SOURCE: “The ‘New World’ of Augustan Humanism: An Essay on Criticism (1711), An Essay on Man (1733-4),” in Alexander Pope, Basil Blackwell, 1985, pp. 46-93.

[In the following excerpt, Brown analyzes the logic of An Essay on Man, maintaining that the poem incoherently addresses the often contradictory ideological values of capitalism and Christianity.]

We now turn to Pope's two major theoretical treatises, one aesthetic, the other philosophical. An Essay on Criticism was published in 1711, within two years of Windsor-Forest (1713) and the first version of The Rape of the Lock (1712). An Essay on Man was written between 1730 and 1734 and belongs to the last decade of Pope's poetic production. Our reading of Pope's theoretical works will thus require a chronological leap that parallels a division in Pope's poetic career between the early period of generic variety—the period represented by the first collected volume of Pope's Works in 1717—and the late period of satire and philosophy. These two segments of the corpus of Pope's original poetry stand on either side of a decade of translations and editions—the Iliad (1715-20), the Odyssey (1725-6) and Shakespeare (1725). Readers of the whole of Pope's poetry have readily noticed an increasing bitterness in the satire, a growing anticipation of cultural collapse, and a related turn to grander, more systematic and more ambitious projects as that apocalypse apparently becomes more imminent.¹ Yet it is equally important to see the basic continuity in Pope's outlook throughout his career. Pope's works have their own history, but their historical importance, and their significance for this study, lie not so much in this private evolution as in their representation of the structures of thought of an age whose thinking is profoundly significant to the course of modern history.²

In fact throughout his career Pope remained committed to the project of forming a unified ruling class. As the son of a tradesman, Pope's associations with the aristocracy were inevitably those of an upwardly-mobile outsider, and this ambiguity in his class connections in part explains the double-edged attitude of admiration and contempt for the powerful landed families that we have already found in The Rape of the Lock. Nevertheless, Pope's social sympathies and friendships lay with the country aristocrats and prosperous landowners whom he viewed as the emblems of a progressive capitalist prosperity. And he considered this cultural ideal to be consistent with the mercantile interests responsible for the expansion of English overseas trade. In a sense Pope was ahead of his time. His early poetry, much of it written during the turbulent years surrounding the War of the Spanish Succession, coincides with a period of intense party strife within the upper classes and a frequent hostility between landed and business interests. The next fifty years, however, saw the gradual resolution of these conflicts and the formation of a narrow homogeneous ruling oligarchy sharing a broad community of interests and reinforced by pervasive family ties. This process of class consolidation, not yet completed at Pope's death, was none the less underway by the 1720s at the latest.³ In general much of Pope's poetry seeks to persuade a class-divided audience that its interests could only be reconciled by means of aristocratic paternalism. Viewed from the perspective of the long-term creation of hegemony, Windsor-Forest in particular can be seen as a hortatory poem, an anticipatory attempt to fuse the still conflicting positions within the English upper classes into a unitary whole by offering the prospect of imperialist peace and prosperity.

It might seem surprising in this light that twenty years later, when Pope's ruling-class vision was considerably closer to realization, he would find himself in opposition to the dominant government policy. Pope played a prominent role in the bi-partisan attack on Robert Walpole that progressively increased in strength during the decade of the 1730s. His second major period of poetic production roughly coincides with this political offensive. Significantly, Walpole's opponents accused him of reviving the ‘invidious Distinction of the landed and trading Interest, which in Reality are always united; the annual Rent of Lands and the Number of Years Purchase having generally increased, or decreased, as Trade hath been more, or less flourishing.’⁴ Further, although the Opposition highlighted the corruption of Walpole's ministry, the more decisive point, and the issue that eventually assured Walpole's fall from power, was his pacific foreign policy. Walpole would not go to war, except reluctantly and under great pressure in the last moments of his administration. He supported the large trading companies and the established commercial and financial interests, whose profits were steady and sure; but he had less sympathy for mercantile adventurers and for the more speculative schemes that fuelled an interest in an aggressively expansionist programme. Thus he repeatedly refused to extend, or even in some cases defend, England's commercial empire, despite the encroachments of other powers. The main political demand of the oppositional Patriots, the group for which Pope served as a kind of moral and cultural arbiter, was an aggressive struggle for an English share of Spain's South American and Pacific trade.⁵

The high moral claims of Pope's satires on the government and on contemporary society, then, are grounded in an imperialist content quite comparable to that of Windsor-Forest. In an ironic encomium to George II from the Imitations of Horace, The First Epistle of the Second Book (1737), Pope makes clear the source of his bitterness towards the current policy:

Oh! could I mount on the Mæonian wing,
Your Arms, your Actions, your Repose to sing!
What seas you travers'd! and what fields you fought!
Your Country's Peace, how oft, how dearly bought!
How barb'rous rage subsided at your word,
And Nations wonder'd while they dropp'd the sword!
How, when you nodded, o'er the land and deep,
Peace stole her wing, and wrapt the world in sleep.

(394-401)

The peaceful sleep of the conclusion of The Dunciad arises in part from this same imperialist position. Pope evokes Walpole, pilot of the ship of state, as Palinurus in the last lines of that poem:

Wide, and more wide, it spread o'er all the realm;
Ev'n Palinurus nodded at the Helm:
The Vapour mild o'er each Committee crept;
Unfinish'd Treaties in each Office slept;
And chiefless Armies doz'd out the Campaign;
And Navies yawn'd for Orders on the Main.

([B] IV, 613-18)

The pax Britannica, so firmly established in the rhetoric and ideological structures of Windsor-Forest, becomes a liability in the later works, as the relation between Pope's imperialist ideology and his perception of current foreign policy undergoes a diametrical reversal.

.....

In the Essay on Criticism we located a vocabulary of contradiction, a fluid poetic language that enables Pope's discourse to operate at a variety of levels—cosmic, aesthetic and political—and to carry without collision a variety of contradictory meanings—individualist, bourgeois and absolutist. An Essay on Man makes a parallel use of imagery. Though its basic terminology is relatively stable, at least compared to the elusiveness of wit and nature in the Essay on Criticism, its central images introduce a formal instability parallel to that of the earlier work and indicative of a complex of contradictions that place the poem's philosophical premises in question. The problem begins with Pope's allusions to himself. In The Rape of the Lock he quotes himself as Homer, and the mock-heroic ironies of that poem derive in part from his ventriloquization of an external authority. In the Essay on Man he quotes himself directly, taking his own early work as his text. The intermediary here is not Homer but Pope's period of classical translation and edition, the gap in his poetic career between the first collected Works and the late poems. Indeed … the major poems at the end of Pope's career consistently recall phrases, images, themes and passing moments from his earlier works. In the Essay on Man, and also in The Dunciad, the relationship between the earlier and the later poems is unclear, strained and inverted. Pope rarely quotes himself with simple approval, and he rarely places this kind of self-reference in the same context as the original. The result is a tension that signals the central ideological problems of Pope's poetry.

Near the beginning of the Essay's first epistle, following the opening description of the chain of being and the ‘general Order of things’ within which man must accept his proper ‘place and rank’, Pope supplies an illustration of his assertion that human happiness depends upon man's ‘ignorance of future events, and … hope of a future state’ (‘Argument of the First Epistle’):

Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topt hill, an humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the watry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!

(I, 99-108)

The immediate relevance of this image is obvious. It derives in part from the Deist concern—well established by the eighteenth century—that pagans ignorant of revelation must not by that accident be excluded from God's mercy. Pope may have recalled Dryden's passage on the ‘Indian Souls’ in Religio Laici (1682):

'Tis said the sound of a Messiah's Birth
Is gone through all the habitable Earth:
But still that Text must be confin'd alone
To what was then inhabited, and known:
And what Provision cou'd from thence accrue
To Indian Souls, and Worlds discover'd New?(6)

But Pope's ‘poor Indian’ dreaming of slaves who once more behold their native land has a different resonance from Dryden's ‘Indian Souls’. Slavery, as we have discovered, is a central conscious and unconscious feature of Windsor-Forest, and that poem provides a detailed prior model for the Essay's image of pagan hope:

Oh stretch thy Reign, fair Peace! from Shore to Shore,
Till Conquest cease, and Slav'ry be no more:
Till the freed Indians in their native Groves
Reap their own Fruits, and woo their Sable Loves,
Peru once more a Race of Kings behold,
And other Mexico's be roof'd with Gold.

(407-12)

The conjunction of slavery, native lands, gold and the Indians who are made to behold and bear witness to their own future for the edification and consolation of an English audience links these passages directly with one another. The ‘freed Indians’ in Windsor-Forest embody the imperialist fantasy of power without violence, exploitation without slavery. The ‘poor Indian’ of the Essay on Man also enacts a fantasy of power, but one located in the present rather than the future—a fantasy of the quiescence and collaboration of the oppressed. The Indian will submit to slavery, torment and expropriation without resistance because ‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’ (I, 95): he has his own pathetic belief in a world without slavery, as impossible as that of Windsor-Forest. This belief, which includes his hope that ‘His faithful dog shall bear him company’ (I, 112) in that happier land, is explicitly ridiculed in Epistle IV, where Pope attacks the fools who form concrete expectations about the rewards of heaven:

Go, like the Indian, in another life
Expect thy dog, thy bottle, and thy wife.

(IV, 177-8)

We know the Indian's expectations are false, and yet he is meant to serve as an example to the poem's audience, to teach us to ‘Submit—In this, or any other sphere, / Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear’ (I, 285-6). The crux of the problem in this passage is the representation of power. The parallel with Windsor-Forest emphasizes the connection of the image of the Indian with the violence of imperialism. Though Pope's reference to ‘fiends’, ‘Christians’ and ‘gold’ in the Essay directs his attack at the Spanish, we know his own and England's complicity in the West Indian slave trade. English traders, of course, dealt primarily in African rather than Native American slaves, and English settlers in the New World had a less explicitly genocidal programme than the Spanish. But the Native Americans who came in contact with English imperialism would be as likely as those who met the Spanish to wish for a ‘safer world’. In the century before the writing of Windsor-Forest, English settlers in North America had fought a virtually continuous war with the coastal tribes: the most notable conflicts being the Pequot War (1636-7), the Wampanoag King Philip's War (1675-6), the Tuscarora War (1711-13), and the Yamasee War (1715). By the first quarter of the eighteenth century these tribes were essentially destroyed, their populations reduced to a fraction by battle, massacre, disease or sale into slavery. During the campaign against the Pequot nation of the Connecticut River Valley, a large segment of the tribe was slain at a single famous massacre in which a fortified village was burned to the ground and the fleeing populace picked off by colonial and ‘friendly’ native troops stationed around the circumference; this victory was succeeded by a genocidal hunt for the remnants of the tribe. King Philip's War, a much lengthier and broader conflict, involved a loose confederation of tribes, nominally headed by Philip, a Wampanoag leader renamed by the colonists. The battles, sieges and raids of this war ranged across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and what is now New Hampshire, while the Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars were restricted to the Carolinas. Throughout this period it was common practice to sell the captured natives into slavery either in the Virginia colonies or the West Indies, and by this means, as well as through the depradations of the Carolinian slave raiders upon the mission Indians of Florida, significant numbers of the coastal Native Americans became slaves.

The Peace of Utrecht, in the context of the concession of the Hudson Bay Territory to England, pronounced the peoples of the great Iroquois Confederacy of the Mohawk River Valley British subjects. The Iroquois themselves had no voice in this decree. In the succeeding years before the official outbreak of war with France in 1756, English colonists made a series of desultory efforts to enlist these new ‘subjects’ against the French settlers. During the first stage of the French and Indian War, Native American warriors did some of the fighting as proxies for the two European imperialist powers, and the forced and arbitrary division of the Indian nations among the French and English sometimes pitted members of the same tribe against one another.

Even when armed confrontation was less extensive, contact with the English settlers brought economic subjection, debt and servitude. The Native Americans were constantly involved in local conflicts with the colonists over land and hunting rights. Their territories were gradually and inexorably usurped; and trials under English law in colonial courts pronounced them the offenders.⁷ Though Pope certainly did not intend to evoke this specific history of suffering, the image of the Native American victim of imperialism is, willy-nilly, a resonant one for him and for his age. A contemporary poem by Richard Savage gives evidence of this resonance from a perspective very different from Pope's:

Do You the neighb'ring blameless Indian aid,
Culture what he neglects, not His invade;
Dare not, oh dare not, with ambitious View,
Force or demand Subjection, never due.
Let, by My specious Name [Public Spirit] no Tyrants
          rise,
And cry, while they enslave, they civilize!
Know LIBERTY and I are still the same,
Congenial!—ever mingling Flame with Flame!
Why must I Afric's sable Children see
Vended for Slaves, though form'd by Nature free,
The nameless Tortures cruel Minds invent,
Those to subject, whom Nature equal meant?(8)

Thus, while Pope's ‘poor Indian’ passage seems to provide a sentimental argument for passivity, it advertises, though implicitly, an alternative indication of the oppressive activity of imperial power, an activity of which Savage's parallel ‘blameless Indian’ is well aware. In the quietist context of the Essay on Man this implicit alternative, like the recollection of the slavery passage from Windsor-Forest, is weird and uneasy, as if the poem's imagery accidentally exposed a threat for which the notion of a beneficient natural order—even if it operates on a general scale and in the long run—cannot account.

The threat of violence is not restricted to the single image of the Indian, though there it takes on its most directly political valence. The Essay on Man, strangely like Windsor-Forest, returns more than once to the representation of the slaughter of animals.⁹ In the first epistle, just before the appearance of the Indian, the poem illustrates the dependence of happiness upon ignorance with a description of another victim:

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last, he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood.

(I, 81-4)

And in Epistle III, to define the interconnection of every being in the orderly system of nature, Pope provides a more comic version of the same metaphorical lesson:

Know, Nature's children all divide her care;
The fur that warms a monarch, warm'd a bear.
While Man exclaims, “See all things for my use!”
“See man for mine!” replies a pamper'd goose.

(III, 43-6)

The doctrine that animals are providentially provided for man's use can be found in contemporary encomia on trade and imperialism, in the notion that the whole order of nature, including climate, winds, the possibilities of navigation and the regional variety of products, is designed to promote commerce and guarantee prosperity.¹⁰ Defoe argues, for instance, that it is through this divine provision that sheep are ‘the tamest, quietest, submissivist Creatures in the World, that lay their Throats down to your Knife, and their Backs to the Sheers’.¹¹ And other writers cite the natural collaboration of birds, tortoises, sables, silkworms, elephants and—perhaps most prominently—whales in supporting a productive commerce.

Pope's images of animals, though ostensibly meant as a caution against human pride, clearly evoke this doctrine of power and acquisition. Beneficent mutual dependency is quickly unmasked here: the animals in the Essay devour one another, and man, the model for the ‘chain of Love’ (III, 7) that holds the system together, devours them all:

Man cares for all: to birds he gives his woods,
To beasts his pastures, and to fish his floods;
For some his Int'rest prompts him to provide,
For more his pleasure, yet for more his pride:
All feed on one vain Patron, and enjoy
Th'extensive blessing of his luxury.
That very life his learned hunger craves,
He saves from famine, from the savage saves;
Nay, feasts the animal he dooms his feast,
And, 'till he ends the being, makes it blest;
Which sees no more the stroke, or feels the pain,
Than favour'd Man by touch etherial slain.
The creature had his feast of life before;
Thou too must perish, when thy feast is o'er!

(III, 57-70)

In Windsor-Forest the pheasant and the fish, the pastoral victims of imperialism, are in the same relation to man as the Essay's goose, and that earlier poem too wants to see the predatory violence of imperial power as natural and beneficent. But the claim for beneficence in both cases undermines itself, in the Essay on Man by invoking a problematic relationship of exploitation as a central positive image.

Imperial exploitation forms a backdrop to the poem in at least one other respect. Pope's renditions of human pride echo the rhetoric of imperialism which we identified in The Rape of the Lock and Windsor-Forest. In Epistle III he asks:

Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?
Joy tunes his voice, joy elevates his wings:
Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?
Loves of his own and raptures swell the note.

(III, 31-4)

And in the first epistle he renders the same sentiment through ironic direct quotation:

Ask for what end the heav'nly bodies shine,
Earth for what use? Pride answers, ‘'Tis for mine:
‘For me kind Nature wakes her genial pow'r,
‘Suckles each herb, and spreads out ev'ry flow'r;
‘Annual for me, the grape, the rose renew
‘The juice nectareous, and the balmy dew;
‘For me, the mine a thousand treasures brings;
‘For me, health gushes from a thousand springs;
‘Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
‘My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.’

(I, 131-40)

Pope is here echoing a traditional attack on anthropocentrism,¹² but he is also invoking another contemporary tradition. The ‘thousand treasures’ recall the ‘Unnumber'd Treasures' of Belinda's toilet, and the co-operative stars and seas the universal collaboration of nature in the voyages of discovery. The inverted syntax, which places ‘For me’ in first position in the line, is identical to Father Thames's climactic claim in Windsor-Forest:

For me the Balm shall bleed, and Amber flow,
The Coral redden, and the Ruby glow.

(393-4)

In Pope's own immediate past, this rhetoric echoes the conclusion of the Messiah (1712), the model for the closing passage of Windsor-Forest, in which the glory of Salem (that is, Jerusalem) at Christ's nativity is celebrated as an imperialist prosperity:

See barb'rous Nations at thy Gates attend,
Walk in thy Light, and in thy Temple bend.
See thy bright Altars throng'd with prostrate Kings,
And heap'd with Products of Sabæan Springs!
For thee, Idume's spicy Forests blow;
And Seeds of Gold in Ophyr's Mountains glow.

(91-6)

Indeed this locution seems to be a period trope for the pleasures of mercantile accumulation, occurring with notable frequency in the imperialist passages of the minor poetry of the age. In Young's Imperium Pelagi (1729) its connection with the general co-operation of nature is most explicit:

          Luxuriant Isle! What Tide that flows,
          Or Stream that glides, or Wind that blows,
Or genial Sun that shines, or Show'r that pours,
          But flows, glides, breathes, shines, pours for thee?
          How every Heart dilates to see
Each Land's each Season blending on thy Shores?
          …
          Britain! behold the World's wide Face;
          Not cover'd Half with solid Space,
Three Parts are fluid; Empire of the Sea!
          And why? for Commerce. Ocean Streams
          For that, thro' all his various Names:
And if for Commerce, Ocean flows for Thee.(13)

The structure of initial repetition or anaphora, more common in the heroic couplet versions of the trope, give it even greater rhetorical emphasis. It is repeated seven times in James Ralph's Clarinda, or the Fair Libertine (1729):

For them the Gold is dug on Guinea's Coast,
And sparkling Gems the farthest Indies boast,
For them Arabia breathes its spicy Gale,
And fearless Seamen kill the Greenland Whale.
For them the Murex yields its purple Dye,
And orient Pearls in Sea-bred Oisters lye;
For them, in clouded Shell, the Tortoise shines,
And huge Behemoth his vast Trunk resigns;
For them, in various Plumes, the Birds are gay,
And Sables bleed, the savage Hunter's Prey!
For them the Merchant, wide to ev'ry Sail,
Trusts all his Hopes and stretches ev'ry Gale,
For them, O'er all the World, he dares to roam,
And safe conveys its gather'd Riches home.(14)

