Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 2

by Thomas De Quincey

What is it, then, that he has attempted? Certainly he imagines himself to have done something or other in behalf of moral philosophy. For in a well-known couplet he informs us—

'That not in Fancy's maze he lingered long, But stooped to Truth, and moralized his song.'

Upon these lines a lady once made to me this very acute and significant remark. The particular direction, she said, in which Pope fancied that he came upon Truth, showed pretty clearly what sort of truth it was that he searched after. Had he represented Fancy, as often is done, soaring aloft amongst the clouds, then, because Truth must be held to lie in the opposite direction, there might have been pleaded a necessity for descending upon Truth, like one who is looking for mushrooms. But as Fancy, by good luck, is simply described as roaming about amongst labyrinths, which are always constructed upon dead levels, he had left it free for himself to soar after Truth into the clouds. But that was a mode of truth which Pope cared little for; if she chose to go galavanting amongst the clouds, Pope, for his part, was the last person to follow her. Neither was he the man to go down into a well in search of her. Truth was not liable to wet feet—but Pope was. And he had no such ardor for Truth as would ever lead him to forget that wells were damp, and bronchitis alarming to a man of his constitution.

Whatever service Pope may have meditated to the philosophy of morals, he has certainly performed none. The direct contributions which he offered to this philosophy in his 'Essay on Man,' are not of a nature to satisfy any party; because at present the whole system may be read into different, and sometimes into opposite meanings, according to the quality of the integrations supplied for filling up the chasms in the chain of the development. The sort of service, however, expected from Pope in such a field, falls in better with the style of his satires and moral epistles than of a work professedly metaphysical. Here, however, most eminently it is that the falseness and hypocrisy which besieged his satirical career have made themselves manifest; and the dilemma for any working-man who should apply himself to these sections of Pope's writings is precisely this: Reading them with the slight and languid attention which belongs to ordinary reading, they will make no particular discoveries of Pope's hollowness and treacherous infidelities to the truth, whether as to things or persons; but in such a case neither will they reap any benefit. On the other hand, if they so far carry out Lord Carlisle's advice as to enter upon the study of Pope in the spirit of earnest students, and so as really to possess themselves of the key to his inner mind, they will rise from their labors not so much in any spirit of gratitude for enlarged and humanizing views of man, as in a spirit of cynical disgust at finding that such views can be so easily counterfeited, and so often virtually betrayed.

[The paper of last month, [Footnote 7] on Lord Carlisle's lecture, having been written under the oppression of a nervous illness, accompanied by great suffering, may probably enough have been found heavy. Another objection to that paper is, that it too easily assumes the radical falseness, of Pope, as a notorious fact needing no evidence or illustration. To myself it did not need either. But to any casual reader, whose attention had never been attracted to the circumstantialities of Pope's satiric sketches, this assumption would be startling; and it would have done him a service to offer a few exemplifications of the vice attributed to Pope, both as substantiating the charge, and as investing it with some little amusement. This it had been my intention to do at the moment; but being disabled by the illness above-mentioned, I now supply the omission.]

Whom shall we pronounce a fit writer to be laid before an auditory of working-men, as a model of what is just in composition—fit either for conciliating their regard to literature at first or afterwards for sustaining it? The qualifications for such a writer are apparently these two: first, that he should deal chiefly with the elder and elementary affections of man, and under those relations which concern man's grandest capacities;—secondly, that he should treat his subject with solemnity, and not with sneer—with earnestness, as one under a prophet's burden of impassioned truth, and not with the levity of a girl hunting a chance-started caprice. I admire Pope in the very highest degree; but I admire him as a pyrotechnic for producing brilliant and evanescent effects out of elements that have hardly a moment's life within them. There is a flash and a startling explosion, then there is a dazzling coruscation, all purple and gold; the eye aches under the suddenness of a display that, springing like a burning arrow out of darkness, rushes back into darkness with arrowy speed, and in a moment all is over. Like festal shows, or the hurrying music of such shows—

'It was, and it is not.'

Untruly, therefore, was it ever fancied of Pope, that he belonged by his classification to the family of the Drydens. Dryden had within him a principle of continuity which was not satisfied without lingering upon his own thoughts, brooding over them, and oftentimes pursuing them through their unlinkings with the sequaciousness (pardon a Coleridgian word) that belongs to some process of creative nature, such as the unfolding of a flower. But Pope was all jets and tongues of flame; all showers of scintillation and sparkle. Dryden followed, genially, an impulse of his healthy nature. Pope obeyed, spasmodically, an overmastering febrile paroxysm. Even in these constitutional differences between the two are written and are legible the corresponding necessities of 'utter falsehood in Pope, and of loyalty to truth in Dryden.' Strange it is to recall this one striking fact, that if once in his life Dryden might reasonably have been suspected of falsehood, it was in the capital matter of religion. He ratted from his Protestant faith; and according to the literal origin of that figure he ratted; for he abjured it as rats abjure a ship in which their instinct of divination has deciphered a destiny of ruin, and at the very moment when Popery wore the promise of a triumph that might, at any rate, have lasted his time. Dryden was a Papist by apostasy; and perhaps, not to speak uncharitably, upon some bias from self-interest. Pope, on the other hand, was a Papist by birth, and by a tie of honor; and he resisted all temptations to desert his afflicted faith, which temptations lay in bribes of great magnitude prospectively, and in persecutions for the present that were painfully humiliating. How base a time-server does Dryden appear on the one side!—on the other, how much of a martyr should we be disposed to pronounce Pope! And yet, for all that, such is the overruling force of a nature originally sincere, the apostate Dryden wore upon his brow the grace of sincerity, whilst the pseudo-martyr Pope, in the midst of actual fidelity to his Church, was at his heart a traitor—in the very oath of his allegiance to his spiritual mistress had a lie upon his lips, scoffed at her whilst kneeling in homage to her pretensions, and secretly forswore her doctrines whilst suffering insults in her service.

The differences as to truth and falsehood lay exactly where, by all the external symptoms, they ought not to have lain. But the reason for this anomaly was, that to Dryden sincerity had been a perpetual necessity of his intellectual nature, whilst Pope, distracted by his own activities of mind, living in an irreligious generation, and beset by infidel friends, had early lost his anchorage of traditional belief; and yet, upon an honorable scruple of fidelity to the suffering church of his fathers, he sought often to dissemble the fact of his own scepticism, which yet often he thirsted ostentatiously to parade. Through a motive of truthfulness he became false. And in this particular instance he would, at any rate, have become false, whatever had been the native constitution of his mind. It was a mere impossibility to reconcile any real allegiance to his church with his known irreverence to religion. But upon far more subjects than this Pope was habitually false in the quality of his thoughts, always insincere, never by any accident in earnest, and consequently many times caught in ruinous self-contradiction. Is that the sort of writer to furnish an advantageous study for the precious leisure, precious as rubies, of the toil-worn artisan?

The root and the pledge of this falseness in Pope lay in a disease of his mind, which he (like the Roman poet Horace) mistook for a feature of preternatural strength; and this disease was the incapacity of self-determination towards any paramount or abiding principles. Horace, in a well-known passage, had congratulated himself upon this disease as upon a trophy of philosophic emancipation: