Week 13, Alexander Pope

Notes on Alexander Pope

Neoclassical Premises (ca. 1650-1789)

(a) broad social commitment: a response to the very deep divisions of the Civil War, 1642-1649, and the Commonwealth, 1649-1660. Emphasis on continuity.

(b) an inclination to categorize experience, nature, literature—the neoclassical “kinds”

(c) uses of satire

(d) importance of probability; thus the use of analogy as a literary figure: the two terms of the comparison both illuminate each other and are kept distinct

(e) the prevalence of moral categories

(f) use of classical precedent

(g) obedience to ordinary English grammar

(h) categorizing the appropriate types of speech for appropriate subjects: thus we use epic for high subjects, lyric for love poetry, etc.

(i) importance of the idea of mirroring nature in art (mimesis)

(j) skepticism about language—another reason for analogy: metaphor tends to collapse the two terms of comparison: man = pig, etc.

(k) importance of utile et dulce: literature must both please and teach, with emphasis on the latter function

Epic Conventions

Rape of the Lock

Pope’s ideas about the value of art come from Horace, a silver-age poet and urbane critic. Horace’s era (65 BC—8 BC, covering the reign of Augustus 27BC-14AD following the Civil War and assassination of JC) accords well with the reign of Queen Anne in Great Britain (1702-14) and then the Hanoverian kings George I-III (1714-27, 1727-60, 1760-1820). Pope lived from 1688-1744. The perceived need was for continuity and calm after the turmoil of the English Civil War in the 1640’s and the Puritan Rule of Cromwell in the 1650’s. Throughout the eighteenth century, that’s what many British citizens looked for in their rulers and in their literature.

This is an age in which the predominant theory of art is mimetic, meaning that readers and critics expect literature to offer them a judicious and ethically sound representation of life. And the point of such mimetic art is to influence morals for the better: as Horace had said, good art is both utile and dulce, indissolubly useful and delightful. It’s easy to make fun of that sort of statement, but the point is that people respond emotionally to eloquence and beauty, and emotion can temper the severity and callousness of reason. It would be a mistake to think of the C18 as “an age of Reason” only—that’s taking a motivated exaggeration at face value. After all, the C18 philosopher David Hume said that “reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions.” Sentiment, properly directed and educated, was just as important as reason in this age, whatever C20 critics claim the romantics say later on about C18’s “overemphasis on reason” at the expense of universal passions that bring humans together.

It’s true that C18 language theory tends towards classification—rather a scientific model of language, one distrustful of wispy metaphor and flights of fancy. Horace made fun of the “furor poeticus,” and the C18 is similarly distrustful of placing too much value on poetic genius and originality for the sake of originality.

Imagination and language are wonderful things, but they need restraint and education to temper them into fine instruments that produce excellent works of art. The Baconian distrust of “idols” (errors due to the peculiarities of the individual and to the needs of the collective, as well as the tendency of perception to slide from raw accuracy into dull comfort of abstractions) reigns in C18 notions of language.

Still, we need not think of this horizon of expectations as implying an insatiable appetite for pompous “poesy,” though second-rate poets may lapse into that kind of adherence to mere formal elegance. Pope himself makes fun of anyone who lards on the elegance too thick. In an era of refined art, taste and restraint are everything—one must know what to omit as well as what to include, and when an acceptable tendency becomes a travesty. Calling fish “the finny tribe” is a ludicrous abuse of the tendency to categorize individual things, sacrificing whatever is “fickle, freckled, who knows how” for the sake of dull comprehensibility. The same goes for the “breeze” that “whistles through the trees” like clockwork. What an abomination against nature and poetry! Pope mocks both these tendencies—abstractionism and hollow rhyming that imposes a false order on the beautiful variety of nature—in his “Essay on Criticism.”

When Samuel Johnson says, “nothing can please long except just representations of general nature,” nature here meaning both the environment and human nature, he speaks for a whole century’s worth of critics, readers, and audiences. Well, we might think that in such a Silver Age where decorum, observation of refined rules, maintenance of tact and restraint, is nearly everything, something as rough and rude as, say, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or satire in general would be out of place. But we would be wrong.

“Mock epic” is the appropriate generic handle for The Rape of a Lock. A mock epic, of course, mocks the conventions and aims of epic by adhering to them, with a significant change in subject matter.

