SOURCE: “‘Steering betwixt extremes’: An Essay on Man,” in The Unbalanced Mind: Pope and the Rule of Passion, Harvester Press, 1986, pp. 64-94.

[In the following essay, Ferguson links the dialectic of An Essay on Man to its poetic form, emphasizing philosophical and literary dimensions of the concept of discordia concors.]

In the preceding chapters I have made note of two very generalised but significant anticipations of the Essay on Man's philosophy some years before any detailed plans for the work had been laid down by Pope; the first of these is the emphasis on the terms ‘grace and nature, virtue and passion’ developed in Eloisa to Abelard, and the second the note to Book XVII of the Iliad (n.5) which refers the contrasting temperaments of Achilles and Patroclus to the balancing of contrary principles within the scheme of Providence. In either case the links may perhaps appear limited or superficial; in fact, however, they express two facets of Pope's thinking which were developed consistently through his works and which became central to the Essay on Man in particular—the striving towards a form of moral idealism, and a strong imaginative interest in the concept of harmony through the reconciliation of opposites, the discordia concors. When Pope came to develop his theories on human nature within the optimistic framework of the Essay, his philosophy was propounded through a process which he described, characteristically, as ‘steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite’ (‘Design’, ll.21-2); the pursuit of this goal was taken as something of a challenge. The ‘doctrines’ to which he refers are in particular those concerning the various attributes of Man and their potential for perfection or corruption, and it is the nature of his attempted compromise between them which I wish to examine in this chapter. I am indebted in my discussion of the intellectual context of the poem to the excellent commentary and thorough scholarship of Maynard Mack assimilated in the Twickenham text and (on the passions) to further studies by Bertrand Goldgar and Douglas White;¹ in the light of these studies and my own research I have tried to draw together the chief threads of Pope's system, adding further footnotes and analogues of my own where these seemed enlightening, with as much background reference as is consistent with brevity. Instead of pursuing the approach of White and Goldgar, defining Pope's position on specific philosophical issues, I have chosen to follow the line of argument presented within the Essay as a whole, keeping in mind the fact that it is shaped not only dialectically but poetically, and that often Pope's manner of delivery has an important bearing on the tenor of his assertions.

The Essay was originally conceived as the centre of a wider ethic scheme which was first alluded to by Bolingbroke in November 1729 (see TE, [Poems of Alexander Pope, Twickenham Edition] III (i), xiii), and within this scheme it was particularly closely linked with the four epistles which Warburton later entitled the ‘Moral Essays’.² Most of the epistles originally projected for the system (which Pope termed his ‘opus magnum’) were never completed, and he appears to have grown disenchanted with his plans by around 1735; the process whereby much of the material was assimilated into the Moral Essays and The Dunciad of 1742 has been meticulously charted in Miriam Leranbaum's study Alexander Pope's ‘Opus Magnum’ 1729-1744 (Oxford, 1977). Within its wider framework, the Essay itself did not immediately emerge as a coherent unit; epistles I-III were published close together between February and May 1733, and it was not until January 1734 that a fourth epistle completed the work as we now have it. Leranbaum sees the first two epistles as distinctively the most assured and carefully related sections of the whole (pp.59-63), although the two manuscripts of the poem, in the Pierpont Morgan and Houghton libraries, show extensive reworking and revision of individual passages throughout.³ In the Morgan manuscript (p.1, recto) a particularly interesting set of notes maps out the specific links between the ‘exordium’ opening Epistle I and some of the projected ‘opus magnum’ epistles, as follows:

A mighty Maze	Inconsistencys of character, ye Subject of Ep.5
Or Wilde	Passions, Virtues &c. ye Subject of Ep.2
Or Orchard	The Use of [wild?] pleasure, in Lib.2

This scheme demonstrates some of the obvious links in Pope's early plans between the Essay on Man and the Moral Essays, yet the nature of the works as they eventually emerged was markedly different. Pope's survey of man in the Essay keeps close to the central tenet that partial evil is compatible with, and even conducive to, universal good; it might be described in Pope's words to Swift (June 1730: Correspondence, III, 117) as ‘a book, to make mankind look upon this life with comfort and pleasure, and put morality in good humour’. Although the Moral Essays share the terms of this optimism, they emerge as predominantly satiric works, stressing and castigating the wild inconsistencies and viciousness of human nature. This distinction arises principally from the fact that the Essay deals in universals rather than the ‘finer nerves and vessels’ of humanity; the approach (as the ‘Design’ makes clear) is relatively tentative and comprehensive, moderate and less impassioned, although in tone the Essay is highly assertive and often marked by a satiric edge.

Douglas White has emphasised the importance of the Essay's intellectual eclecticism, and also the way in which specific contentions as summarised in the ‘Argument’ prefixed to each epistle seem often to suggest commitment to philosophical tenets which are not in fact accommodated in Pope's scheme. This approach to the work, in terms of the ‘manipulation of ideas’, stresses the urgency of contemporary counter-arguments to many of Pope's assumptions and deductions, and on this basis White suggests that Pope may at certain points be consciously leading the reader towards mistaken conclusions. While such a strategy does appear to me to underlie the structure of To Cobham, in the Essay I would see it as a technique which is exploited only within the rhetorical framework of shorter passages. What we need to be aware of is that Pope is propounding an original thesis on premises which were the subject of extensive and time-honoured debate, and that many of his assertions and demonstrations were certainly designed to be provocative.⁴ Most contemporary treatises on the nature of man and the status of the passions similarly cover well-tracked territory, with a marked degree of mutual indebtedness and exploitation of common sources; Pope's Essay is typical in this respect, and beyond a certain point it is impossible to gauge with any certainty which works he was best acquainted with, although in general it is in the use of analogy and metaphor that his debts seem to become most apparent.

The poem as a whole is however distinctive for its overriding preoccupation with ethics, and consequently in the argument of the second epistle Pope's interest in defining ‘passion’, or in delineating the operations of the passions, is strictly limited. Fundamentally the Essay is more doctrinal than analytical, although its doctrine is built up from the exploratory terms set out in the ‘Design’, which contends that ‘to examine the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what condition or relation it is placed in, and what is the proper end and purpose of its being’ (ll.6-9). The scheme of the argument embraces firstly man as a unit in the order of the universe, secondly man as microcosm, and thirdly man in relation to society. In considering what ‘condition’ man is placed in, Pope sets out to assert that it is in the best of all possible worlds, that both human nature and the ordering of this world are not degenerating in post-lapsarian chaos but continue by their own operations to answer the ends of Providence. He eschews the more strictly theological questions concerning grace and faith, not because such issues are divorced from the tenor of his argument, but because he chooses to set out his vindication chiefly in humanistic terms. Thus on the ‘end and purpose’ of man's existence, Pope confidently pronounces that the immediate human aim is happiness, that happiness consists in virtue, and that virtue concerns the active love of our kind. These points are assumed a priori, on premises which are summarised in a general note in the Morgan manuscript (the opening of Epistle IV); there Pope observes that the desire of happiness and the yearning for immortality are both implanted in man directly by God, and that the passion of hope is the medium of such desires:

… As God plainly gave [?] Hope [as?] instinct, it is plain Man should entertain it. Hence flows his greatest Hope v greatest Incentive to Virtue.

3. Hope his sumu bonum, not Possession. Hobs always for s.thing to come. So on to Imortality.⁵

The questions concerning happiness and virtue lead directly to questions on the nature of man himself, how far he is to be seen as degenerate and in what respects he is capable of virtue; in this context, Pope's vindication of the passions and the motivating force of self-love forms the very foundation of his ethical scheme, and thus Epistle II is the focal point of the Essay as a whole. The assertions which are made in that epistle form the ground of all the speculations and developments of Epistles III and IV, a formulation which is particularly clear from the Houghton manuscript notes to Epistle I, ll.6-16—the lines glossed are the same as those expounded in the Morgan MS exordium:

The 6th, 7th and 8th lines allude to y^e Subjects of This Book; the General Order and Design of Providence; the Constitution of the Human Mind, whose Passions cultivated, are Virtues, neg[lected], Vices; the Temptations of misapplyd Selflove and wrong pursuits of Power, Pleasure and false Happiness.