And again in J. D. Breval's Art of Dress (1717):

For you, th'Italian Worm her Silk prepares,
And distant India sends her choicest Wares.(15)

And also in Soame Jenyns's Art of Dancing (1730):

For you the silkworms fine-wrought webs display,
And lab'ring spin their little lives away,
For you bright gems with radiant colours glow,
Fair as the dies that paint the heav'nly bow,
For you the sea resigns its pearly store,
And earth unlocks her mines of treasur'd ore.(16)

The pronouns in these last three poems refer to the ladies—emblems of cultural expansion—who, like Belinda, are adorned with the commodities of a prosperous mercantilism. Indeed, all these passages—except the second from the Essay on Man—betray a systematic effort at displacement from the aggressively acquisitive imperialist subject. Though in every case it is ‘me’ who desires, ‘me’ who acquires and ‘me’ who profits from the goods so glowingly enumerated, either woman or the female construct of ‘Britannia’ is made to stand for this desire in the pronouns ‘thee’, ‘them’ and ‘you’.

Though the explicit purpose of this imperialist trope in the Essay on Man is to ridicule anthropocentrism, it carries with it all the attractions of acquisition and power that we can easily see in its other contemporary appearances. Pope's obvious irony cannot negate these attractions, especially since he has filled his poem with metaphors of submission from imperialist apologia. The Indian and the animals serve as images of co-operative quiescence strongly symptomatic and supportive of an expansionist ideology. Though the epithets—‘his woods’, ‘his pastures’, ‘his floods’—that describe man's treatment of the animals in the chain of love satirize the claim to pre-eminence and point forward to the deflating line ‘thou too must perish’, they also supply a generalized advocacy of appropriation, a fantasy of a perfect hierarchy of exploitation that stands in uneasy tension with the poem's attacks on pride. From this perspective, the Essay's message of submission appears to be built upon an image of power and acquisition, upon the assumption of a hierarchical system of exploitation. It is as if the displacement of the desire for acquisition upon the woman that we discovered in the trope of ‘for me’ surfaces in the Essay as a symptomatic affective ambiguity: the Indian and the sheep do submit ‘for me’, and their submission is extolled, but at the same time the poem preaches against the very appropriation of power that requires such submission. This ambivalence in the Essay's treatment of oppression helps to explain the ill-concealed uneasiness of Pope's least respected line: ‘One truth is clear, “Whatever IS, is RIGHT”’ (I, 294). The blank and abstract assertiveness of this passage embraces the dichotomy that I have been belabouring here: the exemplary submission of the Indian to ‘Whatever IS’ is one thing, and the sanguine acceptance of an order of oppression by a prosperous and expanding society is another. In the latter, ‘submission’ could easily be translated as imperialism. Pope's optimistic philosophy in the Essay is readily seen as a defence of the status quo, however brutal or unjust. But the allusions to imperialist ideology that we have uncovered in the poem show that defence to be more coercive and more concrete than a merely passive acceptance of the inevitable.

If we turn now, fortified with our reading of some of the Essay's metaphors, to an analysis of the poem's philosophy, perhaps we will be in a position to evaluate the problem in its logic. The absence of rigour in Pope's philosophical formulations is a familiar focus for attack.¹⁷ But Pope is not our enemy; he is our route to a closer and more complex reading of the major ideologies of the day, and his poems are documents of our own ideological past. The issue for us is not the looseness of Pope's logic—we know he was no philosopher—but the relationship between the symptomatic gaps in his philosophical argument and the affective ambivalence of his poetic language.

Most critiques of the logical coherence of the Essay on Man begin with the second epistle and its theory of human nature. The first epistle serves mainly to introduce the basic scheme of the poem—the great chain of being—and the notions of order, hierarchy and harmony that we found associated with the cosmic order of nature in the Essay on Criticism. Here again Pope is reworking, though with more complexity and elaboration, motifs deriving from Renaissance neo-Platonic thought. All creation exists in a hierarchy where everything has its proper place and ‘All must full or not coherent be’ (I, 45)—every conceivable place, from inanimate objects to God, is and must be filled.¹⁸ Nothing can move out of its place on the chain, for such a transgression would disrupt the structure of the universe and result in chaos:

Let Earth unbalanc'd from her orbit fly,
Planets and Suns run lawless thro' the sky,
Let ruling Angels from their spheres be hurl'd,
Being on being wreck'd, and world on world.

(I, 251-4)

Everything in this ‘Vast chain of being’ (I, 237) is thus mutually dependent and, though hierarchical, divinely harmonious. When Pope outlines this scheme and places man in structural relationship with the rest of creation, his position is simple and consistent. When he begins to elaborate the system in the second epistle, however, he produces a series of inconsistencies that inform the rest of the poem.

Epistle II could be described as logically diffuse. Though it is possible, through an explanation and elaboration of Pope's categories, to argue for coherence in Pope's presentation of the relationship of reason and passion or self-love and virtue,¹⁹ the system as it stands in the poem is at best unsteady, at worst incoherent. The most often-cited problem is the shifting role of reason. We are presented at first with a clear opposition: ‘What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone’ (II, 42). Reason and passion are the two competing principles of human nature, each with a separate role: ‘Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call, / Each works its end, to move or govern all’ (II, 55-6). But this clear duality is quickly and confusingly overcomplicated. On the one hand reason, the comparing principle, ‘rules the whole’ (II, 60); in accordance with nature, reason should subject and confine the passions (II, 115-20). On the other hand, passion seems the predominant force: ‘Reason itself but gives it edge and pow'r’ (II, 147). Reason is a ‘weak queen’ (II, 150), directed by passion, the usurping ‘fav'rite’ whom we ‘wretched subjects’ obey (II, 149-50). In fact reason can supply no ‘arms’ for the battle with passion, it is ‘helpless’, pleading, ‘no guide’ (II, 151-62), and it only strengthens the ruling passion by eliminating weaker ones (II, 158). This state of affairs is both unfortunate and desirable.

