SOURCE: “Trivializing An Essay on Man,” in The Rape of the Text: Reading and Misreading Pope's Essay on Man, University of Alabama Press, 1993, pp. 6-31.

[In the following essay, Solomon details the historical development of the critical consensus that now regards An Essay on Man as a fundamentally flawed work.]

If the question were asked, What ought to have been the best of Pope's poems?” Thomas De Quincey wrote, “most people would answer, the Essay on Man. If the question were asked, What is the worst? all people of judgement would say, the Essay on Man.”¹ Ours must be an age of judgment, for the current consensus is indisputable: An Essay on Man is fundamentally flawed. The textbook of eighteenth-century British literature most frequently used in American universities concludes: “To write sustainedly on Man in prose … calls for powers that few poets possess, and from the start Pope had to face his deficiencies as an exact philosopher. An Essay on Man, then, could never be more than a partial success.”² Although the poem contains isolated passages of great power, Leopold Damrosch, Jr., writes in 1987, it “never quite becomes a great poem.”³ These and a plenitude of similar pronouncements are the most recent reinscriptions of a consensus developed two centuries earlier.

The development of this consensus has never been described in any detail; and it is interesting literary history involving as it does the triumph of Samuel Johnson over Alexander Pope, a triumph reinscribed in A. D. Nuttall's concluding of his recent book-length study of the Essay with an otherwise inexplicable chapter praising Johnson's intellect as “manifestly greater” than Pope's. More important than the intrinsic interest of the trivialization of the Essay, however, is the possibility that once the historical development of this consensus is understood we may be able to write about An Essay on Man without being compelled to reinscribe the interpretative status quo and, perhaps, to answer De Quincey's question differently.

“THE SAGE'S WISDOM, AND THE POET'S FIRE”

The warfare that is a wit's life on earth was raging at full tide in the early 1730s following the publication of Pope's Dunciad Variorum. Knowing that his enemies would pounce upon and ravage any poem bearing his name, Pope took elaborate precautions to disguise his authorship as the separate epistles of the Essay were published. In the year from January 1733 to January 1734 when the four epistles of the Essay were being published anonymously by a bookseller not earlier associated with him, Pope was simultaneously publishing new works bearing his name and the imprint of his usual booksellers.⁴ In one of these, The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Pope celebrates his Twickenham retirement where “St. John mingles with my friendly Bowl, / The Feast of Reason and the Flow of Soul.”⁵ The epistles of the Essay were in subsequent editions to be addressed to Pope's friend and neighbor Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke. But knowing that inclusion of Bolingbroke's name in the poem would encourage speculation that Pope was the author, the first epistle was issued in February 1733 addressed to “laelius” rather than “st. john”:

awake, my laelius! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of Kings.
Let us (since Life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Expatiate free o'er all this scene of Man;
A mighty maze! of walks without a plan.(6)

Pope's deception worked. Even recently abused dunces like Leonard Welsted and Bezaleel Morrice croaked forth unqualified praise of this new wonder of philosophical poetry. An Essay on Man is “above all commendation,” Welsted wrote, as Pope reminded him in subsequent edition of the Dunciad.⁷ Recurrent in initial responses to the anonymous poem is praise for its simultaneous success as poetry and as philosophy. Representatively, the London Evening Post praised the first epistle of the Essay for its inspired blending of the charms of verse with the ratiocinative rigor of prose: “Go on, Great Genius, with thy bold Design, / And Prose's Strength with Verse's Softness join.” Most reviews, following the Weekly Miscellany's judgment upon the publication of the third epistle, found it “difficult to know which Part to prefer, when all is equally beautiful and noble.” A correspondent from Bath lauds the Essay as an “inimitable” poem “calculated on the noblest Basis of Philosophy and Divinity.” In the same issue a commendatory poem “To the Unknown author of the Essay on Man” begins:

To praise thy judgment or commend thy strain,
In this were all superfluous or vain.
Hail, then, instructing bard (whoe'er thou art)
That opens thus our eyes and clears our heart!(8)

Similarly, a correspondent from the north of England writes the Gentleman's Magazine praising the Essay as uniting “the most Nervous Reasoning in the Advancement of profound natural Truths” with “the sublimest … Poetry in its Kind.” When read “with deliberate Attention,” the writer concludes, the Essay “at once enlarges the Understanding, convinces the Judgment, and touches the Heart.”⁹ The aspiring footman Robert Dodsley encapsulated contemporary response when he celebrated Pope's incarnation of the Philosophic Poet: “great Bard! in whom united we admire / The Sage's Wisdom, and the Poet's Fire.”¹⁰

However, as Pope anticipated, once Bolingbroke was acknowledged as the “guide, philosopher, and friend” addressed in the epistles, Pope's authorship was suspected; and both their enemies attacked with greater vehemence for having been gulled into immoderate praise. On New Year's Day 1734 Pope wrote his friend John Caryll mentioning both that a “poetical war” against him had been initiated by Lord Hervey and that Pope thought that the forthcoming fourth epistle of the Essay on Man would allay Caryll's apprehension that the author was not distinctively Christian.¹¹ Clearly by early February Hervey's friend and collaborator in the war against Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, knew who had written the much-lauded Essay. In The Dean's Provocation For Writing the Lady's Dressing-Room, she compares Swift's sexual impotence to Pope's philosophical ineptitude:

Poor Pope Philosophy displays on
With so much Rhime and little reason,
And tho he argues ne'er so long
That, all is right, his Head is wrong.(12)

Lady Mary continued the attack with an abusive epistle from “Pope to Bolingbroke”; and in addition to personal enemies, their Opposition politics brought out Robert Walpole's literary minions.

In March of 1734 the author of The False Patriot criticizes Pope for using “immortal lines” to praise the Jacobite Bolingbroke: “Recall your Muse, lur'd into Factions Cause / And sing, great Bard, of Heav'ns and Natures Laws.”¹³ As late as October, according to a criticism in The Present State of the Republic of Letters, “no one [had] expressly own'd” the poem. However, allusions to Pope's satiric epistles leave no question that he is the “peevish Satyrist” and “proud Dictator” whose plagiarism of Shaftesbury provides the apparent “Sublimity of the Thoughts” in An Essay on Man. Consequently, the writer undertakes to disabuse the rhetorically ravished by laying “before you in plain and genuine Colours” the content of the first epistle “undisguised by any Arts, unassisted by the Magick of his Numbers” so that “some may thereby be cur'd of their implicit Submission to his Dictates, and it may weaken his Power of enchanting the Multitude when he pleases into Error.”¹⁴ Alluding directly to Pope's “Libel” on Lord Hervey as Sporus in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, an outraged reader of The Prompter fulminates against the impiety of an Essay which, “I vow to God” goes “a Bar's Length beyond Lucretius.”¹⁵ Thomas Bentley, smarting from Pope's ridicule of his famous uncle, explicitly linked Bolingbroke's alleged atheism with the ideology of Pope's poem. His Letter to Mr. Pope regrets that the impious Bolingbroke should be celebrated in Pope's “immortal verse,” and asks, “Are you then really content to go down to Posterity with that Gentleman … ? Can you think the Christian religion true … and not fear being damned with him?”¹⁶

When neither Pope's nor Bolingbroke's name was associated with the Essay, the poem's piety seems not to have been a salient consideration. With various degrees of difficulty the Essay was assimilated to the preexisting theology of its admirers, some even attributing its authorship to a Christian divine. “The design of concealing myself was good,” Pope confided to Swift, “and has had its full effect; I was thought a divine, a philosopher and what not? and my doctrine had a sanction I could not have given to it.”¹⁷ With Bolingbroke now ensconced as Pope's addressee strictly orthodox readings became more problematic. What was there, after all, specifically Christian in An Essay on Man? “We ought to be respectful to Parts and Ingenuity,” an essayist in the Weekly Miscellany concludes of the still anonymous author of the Essay, “but the Bible is Sacred.” Good poets are seldom “close Logicians,” the writer argues; and “tho' the Art of Poetry be Divine, we have had but very few Divine Poets.” The powers of poetry “all conspire to captivate the Affections”; but because “the Poetical and the Reasoning Faculties seldom unite in the same Person,” poets like the author of An Essay on Man are “as dangerous as they are delightful.”¹⁸

“I am far from charging Mr. pope with any Design against Christianity,” one Mr. Bridges wrote in the preface to his imitative Divine Wisdom and Providence; “but if he builds upon such Principles as appear to others entirely destructive of the Foundation of the Christian System,” he must expect criticism. Bridges excuses Pope's implicit heterodoxy by suggesting that the poet fails to perceive the implications of his arguments. Pope's immortal style only unintentionally perpetuates immoral content; but in so doing the Essay exists as a pretext for Bridges's own work, which he humbly acknowledges cannot aspire “to give the same Poetical Entertainment” but does claim the virtue of consistent piety.¹⁹ Only a few years later Edward Young makes the same claim for his Night Thoughts as a pious though aesthetically inferior supplement to Pope's Essay. “Night the First” concludes with an explicit contrast between Pope's natural “darkness” and Young's supernatural “day”:

Man too [Pope] sung: Immortal man I sing;
Oft bursts my Song beyond the bounds of Life;
What, now, but Immortality, can please?
O had He press'd his Theme, pursu'd the track,
Which opens out of Darkness into Day!
O had he mounted on his wing of Fire,
Soar'd where I sink, and sung Immortal man!
How had it blest mankind? and rescued me?(20)

As in England the first European responses to the Essay stressed Pope's inspired union of the mental faculties of reason and imagination: “C'est un philosophe profound & un poete vraiment sublime,” one distinguished French cleric pronounced.²¹ Also as in England, when Pope inserted Bolingbroke's name the text became suddenly suspicious. Isolated phrases and even general tendencies of argument were now seen as susceptible to pantheistic or fatalistic interpretation. In the preface to his 1736 prose translation of the Essay, Etienne de Silhouette felt obliged to defend Pope's orthodoxy against mounting criticisms of “Spinosisme.” Similarly, when on the heels of four quick editions of the prose translation Jean-François Du Resnel published his verse translation of the Essay, he prefaced his bloated version with a defense of Pope against those who found in the poem “a lurking Poison, and charge it with the Absurdities of Spinoza's System.” French readers were confused, Du Resnel asserted, because of their discomfort with a subtle British poetic that demanded a great deal of readers. Convinced that the “Order of its Parts is not very easily discovered by those accustomed to the exact Regularity of our Treatises in Prose,” he added, deleted, and rearranged passages from the Essay to render its “System” accessible to French readers. Correctly conceived, Du Resnel concluded, Pope's poem is not only entirely orthodox but the only modern example of a true philosophical poem: it is “an Honour reserved in the later Ages for Mr. Pope” to unite “the Extasies and Flights of the Poet, and the Nicety and cool Argumentation of the abstracted Reasoner.”²²

The Roman Catholic Church was now having none of it; and there were whispers that young Voltaire had encouraged the verse translation of the Essay. In June 1736 the Jesuit journal Mémoires de Trévoux had praised Pope's pious work; the following year the same periodical reversed its assessment and condemned the doctrine and moral tendency of Pope's poem. Nor were Roman Catholics the only ones unconvinced by the apologies put forward by Pope's translators. Also in 1737, Jean Paul de Crousaz, a Protestant professor at Lausanne, a logician and theologian who understood no English, wrote an extended denunciation of the Essay's “Spinozist” and “Leibnizian” tendencies in Examen de l'Essai de M. Pope sur l'Homme. Told that the prose translation upon which he based his criticisms in the Examen was faulty, Crousaz used Du Resnel's much-altered version as the basis for a laboriously pedantic Commentaire sur la traduction en vers … de l'Essai … sur l'Homme.

As Maynard Mack correctly observes, “a less happy confrontation of minds and methods could scarcely have been imagined” than Pope and Crousaz.²³ Yet by November of 1738 the London booksellers realized that because of their target Crousaz's blunderbusses were certain to sell. Pope's old enemy the “abominable” Edmund Curll published an abridged translation of the Commentaire by Charles Forman, advertising it is a “critical Satire” on the Essay which Pope was obliged to answer. The same week the bookseller Anne Dodd published Elizabeth Carter's translation of the Examen. Her friend Samuel Johnson helped with the advertisements that promised “an Enquiry what View Mr. Pope might have in touching upon the Leibnitzian Philosophy.” Also, and most significantly, Dodd also had Johnson's own translation of the Commentaire with notes ready for sale. Thus, in a one-week period, three translations of Crousaz's critiques were being hawked on the streets of London.

In December an aspiring British cleric, William Warburton, came to Pope's defense and in the first of a series of letters in the History of the Works of the Learned began the response Curll said Pope was obliged to give to Crousaz. Each month thereafter through April another installment of Warburton's tendentious rebuttal lumbered out; and all were collected and augmented for publication as A Vindication of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man on 15 November 1739.²⁴ With the publication of Johnson's translation of Crousaz's Commentaire in November 1738 and Warburton's “Vindications” in the December, January, February, March, and April issues of the Works of the Learned the die was cast for most subsequent interpretations of the poem to the present day. As A. D. Nuttall admits, “Criticism of the Essay on Man has tended ever since to be either Crousazian or Warburtonian.”²⁵

Inasmuch as the terms of Warburton's defense were set by Crousaz's attack, the truth is that the basis for all subsequent discussion of An Essay on Man in English was established by a man judged by all subsequent scholars from Warburton and Joseph Warton to Maynard Mack and A. D. Nuttall to be an unsympathetic, unsubtle pedant whose sole motive was to discredit Pope's work as dangerously heterodox. “Crousaz seems to be unequipped mentally for dealing with any sentence,” Nuttall says, “in which there is some shadow of irony, or play of metaphor and paradox.”²⁶ Nonetheless, Crousaz established the salient points of subsequent discussion—the concept of plenitude or the importance of “Whatever is, is right,” for example—without having read a word of Pope's poem. He only knew the prose and verse deformations produced for a French taste, as Resnel flatly admits, “accustomed to … exact Regularity.”

“DISCORDANT SENSE”

In his Life of Pope Samuel Johnson powerfully reinscribed the objections he had translated over forty years earlier; but the fountainhead is clearly Crousaz. The professor used three interrelated tactics to discredit Pope's Essay. He asserted that as theology the poem was heretical, that as philosophy it was illogical, and that as poetry it was ravishingly beautiful. The first tactic is obvious and is aptly encapsulated in Crousaz's rhetorical question in the Commentaire: “Has Mr. Pope ever read the Scripture?” Discussion of the third tactic will be reserved for the following section. The logician's second tactic most interests a modern reader because it was in denigrating the reasoning in Pope's poem that Crousaz did his most enduring damage.

Crousaz uses every yardstick logic can supply to demonstrate Pope's perpetual inconsistency. At times, using a single word or image, he will situate Pope compromisingly in the history of ideas. After finding the sources of the Essay in heterodox philosophers like Leibniz and Spinoza, Crousaz then proves Pope's inconsistency by showing that other parts of the Essay contradict the metaphysical systems of his putative “sources.” In response, William Warburton goes to grotesque lengths to find analogues for Pope's arguments in reputable places. The principle of plenitude may figure in the metaphysics of Leibniz and Spinoza, Warburton counters, but it likewise enjoys an august pedigree in “the most celebrated and orthodox Fathers and Divines of the ancient and modern Church.” However, Warburton capitulates unintentionally to Crousaz's indictment of Pope's intellectual competence when he concurs with the logician in questioning the truth of the “Notion” of plenitude.

Warburton feels he has accomplished his rhetorical purpose when he has demonstrated Pope's piety; and despite the special pietistic pleading of his Vindication, Warburton seems to have had no high opinion of Pope's reasoning powers.²⁷ Bolingbroke subsequently wrote a pamphlet against Warburton as the “Most Impudent Man Living”; and Warburton spent some energy trying to write Bolingbroke out of Pope's Essay. To dissociate Pope from Bolingbroke's deism (and thereby to vindicate his own Vindication), Warburton quotes Bolingbroke as saying disparagingly that Pope “understood nothing of his own principles nor saw to what they naturally tended.” This position allows Warburton, in his View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy, to contrast Pope's “real vindication of Providence against Libertines and Atheists” in the Essay with Bolingbroke's attempts “to discredit the Being of a God.”²⁸

After Pope's death Warburton quarreled bitterly with both Bolingbroke and Robert Dodsley, the young footman-poet who praised An Essay on Man and whom Pope subsequently made his bookseller. Eventually, an ally of Dodsley—Joseph Warton—took Warburton to task for his distorting interpretation of the Essay; but the damage was already done. Warburton's Christian reading of the poem together with his denunciation of the impious Bolingbroke made Pope look philosophically naive in acknowledging St. John as his “guide”; and although Warton finds Warburton's dogged piety absurdly strained, he nonetheless agrees that Pope never really understood Bolingbroke's philosophy. Two questions are central to Warton's interpretation of the Essay: Is the poem orthodox? and Is Pope aware of the implications of his arguments? Whereas Warburton had answered yes to both questions while stressing Pope's deliberate deviations from Bolingbroke's atheism, Warton says no to both, characterizing Pope as a naive “disciple” of his noble friend.²⁹