These notes, instead of referring to the sequence of ‘opus magnum’ epistles, now appear to embrace the matter of the Essay as a coherent unit, although the final phrase certainly evokes the ‘ruling passion’ argument of To A Lady (ll.207-42) as well as the Essay's fourth epistle. The unity of theme, founded on the theory of the passions, which the whole outline proposes is reaffirmed in the eulogy to Bolingbroke which closes Epistle IV:

And while the Muse now stoops, or now ascends,
To Man's low passions, or their glorious ends,
Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise,
To fall with dignity, with temper rise.

(375-8)

In Pope's theory of the passions, the most significant point is the contention that self-love is not only the root of all passions and the principle of action in Man, but equally the natural spring of virtue and of social love. The first part of this assertion adopts the principle of ‘motion’ animating the soul through appetitive impulse which reaches back in ethical thought to Aristotle, but Pope's emphasis on its supreme force and his definition of it as self-love strongly suggests a Hobbesian line of thought; the Morgan MS note quoted above confirms that it had this association in Pope's mind.⁶ On this foundation, there is also a potential affinity with the assumptions of the cynic moralists (La Rochefoucauld in particular)⁷ who maintained that if self-interest rules over all personal choice, then virtue, in the rigoristic definition of the term, is either a chimera or else thinly-veiled vice. Bernard de Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (1714) took this argument to the point of directing that private gratifications should be guided to their most useful ends, that is to luxurious fulfilments which would also advance the national economy. Thus although both Hobbes and Mandeville see a potential for social cohesion in the force of self-interest, the perspective on ‘benefits’ is utilitarian rather than ethical, and social rather than personal. The argument stands in contrast to the more intransigently negative perspective on personal virtue which subsists in the tradition of Augustinian pessimism, viewing man's self-love as a testimony to his post-lapsarian state of corruption, which may only be redeemed by the divine light of reason and the intercession of grace.⁸ From this standpoint, virtue consists above all in the suppression of the passions, Stoic ‘apathy’ being transmuted into the supreme moral good of rationality; Malebranche, Charron and Antoine le Grand are perhaps the most notable exponents of this position, with varying degrees of Stoic rigour.⁹ The plea for the supremacy of reason, however, is very far from confident rationalism; in Pierre Nicole's Moral Essays, the familiar metaphor of ocean, ship and pilot (also taken up by Pope in the Essay) is used to emphasise the fallibility of ‘raison humaine’ as well as the dangerous potency of the appetitive impulses:

We are tost on the Sea of this World at the pleasure of our Passions, … like a Ship without Sail, without Pilot: And it is not Reason which makes use of Passions, but Passions which make use of Reason to compass their ends; and this is all the stead Reason stands us in for the most part.

(I, 43)

It is rather the power of ‘raison divine’ to which Charron appeals in defining the wise man as one who ‘directs all his Aims and Actions so as that they shall agree with Nature, that is, pure uncorrupted Reason, the Primitive Law and Light inspired by God’ (Of Wisdom, I, ‘Preface’). In Malebranche's Search After Truth, the epistemology is strikingly opposed to any kind of empiricism; the evidence of the senses is treated as corrupt delusion, and indeed ‘sense’ is defined as equivalent to ‘passion’:

Thus a Man, who judges of all things by his Senses; who on all accounts pursues the Motions of his Passions, who has no other than Sensible Perceptions, and loves only Flattering Gratifications, is in the most wretched state of Mind imaginable …

(I, p.a2)

From a more moderate point of view, the ‘Peripatetic’ group of moralists¹⁰ (including Samuel Clarke, Bishop Reynolds, and William Wollaston) had contrived to reconcile an anti-Stoic reaction with a defence of the rational faculty, by adopting the argument that the passions are in effect the strongest incentives to virtue so long as they are held in check by the regulating power of reason. From this area of debate, and the contention as to whether the soul should be regarded as a composition of ‘antithetical’ elements, arise some particularly interesting issues relating to the definition of will, the problem of complex or mixed motives, and the process of reasoning. The great philosophical error of the Stoics and Epicureans was commonly identified as their over-emphasis on soul and body respectively, and that error is berated in James Lowde's Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man (1694, pp.23-4) in much the same terms as in the opening of Pope's second epistle of the Essay. Lowde reacts bitterly against Hobbes, however, particularly for what he sees as Hobbes' undermining of all certainty in the faculty of will and in the capacity for self-knowledge. The discussion of ‘Trayne of Imaginations’ in Leviathan (part I. ch.3) does raise an especially contentious point in proposing that reasoning and therefore ultimately the resolution of will is a process dictated by passion, and that an unguided sequence of thoughts is one ‘wherein there is no Passionate Thought, to govern and direct those that follow, to it self, as the end and scope of some desire, or other passion’. When Hume took up the subject in the Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), his argument concerning the ‘Influencing Motives of the Will’ (Book II, section iii) was again to assert that the dualistic separation of reason and passion offers a false paradigm, and that ‘reason alone can never be a motive for any action of the will’. These are some of the most suggestive and interesting problems which exercised Pope in the Essay, and … they also entered significantly into the epistles which followed it (Moral Essays). Within the scope of the Essay on Man and the philosophy of the passions which it propounds, Pope is clearly anti-Stoic in recognising an impulsive spring of virtue, but at the same time (as Mack observes, TE, III (i), xxxv) the broader frame of the work, adopting the principle of plenitude and the assurance of personal happiness through the practice of goodness, is distinctively Stoic in origin. And although Pope shares some common ground with the ‘benevolist’ philosophers (notably Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson),¹¹ he does not postulate an innate moral sense discriminating between good and bad actions, nor attempt any distinction between intrinsically self-regarding and socially-directed (‘benevolent’) passions; this constitutes an important departure from Shaftesbury, both on the nature of motive and hence on the nature of virtue. Pope's position is in fact not only anti-Stoic but also strongly anti-rationalist; reason is presented merely as a ‘weak queen’, a defective faculty continually overborne by the superior force of the passions. The weakness is demonstrated most disarmingly in relation to the power of the strongest of these, the ‘ruling passion’ (II.131ff.), yet in contrast to Montaigne, Pope does not make this recognition the ground of total scepticism. Indeed it is the ruling passion above all which is represented as the most potent agent of providential harmony and of stability in the microcosm of human nature. Having made these general observations on the context and implications of Pope's position, the terms in which he presents his contentions are perhaps best examined through an analysis of the Essay's developing argument.

