Chapter 41

[1573]Boileau's Art of Poetry, translated by Soame and Dryden, Cantos i.:Happy, who in his verse can gently steerFrom grave to light, from pleasant to severe.—Wakefield.[1574]MS.:And while the muse transported, unconfined,Soars to the sky, or stoops among mankind,Teach her like thee, through various fortune wise,With dignity to sink, with temper rise;Formed by thy converse, steer an equal flightFrom grave to gay, from profit to delightArtful with grace, and natural to please,Intent in business, elegant in ease.[1575]From Statius, Silv. Lib. i. Carm. iv. 120:immensæ veluti connexa carinæCymba minor, cum sævit hyems, pro parte, furentesParva receptat aquas, et eodem volvitur austro.—Hurd.Mr. Pope forgot while he wrote ver. 383-6, the censures he had so justly cast, ver. 237, upon that vain desire of an useless immortality—Crousaz.[1576]An unfortunate prophecy. Posterity has more than confirmed the contempt in which Bolingbroke's character was held by his contemporaries.[1577]"Pretend" is used in the old and literal sense "to stretch out before any one." Its exact synonym in Pope's line is "proclaim."[1578]Pope professes to believe that all his poetry up to the Essay on Man was made up of "sounds" to the exclusion of "things," and was addressed as little "to the heart" as to the understanding. His change of subject, and his panegyrics on virtue, had at least not taught him that the manly simplicity of truth was to be preferred to insincere hyperboles.[1579]In the MS. thus:That just to find a God is all we can,And all the study of mankind is man.—WARBURTON.The MS. has another version of the couplet in the text:And all our knowledge, all our bliss below,To love our neighbour, and ourselves to know.[1580]The rule of Horace and Warton for testing poetry was to divest it of metre by changing the order of the words. The language of Bowles would give the idea that the change was to be from one measure and set of rhymes to another.[1581]Voltaire, Œuvres, tom. xiv. p. 169.[1582]Epist. iv. ver. 112.[1583]Epist. iv. ver. 111-113.[1584]Epist. iv. ver. 121.[1585]Archbishop Whately, Bacon's Essays, p. 145, quotes this stanza, and says that it is strange that Pope, and those who use similar language, should have "failed to perceive that the pagan nations were in reality atheists. For by the word God we understand an Eternal Being, who made and who governs all things. And so far were the ancient pagans from believing that 'in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth,' that, on the contrary, the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and many other natural objects, were among the very gods they adored. Accordingly, the apostle Paul expressly calls the ancient pagans, atheists, Ephes. ii. 12, though he well knew that they worshipped certain supposed superior beings which they called gods. But he says in the Epistle to the Romans that 'they worshipped the creature more than, that is, instead of the Creator.' And at Lystra, when the people were going to do sacrifice to him and Barnabas, mistaking them for two of their gods, he told them to 'turn from those vanities to serve the living God, who made heaven and earth.'" The pagans were equally ignorant of the holiness of the Supreme Being; and Pope himself, describing the heathen divinities, Essay on Man, Epist. iii. 257, calls themGods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust.Such a divinity was Jupiter, and to worship an abominable phantom, conspicuous for "rage, revenge, and lust," was not to adore "Jehovah."[1586]It ought to be "confinedst" or "didst confine," and afterwards "gavedst" or "didst give" in the second person.—Warton.[1587]This may mean that the Deity was beneficent, or holy, or both, but whatever sense Pope attached to the word, he held with Bolingbroke that the attributes of the Divine Being were not the qualities which passed by the same name among us, and the present stanza is a re-assertion of the doctrine of the Essay on Man, Epist. ii. 1, that we must not "presume to scan God," or think to know more than the bare fact that he is "good."[1588]First edition:Left conscience free and will.Here followed, if it is genuine, a suppressed stanza, which Mrs. Thrale repeated to Dr. Johnson, and which she said a clergyman of their acquaintance had discovered:Can sins of moments claim the rodOf everlasting fires?And that offend great nature's GodWhich nature's self inspiresMrs. Thrale called the stanza "licentious," Johnson observed that it was borrowed from the Pastor Fido of Guarini, and Boswell pointed out that a "rod of fires" was an incongruous metaphor. "I warrant you, however," said Johnson, "Pope wrote this stanza, and some friend struck it out." The folly of the lines is transparent. The "sins" with which "nature's self inspires" man, "conscience warns him not to do," ver. 14, and Pope assumes that God will never be "offended" if we disregard conscience, and yield to temptation.