SOURCE: “Pope's Beliefs,” in A Preface to Pope, Longman Group Ltd., 1976, pp. 109-24.

[In the following essay, Gordon explores the intellectual and ethical background of Pope's thought in An Essay on Man, highlighting the poem's expression of prevalent philosophical, religious, and political ideas in early eighteenth-century England.]

Papist or Protestant, or both between,
Like good Erasmus in an honest Mean,
In Moderation placing all my Glory,
While Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory.

Imitation of Horace, Satire II, i, 1733 (65-8)

The separation of Pope's beliefs into the philosophical, religious and political divisions propounded in this chapter is clearly an oversimplication of complex material. Philosophical ideas can never be set apart from religious and political views for the fundamental reason that any enquiry into the meaning of the universe must also be an enquiry into the existence of God and the behaviour of man. Pope's philosophical views are, therefore, both the result of and the basis for his religious beliefs and political commitments. The divisions used here for the sake of convenience are put forward in full awareness of the false separation frequently involved.

For the major part of his life Pope strove to avoid too contentious a position with regard to any one of these areas of thought. In his religion he was a practising member of the Catholic Church. At the same time he was only too aware of the precariousness of his position as a practising Catholic and took care not to make any too obvious demonstration of his faith. In An Essay on Man we find him treading a cautious path between respectable defence of established Christian orthodoxy and open interest in new interpretations of it. In his politics he was by temperament and instinct a conservative, but for most of his life took, if anything, even more care not to commit himself to the Tory party than he took not to draw special attention to his Catholicism. It was only during his later years, when his social position was assured and his political disillusion intense, that he openly espoused the cause of the Patriot opposition. And in his philosophical beliefs he was a clear and eclectic thinker, but rarely took either an extreme or an original position. As he says in the introductory note to An Essay on Man, ‘If I could flatter myself that this Essay has any merit, it is in steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite …’

An Essay on Man is the clearest and most sustained expression Pope made of his philosophical and ethical beliefs. It is also a forceful and concise introduction to ideas widely prevalent in early eighteenth-century England. …

PHILOSOPHY

Pope was not a professionally trained philosopher. He was widely read in philosophy, but he was not formally educated in the logical study of either science, ethics or metaphysics. He had an intellectual interest in the ordering of the universe and a profound concern for the behaviour of man and his pursuit of happiness, but this interest and concern were those of the creative poet rather than the professional philosopher. The reader will be disappointed if he goes to An Essay on Man looking for a regular system of philosophical thought.

This is not to say that the poem is valueless as philosophy, but that its primary value is poetic rather than philosophical and that its philosophical content is subservient to its artistic purpose. An Essay on Man is a mélange of philosophical ideas, some traditional, some current, that show Pope's powers as an eclectic more than as a speculative thinker. The only idea in the poem that might be called original is that of the ruling passion, and even that has distinct origins in the medieval belief concerning the shaping power of the bodily humours. Out of this mixture of ideas Pope precipitates a poetic realization of man and the universe he lives in that is consistent in itself, powerfully felt and keenly visualized. It is a poem of changing moods in which the speaker steers from ‘grave to gay’ and from ‘lively to severe’. Sometimes the tone is sombre and reasoning, at other times it is witty and satiric, but most of the time it is exhortatory and didactic. It is a poem that sets out to ‘vindicate the ways of God to man’, and though one would not want to call it a religious poem the voice of the Christian advocate is never very far away.

Pope believes in an ordered universe. ‘order is Heav'n's first law’, he tells us in his fourth epistle (49). It is not an easy order to explain, however, for though the Universal Cause ‘acts to one end’, it ‘acts by various laws’ (III, 2). The result is that the scene of man is ‘A mighty maze! but not without a plan’ (I, 6). The universe has a ‘frame’, ‘bearing’ and ‘ties’ (I, 29) that give it a coherent structure similar to that of a building, but man is not able to see the structure of this building as clearly as he might like because of obstacles he himself has erected. Pope's poem is an attempt, an essai, to describe this structure and define the right order as he sees it.

