SOURCE: “Pope on the Origins of Society,” in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, edited by G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 79-93.

[In the following essay, Erskine-Hill discusses the political character of the third epistle of An Essay on Man, tracing the influence of contemporary debates, literary antecedents, and Bolingbroke on Pope's interpretation of the origins of society and government.]

I

Most readers agree that Pope's poetry is comprehensively social, and few deny that, implicitly or explicitly, in a variety of ways, it is often political. It is then surprising that in the wave of critical and biographical discussion which has pursued the earlier volumes of the Twickenham Edition relatively little attention has been paid to Epistle III of An Essay on Man (May 1733), the one poem in Pope's canon in which he offers an account of the origin of society and the origin of government.¹ For we may safely say of the eighteenth century, more than of our own time, that the quest for the origin of any given phenomenon was thought essential to the understanding of it. In the earlier eighteenth century, debate still continued concerning the origin of the English constitution, whether to be found among the Danes, Saxons, or even the British first encountered by the Romans in their conquest; while proponents of a contractual basis of government were still pressed to show when, historically, that Original Contract had been established.

From these examples alone it can be seen that An Essay on Man, Epistle III, ‘Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Society’, ventures upon some of the most fought-over ground in the Renaissance, namely the original state of mankind, the nature of man's fall, and the relation to these of the earliest government. Here, for example, is Henry Parker, most important of the early parliamentary pamphleteers, writing at the outbreak of the Civil War:

Man being depraved by the fall of Adam grew so untame and uncivil a creature, that the Law of God written in his breast was not sufficient to restrain him from mischief, or to make him sociable, and therefore without some magistracy to provide new orders, and to judge of old, and execute according to justice, no society could be upheld. Without society men could not live, and without laws men could not be sociable, and without authority somewhere invested, to judge according to Law, and execute according to judgement, Law was a vain and void thing. It was soon therefore provided that laws agreeable to the dictates of reason should be ratified by common consent, and that the execution and interpretation of those Laws should be entrusted to some magistrate, for the prevention of common injuries betwixt Subject and Subject. …²

and here is Milton within a week of the execution of King Charles I, defending the regicides:

No man who knows ought, can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himselfe, and were by privilege above all the creatures, borne to command and not to obey: and that they lived so, till from the root of Adams transgression, falling among themselves to do wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury, and joyntly to defend themselves against any that gave disturbance or opposition to such agreement. Hence came Cities, Townes and Common-wealths. And because no faith in all was found sufficiently binding, they saw it needful to ordaine some authoritie, that might restraine by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common right: This authoritie and power of self-defence and preservation being originally and naturally in every one of them, and unitedly in them all, for ease, for order, and least each man should be his owne partial judge, they communicated and deriv'd either to one, whom for the eminence of his wisdom and integritie they chose above the rest, or to more than one whom they thought of equal deserving: the first was called a King; the other Magistrates.³

The concept of a pre-contractual, pre-political, condition of human life could take many forms and be used to support different ends. The savage individualism which Hobbes saw as having been the primitive state of mankind was adduced, not to justify resistance to rulers, as in the arguments of Parker and Milton, but to enjoin the necessity of obedience to the powers that be: whatever government was in a position to give protection to the subject.⁴ And against all these Sir Robert Filmer, in a series of topical replies to Parker, Milton, Hobbes and others published during the Civil War, and in his major work Patriarcha, composed during the 1630s but not published until 1680, urged that government was ordained of God from the beginning of the world in the patriarchy of Adam, from whom all later government derived and monarchy descended. ‘And indeed not only Adam, but the succeeding Patriarchs had, by right of fatherhood, royal authority over their children. … This lordship which Adam by creation had over the whole world, and by right descending from him the Patriarchs did enjoy, was as large and ample as the absolutest dominion of any monarch which hath been since the creation.’⁵ Filmer's position seemed stronger than it does today in an age when it was orthodox to go to the Holy Scriptures for the origins of history. Further, his argument challenged the contractualists to show a time when all men gave up their individual sovereignty, equality and freedom in return for the protection of magistracy; but it was vulnerable in its claims concerning true hereditary succession in modern times. Monarchy might have been ordained of God, and Adam the first king, but how was it possible to demonstrate the unbroken hereditary descent of modern monarchs from him?

The 1670s saw the composition of two works on the origin of government known to Pope.⁶ The first of these was An Essay on the original and nature of government (1672) by the diplomat who was to be Jonathan Swift's patron, Sir William Temple. The second was John Locke's Two treatises of civil government (1690) originally composed as theoretical support for the first Earl of Shaftesbury's effort to bar the heir to the throne, the Catholic Duke of York, from the royal succession, thus effectively establishing parliamentary control over the appointment of the monarch. Temple, discussing the origin of government in the light of reason and not professing to speak ‘of those Changes and Revolutions of State, of Institutions of Government that are made by the more immediate and evident Operation of Divine Will and Providence, being … the Subjects of our Faith, not of Reason’, sees authority deriving from virtue, ‘from the Opinion of Wisdom, Goodness, and Valour in the Persons who possess it’ and from this ‘natural Authority, may perhaps be deduced a truer Original of all Governments among Men, than from any Contracts: Tho' these be given us by the great Writers concerning Politicks and Laws.’⁷ Temple agrees with Filmer that there is no evidence of ‘great Numbers of Men’ meeting ‘in that natural state of War’ to settle the first government by contract, and argues that the ‘Principle of Contract as the Original of Government’ is like a poet's account of the creation of man, raised out of the ground in great numbers and in perfect stature and strength. Following Aristotle, Temple argues for a gradual development of monarchy from natural ‘paternal Authority’, the origin of government (p. 100). Aristocracy and democracy might indeed have succeeded monarchy so founded, however, and ‘Government founded upon Contract, may have succeeded those founded upon Authority’; but Temple sees such contracts as more likely to have taken place between princes and subjects in the aftermath of a conquest, ‘than between Men of equal Rank and Power’ (p. 103).

By contrast with Temple's cautious and flexible patriarchalism Locke, writing what we now know as The second treatise of government towards the end of the same decade seeks to distinguish ‘the Power of the Magistrate over a Subject … from that of a Father over his Children’. For him ‘a State of perfect Freedom … within the bounds of the Law of Nature’ precedes the advent of any government.⁸ Locke's account of the origin of government takes us back (though not, probably, in any conscious echo) to Henry Parker.

Man being born, as has been proved, with a Title to perfect Freedom, and an uncontrolled enjoyment of all the Rights and Privileges of the Law of Nature, equally with any other Man, or Number of Men in the World, hath by Nature a Power, not only to preserve his Property, that is, his Life, Liberty and Estate, against the Injuries and Attempts of other Men; but to judge of, and punish the breaches of that Law in others, as he is persuaded the offence deserves. … But because no Political Society can be, nor subsist without having within it self the Power to preserve the Property, and in order thereunto punish the Offences of all those of that Society; there, and there only is Political Society, where every one of the members hath quitted this natural Power, resign'd it up into the hands of the Community in all cases that exclude him not from appealing for Protection to the Law established by it. And thus all private judgement of every particular Member being excluded, the Community comes to be Umpire, by settled standing Rules, indifferent, and the same to all Parties; and by Men having Authority from the Community, for the execution of those Rules, decides all the differences that may happen between any Members of that Society, concerning any matter of right; and punishes those Offences, which any Member hath committed against the Society, with such Penalties as the Law has established.

(The Second Treatise, VII, 86-7, pp. 366-7)

An account such as this, unlike that of Temple and still more unlike Filmer, emphasizes a clean break between man's original condition and the beginning of civil society. He has acknowledged in the previous chapter, ‘Of Paternal Power’, how fathers might seem to develop naturally into princes, but he insists that behind that apparent continuity there was absolute discontinuity (The Second Treatise, VI, 55-9, pp. 346-9). What leads Locke so to insist on this clean break is the urgent and categorical requirement of his preferred model of society, the underlying assumptions of which he throws into the form of an historical narrative. It is notable that he makes no attempt to meet Filmer's challenge to the contractualists: when historically did this total delegation of sovereignty occur? It may be thought beside the point to criticize Locke for writing incredible history: his account, it might be argued, is to be valued as logical deduction rather than historical narration. It is, however, logical deduction not from society in general but from a particular model. Convincing historical derivation should not then be irrelevant to Locke's persuasive purpose. Nonetheless his case, though argued in prose and in philosophical and legal terms, is really no more than an affirmation of his desired hypothesis. What he offers is a myth, though it does not at first sight look like one. Temple's remark that the ‘argument’ of contractualists was fittest for poets had been a shrewd hit.

II

‘You poets’, wrote Bolingbroke in what sounds more like a comment on An Essay on Man, III, than the record of one of its sources, ‘have given beautiful descriptions of a golden age, with which you suppose that the world began. I do not believe that men were as good, any more than I believe that other animals were as tame, by nature, as you represent them to have been in the primordial world.’⁹ It is a fair point that poets have often substituted the pleasant for the probable; but it also suggests an opportunity of which Pope was likely to have been aware. Where a philosopher like Locke purveys a myth de facto, a poet can supply one de jure and openly. In the present case, if the poet builds his myth of origins upon what appears the most probable the myth will be doubly compelling. What Pope considered the most probable, well-versed as he doubtless was in both the patriarchal and contractual traditions from the talk of Bolingbroke if not from earlier reading, cannot be certainly known. But as he wrote An Essay on Man, the design of which was to preclude expression of the revealed truths of Christianity, he may have recalled Temple, in an essay written on the same plan, stating that ‘All Nations’ appear, ‘upon the first Records that are left to us, under the Authority of Kings, or Princes, or some other Magistrates.’¹⁰

Before discussing Pope's poetic rendering of the origins of government it is worth considering his precedents from earlier poets. For if the myth of an original golden age in Hesiod, Virgil and Ovid leaps first to our mind as it did to Bolingbroke, it was not in fact the only possibility. In ‘The Ancient Concept of Progress’ E. R. Dodds observes that the idea of progress emerged late from Greek literature to find the field already occupied by two great anti-progressive myths, ‘the myth of the Lost Paradise—called by the Greeks “the life under Kronos”, by the Romans the Saturnia regna or Golden Age—and the myth of Eternal Recurrence’.¹¹ Still, the very early poet-philosopher Xenophanes could write: ‘Not from the first did the gods reveal everything to mankind, / But in course of time by research men discover improvements’ (Dodds, p. 4). Posidonius and Lucretius, in the first century bc, saw man emerging from primitivism through the invention of useful arts, and since De Rerum Natura was a major model for An Essay on Man,¹² it is interesting to consider Lucretius' account. For Lucretius, primitive man, the product like the rest of nature of a random collision of atoms, was, as his seventeenth-century translator Creech put it, ‘as hard as Parent-stones’.¹³ Like other beasts man slept in woods and caves; he lived off acorns, apples and water; went naked; and knew nothing of fire.

No fixt Society, no steddy Laws,
No publick Good was sought, no common Cause,
But all at War, each rang'd, each sought his food,
By Nature taught to seek his private Good.

(p. 169)

Without much explanation, Lucretius recounts the invention of huts and clothes, of the use of fire, and marital fidelity. Then the temper of man's mind grew more gentle: and

          Then Neighbours, by degrees familiar grown,
Made Leagues, and Bonds, and each secur'd his own:
And then by signs and broken Words agreed,
That they would keep, preserve, defend, and feed
Defenceless Infants, and the Women too,
As Natural Pity prompted them to do.

(p. 171)

In this account of the progress of primitive man is, in loose form, a statement of an original contract as the basis of society.

Analogues to this view of the progress of man were to be found in Cicero and in the Augustan Vitruvius. Cicero, in his early work De Inventione, also postulated a primitive stage at which man wandered like the animals living off wild food, relying only on his strength, and enjoying no ordered religion, social duties, legitimate marriage, or equitable law. In Cicero's hypothesis it was then that the gift of eloquence of some great and wise man called together the rest and changed them, not without resistance, from savages into civilized people.¹⁴ Thus Cicero introduced what was to have been a full-scale treatise on eloquence and oratory, and it is to this public and legal ability that, in effect, he ascribes the origins of society. It is not surprising that the sixteenth-century humanist Buchanan had turned to De Inventione to help him evolve his own theory of original contract.

Vitruvius also saw man as having lived, more vetero, in caves, woods and forests like beasts. For him not the advent of an orator but the accidental discovery of fire led to language and a life in common. For Vitruvius, man learned to build by the imitation of nature and, progressing by degrees to other arts and disciplines, pioneered a way from savage life to civilization.¹⁵

These examples extend our awareness of the choice open to Pope in An Essay on Man. The poetic tradition from the ancient world did not point in one direction only; if Pope wished to propound the contractual myth Lucretius afforded him an excellent base on which to build. There was a less close affinity, perhaps, between patriarchalism and the myth of the Golden Age. If in Parker and Milton the contractual myth shows man seeking to make good something lost at his fall, the patriarchal myth proposes an institution which has survived the Fall (in classical terms the loss of the Saturnia Regna).¹⁶

III

Pope's account of the origin of society is based on his particular understanding of the Law of Nature. That is to say that the poet, before he speaks like a political theorist, must speak like a natural philosopher. Hence, writing of the unity of Nature, Pope urges:

See plastic Nature working to this end,
The single atoms each to other tend,
Attract, attracted to, the next in place
Form'd and impell'd its neighbour to embrace.
See Matter next, with various life endu'd,
Press to one centre still, the gen'ral Good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again:
All forms that perish other forms supply,
(By turns we catch the vital breath, and die)
Like bubbles on the sea of Matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.