[1589]This stanza was evidently directed against the ascetic acts which were rated high among virtues by the papists.[1590]There is something elevated in the idea and expression,Or think Thee Lord alone of man,When thousand worlds are round;but the conclusion is a contrast of littleness,And deal damnation round the land.—Bowles.[1591]Unquestionably no man of right judgment will pronounce the holder of any opinion to be beyond the limits of divine mercy; but he may justly pronounce the opinion itself to be ruinous in the highest degree. Nothing can be more false than the spurious liberality which presumes all opinions to be equally innocent, or affects to conceive that man is answerable only for the sincerity of his convictions. He is accountable for his opportunities, his understanding, and his knowledge, and if he espouses error through negligence, prejudice, or presumption, he involves himself in the full criminality of his error.—Croly.[1592]I have often wondered that the same poet who wrote the Dunciad should have written these lines. Alas for Pope, if the mercy he showed to others was the measure of the mercy he received.—Cowper.[1593]Lucan, ix. 578:Estne Dei sedes, nisi terra, et pontus, et aer,Et cœlum, et virtus?—Wakefield.[1594]Erudition and acuteness are not the only requisites of a good commentator. That conformity of sentiment which enables him fully to enter into the intention of his author, and that fairness of disposition which places him above every wish of disguising or misrepresenting it, are qualifications not less essential. In these points it is no breach of candour to affirm, since the public voice has awarded the sentence, that Dr. Warburton has, in various of his critical labours, shown himself extremely defective, and perhaps in none more than in those he has expended upon this performance, his manifest purposes in which, have been to give it a systematic perfection that it does not possess, to conceal as much as possible the suspicious source whence the author derived his leading ideas, and to reduce the whole to the standard of moral orthodoxy. So much is the sense of the poet strained and warped by these processes of his commentator, that it is scarcely possible in many places to enter into his real meaning, without laying aside the commentary, and letting the text speak for itself—Aikin.[1595]Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. i. p. 377.[1596]Descartes.[1597]Soame Jenyns, who published in 1757 a Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil.[1598]All three were republicans who flourished at the period of the Great Rebellion. Harrington published his political work, Oceana, in 1656, and Neville his Plato Redivivus, or A Dialogue concerning Government, in 1681. Burnet says of Wildman that he "had been a constant meddler on all occasions in everything that looked like sedition, and seemed inclined to oppose everything that was uppermost." He served in the Parliamentary army, and proved troublesome to Cromwell, who imprisoned him. His restless republicanism was thought dangerous at the Restoration, and the government kept him under lock and key for some years. He survived to take a share in the Revolution of 1688, and was as hard to please as in his younger days. Pepys says in 1667, that he had been "a false fellow to everybody."[1599]In the Commentary on ver. 303.[1600]A false pretence. Waterland expressed his disapproval of Warburton's Divine Legation, and Jackson wrote a formal refutation. Warburton, as sensitive as he was abusive, never forgave them, and to revenge his wounded vanity, he thrust this forced digression into the middle of Pope's works under the hollow plea that Pope seemed to have had in his mind the controversy between Jackson and Waterland on the Trinity. Jackson was an Arian clergyman, who defended the views of Samuel Clarke.[1601]Tindal, who was a deist, published in 1730 his well-known work, Christianity as old as the Creation. Waterland wrote an answer called Scripture Vindicated, and Jackson, his Remarks on a book entitled, etc.[1602]Waterland published a sermon called, A familiar discourse upon the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and the use and importance of it; and Jackson, after publishing in 1734 his treatise On the Existence and Unity of God, followed it up in 1735, with A Defence of the book entitled, On the Existence, etc., in answer to Law's Enquiry into the Ideas of Space, Time, etc. Warburton, in his discreditable note, has not the candour to allude to the real ground of his rancour against Jackson and Waterland.[1603]Nothing was ever more unfortunate than these five examples of sublimity, all of which, as Dr. Warton observes, prove the contrary.—Bowles.