Pope inherited the popular medieval and renaissance idea, familiar in their day to both Chaucer and Shakespeare, of the Great Chain of Being. This was a metaphysical doctrine—based on a priori assumptions about God—that explained the existence, plenitude and unity of creation. It did this in accordance with deductive argument, concluding that the world was the best that God could have created, where nothing apart from him could be perfect. The important point for our purpose is that Pope adopted only certain parts of this belief. What he describes in An Essay on Man is the ladder of created nature, or scala naturae, which is one element in the Great Chain that can nevertheless be separated from it and argued on a posteriori grounds. The scala naturae describes the world of observable reality, ‘Creation's ample range’, from the ‘green myriads in the peopled grass’ to ‘Man's imperial race’ (I, 207-210). But it does not go any higher, as the Chain of Being does, and it is this limitation that Pope accepts when he says, near the beginning of the poem:

          Say first, of God above, or Man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of Man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro' worlds unnumber'd tho' the God be known,
'Tis ours to trace him only in our own.

(I, 17-22)

Both Pope's present poem and his habits of mind generally are rootedly empirical. One need only recall the gloomy clerk in The Dunciad, Book IV, who ‘nobly takes the high Priori Road’ and then loses himself in a mist, to indicate Pope's consistent distrust of deductive habits of thought.

Pope certainly refers to the Great Chain of Being in An Essay on Man, but when he does so he is using the term to refer to empirically observed Nature. The chain and the ladder or scale become interchangeable terms for him:

                                                                                                    On superior pow'rs
Were we to press, inferior might on ours:
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroy'd:
From Nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

(I, 241-6)

If we are to be asked to entertain, as in that closing couplet, the possibility of a breakable chain, then Pope must stand some way outside the strict Great Chain philosophy, as it is called, and be using the terms chain and scale in his own fashion as interchangeable concepts. However, the underlying philosophy cannot be understood as so readily interchanged as this may sound. In the last analysis Pope remains critical of deductive methods of thought, preferring instead the empirical methods common in the eighteenth century that depend upon personal observation.

The order that Pope espouses in An Essay on Man is a paradoxical one based on integrated opposites. It is ‘A Wild where weeds and flow'rs promiscuous shoot’ (I, 7) and where ‘all subsists by elemental strife’ (I, 169). It is an order and harmony that Pope describes most powerfully in the opening lines of Windsor-Forest, where,

… Earth and Water seem to strive again,
Not Chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But as the World, harmoniously confus'd:
Where Order in Variety we see,
And where, tho' all things differ, all agree.

(12-16)

This harmony of opposites, or concordia discors (Horace, Epistle, I, xii, 19), comprehends both strife and antagonism, so that ‘All Discord, [is but] Harmony, not understood’ (Essay on Man, I, 291), and ‘jarring int'rests of themselves create / Th'according music of a well-mixed State’ (III, 293-4). As Pope says at the opening of the third epistle: ‘“The Universal Cause / Acts to one end, but acts by various laws”’ (III, 1-2).

These ideas concerning the organization of the universe at large form a backdrop in the poem for a unifying concept of man that develops in complexity. The presumptuous creature, or ‘vile worm’ as Pope calls him, who dominates the first two epistles becomes through a proper regard for virtue and love of God the regenerate subject of Epistles III and IV. Maynard Mack, in his introduction to the Twickenham edition of An Essay on Man, describes this fundamental pattern of development within the poem and its close relationship to Milton's great theme in Paradise Lost (see Essay on Man, I, 16) as follows: ‘Beginning with a reminder of a paradise man has lost, the poem ends with a paradise he can regain’.

Behind every philosophical idea in the first two epistles of An Essay on Man there lies the voice of the poet wittily, ironically and scornfully cutting man down to size. Two particular aspects of man come in for repeated attack, his pride and his dullness. The two qualities are inseparable, making him a being both ‘darkly wise, and rudely great’ (II, 4). They are given metaphorical force through the contrasted but connected motions of ascension and descension that run through both epistles. Thus Pope ironically describes man sightlessly soaring (I, 12), or upward soaring (I, 173), or soaring with Plato (II, 23) in his pride, at the same time as he contemptuously depicts him blindly creeping (I, 12) or dropping into himself to be a fool (II, 30) in his ignorance.

