The fourth epistle treats of Happiness, and was a supplement imposed on the poet by Bolingbroke. The professed object was to refute the atheist, who maintained that the condition of mankind was not regulated by the rules of justice, and thence inferred that there could be no superintending Providence. The real intention of the "guide, philosopher, and friend" was to deprive divines of the argument for the immortality of the soul which they built upon the want of proportion between men's conduct and happiness. Pope was partly the dupe of Bolingbroke, and partly his accomplice. He may not have seen the full scope of his instructor's lessons, but he knew that they favoured annihilation, and, to please "the master of the poet and the song," the poet forbore to assert the opposite belief. His orthodox friends complained of the omission, and Pope was driven to deny that there was any connection between the purpose of his Essay and the doctrine of a future state. After mentioning to Spence that he had omitted the address to our Saviour by the advice of Berkeley, he added, "One of our priests, who are more narrow-minded than yours, made a less sensible objection to the epistle on Happiness. He was very angry that there was nothing said in it of our eternal happiness hereafter, though my subject was expressly to treat only of the state of man here."[886] He subsequently extended the remark to the entire poem. "Some wonder why I did not take in the fall of man in my Essay, and others how the immortality of the soul came to be omitted. The reason is plain: they both lay out of my subject, which was only to consider man as he is in his present state, not in his past or future."[887] When Pope told Spence that he could not discuss the fall of man in his Essay, because the "past state" of man was foreign to his subject, he had forgotten the contents of his third epistle, which treats of primitive man, the age of innocence, and the depravation of mankind through eating meat. When he said that a future state "lay out of his subject," he did not perceive the true bearings of his promise to "vindicate the ways of God to man,"[888] nor the force of his own admission that to pronounce upon the fitness of man's nature, to judge "the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what relation it is placed in, and what is the proper end and purpose of its being."[889] This is the language of common sense. Man's condition on earth is adapted to his destiny, which can alone explain and justify his position in the world. The justice and goodness of the Deity wear a totally different aspect according as we discover evidence that life is a discipline for immortality, or a sorrowful transit to annihilation. The first epistle, again, is on the "nature and state of man with respect to the universe;" and in this relation of man to the universe, the one inquiry which gives importance to the rest, is whether we are to have a share in the eternal system of things, or whether, as the poet says of vegetables, we are mere "bubbles which rise from the sea of matter, break, and return to it."[890] The destiny of man was at the root of Pope's subject, and he could not have thought otherwise unless he had been bent upon accommodating his philosophy to the infidelity of Bolingbroke.
The weak attempt to use language which would fit both infidelity and belief, led to sorry conclusions. Pope allowed that it was God who instilled into man a hope of immortality, with the object of soothing him during his earthly career; but the poet was careful to employ expressions which implied that the hope might be a delusion.[891] He thus vindicated the ways of God by acknowledging that the Creator of the universe might be a deceiver. As the hope, which he confessed to be a promise engraved on the heart of man by the finger of God, might be false, the fears of future punishment imprinted on the conscience could not be more trustworthy. The christian who died, exulting, at the stake, in the flower of his age, a martyr to conscience, and the miscreant, who went terrified to execution, oppressed by the sense of his crimes, might both be mocked by the lying voice which spoke through the nature bestowed on them by their Maker. The poet could see no objection to the supposition that the Governor of the world might rule by promises he never intended to keep, and by threats he never intended to enforce.
The more we look into the nature which the Deity has conferred upon man, the more untenable Pope's alternative appears. All our best aims,—the efforts after holiness, love, knowledge, and rational happiness,—are a progressive work in which the mind is increasingly fitted for the enjoyment of its aspirations, without once attaining to a satisfactory realisation of its desires. Especially the Deity is hidden from our sight; and devout souls would be baulked of the primary purpose of their existence unless they were to behold him at last. The legitimate deduction is strengthened when we consider the afflictive methods by which we advance towards the appointed ends of our being. The toils of virtuous men, their pangs of body, their anguish of mind, their sacrifices to duty, their heroic martyrdoms, are irreconcileable with the wisdom and goodness of the Deity if total extinction is the meed of victory to the suffering soldier. The painful education of the soul, which is unintelligible as an abortive preliminary to annihilation, becomes plain as a preparation to a higher state, in which the purified spirit enters upon the enjoyment of its regenerated faculties. Pope disregarded the fundamental principle of his Essay. The burthen of his argument in his first epistle is that the evils of the world are explained by the hypothesis that they have an ulterior end. The moral life of man is the sphere in which we can best perceive the necessity for the principle, and follow its wise operation; and it was just this instance of a clear exemplification of his law which Pope was willing to reject. He admitted that the life of the saint upon earth might require no sequel, that his brief and self-denying history might properly begin and end with his passage from the cradle to the grave, that his implanted hopes and fears might be a deception, the objects proposed to his faculties a vain enticement, his sufferings a fruitless discipline, his conquest over sin a barren triumph, his growth in holiness the signal for resolving him into dust.
