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1 Pope, Self, and World by Helen Deutsch
1 Pope, Self, and World by Helen Deutsch
HELEN DEUTSCH
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of critical response, in which Pope is marked out from the order his own
words construct.2 These reactions reveal Pope, who took on a variety of
guises over the course of his career – the young would-be libertine and love
poet, the dutiful translator and ambitious emulator of the classics, the mature
moral arbiter, and ultimately the great negator of English satire – as excluded
from what he celebrates, or implicated in what he rejects. Whether he is
Leslie Stephen’s monkey pouring boiling oil on his victims, William Empson’s
cripple admiring a natural order he cannot enter at the end of the grand
georgic vision of empire in Epistle to Burlington, Maynard Mack’s self-
styled “feisty little alien . . . in the country of the normals,” or the aspiring
bourgeois hypocrite of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, immersed in the
Grub Street culture he disdains, Pope becomes, to use his phrase for Atossa
in the Epistle to a Lady, one who “is whate’er he hates and ridicules,” while
doomed to love – like the lovelorn “future Bard” summoned by the grieving
heroine of Eloisa to Abelard as best suited to “paint” the grief he himself
feels – at a distance. Yet the couplet partner to this need to fix Pope, to
objectify him and his intent, is career-long changeability: he is as variable
and hard to “hit” as the women over whose portraits he puzzles in the
opening of Epistle to a Lady, which begins with the casually uttered and
recollected words of Pope’s friend Martha Blount, “Most Women have no
Characters at all” (2). In short, Pope’s portraits reflect and refract himself.
Who is more than he an “Antithesis,” split between a “Cherub’s face” and
a beastly body (Arbuthnot, 325, 331)? Who else, like Atossa in To a Lady
(118), called his life “one warfare upon earth”? As this essay will reveal, Pope
often employed even more self-conscious and self-referential examples.
If the portrait was Pope’s favorite genre, he was – as the proud monument
of the 1717 Works and the full embrace of the personal voice afforded by
the Horatian imitations of the 1730s demonstrate – his own favorite subject.
Despite, or perhaps because of his career-long focus on himself, Pope remains
one of the most elusive authors in the English canon. This paradox becomes
even more complex when we consider the fact of Pope’s deformity, which
marked him apart from the intricate interrelations of nature and art as his age
understood them, “where,” as he wrote in his loco-descriptive masterpiece
Windsor-Forest, “Order in Variety we see, | And where, tho’ all things differ,
all agree” (15–16). How then are we to understand Pope’s insistence on
making nature and art identical – both in the Essay on Criticism, when Virgil,
attempting original poetry, finds that “Nature and Homer were . . . the same”
(135), and in the Essay on Man’s vindication of the ways of God to man, in
which “All Nature is but Art, Unknown to Thee” (i, 289)? Deformity served
as Pope’s trademark, as key to originality in a career of literary imitation,
as proof of self-ownership in a world of economic circulation.3 In this essay
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and making those windows Casements: that while a Man showed his Heart
to all the world, he might do something more for his friends, e’en take out,
and trust it to their handling” (Corr, i, p. 353). In his first Horatian imitation,
such transparency exposes the poet’s flaws:
We might read this passage as a prime example of the ways in which Pope
deploys the rhetoric of personal deformity as proof of his universal virtue –
the spots in the medium, like the printed marks on the page, are proof of his
complete self-disclosure and sentimental transparency.4 But such frankness is
also informed by a tradition of philosophical skepticism of which Horace and
Montaigne are important examples. From this perspective, Pope creates not
complete transparency but rather a paradoxically elusive depiction of what
James Noggle calls “a specially poetic, cleansed, fluid version of himself,
apparent only in contrast with the ordinary self represented as the ‘spots’ or
personal flaws that appear in it . . . [A] self so cleansed is a nothing, empty
if not for what it bears, virtuous only in invisibility.” The ultimate Popean
couplet, as Noggle would have it, holds in tension not deformity and form
but rather the poetic self and any attempts to define it.5 Pope is never more
elusive, in other words, than when he is telling us everything.