It is the contrast between man's pride in his own potential and his actual dullness that makes him so obvious a target for ridicule. In Pope's view man is so presumptuous that he needs to be forcibly reminded of his own weakness, littleness and blindness (I, 36). He may seem principal on earth, but in fact he is only a minute part of the greater whole. His life fills merely a moment in eternity and a point in infinity (I, 72), but he is so proud that he aspires to the power of an angel, just as Satan aspired to the power of God:

          In Pride, in reas'ning Pride, our error lies;
All quit their sphere, and rush into the skies.
Pride still is aiming at the blest abodes,
Men would be Angels, Angels would be Gods.

(I, 123-6)

Man thinks he is the ‘Great Lord of all things’ and the ‘Sole judge of Truth’, but in fact he is a ‘prey to all’ and is hurled in ‘endless Error’ (II, 16-17). Even the wisest of men, Newton, is merely an ape when compared to the angels (II, 34). Again and again in these two epistles Pope brings man face to face with his feeble significance within the overall pattern of the universe.

Pope continually confronts the reader with the brevity of human life and the imminence of death. As early as the third line of the poem he says that ‘life can little more supply / Than just to look about us and to die’. Further on in the first epistle death is described as ‘the great teacher’ (I, 92), and man is reminded of the fact that he is helplessly subject to plagues, earthquakes and tempests (I, 142-4). At the beginning of the second epistle man is described as ‘born but to die’, as if this were the sole reason for life (II, 10). Next we are told that man, at the very moment of his birth, ‘receives the lurking principle of death’ (II, 134). The theme is continued in the third epistle where the brevity and insignificance of human life is compared to the transience and fragility of a bubble:

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, 17-20)

Seen from the almost godlike perspective and detachment that the speaker assumes for himself, man's existence is purely momentary.

What Pope urges in the first two epistles is a Christian humility before these facts. Pope's advice is the same as that of Raphael to Adam in Paradise Lost, Book VIII:

Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid,
Leave them to God above, him serve and fear;
Of other Creatures, as him pleases best,
Wherever plac't, let him dispose: joy thou
In what he gives to thee, this Paradise
And thy fair Eve: Heav'n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there
Live, in what state, condition or degree,
Contented that thus far hath been reveal'd
Not of Earth only but of highest Heav'n.

(167-78)

According to Pope too, man must be lowly wise, he must recognize his limitations, know his ‘own point’ (I, 283), ‘hope humbly’ (I, 91), and learn to ‘welcome Death’ (II, 260). ‘To reason right’, he says, ‘is to submit’ (I, 164). This central directive comes again at the end of the first epistle:

Submit—In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear.

(I, 285-6)

‘I believe’, Pope wrote to Caryll on 3 September 1718, ‘that there is not in the whole course of the Scripture any precept so often and so strongly inculcated, as the trust and eternal dependence we ought to repose in that Supreme Being who is our constant preserver and benefactor’. Man must submit to God's disposing power, and so far as Pope is concerned this means accepting traditional Christian explanations of the way the world is ordered.

Pope selects two main principles in human nature for special attention. These are Self-Love, which he sees as the ‘urging’ principle, and Reason, which he calls the ‘restraining’ principle. Thus the idea of a tension between opposites producing overall harmony (concordia discors), which we saw operating in the macrocosm, or world at large, is also seen operating in the microcosm of man. Shifting his imagery from that of horse-riding to that of watch-making, Pope calls self-love ‘the spring of motion’ and reason the ‘comparing balance’ (II, 59-60). Both qualities are necessary if man is to act to the best purpose, but self-love is naturally stronger, whereas reason must be developed through ‘attention, habit, and experience’ until it is capable of restraining self-love.

