit and new shoes to go gardening in, and it would be disrespectful to wear one's tattiest clothes to attend a wedding. In the same way, it is ridiculous to use an elevated style to describe a trivial event like the removal of a lock of hair from a young lady's head, just as it is disrespectful to use an earthy style to praise the King. As the above examples imply there are times when Pope deliberately breaks the concept of decorum for satiric effect, but in breaking it he is of course tacitly acknowledging its fundamental importance.

The epic demands a specially well-chosen style. It should be written in a language appropriate to its grand purpose. Indeed, one of Pope's rare criticisms of Dryden concerns the inappropriateness of part of his translation of the Aeneid:

I agree with you [he writes to his friend Henry Cromwell in 1710] in your censure of the use of sea-terms in Mr Dryden's Virgil; not only because Helenus was no great Prophet in those matters, but because no Terms of Art, or Cant-Words, suit with the majesty and dignity of style which epic poetry requires.

An understanding of the literary concept of decorum helps us to appreciate two particular aspects of Pope's vocabulary that have given readers trouble and concern over the years: his use of poetic diction, and his use of scatologic words.

Poetic diction is a term used by Pope in his Preface to the Iliad to describe that quality in Homer's expression which is especially alive and glowing and more highly charged than ordinary speech. But the term was taken up by the Romantics and used in a much narrower and more pejorative sense to describe the artificial language that they felt to be the overriding fault of eighteenth-century poetry. The most famous and influential attack on poetic diction comes in Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800:

There will be found in these volumes little of what is usually called poetic diction: as much pains has been taken to avoid it as is ordinarily taken to produce it; this has been done for the reason already alleged, to bring my language near to the language of men.

Later on Wordsworth refers to poetic diction as ‘adulterated phraseology’ and a ‘motley masquerade of tricks, quaintness, hieroglyphics and enigmas’.

Wordsworth's attack on poetic diction is particularly a rejection of personification and periphrasis: phrases like the ‘scaly breed’, used by Pope to describe fish in Windsor-Forest, or the ‘glitt'ring forfex’, to describe a pair of scissors in The Rape of the Lock. These are words specially chosen to raise the respective scenes in which they occur, either seriously or ironically, above an ordinary scene. Furthermore, they add a dimension to the meaning that the more ordinary words could not possibly add. In calling the fish the ‘scaly breed’ in Windsor-Forest, for example, Pope shows through the adjective what the individual fish that he is about to describe in great detail have in common that distinguishes them from other creatures in the scala naturae; through the noun he points out that they are at the same time a generative part of that scala naturae, thus adding to the sense of creative plenitude found in the forest at large. The more ordinary word ‘fish’ could not have suggested these additional areas of meaning. Similarly detailed reasons can be given for the periphrastic description of the scissors in The Rape of the Lock (see under ‘Periphrasis’ in the Glossary of Technical Terms, p. 162).

Because Pope can be shown to be using poetic diction here for a deliberate purpose, however, it does not follow that there is not a great deal of substance in Wordsworth's attack on it. There certainly was a decaying poetic style among the minor poets of fifty years later, who frequently used the formulaic quality of poetic diction as a way of constructing stock effects, and Wordsworth's rejection of this habit was more than welcome. What needs to be pointed out here is that the best poets, such as Pope, Thomson and Gray, used poetic diction as an integral support to their poetic feeling, not as a substitute for it.

The difficulty with scatologic words is similar. Pope is gratuitously obscene in The Dunciad, Book II, critics will say, or his image of excrement being passed on from ‘hog to hog in huts on Westphaly’, in Epilogue to the Satires: Dialogue II, 171-80, is unpardonably filthy. But this is exactly what Pope wants us to say. To an audience that is not shocked by his attack on moral decay, only the analogy with physical decay remains. Again the concept of decorum is at work, for just as the epic requires a suitably elevated style, so satire requires a suitably vigorous and scabrous one. Pope did not hesitate to call a spade a spade if it was appropriate, and he did not shrink from calling it a shovel if it was necessary. When Boswell objected to a certain phrase in Pope as being low, Dr Johnson replied: ‘Sir, it is intended to be low: it is satire. The expression is debased to debase the character’.

THE RULES

Much of the foregoing discussion might suggest that Pope and the Augustans believed poetry should be written according to a set of pre-ordained rules. But there is a great difference between the person who believes that poetry should be written according to a narrow set of sharply defined rules and the person who believes that the poet's imagination works the more freely for operating within a broad set of shared expectations. The theoretical discussion concerning whether a poet is born or made is a simplification of the same issue. A poet, of course, is both born and made: he has both genius and skill. The critical question is where the emphasis should lie, which is the more important? The question was indeed a lively and perennial one in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but only the most stereotyped of neoclassical critics, like Thomas Rymer, believed in a strict and uncompromising adherence to the rules. The great creative writers, especially Dryden and Pope, were far too aware of the complex workings of the imagination to subscribe to limiting formulae without making serious reservations.