Yet we should also recall that, beginning with the young author’s mockery
of the older critic Dennis, or perhaps even earlier with an anecdote recorded
by Joseph Spence of the poet as schoolboy penning a satire on his master and
being beaten for his pains, Pope provoked the attacks that justified a satire
advertised as virtuous self-display. “And with the Emblem of thy crooked
Mind | Mark’d on thy Back, like Cain, by God’s own Hand, |Wander, like
him, accursed through the Land,” ends one lampoon by two of Pope’s famous
targets, Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Verses Address’d to
the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace (1733), lines
110–12). Branded for life, Pope makes a career out of the indelibility of insult.
What Didier Eribon has recently argued about insult and the formation of gay
identity might equally apply to Pope’s life-long effort to rewrite marginality
as authority.6 Arguing that insult creates a subject who is “destined for
shame,” forced to don a mask of otherness that can’t be removed, Eribon
sees literature as a field of struggle in which the person objectified by insult
can speak in a self-created voice, thus rupturing the “world as it is” that has
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rendered him alien. We might also recognize Pope in Eribon’s claim that the
internalization of insult creates a melancholy for “normal society” which is
articulated as rejection.
Pope’s embrace of the “not unpleasing Melancholy” that characterizes his
lot at the end of An Epistle to Arbuthnot also shades the unrequited love
triangles of the Pastorals and the sympathetic mirroring of poet and episto-
lary heroine in the dark anthropomorphic landscape of the lovelorn Eloisa
at the beginning of his career, while animating his unique spin on Horatian
retirement of the 1730s. By turning his rented Twickenham estate on the out-
skirts of London into a symbol of moral self-possession and freedom from
material attachment, Pope transforms the legal ban on Catholics owning
property or living within the city limits into a sign of his personal distinc-
tion. These qualities also infuse the grand condemnation of British society in
his Epilogue to the Satires and irradiate the “universal darkness” at the end
of The Dunciad. We might consider that the great philosophical Opus Mag-
num – a unfinished project that included a “system of ethics in the Horatian
way” in the form of the four Moral Essays (also termed “Epistles to Several
Persons”), along with that hybrid of poetry and philosophy, An Essay on
Man – which crowned Pope’s career in the 1730s, arose in part out of a need
to justify his satiric attacks on poor scribblers in the 1728 Dunciad. We may
then realize how even the larger currents of Pope’s poetic progress were put
into motion by a dynamic of insult and response. Pope, in other words, was
constantly aware of himself as framed – as a person whose meaning had
already been partially determined by commonplace, burdened by the book
of his adversary. This does much to explain his career-long preoccupation
with the portrayal of character, in which he would increasingly insist upon
“touching persons” with the bite of satire.
When David Garrick, the most famous actor of the eighteenth century,
glimpsed Pope at the theatre two years before his death in 1744, he gave us
an emblem of this dynamic:
When I was told . . . that POPE was in the house, I instantaneously felt a
palpitation at my heart; a tumultuous, not a disagreeable emotion in my mind.