(III, ll. 9-20)

Lucretius, who is partly Pope's model here (Leranbaum, p. 54), serves the later poet well with the powerful sense of an objective and impersonal nature which he so often imparts. Pope's optimism in this poem (if optimism it be) depends for conviction on his initial resistance to any obvious, anthropocentric vision. Rather he needed something of the austerity of Rochester's Lucretian imitation of the Chorus from Seneca's Troades.¹⁷ This is the great importance in Pope's passage of ‘the sea of Matter’. At the same time the passage displays another debt, not this time pagan, early Roman and materialist, but Christian, late Roman and Platonic. The chain of love with which this paragraph opens (‘behold the chain of Love …’) is in debt to Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae, and to Chaucer's echo of a passage from it in Dryden's version.¹⁸ Thus the doctrine of the interdependence of nature, formally announced at the beginning of the paragraph, seems to have emerged from the observation of physical phenomena by the end:

All serv'd, all serving! nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

(ll. 25-6)

It carries overtones of divine love despite the austere alienness of vision disclosed by some of the lines. The ‘all-preserving Soul’ (l. 22) is seen to move on the face of the terrifying ‘sea of Matter’.

Passages such as this are important in order that later sequences of the Epistle should not appear anthropocentrically fanciful. In these sequences religious doctrine is meant to have some natural-philosophical force, the implied argument for God's existence from design brought to life:

          Who taught the nations of the field and wood
To shun their poison, and to chuse their food?
Prescient, the tides or tempests to withstand,
Build on the wave, or arch beneath the sand?
Who made the spider parallels design,
Sure as De-moivre, without rule or line?
Who bid the stork, Columbus-like, explore
Heav'ns not his own, and worlds unknown before?
Who calls the council, states the certain day,
Who forms the phalanx, and who points the way?
          God, in the nature of each being, founds
Its proper bliss, and sets its proper bounds.

(ll. 99-110)

Is it quite clear that the human world is being imposed on the natural in this passage? Did not (Pope thought) the halcyon really nest on the wave and the kingfisher beneath the sand? Was there not a natural geometry in the spider's web? Did not and do not migratory birds find by instinct worlds to them unknown?¹⁹ Interesting, too, is the political language used at the beginning and end: ‘the nations of the field and wood’ have their own councils and communal appointments.

The Epistle, like some others by Pope at this period, may be seen to have an alternating procedure. An ‘objective’, Lucretian account alternates with more evidently human and religious terms. Thus the role of the natural passions is next allowed to pick up the interdependence of Nature, once again showing man to resemble the animal, though not in any merely brutal way:

Not Man alone, but all that roam the wood,
Or wing the sky, or roll along the flood,
Each loves itself, but not itself alone,
Each sex desires alike, 'till two are one.
Nor ends the pleasure with the fierce embrace;
They love themselves, a third time, in their race.
Thus beast and bird their common charge attend …

(ll. 119-25)

This meditation on natural ties immediately precedes that formal poetic portrait of ‘The state of Nature’ which Bolingbroke seems to have been complaining about in his Fragment X.

          Nor think, in Nature's State they blindly trod;
The state of Nature was the reign of God:
Self-love and Social at her birth began,
Union the bond of all things, and of Man.
Pride then was not; nor Arts, that Pride to aid;
Man walk'd with beast, joint tenant of the shade;
The same his table, and the same his bed …

(ll. 147-53)

The paradox of Pope's presentation of ‘a golden age’—if that indeed is what Pope thought he was offering—is that, while not without a proleptic view of future fall (‘Ah! how unlike the man of times to come’, l. 161), it is succeeded not by an account of degeneration but of gradual progress:

          See him from Nature rising slow to Art!
To copy Instinct then was Reason's part;
Thus then to Man the voice of Nature spake—
‘Go, from the Creatures thy instructions take:
‘Learn from the birds what food the thickets yield;
‘Learn from the beasts the physic of the field;
‘Thy arts of building from the bee receive;
‘Learn of the mole to plow, the worm to weave;
‘Learn of the little Nautilus to sail,
‘Spread the thin oar, and catch the driving gale.
‘Here too all forms of social union find,
‘And hence let Reason, late, instruct Mankind:
‘Here subterranean works and cities see;
‘There towns aerial on the waving tree.
‘Learn each small People's genius, policies,
‘The Ant's republic, and the realm of Bees;
‘How those in common all their wealth bestow,
‘And Anarchy without confusion know;
‘And these for ever, tho' a Monarch reign,
‘Their sep'rate cells and properties maintain.
‘Mark what unvary'd laws preserve each state,
‘Laws wise as Nature, and as fix'd as Fate.’

(ll. 169-90)

Perhaps, then, Bollingbroke was wide of the mark, if he referred to this passage? Perhaps Pope aimed at the presentation of a ‘state of Nature’ precisely, rather than a Golden Age, with the possibility of progress thereafter, as envisaged by Lucretius, Cicero and Vitruvius. Of the three Cicero is closest to Pope here, for he does not, as it happens, compare the life of primitive man to that of the wild beast, more fearum. Pope has retained the bond between primitive man and beast, not by conceding that man was once savage, but by supposing that beasts were gentle.