The rules received their greatest support and popularity in seventeenth-century France. Boileau's Art Poétique, 1674, Rapin's Réflexions sur la Poétique, 1674, and Le Bossu's Traité du Poème Epique, 1675, belong to a common school of criticism in that they each set out to abstract a set of guidelines for the writing of poetry from the works of the Ancients, and particularly from Aristotle and Horace. Perhaps the most notorious rules abstracted from the Ancients were those concerning drama. The demand that plays be written according to the three unities of time, place and action has long since been shown to be totally irrelevant to the stage, and nowhere more effectively than by Dr. Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare, 1765. But for a short period during the last quarter of the seventeenth century this theoretical demand held great sway in both France and England. Thomas Rymer's vituperative attack on Shakespeare in A Short View of Tragedy, 1692, shows such a position taken to its logical and absurd conclusion. Rymer's ‘commonsense’ approach demonstrates an extraordinary aesthetic insensitivity and has earned him the reputation among most latterday students of being, in Macaulay's words, ‘the worst critic that ever lived’.

Dryden's attitude to the rules is, like that of Pope, mixed. Both men skilfully pick their way between the strict rigidity of the formalist critics and the boundless freedom of their opponents. Where Rymer sees the rules as ends in themselves, Dryden and Pope see them as means to an end:

I never heard of any other foundation of Dramatic Poesy than the imitation of nature; neither was there ever pretended any other by the ancients, or moderns, or me, who endeavour to follow them in that rule. This I have plainly said in my definition of a play; that it is a just and lively image of human nature … if nature be to be imitated, then there is a rule for imitating nature rightly; otherwise there may be an end, and no means conducing to it.

Dryden, Defence of Dramatic Poesy, 1668.

Pope begins his discussion of the rules in An Essay On Criticism in much the same way:

Those rules of old discover'd, not devis'd,
Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz'd;
Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain'd
By the same Laws which first herself
ordain'd.

(88-91)

The modern reader may feel that Pope is trying to have his cake and eat it, but there is a great deal of validity in what he says. He neatly sidesteps involvement in the debate between the proponents of rules and the proponents of imitating nature by saying that the two are essentially the same. He makes the identical point later in the poem when he says:

Learn hence for Ancient Rules
a just Esteem;
To copy Nature is to copy Them.

(139-40)

Pope draws, in An Essay on Criticism, on many of the same persons who so influenced Rymer—Boileau, Rapin and Le Bossu—but never in so slavish a way. He struggles throughout to effect a reasonable reconciliation between the adherents and the opponents of the rules, a reconciliation that is summed up in the antithetical force of the second line in the following couplet:

Hear how learn'd Greece her useful Rules indites, When to repress, and when indulge our Flights.

(92-3)

He defends ‘just precepts’ drawn from ‘great examples’, but the emphasis in both phrases is an much on the adjective as the noun. What really counts, however, is the ‘Poet's Fire’, that is, his imagination (cf. Pope's admiration for Homer's fire which ‘burns everywhere clearly and everywhere irresistibly’, Preface to the Iliad), and for as long as critics admired that ‘coelestial fire’ (195) criticism remained in a healthy state:

Then Criticism the Muse's Handmaid prov'd,
To dress her Charms, and make her more belov'd.

(102-3)

But later critics grew jealous of what they could not themselves achieve and, elevating criticism above the art it presumed to study, used ‘mistaken rules’ to attack the poets they were meant to serve:

But following Wits from that Intention stray'd;
Who could not win the Mistress, woo'd the Maid;
Against the Poets their own Arms
they turn'd,
Sure to hate most the Men from whom they learn'd.

(104-7)

Critics who slavishly adhere to precept are seen as quack apothecaries (108-11), insects (112-13) and even as cooks, who ‘write dull Receits [recipes] how Poems may be made’ (115).

For Pope the only true way to sharpen one's critical discrimination is to soak oneself in the classics:

Be Homer's Works your Study, and Delight,
Read them by Day, and meditate by Night,
Thence form your Judgment, thence your Maxims bring,
And trace the Muses upward to their Spring.

(124-7)

Pope's strategy in effecting a reconciliation in the debate concerning the rules is to redefine what is meant by them so that following them becomes the same thing as following nature. Yet even when he has thus carefully qualified his approval he still finds it necessary to insist on the escape clause:

          Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,
For there's a Happiness as well
as Care.