These considerations are not affected by the question of the distribution of happiness. Rewards and punishments might be meted out with an even hand, and this life singly would still be quite incompetent to fulfil the conditions of man's nature. But the pretext of Bolingbroke is itself unfounded, and he yielded to the exigencies of his infidelity when he maintained that the world had never furnished examples of unequal happiness which could call for future redress. Pope's efforts to prove the paradox are a continuous series of contradictions, sophistries, and misstatements. "Virtue alone," he says, "is happiness below," and "God intends happiness to be equal."[892] It follows, from these premises, that Pope did not mean that all the world were equally happy. Happiness he holds to be proportioned to virtue; the best men are the richest in earthly felicity. The supposition is repugnant to innumerable appearances, and Pope endeavoured to evade them by contending that happiness is not placed in "externals."[893] "Virtue's prize," he says, "is the soul's calm sunshine which nothing can destroy;" and he justly calls men "weak and foolish" who imagine that a better reward would be "a crown, a coach-and-six, a conqueror's sword," or the gown which is the badge of official dignity.[894] The fallacy is upon the surface. "The soul's calm sunshine" may mean peace of conscience or complete felicity. In the first sense it cannot be "destroyed" by physical torture; in the second sense, physical torture overclouds the "sunshine" and disturbs the "calm." It is vain to pretend that a virtuous man upon the rack has the same amount of mental ease as when he is in bodily comfort. "Externals" are one element in human happiness, or the worst persecutions which have desolated the world could not have occasioned the smallest exceptional sufferings to the good. "If pain," says Mackintosh, "were not an evil, cruelty would not be a vice."[895] Pope, in his luxurious retirement at Twickenham, might exclaim, "Condition, circumstance, is not the thing."[896] He would have thought differently if he had been the slave of a brutal master, or had been immured in one of the dungeons called "little-ease," where a prisoner of stout frame and sturdy principles was sometimes maimed in the process of squeezing him into a space too small for his coffin.
Pope's reason for his opinion is weaker than the opinion itself. "Present ill," he says, "is not a curse, nor present joy a good," since joy and misery depend on our "future views of better or worse," and "the balance of happiness" is kept even while the seemingly fortunate are "placed in fear," and the unfortunate in "hope."[897] "Pope's sylphs," remarked Fox to Rogers, "are the prettiest invention in the world. He failed most, I think, in sense; he seldom knew what he meant to say."[898] Here we have an instance of the failing. His proposition is that present happiness is independent of "externals," and his argument asserts that it is not. If "fortune's gifts" invariably fill the virtuous with "fear," and unfortunate circumstances buoy them up with "hope," if happiness depends exclusively on "future views of better," and misery on apprehensions of "worse," it follows that virtue imprisoned and persecuted is "in joy," and when free and prosperous is distressed. "Externals" are not, as Pope pretends, indifferent; he has merely transferred the preponderating weight to the opposite scale. Adversity is a more exhilarating state than prosperity; the inmate of "little-ease" was happier than his brethren of kindred virtue who were at large. Rewards and punishments should be interchanged. Criminals should be condemned to a life of luxury, and public benefactors should be sent to jail. The feelings Pope ascribed to the human mind are fictitious. Fear of reverses which do not appear to be impending, has little influence in marring enjoyment, and hope alleviates torments without depriving them of their sting.
