The Age of Voltaire

  Dr. John Arbuthnot, whose History of John Bull (1712) had given England a personality and a name, joined Swift, Congreve, Gay, and Pope in the famous Scriblerus Club (1713–15), dedicated to ridiculing every kind of quackery and ineptitude. All their victims were added to the swelling roster of Pope’s foes. With Lady Mary he had a half-real, half-literary romance that ended in bitter enmity. Swift sometimes stayed with him, as when publishing Gulliver (1726); the two exchanged misanthropies, and some letters that revealed the tenderness under their carapaces.23 Pope’s acquaintance with Bolingbroke began about 1713, and developed into a philosophical tutelage. Each paid the other fulsome compliments. “I really think,” said Pope, “that there is something in that great man which looks as if it were placed here by mistake from some higher sphere”; and Bolingbroke, when Pope was dying, said, “I have known him these thirty years, and value myself more on this man’s love”—whereat, we are told, his voice failed.24

  There must have been something to love in this poet whom tradition, and sometimes his own pen, have pictured as quarrelsome, deceitful, mean, and vain. We should always remember that he was forgivably embittered by the daily humiliation of his physical disabilities. In early life he had been beautiful of face, and of pleasant temper; and his face always remained attractive, if only by the animation of his eyes. But as he grew up the curvature of his spine became more painfully pronounced. He described himself as “a lively little creature, with long legs and arms; a spider is no ill emblem of him; he has been taken at a distance for a small windmill.”25(We are reminded of the pitiful Scarron.) At table, to be on a level with others, he had to be propped up on a raised seat like a child. He required almost constant attendance. He could not go to bed or get up without help; could not dress or undress himself; had difficulty in keeping himself clean. On rising he could scarce hold himself erect until his servant laced him in a bodice of stiff canvas. His legs were so thin that he wore three pairs of stockings to enlarge their size and keep them warm. He was so sensitive to cold that he wore “a kind of fur doublet” under a shirt of coarse warm linen. He rarely knew the zest of health. Lord Bathurst said of him that he had headaches four days a week, and was sick the other three. It is a marvel that Jonathan Richardson could have painted so presentable a portrait of Pope 26—all alertness and sensitivity; but in the bust by Roubillac 27 we can see the tortured body torturing the mind.

  It would be cruel to expect such a man to be even-tempered, complaisant, cheerful, or kind. Like any invalid he became irritable, demanding, and morose; he seldom came closer to laughter than a smile. Deprived of all physical charm, he comforted himself with pride of place and vanity of intellect. Like a weak or wounded animal, and as one of an oppressed minority, he developed cunning, evasion, and subtlety; he soon learned to lie, even to practice dishonesty with his friends. He flattered the aristocracy, but he scorned to write acquisitive dedications. He had the courage to refuse a pension offered him by a government that he despised.

  We see some lovable qualities in his private life. Swift called him “the most dutiful son I have ever known or heard of.” 28 His affection for his mother was the purest and most lasting sentiment of his troubled spirit; in her ninety-first year he wrote that her daily company made him insensitive to any lack of other domestic attachments. His sexual morals were better in practice than in speech; his frame was not adapted to fornication, but his tongue and pen could be licentious ad nauseam. 29 Even to the two women with whom he thought he was in love he wrote with a loose freedom that none but a trull would tolerate today. And yet one of these, Martha Blount, developed for the infirm poet a devotion that gossip mistook for a liaison. In 1730 he described her as “a friend … with whom I have spent three or four hours a day these fifteen years.” 30 In his premature old age he became dependent upon her affection, and he bequeathed to her nearly all of his substantial estate.

  Always conscious of his bodily defects, he felt with double keenness every word critical of his character or his poetry. It was an age preeminent in the vindictiveness of its literary wars; and Pope returned abuse with abuse sometimes unfit to print. In 1728 he gathered his foes and critics into the corral of his verse, and let loose upon them all the arrows of his wrath in his most powerful and disagreeable work. It was anonymous, but all literate London saw his signature in its style. Treading the rugged path of Dryden’s MacFlecknoe (1682), Pope’s Dunciad hailed the scribes of Grub Street as the leading dunces of the Court of Dullness, where Theobald is king. He mourned the death of Wren and Gay, and the Hiberniating exile of Swift, who was dying “like a poisoned rat in a hole”—i.e., Dublin Cathedral. For the rest he saw nothing about him but a venal and tasteless mediocrity. Theobald, Dennis, Blackmore, Osborne, Curll, Cibber, Oldmixon, Smedley, Arnall received in turn their meed of lashes, taunts, and filth—for the poet, perhaps as an attribute of impotence, had a flair for offal. 31