(141-2)

He goes on to stress the mysterious quality that exists in the greatest poetry, the ‘nameless Graces which no methods teach’, and which depend on a ‘Lucky licence’ [Pope's capitals], or a ‘brave Disorder’ that will part from ‘vulgar Bounds’ and ‘snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art’ (144-55).

What this account of Pope's discussion of the rules in the Essay on Criticism shows us is that, far from being the fervent disciple of the rules that he is sometimes described as being, Pope gives them, at most, a qualified vote of approval. He admits their usefulness when they lead us back to the great works of creative genius, but once they become dogmatic or limiting they must be put aside. On the whole he is a far fiercer defender of the ‘Liberties of Wit’ than he is of the ‘vulgar Bounds’ of ‘Foreign Laws despis'd’.

WIT

Of all the literary terms current in the Augustan period ‘wit’ is the most difficult to define. The word is used in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to cover a variety of widely different meanings, each one of which forces us to see the other in a slightly different light. Pope was concerned with the word's complexity from a very early age. In 1704, for instance, we find him writing to William Wycherley offering the following definition: ‘True Wit I believe, may be defin'd as a justness of Thought, and a Facility of Expression; or (in the Midwives phrase) a perfect Conception, with an easy Delivery’. The definition is itself an example of one kind of wit, but the sixteen-year-old Pope was fully aware of the elusive nature of the term, for he continued in the next sentence: ‘However this is far from a compleat definition; pray help me to a better, as I doubt not you can’.

In his Dictionary, 1755, Dr Johnson lists eight different meanings of the word, while the OED, published almost two hundred years later, lists fourteen main meanings and any number of subordinate and compound ones. William Empson has pointed out in The Structure of Complex Words that the word appears on an average every sixteen lines in An Essay on Criticism and in a somewhat different sense nearly every time, though he adds that ‘there is not a single use of the word in the whole poem in which the idea of a joke is quite out of sight’. All this is of little comfort to the new reader, but it is a warning against expecting a clear cut definition of so complex a word.

The basic meaning of the word, from which all others derive, concerns the various powers of the mind. The term could refer either to all the mental faculties working together, or to individual mental faculties, such as the imagination, judgment and memory. It is because the word originally covered each of these very different faculties that its meaning became so complex when writers tried to limit its application to a particular faculty. We still use the term in its overall sense, albeit somewhat unconsciously, when we talk about being at our ‘wit's end’, but by and large the word has a very much narrower meaning in its most commonly accepted usage today, referring to a person's ability to say clever and ‘witty’ things.

There are four main ways in which Pope uses the expression in An Essay on Criticism. First, he occasionally uses it in its original sense to refer to all the mental faculties considered together:

          Nature to all things fix'd the Limits
fit,
And wisely curb'd proud Man's pretending Wit:
As on the Land while here the Ocean gains,
In other Parts it leaves wide sandy
Plains;
Thus in the Soul while Memory prevails,
The solid Pow'r of Understanding
fails;
Where Beams of warm Imagination play,
The Memory's soft Figures melt
away.
One Science only will one Genius fit;
So vast is Art, so narrow Human Wit.

(52-61)

Wit, as it is used in the last line of this passage, refers to each of the cognitive faculties in turn whether one is considering the ‘soft figures’ of Memory, the ‘solid power’ of Understanding [i.e. Judgment], or the ‘beams of warm’ Imagination. No man can excel in all the faculties of the mind, ‘so vast is Art [Learning], so narrow Human Wit’, and man must therefore fit his genius to one particular branch of knowledge.

The second meaning of the word, and the one with which he begins the poem, is as a synonym for genius, or the indefinable gift of the poet:

In Poets as true Genius is but rare,
True Taste as seldom is the Critick's Share;
Both must alike from Heav'n derive their Light,
These born to Judge, as well as those
to Write.
Let such teach others who themselves excell,
And censure freely who have written well.
Authors are partial to their Wit, 'tis true,
But are not Criticks to their Judgment too?

(11-18)

In the first line here the distinguishing mark of the poet is ‘true Genius’ which must be derived from Heaven (cf. poeta nascitur non fit), but by line 17 the distinguishing mark of the poet is his ‘Wit’. The term ‘wit’ has become interchangeable with ‘genius’ and distinct from ‘judgment’. We shall see when we come to Pope's fourth meaning that, in other places, he stresses the importance of its liaison with judgment. Such paradoxes are an essential part of the word's complexity.