Warton's “deistic” reading of the Essay and his characterization of Pope's philosophical naiveté occur both in the second volume of An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (1782) and in his edition of Pope's Works (1797). A generation later in his own edition of Pope's Works (1824), William Roscoe sought to reclaim Pope's poem for the pious by relying heavily on Warburton's annotations to attack Warton's “erroneous” interpretation.³⁰ Roscoe's approach was, by then, atavistic; more indicative of the prevailing assessment of Pope as philosopher was De Quincey's denigration in his review of Roscoe's edition. In turn, Whitwell Elwin quotes De Quincey's indictment of both the poem and the poet who would be a philosopher in the voluminous commentary to his “definitive” edition of the Essay (1871). The theologian Elwin, convinced that Pope had “renounced Christianity,” agrees with Warton that the poem is deistic but also agrees with De Quincey that Warton evinces “reckless neutrality” in the face of Pope's impiety rather than an appropriate Christian zeal. All blunderbuss and thunder, Elwin fulminates against an ignorant Pope misled by Bolingbroke's more powerful satanic intellect. A “puerile” Essay on Man is laboriously belittled as “a tissue of inconsistency and incoherence” unworthy of serious interpretation.³¹

Elwin's edition of the Essay remained standard for eighty years and set the tone for subsequent commentary including that of Mark Pattison and Leslie Stephen, both men whose denigration of Pope's poem could not be dismissed as wounded piety. In a review of Elwin's edition, Pattison adopted wholesale the image of Pope's confused incompetence. Similarly, in his Men of Letters volume on Pope, Leslie Stephen diminishes Pope's Essay as merely a confused versification of Bolingbroke's Essays. Thus, rather than attack An Essay on Man directly, Stephen rails against Bolingbroke's “superficial and arrogant” philosophical essays. The “half-read” poet and his incoherent “mosaic” are treated as marginal adjuncts to the history of Bolingbroke's half-baked ideas.³²

The mosaic metaphor, which Stephen admits he is borrowing from Pattison, vivifies the objection to Pope's indiscriminate borrowing and resultant inconsistency inherited from Crousaz. “If I could flatter myself that this Essay has any merit,” Pope asserts in the “Design” prefixed to all editions from 1734 on, “it is in steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite” (p. 7). Almost immediately, the enemy he attached as “Sporus” in his Epistle to Arbuthnot alleged that Pope's eclecticism was, in fact, the central flaw of the Essay. “Resolving to turn Philosopher,” Lord Hervey snidely says, “he has, in order to fit himself for Execution of that Task, read every speculative Book upon the Subject he treats; and whenever a Passage happen'd to strike him in any of these different Authors, writing upon different Principles … and consequently maintaining different Opinions, and exhibiting different Sentiments, he has put them into most harmonious Verse, I confess, but such discordant Sense … that his whole Work is nothing but a Heap of poetical Contradictions, and a jarring Series of Doctrines, Principles, Opinions and Sentiments, diametrically opposite to each other; making an Olio, Hodge-Podge Mess of Philosophy.”³³

In an ambitious work like the Essay, De Quincey argues, “eclecticism ceases to be possible. … The parts lose their support, their coherence, their very meaning.”³⁴ The coexistence of pious (Warburton, Roscoe) and impious (Crousaz, Warton) interpretations of the Essay reinforced this Argument from Inconsistency that increasingly pervaded discussions of Pope's poem. An Essay on Man “is indeed the realization of anarchy,” De Quincey asserts, “and one amusing test of this may be found in the fact that different commentators have deduced from it the very opposite doctrines.” This is the recurrent motif in Elwin, Pattison, and Stephen. Pope's “weak attempt to use language which would fit both infidelity and belief led,” Elwin objects, “to sorry conclusions” and makes the Essay a shoddy assemblage of “clashing theories” best fitted to document Pope's astonishing “ignorance of philosophy.”³⁵ Readers should not approach Pope's poetry looking for “the higher range of religious and philosophical ideas,” Pattison wrote in a review of Elwin's edition for the British Quarterly Review. “When he attempted them, as in the Essay on Man, he found himself out of his depth.”³⁶

Within a decade three sage Victorians appropriated Crousaz's denigration and chiseled in granite the condescending estimate of Pope's Essay which has been reinscribed ever since. To his 1869 edition of the Essay for the Clarendon School series, Mark Pattison provided a lengthy and very hostile preface. Within a decade it went through six editions and continued to serve as a standard school text well into the next century. Elwin's edition and voluminous commentary, destined to become the definitive edition for scholars until 1950, appeared in 1871. In his review the following year, Pattison secularized Reverend Elwin's zeal; and in 1880 Leslie Stephen provided the capstone. Discussing An Essay on Man in his Alexander Pope, Stephen concludes that “anything like sustained reasoning was beyond Pope's reach.” Stephen's ridicule of the Essay shows his familiarity with Johnson's adaptation of Crousaz in his own Life of Pope. “When [Pope's] wonder-working sounds sink into sense,” the pious Johnson had judged, the reader recognizes nothing more profound than the jejune “talk of his mother and his nurse.” Stephen concludes with Johnsonian definitiveness, “The reasonings in the essay are confused, contradictory, and often childish.” Stephen also wrote the entries for both Pope and Bolingbroke for the Dictionary of National Biography, cross-referencing his denunciation of Bolingbroke's Essays with his denigration of Pope's Essay. Thus, at the close of the nineteenth century the most authoritative sources, Pope's editors and biographers, concurred in dismissing the Essay as a worthless “realization of anarchy”: “puerile,” “ignorant,” and “childish.”³⁷

Almost all subsequent commentary presumes this Victorian assessment of the Essay's incoherence. “Pope's very inconsistent poem,” one critic writes, “is known to be a hodge-podge of incompatible philosophies.”³⁸ Another finds “no real logical order” in the poem;³⁹ and another criticizes its “illogicality.”⁴⁰ “The eclecticism of the Essay,” still another writes, is “a major source of the poem's failure to achieve … coherent thought.”⁴¹ Entirely worthless as philosophy, another contends, Pope's poem is “no more than rhetoric.”⁴² Even the most subtle and astute recent critics conclude that “Readers who approach An Essay on Man in search of philosophical richness” will be disappointed because Pope was incapable of the “sustained conceptual thinking” we expect of a Locke or a Leibniz.⁴³ The judgment of recent critics that Pope's unfortunate “eclecticism” led to his “hodge-podge” poem literally reinscribes Lord Hervey's 1742 attack. Through the authoritative alchemy of literary scholarship what was initially an expression of tendentious, personal hostility has been transmuted into the sagest of received wisdom, exactly the kind of received idea that blinds us to author and work alike.⁴⁴

“HARMONIOUS VERSE”

Crousaz's second tactic was to discredit Pope as philosopher; his third tactic was to celebrate Pope as poet. Crousaz inherited a philosopher's allegiance in the antique antagonism of Plato to Homer and, like Hobbes and Locke, distrusted poetry. At best, they agreed, poetry and philosophy were different discourse modes whose marriage inevitably resulted in obscurity and inconsistency. Both the poetical philosopher and the philosophic poet were unnatural couplings. The point made by his translator Resnel in praising Pope's dual success as “Poet” and “abstracted Reasoner” is to highlight his unique ability “in this latter Age” to unite “Poetry and Metaphysics [which] are generally considered as two Kinds of Writing inconsistent with each other.” Johnson included this laudatory assessment in his translation of Crousaz, correctly seeing the Swiss theologian's attack as a deconstruction of its assertion that Pope, unique among the moderns, had bridged the generic gap and written a successful philosophical poem.⁴⁵

Contemporary consensus was on Crousaz's side in dissociating the genres. In 1721 John Clarke representatively criticized Cicero's Nature of the Gods along with “the later arguments of the Academicks, as rather oratorical and poetical Descriptions, than Arguments,” as rhetorical tricks “calculated more to excite the Passions and captivate the Imaginations of the vulgar, than to convince the Reason and satisfy the Judgment.”⁴⁶ Following Plato's dichotomy in the Republic, Clarke's contemporaries reserved the empyrean realm of real Knowledge for rational philosophical discourse and relegated poetical effusions to the ash heap of passionate Opinion. During the composition of An Essay on Man even Bolingbroke affirmed the dichotomy in a letter to Pope: “The business of the philosopher is to dilate,” he wrote, “to press, to prove, to convince; and that of the poet to hint, to touch his subject with short and spirited strokes, to warm the affections, and to speak to the heart.”⁴⁷

In the division of human spoils, the head goes to the philosopher, the heart to the poet. The “long process of reasoning,” which distinguishes the philosopher, Bolingbroke tells Pope, sinks the poet. Similarly, when David Hume argues that the poet, unlike the philosopher, does not hitch his reputation to a syllogism so that “Addison, perhaps, will be read with pleasure when Locke shall be entirely forgotten,”⁴⁸ he is presupposing the same dichotomy between the bewitching rhetorician and the empiricist-logician which Locke advocates in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. “If we would speak of things as they are,” Locke soberly advises, “we must allow that all the art of rhetoric … all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.”⁴⁹ This statement accords perfectly with the resolution of Locke's fellows in the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge to banish “this beautiful deceipt,” “this vicious abundance of Phrase,” “this trick of Metaphor” and replace it with a “manner of Discourse … as near the Mathematical plainness” as possible.⁵⁰