The problem with reason and passion is connected with the use of the theory of the ruling passion in the epistle, and the related appearance of virtue in conjunction with the notion of self-love. The turn from a balanced opposition of reason and passion to a comparative privileging of passion as a more determinant category accords with the rise in the argument of the efficacious notion of the ruling passion. That is, since the theory of the ruling passion is clearly designed to account for the ultimately beneficent order of the ‘state of man’, both as an individual and, later, in respect to society, then passion must be granted a larger significance than a simple opposition with reason would permit. The usurpation of reason by passion begins with the designation of the passions as modes of self-love, since reason is also implicitly defined as simply a long-term form of the same motivating force (II, 71-2, 93-6). The next major ambiguity in the epistle arises precisely here, in the assignment of virtue to either reason or self-love. Virtue is clearly an essential ingredient of any scheme of beneficent order, and, not surprisingly, in a system where the relation of reason and passion is elusive, virtue can be found in either camp. On the one hand, it seems to be potentially separable from self-love; it arises from passions of ‘fair means’ that therefore come under the care of reason and, ‘that imparted, court a nobler aim, / Exalt their kind, and take some Virtue's name’ (II, 97-100).²⁰ On the other hand, it is grafted onto the ruling passion by the ‘Eternal Art’ that educes ‘good from ill’ (II, 175-6). In this guise, it is much more clearly constituted by self-love; it cannot claim to take a separate course or pursue a ‘nobler aim’, and it is characterized, in the succeeding examples, by a virtual simultaneity with vice, which we shall shortly examine.

But this simultaneity is another locus of anxiety in the epistle, another source of potential ambiguity. The notion of a ‘nobler aim’ or separate end for virtue persists in Pope's affirmation of a clear and diametrical moral distinction: ‘Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen’ (II, 217-18). The difference between vice and virtue is as clear as ‘black and white’: ‘Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain; / 'Tis to mistake them, costs the time and pain’ (II, 214-16). But, on the other hand, virtue is so intermingled with vice that ‘the diff'rence is too nice / Where ends the Virtue, or begins the Vice’ (II, 209-10). Again, the terms can be adjusted and the difficulty mitigated so as to produce a reading that emphasizes not incoherence but rather Pope's ‘disposition to combine and adapt ideas’.²¹ He certainly had such a disposition, and he deliberately treads a thin line in the Essay in an effort to bring together disparate positions. But it is this very disposition and this thin line that we must examine. The purpose of my reading of the Essay on Man is not to reconcile contradiction but to define the strong poles of the poem, in order to assess their relevance to its ideology.

The slippages that we have so far located primarily in the second epistle of the Essay are as complex and intricate as the disparate traditions—Christian and classical—that stand behind the poem's philosophical categories. But the crucial problem for Pope lies in the relatively simple question of the definition of virtue in relation to self-interest. We can pursue this problem further if we move from Epistle II to the descriptions of virtue in the rest of the poem. On the one hand, as we have begun to see, the Essay argues that virtues are the products of the passions—of anger, avarice, sloth and lust:

The surest Virtues thus from Passions shoot,
Wild Nature's vigor working at the root.
What crops of wit and honesty appear
From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear!
See anger, zeal and fortitude supply;
Ev'n av'rice, prudence; sloth, philosophy;
Lust, thro' some certain strainers well refin'd,
Is gentle love, and charms all womankind:
Envy, to which th'ignoble mind's a slave,
Is emulation in the learn'd or brave:
Nor Virtue, male or female, can we name,
But what will grow on Pride, or grow on Shame.

(II, 183-94)

Nature operates so that man's ruling passion acts ‘in one interest’ with his best principles (II, 176-80) and thereby generates his best actions. Self-interest thus serves mankind by producing appropriate ‘vices’ in their proper places:

Shame to the virgin, to the matron pride,
Fear to the statesman, rashness to the chief,
To kings presumption, and to crowds belief,
That Virtue's ends from Vanity can raise,
Which seeks no int'rest, no reward but praise;
And build on wants, and on defects of mind,
The joy, the peace, the glory of Mankind.

(II, 242-8)

In this proto-utilitarian view, virtue is defined in terms of results, in terms of one's acts in the world, and not in terms of altruism or the abstract principles of moral ‘rigorism’.²² But the Essay offers the opposite position as well: in Epistle II, as we have seen, virtues are, if only briefly, noble passions that ‘Exalt their kind’ (II, 100) and can be clearly discriminated from vice. And in Epistle IV virtue is:

The only point where human bliss stands still,
And tastes the good without the fall to ill;
Where only Merit constant pay receives,
Is blest in what it takes, and what it gives;
The joy unequal'd, if its end it gain,
And if it lose, attended with no pain:
Without satiety, tho' e'er so blest,
And but more relish'd as the more distress'd:
The broadest mirth unfeeling Folly wears,
Less pleasing far than Virtue's very tears.
Good, from each object, from each place acquir'd,
For ever exercis'd, yet never tir'd;
Never elated, while one man's oppress'd;
Never dejected, while another's bless'd;
And where no wants, no wishes can remain,
Since but to wish more Virtue, is to gain.

(IV, 311-26)

The virtuous person, then, is one ‘Who noble ends by noble means obtains, / Or failing, smiles in exile or in chains' (IV, 233-4). He chooses right or wrong (IV, 86), is charitable and benevolent, and sets no store by wealth, rank, greatness, fame or parts (IV, 185-268). The reward of virtue is happiness, ‘The soul's calm sun-shine, and the heart-felt joy’ (IV, 168), a kind of earthly bliss derived from the sensibility of doing good. This sort of virtue, needless to say, is not to be found in the ‘wickedly wise’ or ‘madly brave’ (IV, 231): the rash chief, then, who served to exemplify virtue in Epistle II, is explicitly excluded here in favour of those with more altruistic motives and more ascetic ideals.

We can pursue this basic dichotomy in a variety of directions. First, we can use it to account for other inconsistencies in the poem. The problem that we have already noted in the role of reason as a force either opposing or abetting the passions is a consequence of this larger difficulty. If there are separate ‘good’ and ‘bad’ passions in the human mind, then Pope must posit a controlling reason that can set them in order. But if the passions in general are in action transmuted into virtues, the only role for reason is co-operative. In addition, the problematic distinction in the Essay between ‘passions’ on the one hand and ‘vice’ and ‘virtue’ on the other also belongs to the basic dichotomy that we have identified. If virtue comes from the good results of vicious passions in action, then there is no inherent distinction between virtue and vice: in a sense virtues are vices. But the poem persistently claims to distinguish vice from virtue, and, as we have already noticed, Pope attacks self-interest in the form of error, presumption, pride, imperfection and vanity throughout the Essay.²³

This problem is translated into social terms in the third Epistle: ‘Of the Nature and State of Man, with respect to Society’. Here Pope provides two models for the origin of society, in a pseudo-historical relationship with one another. The first posits an order based on ‘the chain of love’ (III, 7), in which man, naturally good, learns through his love for the opposite sex and for the young to love all of creation. This process produces the initial social bond. In the other scheme, presented as a second phase in primitive history,²⁴ social order is predicated upon the social contract, by which warring individuals concede some of their immediate self-interest in order to guarantee their long-term safety:

So drives Self-love, thro' just and thro' unjust,
To one Man's pow'r, ambition, lucre, lust:
The same Self-love, in all, becomes the cause
Of what restrains him, Government and Laws.
For, what one likes if others like as well,
What serves one will, when many wills rebel?
How shall he keep, what, sleeping or awake,
A weaker may surprise, a stronger take?
His safety must his liberty restrain:
All join to guard what each desires to gain.
Forc'd into virtue thus by Self-defence,
Ev'n Kings learn'd justice and benevolence:
Self-love forsook the path it first pursu'd,
And found the private in the public good.

