Rape of the Lock and Other Poems | Page 6

1726, Swift visited Pope and encouraged him to complete a satire
which he seems already to have begun on the dull critics and hack
writers of the day. For one cause or another its publication was deferred
until 1728, when it appeared under the title of the 'Dunciad'. Here Pope
declared open war upon his enemies. All those who had attacked his
works, abused his character, or scoffed at his personal deformities,
were caricatured as ridiculous and sometimes disgusting figures in a
mock epic poem celebrating the accession of a new monarch to the
throne of Dullness. The 'Dunciad' is little read to-day except by
professed students of English letters, but it made, naturally enough, a
great stir at the time and vastly provoked the wrath of all the dunces
whose names it dragged to light. Pope has often been blamed for
stooping to such ignoble combat, and in particular for the coarseness of

his abuse, and for his bitter jests upon the poverty of his opponents. But
it must be remembered that no living writer had been so scandalously
abused as Pope, and no writer that ever lived was by nature so quick to
feel and to resent insult. The undoubted coarseness of the work is in
part due to the gross license of the times in speech and writing, and
more particularly to the influence of Swift, at this time predominant
over Pope. And in regard to Pope's trick of taunting his enemies with
poverty, it must frankly be confessed that he seized upon this charge as
a ready and telling weapon. Pope was at heart one of the most
charitable of men. In the days of his prosperity he is said to have given
away one eighth of his income. And he was always quick to succor
merit in distress; he pensioned the poet Savage and he tried to secure
patronage for Johnson. But for the wretched hack writers of the
common press who had barked against him he had no mercy, and he
struck them with the first rod that lay ready to his hands.
During his work on the 'Dunciad', Pope came into intimate relations
with Bolingbroke, who in 1725 had returned from his long exile in
France and had settled at Dawley within easy reach of Pope's villa at
Twickenham. Bolingbroke was beyond doubt one of the most brilliant
and stimulating minds of his age. Without depth of intellect or solidity
of character, he was at once a philosopher, a statesman, a scholar, and a
fascinating talker. Pope, who had already made his acquaintance, was
delighted to renew and improve their intimacy, and soon came wholly
under the influence of his splendid friend. It is hardly too much to say
that all the rest of Pope's work is directly traceable to Bolingbroke. The
'Essay on Man' was built up on the precepts of Bolingbroke's
philosophy; the 'Imitations of Horace' were undertaken at Bolingbroke's
suggestion; and the whole tone of Pope's political and social satire
during the years from 1731 to 1738 reflects the spirit of that opposition
to the administration of Walpole and to the growing influence of the
commercial class, which was at once inspired and directed by
Bolingbroke. And yet it is exactly in the work of this period that we
find the best and with perhaps one exception, the 'Essay on Man', the
most original, work of Pope. He has obtained an absolute command
over his instrument of expression. In his hands the heroic couplet sings,
and laughs, and chats, and thunders. He has turned from the ignoble

warfare with the dunces to satirize courtly frivolity and wickedness in
high places. And most important of all to the student of Pope, it is in
these last works that his personality is most clearly revealed. It has
been well said that the best introduction to the study of Pope, the man,
is to get the 'Epistle to Arbuthnot' by heart.
Pope gradually persuaded himself that all the works of these years, the
'Essay on Man', the 'Satires, Epistles', and 'Moral Essays', were but
parts of one stupendous whole. He told Spence in the last years of his
life: "I had once thought of completing my ethic work in four
books.--The first, you know, is on the Nature of Man [the 'Essay on
Man']; the second would have been on knowledge and its limits--here
would have come in an Essay on Education, part of which I have
inserted in the 'Dunciad' ['i.e.' in the Fourth Book, published in 1742].
The third was to have treated of Government, both ecclesiastical and
civil--and this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have
said what 'I would' have said without provoking every church on the
face of the earth; and I did not care for