NOTES ON EPISTLE I.
Ver. 7, 8. A wild,—Or garden,] The wild relates to the human passions, productive, as he explains in the second epistle, both of good and evil. The garden to human reason, so often tempting us to transgress the bounds God has set to it, and wander in fruitless enquiries.
Ver. 12. Of all who blindly creep, &c.] i.e. Those who only follow the blind guidance of their passions; or those who leave behind them common sense and sober reason, in their high flights through the regions of metaphysics. Both which follies are exposed in the fourth Epistle, where the popular and philosophical errors concerning happiness are detected. The figure is taken from animal life.
Ver. 15. Laugh where we must, &c.] Intimating, that human follies are so strangely absurd, that it is not in the power of the most compassionate, on some occasions, to restrain their mirth; and that its crimes are so flagitious, that the most candid have seldom an opportunity, on this subject, to exercise their virtue.
Ver. 16. Vindicate the ways of God to man.] Milton's phrase, judiciously altered, who says, justify the ways of God to man. Milton was addressing himself to believers, and delivering reasons or explaining the ways of God; this idea, the word justify precisely conveys. Pope was addressing himself to unbelievers, and exposing such of their objections whose ridicule and absurdity arises from the judicial blindness of the objectors; he, therefore, more fitly employs the word vindicate, which conveys the idea of a confutation attended with punishment. Thus suscipere vindictam legis, to undertake the defence of the law, implies punishing the violators of it.
| Ver. 19, 20. | Of man, what see we but his station here, |
| From which to reason, or to which refer? |
The sense is, "we see nothing of man but as he stands at present in his station here; from which station, all our reasonings on his nature and end must be drawn; and to this station they must all be referred." The consequence is, that our reasonings on his nature and end must needs be very imperfect.
Ver. 21. Through worlds unnumbered, &c.] Hunc cognoscimus solummodo per proprietates suas et attributa, et per sapientissimas et optimas rerum structuras et causas finales. Newtoni Princ. Schol. gen. sub. fin.
Ver. 30. The strong connexions, nice dependencies,] The thought is very noble, and expressed with great beauty and philosophic exactness. The system of the universe is a combination of natural and moral fitnesses, as the human system is of body and spirit. By the strong connexions, therefore, the poet alluded to the natural part; and by the nice dependencies, to the moral. For the Essay on Man is not a system of naturalism, on the philosophy of Bolingbroke, but a system of natural religion, on the philosophy of Newton. Hence it is, that where he supposes disorders may tend to some greater good in the natural world, he supposes they may tend likewise to some greater good in the moral, as appears from these sublime images in the following lines:
If plagues and earthquakes break not heav'n's design,
Why then a Borgia or a Catiline?
Who knows, but he whose hand the lightning forms,
Who heaves old ocean, and who wings the storms,
Pours fierce ambition in a Cæsar's mind,
Or turns young Ammon loose to scourge mankind?
Ver. 35 to 42.] In these lines the poet has joined the beauty of argumentation to the sublimity of thought; where the similar instances, proposed for his adversaries' examination, show as well the absurdity of their complaints against order, as the fruitlessness of their inquiries into the arcana of the Godhead.
Ver. 41. Or ask of yonder, &c.] On these lines M. Voltaire thus descants: "Pope dit que l'homme ne peut savoir pourquoi les lunes de Jupiter sont moins grandes que Jupiter. Il se trompe en cela; c'est une erreur pardonnable. Il n'y a point de mathématicien qui n'eût fait voir," &c. And so goes on to show, like a great mathematician as he is, that it would be very inconvenient for the page to be as big as his lord and master. It is pity all this fine reasoning should proceed on a ridiculous blunder. The poet thus reproves the impious complainer of the order of Providence: You are dissatisfied with the weakness of your condition. But, in your situation, the nature of things requires just such a creature as you are: in a different situation, it might have required that you should be still weaker. And though you see not the reason of this in your own case, yet, that reasons there are, you may see in the case of other of God's creatures:
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller or stronger than the weeds they shade;
Or ask of yonder argent fields above,
Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove.