So what is an epic? The genre is easy to define formally: “the epic is a long narrative poem involving heroic figures in the performance of heroic deeds, usually extended over a wide geographical area; it is written in a heroic or grandiose manner” (Norton and Rushton). Just as easy is to list its major conventions:

1. Hero: a mythical or historical figure, usually national.

2. Subject matter: heroic deeds, battles, long journeys.

3. Verse: elevated, lofty, “heroic”; the best known device is epic simile—see PL I.331-343, 351-355, 761-798.

4. Action: intermixture of supernatural elements/ figures with human characters.

5. Place: world-wide, even cosmic, scale.

6. “Comic,” not “tragic”: the hero is successful in his exploits.

7. “Objective” poet: but consider the “Miltonic aside.”

Some of the minor conventions would be

1. Invocation to the muse: PL I.1-26 and elsewhere. “Hail, Muse!” &tc.

2. starting in medias res, as when the Odyssey begins with Odysseus having almost finished his wandering and ready to make his way back to Ithaca , or the Iliad begins with the Trojan War well advanced in its course.

3. Narrative of events that transpired before poem: “flashback.”

4. Processions of characters: PL I.376-505. Remember Milton’s long catalogs of “devils to adore for deities,” and fascination with geography and the etymology of words, the origin of various practices, and so forth.

5. Set or formal speeches like Satan’s to his fallen legions in Paradise Lost.
But more importantly, Epic always has a serious ethical purpose—it “labors” within the culture out of which it comes, trying to affect that culture. An epic has a cultural “task,” we might say.
Homer wrote about the exploits of Odysseus and the wrath of Achilles, probably hoping to infuse into his own difficult time some of the ancient heroic virtues and resilience of an earlier age.

Virgil wrote about the sad but fortunate fall of Troy —the Trojan Aeneas had to see his city destroyed so he could sail to Rome and found what would later become the Roman Republic and then the Empire. And of course Milton wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to men,” perhaps most immediately to reassure his dejected fellow-Puritans that God had not abandoned them.

Mock epic is similar to satire, and it, too, might be said to have a “task.” Sometimes we satirize and mock when we have no power to change things directly, when we are on the periphery of power, and so forth.

Does the sly cynicism of “Doonesbury” ring a bell in this regard? Or the raucous, Aristophanes-like satire of Al Franken, author of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them? The Left in America long felt powerless; in art, the result is often subtle mockery of conservatives like Richard Nixon, Reagan, Dan Quayle, and the proudly Texan George W. Bush. How different this kind of art is from, say, modern anti-colonialist protest literature is—literature that aims to get dispossessed people to do something about their plight, and to make the powerful recognize the error of their ways. “Make everybody see / In order to Fight the Powers that Be!” as the rappers say.

Political impotence need not be our only guess at the impulse behind mock-genre and satire, however—perhaps, as in Pope’s case, there’s a need for an entire culture to examine its tendencies lest they become ridiculous exaggerations. In this way, a mock-epic might be something of a warding-off, a warning that today’s happy conformity—a society with lots of beaming people mostly accepting the same fundamental assumptions about themselves, their government, and the world at large—might well be tomorrow’s stale, real-life parody. Maybe conformity itself soon lapses into morbid me-tooism (a lame excuse for healthy existence), or generates excesses in the other direction, so it needs to be regularly and vigorously questioned.

That’s a serious social “task” to ascribe to mockery and satire. I think it’s the one most appropriate to Pope: he speaks as a self-educated gentleman and man of letters to those whose assumptions he mostly shares. His Catholicism in a deeply Protestant country makes him something other than a simple adherent to neoclassical taste and political values. His traditionalism is somewhat self-conscious, I should think—he’s not the kind of aristocratic brute who absorbs his “values” from the nice thick beefsteak he gnaws every evening and the good wine with which he washes it down. As your Norton introduction says, Pope is the first real man of letters to make a comfortable living just by writing—his father was a prosperous merchant, and Pope lifted himself into even more polite society by means of literary skill. Moreover, he belongs early in the tradition we may trace down to Wilde and then the Modernists—artists of great culture and learning who fear the effects of “mass culture” both upon society at large and, more narrowly, upon the arts. As Wilde would later say, “In old times books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays, books are written by the public and read by nobody.” Or “public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.” This is of course a cruel thing to say about one’s fellow citizens, but it’s also not entirely false, is it?