The poet proceeds to unfold more particularly "what the happiness of individuals is, as far as is consistent with the constitution of this world."[899] All the good that God meant for mankind, "all the joys of sense, all the pleasures of reason, lie in three words,—health, peace, and competence."[900] The passage was versified from Bolingbroke, who for "health" has "health of body," for "peace" has "tranquillity of mind," and for "competence" has "competency of wealth."[901] Social intercourse and liberty must be added to the list, or "all the joys of sense," and all "the pleasures of reason" are compatible with solitary confinement. Pope flings aside his previous doctrines. Four lines earlier every individual who had the misfortune to possess "all the joys of sense" was the slave of fear. Now these accompaniments are pronounced essential to happiness. Lately happiness was independent of externals, and now health of body and competency of wealth are declared to be indispensable. Pope's change of front did not strengthen his position. As health, peace, and competence are necessary to happiness they must be constant attendants on worth, or his paradox that happiness is proportioned to virtue falls to the ground. He accordingly affirmed, in a suppressed couplet, that "the blessings were only denied to error, pride, or vice," and the language in the text, to have any pertinency, must bear the same construction. But will virtue secure health? Yes, replies Pope, for "health consists with temperance alone," which, for the purpose of his argument, must mean that all the temperate are healthy. Safe from casualties, infection, and every other disorder, they bear about with them a charmed life, and die at last in a good old age. The poet passes over "competence," and in a subsequent part of his epistle allows that "virtue sometimes starves."[902]
He had no sooner resolved happiness into "health, peace, and competence," and claimed them for virtue, than he admits that vice may be "blessed" and virtue "cursed," or afflicted. A fresh assumption is introduced to restore the balance. "Contempt," he says, dogs "vice;" "compassion" attends upon "virtue."[903] The new powers are not more competent to the task assigned them than the hope and fear he had invoked before. Men who are not truly virtuous, and yet not infamous for vice, have frequently troops of friends, and meet with none of the contempt which is to bring down their happiness to the standard of their worth. Virtue, on the other hand, instead of rousing the compassion of those who could protect it, has, in numberless instances, provoked persecution, bonds, and death. Where the virtue is not the cause of the misery the sufferers are often not in contact with the compassion, or the sympathy is far from being an equivalent for the sorrow. Heaping fallacy upon fallacy Pope falls back upon the plea that "virtue disdains the advantages of prosperous vice."[904] Disdains the vicious means but constantly longs for the prosperous end. The martyr to conscience when shut up in "little-ease" was not indifferent to liberty. His compressed body, his cramped limbs, the deprivation of light, fresh air, books, and friends were horrible torture. There could be no stronger proof that happiness was not proportioned to virtue than that his "disdain of vice" should have compelled him to accept the alternative of a dungeon.
Hitherto Pope has argued that our virtue is the measure of our happiness. He next descends to the subsidiary proposition that "no man is unhappy through virtue," which means that the disasters of the virtuous are never the consequences of their virtue; they are the "ills and accidents that chance to all."[905] The proposition contains two assertions,—the first that virtue never brings upon us "ills and accidents," the second that it cannot protect us from them. Under the first head Pope points to the heroes who perished fighting for their country, and tells us that they did not meet their fate from "virtue," but from "contempt of life."[906] The martyrs to conscience may be reckoned by hundreds of thousands, and Pope would have us understand that none of them braved death in obedience to duty; they were simply weary of existence. He would deprive humanity of its noblest triumphs that virtue may be absolved from its manifest effects. He glides lightly over the absurd pretence that virtue has never entailed suffering, and dwells upon the second half of his proposition,—his admission that virtuous and wicked are equally exposed to "ills and accidents." Good and bad men, he says, are alike subjected to the laws of nature, and God will not "reverse these laws for his favourites." A falling wall crushes passengers without regard to virtue or vice;[907] blind forces take no cognisance of morality. The doctrine is inadmissible; the laws of nature cannot supersede the providence of God. Man's welfare and very existence are at the mercy of many human and material agencies which man is unable to anticipate or control. The Almighty preserves a glorious order in his physical laws, and it is incredible that he should permit a chaos in the highest department of our globe. He would not guard against irregularities in the action of insensate matter, and allow good men to be the sport of the endless hazards of life. The conclusions of reason are confirmed by revelation. "Are not two sparrows," says our Lord, "sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows."[908] He who sees from the beginning the entire chain of causes and effects, can devise laws which will provide for particular cases without any subsequent interference. Or a man may be protected from a falling wall by a sudden impulse to his mind whereby he may forget to go, or have a motive to loiter, or to hasten forward, or to take another road.[909] Or there may be a temporary interference with mechanical laws; or the Almighty may use methods inconceivable by us. Not that his superintendence implies that his servants are safe from any of the ordinary operations of natural laws. Habitually to exempt the good would be to abolish prudence in their dealings with physical forces, and to engender presumption in the region of morals. The insecurity which keeps virtue vigilant and faithful, the hardy discipline which draws out ennobling energies, and corrects baser properties, would be turned to carelessness and corruption. The interests of the virtuous will not permit that they should be constant and conspicuous exceptions to the common lot. But the "ills and accidents" never strike at random. The human race is not with the Deity an abstract conception. He beholds every creature in its individuality, and shields and chastens each by the rules of a wisdom which can never be suspended. The idea we frame of his attributes negatives the hypothesis of Pope. God cannot fail to establish a harmony between physical laws, and the dispensation which befits each particular man.