(III, 269-82)

In the first scheme, virtue is a positive attribute derived from instinctual love. In the second, it arises from self-defence. Again, the fundamental issue is whether the beneficence of nature that the poem posits and sets out at its opening to ‘vindicate’ derives from consequences or motives, whether God is good because man's self-interest operates—despite his intentions—to good ends or because man is naturally and instinctively loving, whether virtue is utilitarian or absolute.

Not surprisingly, the vision of human life that the Essay presents is also infected by this dichotomy. On the one hand, the poem glories in the enlightened soul that transcends the trivial and sees beyond the concrete to a broader realm of self-knowledge and altruism:

For him alone, Hope leads from goal to goal,
And opens still, and opens on his soul,
'Till lengthen'd on to Faith, and unconfin'd,
It pours the bliss that fills up all the mind.
He sees, why Nature plants in Man alone
Hope of known bliss, and Faith in bliss unknown:
(Nature, whose dictates to no other kind
Are giv'n in vain, but what they seek they find)
Wise is her present; she connects in this
His greatest Virtue with his greatest Bliss,
At once his own bright prospect to be blest,
And strongest motive to assist the rest.

(IV, 341-52)

But on the other hand, the poem sees human life as empty, meaningless, and vain:

Behold the child, by Nature's kindly law,
Pleas'd with a rattle, tickled with a straw:
Some livelier play-thing gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite:
Scarfs, garters, gold, amuse his riper stage;
And beads and pray'r-books are the toys of age:
Pleas'd with this bauble still, as that before;
'Till tir'd he sleeps, and Life's poor play is o'er!

(II, 275-82)

In both passages nature is the beneficent agent of man's fate, but in the first version the effect of nature is to broaden and brighten human prospects, to raise man through hope and faith to a better understanding of his condition. In the second, ‘Nature's kindly law’ can only keep man entertained for the brief tenure of his oblivious mortality. Each of these views is warranted in the work's ‘philosophy’: the former based on the notion of a categorical morality defined through implicit acceptance of the chain of love, the latter on a proto-utilitarian ethic emphasizing the effects of self-love as it operates in the world.²⁵

With this last example of the images of human life generated by the Essay's contradictory treatment of virtue and passion, we have already returned to the point at which we began our discussion, the problem of the poem's effect. Where does the ambivalence of its imagery—the evocation of exploitation, the rhetoric of imperialism, the incongruous echoes of Windsor-Forest—meet the incoherence of its philosophical system? Albert O. Hirschman has suggested that the transformation of the idea of the passions from a destructive force to be repressed or controlled into a positive force to be harnessed or managed for the benefit of the public welfare coincided with the development of capitalism and served in the eighteenth century as a major political argument in favour of the new economic system.²⁶ One version of this new notion is summarized by Giambattista Vico:

Legislation considers man as he is in order to turn him to good uses in human society. Out of ferocity, avarice and ambition, the three vices which run throughout the human race, it creates the military, merchant and governing classes, and thus the strength, riches and wisdom of commonwealths. Out of these three great vices, which would certainly destroy all mankind on the face of the earth, it makes civil happiness.

This axiom proves that there is divine providence and further that it is a divine legislative mind. For out of the passions of men each bent on his private advantage, for the sake of which they would live like wild beasts in the wilderness, it has made the civil orders by which they may live in human society.²⁷

We may recall here Pope's ‘Fear to the statesman, rashness to the chief / To kings presumption, and to crowds belief’ (II, 243-4). In England, Addison gives a similar though more circumscribed definition of the positive social value of the passions:

The Soul, considered abstractedly from its Passions, is of a remiss and sedentary Nature, slow in its Resolves, and languishing in its Executions. The use therefore of the Passions, is to stir it up and put it upon Action, to awaken the Understanding, to enforce the Will, and to make the whole Man more vigorous and attentive in the Prosecution of his Designs. As this is the End of the Passions in general, so it is particularly of Ambition, which pushes the Soul to such Actions as are apt to procure Honour and Reputation to the Actor. But if we carry our Reflections higher, we may discover further Ends of Providence in implanting this Passion in Mankind.

It was necessary for the World, that Arts should be invented and improved, Books written and transmitted to Posterity, Nations conquered and civilized: Now since the proper and genuine Motives to these and the like great Actions, would only influence vertuous Minds; there would be but small Improvements in the World, were there not some common Principle of Action working equally with all Men. And such a Principle is Ambition or a Desire of Fame, by which great Endowments are not suffered to lie idle and useless to the Publick, and many vicious Men over-reached, as it were, and engaged contrary to their natural Inclinations in a glorious and laudable course of Action.²⁸

Addison's statement indicates the positive conjunction of imperialism, arts and self-interest in the thinking of the period. This is the same interdependency that we have been approaching in our discussion of the role of imperialist apologia in Pope's paean to the beneficent universal efficacy of self-interest.

In the process of the transformation of the passions' place in political, ethical and psychological thought, traditional Christian vices—avarice, pride and especially luxury—came to be seen as social virtues by which, ultimately, money-making, competition, expansion, acquisition, accumulation and prosperity were promoted. The new ‘virtues’ that this reasoning discovered in the passions were often linked to ‘interest’, which was inserted into the scheme either as a set of countervailing passions by which wilder and more aggressive ones could be balanced, or, in a less morally radical move, as a kind of forethinking equivalent of passion that could direct its social utility. In Pope, we see the influence of the former theory most clearly in the description of self-interest in the social scheme of Epistle III, where, in a musical metaphor typical of images of concordia discors,

… jarring int'rests of themselves create
Th'according music of a well-mix'd State.

(III, 293-4)

And we can locate the latter theory in those later passages of Epistle II where reason takes a subordinate role in relation to passion or seems to be defined as a version of more far-seeing self-interest.