In American terms, we could say that democracy is great, but we may also feel that nothing within the system necessarily leads average people to “improve themselves.” Are “the market” and representative democracy shaping and improving forces over the lives of those who live those systems? Or do they tend towards collective navel-gazing, atomistic pursuit of hedonistic impulses? At its worst, the argument goes, American life is just about accumulating things that make us happy for a little while, and democracy not much more than what Wilde called it “the bludgeoning of the people by the people.” We ignorantly choose politicians who tell us what we want to hear, and punish or ignore those who try to tell us what we don’t want to hear. Culture tends to gravitate towards the latest potboiler novel, and so forth—to the lowest common denominator of frivolous, throwaway art that titillates but doesn’t challenge us. Why? Because we can. We don’t have to listen to the erudite or the cultured; we acknowledge superiors (bosses) but not, in the English sense “betters.” That’s healthy in a sense, but also dangerous when it goes so far that we lose the capacity to imagine anything better than sitting on the sofa, drinking cheap beer, and watching dumbed-down television. Enough—all of this has been said many times, and it comes down to a lament over the slippage of so-called “high culture” into insipid bourgeois conventionality masquerading as individual expression and variety. It comes down to a feeling of loss of intelligibility and direction in our collective life.

Pope is this kind of critic, and his mockery is directed in part at his own audience. Done just right, satire is excellent and effective social critique, and may well change minds that should matter—i.e. literate people with wealth and connections. That’s the audience of The Rape of the Lock. Pope shares the basic assumptions of his audience, and most likely believes his work will influence their perceptions.

Of course, all he’s trying to do in this poem, I suppose, is reflect humorously on the elaborate quality of gender relations in his day. He makes fun of the assumptions about female virtue—the language of commodification and ethics seem to go together, and of male superiority, the “honor code.” A woman’s position in his time was complex—she was hemmed in by all sorts of constraints and yet extremely important in symbolic terms. The image of the female was central to notions of domesticity and morals, her beauty bodying forth the goodness of the era itself, rather like the courtier’s grace signifying the sovereign’s legitimacy and rightness in earlier times—the Renaissance Courts of the Tudors.

General Notes on Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

Nature: nature is structured like the human mind, and it operates in a rational and stable way. The ancients based their works upon Nature, so studying Homer is like going back to nature. So the “rules” are actually based on nature—that’s why we should follow them, and why we should value the ancients. Not to hold them in high regard merely shows that we have gone astray from what Dr. Johnson will call “just representations of general nature.”

Imitation: Notice the predominance in the C18 of certain mimetic figures: mirror, speech as dress, ornament. What is to be dressed and finely decked out is “nature,” human nature, or the social and political hierarchy. These are already solid and “there”; the point is to make them memorable and attractive. In this way, poetry is something like elegant rhetoric, whose point is to reaffirm our sense that our ways and understandings are right. “Whatever is, is right.”

The point is that neoclassical critics generally support the principle of hierarchy underlying the social order, so they can conceive of a genial, erudite critic who does justice to the work itself and helps a broader public (gentlemen, not Dickensian kitchen scullions and hookers) understand the work’s complexities to as great an extent as possible. Such a critic serves the text and the public. Modern formulations, by contrast, betray an anxiety that culture is either a top-down ideological control mechanism or an exercise in commercial vulgarianism: bread and circuses, the nightly news as entertainment, etc.

Analyzing the relationship between author/work/public and criticism calls for consideration of the cultural value of art: does it reflect an already held value system and merely dress or adorn it? Or is art a shaping force, a creator of culture, rather than a passive storehouse of normative ideas and aesthetic images? We can see art as establishing and maintaining consensus, or as tearing it down in favor of something new. It seems reasonable to say that it has done all these things—it is interesting to watch how critics and artists have reacted to them (example: romanticism).

Some critics see themselves as guardians of culture—highbrow watchdogs, one might say—while others see themselves as unmasking texts’ claims to normative status, and still others claim they’re more or less operating in a politics-free zone where they should strive to “see the object as in itself it really is” (to borrow Matthew Arnold’s phrase).

During the C19, the notion of a “public” and even of several levels of public readership, from the low to the high, becomes an issue. We see the rise and fall of the man of letters and the advent of what George Gissing describes in New Grub Street as hack journalists and critics churning out semi-cultured pablum for a quarter-educated public. Pope isn’t really facing this crass commercialization of art to the lowest common denominator. But you can see in his admonitions to critics to “know their limits” a flicker of anxiety that criticism may be starting to pander to a paying public. Modern artists have had to try and turn this stricture into a positive thing, but it isn’t easy to do, and to varying degrees it may mean ceding ground on the claims surrounding art’s power to change individuals and even entire societies.

a) Is the literary author superior to the critic?

b) Is critic’s task to explain the text, or add to it and go beyond it? (Arnold/Wilde)

c) To what extent should authors be familiar with criticism?

d) Today, literary theorists assert something like an independent right to do what they do, and not simply to serve as handmaids to art. This claim rejects the notion that art innocently exists as an autonomous realm or that it straightforwardly adorns a culture’s values.

e) Rejecting the responsibility to make texts accessible to a broad public by explaining them amounts to an atrophying of the critical function, or at least a narrowing of it to wholly academic circles. This is not necessarily to be condemned since there is much of value that the public can’t appreciate and yet shouldn’t be hounded out of existence. But if that’s all there is to it, it’s easy to see that the arts would be too divorced from just plain folks to have much of a social impact. They would be the products of marginalized, specialized labor—not something vital in which everyone has an interest.