In admitting that calamities befall mankind without reference to virtue and vice, Pope was drawn into statements which completely upset his principle that happiness is always proportioned to desert. He asks if virtue "made Digby, the son, expire, why his father lives full of days and honour?"[910] He might be asked in turn, why, if good men in this life have an equal share of happiness, the father should have lived fifty years longer than the son? For happiness to be equal there must be an equality of duration as well as of degree. He grants that "virtue sometimes starves," and thinks it enough to answer, in the face of historical facts, that virtue does not occasion the destitution. "Bread," he says, "is the price of toil, not of virtue, and the good man may be weak, be indolent."[911] Indolence is a vice, and irrelevant to the discussion. The weakness may be a misfortune, and Lazarus is not less deserving because he is covered with sores. Or the "good man" may be neither "indolent" nor "weak," and yet be starved, which happened to thousands of protestants who were driven from their homes and employments by the callous bigotry of Louis XIV. Whatever the cause of the starvation, the balance of happiness is disturbed, and Pope, to mask the flaw in his argument, added that the "claim" of starving virtue was not "to plenty, but content."[912] Now contentment is of two kinds. There is a contentment of happiness which is incompatible with excessive suffering, and a contentment of resignation which acquiesces in the severest dispensations of Providence. St. Paul said in the latter sense, "I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content,"[913] which does not prevent his speaking repeatedly of the afflictions he endured, or keep him from asserting that "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous."[914] Of this type is the contentment of starving virtue,—a patient submission to trial, and not the contentment which is required to produce equality of happiness. Human nature has been denied the capacity for neutralising all degrees of anguish. Pope straightway slides off into the subterfuge that the craving for bread is "a demand for riches." He inveighs against the rapacious desire, and insists that nothing will satisfy man.[915] He undertook to prove that happiness is proportioned to virtue, and finding his text too hard for him he substitutes an invective against insane discontent.
A few undoubted truths are appended to the main argument of Pope. He says that only a fool will think a man with health, and a clear conscience, hated by God because he lacks a thousand a year.[916] He tells us that genuine honour and shame are dependent on conduct, and not on high or low station,[917] and that titles, power, fame, etc., are insufficient to make bad men happy.[918] He comes to the instance of "superior parts," and the inconsistency recommences. He supposes the great intellect to be combined with learning, wisdom, and patriotic virtue.[919] Out of compliment to his "guide, philosopher, and friend," Pope takes Bolingbroke for the typical example of this imposing union of lofty qualities. In him we are to behold the universal fate of generous, philanthropic wisdom. He "is condemned to drudge in business or in arts" without any one to "second" him, or "judge" him rightly. He aspires "to teach truths, and save a sinking land; few understand, all fear, and none aid him." When he "drudged in arts" the world received coldly his wordy rhetoric. When he "drudged in business" the country only saw in him an intriguer for power. Novel ideas in politics, signal originality in literature, often work their way slowly. Genius and patriotism have faith in their conceptions, and are not daunted by opposition. The public spirit which has to battle at all can seldom be placed under softer conditions than Bolingbroke enjoyed. He had every luxury of a civilised age; he had health and energy; he had unbroken leisure; he had books at will; he had freedom to say and write what he pleased; he was safe from every injury to person and property. Virtuous patriotism, sitting at ease in a delightful library, and surrounded by blessings, might be expected to exert itself with cheerful hope to enlighten a tasteless and misguided nation. Quite the reverse. "Painful pre-eminence!" exclaims Pope, and he declares that Bolingbroke by being "above life's weakness" is above "its comforts too." The moral is that wisdom is not to be desired; the pain exceeds the benefit. Happiness is proportioned to virtue under the worst conditions of brutal persecution, and yet wise and virtuous patriots, in the midst of the comforts of life, are deprived of every comfort in life by the lamentable circumstance that they are "above life's weakness."