Here, says the poet, the ridicule of the weeds' and the satellites' complaint, had they the faculties of speech and reasoning, would be obvious to all; because their very situation and office might have convinced them of their folly. Your folly, says the poet to his complainers, is as great, though not so evident, because the reason is more out of sight; but that a reason there is, may be demonstrated from the attributes of the Deity. This is the poet's clear and strong reasoning; from whence, we see, he was so far from saying, that man could not know the cause why Jove's satellites were less than Jove, that all the force of his reasoning turns upon this, that man did see and know it, and should from thence conclude, that there was a cause of this inferiority as well in the rational as in the material creation.
Ver. 64. Egypt's God:] Called so, because the god Apis was worshipped universally over the whole land of Egypt.
Ver. 87. Who sees with equal eye, &c.] Matt. x. 29.
Ver. 93. What future bliss, &c.] It hath been objected, that "the system of the best weakens the other natural arguments for a future state; because, if the evils which good men suffer, promote the benefit of the whole, then every thing is here in order, and nothing amiss that wants to be set right, nor has the good man any reason to expect amends, when the evils he suffered had such a tendency." To this it may be replied, 1. That the poet tells us, Ep. iv. ver. 361, that God loves from whole to parts. Therefore, if, in the beginning and progress of the moral system, the good of the whole be principally consulted, yet, on the completion of it, the good of particulars will be equally provided for. 2. The system of the best is so far from weakening those natural arguments, that it strengthens and supports them. For if those evils, to which good men are subject, be mere disorders, without any tendency to the greater good of the whole, then, though we must, indeed, conclude that they will hereafter be set right, yet this view of things, representing God as suffering disorders for no other end than to set them right, gives us too low an idea of the divine wisdom. But if those evils (according to the system of the best) contribute to the greater perfection of the whole, such a reason may be then given for their permission, as supports our idea of divine wisdom to the highest religious purposes. Then, as to the good man's hopes of retribution, these still remain in their original force: for our idea of God's justice, and how far that justice is engaged to a retribution, is exactly and invariably the same on either hypothesis. For though the system of the best supposes that the evils themselves will be fully compensated by the good they produce to the whole, yet this is so far from supposing that particulars shall suffer for a general good, that it is essential to this system, that, at the completion of things, when the whole is arrived to the state of utmost perfection, particular and universal good shall coincide;
Such is the world's great harmony, that springs
From order, union, full consent of things:
Where small and great, where weak and mighty, made
To serve, not suffer, strengthen, not invade, &c.—Ep. iii. ver. 295.
Which coincidence can never be, without a retribution to each good man for the evils he has suffered here below.
Ver. 97. from home,] The construction is,—The soul, uneasy and confined, being from home, expatiates, etc. By which words, it was the poet's purpose to teach, that the present life is only a state of probation for another, more suitable to the essence of the soul, and to the free exercise of its qualities.
Ver. 110. He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;] The French translator, M. l'Abbé du Resnel, has turned the line thus:
Il ne désire point cette céleste flamme
Qui des purs Seraphins dévore, et nourrit l'ame.
i.e. The savage does not desire that heavenly flame, which at the same time that it devours the souls of pure seraphim, nourishes them. On which M. de Crousaz (who, by the assistance of a translation abounding in these absurdities, writ a Commentary on the Essay on Man, in which we find nothing but greater absurdities) remarks, "Mr. Pope, in exalting the fire of his poetry by an antithesis, throws occasionally his ridicule on those heavenly spirits. The Indian, says the poet, contents himself without any thing of that flame, which devours at the same time that it nourisheth." Comm. p. 77. But the poet is clear of this imputation. Nothing can be more grave or sober than his English, on this occasion; nor, I dare say, to do the translator justice, did he aim to be ridiculous. It is the sober, solid theology of the Sorbonne. Indeed, had such a writer as Mr. Pope used this school-jargon, we might have suspected he was not so serious as he should be. The reader, as he goes along, will see more of this translator's peculiarities. And the conclusion of the commentary on the fourth Epistle will show why I have been so careful to preserve them.
