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Dispensary, Denouncing Apothecaries and Their Cohort Physicians. There Was A Rumour Current That Garth Was Not Its
Dispensary, Denouncing Apothecaries and Their Cohort Physicians. There Was A Rumour Current That Garth Was Not Its
Carol Rumens
The Guardian, Monday 8 July 2013
This week's choice is an extract from Part Three of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism. The whole poem runs to
744 lines, but that shouldn't put you off! It's as readable as it was 300 years ago, and highly pertinent to many burning
literary issues writers' prizes and who judges them, for instance. Pope wrote it in 1709, the year his first work, four
pastorals, appeared in print. He was barely 21. When it was published in 1711 it earned the young poet immediate
acclaim.
Typically, Pope undertook the work in a competitive spirit. He was an ambitious, driven writer, largely self- and
home-educated because of a painful spinal deformation, and because the repressive legislation against Catholics at the
time denied him access to a university.
It was Nicholas Boileau's treatise, L'Art Potique, which fired Pope to produce his own study of literary-critical
principles. Like Boileau, he champions neoclassicism and its governing aesthetic of nature as the proper model for art.
His pantheon of classical writers, the "happy few," as he calls them, includes Quintilian, Longinus and, most
importantly, Horace.
Pope's ideals may be recycled, but there's no doubting his passionate belief in them. Deployed in his sparkling heroic
couplets, the arguments and summaries are alive with wit, verbal agility and good sense. From his neoclassical
scaffolding, he looks outwards to the literary marketplace of his own age. It was a noisy time, and sometimes the
reader seems to hear the buzz of the coffee house, the banter, gossip and argument of the writers and booksellers, the
jangle of carts and carriages.
Pope's wit is famously caustic, so it's surprising how often the essayist advocates charity and humility. In the chosen
section, he begins by advising restraint in criticising dull and incompetent poets. His tongue is in his cheek, as it turns
out: "For who can rail as long as they can write?" Although he takes the view that bad critics are more culpable than
bad poets, Pope enjoys a sustained dig at the poet-bores who go on and on and on. The metaphor of the spinning-top
implies that a whipping will simply keep them going. Tops "sleep" when they move so fast their movement is
invisible hence the faded clich "to sleep like a tops". The metaphor shifts to "jades" old horses urged to recover
after a stumble and run on, as these desperate poets "run on", their sounds and syllables like the jingling reigns, their
words "dull droppings".
From the "shameless bards" in their frenzy of forced inspiration, Pope turns his attention to the critics, and, with nice
comic effect, tars them with the same brush. "There are as mad, abandoned critics too." The "blockhead" he conjures
reads everything and blindly attacks everything, "From Dryden's fables down to Durfey's tales." Durfey is placed
pointedly at the bottom of the pile. He was generally considered an inferior poet, although Pope's friend Addison had
time for him. Samuel Garth, on the other hand, was well-regarded, by Pope and many others, for a poem, The
Dispensary, denouncing apothecaries and their cohort physicians. There was a rumour current that Garth was not its
real author.
Sychophancy is one of the Essay's prime targets. Pope's rhetoric rises to a pitch as he castigates the hypocrisy of the
"fops" who always praise the latest play, and the loquacious ignorance of the preferment-seeking clergy. St Paul's
Churchyard, the corrupt precinct of the booksellers, may be full of bores and fools, but there's no safer sanctuary at the
cathedral's altar.
The Essay is rich in epigrams, still widely quoted. "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread" is among the best
known and most borrowed (by Frank Sinatra, among others). Briefly allegorising, Pope goes on to contrast cautious
"sense" and impetuous "nonsense", again evoking the rowdy traffic of 18th-century London with the onomatopoeic
"rattling".
The flow has been angrily headlong: now, the pace becomes slower, the argument more rational. Antithesis implies
balance, and the syntax itself enacts the critical virtues. Where, Pope asks, can you find the paradigm of wise
judgement? It's not a rhetorical question. The poem goes on to provide the answer, enumerating the classical models,
having a little chauvinistic nip at the rule-bound Boileau, and happily discovering two worthy inheritors of the critical
Golden Age, Roscommon and Walsh.
Readers and writers today can't, of course, share Pope's certainties of taste. But we can apply some of his principles,
the most important of which is, perhaps, that principles are necessary. And we might even take some tips from writers
of the past.