Pope then breaks self-love down into its different modes, or passions, which he groups into sets of opposites, such as love and hate, hope and fear, joy and grief, whose ‘well accorded strife / Gives all the strength and colour of our life’ (II, 121-2). It is at this point in the poem that Pope develops his theory of the ruling passion. This idea, developed further in the Epistle to Cobham, is that God gives every man one particular passion which will operate as a ‘strong direction’, or focal point, that will enable him to cope with the complexity of his other passions. Whether man lets this ruling passion lead him on to vice or virtue is entirely up to him and the way he uses his restraining reason. As a result there are both vicious and virtuous men, and this becomes yet another part of the variety that goes to make the overall order.

Reason is the faculty that separates man from the animals, but this does not mean that man is superior to the animals. In a strict Great Chain of Being philosophy this would be so, but the scale naturae doctrine that Pope develops is descriptive rather than hierarchical. It is quite clear in An Essay on Man that reason has severe limitations. The point is worth insisting on, for too many readers still come to Pope with unfavourable preconceptions of him as the great poet of ‘an age of prose and reason’. But for Pope reason is not as good a guide in man as instinct is in animals. Reason is ‘cool at best’, and ‘cares not for service, or but serves when prest’, whereas ‘honest instinct’, to continue the military metaphor, ‘comes a volunteer’ (III, 85-8). Where ‘heavier reason’ labours at happiness in vain, instinct gains it by ‘quick Nature’; and where reason is merely a direction imposed by man, instinct is the direct power of God operating in animals. Reason, then, must learn from instinct. The idea is parallel to that expressed in An Essay on Criticism where art, which is made by man, must copy nature, which is made by God.

The fourth epistle deals with the possibility of human happiness. Pope takes the traditional Christian view that happiness has nothing to do with external goods or material wealth. For him the key to human happiness involves conforming to God's order, and the best way to do this is to fulfil the particular gifts that God has given one: ‘Act well your part, there all the honour lies’ (IV, 194). One acts one's part well when one leads a virtuous life—‘Virtue alone is happiness below’ (IV, 310)—and one leads a virtuous life when one pursues humility, honesty, justice, truth, public-spiritedness and benevolence. These values, which emerge so strongly from the fourth epistle, form an important basis for an appreciation of Pope's later satires, for they are the positive criteria that underlie and inform all his attacks on the corruptions of Hanoverian England.

The effect of self-love on the virtuous mind is like that of a pebble thrown into a peaceful lake. Just as the pebble creates perfect circles which grow in size and perfection until they finally merge into the lake itself, so self-love will stir the virtuous mind first into love for its friends, parents and neighbours, next for its country and finally for the whole human race:

Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake,
As the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake;
The centre mov'd, a circle strait succeeds,
Another still, and still another spreads,
Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race,
Wide and more wide, th'o'erflowings of the mind
Take ev'ry creature in, of ev'ry kind;
Earth smiles around, with boundless bounty blest,
And Heav'n beholds its image in his breast.

(IV, 363-372)

Thus the poem that began with images of man's intellectual pride and physical mortality closes with images of man's spiritual regeneration and earth's boundless bounty. The vile worm has become an image of Heaven, and the threat of damnation that dominated the first two epistles has given way to the possibility of redemption in the last two.

RELIGION

It would be absurd to call Pope a religious poet in the sense that one calls George Herbert or Gerard Manley Hopkins religious poets. Religion is not the main concern or subject matter of his poetry, but its acceptance is always assumed and in indirect ways shapes much of the structure of his poetry.

Pope inherited his faith from a devoutly Catholic mother and a series of family priests who were appointed to educate him. He was never a fervent Catholic, however, and clearly gave his friends some hope that they might persuade him to join the Anglican Church. When his father died suddenly in 1717, Bishop Atterbury wrote to Pope offering his condolences and suggesting that now was the time for him to make this change of allegiance. Pope's reply is worth quoting at length because it is one of the fullest statements we have of his religious and political position:

Whether the change would be to my spiritual advantage, God only knows: this I know, that I mean as well in the religion I now profess, as I can possibly ever do in another. Can a man who thinks so, justify a change, even if he thought both equally good? To such an one, the part of joyning with any one body of Christians might perhaps be easy, but I think it would not be so to renounce the other. … I'll tell you my politick and religious sentiments in a few words. In my politicks, I think no further than how to preserve the peace of my life, in any government under which I live; nor in my religion, than to preserve the peace of my conscience in any Church with which I communicate. I hope all churches and all governments are so far of God, as they are rightly understood, and rightly administered: and where they are, or may be wrong, I leave it to God alone to mend or reform them; which whenever he does, it must be by greater instruments than I am.