Ver. 131. Ask for what end, &c.] If there be any fault in these lines, it is not in the general sentiment, but in the ill choice of instances made use of in illustrating it. It is the highest absurdity to think that earth is man's footstool, his canopy the skies, and the heavenly bodies lighted up principally for his use; yet surely, it is very excusable to suppose fruits and minerals given for this end.
Ver. 150. Then Nature deviates; &c.] "While comets move in very eccentric orbs, in all manner of positions, blind fate could never make all the planets move one and the same way in orbs concentric; some inconsiderable irregularities excepted, which may have risen from the mutual actions of comets and planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till this system wants a reformation." Sir Isaac Newton's Optics, Quæst. ult.
Ver. 155. If plagues, &c.] What hath misled M. de Crousaz in his censure of this passage, is his supposing the comparison to be between the effects of two things in this sublunary world; when not only the elegancy, but the justness of it, consists in its being between the effects of a thing in the universe at large, and the familiar, known effects of one in this sublunary world. For the position enforced in these lines is this, that partial evil tends to the good of the whole:
Respecting man, whatever wrong we call,
May, must be right, as relative to all.—Ver. 51.
How does the poet enforce it? If you will believe this critic, in illustrating the effects of partial moral evil in a particular system, by that of partial natural evil in the same system, and so he leaves his position in the lurch. But the poet reasons at another rate. The way to prove his point, he knew, was to illustrate the effect of partial moral evil in the universe, by partial natural evil in a particular system. Whether partial moral evil tend to the good of the universe, being a question which, by reason of our ignorance of many parts of that universe, we cannot decide but from known effects, the rules of good reasoning require that it be proved by analogy, i.e. setting it by, and comparing it with, a thing clear and certain; and it is a thing clear and certain, that partial natural evil tends to the good of our particular system.
Ver. 157. Who knows but He, &c.] The sublimity with which the great Author of Nature is here characterized, is but the second beauty of this fine passage. The greatest is the making the very dispensation objected to, the periphrasis of his title.
Ver. 174. And little less than angels, &c.] "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour." Psalm viii. 5.
Ver. 202. And stunned him, &c.] This instance is poetical, and even sublime, but misplaced. He is arguing philosophically in a case that required him to employ the real objects of sense only: and, what is worse, he speaks of this as a real object, If nature thundered, &c. The case is different where, in ver. 253, he speaks of the motion of the heavenly bodies, under the sublime conception of ruling angels: for whether there be ruling angels or no, there is real motion, which was all his argument wanted; but if there be no music of the spheres, there was no real sound, which his argument was obliged to find.
Ver. 209. Mark how it mounts, to man's imperial race,] M. du Resnel has turned the latter part of the line thus,
Jusqu'à l'homme, ce chef, ce roi de l'univers.
"Even to man, this head, this king of the universe," which is so sad a blunder, that it contradicts the poet's peculiar system; who, although he allows man to be king of this inferior world, yet he thinks it madness to make him king of the universe. If the philosophy and argument of the poem could not teach him this, yet methinks the poet's own words, in this very Epistle, might have prevented his mistake:
So man; who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown.
If the translator imagined that Mr. Pope was speaking ironically where he talks of man's imperial race, and so would heighten the ridicule of the original by ce roi de l'univers, the mistake is still worse; for the force of the argument depends upon its being said seriously; the poet being here speaking of a scale from the highest to the lowest in the mundane system.
Ver. 224. For ever separate, &c.] Near, by the similitude of the operation; separate, by the immense difference in the nature of the powers.