The first epistle of the Essay establishes that emphatic castigation of pride which is a hallmark of the whole, and like To Cobham the work attempts both to undermine Man's faith in the validity of his own judgement while defending the propriety of his actual disposition. The ‘nosce teipsem’ injunction which opens Epistle II is thus central to both the epistles, in directing attention to Pope's humanistic frame of reference, and in establishing a predominantly Sceptic perspective on the subject of reason. His scepticism is expressed as a measured and qualified (though often sharply satirical) attack on the overconfidence of certain schools of philosophical thought, rather than as systematic and assertive doubt; overconfidence, indeed, was the primary charge against the most thoroughgoing school of Sceptics, or Pyrrhonists.¹² Like Bacon, Pope proposes to begin with doubts so that he may end in certainties. The disgruntlement of the idealistic philosopher at the imperfections of man is as it were set up as the object of the Essay's argument and rhetoric, and Pope attempts to demonstrate firstly that pride itself distorts the power to reason in the would-be sage, and secondly that man's imperfections are (sub specie aeternitatis) only apparent. Thus Pope's satiric gestures are consistently addressed to the naive rationalism or overweening confidence of such analysts, ranging from the complacency of the Stoic to the presumption of the Cynic; cynicism, as Swift once observed, is a soured version of the idealist's credulity. It is important that the misconceptions of both extremes are represented, in the context of the Essay's theodicy, as more than a venial error of judgement; they constitute a breaking of faith in God's ordering wisdom as well as an elevation of man beyond his proper status, and hence the word ‘Pride’ occurs as a central term of invective against man together with ‘Impiety’ and ‘Madness’ in I. 258.¹³ None the less, even the scornful opening passages of the Essay acknowledge a contradiction on this head, since the note to verse-paragraph 77-90 (on man's contentment in the face of futurity) concedes that ‘his happiness depends upon his Ignorance to a certain degree’. The point was one which Pope made again to Spence in 1737 (Anecdotes, I, 238): ‘if a man saw all at first, it would damp his manner of acting; he would not enjoy himself so much in his youth, nor bustle so much in his manhood’. Similarly in the Essay Pope goes on to expatiate on the necessity of hope, as contributing to a vital strain of aspiration in man which is part of the spring of his virtue and which properly renders him restless in this world's confinement. Secure self-knowledge, if there could be such a state, would foster an equanimity which is not compatible with these ends; felicity is thus defined as the perpetual anticipation of felicity, and indeed the image of the lamb skipping its way to slaughter is harsh enough to bring to mind Swift's more acerbic definition, ‘a perpetual possession of being well-deceived’ (A Tale of a Tub; Prose Writings, I, 208). Hope in this life is seen as ultimately illusory, yet also (in its theological significance) as directed towards a firmer reality than the world itself can offer. The injunction of l.91, to ‘Hope humbly then’, emphasises the paradox in specifically Christian terms:¹⁴ to aspire beyond this point is to invoke a disruption of the scale of creation, which has been organised to accommodate man's apparent frailties.

The ‘great end’ of happiness therefore demands deviation from apparent, absolute ‘goodness’, just as within the natural world fertility is sustained by the shifting elements:

As much that end a constant course requires
Of show'rs and sun-shine, as of Man's desires;
As much eternal springs and cloudless skies,
As Men for ever temp'rate, calm and wise.

(151-4)

By extension of the metaphor of nature, Pope sets out to justify (in a speculative context) the tempestuous side of human nature, and the havoc of world-destroyers in particular; his conclusion is that even the extremes of malice and tyranny are endorsed by the ultimate justice of God, who is here represented distinctively as the God of the Old Dispensation … :

Who heaves old Ocean, and who wings the storms,
Pours fierce Ambition in a Caesar's mind,
Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind.

(158-60)

Dubious as Pope's vindication may appear, his countering lines upon the prospect of perpetual tranquillity (167-8) attempt to convey with some rhetorical emphasis the stagnation of the mind bereft of passions; by contrast to this stasis, the passions are described as ‘the elements of life’, an argument which refers forward to Epistle II (ll.101-14), and which also evokes the ‘humoural’ conception of character. … Among Man's innumerable follies, in fact, the most absurd and self-betraying is his desire to be freed from the solicitations of desire; in Swift's words, ‘the Stoical Scheme of supplying our Wants, by lopping off our Desires; is like cutting off our Feet when we want Shoes’ (Prose Writings, I, 244). Pope's stress on the ‘thin partitions’ dividing the mental and sensual powers, the ‘nice barrier’ between the semi-rational elephant and man as animal rationale, presents an implicit challenge to those who choose to ignore his affinities with the bestial world, and attempt to delineate absolute distinctions on the relative uses and values of his mixed faculties. At the same time, the very delicacy of these distinctions is presented as testimony to ‘th' insuperable line’ which separates each link within the Chain of Being from the next. The theme of man's middle nature is again exploited by Pope partly to humble his constitutional pride, but predominantly in the optimistic context, repudiating the condemnation which such a theme would imply for the rigoristic Christian moralist or the Cynic. The subject is elaborated most forcefully in the celebrated verse-paragraph opening Epistle II; but here there is a subtle shift in emphasis which actually sways the balance towards man's limitations, perhaps suggestive not only of the diversity and extremes of his position, but also of a dangerously latent ‘stalemate’ between opposed forces, an incipient inertia born of confusion. It is this confusion in particular which stems from our lack of self-knowledge:

With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast …
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confus'd;
Still by himself abus'd, or disabus'd.

(5-8, 13-14)

‘Nosce teipsem’ is thus not only a criterion of wisdom, but also a necessary principle of action; abstruse metaphysical speculation serves only to confirm the deep paradoxes of human nature, and the mind remains beyond the scope of objective analysis for the ironic reason that its own powers are too inconstant to conform to pure reasoning. Whereas reason is represented in Epistle I (l.232) as a faculty superseding those lesser faculties possessed in a more acute degree by the animal world, here it is seen perpetually confounded by the conflicts within the whole creature. Pope reduces the term at II. 39-42 to its narrowest definition as a mere intellectual system-builder, constantly deflected from its course by the distorting mirrors of individual passion; ‘passion’ here probably has a close affinity with the concept of ‘prejudice’ employed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century psychologies:¹⁵—‘what Reason weaves, by Passion is undone’ (42). In whatever sense we take ‘Reason’ at this point, the nature of the assertion is suggestive of scepticism, and is central to the satiric note which marks this section of the epistle.¹⁶ As in Epistle I, however, Pope deploys the satire to probe at the weak foundations of rationalist complacency; his own thesis, which he here presents in full, rests on the assumption that a special kind of synthesis between the operations of reason and the passions is ideally possible, even though the passions are inherently the stronger of the two.

Self-love and reason are defined in Aristotelian terms as the two directing forces in human nature—analogous, as Mack notes, with the Renaissance distinction between the rational and sensitive soul (TE, III (i), 62n.). Within this division, self-love is identified as the spring of all the passions (l.93):

Two Principles in human nature reign;
Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain;
Nor this a good, nor that a bad we call,
Each works its end, to move or govern all:
And to their proper operation still,
Ascribe all Good; to their improper, Ill.

(53-8)

This attitude to motive is important, since Pope is aiming to clarify immediately the ground of his departure from the ‘benevolists’ who would argue for a dichotomy in the nature of ‘good’ and ‘ill’ passions. The operation rather than the origin of the passion is Pope's index to morality; it is also possible that Pope is suggesting that moral good and ill are simply the beneficial or destructive results of an action, although this would imply an arbitrary role for reason and the will.¹⁷ The analysis makes it clear that, as the spring of the passions, self-love is at least partially restrained and directed by reason:

Man, but for that, no action could attend,
And, but for this, were active to no end; …
          Most strength the moving principle requires;
Active its task, it prompts, impels, inspires.
Sedate and quiet the comparing lies,
Form'd but to check, delib'rate, and advise.
Self-love still stronger, as its objects nigh;
Reason's at distance, and in prospect lie.

(61-2, 67-72)

This division of labours may seem reassuring enough, but lines 77-80 apparently sound a warning note exhorting vigilance from reason, and suggest that habit will act as an ally to confirm its exercise—this is still more disarming in relation to l.145, in which it is claimed of the ruling passion that (second only to its mother ‘Nature’), ‘Habit is its nurse’. The problem seems to be that, according to whether the general bent of our actions reflects the dominant sway of self-love or reason, habit will work to confirm either the impulsive or the deliberative side of our nature.¹⁸ In either case, ‘experience and habit’, as Pope wrote to Fortescue …, ‘are the two strongest of things’—that is, the strongest secondary forces in our nature.

As we will see in reviewing the Moral Essays, these reservations on the potential tyranny of the passions are extremely significant; however, lines 81ff (perhaps the central lines of the epistle, and distinctly acerbic) turn the balance again towards the celebration of synthesis, the concors discordia rerum within man's soul. The relevance of this vituperation on scholastic pedantry to the ethical values expressed in Eloisa to Abelard has already been noted … :

          Let subtle schoolmen teach these friends to fight,
More studious to divide than to unite,
And Grace and Virtue, Sense and Reason split,
With all the rash dexterity of Wit:
Wits, just like fools, at war about a Name,
Have full as oft no meaning, or the same.