It would be misleading to take this statement as a lasting testament of his religious and political beliefs—his political views, especially, became very much more definite as he grew older—but it does help to indicate his distinctly undogmatic feelings about Catholicism. His attitude to the Church he belongs to is similar to his attitude to the universe in An Essay on Man: it is not for man to presume to scan God's affairs. If there seems to be a certain lack of commitment to the Roman Catholic Church in this letter, there is at least a firm avowal of Christian faith and not the slightest doubt about his belief in God.

Pope lived at a time of important scientific discoveries concerning the universe. The development of the microscope had led to greatly increased knowledge of natural history in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and, most important of all, Newton had explained the gravitational basis of the universe in his Principia, 1687. These discoveries, unlike those of the nineteenth century, were taken as giving mathematical corroboration to God's majestic creation. What had before been a matter of faith was now regarded as a matter of scientific proof. Pope's epitaph intended for Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey sums up this attitude:

Nature, and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.

Pope's concept of a God who is both immanent and transcendent (Essay on Man, I, 267-80) is very close to Newton's concept in the Opticks of a divine spirit who is omnipresent at the same time as he is a uniform Being.

Pope's poetry is rarely either explicitly Catholic, or even explicitly Christian. His Messiah, 1712, is something of an exception, although even here one senses that the religious content is subservient to the carefully wrought display of grandeur. Nevertheless, his religious beliefs are deeply rooted in the general pattern of his thought and affect the structure and imagery of many of his poems. His delightful account of Belinda's toilet at the end of The Rape of the Lock, Canto I, for example, takes on a greater cogency when one sees it as a vain inversion of the Catholic mass. Similarly, the satiric description of Timon's banquet in An Epistle to Burlington gains additional force when one sees it as an Epicurean parody of the communion service. And, to take one more example of implicit structural influence, Earl Wasserman has shown that the portrait of the Man of Ross in An Epistle to Bathurst is an ‘imitatio Christi’, and that ‘beneath the surface of the language there is a current of references to Christ's life and miracles’.

Allusion to scripture is another way in which Pope's religious beliefs become a subsumed part of his poetry. Sometimes he uses such allusion to give emphasis to a point he is making, as in the following couplet from An Epistle to Bathurst:

Riches like insects, when conceal'd they lie,
Wait but for wings, and in their season, fly.

(171-2)

This is a rewriting of Proverbs 23; 5—‘Wilt thou set thy eyes upon that which is not? for riches certainly make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven’. At other times Pope uses allusion to the Bible for ironic purposes in order to create a deliberate contrast between a corrupt present and an ideal past. Nowhere does he do this to more effect than in the magnificent finale to The Dunciad, where the catastrophe of the ‘Universal Darkness’ that ‘buries All’ is heightened through the ironic allusion to the universal light that began all in Genesis. It is through the use of allusive and associative religious imagery, rather than through formally structured divine poems, that Pope's religion makes itself felt in his poetry.

POLITICS

Pope is perhaps better known than any other poet in our literature for his close involvement with politics, yet until the last ten years or so of his life he went out of his way to cultivate a neutral position towards political parties. ‘The general division of the British Nation is into Whigs and Tories’, wrote Addison in The Freeholder of 25 June 1716, ‘there being very few, if any, who stand Neuters in the Dispute, without ranging themselves under one of these denominations’. At the time of Addison's writing Pope was one of these few, and in order to understand both this early neutrality and his later commitment we need to take a brief look at the political scene in England during the early part of the eighteenth century.

