The noblest fruits the planter's hope may mock,
Which thrive inserted on the savage stock.
[1206] He argues that our primitive tendencies are too various to be steady. Man is mercurial and fickle till his numerous passions are lost in the ruling passion, which converts our changeable propensities into a single desire. Under the government of reason this "savage" and vicious "stock" sends forth a healthy shoot of virtue which is rendered strong and stable by the vigour of the ruling passion, or parent stem. The theory is wrong throughout. People are not composed of only one passion, virtue cannot be the product of a vice, and the simulated virtue which proceeds from a solitary passion will be as contracted as its cause. Pope's catalogue of the ruling passions, and their attendant virtues, exhibits a counterfeit dismembered virtue,—a single false limb in the place of a complete and living body. An unmaimed virtue requires the cultivation of our nature in its complexity, and virtues are grafted on lawful tendencies, and not on lawless passions.
[1207] Ver. 184 is followed by this couplet in the MS.:
As dulcet pippins from the crabtree come,
As sloes' rough juices melt into a plum.
[1208] Pope probably alluded to Swift when he spoke of the "crops of wit and honesty" which were the product of "spleen, obstinacy, and hate." The spleen and hate engendered wit by prompting satiric effusions; but wit is not in itself a virtue, and when Pope inserted it in his catalogue he must have been thinking of the moral ends it might subserve.
[1209] MS.:
Vain-glory, courage, justice can supply.
[1210] MS.:
Envy, in critics and old maids the devil,
Is emulation in the learn'd and civil.
"Emulation," says Bishop Butler, "is merely the desire of equality with, or superiority over others, with whom we compare ourselves. To desire the attainment of this equality, or superiority, by the particular means of others being brought down to our level, or below it, is, I think, the distinct notion of envy." A man who was made up of rivalry, which is Pope's supposition, would be an odious character, even without the additional taint of envy, from which, nevertheless, he could hardly be free.