The best-known English exponent of these views is Pope's contemporary Bernard Mandeville, who posits a whole system of public prosperity based upon private vices in his Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1705-29). Mandeville's work is based on the paradoxical observation that, contrary to traditional theories of social prosperity where the good of the state was directly equated with individual virtue, the prosperity of the complex modern state seems necessarily to be based on private vice:

          The Root of Evil, Avarice,
That damn'd ill-natur'd baneful Vice,
Was Slave to Prodigality,
That Noble Sin; whilst Luxury
Employ'd a Million of the Poor,
And odious Pride a Million more:
Envy it self, and Vanity,
Were Ministers of Industry;
Their darling Folly, Fickleness,
In Diet, Furniture and Dress,
That strange ridic'lous Vice, was made
The very Wheel, that turn'd the Trade.
          …
          Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity,
Which join'd with Time and Industry,
Had carry'd Life's Conveniencies,
It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,
To such a Height, the very Poor
Liv'd better than the Rich before,
And nothing could be added more.(29)

Mandeville found this scheme both socially necessary and morally abhorrent, and he used his position as a means of attacking both the immorality of modern society and the categorical and abstract principles of traditional moralists. Significantly, in the manuscript version of the Essay on Man, Pope included what seems like a direct reference to Mandeville:

But Heav'n's great view is One, and that the Whole:
That counter-works each folly and caprice;
And public good extracts from private vice.

(II, 238-40)³⁰

While Pope is not simply imitating Mandeville, and while Mandeville is not the sole or even perhaps the most significant influence on the Essay, the philosophical tensions and inconsistencies that we have found in the poem are structurally similar to the famous ethical paradox of Mandeville's work. F. B. Kaye summarizes Mandeville's problem this way:

By juxtaposing together the utilitarian principles by which the world is inevitably controlled and the demands of rigoristic ethics, and showing their irreconcilability, Mandeville achieved a latent reductio ad absurdum of the rigoristic point of view. But he never educed this reductio ad absurdum. Although he spent most of his book in the demonstration that a life regulated by the principles of rigoristic virtue as expressed in his definition is not only impossible but highly undesirable, whereas the actual immoral world is a pleasant place, he continued to announce the sanctity of the rigoristic creed. This paradoxical ethical duet which Mandeville carried on with himself is the point to note here, for it is this fact which gives the clue to the influence on ethics which he exerted.³¹

The Fable of the Bees struggles—though in a very different mode and manner—with the same contradiction as the Essay on Man. The precedent for Pope is in the structure of that ‘ethical duet’.

Philosophically, then, the Essay on Man hangs between a capitalist ethic and traditional Christian morality. In fact, it documents in its own contradictions the appropriation of the passions by a new ideological system. As we have seen, the poem alternately supports a proto-utilitarian and a rigoristic moral understanding of virtue, and it defines man and his role in society in terms of both aggressive self-interest and Christian selflessness. It is no accident, then, though perhaps no conscious plan, that the poem refers back to the period's most resonant apology for expansion and acquisition, Windsor-Forest. This fundamental indecision in its theoretical structure begins to explain why, in its metaphorical structure, the Essay on Man is predicated on the problematic fantasy of an ideal exploitation; why it seems to warn against a system that it advocates; why it appears unable to distinguish beneficence from oppression, benevolence from threat, consolation from violence: why the Indian and the lamb place such a strain on the exhortation to ‘Submit’; and why the phrase ‘Whatever is, is right’, to the extent that it translates that neo-Platonic chain of being into a chain of capitalist exploitation, fails to carry even an internal conviction of efficacy.

We can read the Essay on Man in a variety of ways, depending on where we place the poem in the dynamic of eighteenth-century history. From a progressive perspective, we can see it as an early, tentative and therefore incomplete formulation of capitalist ideology. From a reactionary perspective, it could be said to embody the struggle against capitalist hegemony, the incoherence of its treatment of the passions standing as a testament to Pope's resistance to the arguments for an acquisitive self-interest. But perhaps we can best appreciate its significance if we read it at the same time in both ways. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), the work that represents the great culmination of the theory of passion and self-interest, Adam Smith expresses a strangely familiar ambivalence toward the system for which he is the century's major theorist. His sense of the positive and self-sufficient role of self-interest in producing progress and social welfare becomes one of the central tenets of his economic theory:

The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.³²

But Adam Smith also saw the system of free self-interest that he supported as corrupting, degrading and destructive of traditional values. In The Wealth of Nations his advocacy of the division of labour, which he defines as an essential component for economic prosperity, is notoriously problematized and undercut:

[The labourer] has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention. … He naturally … becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment.³³

Elsewhere Smith addresses the effects of capitalism in a broader context: ‘These are the disadvantages of a commercial spirit. The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished.’³⁴ ‘Life's poor play’ is here confronted in its most degraded aspect. The sad irony of Smith's position—its double stance of advocacy and regret, and even its futile reference backwards to a pre-capitalist ‘heroic spirit’—enables us to recover the much obscurer poignancy and paradox of the Essay on Man's ‘ethical duet’.

Notes

1. See Donald T. Siebert, Jr., ‘Cibber and Satan: The Dunciad and civilization’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1976/77), pp. 203-21, esp. pp. 203-7, for an interesting survey of what he calls the ‘School of Deep Intent’.

2. See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, tr. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) on Jules Verne: ‘It is interesting that Verne's work has a history, but it is not this aspect of his work which has been historically important’ (p. 164).

3. W.A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England, 1714-1760 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 143-66, and H.T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977), pp. 163-92.

4. The Craftsman, by Caleb d'Anvers, no. 346, vol. 10 (London, 1737), pp. 145-6. Also cited in Speck, Stability and Strife, p. 158.

5. For Walpole's policies, see J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1950), pp. 60-73, and Dickinson, Walpole and the Whig Supremacy (London: English Universities Press, 1973), pp. 113-39.

6. John Dryden, Religio Laici, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. II: Poems 1681-1684, ed. H.T. Swedenberg, Jr., and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1972), lines 174-9.

7. The main contemporary source for these conflicts is Narratives of the Indian Wars 1675-1699, ed. Charles H. Lincoln (New York: Charles Scribner, 1913). For a comprehensive though judgementally prejudiced summary, see William Christie Macleod, The American Indian Frontier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), pp. 193-292. A briefer account is available in John Tebbel, The Compact History of the Indian Wars (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), pp. 9-47.

8. Richard Savage, Of Public Spirit in Regard to Public Works, second version (1737), in The Poetical Works of Richard Savage, ed. Clarence Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1962), p. 233, lines 293-304.