[1573]Boileau's Art of Poetry, translated by Soame and Dryden, Cantos i.:Happy, who in his verse can gently steerFrom grave to light, from pleasant to severe.—Wakefield.

[1573]Boileau's Art of Poetry, translated by Soame and Dryden, Cantos i.:

Happy, who in his verse can gently steerFrom grave to light, from pleasant to severe.—Wakefield.

[1574]MS.:And while the muse transported, unconfined,Soars to the sky, or stoops among mankind,Teach her like thee, through various fortune wise,With dignity to sink, with temper rise;Formed by thy converse, steer an equal flightFrom grave to gay, from profit to delightArtful with grace, and natural to please,Intent in business, elegant in ease.

[1574]MS.:

And while the muse transported, unconfined,Soars to the sky, or stoops among mankind,Teach her like thee, through various fortune wise,With dignity to sink, with temper rise;Formed by thy converse, steer an equal flightFrom grave to gay, from profit to delightArtful with grace, and natural to please,Intent in business, elegant in ease.

[1575]From Statius, Silv. Lib. i. Carm. iv. 120:immensæ veluti connexa carinæCymba minor, cum sævit hyems, pro parte, furentesParva receptat aquas, et eodem volvitur austro.—Hurd.Mr. Pope forgot while he wrote ver. 383-6, the censures he had so justly cast, ver. 237, upon that vain desire of an useless immortality—Crousaz.

[1575]From Statius, Silv. Lib. i. Carm. iv. 120:

immensæ veluti connexa carinæCymba minor, cum sævit hyems, pro parte, furentesParva receptat aquas, et eodem volvitur austro.—Hurd.

Mr. Pope forgot while he wrote ver. 383-6, the censures he had so justly cast, ver. 237, upon that vain desire of an useless immortality—Crousaz.

[1576]An unfortunate prophecy. Posterity has more than confirmed the contempt in which Bolingbroke's character was held by his contemporaries.

[1577]"Pretend" is used in the old and literal sense "to stretch out before any one." Its exact synonym in Pope's line is "proclaim."

[1578]Pope professes to believe that all his poetry up to the Essay on Man was made up of "sounds" to the exclusion of "things," and was addressed as little "to the heart" as to the understanding. His change of subject, and his panegyrics on virtue, had at least not taught him that the manly simplicity of truth was to be preferred to insincere hyperboles.

[1579]In the MS. thus:That just to find a God is all we can,And all the study of mankind is man.—WARBURTON.The MS. has another version of the couplet in the text:And all our knowledge, all our bliss below,To love our neighbour, and ourselves to know.

[1579]In the MS. thus:

That just to find a God is all we can,And all the study of mankind is man.—WARBURTON.

The MS. has another version of the couplet in the text:

And all our knowledge, all our bliss below,To love our neighbour, and ourselves to know.

[1580]The rule of Horace and Warton for testing poetry was to divest it of metre by changing the order of the words. The language of Bowles would give the idea that the change was to be from one measure and set of rhymes to another.

[1581]Voltaire, Œuvres, tom. xiv. p. 169.

[1582]Epist. iv. ver. 112.

[1583]Epist. iv. ver. 111-113.

[1584]Epist. iv. ver. 121.