(81-6)

The reference to ‘Grace’ of l.83 argues that, in so far as fallen man is susceptible of redemption, the retracing of virtue must take place through the channels of his own nature; the passions are emphatically not retrograde impulses to be stifled by divine aid¹⁹.

The chief point of unity and coherence in the ‘aims’ of both the impulsive and the restraining faculties lies in the avoidance of pain and the pursuit of pleasure (both the real and the apparent, the immediate and the projected); this part of Pope's argument includes the judging faculty within a definition which was often applied to the passions alone, as for example in the second Discourse of Senault's The Use of the Passions,²⁰ which sets out ‘What the Nature of Passions is, and in what Faculty of the Soul they reside’: ‘Passion then is nothing else, but a motion of the Sensitive Appetite, caused by the Imagination of an appearing or veritable good, or evil, which changeth the Body against the laws of Nature.’ None the less, Pope makes the moral point that unadulterated self-love culminates in destroying those objects which supply its gratifications (a corollary to the view that vice is ultimately self-punishing). The figure of the bee and flower of 89-90, almost certainly contrived as a refutation of La Rochefoucauld,²¹ is thus designed to illustrate reason's superior power of restraint, not of disinterestedness. Pleasure is shown either to exalt or debase the soul, according to the uses to which it is directed, and in the same way the passions may prove either pernicious or beneficent forces. It is important that, within this dialectic, self-love even in the narrower sense of self-interest is seen as a principle endorsed by reason:

Since Reason bids us for our own provide;
Passions, tho' selfish, if their means be fair,
List under Reason, and deserve her care;
Those, that imparted, court a nobler aim,
Exalt their kind, and take some Virtue's name.

(96-100)

The approval of ‘exalted selfishness’ as strenuous virtue is pitted against the negative, defensively rationalist virtue (‘lazy apathy’) of the Stoics, which has none of the outward, social movement which Pope sees as so vital a function of wants and desires. Reverting to the general argument and imagery governing Epistle I, 141-72, he elaborates the thesis that ‘ALL subsists by elemental strife’ within the microcosm of human nature, and again the agency of God in this struggle for supremacy is affirmed:

… strength of mind is Exercise, not Rest:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but Passion is the gale.(22)

(104-8)

Although the tempering of the passions is seen primarily as the work of reason, both ‘Nature’ and God are also closely identified in the process, a significant departure from Shaftesbury's assumption that only the benevolent passions are ‘natural’ at all. … This proposed relationship between nature and reason is interesting, and is closely discussed in White's study (pp.106ff.); the analogy as he presents it lies in the conception of nature as ‘active and purposive … an impulse within matter that is responsible for growth and direction’ (p.106). Within this analogy there is not a suggestion of the higher ‘artistry’ which attains the equilibrium of opposed forces, a shadow of the original act of Creation holding the elements in tension (ll.119-22).

Throughout his argument, Pope concentrates his energies on vindicating ‘the passions in general’ (as they were generally termed in contemporary treatises);²³ he comes no nearer to categorising ‘the passions in particular’ than to adopt the Aristotelian distinction between the concupiscible and irascible passions, that is impulses tending towards the pursuit of personal good and the avoidance of personal ill:

Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling train,
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain.

(117-18)

A note in the Morgan MS of the poem (p.3) glosses these lines, and explicates those which follow (119-20) with the observation that ‘The mean between opposite Passions makes Virtue, y^e Extremes Vice’—the equilibrium between the passions themselves, in other words, is as crucial as the balance of reason against self-love. Pope takes more interest in the social than the personal implications of this notion, as the Moral Essays show, although it is central to the ideal of personal virtue expressed in the closing lines of To A Lady. Within the more abstract context of the Essay, the varying intensity of different passions is explained in terms of the varying susceptibility of the senses in individuals, a directly physical process which deliberately precludes a moralistic interpretation or an emphasis on will;²⁴ the Morgan MS shows that Pope heavily reworked the whole verse-paragraph (ll.123ff.), and particularly lines 128-30. It also contains an interesting couplet (excised in the printed editions) to follow l.130, which attempts a fuller explanation of the action of the passions:

Nor here [?] internal faculties controll
Nor Soul on body acts but that on Soul,
And hence one Master Passion in the breast …

(etc.)

This again implies that the passions are ultimately of a ‘mechanical’, or physical, operation, and in fact strengthens the suggestion of a ‘humoural’ conception of character within the ‘ruling passion’ theory. The disappearance of the manuscript lines from the printed text may indicate that Pope wished to retain a speculative approach to the interaction of the soul and body, but none the less the phrase ‘organs of the frame’ (l.130) still implies a physical basis for personality differences. The general point leads on, by an explicit, consequential link, to Pope's theory that a single dominant passion, unique to the individual, persists through the whole course of life:²⁵

On diff'rent senses diff'rent objects strike;
Hence diff'rent Passions more or less inflame,
As strong or weak, the organs of the frame;
And hence one master Passion in the breast,
Like Aaron's serpent, swallows up the rest.

(128-32)

The following powerful train of description representing the ‘master Passion’ as ‘the Mind's disease’ has a disturbingly divided effect; it shows the ruling passion on the one hand as an instrument of God's will controlling the vagaries of individual action, and on the other as a seed of incipient destruction monopolising the growing powers of mind and body. Fixing its roots in the matter of ‘nature’, it is nurtured by habit and further indulged by the imagination, and is finally only intensified in direct proportion to the capacities of the ‘victim’: ‘Wit, Spirit, Faculties, but make it worse’ (l.146). This ambivalence is to a great extent a product of the vivid and varied imagery which Pope employs, connecting as it does with patterns of imagery in the whole Essay. A central motif is that of growth; here, that of the body and (negatively) of disease and ‘the lurking principle of death’; the ruling passion grows like a cancer:

Each vital humour which should feed the whole,
Soon flows to this, in body and in soul.
Whatever warms the heart, or fills the head,
As the mind opens, and its functions spread,
Imagination plies her dang'rous art,
And pours it all upon the peccant part.

(139-44)

‘Peccant’ is a term which charges the whole description with a suggestion of corruption, and yet the very aspect of the conception which is most sinister—the all-engulfing parasitism of the ruling passion—is also expressed in language which, from the rest of the Essay as well as in its immediate context, has certain positive overtones. ‘Soon flows to this’, ‘warms the heart’, ‘fills the head’, ‘pours it all’ dramatise spontaneity and fluidity, picking up (however subliminally) the tenor of the ‘water in motion’ imagery which is so strong a metaphor in the ‘passions’ debate, and as we will see Pope ends Epistle IV forcefully and imaginatively on that same motif.²⁶ The evocation of growth is also balanced in positive terms by the notion of the ruling passion itself as a plant (175-94), with God as gardener ‘grafting’ the virtues upon this ‘savage stock’ so that they may be reimbued with vigour and, above all, bear fruit, a metaphor which is perhaps strengthened by Christ's parable of the barren and fertile trees. This emphasis on fertility stands in contrast to the image of vegetable existence as stasis in II.63—man without passionate impulses, ‘Fix'd like a plant on his peculiar spot, / To draw nutrition, propagate, and rot’—whereas Epistles III and IV present man as capable of social growth, a being who ‘like the gen'rous vine, supported lives’ (III. 312), and happiness as a plant which will sustain growth only in the right ‘culture’ (IV. 7-8).