I was then in the prime of youth; and in the zenith of my theatrical ambition. It
gave me a particular pleasure that RICHARD was my character, when POPE
was to see, and hear me. As I opened my part; I saw our little poetical hero,
dressed in black, seated in a side box, near the stage, and viewing me with a
serious and earnest attention. His look shot and thrilled, like lightning, through
my frame; and I had some hesitation in proceeding, from anxiety, and from
joy. As RICHARD gradually blazed forth, the house was in a roar of applause;
and the conspiring hand of Pope showered me with laurels.7
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Haunting this exchange of looks between the poet and the actor, and no
doubt informing the “particular pleasure” that Garrick experiences at seeing
Pope in the audience for this performance, is the awareness that both are
using the same script – that of Shakespeare’s King Richard III, that most
infamous of hunchbacks who defines himself at the outset as unfit for love,
“nor made to court an amorous looking-glass”:
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his Essay on Criticism, (362–3): “But Ease in writing flows from Art, not
Chance, | As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance” (178–9). His
italicization of “torquebitur” in the Latin text on the opposite page reminds
us of his epigraph, and undermines the youthful sprezzatura of his earlier
insistence on the invisibility of poetic labor. These ironically quoted lines
seem to respond not just to the “you” of the previous line in the poem, who
is tricked into thinking good poetry only “Nature and a knack to please,”
but also to Horace and the younger self for whom emulating the ancients
was all. At this moment of self-scrutiny, Pope embraces disease as the pain
of a laborious art that refuses to conceal itself, and that in a tacit revision of
Horace refuses, at the end of the poem, decorously to abandon the stage of
life to the young without judging their folly.
The next is a brief moment in Pope’s self-portrait in his last Horatian
poem, Epistle i.i, a poem that seems to abandon satire for a different kind
of moral exemplarity. Housing “with Montagne now, or now with Locke”
(26), Pope in his self-confessed changeable folly is at once skeptical of Chris-
tian tenets and free-ranging in his thought (Montaigne), while rigorously
logical and overly accepting of the proofs of Christianity (Locke). He is also
living a continual flux between the active (Montaigne’s social criticism) and
contemplative (Locke’s investigation of the mind),8 a flux complicated fur-
ther by the unbalanced contrast between the poet’s penchant to “Mix with
the World, and battle for the State, | Free as young Lyttelton” (28–9), a
prominent Whig opposition statesman, and his habit to “Sometimes, with
Aristippus, or St. Paul, | Indulge my Candor, and grow all to all” (31–2).
Further dividing his first opposition (between the moderns Montaigne and
Locke) with another doublet (balancing ancient pagan Aristippus and early
Christian Paul) announcing affinities with both the hedonist philosopher
Aristippus, whom, Horace’s Epistle i.i. (17) tells us, all situations suited due
to his infinite adaptability, and his inverse St. Paul, who was “all things to
all men” in his unwavering desire to convert them to the true faith, Pope is
at once a devout Christian and a pagan sceptic, a self unchanged by circum-
stance and a chameleon.
This latter intermittent penchant to “indulge my Candor, and grow all
to all,” is shadowed by Pope’s earlier condemnation of Wharton – the first
and most powerful portrait in that investigation of the “characters of men,”
the Epistle to Cobham, “Grown all to all, from no one vice exempt, | And
most contemptible, to shun contempt” (194–5).9 The line which concludes
this passage from Pope’s Ep, i.i, “And win my way by yielding to the tyde”
(34) completely reverses Horace’s original, “I attempt to subject the world to
me, not myself to the world.” Pope stresses here not his stoical integrity but
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his ideological and historical fluidity, not his satiric authority but his indis-
tinguishability from the human objects of his condemnation. When at the
poem’s conclusion Pope’s addressee Lord Bolingbroke (the Essay on Man’s
“Guide, Philosopher, and Friend,” and most important influence) interrupts
the poet’s ruminations with a laugh (a laugh that reminds us of the cruel
propensity of the eighteenth-century public to mock cripples), the confident
certainties of the Essay’s theodicy, in which all aberration is seen as part
of the divine order, are rewritten as the subjective inconsistencies that limit
all human thought and moral judgment. Pope’s status as a moral exemplar,
through the essayistic shifts of Epistle i.i, comes to rest neither in his satiric
righteousness nor his philosophical confidence but rather in his frank con-
sciousness of his own flawed and unknowable self.