  In a later edition Pope, through the mouth of the poet Savage, told with pleasure how, on the date of first publication, a crowd of authors besieged the bookseller, threatening him with violence if he published the poem; how this made the public more avid for copies; how one edition after another was demanded and consumed; how the victims formed clubs to concert vengeance upon Pope, and destroyed him in effigy. Dennis’ son came with a cudgel to beat Pope, but was diverted by Lord Bathurst; thereafter, for a while, Pope took with him on his walks two pistols and his great Dane. Several victims countered with pamphlets; Pope and his friends started (1730) The Grub Street Journal to continue the war. In 1742 he issued a fourth book of The Dunciad, in which, hungry for new enemies, he attacked the pedagogues and the freethinkers—who boast that

  We nobly take the high Priori Road,

  And reason downward till we doubt of God;

  Make Nature still encroach upon His plan,

  And shove Him off as far as e’er we can; …

  Or, at one bound o’erleaping all His laws,

  Make God man’s image, man the final cause,

  Find virtue local, all relation scorn,

  See all in self, and but for self be born;

  Of nought so certain as our reason still,

  Of nought so doubtful as of soul and will. 32

  Obviously Pope had been delving into philosophy, and not only with Bolingbroke; Hume’s dissolvent Treatise of Human Nature had appeared in 1739, three years before this Book IV of The Dunciad. There is some evidence that the Viscount had already transmitted to the poet the deism of Shaftesbury sharpened with the wisdom of the world. 33 Enough of satire and trivialities, said Bolingbroke; turn your Muse to divine philosophy. “Lord Bathurst,” reported Joseph Warton, “repeatedly assured me that he had read the whole scheme of the Essay [on Man] in the handwriting of Bolingbroke, and drawn up in a series of propositions which Pope was to versify and illustrate.” 34 Pope seems to have done this, even to using specific phrases of the lordly skeptic, 35 but he added some saving remnants of his Christian creed. So he issued his Essay on Man: Epistle I in February, 1733; Epistles II and III later in that year; Epistle IV in 1734. Soon it was translated into French, and a dozen Gauls hailed it as one of the most brilliant unions of poetry and philosophy ever composed.

  Today it is remembered chiefly for lines that everyone knows; let us do Pope the justice to see them in the setting of his art and thought. He begins with an apostrophe to Bolingbroke:

  Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things

  To low ambition and the pride of kings.

  Let us (since life can little more supply

  Than just to look about us and to die)

  Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;

  A mighty maze! but not without a plan; …

  Together let us beat this ample field,…

  Laugh where we must, be candid where we can,

  But vindicate the ways of God to man. 36

  Here, of course, is a memory of Leibniz’ Theodicy and Milton’s Paradise Lost. 37 Pope proceeds to warn philosoph
ers against hoping or pretending to understand—“Can a part contain the whole?” Let us be grateful that our reason is limited and our future unknown:

  The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,

  Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?

  Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,

  And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 38

  There is a secret pessimism here; hope can survive only through ignorance:

  Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;

  Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore.

  What future bliss He gives not thee to know,

  But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.

  Hope springs eternal in the human breast,

  Man never Is, but always To be, blest. 39

  We cannot see the reason for the apparent injustices of life; we must recognize that nature is not made for man, that God must order all things for all things, not for man alone. Pope describes the “vast Chain of Being” between the lowest creatures through man and angel to God, and he keeps his faith in a divine order, however hidden from our ken:

  All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;

  All chance, direction which thou canst not see;

  All discord, harmony not understood;

  All partial evil, universal good;

  And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,

  One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. 40

  The first lesson is intellectual humility. Then a magnificent remembrance of Pascal:

  Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

  The proper study of mankind is man.

  Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,

  A being darkly wise, and rudely great, …

  Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d:

  The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! 41

  Within these human limits let us agree that “self-love, the spring of motion, act[ivate]s the soul,” but also that reason must enter to give order and balance to our passions and save us from vice. For

  Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,

  As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;

  Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,

  We first endure, then pity, then embrace. 42

  These passions, though they are all modes of self-love, are parts of the divine design, and may tend to an end good even to our blind vision. So the lust for the flesh continues the race, and mutual interest begot society. Social organization and religious belief are obvious boons, though kings and creeds have stained history with human blood.

  For forms of government let fools contest;

  Whate’er is best administered is best.

  For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;

  His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right. 43

  The fourth epistle of the Essay on Man examines happiness, and labors to equate it with virtue. If the good man suffers misfortunes, and the wicked sometimes prosper, it is because

  the Universal Cause

  Acts not by partial but by general laws; 44

  God ordains the whole, but leaves the parts to the laws of nature and to man’s free will. Some of us mourn the inequality of possessions as a source of unhappiness; but class divisions are necessary to government;

  Order is Heaven’s first law; and this confessed,

  Some are, and must be, greater than the rest. 45

  This is not as clear as a day in June, but what else could be said to (or by?) Viscount Bolingbroke? And despite the inequality of natural and acquired gifts, happiness is evenly distributed; the poor man is quite as happy as the king. Nor is the prosperous villain really happy; he hugs his gains but feels the world’s contempt, while the just man, even in injustice, has a soul at peace.