Along with the ambivalence of the imagery applied to the ruling passion, there are also the alarming political and legalistic terms of the metaphors which present reason as a ‘weak queen’, an unarmed defender of ‘wretched subjects’, a ‘sharp accuser’ or ‘false pleader’ of implausible causes; it is a final blow to the morale that the ruling passion is seen as positively hastened on its course by the subordinate power of reason, yet it is at this very point that ‘Reason’ as a sun acquires distinct connotations of ‘raison divine’, ‘Heav'ns blest beam’. In effect, however, reason is shown to offer only a more acute consciousness of failure, without having the power of redressing that failure. The hint of complaint in Pope's lines is deepened to a sustained lament on the apparent futility of the rational faculty (149-60), usurped as it is by a seemingly alien force—but the submission and co-operation of reason is none the less exhorted so that the work of the ruling passion, in directing individuals to their personal goals and fulfilments, can be realised:

'Tis hers to rectify, not overthrow,
And treat this passion more as friend than foe:
A mightier Pow'r the strong direction sends,
And sev'ral Men impels to sev'ral ends.
Like varying winds, by other passions tost,
This drives them constant to a certain coast.

(163-8)

The emphasis is thus on the role of domination which is played by the ruling passion: it does not, in the alarming sense of the metaphor, ‘swallow up’ the lesser passions, but counteracts their tendency to futile, self-defeating internal warfare. This is its primary active role; on the passive side, as we have seen, it is presented more as a catalyst to virtue than as a virtue in itself—a fundamental wildness, even baseness (‘dross’) is brought out in Pope's discussion of the passion (179-80), and the integration of the claims of the body with those of the mind (echoing the lost couplet from the Morgan MS) is celebrated. This last point is of course assimilated in the wider thesis of the whole epistle, that virtues are by no means distinct from vices, but disturbingly closely allied:

The surest Virtues thus from Passions shoot,
Wild Nature's vigor working at the root …
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 and brave.(27)

(183-4, 189-92)

The ingenuity of Pope's approach lies in the way in which he has reversed the familiar cynic's maxims of La Rochefoucauld on a near-tautological basis; if virtues are masquerading vices, vices are equally masquerading virtues, and a couplet in the Morgan MS explicitly pronounces that ‘… spite of all the Frenchmans witty lies / Most Vices are but Virtues in disguise’ (p. 5, verso). The positive bias which Pope now gives to his whole argument also serves to clarify up to a point the ambiguous role of reason, since the metamorphoses of virtues and vices tend towards ‘good from ill’ under the auspices of reason. At the same time, Pope has presented himself with the crux of another problem, the question of whether vice and virtue are in fact distinct in their operations, if not in their fundamental motivations. Sidestepping the threat of moral chaos, he answers this in utilitarian terms by maintaining that they are at least readily distinguished in their furthest extremes, except that our powers of recognition tend to be dampened by personal pride and the stupor of habituation:

No creature owns it [vice] in the first degree,
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he.

(225-6)

A mysterious dimension to the power of moral discrimination is also implied in the reference to ‘the God within the mind’ (l.204), which may again relate to the divine agency of reason, but could perhaps (if identified with the testimony of ‘your own heart’, l.215) suggest ‘conscience’. White (pp.103-6) prefers the reading of ‘conscience’, but Pope's first conception of the couplet (Morgan MS, p.2) shows that his original meaning was ‘reason’: ‘This Light and Darkness in our Chaos join'd / 'Tis Reason's task to sep'rate in the mind.’ In either case, Pope assumes that the moral sense can only distinguish between apparent vice and virtue, not vicious and virtuous motivation; leaving aside the extremes of either, the individual emerges as a being composed of subtly mixed motives, rarely following a pattern of consistently (rigorously) ‘moral’ action:

'Tis but by parts we follow good or ill
For, Vice or Virtue, Self directs it still;
Each individual seeks a sev'ral goal;
But Heav'n's great view is One, and that the
          Whole; …
And build[s] on wants, and on defects of mind,
The joy, the peace, the glory of Mankind.

(235-8, 247-8)

The greatest power for harmony endowed by Providence thus consists in the bond of mutual needs and desires; such a picture does of course rest on the premise that man is by nature a social creature, and that the ‘state of nature’ is not in the Hobbesian sense one of ‘nasty, brutish’ discord, but of concord dictated by our very self-love:

Wants, frailties, passions, closer still ally
The common int'rest, or endear the tie:
To these we owe true friendship, love sincere,
Each home-felt joy that life inherits here.(28)

(253-6)

Illusion, pride and aspiration actually foster the desired complacency which keeps mankind in this state of harmony, so that personal self-sufficiency is balanced against the mutual needs which keep society closely knit; and in the catalogue of self-congratulating exempla (261-70), among the sots and lunatics, Pope as poet wryly implicates himself. The familiar motif of man as a regressive infant wandering his bemused way across the cluttered stage of life is charged with pathos and a vein of worldly wisdom which modifies the more affirmatory and exalted tone of much of this epistle. A mounting strain of satire culminates in a dismaying picture of Providence working to confirm man in whatever folly and weakness he may possess, only to secure a tinselled, perpetually self-deluding happiness shored against the morbid perspective of truth:

Each want of happiness by Hope supply'd,
And each vacuity of sense by Pride:
These build as fast as knowledge can destroy;
In Folly's cup still laughs the bubble, joy.

(285-8)²⁹

Building upon the survey of man in the abstract, Epistles III and IV of the Essay detach themselves from the more discomforting aspects of the preceding sections and go on to justify more fully the role of the passions in relation to man's social capacities and his desire for ultimate happiness. In this analysis, Pope presents the earth united by a ‘chain of love’ as it is by the ‘chain of being’, in a vast system of mutual dependency: the paradigm which Pope employs is rooted in science, investing the atoms themselves with the attributes of human, sociable feeling:

The single atoms each to other tend,
Attract, attracted to, the next in place
Form'd and impell'd its neighbour to embrace.
See Matter next, with various life endu'd,
Press to one centre still, the gen'ral Good.

(10-14)

Terms like ‘embrace’ and ‘press’ suggest that even material forces like magnetism and gravity are a reflection of an apparently universal volition, passion or love. A model of the social network is also at work in this ‘neighbourliness’ of the atoms, each reaching out to ‘the next in place’. Self-sufficiency in the creatures is expressed, on the other hand, as ‘joy’, the spontaneous pursuit of pleasure, an exuberance which is raised in Pope's evocation of it to ecstasy:

Is it for thee the linnet pours his throat?
Loves of his own and raptures swell the note:

(33-4)

Man's power of control over these living beings may be that of a tyrant, but the law of nature is evidently on the side of the creatures, the birds who ‘vindicate their grain’ and the horse which is ‘justly’ remunerated from the harvest yield. Man is also in a sense (and in the manner of To Burlington) exploited as a ‘vain Patron’, his very extravagance and the scope of his demands serving to support the existence of his animal dependants. It is through the example of man's nurture of domestic animals that Pope illustrates how self-interest may address itself (if only for a time) to the interests of another creature. In this, the theme of animal indifference to futurity and hence to death relates back to the image of the doomed lamb in Epistle I (81-4)—Pope attempts in the one instance to demonstrate the propriety of all things, the justification of apparent suffering, and also the limitations imposed by man's ‘superior’ faculties. Limitations and benefits exchange their nature as the vices and virtues do; while the foreknowledge of death may seem a dubious benefit and brings its own form of suffering, it also acts as an impetus peculiar to man. ‘Hope’ through this prospect is bestowed in the promise of redemption, and the passions of hope and fear are themselves unique to man because of his powers of anticipation;³⁰ yet the ‘miracle’ of his position is that the certainty of steadily approaching death only endears him more to life and his naive faith in its continuance. This is seen as both necessary, and potentially absurd (ll.75-8).