Ver. 226. What thin partitions, &c.] So thin, that the atheistic philosophers, as Protagoras, held that thought was only sense: and from thence concluded, that every imagination or opinion of every man was true; Πασα φαντασια εστιν αληθης. But the poet determines more philosophically that they are really and essentially different, how thin soever the partition be by which they are divided. Thus (to illustrate the truth of this observation) when a geometer considers a triangle, in order to demonstrate the equality of its three angles to two right ones, he has the picture or image of some sensible triangle in his mind, which is sense; yet, notwithstanding, he must needs have the notion or idea of an intellectual triangle likewise, which is thought; for this plain reason, because every image or picture of a triangle must needs be obtusangular, or rectangular, or acutangular; but that which, in his mind, is the subject of his proposition, is the ratio of a triangle, undetermined to any of these species. On this account it was that Aristotle said, Νοηματα τινι διοισει, του μη φαντασματα ειναι, η ουδε ταυτα φαντασματα, αλλ' ουκ ανευ φαντασματων. "The conceptions of the mind differ somewhat from sensible images; they are not sensible images, and yet not quite free or disengaged from sensible images."
Ver. 243. Or in the full creation leave a void, &c.] This is only an illustrating allusion to the Aristotelian doctrines of plenum and vacuum, the full and void here meant relating not to matter but to life.
Ver. 247. And if each system in gradation roll,] Alluding to the motion of the planetary bodies of each system, and to the figures described by that motion.
Ver. 251. Let earth unbalanced] i.e. Being no longer kept within its orbit by the different directions of its progressive and attractive motions,—which, like equal weights in a balance, keep it in an equilibre.
Ver. 253. Let ruling angels, &c.] The poet, throughout this work, has, with great art, used an advantage which his employing a Platonic principle for the foundation of his Essay, had afforded him; and that is, the expressing himself, as here, in Platonic language, which, luckily for his purpose, is highly poetical, at the same time that it adds a grace to the uniformity of his reasoning.
Ver. 259. What if the foot, &c.] This fine illustration in defence of the system of nature, is taken from St. Paul, who employed it to defend the system of grace.
Ver. 266. The great directing Mind, &c.] "Veneramur autem et colimus ob dominium. Deus enim sine dominio, providentiâ, et causis finalibus, nihil aliud est quam fatum et natura." Newtoni Princip. Schol. gener. sub finem.
Ver. 268. Whose body nature is, &c.] M. de Crousaz remarks, on this line, that "A Spinozist would express himself in this manner." I believe he would; for so the infamous Toland has done, in his atheist's liturgy, called Pantheisticon. But so would St. Paul likewise, who, writing on this subject, the omnipresence of God in his Providence, and in his Substance, says, in the words of a pantheistical Greek poet, In him we live, and move, and have our being; i.e. we are parts of him, his offspring: And the reason is, because a religious theist and an impious pantheist both profess to believe the omnipresence of God. But would Spinoza, as Mr. Pope does, call God the great directing mind of all, who hath intentionally created a perfect universe? Or would a Spinozist have told us,
The workman from the work distinct was known?
a line that overturns all Spinozism from its very foundations. But this sublime description of the Godhead contains not only the divinity of St. Paul; but, if that will not satisfy the men he writes against, the philosophy likewise of Sir Isaac Newton. The poet says,
All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul; &c.
The philosopher:—"In ipso continentur et moventur universa, sed absque mutuâ passione. Deus nihil patitur ex corporum motibus; illa nullam sentiunt resistentiam ex omnipræsentiâ Dei.—Corpore omni et figurâ corporeâ destituitur.—Omnia regit et omnia cognoscit.—Cum unaquæque spatii, particula sit semper, et unumquodque durationis indivisibile momentum, ubique certe rerum omnium Fabricator ac Dominus non erit nunquam, nusquam."
Mr. Pope:
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:
To him, no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
Sir Isaac Newton:—"Annon ex phænomenis constat esse entem incorporeum, viventem, intelligentem, omnipræsentem, qui in spatio infinito, tanquam sensorio suo, res ipsas intime cernat, penitusque perspiciat, totasque intra se præsens præsentes complectatur?"
