Transcribed from the 1891 Cassell & Company edition by LesBowler.
By
ALEXANDER POPE.
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited:
london, paris & melbourne.
1891.
Pope’s life as a writer falls into three periods,answering fairly enough to the three reigns in which heworked. Under Queen Anne he was an original poet, but madelittle money by his verses; under George I. he was chiefly atranslator, and made much money by satisfying theFrench-classical taste with versions of the “Iliad”and “Odyssey.” Under George I. he also editedShakespeare, but with little profit to himself; for Shakespearewas but a Philistine in the eyes of the French-classicalcritics. But as the eighteenth century grew slowly to itswork, signs of a deepening interest in the real issues of lifedistracted men’s attention from the culture of thesnuff-box and the fan. As Pope’s genius ripened, thebest part of the world in which he worked was pressing forward,as a mariner who will no longer hug the coast but crowds all sailto cross the storms of a wide unknown sea. Pope’spoetry thus deepened with the course of time, and the thirdperiod of his life, which fell within the reign of George II.,was that in which he produced the “Essay on Man,” the“Moral Essays,” and the “Satires.” These deal wholly with aspects of human life and the greatquestions they raise, according throughout with the doctrine ofthe poet, and of the reasoning world about him in his latter day,that “the proper study of mankind is Man.”
Wrongs in high places, and the private infamy of many whoenforced the doctrines of the Church, had produced in earnest mena vigorous antagonism. Tyranny and unreason of low-mindedadvocates had brought religion itself into question; andprofligacy of courtiers, each worshipping the golden calf seen inhis mirror, had spread another form of scepticism. Theintellectual scepticism, based upon an honest search for truth,could end only in making truth the surer by itsquestionings. The other form of scepticism, which might betraced in England from the low-minded frivolities of the court ofCharles the Second, was widely spread among the weak, whose mindsflinched from all earnest thought. They swelled the numberof the army of bold questioners upon the ways of God to Man, butthey were an idle rout of camp-followers, not combatants; theysimply ate, and drank, and died.
In 1697, Pierre Bayle published at Rotterdam, his“Historical and Critical Dictionary,” in which thelives of men were associated with a comment that suggested, fromthe ills of life, the absence of divine care in the shaping ofthe world. Doubt was born of the corruption of society;Nature and Man were said to be against faith in the rule of aGod, wise, just, and merciful. In 1710, after Bayle’sdeath, Leibnitz, a German philosopher then resident in Paris,wrote in French a book, with a title formed from Greek wordsmeaning Justice of God, Theodicee, in which he met Bayle’sargument by reasoning that what we cannot understand confuses us,because we see only the parts of a great whole. Bayle, hesaid, is now in Heaven, and from his place by the throne of God,he sees the harmony of the great Universe, and doubts nomore. We see only a little part in which are many detailsthat have purposes beyond our ken. The argument ofLeibnitz’s Theodicee was widely used; and although Popesaid that he had never read the Theodicee, his “Essay onMan” has a like argument. When any book has a wideinfluence upon opinion,