Thus the generic stage was set for Crousaz's indictment of Pope's aspirations to be simultaneously singer and sage. A philosopher is committed to truth and must adopt a rigorously rational methodology, Crousaz asserts, “whereas, a Poet is the Master of the Subject, and … disposes it as he thinks proper. The Philosopher takes a Pride in giving Instructions, in resolving Difficulties, and dissipating Doubts and Obscurities. But the Poet, without any Intention to deceive, aims to surprise, to agitate, and wholly to engage his Reader.” Many of Pope's images and ideas “are magnificent,” Crousaz admits, “but not all are equally clear; they are expressed in Terms proper to give Verse an Air of Sublimity, and which occur of themselves to a Poet. He is pleased with them, and makes use of them. A Philosopher does not admit them so easily.” Rather than prove, Pope proclaims, offering sound where sense was promised. Irritated by the string of antinomies that closes Pope's attack on “Reasoning Pride” in the first epistle, Crousaz demands: “Does the Right of Poets extend so far as boldly to publish the greatest Paradoxes, provided they be deliver'd in pompous Expressions?”⁵¹

Crousaz's objection to Pope's mixing of discourse modes—to Pope's “beautiful deceipt”—was immediately Anglicized. In 1739, shortly after Johnson's translation of Crousaz's Commentary appeared, William Ayre prefaced his epistle on Truth (self-promoted as a “Counterpart” to Pope's poem) with the admonition that such philosophical matters as Pope's Essay expatiated upon “must be consider'd without any regard to Poetry.”⁵² This criticism of An Essay on Man enters the biographical tradition that Johnson inherited when, a year after Pope's death, the same William Ayre argues in his Memoirs of Pope that the glorious poetry of the Essay suspends all exercise of the reader's rational faculties.⁵³ Johnson's authoritative dismissal of the Essay in his Life of Pope reinscribes some of the phrases by Crousaz he translated earlier. “Mr. Pope seems,” Johnson translates, “to express a great deal in a few Words, but upon Reflection, we learn nothing from him.” “The reader feels his mind full,” Johnson writes forty years later, “though he learns nothing.” Like Crousaz and Ayre, Johnson attributes the illusion of profundity to rhetorical bewitchment. An Essay on Man “affords an egregious instance,” he complains, “of the predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence. Never were penury of knowledge and vulgarity of sentiment so happily disguised.”⁵⁴

While bookseller Curll was promoting sales of Crousaz's “Satire” of Pope's Essay, Joseph Warton was defining his own vocation as a poet in contradistinction to Pope's practice. In both the preface to his Odes and in the preface to his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope an adamantine barrier separates the prose and the poetic worlds of discourse; and he agrees with Crousaz that to mix the modes is inevitably self-contradictory. However, unlike Crousaz, Ayre, and Johnson, Warton is troubled neither by Pope's impiety nor by his lapses in logic. In fact, Warton admits that Pope's Essay “is as close a piece of argument … as perhaps can be found in verse.” What Warton denies is that such “verse” can ever be poetry. Retaining the binary opposition, Warton privileges the Poet over the Philosopher.

Appropriately, Warton's Essay on Pope is dedicated to Edward Young whose supplementary Night Thoughts offered the “transcendently sublime” strain which Pope as “Le Poete de la Raison” lacked. Warton records that Young pressed Pope “to write something on the side of Revelation, in order to take off the impression of those doctrines which the Essay on Man were supposed to convey.”⁵⁵ Pope's earthbound art, as Samuel Richardson wrote to Young, “was not the genius to lift our souls to Heaven, had it soared ever so freely, since it soared not in the Christian beam.” In contrast to Pope's naturalism, Richardson praises Young for soaring like an eagle to “apotheosis.”⁵⁶ “What is there transcendently sublime … in Pope?” Warton pointedly asks, arguing that bards degrade themselves by descending to the ratiocinative.⁵⁷ De Quincey's fundamental objection is identical. “To address the insulated understanding is to lay aside Prospero's robe of poetry,” he insists. Consequently, An Essay on Man, like all didactic verse, is destroyed by its own “self-contradiction.”⁵⁸ Elwin invokes De Quincey's authority before concluding that “the false scheme of embodying scientific philosophy in verse determined in advance the failure of the Essay.”⁵⁹ This “Romantic” objection is reincarnated frequently, most recently in Harold Bloom's pronouncement that Pope's Essay attempts an “aesthetic impossibility.” Because Pope's project was “not suited to the Muse,” it could only result in a “poetic disaster.”⁶⁰ As Johnson wrote two hundred years earlier, Pope's “subject is perhaps not very proper for poetry.”⁶¹

Harold Bloom is beating the dead; but in Johnson's day opponents of Pope's Essay were faced with the astonishing popularity of the poem. The enemy was not only alive but esteemed. Therefore, antagonists were compelled to explain why, if the poem was so very bad, it seemed so good. The answer was readily extrapolated from the dichotomy of rational philosopher and passionate poet. Like Eve with Adam, Pope pandered to readers' lower faculties and by overheating their bodies befuddled their minds. Pope's enemies were willing to acknowledge his artistry if they could simultaneously deny his adequacy as a systematic thinker. “Your Essays on Man … are much read and commended,” Thomas Bentley wrote in March 1735. “Yet I have met with very knowing People, that think you are not equal to the Undertaking. … There are Starts and Flights of Poetry very fine, but you prove nothing.”⁶² To account for passages of apparent sense in the Essay, Pope's admitted eclecticism was invoked. When, to his chagrin, Bezaleel Morrice learned that the poem he had extravagantly praised in his own Essay on the Universe in 1733 was by his nemesis Pope, he alleges plagiarism to account for any intellectual substance in the Essay:

If thy Essay on Man some value shows,
'Tis what the bounteous Shaft'sbury bestows;
His only, all that's solid and sublime;
Thine are the measure, and melodious chime.(63)

Insidiously, this depiction of Pope as the mindless rhymester of other men's ideas grew. When Boswell told Johnson that Lord Bathurst had affirmed that Bolingbroke wrote a prose draft of An Essay on Man and that Pope “did no more than put it into verse.” Johnson offers a caveat but essentially concurs: “Sir, this is too strongly stated. Pope may have had from Bolingbroke the philosophic stamina of his Essay … but the poetical imagery, which makes a great part of the poem, is his.”⁶⁴ Joseph Spence reported that Pope acknowledged how obliged he was to Bolingbroke “for the thoughts and reasonings in his moral work,”⁶⁵ and Spence was friends with Joseph Warton who lamented that Bolingbroke drew Pope away from “poetry” into the wasteland of ethical epistles (1782). A hundred years later Leslie Stephen concurred (1880); and another hundred years later (1984) Brean Hammond reinscribed the judgment of Pope's lines as “an attempt to render [Bolingbroke's view] into dramatically compelling verse.”⁶⁶ By the alchemy of academic contempt what began as praise was transmuted to blame. In 1737 Common Sense: Or, The Englishman's Journal lauded Pope's Essay and urged “Minor Poets” not to attempt philosophical poetry since “their Motions must be round their own Axis, and within their own Sphere.” Their feeble imitations are to Pope's poem “what the Satellites of Jupiter are to that Planet: Humble Attendants made to roll round him at a Distance.”⁶⁷ By 1880 Leslie Stephen could confidently reverse the metaphor by characterizing Pope's subordination to Bolingbroke as akin “to one of the inferior bodies of the solar system, whose orbit is dependent upon that of some more massive planet.”⁶⁸

Even Warburton ungraciously contributed to Pope's intellectual denigration. “'Tis perhaps singularly remarkable in Mr. Pope,” Warburton told Spence with specific reference to An Essay on Man, that “his imagination [was] stronger than his judgment when he grew old.”⁶⁹ Warburton took great satisfaction in having rescued Pope's Essay from his enemy Bolingbroke by interpretative fiat; and he listened smugly as flatterers said of his Vindication, “If you did not find Pope a philosopher, you have made him one.” In acid prose Johnson etched a shallow, immature Pope inebriate on a little learning: “the poet was not sufficiently master of his subject; metaphysical morality was to him a new study, he was proud of his acquisitions, and, supposing himself master of great secrets, was in haste to teach what he had not learned. … The positions which he transmitted from Bolingbroke he seems not to have understood.”⁷⁰ At exhausting length Elwin, Pattison, and Stephen repeat Johnson's judgment. “It is much to be lamented,” Pattison writes, “that Pope attempted philosophy. He was very ignorant; ignorant of everything except the art of versification. Of philosophy he knew nothing beyond the name.”⁷¹ Johnson's judgment still dominates discussion of An Essay on Man. John Sparrow concludes that Pope erred in “attempting to expound in verse a philosophy he did not understand.”⁷² “However splendid his cosmic panorama, however beguiling his vision of ultimate harmony,” George Fraser writes, “Pope lacks the muscle of a really strong thinker.”⁷³

