No More Learning

Pope dealt with the question of God in Nature, and the world of Man.

Pope's argument was attacked with violence my M. de Crousaz, Professor of
Philosophy and Mathematics in the University of Lausanne, and defended by
Warburton, then chaplain to the Prince of Wales, in six letters published
in 1739, and a seventh in 1740, for which Pope (who died in 1744) was
deeply grateful. His offence in the eyes of de Crousaz was that he had
left out of account all doctrines of orthodox theology. But if he had
been orthodox of the orthodox, his argument obviously could have been
directed only to the form of doubt it sought to overcome. And when his
closing hymn was condemned as the freethinker's hymn, its censurers
surely forgot that their arguments against it would equally apply to the
Lord's Prayer, of which it is, in some degree, a paraphrase.

The first design of the Essay on Man arranged it into four books, each
consisting of a distinct group of Epistles. The First Book, in four
Epistles, was to treat of man in the abstract, and of his relation to the
Universe. That is the whole work as we have it now. The Second Book was
to treat of Man Intellectual; the Third Book, of Man Social, including
ties to Church and State; the Fourth Book, of Man Moral, was to
illustrate abstract truth by sketches of character. This part of the
design is represented by the Moral Essays, of which four were written, to
which was added, as a fifth, the Epistle to Addison which had been
written much earlier, in 1715, and first published in 1720. The four
Moral essays are two pairs. One pair is upon the Characters of Men and
on the Characters of Women, which would have formed the opening of the
subject of the Fourth Book of the Essay: the other pair shows character
expressed through a right or a wrong use of Riches: in fact, Money and
Morals. The four Epistles were published separately. The fourth (to the
Earl of Burlington) was first published in 1731, its title then being "Of
Taste;" the third (to Lord Bathurst) followed in 1732, the year of the
publication of the first two Epistles on the "Essay on Man.
" In 1733,
the year of publication of the Third Epistle of the "Essay on Man," Pope
published his Moral Essay of the "Characters of Men. " In 1734 followed
the Fourth Epistle of the "Essay on Man;" and in 1735 the "Characters of
Women," addressed to Martha Blount, the woman whom Pope loved, though he
was withheld by a frail body from marriage. Thus the two works were, in
fact, produced together, parts of one design.

Pope's Satires, which still deal with characters of men, followed
immediately, some appearing in a folio in January, 1735. That part of
the epistle to Arbuthnot forming the Prologue, which gives a character of
Addison, as Atticus, had been sketched more than twelve years before, and
earlier sketches of some smaller critics were introduced; but the
beginning and the end, the parts in which Pope spoke of himself and of
his father and mother, and his friend Dr. Arbuthnot, were written in 1733
and 1734. Then follows an imitation of the first Epistle of the Second
Book of the Satires of Horace, concerning which Pope told a friend, "When
I had a fever one winter in town that confined me to my room for five or
six days, Lord Bolingbroke, who came to see me, happened to take up a
Horace that lay on the table, and, turning it over, dropped on the first
satire in the Second Book, which begins, 'Sunt, quibus in satira. ' He
observed how well that would suit my case if I were to imitate it in
English. After he was gone, I read it over, translated it in a morning
or two, and sent it to press in a week or a fortnight after" (February,
1733). "And this was the occasion of my imitating some others of the
Satires and Epistles. " The two dialogues finally used as the Epilogue to
the Satires were first published in the year 1738, with the name of the
year, "Seventeen Hundred and Thirty-eight. " Samuel Johnson's "London,"
his first bid for recognition, appeared in the same week, and excited in
Pope not admiration only, but some active endeavour to be useful to its
author.

The reader of Pope, as of every author, is advised to begin by letting
him say what he has to say, in his own manner to an open mind that seeks
only to receive the impressions which the writer wishes to convey. First
let the mind and spirit of the writer come into free, full contact with
the mind and spirit of the reader, whose attitude at the first reading
should be simply receptive. Such reading is the condition precedent to
all true judgment of a writer's work. All criticism that is not so
grounded spreads as fog over a poet's page.