The party warfare that so dominated early eighteenth-century English politics had its roots in the Exclusion Bill struggle of 1679-80 over whether the Duke of York, the future James II, should be allowed to succeed to the English throne as a Catholic. The term ‘Tory’ was used to describe those who supported the royal prerogative with regard to the succession, while the term ‘Whig’ was applied to those who supported the idea of a constitutional monarchy with government by parliament. The question of succession was crucial in the development of the political parties and came to a head again in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Hanoverian succession of 1714. Broadly speaking the Tories can be identified with the High Church and the landed gentry, while the Whigs can be identified with the Low Church and the commercial interest. The trouble with such a simplification, of course, is that the actual patterns of allegiance were very much more complex than this suggests. There were some Tories, for example, who supported the revolutionary settlement of 1688, and there were some Whigs who later betrayed its principles.

An additional difference between the two parties during the reign of Queen Anne was that the Whigs supported the war with France while the Tories increasingly looked for an end to it. At first Marlborough's victories were more than enough to keep the Whigs in power, but as war-weariness increased so did the pressure for peace, and in 1710 the Whigs were replaced in office by the Tory Ministry of Robert Harley. Harley's administration lasted for four years until the death of Queen Anne in 1714. The resulting establishment of the Hanoverian succession led to the total collapse of the Tory party and the impeachment of its leaders. Harley himself was committed to the Tower, where he remained for two years. With the accession of George I there began a period of Whig supremacy in British politics that was to last for almost fifty years.

The important figures in this scenario as far as Pope is concerned are Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford. Apart from Harley, Bolingbroke was the most dominant personality in the Tory Ministry of 1710-14. Indeed it was the struggle for power between these two men that finally brought the Ministry down. Rather than face the impeachment proceedings about to be brought against him by the Whigs, Bolingbroke fled in 1715 to France, where he became involved in the Pretender's court. He soon became disenchanted with the inefficiency of Jacobite plans, however, and dissociated himself from them in order to devote his time to the study of history and philosophy. In 1723 he was granted a pardon and returned to England where he eventually settled down at Dawley Farm near Twickenham. From 1725 until 1735, when he again left England for France, Bolingbroke led the Tory opposition to Walpole. Since he had been deprived of the right to hold political office, as a condition of his pardon, he had to do this in an extraparliamentary way through the columns of his newspaper, The Craftsman. Two of Bolingbroke's major works, Remarks on the History of England, and A Dissertation on Parties, first appeared in the weekly pages of this paper. It was during these years of opposition to Walpole that he became such a close friend of Pope's, influencing him deeply in both philosophical and political matters. Pope's admiration for Bolingbroke, or ‘all-accomplish'd st john' as he calls him in the Epilogue to the Satires, was almost unlimited. In addition to the great tribute to him in An Essay on Man there are references to him in the letters as ‘a Being paullo minus ab angelis’ (Pope to Warburton, 12 January 1744), and as ‘the Greatest Man I ever knew’ (Pope to Ralph Allen, 17 April 1739).

Sir Robert Walpole first came into prominence during the reign of Queen Anne, but he achieved his real fame under George I. From 1721 onwards he held power as First Lord of the Treasury for an unbroken period of twenty-one years. He was an even more dominant figure in the Whig party than we have just described Bolingbroke as being in the Tory opposition. He was an extremely skilful financier and an adroit manager of men. The main achievements of his long and successful administration were to give the country peace and prosperity. These were no mean achievements, but both were obtained at considerable cost in terms of personal principle. By the end of his period of supremacy he was widely considered to be a totally corrupt politician who had only managed to remain in office for so long because of the confused nature of the opposition.

Pope tried for a long time to keep on good terms with Walpole and in the summer of 1725 received a visit from him at his villa in Twickenham. During this and the next five years there are several references in Pope's correspondence to his having dined at Walpole's ‘Sunday-Tables’. About 1730, however, his friendship with Sir Robert, which had only been diplomatic at the best of times, began to waver, and after 1733 it changed to scarcely veiled personal antipathy and overt political opposition.