A third way in which Pope uses wit is to refer to the quality of ingenuity in a writer. It is this quality of verbal and intellectual agility that the Restoration Wits strove after. At its best the pursuit of such a quality leads to piercing illumination, but at its worst it leads to a purely superficial glamour, to writing that is all frothy extravagance without any ethical basis, or what Pope so aptly calls, ‘One glaring Chaos and wild Heap of Wit’ (292). Pope is totally scornful of this kind of wit:

          Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past,
Turn'd Criticks next, and prov'd
plain Fools at last;
Some neither can for Wits nor Criticks pass,
As heavy Mules are neither Horse
nor Ass.
Those half-learn'd Witlings, num'rous in our Isle,
As half-form'd Insects on the banks of Nile;
Unfinish'd Things, one knows not what to call,
Their Generation's so equivocal:
To tell 'em, wou'd a hundred Tongues require,
Or one vain Wit's, that might a hundred tire.

(36-45)

The comparison of the ‘witlings’ to insects (cf. the opening lines of An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot), the pun concerning their proliferation and the final epigrammatic dig at their endless loquacity show the brilliant effectiveness of Pope's own satiric wit being used to annihilate the glittering falsity of the poetasters and pretenders to wit. At its best, wit of such intellecutal agility adds a sprightliness to poetry that both charms and surprises the reader. It involves a liveliness of mind that should not be underrated, though, as Pope would be the first to admit, it is only part of the great poet's equipment.

The fourth and by far the most important meaning that Pope attributes to ‘wit’ concerns the imagination. Towards the end of the poem he describes Horace as:

He, who supream in Judgment, as in Wit,
Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ,
Yet judg'd with Coolness tho' he sung with Fire;
His Precepts teach but what his Works inspire.

(657-60)

Here wit involves the ‘fire’ of the imagination, an image that picks up the earlier reference to the ‘Beams of warm Imagination’ (58). Wit, as it refers to the imagination, is, like the sun, the source of all light. Pope explicitly makes the comparison when he compares ‘envy'd Wit’ to ‘Sol Eclips'sd’ (468). When the Sun's beams are too strong they draw up vapours that at first obscure but finally reflect added glory. In the same way Wit's shining light at first attracts dull critics, but finally endures despite them.

Perhaps the most important point Pope makes about wit in this sense, however, is that imagination is not in itself sufficient for the poet:

Some, to whom Heav'n in Wit has been profuse,
Want as much more, to turn it to its use;
For Wit and Judgment often are at strife,
Tho' meant each other's Aid, like Man and Wife.

(80-3)

In the best writing the imagination must be at one with the judgment. The two qualities cannot be separated. As ‘grave Quintillian’, whom Pope praises for his clear method (669-74), says in his Institutio Oratoria: ‘I do not believe that invention can exist apart from judgment, since we do not say that a speaker has invented inconsistent two-edged or foolish arguments, but merely that he has failed to avoid them’ (Loeb translation). La Rochefoucauld, whose maxims were translated into English in 1706, just a few years before Pope wrote his poem, says much the same thing:

The making a Difference between Wit and Judgement, is a Vulgar Error. Judgement is nothing else but the exceeding Brightness of Wit, which, like Light, pierces into the very Bottom of Things, observes all that ought to be observed there, and discovers what seemed to be past anybodies finding out: From when we must conclude, that the Energy and Extension of this Light of the Wit, is the very Thing that produces all those Effects, usually ascribed to the Judgement.

(Maxim 98)

It is this idea of wit as the marriage of imagination and judgment that lies behind the best-known couplets in the poem:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er
so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc'd
at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind.

(297-300)

True wit involves both the imagination and the judgment, both nature and art. It involves subject matter and form welded together in the creative mind so that the truth that results convinces us at sight and ‘gives us back the Image of our Mind’.

I have suggested four different ways in which wit is used by Pope in An Essay on Criticism, and the question that now arises is whether these differences in the meaning of one word are the result of confusion or deliberate strategy. In order to answer this we need to say something about the distrust of the imagination found in the writings of the most influential seventeenth-century philosophers and scientists. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not a distrust that is found among Augustan poets. On the other hand they could not help being aware of it and of the corresponding attempt to downgrade the importance of poetry as a medium for expressing truth about human nature.

Francis Bacon was the chief originator of this distrust of the imagination. For Bacon poetry was almost totally a means of escapism that allowed deception to triumph. In The Advancement of Learning, 1605, he admitted the power of poetry and the imagination but he distrusted it as a vehicle for truth because it transformed reality. For Bacon poetry was ‘the play of the mind’. This distrust was taken up by Bacon's disciples, the members of the Royal Society, and eloquently expressed by their official historian Thomas Sprat in his History of the Royal Society, 1667. Sprat described the wit and imagination of the poet as being inconsistent with a sincere enquiry into the works of Nature.

