No More Learning

Pope was at heart one of the most charitable
of men. In the days of his prosperity he is said to have given away one
eighth of his income. And he was always quick to succor merit in
distress; he pensioned the poet Savage and he tried to secure patronage
for Johnson. But for the wretched hack writers of the common press who
had barked against him he had no mercy, and he struck them with the
first rod that lay ready to his hands.

During his work on the 'Dunciad', Pope came into intimate relations with
Bolingbroke, who in 1725 had returned from his long exile in France and
had settled at Dawley within easy reach of Pope's villa at Twickenham.
Bolingbroke was beyond doubt one of the most brilliant and stimulating
minds of his age. Without depth of intellect or solidity of character,
he was at once a philosopher, a statesman, a scholar, and a fascinating
talker. Pope, who had already made his acquaintance, was delighted to
renew and improve their intimacy, and soon came wholly under the
influence of his splendid friend. It is hardly too much to say that all
the rest of Pope's work is directly traceable to Bolingbroke. The 'Essay
on Man' was built up on the precepts of Bolingbroke's philosophy; the
'Imitations of Horace' were undertaken at Bolingbroke's suggestion; and
the whole tone of Pope's political and social satire during the years
from 1731 to 1738 reflects the spirit of that opposition to the
administration of Walpole and to the growing influence of the commercial
class, which was at once inspired and directed by Bolingbroke. And yet
it is exactly in the work of this period that we find the best and with
perhaps one exception, the 'Essay on Man', the most original, work of
Pope. He has obtained an absolute command over his instrument of
expression. In his hands the heroic couplet sings, and laughs, and
chats, and thunders. He has turned from the ignoble warfare with the
dunces to satirize courtly frivolity and wickedness in high places. 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.