Although Pope is a philosophical weakling, Fraser argues, he is nonetheless “a true poet”; and, in fact, both assertions were central to the trivialization of the Essay from the first. “I do not remember,” Crousaz writes in Johnson's translation, “that ever I experienced the Power of Poetry so strongly as in Mr. Pope's Essay.” Yet it was pathos without logos: rhyme without reason. “The Reader, carried away by the Beauty of the Poetry, reads with Eagerness, and supposes, often contrary to Truth, that the Facts are as the Poet represents them.” The Essay, Crousaz insists, is simultaneously “grand and magnificent” and “confused” because “Mr. Pope's Physics smell of the Poet.”⁷⁴ Although he detests the philosophy of the Essay, William Ayre says, Pope has written “a strain of Poetry so wonderfully sublime” that he is bewitched: “I love the music, but condemn the song.” In his Life of Pope, Ayre ends his summary of the Essay with cold words for the content but with adulation for the style: “Such was Mr. Pope's Philosophy, and such his fine Poetry; which, as it never had, perhaps never will have any Equal in our Language.”⁷⁵

A contemporary pamphlet alleges that Pope “has attended to nothing but the Sound of his Words, when he was writing” but that the power of his poetry has blinded readers to the fact that “every thing this celebrated Author says, has not only a tendency to debauch and corrupt the Manners of Mankind, but, throughout the whole Performance, Contradictions and Inconsistencies reign triumphant over all Understanding and good Sense.”⁷⁶ Predictably, Samuel Johnson said it most memorably. Although when Pope's “wonder-working sounds sink into sense” the reader should be able to see Pope's “penury of knowledge,” Johnson fears the dangerous prevalence of Pope's power over the imagination: “The vigorous contraction of some thoughts, the luxuriant amplification of others, the incidental illustrations, and sometimes the dignity, sometimes the softness of the verses, enchain philosophy, suspend criticism, and oppress judgment by overpowering pleasure.”⁷⁷

Johnson's formulation of the disjunction of Pope's “harmonious Verse” and “discordant Sense” was accepted eventually by scholars as authoritative; but initially it had no effect on enthusiasm for An Essay on Man. “Why is the Essay on Man still read,” Pattison is still obliged to answer a hundred years after Johnson's dictum, “when many a volume of the same age, of the same shallow metaphysics, is forgotten?” Since he is so obviously inadequate as a philosopher, Stephen asks, “How, then, could Pope obtain even an appearance of success?” Both Pattison and Stephen are somewhat surprised that Elwin devotes so many pages to demonstrating the Essay's incompetence. That Pope's poem is but “a tissue of incoherence and inconsistence,” Pattison affirms, “is a charge which no one can attempt to deny.” Why, then, is it still being reprinted, read, and written about even by enemies like Elwin, Pattison, and Stephen?⁷⁸

Johnson's image of poetry binding philosophy in chains provides the answer; and nineteenth-century rationalizations of the Essay's popularity are attenuations of Johnson's phrases. “When we turn from the matter of the Essay to the execution,” Pattison admits, “dissatisfaction gives way to admiration. We then see the secret of the eminence which Pope attained, and which he must always retain as long as the English language continues to be read.” In An Essay on Man “the elegance of the phrase hides the absence of an idea. … [Pope] has masked an unmanageable matter by his inimitable art of expression. Such is the importance of style.”⁷⁹ In his Life of Alexander Pope, Elwin's co-editor wrote: “To the question, How the ‘Essay on Man’ could ever have been accepted as embodying a philosophical system; the answer is, that … its poetical qualities blinded men's judgments to its philosophical defects.” Courthope admits that many of the most able eighteenth-century logicians, including Voltaire, Marmontel, and Kant, paid the poem extravagant praise; but “that such praise should have been extorted from eminent doctors of philosophy” need not trouble us, he argues, if we realize that Pope's rhetorical power left them no freedom to reflect on “the weakness or inconsistency of the argument.”⁸⁰ Popular histories and literary handbooks merely reflected this scholarly consensus. H. A. Taine's popular summary is representative: although Pope's “ideas are mediocre, the art of expressing them is truly marvelous: marvelous is the word.”⁸¹ “Read the poem for its poetical merits,” a popular guide to The Age of Pope advised in 1894, “and you will forget its defects.”⁸²

An Essay on Man exists on the margins of two discourse worlds: the Logocentric (rational, logical, philosophical) and the Aesthetic (passionate, imaginative, poetic). When the Essay was published those worlds were mutually hostile: each mode suspicious of the other. It is no accident that Pope's poetic power is recurrently characterized as a dangerous enchantress, as a female playing upon men's passions to seduce them from the rational, as a poetic Circe turning whole herds of otherwise upright philosophers into swine. Crousaz was literally a professor of logic; but even he admitted that he had been tempted by the most powerful rhetoric he had ever read. The equally logocentric Warburton exuded no ink in defending Pope as poet precisely because that was never in question in Crousaz's attacks. Instead, Warburton's entire tendentious tome is a Philosophical Commentary on the poem as “a System of Philosophy.”⁸³

In 1755 the Prussian Royal Academy proposed an examination of Pope's “System” as the subject for their yearly philosophical prize. Kant made some notes toward a submission that would have argued Pope's philosophical superiority to Leibniz.⁸⁴ Gotthold Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn responded to the logocentric bias of the Academy with an ironic analysis of Pope's “system” in Pope ein Metaphysiker! the same year. Assuming that poets and philosophers inhabit different worlds of discourse, they ridiculed the practice of looking for philosophical “systems” in poems. The poet may borrow promiscuously from incompatible philosophies since poetry's concern is with sensuous, sprightly emotional stimulation whereas philosophy is obliged to order consistently precisely defined words divorced from all emotional connotations. An art for art's sake aestheticism is implied in their argument that Pope is performing a primarily nonrational function distinct from that of the philosopher and should be evaluated differently.⁸⁵ Aesthetically, Warton and De Quincey agree; but they fault Pope for attempting to bridge the discourse worlds. To Crousaz's objection that Pope's “Physics smell of the Poet,” Warton and De Quincey retort that Pope's “Poetry stinks of the Philosopher.” Significantly, sympathetic modern commentary on the Essay inevitably stresses the criteria appropriate to an aesthetic discourse isolated from logocentric considerations. Martin Kallich, for example, finds it praiseworthy in the Essay that “the poet appears to be in complete control over the philosopher.”⁸⁶

Thus, from the first, whether hostile or sympathetic, critics have made separate studies of the philosophy and poetry of the Essay. Elwin, Pattison, and Stephen first discuss the logic of the poem and only when that is debunked do they consider its aesthetics. “We may take the thought as a given material,” Pattison says, “and make a separate study of the setting and workmanship.” Although the Essay is entirely worthless as philosophy, “the young scholar [of rhetoric] cannot propose to himself a more instructive model to dwell upon and to analyze.”⁸⁷ Maynard Mack's splendid Twickenham edition continues this dichotomy. Separate sections of his introduction deal with “The Essay and ‘Philosophy’” and “The Essay as a Poem.” The quotation marks around “Philosophy” suggest Mack's aesthetic and sympathetic bias. He believes that a study of “the materials philosophy supplied” and the resultant “ideas, postulates, conclusions (and right and wrong) of the poem's logical meaning and organization” are less important than the poem's “implicit organization, its attitudes, images, emotions, and its developing theme.”⁸⁸ Despite his informed affection for the Essay, Mack unavoidably perpetuates the inherited separation of the poetic from the philosophic (“the thought as a given material” in Pattison; “the materials philosophy supplied” in Mack). Two subsequent booklength studies of the Essay make the dichotomy absolute. Believing that “no careful examination of the whole work as poem … has yet been made,” Martin Kallich studies Pope's rhetoric exclusively.⁸⁹ In contrast, Douglas White is concerned exclusively with the “Manipulation of Ideas” in An Essay on Man, with situating Pope's arguments in the history of philosophy.⁹⁰

JOHNSON'S “MORE MASSIVE INTELLECT”

The only other full-length study of An Essay on Man since Mack's Twickenham edition is that by A. D. Nuttall, which surprisingly ends with a chapter praising “Johnson's intellect as manifestly more powerful than Pope's.” As it stands Nuttall's final chapter seems a quirky conclusion to a volume on the Essay; it seems less so when we realize how pervasive and determining Johnson's response to An Essay on Man has been to subsequent interpretation. Presently only literary scholars write about Pope's poem; and they invariably reinscribe Johnson's Crousazian dichotomy of “wonder-working sound” and “penury of knowledge.” Nuttall's pedigree is archetypal: broadly dividing the history of interpretation into Crousazian and Warburtonian camps, he says that “Johnson is Crousazian” and that his own “book is Crousazian.”⁹¹

Although virtually every Pope scholar quotes Johnson's denigration of the Essay, none has sought to explain Johnson's hostility. Perhaps after the definitive dismissals of Pattison, Elwin, and Stephen in the late nineteenth century, the question of personal animus seems irrelevant. There is no question of ideological bias in Johnson's assessment because he was just speaking a truth which, in Pattison's phrase, “no one can attempt to deny.” There is, however, more to it than that. Interpretations are not neutral descriptions but admissions and assertions of self; Johnson's judgment of Pope's poem tells us about Johnson. His praise of Pope's “seductive powers of eloquence” in the Essay is sincere; and it was that powerful and “egregious” bewitchment that had to be silenced for the sake of Johnson's soul.