[1585]Archbishop Whately, Bacon's Essays, p. 145, quotes this stanza, and says that it is strange that Pope, and those who use similar language, should have "failed to perceive that the pagan nations were in reality atheists. For by the word God we understand an Eternal Being, who made and who governs all things. And so far were the ancient pagans from believing that 'in the beginning God made the heavens and the earth,' that, on the contrary, the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and many other natural objects, were among the very gods they adored. Accordingly, the apostle Paul expressly calls the ancient pagans, atheists, Ephes. ii. 12, though he well knew that they worshipped certain supposed superior beings which they called gods. But he says in the Epistle to the Romans that 'they worshipped the creature more than, that is, instead of the Creator.' And at Lystra, when the people were going to do sacrifice to him and Barnabas, mistaking them for two of their gods, he told them to 'turn from those vanities to serve the living God, who made heaven and earth.'" The pagans were equally ignorant of the holiness of the Supreme Being; and Pope himself, describing the heathen divinities, Essay on Man, Epist. iii. 257, calls themGods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust.Such a divinity was Jupiter, and to worship an abominable phantom, conspicuous for "rage, revenge, and lust," was not to adore "Jehovah."

Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,Whose attributes were rage, revenge, or lust.

Such a divinity was Jupiter, and to worship an abominable phantom, conspicuous for "rage, revenge, and lust," was not to adore "Jehovah."

[1586]It ought to be "confinedst" or "didst confine," and afterwards "gavedst" or "didst give" in the second person.—Warton.

[1587]This may mean that the Deity was beneficent, or holy, or both, but whatever sense Pope attached to the word, he held with Bolingbroke that the attributes of the Divine Being were not the qualities which passed by the same name among us, and the present stanza is a re-assertion of the doctrine of the Essay on Man, Epist. ii. 1, that we must not "presume to scan God," or think to know more than the bare fact that he is "good."

[1588]First edition:Left conscience free and will.Here followed, if it is genuine, a suppressed stanza, which Mrs. Thrale repeated to Dr. Johnson, and which she said a clergyman of their acquaintance had discovered:Can sins of moments claim the rodOf everlasting fires?And that offend great nature's GodWhich nature's self inspiresMrs. Thrale called the stanza "licentious," Johnson observed that it was borrowed from the Pastor Fido of Guarini, and Boswell pointed out that a "rod of fires" was an incongruous metaphor. "I warrant you, however," said Johnson, "Pope wrote this stanza, and some friend struck it out." The folly of the lines is transparent. The "sins" with which "nature's self inspires" man, "conscience warns him not to do," ver. 14, and Pope assumes that God will never be "offended" if we disregard conscience, and yield to temptation.

[1588]First edition:

Left conscience free and will.

Here followed, if it is genuine, a suppressed stanza, which Mrs. Thrale repeated to Dr. Johnson, and which she said a clergyman of their acquaintance had discovered:

Can sins of moments claim the rodOf everlasting fires?And that offend great nature's GodWhich nature's self inspires

Mrs. Thrale called the stanza "licentious," Johnson observed that it was borrowed from the Pastor Fido of Guarini, and Boswell pointed out that a "rod of fires" was an incongruous metaphor. "I warrant you, however," said Johnson, "Pope wrote this stanza, and some friend struck it out." The folly of the lines is transparent. The "sins" with which "nature's self inspires" man, "conscience warns him not to do," ver. 14, and Pope assumes that God will never be "offended" if we disregard conscience, and yield to temptation.

[1589]This stanza was evidently directed against the ascetic acts which were rated high among virtues by the papists.

[1590]There is something elevated in the idea and expression,Or think Thee Lord alone of man,When thousand worlds are round;but the conclusion is a contrast of littleness,And deal damnation round the land.—Bowles.

[1590]There is something elevated in the idea and expression,

Or think Thee Lord alone of man,When thousand worlds are round;

but the conclusion is a contrast of littleness,

And deal damnation round the land.—Bowles.