Page-by-Page Notes on Alexander Pope

Page numbers refer to the following edition: Leitch, Vincent B., ed. ‘‘The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. ’’ New York: Norton, 2001. ISBN 0-393-97429-4.

441. “Too many critics” would be troubling. Pope values criticism for the same reason Horace does—it can notice the best work and make it available for public appreciation and emulation by modern authors. But criticism quickly becomes an industry, almost detached from its object. Consider modern formalism as a looming, institutionalized propagator of artistic standards. Bad critics pander to a vulgar public—this would be a good place to mention Pope’s background as a Catholic and as someone who had to earn his living as a writer.

442. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan….” Here at lines 46-49 is the lesson adapted for critics. You can’t just spin out literary rules from your own head. The great author of classical times isn’t to be condemned because he does something you don’t understand. Homer and Virgil constitute an external, transhistorical, universal set of standards to which you must conform your sensibilities: taste is intricately tied to education. This is an anti-mass way of understanding art—we shouldn’t go up to the work with our hands in our pockets and expect it to please us at first sight or upon first reading. If we do that, art loses all its power to change us for the better.

“Unerring Nature….” Nature is Pope’s sun, source, and end. Mind and nature work analogously; the world follows Reason—it is an intelligential order. Homer follows human nature, which accords with natural process. See page 443, where Pope writes that the rules are themselves rooted in nature. So conventions are natural to humanity, not mere extrinsic ornaments. The artist and critic help us appreciate the intelligibility of the natural order, the compatibility of mind and nature.

443. “Those rules of old, discovered, not devised….” Neoclassical authors such as Pope are careful to insist on selection from nature. Nature must be “methodized.” They do not say authors should copy nature in the lowest sense. This carefulness is partly due to the moral (pragmatic) demand of neoclassical criticism: art should teach by delighting. But it is also an Aristotelian demand to derive the universal significance from the particular instance.

446. “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” Pope is against mediocrity for the same reason as Horace: art should reflect our society and values to us elegantly; that is the meaning of decorum. Otherwise, we end up with Plato’s demagogues and critics and artists pandering to the lowest common denominator. In that case, art would not exert any shaping power, and we would be on a degenerative arc with respect to the ancients. At the bottom of the page, Pope insists we must know the whole work, not just the parts.

447. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed.” True wit does not get itself a raised podium or become its own order of things. Some C18 authors distrust words and wittiness because they tend to get in the way of truth, of things as they are, and so forth. Witty language “dresses” nature to advantage. Just as fashion succeeds only when it knows the body well, so art must accord with human nature. Words “clothe” thought, which implies that thought itself refers to a stable order of things prior to language. The emphasis is on coherence, on building and maintaining consensus. True wit is like nature in that both give us back a proper image of our minds.

448. “But true expression, like the unchanging sun….” Pope makes the same point about language here: it should clarify things and “gild them.” But it should not change the object. True felicity lies in apprehending the order of things, and in expressing that order attractively. Later we will see Matthew Arnold refer nostalgically to what he calls “the object as in itself it really is.” He thereby reasserts human values and facts, not scientific objectivity (which may be cast as opposed to stable, sustainable human values).

450. “Some foreign writers, some our own despise; / the ancients only, or the moderns prize….” Pope does not simply say the ancient authors are better: the category true-false does not reduce to old-new.

454. On achieving consensus in public taste: the phrase “the public” implies a degree of democracy, at least in the sense understood by a market society. Since the function of the critic is to be positive and to form public taste and morals, the critic must behave in a civil manner. At lines 631-32, Pope says pride is the main fault of intellectuals. Sir Philip Sidney describes the way to move people towards virtuous action along similar lines: they must have enough humility to see that it’s their job to please the public and move its members towards virtuous action. Art shouldn’t be about self-aggrandizement, and neither should criticism. That is a typical 18th-century notion, too—literature is better than philosophy because it has broader appeal. If the critic is an authority, he is a benevolent one, not a tyrant and not destructive because you cannot achieve consensus by tyrannical or destructive means.