  What strikes us first in the Essay on Man is the unrivaled compactness of the style. “I chose verse,” said Pope, “because I found I could express them [ideas] I more shortly this way than in prose.” 46 No one, not Shakespeare himself, equaled Pope in gathering infinite riches—at least considerable meaning—in a little room. Here in 652 couplets are more memorable lines than in any equal area of literature outside the New Testament. Pope knew his limits; he explicitly disclaimed originality of ideas; he proposed to rephrase a deistic and optimistic philosophy in syncopated art, and he succeeded. In this poem he laid aside his Catholic creed at least pro tempore. He kept God as a First Cause only, who exerts no “particular providence” to help the virtuous man from the wiles of the wicked. There are no miracles in this system, no God-given Scriptures, no falling Adam or atoning Christ; a vague hope of heaven, but no word of hell.

  Many critics assailed the poem as versified humanism. “The proper study of mankind is man” defined one aspect of humanism, and seemed to scuttle all theology. When the Essay was translated into French it was pounced upon by a Swiss pastor, Jean Crousaz, who argued that Pope had left God off on a siding in a poem supposed to vindicate the ways of God to man. No other than the potent William Warburton came to Pope’s defense against this alien attack; the poem, vouched the future bishop, was a work of impeccable Christian piety. To calm the clergy Pope published in 1738 a lovely hymn, “The Universal Prayer.” The orthodox were not quite satisfied, but the storm died down. On the Continent the Essay was hailed with hyperboles; “in my opinion,” Voltaire judged, “the finest, the most useful, the sublimest didactic poem that has ever been written in any language.” 47

  In 1735 Pope prefaced a volume of satires with an “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” defending his life and works, and dispatching further enemies. Here came the famous picture of Addison as “Atticus,” and the murderous exposure of the ambisexual Lord Hervey, who had made the mistake of calling Pope “hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure.” 48 Pope transfixed him as “Sporus” in lines that show the poet at his best and worst:

  What? that thing of silk,

  Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk?

  Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel,

  Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

  Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,

  This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings …

  Whether in florid impotence he speaks,

  And as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks;

  Or, at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,

  Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,

  In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,

  Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies,

  His wit all seesaw, between that and this,

  Now high, now low, now master up, now miss,

  And he himself one vile antithesis.

  Amphibious thing! that acting either part,

  The trifling head, or the corrupted heart,

  Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,

  Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord. 49

  Pope was proud of his facility in such assassinations—

  Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see

  Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me. 50

  He excused his bitterness on the ground that the age was threatened with the triumph of stupidity, and needed a scorpion to sting it into sense. But in 1743 he concluded that he had lost the battle; in his last revision of The Dunciad he painted a powerful picture—Donne’s forebodings in Miltonic tones—of religion, morals, order, and art in universal darkness and decline. The Goddess of Dullness, enthroned, yawns upon a dying world:

  She comes! she comes! The sable throne behold

  Of night primeval and of Chaos old!

  Before her, fancy’s gilded clouds decay,

  And all its varying rainbows die away. …

  As one by one, at dread Medea’s strain,

  The sick’ning stars fade off th’ ethereal plain; …

  Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,

  Art after art goes out, and all is night.

  See skulking Truth to h
er old cavern fled,

  Mountains of casuistry heaped o’er her head!

  Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,

  Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more.

  Physic [science] of metaphysic begs defense [against Hume?],

  And metaphysic calls for aid on Sense [Locke? ]!

  See mystery to mathematics [Newton?] fly!

  In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die.

  Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,

  And unawares morality expires. …

  Lo, thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;

  Light dies before thy uncreating word;

  Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall,

  And universal darkness buries all. 51

  Perhaps he mistook his own decomposition for the collapse of the cosmos. At the age of fifty-five he was already dying of old age. Dropsy made it difficult for him to walk, asthma made it painful for him to breathe. On May 6, 1744, he fell into delirium, from which he emerged at intervals; in one of these he expressed his confidence in life after death. A Catholic friend asked if he should call a priest; Pope answered, “I do not think it essential, but it will be very right, and I thank you for putting me in mind of it.” 52 He died on May 30, “so placidly” (if we may believe Johnson) “that the attendants did not discern the exact time of his expiration.” As a Catholic, he was ineligible for burial in Westminster Abbey; he was interred beside his father and mother in Twickenham.

  Was he a gentleman? No; his vituperative hatreds shared in poisoning the literary air of England in the first half of the eighteenth century; his physical sufferings produced acrid acids, and deprived him of the strength that overflows in charity. Was he a genius? Of course: not in thought, which he borrowed, but in form, which he perfected in his genre. Thackeray called him “the greatest literary artist that the world has seen.” 53 In felicity of speech, compression of expression, fertility of phrase, he was the paragon of his time. Even the French accepted him as the greatest poet of his generation; Voltaire looked up to him and imitated him, as in the Discours sur l’homme. For thirty years—longer than any other poet—he was the sovereign of English verse, and for thirty more he was the model of English bards till Wordsworth announced another age.