No More Learning

And
most important of all to the student of Pope, it is in these last works
that his personality is most clearly revealed. It has been well said
that the best introduction to the study of Pope, the man, is to get the
'Epistle to Arbuthnot' by heart.

Pope gradually persuaded himself that all the works of these years, the
'Essay on Man', the 'Satires, Epistles', and 'Moral Essays', were but
parts of one stupendous whole. He told Spence in the last years of his
life: "I had once thought of completing my ethic work in four
books. --The first, you know, is on the Nature of Man [the 'Essay on
Man']; the second would have been on knowledge and its limits--here
would have come in an Essay on Education, part of which I have inserted
in the 'Dunciad' ['i. e. ' in the Fourth Book, published in 1742]. The
third was to have treated of Government, both ecclesiastical and
civil--and this was what chiefly stopped my going on. I could not have
said what 'I would' have said without provoking every church on the face
of the earth; and I did not care for living always in boiling
water. --This part would have come into my 'Brutus' [an epic poem which
Pope never completed], which is planned already. The fourth would have
been on Morality; in eight or nine of the most concerning branches of
it. "

It is difficult, if not impossible, to believe that Pope with his
irregular methods of work and illogical habit of thought had planned so
vast and elaborate a system before he began its execution. It is far
more likely that he followed his old method of composing on the
inspiration of the moment, and produced the works in question with
little thought of their relation or interdependence. But in the last
years of his life, when he had made the acquaintance of Warburton, and
was engaged in reviewing and perfecting the works of this period, he
noticed their general similarity in form and spirit, and, possibly under
Warburton's influence, conceived the notion of combining and
supplementing them to form that "Greater Essay on Man" of which he spoke
to Spence, and of which Warburton himself has given us a detailed
account.

Warburton, a wide-read, pompous, and polemical clergyman, had introduced
himself to the notice of Pope by a defense of the philosophical and
religious principles of the 'Essay on Man'.
In spite of the influence of
the free-thinking Bolingbroke, Pope still remained a member of the
Catholic church and sincerely believed himself to be an orthodox, though
liberal, Christian, and he had, in consequence, been greatly
disconcerted by a criticism of his poem published in Switzerland and
lately translated into English. Its author, Pierre de Crousaz,
maintained, and with a considerable degree of truth, that the principles
of Pope's poem if pushed to their logical conclusion were destructive to
religion and would rank their author rather among atheists than
defenders of the faith. The very word "atheist" was at that day
sufficient to put the man to whom it was applied beyond the pale of
polite society, and Pope, who quite lacked the ability to refute in
logical argument the attack of de Crousaz, was proportionately delighted
when Warburton came forward in his defense, and in a series of letters
asserted that Pope's whole intention was to vindicate the ways of God to
man, and that de Crousaz had mistaken his purpose and misunderstood his
language. Pope's gratitude to his defender knew no bounds; he declared
that Warburton understood the 'Essay' better than he did himself; he
pronounced him the greatest critic he ever knew, secured an introduction
to him, introduced him to his own rich and influential friends, in short
made the man's fortune for him outright. When the University of Oxford
hesitated to give Warburton, who had never attended a university, the
degree of D. D. , Pope declined to accept the degree of D. C. L. which had
been offered him at the same time, and wrote the Fourth Book of the
'Dunciad' to satirize the stupidity of the university authorities. In
conjunction with Warburton he proceeded further to revise the whole
poem, for which his new friend wrote notes and a ponderous introduction,
and made the capital mistake of substituting the frivolous, but clever,
Colley Gibber, with whom he had recently become embroiled, for his old
enemy, Theobald, as the hero. And the last year of his life was spent in
getting out new editions of his poems accompanied by elaborate
commentaries from the pen of Warburton.

In the spring of 1744, it was evident that Pope was failing fast. In
addition to his other ailments he was now attacked by an asthmatical
dropsy, which no efforts of his physicians could remove. Yet he
continued to work almost to the last, and distributed copies of his
'Ethic Epistles' to his friends about three weeks before his death, with
the smiling remark that like the dying Socrates he was dispensing his
morality among his friends. His mind began to wander; he complained that
he saw all things as through a curtain, and told Spence once "with a
smile of great pleasure and with the greatest softness" that he had seen
a vision.