Thus we should not be surprised when in one of the most recent crit-
ical readings of Pope’s Essay on Man, one which stresses the poet’s self-
consciously ironic manipulation of received wisdom throughout a poem too
often dismissed as complacent, Helen Vendler pauses over Pope’s perhaps
most famous and oft-quoted portrait, in which he enlists a dizzying array of
echoes from Renaissance literature (most notably Hamlet), in its magisteri-
ally balanced paradoxes:
Aptly describing this passage as a kind of divine creation of Man, one that
“render[s] graphically the mobility of mind as it operates at full tilt,” Vendler
goes on to read the lines as Pope’s ultimate self-portrait.
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Detached from all reference to his own biography, Pope is not, here, the warm
friend, the social companion, the scourge of dullards, or the pious son; rather,
he is looking at himself in his interior solitude. Before his eyes, in a secular Ecce
Homo, he places himself: the strange genius-cripple, the frustrated yearner, the
inquisitive skeptic, the Catholic deist, the gothic classicist, the ill sensualist, the
self-deluding self-satirist, the baffled inquirer, the language-tethered visionary.
He is bold enough to think that what he sees in himself can be generalized to
the rest of us.10
[But Phoebus comes to his aid, and checks the monster, ready for the devouring
grasp; whose expanded jaws, transformed to stone, stand hardened in a ghastly
grin.]
The passage from which these lines are taken reads as follows:
Here, as the head lay exposed on the alien sand, its moist hair dripping brine,
a fierce snake attacked it. But at last Phoebus came, and prevented it, as it
was about to bite, and turned the serpent’s gaping jaws to stone, and froze the
mouth, wide open, as it was.
The ghost of Orpheus sank under the earth, and recognised all those places
it had seen before; and, searching the fields of the Blessed, he found his wife
again and held her eagerly in his arms. There they walk together side by side;
now she goes in front, and he follows her; now he leads, and looks back as he
can do, in safety now, at his Eurydice.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, xi, 70–86)11
Here Pope, whose head circulated freely through the visual culture of Lon-
don, portrays himself with a powerfully self-divided emblem that evokes
both satire triumphant and satire disarmed. He is Orpheus, torn to pieces
by the Bacchantes he spurned (shades of the Dunces’ violent attacks), whose
head continued to sing even after being severed from his body. But he is
also the monstrous serpent threatening that singing head, whose satire has
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the power to bite (unlike Sporus in Arbuthnot, who can only spit, spew,
and “mumble of the game he dare not bite”), frozen for eternity in a pose
of attack. Tellingly, Pope chooses to omit the powerful fantasy that follows
these lines: a dream of losing the self in union with a beloved, and of falling
out of step with the couplet’s metre, looking beyond deformity’s static and
solitary frame.
NOTES
1. On the Works as a monument to love and fame, see Vincent Caretta, “‘Images
Reflect from Art to Art’: Alexander Pope’s Collected Works of 1717,” in Poems in
their Place: The Intertexuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), pp. 195–233.
2. For a fascinating overview of this dynamic, see Blakey Vermeule, The Party of
Humanity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
3. Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation
of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
4. Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, pp. 38–9.
5. James Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory
Satirists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 147, 154.
6. Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, trans. Michael Lucey
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. xv.
7. David Garrick, as quoted in Percival Stockdale, Memoirs of the Life and Writings
of Percival Stockdale 2 vols. (London, 1809), ii, pp. 153–4.
8. Brean S. Hammond, Pope and Bolingbroke: A Study of Friendship and Influence
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984), p. 121; Thomas E. Maresca,
Pope’s Horatian Poems (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), p. 179.
9. Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-
Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 257. Todd
also elucidates the way in which Pope confuses Horace’s orderly oppositions
between the active and contemplative lives in this passage, leaving the reader
and himself unconvinced of his ability to “project himself effortlessly into
opposite extremes,” and preparing us for the tonal shift of the next passage
(pp. 256–7).
10. Helen Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 28.
11. Translated by A.S. Kline, and available at etext.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/ trans/
Metamorph11.html Toc485520962.
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