A further example of the philosopher's distrust of the imagination occurs in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, 1651. For Hobbes imagination ‘is nothing but decaying sense and is found in men, and many other living creatures, as well sleeping as waking’. John Locke also considered the imagination a hindrance in arriving at the truth. The emphasis in his Thoughts Concerning Education, 1695, falls on the importance of judgment and the frailty of imagination. He defines wit as ‘lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures in the fancy’. Judgment on the other hand ‘lies in separating carefully one from another ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by Similitude’. In aligning wit with fancy and opposing it to judgment, Locke is managing further to discredit poetry as likely to mislead the mind. If a child has a poetic vein, he argues, the parents ‘should labour to have it stifled and suppressed as much as may be’.

It is against this background that we need to consider Pope's definition of ‘wit’ in An Essay on Criticism, in which he defends poetry against these attacks as subtly as he can. He does this by taking the word most frequently associated with poetry—namely wit—and working it over and over in a variety of different ways that stress the complexity of the creative process and, above all, the fusion of those faculties of judgment and imagination that Bacon, Hobbes and Locke had been trying to separate. In redefining ‘wit’, Pope is attempting to redefine and secure poetry itself. For Pope ‘wit’ is what E.N. Hooker calls ‘the unique mode of the creative artist’. It is the essence of poetry entailing the inspiration of genius, the mental agility of ingenuity, the fire of imagination and the control of judgment. It involves, in direct contrast to Eliot's notorious phrase, an association of sensibility.

IMITATION

One thing that should be clear from the foregoing discussion is that Augustan wit, and hence Augustan poetry, has nothing to do with originality. The true poet should say things in a new way, but the idea that he can say things that have never been said before, that he can be totally original, is a post-Romantic one. For the Augustan poet there are only a few irrefutable human truths, and they have been discovered long ago. The idea that anyone can come up with original truths is merely an indication of man's presumption and pride. All the living poet can do is reinterpret the validity of established truths as they apply to the modern world:

True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er
so well Exprest.

(297-8)

A person who claimed to be original was looked on with some suspicion. Indeed the noun, an ‘original’, was a term of abuse reserved for laughing at eccentric and singular persons like Captain Lismahago in Smollett's novel Humphry Clinker, 1771.

Instead of trying to be original, the Augustan poet assimilated his knowledge of the past into his awareness of the present. Dryden praises the young Anne Killigrew's poetry by saying that:

Such noble vigour did her verse adorn
That it seem'd borrow'd, where 'twas only born.

(To the Memory of … Mrs Anne Killigrew, 75-6)

Although her poetry had the limitation of being original, it had such vigour that it at least seemed to have the excellence of imitating the ancients.

The Augustan poet, then, sees imitation as more important than originality. But this does not mean that he feels in duty bound simply to copy earlier writers. ‘Those who say our thoughts are not our own because they resemble the Ancients’, wrote Pope in the Preface to his Works, 1717, ‘may as well say our faces are not our own, because they are like our fathers’. True imitation involves both borrowing and recasting. The youthful Pope, writing to his friend William Walsh in 1706, said:

I wou'd beg your opinion too as to another point: it is how far the liberty of Borrowing may extend? I have defended it sometimes by saying, that it seems not so much the Perfection of Sense to say things that have never been said before, as to express those best that have been said oftenest; and that Writers in the case of borrowing from others, are like Trees which of themselves wou'd produce only one sort of Fruit, but by being grafted upon others, may yield variety. A mutual commerce makes Poetry flourish; but then Poets like Merchants, should repay with something of their own what they take from others; not like Pyrates, make prize of all they meet.

The poet both takes from others and repays with something of his own. Like Swift's famous bee in The Battle of the Books, he visits ‘all the flowers and blossoms of the field and garden’, and ‘by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax’.

Pope visited the flowers and blossoms of the literary field widely, especially in his youth. He told Spence, shortly before he died, that in his great reading period, (from about thirteen or fourteen to twenty-one), he went through ‘all the best critics, almost all the English, French and Latin poets of any name, the minor poets, Homer and some of the greater Greek poets in the original, and Tasso and Ariosto in translations’. He not only read widely in classical and English literature, but he also wrote many imitations of earlier English poets including Chaucer, Spenser, Waller and Cowley, and many translations of earlier classical poets including Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Horace. This was an essential part of his apprenticeship as a poet for, as he put it to Spence, ‘my first taking to imitating was not out of vanity, but humility. I saw how defective my own things were, and endeavoured to mend my manner by copying good strokes from others’. Reuben Brower has revealed in his illuminating and subtle book, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion, just how present the classical poets were to Pope and his eighteenth-century readers. Brower shows how, for Dryden and Pope, allusion to the past is ‘a resource equivalent to symbolic metaphor and elaborate imagery in other poets’. We find the same thing, in a more strained and self-conscious way, in the poetry of T. S. Eliot.

But imitation was more than just a frame of mind for the Augustan poet. It was also an accepted form, or literary ‘kind’, that grew out of the great interest and activity in verse translation that took place in the seventeenth century. During the first half of the century most English verse translation tended toward a fairly close adherence to the original, for example Ben Jonson's translation of Horace's Ars Poetica, but during the second half of the century verse translators increasingly took more freedom with their models. It became more important for a translator to catch the spirit of a work than to give a word-for-word rendition.

The imitations written in post-Restoration England are a further extension of this concept of free translation. In the ‘Advertisement’ prefacing his version of Horace's Ars Poetica Oldham says that he thought of turning the work to an advantage which had not occurred to those who went before him in the translation (Jonson and Roscommon) by making Horace speak as if he were then living:

I therefore resolved to alter the scene from Rome to London, and to make use of English names, places, and customs, where the parallel would decently permit, which I conceived would give a kind of new air to the poem, and render it more agreeable to the relish of the present age.

Oldham was not the first to modernize classical poems in this way. Cowley, Sprat and Rochester had each done it before him and would each have agreed with his reasons for taking such liberties. As the imitation developed and became more popular, so it became completely independent of various levels of translation. It made different assumptions of its audience: where translation was primarily intended to help those readers who could not understand the original, imitation assumed that the reader would be sufficiently familiar with the original to appreciate the author's wit in adapting it. For this reason the Latin (and most imitiations were of Roman poetry) was frequently printed on the facing page or at the foot of the poem, while parallel passages were indicated by linking arabic numerals.

Imitation is a way for a poet to give depth and authority to his writing. The poet does not simply rely on his own opinion, he calls on acknowledged classical masters to support his case. He searches for a peculiarly appropriate classical equivalent to the modern subject he wants to write about, or for a peculiarly appropriate modern equivalent to the classical poem he wants to adapt, and then fits his treatment to the overall organization of the classical poem. This relationship between the present and the past can be handled in a variety of ways. It can either be used to add emphasis to the condemnation of the present, as in Oldham's Satire in Imitation of the Third of Juvenal, where London is shown as not only bad but as bad as Juvenal's Rome, or it can be used ironically to undercut the present by creating a contrast with the past. The outstanding example of such a usage is Pope's Imitation of Horace, Epistle II, i (To Augustus) where the compliments sincerely paid by Horace to Augustus are ironically paid by Pope to George Augustus Hanover.

SATIRE

It seems appropriate to close this chapter by saying something about the chief mode of Augustan literature. When all is said and done, it is for the brilliance of its satire that the age in general, and Pope's poetry in particular, is most highly valued. But what did the Augustans understand by satire? What were its aims and intentions, and why was it so popular among Augustan writers? What kind of pressures impel someone to write satire in preference to other literary modes? These are some of the questions that a study of Augustan literature forces one to consider.

The word ‘satire’ as it is used today describes a mode of writing rather than a form. It describes a spirit of conception, or state of mind, that can operate through any number of different forms. Thus an epic poem, such as The Dunciad, or a prose account of imaginary travels, such as Gulliver's Travels, or an opera, such as The Beggar's Opera, are each referred to as satires because they share certain common qualities in terms of their overall conception.

At the most general level one can say that satire attacks human evil and stupidity by making fun of it from a standpoint that at least implies, if it does not state, a consistent moral position. There are three distinct elements of conception involved here—attack, laughter and morality—and a careful fusing of all three elements is necessary for successful satire. If the author concentrates on attack alone then the work of art tends towards mere invective; if he concentrates on laughter alone then he moves into a region of the purely comic; and if he concentrates on morality alone then he moves towards the area of the homily. Clearly satire cannot be completely separated from other allied modes, especially comedy, for, as many critics have pointed out, some of the greatest comic characters also have strong satiric dimensions. Falstaff's gluttony, cowardice and dishonesty, for example, are clearly satirised by Shakespeare, but since his superabundant jollity and massive zest for life so dwarf these vices we see him finally as a comic rather than satiric character.

I have suggested three main qualities that compose the satiric vision overall, but we can also point to certain particular structural elements that are common to most works of satire, whatever their form. Satire frequently involves, for instance, the imaginative creation of absurd, or even grotesque worlds, such as Swift's Yahoos in Gulliver's Travels or Pope's Cave of Spleen in The Rape of the Lock that ridicule man by containing both exaggerations and real depictions of his pretensions and frailties. The satirist creates at the same time as he destroys, and this paradox lies at the root of his power to excite our attention. There is a tendency among some readers to dwell on the destructiveness of satire and to see satire as a totally negative mode. It is, of course, a destructive mode, but the best satirists are never purely destructive. They protest against the viciousness and absurdity of the present world, both by creating grotesque transformations of it in a nightmare world and by suggesting alternative and better ways of proceeding. Their destructiveness goes along with equally important elements of creativity and constructiveness.