As Nicholas Hudson correctly notes, Johnson's hostility to theodicy was shared widely by other orthodox moralists and theologians,⁹² but the persistence of that hostility from his early career (his translation of Crousaz) through his middle years (his review of Soame Jenyns's Free Inquiry) to the writing of the life of Pope late in his career is suggestive. His translation and annotation of Crousaz probably inclined Johnson to categorize Pope's Essay as a theodicy; it certainly established the association in Johnson's mind between the ideology of his bête noire, Bolingbroke, and Pope.⁹³ However, the truth is more complex because it was not—according to the received dichotomy repeated to him by Boswell—Bolingbroke's arguments that troubled him but Pope's poetry. As Martin Maner observes, Johnson's critique of the poem gives it “an evil, almost satanic overtone, as though the Essay on Man were a forbidden fruit on the tree of knowledge.”⁹⁴

Johnson's diaries and prayers are a record of a private struggle over decades against “tumultuous imaginations,” a continuing effort not to be “depraved with vain imaginations.” “My thoughts,” Johnson confided to his God, “have been clouded with sensuality” and “my appetites have predominated over my reason.” Recurrently, he vowed “to study the Scriptures” (1761), “to read the Scriptures” (1764), “to read the whole Bible” (1777), “Biblia legenda” (1777). Increasingly, the vain imaginings took the form of religious skepticism. “Scruplis obsistendum,” he pledged in April 1777: “resist religious doubts.” He resolved “to gather the arguments for Christianity” (1777) and “to study Divinity, particularly the Evidences of Christianity” (1778). Despite extensive readings in the Bible and in church fathers like Aquinas and Chrysostom, he was beset by “terror and anxiety.” He implored God to deliver him “from needless scruples and oppressive terrours” (1777): “Ease, if it shall please thee the doubts of my mind” (1779); “let me be … no longer doubtful” (1780); “remove from me all such scruples and perplexities as encumber and obstruct my mind” (1784); “strengthen my mind against useless perplexities” (1784). In his continual “endeavour to conquer scruples,” as his death drew near Johnson compiled a list of eleven causes of the “Skepticism” that tormented him.⁹⁵

It was at the height of these fears that he worked on the prefaces to a new edition of the English poets. “Last week I published the lives of the poets,” he confided in April of 1779, “written I hope in such a manner, as may tend to the promotion of Piety.” They were not all written until 1781, at which time he was still struggling “Against Inquisitive and Perplexing Thoughts,” which plagued him until his death.⁹⁶ Johnson does not specify how he thought his lives might promote piety; but it seems certain that he saw his inclusion of Sir Richard Blackmore's Creation in this light. Although John Dennis had celebrated Blackmore's philosophical poem as the work of a Christian Lucretius when it was published in 1712, Pope's destruction of Blackmore in Peri Bathos had ended Creation's astonishing popularity; and Johnson's booksellers had no intention of including anything by Blackmore in their collection, much less a physico-theological poem of epic length. Johnson insisted that Creation be included.⁹⁷

Johnson agrees with the Popian consensus that damns Blackmore's other poems; but he lavishly praises Creation, affirming that had Blackmore written nothing else it alone “would have transmitted him to posterity among the first favorites of the English Muse.” Johnson praises Creation's inspired union of “philosophical judgment and poetical spirit”: “it wants neither harmony of numbers, accuracy of thought, nor elegance of diction.”⁹⁸ It is, in essence, what a philosophical poem ought to be: elegant as poetry and accurate as philosophy. It was also—as a deliberate attack on the latter-day disciples of Epicurus including Descartes, Spinoza, and Hobbes—unremittingly pious.⁹⁹

Moreover, Creation was to Johnson the opposite of Pope's “egregious” Essay on Man. After resigning Blackmore to the oblivion of duncedom, Pope supplanted Creation with his own philosophical poem that whether deist or Spinozist or Leibnizian or Shaftesburian or Bolingbrokian was certainly not distinctively Christian. Pope was, he flatly asserted, “Slave to no Sect.” Knowing the immense popularity of the Essay with the public, Johnson could not exclude the Essay from the collection; but what he could do, he did. Through ridicule of his weaknesses and appropriations of his strength, Pope had deposed Blackmore as poet and philosopher. As will be shown in a subsequent chapter, from the sluggish Christian ore of Creation's lines Pope coined golden couplets. Johnson's pious aim was to reestablish Blackmore's priority and to obliterate Pope's disturbing influence. His attempt to rewrite literary history by reinscribing Blackmore's Creation failed; but his trivialization of the Essay succeeded as well as he could have wished.

Whether it worked for Johnson himself is doubtful. “O Lord,” he wrote in 1784, “while it shall please thee to continue me in this world where much is to be done and little to be known, teach me by thy Holy Spirit to withdraw my Mind from unprofitable and dangerous enquiries, from difficulties vainly curious, and doubts impossible to be solved.” “Enable me,” he prayed to God in that final year of his life, “to drive from me all such unquiet and perplexing thoughts as may mislead or hinder me in the practice of those duties which thou hast required.” Delirious and dying, Johnson stared at the vacuity at the end of his bed and demanded, “Will that man never have done talking poetry at me?”¹⁰⁰

The full story of Johnson's need to exorcise Pope belongs elsewhere; but perhaps what has been said is sufficient to interpret his trivialization of the Essay as “written … to the promotion of Piety.” The interpretive tools were ready-to-hand. The age had its discourse lines drawn to separate poetry and philosophy. “A Description in Homer,” Joseph Addison announced, “has charmed more Readers than a Chapter in Aristotle.” While it is true that the “Pleasures of the Imagination” are not “so refined as those of the Understanding,” Addison admits, the enchantments of the imagination are more salubrious. “The Pleasures of the Fancy are more conducive to Health, than those of the Understanding, which are worked out by Dint of Thinking, and attended with too violent a Labour of the Brain.”¹⁰¹ When Pope presumed to marry wit and judgment, Crousaz was quick to ridicule a Homer trying to write like an Aristotle.

Johnson's adoption of this dichotomy allowed him to trivialize the Essay into a glittering rhetorical bauble of no intrinsic worth. By admitting the poem's power and artistry, Johnson appears even-handed at the same time that he rationalizes the popularity of the Essay as an “enchantment” or “bewitchment” or “enchaining” of the intellect by literary language, a “seduction” into “vain imaginings.” Once written, Johnson's judgment was repeated by subsequent editors. Elwin is typical: “The Essay was altogether a mistake. … His thoughts are often gems rendered lustrous by the skill of the cutter, but … when examined are found worthless.”¹⁰² Even the Essay's greatest admirers now presuppose Johnson's assessment. Although a reader must be “dubious … over the logic,” Geoffrey Tillotson exclaims, Pope's poetry “towers in a splendor that is massive.”¹⁰³ There is now scarcely a writer on the Essay who fails to quote Johnson's charge that Pope's verses “enchain philosophy.” Representatively, in The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (1987), Leopold Damrosch quotes Johnson repeatedly in dismissing Maynard Mack's defense of the Essay as a “formed Weltanschauung” which works “not through theorem but through symbol.”¹⁰⁴ No amount of the kind of Renaissance parallels Mack offers, Damrosch insists, “can conceal the dissonance between rhetorical procedure and metaphysical claims. … A strong intelligence can easily take the poem apart.”¹⁰⁵

Johnson authorized what Pope's editors subsequently did to the Essay. For eighty years the student or scholar turning to Elwin's definitive edition found a massive critical apparatus, much longer than the Essay itself, which even the hostile Pattison described as a “furious” denunciation of the poem it pretended to perpetuate. Nuttall inaccurately characterizes Maynard Mack's Twickenham edition, which replaced Elwin's, as “Warburtonian.” Mack is sympathetic to the poem, but unlike Warburton he does not attempt a pious interpretation. Believing “ratiocinative rigour … impossible in poetry and probably undesirable,” Mack is really allied with aesthetic interpreters like Warton, De Quincey, and Bloom who find “philosophical poetry” an oxymoron.¹⁰⁶ True poets do not circumscribe the sublime with syllogisms.