But this is to anticipate an account of Pope's earlier position with regard to party politics. He first came to public notice as a promising poet during those years at the end of Queen Anne's reign in which party warfare was reaching its height of contention. In this situation Pope did all he could to maintain a neutral position. Naturally drawn by his religious sympathies and friends in the Scriblerus Club to the Tory party, he nevertheless managed to retain acquaintances and friends among the leading Whigs. Not least of these was Addison who, as Pope later told Spence, advised ‘me not to be content with the applause of half the nation. He used to talk much and often to me of moderation in parties, and used to blame his dear friend Steele for being too much of a party-man’. Addison was no doubt trying to win Pope over by stages to the Whig cause, but be that as it may, Pope seems to have accepted the advice. What he set out to do, as he later put it in his Imitation of Horace, Satire II, i, was to place all his glory in moderation with the result that ‘Tories call me Whig, and Whigs a Tory’. It was a claim for neutrality that he repeated in the Epilogue to the Satires, Dialogue I (8), and that has a strong resemblance to his statement to Atterbury in 1717, already quoted in this chapter, that in politics he thought no further than how to preserve the peace of his life in any government under which he lived. This uncommitted position towards both political parties, which he maintained with considerable care over a long period of time, is clearly summed up in a letter he wrote to Swift on 28 November 1729:

You know my maxim to keep clear of all offence, as I am clear of all interest in either party. … I have given some proofs in the course of my whole life (from the time when I was in the friendship of Lord Bolingbroke and Mr. Craggs even to this, when I am civilly treated by Sir R. Walpole) that I never thought myself so warm in any Party's cause as to deserve their money; and therefore would never have accepted it.

Gradually during the 1730s, however, and especially after the defeat of Walpole's Excise Bill in 1733 which so raised Tory hopes for the ‘Great Man's’ downfall, Pope began to join forces with the Patriot opposition. This was not quite the same thing as joining the Tory opposition, and Pope would no doubt have defended himself by insisting that what he was fighting for was a resurgence of public spirit, not of a political party. Nevertheless we need to ask why he should have chosen at this stage in his career to get embroiled in political warfare after studiously cultivating detachment to it over such a long period? There are perhaps two main reasons: the increasing personal influence over him exerted by Bolingbroke, and his growing dislike for Walpole.

Whatever the reason it is certainly true to say that the Versifications of Donne and Imitations of Horace written in the five years between 1733 and 1738 are full of pointed attacks on Walpole's administration that show a clear departure from Pope's earlier political impartiality. In the Versification of Donne's Fourth Satire, for example, he uses the character of an impertinent courtier to attack Walpole's graft:

Then as a licens'd Spy, whom nothing can
Silence, or hurt, he libels the Great Man;
Swears every Place entail'd for Years to come,
In sure Succession to the Day of Doom:
He names the Price for ev'ry Office paid,
And says our Wars thrive ill, because delay'd;
Nay hints, 'tis by Connivance of the Court,
That Spain robs on, and Dunkirk's still a Port.

(158-65)

By putting the attack on Walpole into someone else's mouth Pope could always claim to be free of guilt. A few years later in the Imitation of Horace, Epistle I, i, addressed to Bolingbroke, he adopts a persona who talks about being a Patriot and battling for the State. In the same poem Walpole is referred to as a ‘screen’ and a ‘wall of brass’, and George II's court is seen as a lion's den. Finally, in the Imitation of Horace, Epistle II, i, Pope makes merciless fun of Walpole's peace policy while ironically praising George II:

Oh! could I mount on the Maeonian 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;
Till Earth's extremes your mediation own,
And Asia's Tyrants tremble at your Throne—

(394-403)

By the time one comes to the two dialogues of the Epilogue to the Satires, 1738, there is a new note of disillusion in Pope's attitude to party politics. His country's ruin makes him grave and he seems to be totally disenchanted with both parties. The attack on Walpole and the Court party is as strong as in the preceding five years, but there is a new dissatisfaction with both Tories and Patriots. The apocalyptic image of Vice corrupting the whole country that ends Dialogue I, for example, includes the Patriots:

In Soldier, Churchman, Patriot, Man in Pow'r,
'Tis Av'rice all, Ambition is no more!