Pope seems generally closer to these Latin authors than to the English authors of the contractual tradition. Unlike Parker and Milton Pope lays no stress on man's Fall. He rejects Milton's insistence on man's superiority to and ‘command’ over animals; and he does not, like Hobbes, see primitive human life as ‘brutish’. Unlike Locke, to whom the Law of Nature endorsed in principle but could not enforce in practice man's original freedoms and rights, Pope paints a picture of primitive man happy in what he had in common with the beasts. However, a Lockeian moment occurs within the passage quoted when ‘the realm of Bees’ exemplifies a combination of monarchy with individual rights: ‘'tho a Monarch reign, / Their sep'rate cells and properties maintain.’²⁰ In another respect too man's rise to art recalls Locke, or rather what Locke has in common with the contractual tradition:

Here too all forms of social union find

(l. 179)

Something like society is to be observed among the beasts (the argument is as valid today as it was in the eighteenth century) but man has not yet reached formal political community. That point is described in a later passage:

          Great Nature spoke; observant Men obey'd;
Cities were built, Societies were made:
Here rose one little state; another near
Grew by like means, and join'd, thro' love or fear.
Did here the trees with ruddier burdens bend,
And there the streams in purer rills descend?
What war could ravish, Commerce could bestow,
And he return'd a friend, who came a foe.
Converse and Love mankind might strongly draw,
When Love was Liberty, and Nature Law.
Thus States were form'd; the name of King unknown,
'Till common int'rest plac'd the sway in one.
'Twas Virtue only (or in arts or arms,
Diffusing blessings, or averting harms)
The same which in a Sire the Sons obey'd,
A Prince the Father of a People made.

(ll. 199-214)

This paragraph is worth close attention. ‘Cities’, ‘Societies’ and states (l. 200) show that Pope now treats the origin of government (‘Origine of Political Societies’ as Pope's note had once stated; TE III, i, p. 113). It is clear that government as such evolves before contract. When, on the other hand, Pope comes to those lines by which he once placed the gloss: ‘The Origine of Monarchy’ (ll. 210ff.) we find the one clearly contractual moment—it is hardly given great prominence—in the whole Epistle. Pope strikes a careful and intelligent balance. In lines 209-10 Pope affirms that states evolved before the formal institution of monarchy, thus repudiating the strong form of Filmer's argument for patriarchal monarchy; and declares that monarchy was based on consent, though he does not thereby affirm the strong form of Locke's argument, according to which every sovereign individual willingly, though not irrevocably, entrusted magistracy with his own rights. Pope's moment of original contract is presented less as a public legal transaction than as a recognition of appropriate merit, and the context of the Epistle as a whole, with its emphasis upon evolution through imitation of nature, induces us to interpret the contract as a stage in a process rather than a start on a totally new foundation. The conclusion of the paragraph fully adopts the idiom of patriarchalism and, taken out of context, would suggest that Pope's account of the origin of government was Filmerian.²¹ In fact Pope has, in six lines, registered his awareness of both Filmerian and Lockeian positions, recognizing a measure of validity in each. What mediates between the Lockeian and Filmerian moments, interestingly enough, is the notion of natural authority (ll. 211-12) derived from Temple's Essay upon the original and nature of government with Lucretius, among others, behind him (V, ll. 1105-9), in which both patriarchal and contractual argument found a place.

In the next paragraph the patriarchal idiom continues strongly, so strongly in fact that a retrospective emphasis is thrown on a word in an earlier line: ‘the name of King unknown’ (my italics). The implication is that kings had existed earlier in fact though not in name:

          'Till then, by Nature crown'd, each Patriarch sate,
King, priest, and parent of his growing state;
On him, their second Providence, they hung,
Their law his eye, their oracle his tongue.
He from the wond'ring furrow call'd the food,
Taught to command the fire, controul the flood,
Draw forth the monsters of th'abyss profound,
Or fetch th'aerial eagle to the ground.
'Till drooping, sick'ning, dying, they began
Whom they rever'd as God to mourn as Man:
Then, looking up from sire to sire, explor'd
One great first father, and that first ador'd.
Or plain tradition that this All begun,
Convey'd unbroken faith from sire to son,
The worker from the work distinct was known,
And simple Reason never sought but one:
Ere Wit oblique had broke that steddy light,
Man, like his Maker, saw that all was right,
To Virtue, in the paths of Pleasure, trod,
And own'd a Father when he own'd a God.
love all the faith, and all th'allegiance then;
For Nature knew no right divine in Men,
No ill could fear in God; and understood
A sov'reign being but a sov'reign good.