Ironically, even those aesthetic critics who would praise Pope help to damn him. As Richard Rorty stresses, most philosophers are hostile to poetry. “To claim that its statements are structured by logic, reason, truth, and not by the rhetoric in which they are ‘expressed,’ philosophical discourse defines itself against writing.” Philosophers trivialize poetry as a “nonserious margin” dangerous to serious conceptual discourse.¹⁰⁷ Crousaz's complaint that “Mr. Pope's Natural Philosophy seems somewhat infected by his Poetry” astutely encapsulates the logocentric objection that poetry is potential “infection,” a kind of venereal disease of discourse. One is puzzled to see the mingling of recriminations in Johnson's prayers until one recognizes the latent connection between “sensual images,” “vain imaginations,” and religious doubts. The lower faculties are infecting the higher, to his soul's peril. As a recent critic affirms, Pope's ideas “might have doomed [the] Essay to oblivion” had not his poetry made its “appeal to our reason through our senses.”¹⁰⁸ Johnson felt the appeal: Pope's eloquence is “seductive” and must be “disrobed” and seen “naked” if it is not to “oppress [our] judgment by overpowering pleasure.” Stripped of her rhetorical robes, the whore is seen as unsound; but in expiation for his attraction, Johnson resurrected Blackmore and buried Pope.

Here too Johnson is paradigmatic. Indications are that he felt a powerful pull toward Pope's vortex of vain imaginings. Like Crousaz, he acknowledges Pope's “egregious … genius.” Something of the same thing must be true of scholars like Elwin and Pattison who spent so much energy and ingenuity trying to destroy the poem they pretended to interpret. One wonders why, A. D. Nuttall writes, “if Elwin despised Pope so much, he was willing to expend so much labor on him?” The same must be asked of Nuttall himself for his recent book qualifies him as the latest in that line of scholars who come to bury the Essay rather than to praise it. Pope “was not … a clear-sighted philosopher”; he “was an unsystematic thinker,” and, consequently, “the thought of An Essay on Man, philosophical or not, is notably unsystematic.” Nuttall finds Pope to be a writer who only “obscurely senses” philosophical distinctions and has only a “dim” awareness of his own intentions, most of his energies going into “the production of a smooth and acceptable set of couplets.” Pope's “rhetoric and logic,” Nuttall argues, “are not working in perfect union.” In fact, “the energy of Pope's genius perhaps works against the bias of his intellect”; but, whatever the cause, Pope's “slick yet intellectually inept” performance is “the sort of thing that gets poets a bad name with philosophers.” Nearing his conclusion, Nuttall acknowledges his hostile tone: “there have probably been many occasions earlier in this book when I have seemed more contemptuous of Pope than I really am.” In fact, if Nuttall has any intellectual respect for An Essay on Man, it does not come through his text. Random quotation cannot communicate the pervasiveness of his contempt and consequent condescension.¹⁰⁹

So long as one considers Nuttall's book an “interpretation” of An Essay on Man it seems very strange. Once one realizes that it is not an interpretation of the Essay but is instead a destruction of Pope's philosophical poem and a vindication of Johnson's judgment of it, then Nuttall's work is no longer odd and his final chapter is explained. Nuttall's twenty-five-page “Coda” entitled “The End of Theodicy” lauds Rasselas as the philosophical alternative to An Essay on Man. Aware that “the evil of the world is not explained, it is only endured,” Johnson—“most classical of authors”—replaces Pope's “stasis of optimistic theology” with “a stasis which is close to despair. But, in its very surrender,” Nuttall concludes, “Johnson's intellect is manifestly more powerful than Pope's.” Nuttall's demolition is complete. Whereas Johnson admitted his powerful attraction to Pope's dangerous style, Nuttall finds Johnson's style in Rasselas “deeply refreshing” after Pope's “usual flurry of humorous or evasive rhetorical defenses.” Johnson's “style is utterly unlike that of Pope” in that it “simply says what it wishes to say.” In his “Arnoldian moments,” Nuttall admits, “it is suddenly blindingly clear that Pope is not a poet as Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats are poets.”¹¹⁰

What should be blindingly clear is that A. D. Nuttall cannot read An Essay on Man. He is frustrated on virtually every page that Pope will not “simply say” what he wishes to say. He is also blind to “the egregious … predominance of genius, the dazzling splendour of imagery, and the seductive powers of eloquence,” which Johnson perceived. There is, Lord Byron asserted, “ten times more poetry in the Essay on Man, than in [Wordsworth's] Excursion.” Johnson could concur; Nuttall is having none of it. Nor are the rest of us.

William Spanos's extension of Heidegger's “de-struction of the Western onto-theo-logical tradition” to literary criticism helps explain Nuttall's disability and our own. The “onto-theo-logical” critics, the critics I have called “Logocentric” (Crousaz) and “Aesthetic” (Warton), cannot enter into a careful, dialogic encounter with the text because texts are “dangerous,” potentially destructive “of reified formations and present beliefs.”¹¹¹ Johnson's spiritual doubts make clear the grounds of his discomfort with An Essay on Man. Nuttall's grounds are equally clear. He is self-characterized as simultaneously “Arnoldian” and “Crousazian”; and, in fact, he is the epitome of both the Logocentric and the Aesthetic critic. As Logocentric critic he fulminates on almost every page against Pope's “superficial intelligence” and his inadequacy as a philosopher; as Aesthetic critic he finds it “blindingly clear” that Pope is not a real poet. Finally, Nuttall concludes, “the underlying trouble with Pope and his kind is not rationalism or futile metaphysics but the fact that they do not want enough.” Pope and his kind lack “moral imagination.”¹¹²

It may be objected that Nuttall is not a preeminent Pope scholar and that, consequently, his hostility is unrepresentative. However, Maynard Mack, the preeminent scholar of An Essay on Man, characterizes Nuttall's book as “brilliant”; and J. Douglas Canfield's review in Eighteenth-Century Studies applauds Nuttall's dogged denigration of Pope: “Indeed, we track through the poem line by line, shooting every one of Pope's philosophical follies that Nuttall's hounding mind can flush.”¹¹³ This benign response to Nuttall's Crousazianism by our scholarly community suggests the extent to which his “reified formations and present beliefs” are our own.¹¹⁴

Notes

1. The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (London: A. and C. Black, 1897), 11:86.

2. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, Jr., and Marshall Waingrow, eds., Eighteenth-Century English Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1969), p. 635.

3. Leopold Damrosch, Jr., The Imaginative World of Alexander Pope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 191.

4. David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, revised and edited by James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 121.

5. Alexander Pope, Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt, 2nd edition revised (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 17.

6. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950), p. 11. Unless otherwise noted all quotations from the Essay are from this volume of the Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope and will be identified by page or line number.

7. On this and many other matters I am indebted to Maynard Mack's learned introduction to the Twickenham Edition of the Essay, pp. xi-lxxx.

8. “Occasion'd by reading the Essay on Man, first Part,” The London Evening-Post 826 (15-17 March 1733): 2; The Weekly Miscellany 22 (12 May 1733): 2.

9. The Gentleman's Magazine 4 (February 1734): 97, 98.

10. Robert Dodsley, An Epistle to Mr. Pope, Occasion'd by his Essay on Man (London: L. Gilliver, 1734), p. 3.

11. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 3:400.

12. Lady Mary Pierrepont Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity: A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 274.

13. The False Patriot. An Epistle to Mr. Pope (London: James Roberts, 1734), p. 11.

14. The Present State of the Republic of Letters 14 (October 1734): 254-55, 257.

15. The Prompter 111 (2 December 1735): 1-2.

16. Thomas Bentley, A Letter to Mr. Pope, Occasion'd by Sober Advice From Horace (London: T. Cooper, 1735), pp. 9-10.

17. Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 3:433.

18. The Weekly Miscellany 94 (28 September 1734): 1-2.

19. Mr. Bridges, Divine Wisdom and Providence: An Essay Occasion'd by The Essay on Man (London: J. Roberts, 1736), pp. ii-iii.

20. Edward Young, Night Thoughts, ed. Stephen Cornford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 48. It is interesting that most of the “Nights” were initially published by the poet-bookseller Robert Dodsley, Pope's young friend and an early panegyrist of the Essay on Man: The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality (London: for R. Dodsley, at Tully's Head in Pall-Mall, 1742).

21. An Essay on Man, ed. Mack, p. xviii. The fullest surveys of the French reception of the Essay are Robert W. Rogers, “Critiques of the Essay on Man in France and Germany 1736-1755,” ELH 15:3 (1948): 176-93; and Richard Gilbert Knapp, The Fortunes of Pope's “Essay on man” in 18th century France, vol. 82 of Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1971). Vincent Giroud describes a 750-page unpublished manuscript reaction to Pope's “principes des Pyrrhoniens et des Materialistes” in “An Early French Commentary on Pope's Essay on Man,” Yale University Library Gazette 57:1 (October 1982): 10-17. The anonymous author predictably praises Pope as a master poet while censuring him as an obscure and inconsistent philosopher, a “Spinosiste” out of ignorance.

22. J. P. de Crousaz, A Commentary on Mr. Pope's Principles of Morality, or Essay on Man, trans. Samuel Johnson (London: A. Dodd, 1739), p. 302. Jean-François du Bellay du Resnel's preface and poetic translation are included in Johnson's edition of Crousaz, hereafter cited as “Johnson's Crousaz.”

23. An Essay on Man, ed. Mack, p. xix.

24. Reissued as A Critical and Philosophical Commentary on Mr. Pope's Essay on Man (London: John and Paul Knapton, 1742).