(161-2)

When we come to Dialogue II the same sort of attitude is present. It is Vice he attacks, not Whigs, and Virtue he praises, not Tories. His list of worthy men includes Sommers, Halifax and Shrewsbury (77-9), each of whom had been a leading Whig earlier in the century. Pope insists that he follows Virtue and praises her wherever she shines, whether she point to ‘Priest or Elder, Whig or Tory’ (95-6).

What we find in these later poems is a disillusioned return to his earlier moderation, with a strong suggestion of a plague on both your houses. In the rewritten Dunciad of 1743, Cibber asks Dulness in Book I whether she would have him take up party politics:

Or bidst thou rather Party to embrace?
A friend to Party thou, and all her race;
'Tis the same rope at different ends they twist …

(I, 205-7)

Tories and Whigs are merely different sides of the same coin, and it is quite clear that for Pope fervent partisans of either party serve Dulness's cause equally well.

It is perhaps ironic that at the very time when Pope's own attitude to party politics should have become so disenchanted his reputation in the country should have risen to the point at which he was represented by the party hacks as the ‘spiritual patron of the poetical opposition to Walpole’. (Mack, The Garden and the City, p. 190). This emblematic significance attributed to his life can best be illustrated by the flurry of pamphlets printed at the end of 1740. The first of these, a savage denunciation of Walpole called Are these things so?, took the fictional form of an open letter from Alexander Pope, ‘An Englishman in His Grotto’, to Robert Walpole, ‘A Great Man at Court’. In the two months between the 23 October, when Are these things so? was first published, and the 20 December, when A Supplement to Are these things so? appeared, no fewer than nine separate poems (four attacking Walpole and five defending him) were released, each directly related to one another and each written by an unnamed author. Though Pope had nothing whatever to do with this furious spate of party activity, it vividly illustrates the close relationship between literature and politics in the first half of the eighteenth century. While it is inconceivable that the publication of any poem in our own day, even by a major writer, should arouse such a response, it is reasonably typical of the first half of the eighteenth century that the publication of an occasional poem by a minor, indeed anonymous writer should do so.

I have argued that there was nearly always a certain detachment from party politics in Pope's poetry. This should not however be confused with a lack of involvement in the society around him. Pope was deeply committed to the society of his day, but his commitment is to its state of morality not the state of the parties. What he really attacks in the satires of the 1730s is not party political issues but the deeper corruption, as he saw it, of the new moneyed society. This was a state of affairs that had repelled him since at least as early as 1723 when he wrote to Broome saying that:

Every valuable, every pleasant thing is sunk in an ocean of avarice and corruption. The son of a first minister is a proper match for a daughter of a late South Sea Director,—so money upon money increases, copulates, and multiplies, and guineas beget guineas in Saecula saeculorum.

It is this disgust for the new capitalism that rings most stridently through the poems of his later period. It perhaps gives an added perspective to our own views on the limitations of the capitalist system that Pope should challenge it not from a socialist point of view, but from a profoundly conservative one.

As Pope saw it his poetry was above all else a moral song. In January 1733 we find him writing to Caryll saying that his Epistle to Bathurst is,

not the worst I have written and abounds in moral example, for which reason it must be obnoxious in this age. God send it does any good! I really mean nothing else by writing at this time of my life.

As we read through Pope's correspondence this emphasis on the poet's moral duty strikes us again and again. It is there at the beginning of the 1730s and it is there at the end. He tells Warburton on 12 November 1741, that he ‘has no other merit than that of aiming by his moral strokes to merit some regard from such men as advance Truth and Virtue in a more effectual way’.

In the satires of the 1730s we find Pope, driven desperate as he sees the critical condition of his country—the sons of Mammon in charge and public spirit nowhere—responding to that condition by creating the figure of a satirist who protests his outrage and disgust with increasing fervour. The persona Pope creates in the Imitations of Horace is not content simply to pass moral comment on his times. He feels he must join the battle and he therefore enters the public arena, but he does so in no narrow party political way. The urbane friend of the great who speaks through Horace's poems takes on an unrelentingly aggressive public-spiritedness that transforms him into something akin to a public prosecutor. Morality becomes militant.