While self-love motivates all creatures, it is also extended by its own impetus beyond self, towards desire of the opposite sex and finally ‘love of self’ through love of the whole generation of offspring.³¹ Since the physical weakness of man demands longer parental care, the family unit emerges as a smaller model of the wider social framework:

That longer care contracts more lasting bands:
Reflection, Reason, still the ties improve,
At once extend the int'rest, and the love;
With choice we fix, with sympathy we burn;
Each Virtue in each Passion takes its turn;
And still new needs, new helps, new habits rise,
That graft benevolence on charities.(32)

(132-8)

Pope's account of the growth of social benevolence, which is extended to l.146, gives particular stress to the importance of memory, anticipation and reason in the nature of human love, and the affirmation of ‘natural’ in ‘habitual’ love. His meaning on this head, and the importance of gratitude within the framework of mutual indebtedness, is made clearer by his letter to Lord Oxford of November, 1725 (TE, III (i), 107n.):

It is nature that makes us love, but it is experience that makes us grateful … The better a man is, the more he expects and hopes from his friend, his child, his fellow-creature; the more he reflects backwards and aggrandises every good he has received.

The general point looks back to the closing lines of Epistle II, demonstrating that self-love is naturally transmuted as ‘the scale to measure others wants by thine’, which might be deliberately contrasted to Hobbes' observation, ‘men measure, not onely other men, but all other things, by themselves' (Leviathan, p.87). The ‘state of nature’ in Pope's scheme inherently unites self-love and social love, and the process of development which links the one to the other is not enforced or acquired but spontaneous. It is significant that Pope's primitivist vision emphasises the absence of pride in the ideal state (pride being the primal human transgression), and particularly that reckless desire of dominion which Pope sees as perverting the modern society from its natural course of benevolent interdependency. The machinery of the state may either be supported by the principle of love, or by fear (another reflection of the concupiscible and irascible passions)³³ and the origin of religious consciousness is located partly in the earliest system of patriarchal government, when man first looked to his ruler and thence to God as a father: ‘To Virtue, in the paths of Pleasure, trod, / And own'd a Father, when he own'd a God’ (233-4). This implies that the primary impulses to religion are themselves attained through the paths of nature (not by enlightenment from above), and more specifically through the operation of passions. In contrast, the principle of fear is accused of founding tyranny in government and superstition in the place of religion:³⁴

Fear made her Devils, and weak Hope her Gods;
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes were Rage, Revenge, or Lust; …
Zeal then, not charity, became the guide,
And hell was built on spite, and heav'n on pride.(35)

(256-8, 261-2)

Although tyrannical governments thrive through unrestrained self-love Pope also assumes that the self-love of each subject demands some form of social restraint so that the interests of each individual can be protected; hence the development of the state as Hobbes sees it:

All join to guard what each desires to gain …
Self-love forsook the path it first pursu'd,
And found the private in the public good.(36)

(278, 281-2)

The political content of these lines is explicitly a part of the wider thesis which links ‘th' according music of a well-mix'd State' to the ideal harmony of all things, the ‘jarring int'rests’ themselves creating firm bonds of dependency and equally firm bonds of personal generosity. Thus all speculators upon the social and religious duties of man are ideally retracing the paths already indicated by ‘Nature’ and by God (283-8); and it is to the authority of nature and God that Pope returns in the closing declaration of this epistle, that self-love and social love are demonstrably ‘the same’. This assertion ultimately places greater emphasis upon benevolence and charity (280, 300, 307-10) than upon the practical needs and demands of each member of the community. Although in the utilitarian sense we are indeed ‘forc'd into Virtue … by Self-defence’ (279), Pope's movement towards the issue of happiness which occupies Epistle IV adopts the benevolist assumptions expressed by Shaftesbury, ‘that to have the natural, kindly or generous affections strong and powerful towards the good of the public, is to have the chief means and power of self-enjoyment … to want them, is certain misery and ill’ (Characteristics, I, 292). The nature of contentment forms the major theme of Pope's final epistle, which makes an emphatic and markedly Stoic declaration of faith in the possibility of absolute virtue and in the equality of happiness; the final unity of both is of course already implied in the equation of self-love with social, and both are seen as the ‘end and aim’ of the concupiscible passions. The concept of an ‘aim’ is particularly important to Pope's argument—happiness is first presented as a potential and prospect, an incentive to the continued process of living as hope and desires in general are seen as the stimulants to action, yet its very elusiveness is taken as a sign that it lies within the grasp of every man. ‘Extremes’ of hedonistic indulgence or of Stoic restraint, of active engagement or disciplined retirement, all miss the ‘obvious’ mark of personal fulfilment through the practice of social virtue. Man's status as a social animal thus cannot be evaded, even by the most hardened lovers of self:

There's not a blessing Individuals find,
But some way leans and hearkens to the kind.
No Bandit fierce, no Tyrant mad with pride,
No cavern'd Hermit, rests self-satisfy'd.
Who most to shun or hate Mankind pretend,
Seek an admirer, or would fix a friend.

(39-44)

Whereas the gifts of fortune are manifestly unequal, they are not to be equated with the possession of felicity; furthermore, Pope argues, the imbalance is redressed by the universal passions of hope and fear, the expectation of a better future or the dread of impending adversity. In this perspective, the prospect of eternal redemption or damnation plays the greatest part, but Pope does not dwell upon matters of faith specifically. Instead, this world itself is shown to confirm the final emptiness and miseries of vice and the perfection of enjoyment in virtue; external ills may assail the virtuous, but not disturb the inward security of contentment (167-9). Historical exempla fill out a satiric catalogue of all those who sank beneath the pursuit of personal gain, and demonstrate how great men are a prey to the vices and acquisitiveness of others. The presumption that vice is inevitably set on the road to ‘Human infelicity’ is however a difficult one to uphold, and in Pope's couplet concerning the distresses of virtue (‘The broadest Mirth unfeeling Folly wears, / Less pleasing far than Virtue's very tears’, 318-19) there is a defensiveness and an ambiguity in the word ‘pleasing’ (pleasing to God, or to the suffering saint himself?) which is never fully resolved in the Essay as a whole. Pope's attempt to settle the problem is ultimately dependent on the conviction that Providence finally redeems the wrongs of this world, and his ‘Argument’ (319ff.) affirms as a last resort that ‘Virtue only constitutes a Happiness, whose Object is Universal, and whose Prospect Eternal’.

This two-handed argument is partly reflected in Wollaston's observations, cited by Pope in the Houghton MS,³⁷ that not only are we blind to the ‘inward stings and secret pains’ of the vicious, but even supposing

the pleasures of some, and the sufferings of some others, to be just as they appear: still we know not the consequences of them. The pleasures of those men may lead to miseries greater than those of the latter, and be in reality the greater misfortune: and, again, the sufferings of these may be preludes to succeeding advantages.³⁸

Although Wollaston appears to be speaking of worldly ‘advantages’ in this passage, his distinction between immediate and future good is important. It is after all the natural path of ‘enlightened self-interest’ to seek for the ultimate personal good of salvation, and as Archbishop King argues, virtue is above all amenable to reason in that it is addressed ‘even to the true Principle of all our Actions, our own Happiness’³⁹. By this process, self-love is raised not only to social love, but ‘to divine’ (Essay, IV, 353); because of the nature of man, and above all because of the operation of the passions, it is impossible for the ultimate end to be gained except through the paths of nature, through gradual but progressive development: ‘God loves from Whole to Parts: but human soul / Must rise from Individual to the Whole’ (361-2).

Epistle IV ends on a theme which is much more personal and political than philosophical, through the closing address to Bolingbroke; in fact political meaning is already put forward in its opening (ll. 18-19), where we are told that happiness is a quality,

                                                  … never to be bought, but always free,
And fled from Monarchs, ST. JOHN! dwells with thee.