9. For a discussion of the poem's treatment of animals, see Judith Shklar's essay, shortly to be published in the collection of English Institute Essays for 1983.

10. On this doctrine, see Louis A. Landa, ‘Of silkworms and farthingales and the will of God’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century: Essays presented at the Second David Nichol Smith Memorial Seminar, ed. R.F. Brissenden (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 259-77.

11. Daniel Defoe, Review, I [i.e. IX], no. 54 (3 February 1713), Defoe's Review, facs. book 22, p. 107.

12. See Twickenham, vol. III, i, pp. 31-2n.

13. Young, Imperium Pelagi, pp. 67 and 85.

14. [James Ralph], Clarinda, Or the Fair Libertine: A Poem in Four Cantos (London, 1729), pp. 37-8. Quoted from Louis A. Landa, ‘Pope's Belinda, the General Emporie of the World and the Wondrous Worm’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 70 (1971), p. 223.

15. John Durant Breval, The Art of Dress. A Poem (London, 1717), p. 17. Also cited in Landa, ‘Pope's Belinda’, p. 232.

16. [Soame Jenyns], The Art of Dancing. A Poem (1730), in Poems (London, 1752), p. 7. Also cited in Landa, ‘Pope's Belinda’, p. 232.

17. See, for example, John Laird, Philosophical Incursions into English Literature (Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1946), pp. 34-51, and Reuben Arthur Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 209. Most critics of the poem concede its incoherence and go on from there. Martin Price, for instance, makes the typical suggesion that Pope ‘is interested in something more than consistency’ (To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964], p. 139). Miriam Leranbaum observes that interpretations of the poem ‘are a good deal more coherent, more consistent, more fully integrated than the poem itself’ (Alexander Pope's ‘Opus Magnum’, 1729-1744 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977], p. 38). Douglas H. White reverses the pattern by concluding with the concession: ‘The fun of the Essay on Man is with Pope's performance, not with the validity of the philosophy’ (Pope and the Context of Controversy: The Manipulation of Ideas in ‘An Essay on Man’ [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970], p. 193).

18. Again, see Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being. But see also, for a different perspective on the relation of the Essay to the chain of being, F. E. L. Priestley, ‘Pope and the Great Chain of Being’, in Essays in English Literature from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age, Presented to A.S.P. Woodhouse, ed. Millar MacLure and F. W. Watt (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1964), pp. 23-28. Priestley suggests that Pope's representation of the potential dissolution of the chain shows that he does not consistently view it as an ontological category, but rather as a conditional state that must be preserved from challenge. His reading tends to support my sense that the Essay represents a shoring up of traditional values in the face of a simultaneous awareness of their supersession.

19. See the general argument of White's Pope and the Context of Controversy. But White must admit, at times, that ‘Pope's position is, to be sure, not perfectly unequivocal’ (p. 180).

20. The debate over the meaning of this line, carried on through editorial decisions about its punctuation, is summarized by White, Pope and the Context of Controversy, pp. 181-2. My conclusions differ from White's, but the important point, from my perspective, is the problematic nature of the line. The fact that its meaning has proven so slippery in itself supports the categorical instability in the poem which my argument emphasizes.

21. White, Pope and the Context of Controversy, p. 191.

22. For the dichotomy between ‘rigorism’ and ‘loose utilitarianism’—that is, between a traditional allegiance to abstract truth, ascetic ideals and categorical morality, as opposed to a concern with the circumstances and consequences of actions—see F.B. Kaye's introd. to his edition of Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924). The terms ‘rigorism’ and ‘loose utilitarianism’, which Kaye introduced, are now widely used by critics of the Essay on Man.

23. For another summary of the inconsistencies in the Essay, see Twickenham, vol. III, i, pp. xxxviii-xxxix.

24. Price remarks on the incongruity of these two historical phases: ‘This ideal society gives way suddenly and mysteriously to the joint rule of Tyranny and Superstition’ (To the Palace of Wisdom, p. 129).

25. A variety of critics have described this paradox from a variety of different perspectives. Price: ‘One might say that Pope is reconciling a keen Mandevillian sense of the origin of social order with the trust in human nature that Shaftesbury shows’ (To the Palace of Wisdom, p. 131). White: Pope ‘adopts the widely known attitude of Hobbes, Mandeville, Esprit, and Le Rochefoucauld by admitting that all human actions are the product of self-love. To that attitude, however, he adds a definition of virtue that allows man to be self-loving and virtuous at the same time’ (Pope and the Context of Controversy, p. 191). Bertrand A. Goldgar: ‘on the one hand, we are told that self-love is the dominant principle in man, that the passions are all selfish, and that these passions are in a state of war. On the other hand, we are shown simultaneously that self-love and reason both have indispensable functions and can operate harmoniously’ (‘Pope's Theory of the Passions: the background of Epistle II of the Essay on Man’, Philological Quarterly, 41 [1962], pp. 730-43, esp. p. 739).

26. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977).

27. Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1744), tr. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Howard Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1948), p. 56, pghs 132-3.

28. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, no. 255 (22 December 1711), ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. II, p. 490.

29. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, vol. I, pp. 25-6.

30. The published version of line 240 reads ‘That disappoints th' effect of ev'ry vice.’ For the manuscript version, consult An Essay on Man. Reproductions of the Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Houghton Library with the Printed Text of the Original Edition, introd. Maynard Mack (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962). The variant manuscript lines are quoted in The Works of Alexander Pope, vol. II, ed. Croker and Elwin, pp. 394-5, n. 7.

31. Kaye, introd. to The Fable of the Bees, vol. I, p. cxxv.

32. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan, 2nd edn (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), vol. II, pp. 49-50.

33. Smith, The Wealth of Nations, vol. II, pp. 302-3.

34. Adam Smith, Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, ed. Edwin Cannan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896), p. 259. Also quoted in Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, pp. 106-7. Robert L. Heilbroner outlines what he calls the paradox of Smith's assumptions, the contradiction between his ‘sense of confidence and promise’ and the images of decline and decay that he simultaneously presents in his account of the ‘deterioration of the human condition’. According to Heilbroner, Smith exhibits a profound ambivalence toward self-interest, the acquisitive impulse that generates his prediction of a prosperous future. We can compare Smith's ambivalence with Pope's. Heilbroner claims that this central contradiction in Smith's thought ‘enables us to place Smith's masterpiece in its proper historical context … as a paradigmatic exposition of the economic and sociological thought of its time’. The Essay on Man occupies a similar position in the same paradigm. See ‘The paradox of progress: decline and decay in The Wealth of Nations’, in Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 524-39, esp. p. 536.