[1591]Unquestionably no man of right judgment will pronounce the holder of any opinion to be beyond the limits of divine mercy; but he may justly pronounce the opinion itself to be ruinous in the highest degree. Nothing can be more false than the spurious liberality which presumes all opinions to be equally innocent, or affects to conceive that man is answerable only for the sincerity of his convictions. He is accountable for his opportunities, his understanding, and his knowledge, and if he espouses error through negligence, prejudice, or presumption, he involves himself in the full criminality of his error.—Croly.

[1592]I have often wondered that the same poet who wrote the Dunciad should have written these lines. Alas for Pope, if the mercy he showed to others was the measure of the mercy he received.—Cowper.

[1593]Lucan, ix. 578:Estne Dei sedes, nisi terra, et pontus, et aer,Et cœlum, et virtus?—Wakefield.

[1593]Lucan, ix. 578:

Estne Dei sedes, nisi terra, et pontus, et aer,Et cœlum, et virtus?—Wakefield.

[1594]Erudition and acuteness are not the only requisites of a good commentator. That conformity of sentiment which enables him fully to enter into the intention of his author, and that fairness of disposition which places him above every wish of disguising or misrepresenting it, are qualifications not less essential. In these points it is no breach of candour to affirm, since the public voice has awarded the sentence, that Dr. Warburton has, in various of his critical labours, shown himself extremely defective, and perhaps in none more than in those he has expended upon this performance, his manifest purposes in which, have been to give it a systematic perfection that it does not possess, to conceal as much as possible the suspicious source whence the author derived his leading ideas, and to reduce the whole to the standard of moral orthodoxy. So much is the sense of the poet strained and warped by these processes of his commentator, that it is scarcely possible in many places to enter into his real meaning, without laying aside the commentary, and letting the text speak for itself—Aikin.

[1595]Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism, vol. i. p. 377.

[1596]Descartes.

[1597]Soame Jenyns, who published in 1757 a Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil.

[1598]All three were republicans who flourished at the period of the Great Rebellion. Harrington published his political work, Oceana, in 1656, and Neville his Plato Redivivus, or A Dialogue concerning Government, in 1681. Burnet says of Wildman that he "had been a constant meddler on all occasions in everything that looked like sedition, and seemed inclined to oppose everything that was uppermost." He served in the Parliamentary army, and proved troublesome to Cromwell, who imprisoned him. His restless republicanism was thought dangerous at the Restoration, and the government kept him under lock and key for some years. He survived to take a share in the Revolution of 1688, and was as hard to please as in his younger days. Pepys says in 1667, that he had been "a false fellow to everybody."

[1599]In the Commentary on ver. 303.

[1600]A false pretence. Waterland expressed his disapproval of Warburton's Divine Legation, and Jackson wrote a formal refutation. Warburton, as sensitive as he was abusive, never forgave them, and to revenge his wounded vanity, he thrust this forced digression into the middle of Pope's works under the hollow plea that Pope seemed to have had in his mind the controversy between Jackson and Waterland on the Trinity. Jackson was an Arian clergyman, who defended the views of Samuel Clarke.

[1601]Tindal, who was a deist, published in 1730 his well-known work, Christianity as old as the Creation. Waterland wrote an answer called Scripture Vindicated, and Jackson, his Remarks on a book entitled, etc.

[1602]Waterland published a sermon called, A familiar discourse upon the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and the use and importance of it; and Jackson, after publishing in 1734 his treatise On the Existence and Unity of God, followed it up in 1735, with A Defence of the book entitled, On the Existence, etc., in answer to Law's Enquiry into the Ideas of Space, Time, etc. Warburton, in his discreditable note, has not the candour to allude to the real ground of his rancour against Jackson and Waterland.

[1603]Nothing was ever more unfortunate than these five examples of sublimity, all of which, as Dr. Warton observes, prove the contrary.—Bowles.

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