The satirist sees through man's affectations, and sets out to expose them to laughter and scorn. He does not do this out of meanness or envy but because he feels indignation at the wastage and corruption of human potential. The satirist confronts man with his own nakedness and with his own tenuous grasp on existence. He uses his pen partly as a weapon to attack people with and partly as a scalpel with which to lay them open. Consider the defence put forward by Pope's irate satirist in his Imitation of Horace, Satire II, i:

          What? arm'd for Virtue when I point the Pen,
Brand the bold Front of shameless, guilty Men,
Dash the proud Gamester in his gilded Car,
Bare the mean Heart that lurks beneath a Star;
Can there be wanting to defend Her Cause,
Lights of the Church, or Guardians of the Laws?
Could pension'd Boileau lash in honest Strain
Flatt'rers and Bigots ev'n in Louis' Reign?
Could Laureate Dryden Pimp and Fry'r
engage,
Yet neither Charles nor James be in a Rage?
And I not strip the Gilding off a Knave,
Un-plac'd, un-pension'd, no Man's Heir, or Slave?

(105-16)

The satirist describes himself in an aggressively militant way. He points, brands, dashes, bares, lashes and strips his enemy. The verbs draw comparisons between the satirist's profession and that of the public prosecutor: both see it as their duty to publish and punish, to strip bare and to whip.

The satirist forces man to come face to face with the most brutal and least attractive part of himself. As a result we often find in satire scenes of crowded humanity portrayed at its most barbaric and uncivilized. The unthinking mob that surges through the stinking streets of London in The Dunciad Book II is related in this way to the wretched mass of humanity that accompanies Tom Idle on his way to execution at Tyburn in Hogarth's Industry and Idleness, Plate XI. The satirist forces us to watch not only a close clinical analysis of man's anatomy, but very often a dissection, or even a vivisection of it. ‘Yesterday’, says Swift's scientist persona in his most complex satire A Tale of a Tub,

I ordered the carcass of a beau to be stript in my presence; when we were all amazed to find so many unexpected faults under one suit of clothes. Then I laid open his brain, his heart, and his spleen, but I plainly perceived at every operation, that the further we proceeded we found the defects increase upon us in number and bulk.

The satirist analyses man and his world with brutal and often horrifying frankness. At his most extreme he is not content with confronting man with his own nakedness, but lays open the flesh and exposes the festering innards.

The satirist protests against the state of the world as he finds it, largely because he knows there are other and better states. In looking for examples of better states he frequently looks to the Golden Age of Mythology, or to the security of the past. Sometimes this becomes mere nostalgia for the good old days, but in Pope and Swift it is very much more than this. Both men share a deep-rooted belief in the stability of inherited order. The satirist nearly always finds himself in a minority position, for if his viewpoint was that of the majority he wouldn't feel the need to protest in the first place. Thus in the early part of the eighteenth century, when the government was nearly always Whig, it is hardly surprising that most satire is written by opponents of the Whigs. Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, Gay, Fielding and Thomson were all, at various times and in various differing degrees of commitment, affiliated to the Tory opposition to Robert Walpole.

The satirist's traditional justification for his art is that he does it for the good of society. He hopes to reform and correct corruption, and for this reason frequently takes on the role of the defender of virtue or spokesman for the public good. Whether or not he really believes in such a role is another question: it is sufficient for him that he has a conventional framework within which to carry out his attack. ‘Ask you what Provocation I have had?’ says Pope's satirist in the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II,

The strong Antipathy of Good to Bad.
When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
Th' Affront is mine, my Friend, and should be yours.

(198-200)

Above all else the satirist is committed to the living world. He cares about its decay, and if he does not, if he merely uses his wit in a virtuoso way, then his satire will be shortlived.

So far I have talked about satire as a mode in literature, but the word has not always been used in this all-embracing sense and it is helpful to consider briefly its origins as a particular form of poetry. The English word satire derives from the Latin word satura (meaning medley or mixture), which was the name Horace (65-8 b.c.) first gave to a genre of poetry he inherited from Ennius and Pacuvius. This genre, or form, was later taken up by Persius (a.d. 34-62) and Juvenal (a.d. 60-140) and imitated at the same time as it was further developed. Horace and Juvenal wrote poems in which they attacked particular vices and follies of their day. They were so effective that a word which was originally used to designate a particular literary form, with a definable rhetorical structure, has been extended to cover a whole mode of writing. That literary form does, however, have an independent and continuing tradition in English literature which we usually refer to as formal verse satire. It is a form that reached its peak in England during the eighteenth century, particularly in the poetry of Pope, Swift and Dr Johnson.

