Alexander Pope's Catholic Vision

"Slave to No Sect"

G. Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137344786
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

A fresh look at the greatest poet of early eighteenth-century England, this highly readable book focuses on Pope's religious thinking and major poems. G. Douglas Atkins extends the argument that the Roman Catholic poet was no Deist, 'closet' or otherwise.

1

“So vast is Art, so narrow Human Wit”: Subordinating Part to Whole in An Essay on Criticism

Abstract: An Essay on Criticism (1711) is a poem (as well as an essay) and important critical commentary: poetry as criticism, criticism as poetry. It is also centrally concerned with the parts–whole problem, which Pope both discusses and embodies and whose incarnation he shows in a range of critical attitudes, judgments, and preferences. “Anti-sectarianism” functions as a major structuring device in this work. In particular, Pope exposes the various kinds of “part-iality” with which we go about reading and evaluating and rendering judgment concerning what we read. Here, Pope dramatizes the position he described later as being “Slave to no sect,” committed to neither one “part-y” nor another.

Atkins, G. Douglas. Alexander Pope’s Catholic Vision: “Slave to no sect.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137344786.

Very few people, I suspect, know how to read—in the sense of being able to read for a variety of motives and to read a variety of books each in the appropriate way. . . . Philosophy is difficult, unless we discipline our minds for it; the full appreciation of poetry is difficult for those who have not trained their sensibility by years of attentive reading.

—T.S. Eliot, Foreword, Thoughts for Meditation, sel. and arr. N. Gangulee

In his first poetic essay, what strikes us immediately is Pope’s judiciousness, as well as his wisdom (despite his few years), his amazing capacity to bring together what so often is separated and, worse, made into oppositions. An Essay on Criticism (1711) is both a magnificent work of criticism and a great poem. In the terms of the poem, An Essay on Criticism is a work of wit and judgment—and of one as the other: criticism that is also poetry, poetry made of criticism. The achievement is remarkable—especially so for one who could have been no older than twenty-three, and maybe, as he was not above suggesting, years younger.

The issues, along with Pope’s strategies and his values, are marked early on. Thus he writes, regarding the central concern:

Some, to whom Heav’n in Wit has been profuse,

Want as much more, to turn it to its use;

For Wit and Judgment often are at strife,

Tho’ meant each other’s Aid, like Man and Wife. (80–83)¹

Between 1711, when the poem first appeared, and 1743, its last appearance in Pope’s lifetime, the first couplet here became perhaps even clearer in significant intent: “There are whom Heav’n has blest with store of Wit, / Yet want as much again to manage it.” In his magisterial introduction to An Essay on Criticism in the Twickenham Edition, Aubrey Williams superbly points the issues at stake.² Whereas Pope thus refuses to separate wit and judgment, many of his contemporaries were doing just that, including Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, following the lead of Peter Ramus, who notoriously rearranged the five parts of the art of rhetoric, removing invention, arrangement, and memory from rhetoric, giving them to dialectic, and leaving rhetoric with only expression (or style) and delivery. This position would prevail, with disastrous consequences for poetry. Williams spells them out:

The ultimate effect of such a line of thought as this would be the trivialization of poetry itself: the faculty of Wit and the figurative language it inspires are seen as unrelated to truth and real knowledge, to “things as they are”. Since figurative language is of the essence of poetry, the denial of its ability to express truth is the denial of the value and dignity of poetry. At best, the main role of Wit or of poetry becomes (as in Ramistic theory) the mere ornamentation of those truths provided for it by the judgment, and it is scarcely conceivable that Pope, for whom Wit in the Essay is synonymous on occasion with Genius and Art itself, would or could share in assumptions so prejudicial to his art.³

From here, Williams proceeds, with equal authority and definition, to a reading of lines 80–83 of the poem, quoted above. Unmistakable, indeed, is Pope’s “insisting that Wit, rather than Judgment or Sense, can manage Wit. Wit thus becomes not only a faculty which provides quickness of insight and liveliness of expression, but also a controlling and ordering faculty. Wit and Judgment seem to be . . . differing aspects of the same faculty.”⁴ If judgment already exists within wit, then criticism lies within literature, which offers access to it as part of itself. The implications are momentous. Judgment is no exterior force, power, or capacity; indeed, it is secondary to wit, or literature.