(ll. 215-238)

The concept of patriarchy could hardly be more pervasive than it is here, the natural fount of families, of kingship, of priesthood, of monotheism. It is patriarchal monarchy in all but name, the name only denied because the patriarch is a monarch and more. Pope wishes to show the root of rule in Nature. The more divided and sophisticated state in which, for example, kingship and priesthood were distinguished had not yet arisen. The godlike creativeness which for the first time cultivated the earth, exploited fire and controlled water was that of natural authority. Being natural, however, it was mortal; decay was as natural as command. This feature of Nature thus gave rise to a further natural principle which transcended decay and death, that of succession and inheritance, which was the temporal chain leading backward and upward to God, downward and onward to the rulers which the future would need.

It is in the context of this picture of natural society that Pope sets forth the grounds of political allegiance, and here, in this affirmation of a myth of natural patriarchy, that he repudiates the formal patriarchalism we associate with Filmer (‘Nature knew no right divine in Men’). If in his earlier repudiation of Filmer (ll. 209-10) Pope conceded contract, here it is love of the ‘sov'reign good’ of natural authority that is proposed in place of obedience to the lineal successors of Adam. Pope thus denies original equality and individual freedom but finds happiness in natural subordination to the sway of the patriarchs. And from this it can be seen that when, for Pope, ‘common interest plac'd the sway in one’, this social contract was not, as for Parker, Milton and Locke, a radical discontinuity in life but rather the recognition through monarchy of the natural structure of patriarchalism. This brings Pope closer to Temple than to Locke. Though Pope is sometimes close to specific passages in Locke his poem does not centrally affirm the Lockeian myth of contract.

IV

The resemblance of Pope's position to that of Bolingbroke in his posthumous Fragments or minutes of essays (1754) raises the question of Bolingbroke's influence on An Essay on Man, urged afresh by Brean Hammond in his Pope and Bolingbroke: a study of friendship and influence. Hammond rightly says that Pope and Bolingbroke share the Aristotelian ‘view of monarchy as a development from paternal authority’ and ‘consider familial bonds precedent to civil obligations’ (p. 89). That in An Essay on Man and elsewhere Pope acknowledged a major general debt to Bolingbroke is a matter of record; that some written materials were communicated by Bolingbroke to Pope for the poem was stated by several contemporaries and is entirely probable. That the Fragments or minutes of essays as we have them were written as well as published after An Essay on Man is also clear, however, and unless new evidence comes to light it must remain a matter of speculation as to how faithfully they preserve any materials supplied to Pope when the poem was being composed. The Bolingbroke who had turned against the memory of the dead poet was not above wanting to claim credit for Pope's most internationally famous poem (to win it back, as it were, from Warburton), and Maynard Mack's argument that the Essay may have influenced the Fragments remains intrinsically cogent, and on present evidence virtually impossible to refute.²² A common tradition of political thought deriving from Aristotle and critical of Hobbes and Locke on contract and the state of nature flows through both Pope and Bolingbroke, and Pope could find all his leading ideas from earlier sources. There was, possibly, an intricate relationship of mutual influence between Pope and Bolingbroke; but whichever side the balance of debt came down on hardly affects the political character of Epistle III, which it has been the aim of the present essay to delineate.

It may however be worth noting the very different manner and tone of the relevant Fragments, X-XVI, from Pope's Epistle. Addressed to Pope when, or as if, he was alive, the Fragments is an overtly controversial work, full of citation, quotation and refutation. It is filled with learned names, and Bolingbroke disposes grandly and usually very intelligently with them all. Pope, in his Epistle, might have chosen to evoke a genealogy of famous names as Thomson had six years earlier in his ‘Summer’ (and in amplified form in first publication of the whole Seasons as recently as 1730). Thomson's list of classical and English worthies, which included Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero; Bacon, Boyle and Locke, would have afforded Pope a poetic idiom capable of assimilating the author-laden paragraphs of the Fragments.²³ But Pope aimed at a totally different effect. If possible he wished to dispel the tang of controversy, to melt down opinion into myth, and draw close imaginatively to his picture of primitive society.

It may also be noted that Bolingbroke, in his specific management of a controversial idiom, is at pains to strike a modern and indeed ‘enlightened’ attitude. This leads him into open mockery of ‘that ridiculous writer Filmer’, with whom he has in fact much in common, and makes him ostentatiously respectful to Locke (with Hooker one of ‘our best writers’)²⁴ whose leading political argument he explicitly rejects. Bolingbroke's tone, though not his content, is distinctly Whiggish. This is hardly the case with Pope, who manages his own attempt at the reconciliation of opposing principles in a very different way.

