Rape of the Lock and Other Poems | Page 6

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 living always in boiling water.--This part would have come into my 'Brutus' [an epic poem which Pope never completed], which is planned already. The fourth would have been on Morality; in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of it."
It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Pope with his irregular methods of work and illogical