Bolingbroke thus represents the incorruptible, unbribable man nurturing virtue in retirement. It is characteristic that the Essay, like so many of Pope's poems, should turn the subject to embrace the poet and addressee; in doing so, Pope explicitly links his vindication of the ‘low’ yet ‘glorious’ passions with a dramatisation of the grounds of his adulation of Bolingbroke, uniting it with the theme of Bolingbroke's control over his own temperament, his dignified capacity to rise above circumstance, and still further with his eloquence as speaker and conversationalist. The poet indeed claims Bolingbroke's art of conversation as the model for his own facility in varied styles of writing:

And while the Muse now stoops, or now ascends,
To Man's low passions, or their glorious ends,
Teach me, like thee, in various nature wise,
To fall with dignity, with temper rise;
Form'd by thy converse, happily to steer
From grave to gay, from lively to severe;

(375-80)

Implicitly, this laudatory ending has also been anticipated by the verse-paragraph which precedes it, extolling the type of the ‘virtuous mind’ which grows first to embrace ‘friend, parent, neighbour’, and then the wider spirit of patriotism and of universal benevolence. Even Pope's most exalted line, ‘And Heav'n beholds its image in his breast’ is consistent with Pope's naming his mentor (in a letter to Swift, 15 October 1725; Correspondence, II, 332) as ‘the most Improv'd Mind … that ever was without shifting into a new body or being Paullo minus ab angelis’. While this passage of verse expresses the ideal growth to beneficence as the rippling of water outwards in circles, ‘as the small pebble stirs the peaceful lake’, Bolingbroke is associated with the ‘stream of Time’ and animating gale; it is he who becomes the exemplar of the spirit of motion animating the human and cosmic frames, and this final emphatic demonstration of Pope's friendship and regard for him is made an integral part of the overall argument of the Essay, as is the case with many of the satires and the Moral Essays.

The note of optimism and assurance on which Epistle IV ends is an attempt to affirm that the potential for perfection in this world may actually be realised; yet the greatest power of the whole poem, and equally the greatest problem which it presents to the analyst, lies in its curious blend of declamation and satire, optimism and reservation. The intellectual liveliness of the Essay is realised through these often unexpected shifts in perspective and in rhetorical delivery, and this was indeed Pope's wider aim in ‘steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite’; the effect is of a kind which could only have been achieved through poetry, and although Pope himself avowed that he chose the poetic medium for its conciseness (‘Design’, 29-31), it becomes apparent that it was also a medium in which the tensions embodied in the Essay could be kept alive. Within the terms of Pope's philosophy, however, it is evident that it is not finally possible to smooth out, or fully counterbalance, many of the difficulties and contradictions which pervade his optimistic ‘doctrine’. These difficulties are most conspicuous with regard to the ‘ruling passion’ theory, which it seems Pope is not prepared to rescue from an implied determinism and destructiveness. Discussing the problem of free will, Anne Barbeau has suggested that for Pope as for Dryden freedom is attained only in the subordination of personal desire to the ideal order, but that in the characters of Pope's satires the true drama of self-assertion against that order never really begins.⁴⁰ They are ‘more often guilty of failing to think and will’, and vice is seen to reflect above all the loss of a higher goal, a misdirecting of energies which quickly enters the cycle of repetition and stagnation. It is indeed the pursuit of ‘ends’ which absorbs Pope's attention consistently, both as moralist and psychologist; as we have seen, hope and happiness as incentive and aim are the fundamental questions on which the Essay's whole scheme is constructed, and the ultimate question in the ‘Argument’ of the Epistle to a Lady: Of the Characters of Women similarly concerns ‘the Aims, and the Fate of the Sex, both as to Power and Pleasure’. The integration of the ‘ruling passion’ theory with the content of the Moral Essays and the role which it plays in Pope's ‘characteristical satire’ thus raises particularly interesting questions; as I hope to show in the following chapter, the theory is the focal point of all four epistles, and not simply a pet notion which Pope has foisted onto their diverse subjects. Its preeminence within their arguments, however, might also be seen as a sign that Pope's philosophical assurance (or over-assurance) is increasingly undercut by pessimism.

Notes

1. Bertrand A. Goldgar, ‘Pope's theory of the passions: the background of Epistle II of the Essay on Man’, PQ, 41 (1962), 730-43; Douglas White, Pope and the Context of Controversy: The Manipulation of Ideas in ‘An Essay on Man’ (Chicago and London, 1970).

2. Pope's title for the Moral Essays was Epistles to Several Persons, and I agree with Bateson that his own title is more appropriate (TE, III (ii), ix, xxxvii); none the less I have referred to the works collectively as Moral Essays to avoid confusion with the various epistles of the ‘opus magnum’, the Essay on Man, and the Imitations of Horace.

3. See Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: 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 (Oxford, 1962), hereafter referred to as Mack, Reproductions.

4. See particularly Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will (1963), and Anthony Levi, French Moralists: The Theory of the Passions 1586 to 1649 (Oxford, 1964), who observes that ‘the theory of the passions was central to the moral debates of the period’ (p.3).

5. Mack (Reproductions, p.xviii) takes this sketch to be an outline for the closing sections of Epistle IV.

6. The statement which Pope may well have had in mind occurs in Leviathan (1651; ed C. B. MacPherson, 1968), part I, chapter XI: ‘Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later [sic]’ (p.160). Compare Thomas Stanley's History of Philosophy (3 vols, 1656-60), vol.I, part 4, on Aristippus: ‘That pleasure is our chiefe end is manifest, in that from our first infancy, without any instruction of others, we naturally aime thereat.’

7. La Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections … made English, 1694.

8. See, for example, Pierre Nicole's Moral Essays … Rendred into English, by a Person of Quality (3 vols, 1677-80), and Richard Baxter, A Treatise of Self-Denyall (1660).

9. Father Malebranche's Treatise Concerning the Search after Truth, trans. by T. Taylor (2 vols, Oxford, 1694); Pierre Charron, Of Wisdom … Made English by George Stanhope (2 vols, 1697); Antoine Le Grand, Man Without Passion, or, the Wise Stoick, trans. by ‘G.R.’ (1675).

10. So termed by Goldgar, p.735, after the ancient Peripatetic school of philosophers; see Clarke, Six Sermons on Several Occasions (1718); Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640); Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated (1724).

11. Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 vols, 1711; ed J. M. Robertson, 2 vols, New York, 1900); Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728).

12. For a discussion of relations between the Sceptics and Pyrrhonists, see Phillip Harth, Contexts of Dryden's Thought (1968), 6-13.

13. Compare Walter Charleton's Natural History of the Passions (1674), 94, describing pride as ‘a Vice so unreasonable and absurd, that if there were no Adulation to deceive men into a better conceipt of themselves than they really deserve; I should number it among the kinds of Madness’.

14. In general terms, this might be compared with the philosophical ideal of ‘Mediocrity, betwixt hope and despair of the future’, which Thomas Stanley glosses in his History of Philosophy, III (part 5), 252-3.

15. On the association of the passions with ‘prejudice’, see Kathleen Williams, Jonathan Swift and the Age of Compromise (Lawrence, Texas, 1955), 56.

16. The line is above all suggestive of Montaigne's emphasis on the defective nature of ‘raison’; but the word has a variety of significances for the French moralists, and for Montaigne in particular (see chapter 4 below, and Levi, pp.2, 59-63). Pope refers to ‘Reason’ with some ambiguity throughout the Essay, and its various functions are closely discussed by White, 74-125.

17. Compare Essay, II. 99, also on reason and the passions. White (181) makes note of the varying punctuations of this line in successive editions, and argues that it may well contain ‘a functional, rather than intentional or rigoristic, definition of virtue’.

18. James Lowde's Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man discusses virtue itself as ‘an Habit’, defining habit as ‘not a meer dull in-active thing, but Action is included in the Notion of it’ (203).

19. Pierre Nicole, for example, maintains that God has the direct power to destroy self-love by Grace (Moral Essays, III, 125).

20. J. F. Senault, The Use of the Passions … Put into English by Henry Earl of Monmouth (1671), 17. Compare Stanley's History of Philosophy, III, 202: ‘the generall affections of the Soul seem to be these four, Pain and Pleasure, the extream: Aversion and Desire, the intermediate … the rest are kinds of these … and may be reduced principally to Desire and Avoidance’ (ch. XIX, ‘Epicurus’).