25. Nuttall, Pope's “Essay on Man,” p. 184.

26. Ibid., p. 182.

27. William Warburton, The Works of the Right Reverend William Warburton, 12 vols. (London: Printed by L. Hansard for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), 12:335. Cf. The Works of … Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, ed. David Mallet, 5 vols. (London: D. Mallet, 1754), 3:239.

28. William Warburton, A View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy (London: J. and P. Knapton, 1754-55), 1:80-81.

29. The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Joseph Warton et al., 9 vols. (London: B. Law, 1797), 3:14, 10. This view was earlier perpetuated in the second volume of Warton's Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (London: J. Dodsley, 1782).

30. The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. William Roscoe, 10 vols. (London: Longman, 1824), 5:9.

31. The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Rev. Whitwell Elwin and W. J. Courthope, 10 vols. (London: John Murray, 1871-89), 2:276, 313, 326.

32. Leslie Stephen, Alexander Pope (London: Macmillan, 1880), pp. 159-60, 166.

33. John Hervey, A Letter To Mr. C———b-r, On his Letter to Mr. P———(London: J. Roberts, 1742), pp. 14-15.

34. De Quincey, Writings, 11:92, 94.

35. Works, ed. Elwin, 2:319, 326.

36. Essays by the Late Mark Pattison, ed. Henry Nettleship, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), 2:130.

37. Works, ed. Elwin, 2:312, 332; Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1925), 2:226; Stephen, Pope, p. 162.

38. Cecil A. Moore, “Did Leibniz Influence Pope's Essay?” Journal of English and German Philology 16 (1917): 84.

39. Donald J. Greene, “‘Logical Structure’ in Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” Philological Quarterly 31 (1952): 330.

40. R. L. Brett, Reason and Imagination (London: Published for the University of Hull by Oxford University Press, 1960), p. 55.

41. Frederick S. Troy, “Pope's Images of Man,” Massachusetts Review 1 (1960): 374.

42. James Reeves, The Reputation and Writings of Alexander Pope (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 217.

43. David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 156.

44. de Man, Blindness and Insight, p. 111.

45. Johnson's Crousaz, p. 302.

46. John Clarke, An Enquiry into the Causes and Origin of Moral Evil (London: J. Knapton, 1721), p. 31. Clarke's Boyle lectures were aimed at advocates of the “Manichaean scheme, particularly Mr. Bayle.”

47. Bolingbroke, Works, 3:317-18.

48. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), p. 17.

49. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1959), 2:146.

50. These phrases are taken from the section describing “Their manner of Discourse” in Thomas Sprat's 1667 The History of the Royal Society. Written just a few years after the chartering of the Royal Society, Sprat's History was really a manifesto for the future.

51. J. P. de Crousaz, A Commentary on Mr. Pope's Four Ethic Epistles, Intituled, An Essay on Man. Wherein His System is fully Examin'd, trans. Charles Forman (London: E. Curll, 1738), p. 20 (hereafter cited as “Curll's Crousaz”); Johnson's Crousaz, p. 26.

52. William Ayre, Truth. A Counterpart to Mr. Pope's Esay [sic] on Man, Epistle the First (London: R. Minors, 1739), contents.

53. William Ayre, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope (London: For the Author, 1745), 2:329, 374, hereafter cited as Ayre, Life of Pope.

54. Johnson's Crousaz, p. 59; Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2:226.

55. Warton, Essay, 2:58, 1:x-xi, 2:143.

56. The Correspondence of Edward Young, 1683-1765, ed. Henry Pettit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 448.

57. Warton, Essay, 1: x.

58. De Quincey, Writings, 11:89.

59. Works, ed. Elwin, 2:337.

60. Bloom, Alexander Pope, pp. 3-4.

61. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2:226.

62. Bentley, Letter To Mr. Pope, p. 9.

63. Bezaleel Morrice, To the Falsely Celebrated British Homer. An Epistle (London: Printed for the Author, 1742), p. 8.

64. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), p. 1032.

65. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 311.

66. Brean S. Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. 87.

67. Common Sense: Or, The Englishman's Journal 14 (10 December 1737): 1.

68. Stephen, Pope, p. 159.

69. Spence, Observations, p. 258.

70. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2:226.

71. Pattison, Essays, 2:130.

72. John Sparrow, Independent Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), p. 75.

73. George S. Fraser, Alexander Pope (London: Routledge, 1978), p. 74.

74. Johnson's Crousaz, pp. 150, 207; Curll's Crousaz, pp. 36, 64.

75. Ayre, Truth, p. 6; Ayre, Life of Pope, 2:252, 374.

76. Common Sense a Common Delusion. Or, The generally-received Notions of Natural Causes, Deity, Religion, Virtue, &c. As exhibited in Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, Proved Ridiculous, Impious and the Effect of Infatuation; and the chief Cause of the present formidable Growth of Vice among Christians, and the great Stumbling-block in the Way of Infidels … By Almonides, a believing Heathen (London: T. Reynolds, 1751), pp. 7, 27.

77. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2:226-27.

78. Pattison, Essays, 2:386; Stephen, Pope, p. 164.

79. Essay on Man, ed. Pattison, pp. 16, 13; Stephen, Pope, p. 169.

80. Courthope, Life of Alexander Pope, pp. 245, 251.

81. H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, trans. H. Van Laun, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1873), 3:359.

82. John Dennis, The Age of Pope (London: G. Bell, 1894), p. 112.

83. Warburton, Critical and Philosophical Commentary, p. 2. Following the focus of his title, A Critical and Philosophical Commentary on Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, Warburton makes clear that his defense will be limited to nonaesthetic matters.

84. An Essay on Man, ed. Mack, pp. xli-xlii.

85. Cf. Rogers, “Critiques of the Essay on Man in France and Germany,” pp. 188-90.

86. Martin Kallich, Heav'n's First Law: Rhetoric and Order in Pope's Essay on Man (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 136.

87. Essay on Man, ed. Pattison, pp. 16-17.

88. An Essay on Man, ed. Mack, pp. xxiii, xlvii-xlviii.

89. Kallich, Heav'n's First Law, p. vii.

90. Douglas H. White, Pope and the Context of Controversy: The Manipulation of Ideas in An Essay on Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

91. Nuttall, Pope's “Essay on Man,” pp. 195-219, 188.

92. Nicholas Hudson, Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 99.

93. Donald J. Greene characterizes Bolingbroke as Johnson's bête noire in The Politics of Samuel Johnson, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 262.

94. Martin Maner, The Philosophical Biographer: Doubt and Dialectic in Johnson's “Lives of the Poets” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), p. 127.

95. Samuel Johnson, Diaries, Prayers, and Annals, ed. E. L. McAdam, Jr., with Donald and Mary Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), pp. 46, 63, 77, 73, 268, 266, 303, 305, 289, 364-65, 271, 273, 265, 297, 300, 363, 368, 393, 414. Three chapter titles in Charles E. Pierce's Religious Life of Samuel Johnson (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1983) are indicative of Johnson's state of mind: “The Anvil of Anxiety,” “The Character of Fearing,” and “A Crisis of Faith.”

96. Johnson, Diaries, pp. 294, 383.

97. Harry M. Solomon, Sir Richard Blackmore (Boston: Twayne, 1980), p. 140.

98. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, 2:25.

99. Solomon, Sir Richard Blackmore, p. 128.

100. Johnson, Diaries, pp. 383-84.

101. Joseph Addison, et al., The Spectator, ed. Gregory Smith, 4 vols. (London: Dent, 1945), 3:278.

102. Works, ed. Elwin, 2:338-39.

103. Geoffrey Tillotson, Pope and Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 42.

104. An Essay on Man, ed. Mack, p. xlvii.

105. Damrosch, Imaginative World of Alexander Pope, pp. 164, 183, 190.

106. An Essay on Man, ed. Mack, p. xxi.

107. The attitude of Richard Rorty's logocentric Kantians to physics and to writing provides a suggestive parallel to Crousaz's reaction to Pope's Essay. Cf. “Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida,” New Literary History 10 (1978), 156; Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 91, 147.

108. Yasmine Gooneratne, Alexander Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 105.

109. Nuttall, Pope's “Essay on Man,” pp. 189, 43, 48, 61-62, 94, 98, 73, 75, 86, 84, 188, 182, 68, 54, 202, 219, 208.

110. Ibid., pp. 219, 213, 176.

111. William V. Spanos, “Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and the Hermeneutic Circle: Toward a Postmodern Theory of Interpretation,” in Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature: Toward a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics, ed. William V. Spanos (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 116.

112. Nuttall, Pope's “Essay on Man,” pp. 203, 194, 202.

113. J. Douglas Canfield, “A. D. Nuttall. Pope's ‘Essay on Man,’” Eighteenth-Century Studies 19:2 (1985-86): 291.

114. Mack calls Nuttall's book “brilliant” if “sometimes rather off-the-cuff” (Alexander Pope, p. 899).