Although Horace and Juvenal use the same form, satura, there are important differences in the way they use it. Where Horace's satirist sets out to persuade with witty and urbane ridicule, Juvenal's attempts to chastise with fierce and savage denunciation. Horace tries to laugh us into truth, while Juvenal sets out to provoke our indignation and horror. In the First Satire of his First Book Horace asks why one cannot tell the truth with laughter, as a teacher gives children sweets to persuade them to learn to read. Juvenal, in his first satire, tells us that it is indignation and anger that drives him to write satire. As a result of this difference of tone in the satires of Horace and Juvenal we have developed the habit of referring to milder, more gentle satire as Horatian, and of referring to harsh and savage satire as Juvenalian. The dominant influence on English verse satire from Skelton through Donne, Hall and Marston to the great satirists of the Restoration and Augustan periods has been that of Juvenal, and although it was Horace's poems that Pope chose to imitate so widely in the 1730s it makes a great deal of sense to say that in imitating Horace he has ‘Juvenalized’ him.

We can find useful hints about Pope's concept of satire and his reasons for writing it by consulting his Correspondence. He writes to Swift in March 1732 saying, ‘I know nothing that moves strongly but Satire, and those who are ashamed of nothing else, are so of being ridiculous’. He clearly feels that the satirist aims at an emotional as well as an intellectual response. Satire ‘moves’ the reader, and furthermore it moves him ‘strongly’. Two years later, on 17 July 1734, Arbuthnot wrote to Pope urging him to ‘continue that noble Disdain and Abhorrence of Vice which he seem'd naturally endued with,’ but begging him to show a certain regard for his own safety and to ‘study more to reform than chastise’. This distinction that Arbuthnot presses on Pope is similar to that we have already described between Horatian and Juvenalian satire.

Pope's reply to Arbuthnot's letter offers the clearest prose statement we have of his theory of satire. He thanks Arbuthnot for his comments about his disdain of vice and for the concern he expresses for his safety, but with regard to Arbuthnot's request that he study more to reform than chastise he argues that such a separation is impossible:

But General Satire in Times of General Vice has no force, and is no Punishment: People have ceas'd to be ashamed of it when so many are joined with them; and tis only by hunting One or two from the Herd that any Examples can be made. If a man writ all his Life against the Collective Body of the Banditti, or against Lawyers, would it do the least Good, or lessen the Body? But if some are hung up, or pilloried, it may prevent others. And in my low Station, with no other Power than this, I hope to deter, if not to reform.

If the satirist merely tries to reform without using examples to enforce his reform, then his satire will have little effect. As Pope put it when he rewrote this letter for the publication of his Correspondence in 1737, ‘to attack Vices in the abstract, without touching Persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with Shadows’. Both the references to ‘fighting’, in this quotation, and to ‘hunting’, in the previous quotation, indicate that Pope sees the satirist's role in militant terms.

It is this concept of the satirist's role that emerges most strongly from the poetry. Sometimes he appears as a hunter, as in the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue II where knaves are seen as ‘game’ (27) to be ‘run down’ (29) and where the satirist has to ‘beat about’ to find an honest man:

To find an honest man, I beat about,
And love him, court him, praise him, in or out.

(102-3)

The broken movement of the second line here acts out the image of the hunter thrashing about in the undergrowth to raise the game. At other times the satirist is seen as a bird of prey hovering over the world ready to drop on its victim. Thus in the same poem the satirist ‘sowzes’ (15) and ‘stoops’ (110) on mankind. Both words are technical terms taken from falconry, where they describe the action of the bird swooping down on its prey. The image is also found in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot when the speaker tells us,

That not in Fancy's Maze he wander'd long
But stoop'd to Truth, and moraliz'd his song.

(340-1)

The concept of the satirist that informs Pope's satirical poetry is one of a militant defender of the public good, determined to continue ‘that noble Disdain and Abhorrence of Vice’ that Arbuthnot describes. Contrary to what has all too frequently been said about the wounded and besieged poet who lashes out at his enemies in desperate retaliation, Pope usually directs his wrath from a position of personal detachment. The satirist's attack is not primarily the result of personal hurt or grievance, nor is it primarily a form of self-defence: it springs rather from a profound disgust at his ‘Country's Ruin’ and from a correspondingly strong sense of public spiritedness concerning the ‘Public Weal’.