21. La Rochefoucauld represents the bee's activity as a paradigm of selfishness: ‘self-love is the Love of a mans own self, and of everything else for his own sake … and if for a little while it dwell upon some other thing, 'tis only as Bees do, when they light upon Flowers, with a design to draw all the Virtue there to their own advantage’ (Maxims, no.II, 1-2).

22. The commonplace status of the ‘sea and wind’ metaphor is one point which casts doubt on Pope's supposed authorship of Spectator no.408 (1712); see Donald Bond, ‘Pope's contributions to the Spectator’, MLQ, 5 (1944), 69-78.

23. See, for example, Senault, Use of the Passions (part II, treatises I-VI), Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; I, ii, 3-15), and Charron's Of Wisdom (I, chs 19-33).

24. On the role of the senses, compare Antoine Le Grand, Man Without Passion, 91,93.

25. This is the ‘new hypothesis’ mentioned to Spence in May 1730 (Anecdotes, I, 130); see chapter 4 below, especially note 21. Charron makes explicit the possible link between ‘humours’ and dominant passions in a passage which is closely analogous to Pope's idea of the ‘ruling passion’: ‘L'on vainc et l'on estouffe une passion, par une autre passion plus forte: car jamais les passions ne sont en egale balance. Il y en a tousjours quelqu'une (comme aux humeurs du corps) qui predomine, qui regente et gourmande les autres.’ (De La Sagesse, Bordeaux, 1601, 304; Stanhope's translation (II, 11) omits the reference to ‘humours’).

26. See, for example, Stanley's History of Philosophy, III, 232 (‘Epicurus’): ‘as we would not have the life of a wise man to be like a torrent or rapid stream, so we would not it should be like a standing dead-pool: but rather like a river gliding on silently and quietly.’

27. With lines 191-2, compare Senault (part I, treatise IV, discourse iii, ‘That there are no Passions which may not be changed into Virtues’), 145: ‘a good emulation may be framed out of a well-regulated envy.’

28. Jacques Esprit, The Falshood of Human Virtue. Done out of French (1691), 40, also argues that friendships ‘are like so many Rivulets, that take their rise from the Spring of Self-Love’, but with a cynical emphasis quite contrary to Pope's.

29. Line 286 closely resembles one of Pope's Thoughts Upon Various Subjects (EC, X, 551), that ‘every man has just as much vanity as he wants understanding’, a maxim which is very much in the vein of La Rochefoucauld.

30. The Morgan MS notes on hope, virtue and immortality are important in connection with this passage; compare also Senault, 125: ‘There is none but will avow, That Passions are necessary to our soul, and that joy must perfect the Felicity which desire hath begun.’ Jacques Abbadie, The Art of Knowing One-Self (Oxford and London, 1698), 22, sees the fact of Man's immortality as the only justification of his infinite desires.

31. Irène Simon (‘An Essay on Man III, 109-146: a footnote’; English Studies, 50 (1969), 93-8) points out Pope's indebtedness here to certain of the later Stoic thinkers, citing specifically Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, III, xix, 62-3 as a source. As she argues, ‘some of the Stoics regarded the ties uniting man to his fellow-beings as arising from the natural affections, and philanthropia as an extension of the vital impulse’ (95), and Cicero, like Pope, is attempting to steer ‘betwixt extremes’ philosophically.

32. The contrasting view of the family in a state of Hobbesian faction is put in Pope's Thoughts (EC, X, 558): ‘A family is but too often a commonwealth of malignants: what we call the charities and ties of affinity, prove but so many separate and clashing interests: … It is but natural and reasonable to expect all this, and yet we fancy no comfort but in a family.’

33. Compare the subject of Senault's Use of the Passions, part I, treatise V, discourse iii: ‘That Princes win upon their Subjects either by Love or Fear’.

34. Compare Pope's Thoughts, (EC, X, 552): ‘Superstition is the spleen of the soul.’

35. James Lowde, in A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man, proposes that the Stoics were among the heathen as ‘enthusiasts’ among the Christians, who are motivated by ‘ill-guided Zeal’, and speculate ‘as if the Sun of Righteousness came only to enlighten the understanding; but not either to regulate the Will, or warm the Affections’ (34). Pope's lines (261-2) certainly seem to reflect beyond their immediate context to embrace ‘enthusiasts’ (see TE, III (i), 119n.).

36. An earlier version of III, 269-72 was designed in the Morgan MS (p.5, verso) to follow Epistle II, 249-54, linking the political implications of the passage to the general argument concerning ‘wants, frailties, passions’.

37. Pope refers his whole argument upon rewards to Wollaston, 71, 110, 182, in the Houghton MS (the bottom of p.3, verso).

38. The Religion of Nature Delineated, 1724, pp.110-11.

39. An Essay on the Origin of Evil (1731), translated by Edmund Law from King's De Origine Mali (1702), xiv. King also argues (xxv) that ‘the Mistake which some have run into, viz. that Merit is inconsistent with acting upon private Happiness, as an ultimate End, seems to have arisen from hence, viz. that they have not carefully enough distinguish'd between an inferior and ultimate End; the end of a particular Action, and the end of Action in general.’

40. Anne Barbeau, ‘Free will and the passions in Dryden and Pope’, Restoration, 4 (1980), 2-8.

A Note on Texts and Abbreviations

Unless otherwise stated, the text of Pope's poems used throughout is that of the Twickenham Edition (general editor John Butt; 11 volumes, 1939-69), abbreviated as ‘TE’, followed by volume number, as follows:

Volume I (1961)—Pastoral Poetry, and An Essay on Criticism. Edited by Emile Audra and Aubrey Williams.

Volume II (third edition, reset, 1962)—The Rape of the Lock and other Poems. Edited by Geoffrey Tillotson.

Volume III (i) (reprint, 1964)—An Essay On Man. Edited by Maynard Mack.

Volume III (ii) (second edition, 1961)—Epistles to Several Persons—Moral Essays. Edited by F. W. Bateson.

Volume IV (second edition, 1953)—Imitations of Horace, with An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Edited by John Butt.

Volume V (third edition, 1963)—The Dunciad. Edited by James Sutherland.

Volume VI (reprinted, 1964)—Minor Poems. Edited by Norman Ault, completed by John Butt.

Volume VII, VIII (1967)—The Iliad of Homer. Edited by Maynard Mack, Norman Callan, and others.

Volume IX, X (1967)—The Odyssey of Homer. Edited by Maynard Mack, Norman Callan, and others.

Volume XI—Index (1969).

Other abbreviations used are:

Anecdotes: Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men, edited by James M. Osborn (2 vols, Oxford, 1956).

Correspondence: The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, edited by George Sherburn (5 vols, Oxford, 1956).

Dryden, Poems: The Poems of John Dryden, edited by James Kinsley (4 vols, Oxford, 1958).

Dryden, Essays: ‘Of Dramatic Poesy’ and other Critical Essays, edited by George Watson (2 vols, 1962).

EC: The Works of Alexander Pope, edited by W. Elwin and W.J. Courthope (10 vols, 1871-89).

Spectator: The Spectator, edited by Donald F. Bond (5 vols, Oxford, 1965).

Swift, Prose Writings: The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, edited by Herbert Davies (12 vols, Oxford, 1939-55).

Periodicals

ECS: Eighteenth Century Studies.

ELH: English Literary History.

HLQ: The Huntington Library Quarterly.

JEGP: Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

JHI: Journal of the History of Ideas.

MLN: Modern Language Notes.

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly.

MLR: Modern Language Review.

PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

PQ: Philological Quarterly.

REL: Review of English Literature.

RES: Review of English Studies (n.s.: new series).

SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900.

YES: Yearbook of English Studies.