V

In ‘steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite’, Pope succeeds in the reconciliation of opposites to a considerable degree. He has something for the contractualists, and something more for the patriarchalists. Yet, despite ubiquitous local borrowing and echoing, his poem is not equally hospitable to all traditions of political thought. Nobody who subscribed to the full argument of Locke's Two treatises, or to Hobbes, Milton and Parker before him, could be satisfied with Pope's narrative. The Original Contract by which each free, equal and sovereign individual was supposed to have entrusted his rights to magistracy of some kind has a very diminished role here. On the other hand, though Pope denies formal political monarchy in primitive society, and emphatically denies the patriarchs that unique mark of the magistrate the ‘right divine’ to be judged by God alone, the whole spirit and tone of his story is patriarchalist. Godhead is found through fatherhood; kingship is bequeathed by it. As in Temple's Essay, however, the patriarchal principle has been disentangled from the specific historical difficulties of tracing true royal successions from Adam. Patriarchalism is not proffered, as in Filmer, in the form of sacred history, but in the easier and more flexible form of a poetic ‘natural philosophy’.

This permits Pope to combine with it those progressive accounts of the early life of man to be found in Vitruvius, Cicero and above all Lucretius. It is not the case that in Epistle III Pope offers a myth of the origin of society the implicit effect of which is to ratify a social status quo: to borrow the original title of Caleb Williams, things as they are. Furthermore it is the case that, immediately after the passages in Epistle III we have been considering, Pope added a usurpation myth:

Force first made Conquest, and that conquest, Law;
'Till Superstition taught the tyrant awe,
Then shar'd the Tyranny …

(ll. 245-7)

Not only are such myths of immense importance in theodicy, whether narrative or discursive in form, but they are, like the myth of the Norman Yoke, available to justify fundamental change. This can be seen from Pope's use of more or less the same myth of usurpation in An Essay on Criticism (ll. 681-92) and Windsor Forest (ll. 43-92). All this is worth emphasis since readers of An Essay on Man, and especially those whose idea of the poem is based on Epistle I, so often interpret it as an apologia for Things as they Were or Things as They Had Been: ‘Cosmic Toryism’ or ‘the Politics of Nostalgia’.²⁵ The larger design of Pope's poem, however, would seem to have been to commend humility and resignation where man's relation with God was concerned, but to allow for and even applaud man's capacity for social and political evolution in obedience to Nature. This does not, of course, mean that Pope foresaw and approved the ways by which his own society was to change. It means merely that he found no conflict between the idea of patriarchalism and the idea of progress.

Notes

1. Before Maynard Mack's Twickenham Edition of the poem John Laird, in Philosophical incursions into English literature (Cambridge, 1946), considered that Pope's third epistle must be allowed to be enormously better argued than its two predecessors, and indeed to be structurally quite well argued (p. 47). But R. A. Brower, that fine critic of Pope, calls Epistle iii ‘certainly the dullest of the four’: Alexander Pope: the poetry of allusion (Oxford, 1959), p. 226; Miriam Leranbaum considered Pope's account of the change from a state of nature to civil society ‘unsatisfying’ (Alexander Pope's ‘opus magnum’ 1729-1744 (Oxford, 1977)), p. 60; while Brean S. Hammond is concerned with it mainly as an opportunity to reinstate the case for Bolingbroke's influence on Pope (Pope and Bolingbroke: a study of friendship and influence (Missouri, 1984)), pp. 87-91. Douglas H. White, Pope and the context of controversy: the manipulation of ideas in An Essay on Man (Chicago and London, 1970), pays little attention to Epistle iii though it lends itself to his valuable approach. More recently, A. D. Nuttall's monograph, Pope's Essay on Man (London, 1984), has offered a full, welcome, critical discussion of the whole poem, which touches on the Lockeian features of Epistle iii (pp. 101-28). Neither David B. Morris' Alexander Pope: the genius of sense (London, 1984) nor, most recently, Maynard Mack's classic biography, Alexander Pope: a life (New Haven, New York and London, 1985), had the opportunity to discuss An Essay on Man iii, very fully.

2. Henry Parker, Observations upon some of His Majesties late answers and expresses (1642), in Howard Erskine-Hill and Graham Storey (eds), Revolutionary prose of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1983), p. 45.

3. John Milton, The tenure of kings and magistrates (1649), Prose …, p. 121.

4. See Quentin Skinner, ‘Conquest and consent: Thomas Hobbes and the engagement controversy’ in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The interregnum: the quest for settlement, 1646-1660 (London, 1972), pp. 79-98.

5. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha, or, the natural powers of the kings of England asserted, in Patriarcha and other political works of Sir Robert Filmer (Oxford, 1949), pp. 57-8; quoted by Locke in Peter Laslett (ed.), Two treatises of civil government, The first treatise, ii, 8; (Cambridge, 1960); Mentor Reprint, pp. 180-1.