Although writing stands as Pope’s main concern in An Essay on Criticism—both the primary sort that is poetry and the secondary that is commentary and evaluation—he also discusses reading, albeit not nearly so extensively. What he says about criticism must, of course, have to do with reading. On reading specifically, his most direct, and valuable, advice is that with which such later—and different—critics as Virginia Woolf and C.S. Lewis concur: “A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit / With the same Spirit that its Author writ” (233–34). This is, note, different from E.D. Hirsch’s admonition to quest for the writer’s “intention.”⁵ It is quite close to the account of reading as meditation offered up by T.S. Eliot in the passage I used as an epigraph above.⁶ That “perfect Judge” Pope describes later, in detail, absence of pride being very nearly the fundamental requirement:

But where’s the Man, who Counsel can bestow,

Still pleas’d to teach, and yet not proud to know?

Unbiass’d, or by Favour or by Spite;

Not dully prepossest, nor blindly right;

Tho’ Learn’d, well-bred; and tho’ well-bred, sincere;

Modestly bold, and Humanly severe?

Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show,

And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe?

Blest with a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d;

A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind;

Gen’rous Converse; a Soul exempt from Pride;

And Love to Praise, with Reason on his Side? (631–42)

Much here applies more or less directly to any reader. Crucial is the uniting of differences, even of apparent opposites, as well as the unsurpassed description of criticism as “Gen’rous Converse.” Pope’s well-chosen words themselves fit well together.

As criticism consists of both wit and judgment, matter and manner, so does reading in general. Sympathy and judgment must come together in the whole act that we call reading, although the temptation remains strong to make that whole depend upon a part: either we give ourselves to our author, as Virginia Woolf urges, or we judge immediately, even before finding out what he or she is saying (as do many of my students nowadays). But if wit manages judgment, and literature has judgment within itself, then surely judgment already exists within that sympathetic engagement essential to reading, by any and all of us, critics or general or “common readers.”

A fundamental point for Pope is one that none of us, I suspect, really wishes to hear. Not only is “A little Learning . . . a dang’rous Thing” (215), but “Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our Defence, / And fills up all the mighty Void of Sense” (209–10). In this case, the most important criticism is self-criticism: “Trust not your self; but your Defects to know, / Make use of ev’ry Friend—and ev’ry Foe” (213–14). In any case, “Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join; / To Err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine” (524–25).

Character thus matters—it may be the most important thing for a critic. He or she must forgo or avoid the great temptation toward part-iality of one sort or another and combine frequently separated qualities: knowing “Humankind” as well as “Books” and having “a Taste exact, yet unconfin’d.” The demand is considerable: nothing less than “a Soul exempt from Pride.” Then, and only then, may appear the ideal of “Gen’rous Converse.”

In a very real sense, of course, Pope’s entire poem concerns reading and how fairly and judiciously to manage it. Behind him stands John Dryden, who made reading the focus of his essay-poem Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith, which posits reading as a key to one’s position relative to God.⁷ More directly than Dryden, Pope is a moral critic, through and through. “Learn then what Morals Criticks ought to show,” he writes, beginning the third and final section of An Essay on Criticism, “For ’tis but half a Judge’s Task, to Know” (560–61). As in the depiction of the ideal critic, so here Pope ins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Toward Deconfining Pope
• 1  So vast is Art, so narrow Human Wit: Subordinating Part to Whole in An Essay on Criticism
• 2  Slave to no sect: From Part to Whole
• 3  Avoiding Deisms high Priori Road: A Catholic Sensibility and a Laymans Faith
• 4  An Emergent Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index