But now, admitting there were an ambiguity in these expressions, so great that a Spinozist might employ them to express his own particular principles; and such a thing might well be, because the Spinozists, in order to hide the impiety of their principle, are wont to express the omnipresence of God in terms that any religious theist might employ; in this case, I say, how are we to judge of the poet's meaning? Surely by the whole tenor of his argument. Now, take the words in the sense of the Spinozists, and he is made, in the conclusion of the epistle, to overthrow all he had been advancing throughout the body of it: for Spinozism is the destruction of an universe, where every thing tends, by a foreseen contrivance in all its parts, to the perfection of the whole. But allow him to employ the passage in the sense of St. Paul, That we, and all creatures, live, and move, and have our being in God; and then it will be seen to be the most logical support of all that had preceded. For the poet, having, as we say, laboured through his epistle to prove, that every thing in the universe tends, by a foreseen contrivance, and a present direction of all its parts, to the perfection of the whole, it might be objected, that such a disposition of things, implying in God a painful, operose, and inconceivable extent of Providence, it could not be supposed that such care extended to all, but was confined to the more noble parts of the creation. This gross conception of the First Cause the poet exposes, by showing that God is equally and intimately present to every particle of matter, to every sort of substance, and in every instant of being.
Ver. 277. As full, as perfect, &c.] Which M. du Resnel translates thus,
Dans un homme ignoré sous une humble chaumière,
Que dans le séraphin, rayonnant de lumière.
i.e. "As well in the ignorant man, who inhabits a humble cottage, as in the seraph encompassed with rays of light." The translator, in good earnest thought, that a vile man that mourned could be no other than some poor country cottager. Which has betrayed M. de Crousaz into this important remark: "For all that, we sometimes find in persons of the lowest rank, a fund of probity and resignation which preserves them from contempt; their minds are, indeed, but narrow, yet fitted to their station," &c. Comm. p. 120. But Mr. Pope had no such childish idea in his head. He was here opposing the human species to the angelic; and so spoke of the first, when compared to the latter, as vile and disconsolate. The force and beauty of the reflection depend upon this sense; and, what is more, the propriety of it.
Ver. 278. As the rapt seraph, &c.] Alluding to the name seraphim, signifying burners.
Ver. 294. One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.] It will be difficult to think any caviller should have objected to this conclusion; especially when the author, in this very epistle, has himself thus explained it:
Respecting man, whatever wrong we call,
May, must be right, as relative to all.
So man, who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown;
Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal:
'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.
But without any regard to the evidence of this illustration, M. de Crousaz exclaims: "See the general conclusion, All that is, is right. So that at the sight of Charles the First losing his head on the scaffold, we must have said, this is right; at the sight too of his judges condemning him, we must have said, this is right; at the sight of some of these judges, taken and condemned for the action which he had owned to be right, we must have cried out, this is doubly right." Never was any thing more amazing than that the absurdities arising from the sense in which this critic takes the great principle, of whatever is, is right, did not show him his mistake. For could any one in his senses employ a proposition in a meaning from whence such evident absurdities immediately arise? I have observed, that this conclusion, whatever is, is right, is a consequence of these premises, that partial evil tends to universal good; which the author employs as a principle to humble the pride of man, who would impiously make God accountable for his creation. What then does common sense teach us to understand by whatever is, is right? Did the poet mean right with regard to man, or right with regard to God; right with regard to itself, or right with regard to its ultimate tendency? Surely with regard to God; for he tells us his design is to vindicate the ways of God to man. Surely with regard to its ultimate tendency; for he tells us again, all partial ill is universal good. Ver. 291. Now is this any encouragement to vice? Or does it take off from the crime of him who commits it, that God providentially produces good out of evil? Had Mr. Pope abruptly said in his conclusion, the result of all is, that whatever is, is right, the objector had even then been inexcusable for putting so absurd a sense upon the words, when he might have seen that it was a conclusion from the general principle above-mentioned; and therefore must necessarily have another meaning. But what must we think of him, when the poet, to prevent mistakes, had delivered, in this very place, the principle itself, together with this conclusion as the consequence of it?
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.
He could not have told his reader plainer that his conclusion was the consequence of that principle, unless he had written therefore in great church letters.