6. It is interesting that Pope, when hard-pressed in his own defence, over Essay on Man, iii, ll. 303-04 (‘For Forms of Government let fools contest …’) reached back in his memory, accurately, to Temple: ‘There is a passage in Sir W. Temple's Essay on Government, very much of y^e same nature’ (TE iii, i, p. 170). Pope's detailed knowledge of Locke's Two treatises is clear from Mack's edition for TE: see, for example, iii, p. 114, 214n. In The Dunciad, of course, Pope makes general reference to Locke in the eyes of Oxford orthodoxy (iv, l. 196); TE v, p. 361.

7. The Works of Sir William Temple, Bart. in two volumes (London, 1731), i, pp. 95-9.

8. Two treatises of civil government, The second treatise, i-ii, 3-4; ii, 6; pp. 308-9, 311.

9. ‘Fragments or minutes of essays’, x; The works of the late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke (London, 1754), v, p. 107.

10. William Temple, An essay on the original and nature of government, in The works …, i, p. 99.

11. E. R. Dodds, The ancient concept of progress and other essays on Greek literature and belief (Oxford, 1973), p. 3.

12. On Lucretius and An Essay on Man see: Pope to Swift, 15 Sept. 1734, Correspondence, iii, p. 433; Spence, i, p. 135 (item 305); Miriam Leranbaum, Alexander Pope's ‘opus magnum’ 1729-1744 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 40-63; and Bernard Fabian, ‘Pope and Lucretius: observations on An Essay on Man’, Modern Language Review lxxiv (1979), 524-37. Brean S. Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke: a study of friendship and influence, pp. 80-5, opposes Fabian's case, in order to make more room for the influence of Bolingbroke.

13. Titus Lucretius Carus, his Six books De natura rerum. Done into English verse, with notes by Thomas Creech (London, 1682), p. 168.

14. Cicero, De Inventione, i, ii, 2.

15. Vitruvius, De Architectura, ii, 1.

16. See Filmer, Patriarcha, iii, p. 57.

17. David M. Vieth (ed.), The complete poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (London, 1968), pp. 150-1.

18. See An Essay on Man, TE, iii, p. 92 (ll. 7-26n). These references, pointing back to Dryden's Fables, and to Boethius, parts of whom Pope translated in his youth, seem to indicate early and important influences.

19. Note the discussion of a modern naturalist, W. H. Thorpe, Animal nature and human nature (New York, 1974), pp. 191-203.

20. A. D. Nuttall calls it ‘a very British defence of small-scale private property’ in his monograph, p. 114.

21. It is taken as such by J. C. D. Clark in his powerful and challenging study, English society 1688-1832: ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien régime (Cambridge, 1985), p. 80. The couplet is indeed an instance of what Clark terms ‘The Survival of Patriarchalism’ and so is much else in this Epistle, but it is a qualified survival. Nuttall errs more obviously in the opposite direction: perceiving that ‘Pope found what he wanted’ in a patriarchal sentence at the end of Locke's chapter ‘Of Paternal Power’ in The second treatise, he concludes that ‘Pope's scheme obviously resembles Locke's in that the rise of human institutions is seen, not as an extrinsic curbing of anarchic appetite, but as the gradual codification of impulses already present and “naturally governed” by the law of human nature’ (p. 116). He ignores the point that the sentence which ‘Pope wanted’ is in the same paragraph repudiated by Locke as a basis for any kingly title; and that Locke's general argument in this and the following chapter does not ‘obviously resemble’ Pope's ‘scheme’. (Nuttall is also wrong to give the date of Locke's Second treatise as 1714.)

22. See An Essay on Man, TE iii, i, pp. xxvi-xxxi; and Hammond, pp. 69-79, 84-91.

23. ‘Summer’, ll. 1535-59; James Sambrook (ed.), The Seasons (Oxford, 1981), pp. 128-31.

24. Bolingbroke, Works v, 114, 125.

25. The phrase, apparently first used by Basil Willey as a chapter-title in The eighteenth-century background: studies on the idea of nature in the thought of the period (London, 1940) is also found in J. M. Cameron, ‘Doctrinal to an age: notes towards a revaluation of Pope's Essay on Man’, originally published in the Dublin Review (1951), reprinted in revised form in Maynard Mack (ed.), Essential articles for the study of Alexander Pope, (Connecticut, 1968), p. 358. It involves a misconstruction of eighteenth-century Toryism as well as of Pope's poem. For the influential half-truths involved in the terms ‘The politics of nostalgia’ and ‘The nostalgia of the Augustan poets’, see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his circle: the politics of nostalgia in the age of Walpole (London, 1968): an important book which needs to be re-assessed. I am grateful for the advice of Mr A. S. A. Rushdy in this note.