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“At Once the Source, and End”: Nature's Defining Pattern in An Essay on Criticism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
Scrutiny of ambiguous syntax, puns, and buried metaphors in key passages reveals a less eclectic, more defined vision than readers have usually recognized in An Essay on Criticism. Its center is an image of Nature that adumbrates various analogies involving expansive energy and limiting boundaries, inspired intention and realized form. Pervading the poem, reappearing in different forms, these analogies define the relationships between Nature and Art, creative process and artistic form, artistry and criticism. Implicit in all such relationships is a further image of creating power’s radiating from God, and of the created being’s attempting to rise back to its “Source, and End” where all seeming discords and divisions are perfectly unified. Pope’s Essay follows this image by asking its reader not just to mediate between apparently opposing critical precepts but to transcend their limits to recognize the unconfined truths that bring precepts into being.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975
References
Notes
1 Introd. to An Essay on Criticism, Alexander Pope, Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, The Twickenham Ed. of the Poems of Alexander Pope, i (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, and London: Methuen, 1961), 211–12. All quotations from An Essay on Criticism are from this edition and will be cited in the text.
2 “Wit Governing Wit,” An Argument of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971), p. 38. This study generates an excellent sense of the poem's unity. Yet its conclusion, that Pope fails to integrate completely “a body of traditional doctrine” into “a poetic texture” (pp. 39–40), is, I think, incorrect. Martin Kallich's “Image and Theme in Pope's Essay on Criticism,” Ball State University Forum, 8, No. 3 (1967), 54–60, also offers an account of the poem's imagery as a unifying device. For other useful studies of specific techniques, see John M. Aden, “ ‘First Follow Nature’ : Strategy and Stratification in An Essay on Criticism,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 55 (1956), 604–17; John A. Jones, Pope's Couplet Art (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 45–63; Kallich, “Pegasus on the Seesaw: Balance and Antithesis in Pope's Essay on Criticism,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 12(1967), 57–68; and, of course, William Empson's “Wit in the Essay on Criticism,” Hudson Review, 2 (1950), rpt. in Essential Articles: Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, rev. ed. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1968), pp. 208–26.
3 “‘Wit and Poetry and Pope’: Some Observations on His Imagery,” Pope and His Contemporaries, ed. James L. Clifford and Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), p. 40.
4 “‘First Follow Nature’: An Annotation,” English Studies, 49 (1968), 290.
5 Arthur Fenner, Jr., e.g., in “The Unity of Pope's Essay on Criticism,” Philological Quarterly, 39 (1960), rpt. in Essential Articles, p. 232, speaks of An Essay on Criticism as representing the typical Augustan “dialectical ‘zig-zag’ across the golden mean.” See also Kallich, “Pegasus on the Seesaw.”
6 Edward Niles Hooker, “Pope on Wit: The Essay on Criticism,” The Seventeenth Century by Richard Foster Jones and Others (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1951), rpt. in Essential Articles, pp. 185–207; Williams, pp. 213–19. See also Empson's discussion of this couplet, pp. 219–20.
7 See Empson, p. 211, and Spacks, p. 23. For a fuller discussion of the analogies to Romantic theory, see Richard Harter Fogle, “Metaphors of Organic Unity in Pope's Essay on Criticism,” Tulane Studies in Erglish, 13 (1963), 51–58. G. Wilson Knight, in The Burning Oracle (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1939), p. 159, describes the importance of Pope's seeing Nature as a great whole: “So ‘nature’ and ‘judgment,‘ power and control, instinct and art, may be readily unified under the holistic concept: for stern control of any part is itself constituent to the organic quality of a whole existing, as an organism, through the infusing power of its own central, and instinctive, life.” For other arguments of unity, see William Bysshe Stein, “Pope's An Essay on Criticism: The Play of Sophia,” Bucknell Review, 13, No. 3 (1965), 75–86; and Jones, p. 62.
8 I have drawn for word meanings—but not for their synthesis in what follows—upon Aden, p. 612. All meanings to follow have been checked in the OED.
9 M. H. Abrams, in The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Norton, 1958), p. 58, discusses the significance of “Plotinus' basic figure of creation as emanation, in which the One and the Good are habitually analogized to such objects as an overflowing fountain, or a radiating sun, or (in a combination of the two images) to an overflowing fountain of light.” See also Mack's discussion of this imagery in his introduction to An Essay on Criticism, “The Augustans,” English Masterpieces, 2nd ed., v (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 23.
According to the OED, the meaning of “Art” suggested here as the production of the beautiful, as well as the agent of that production, is relatively modern and would have been available to Pope only in discussions of painting. That he intends this meaning of “Art,” nevertheless, seems very possible. Cf. An Essay on Criticism, 11. 492–93: “The treacherous Colours the fair Art betray, / And all the bright Creation fades away!” That he might extend the meaning of “Art” beyond the specific context of painting would be typical of Pope's thorough consciousness of the evolved and evolving meanings of words.
10 Aubrey Williams suggests the influence of La Rochefoucauld's description of “the Energy and Extension of this Light of the Wit, … the very Thing that produces all those Effects, usually ascrib'd to the Judgment” (quoted in Williams, p. 214).
11 An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack, The Twickenham Ed. of the Poems of Alexander Pope, iii, Pt. i (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, and London: Methuen, 1950).
12 Anthony Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics, ed. J. M. Robertson (1900; rpt. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963), ii, 112.
13 Idea (1924; trans. Joseph J. S. Peake, Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1968), pp. 26, 54–68, 85–99, 129–53. For a more general description, see M. H. Abrams, pp. 42–46. His further description of the way Romantic theories of mind and creation derive from this tradition and its imagery accounts for the similarities noted between Pope's Wit and the Romantic Imagination.
14 See M. H. Abrams, pp. 272–85, esp. p. 276.
15 Cf. Sheffield's Essay on Poetry, 11. 20–25, quoted in Twickenham Ed. notes to An Essay on Criticism, 11. 76–79, n.
Without a Genius too, for that's the Soul,—
A Spirit which inspires the work throughout,
As that of Nature moves this World about:
A heat that glows in every word that's writ,
That's something of Divine, and more than Wit;
It self unseen, yet all things by it shown.
Or consider some anonymous poems quoted in Hooker, Essential Articles, p. 199, that define wit as “a Thought sprung from a Ray Divine,” or as:
a Radiant Spark of Heav'nly Fire,
Full of Delight, and worthy of Desire;
Bright as the Ruler of the Realms of Day,
Sun of the Soul, with in-born Beauties gay.
Ode. Of Wit, by Abraham Cowley, in Poems, ed. A. R. Waller (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1905), p. 18, uses different imagery but also suggests the power and emphasis of the divine analogy:
In a true piece of Wit all things must be,
Yet all things there agree.
… as the Primitive Forms of all
(If we compare great things with small)
Which without Discord or Confusion lie,
In that strange Mirror of the Deitie.
Louis I. Bredvold, “The Tendency toward Platonism in Neo-Classical Esthetics,” Journal of English Literary History, 1 (Sept. 1934), 91–119, and Samuel Holt Monk, “A Grace beyond the Reach of Art,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), rpt. in Essential Articles, pp. 38–62, both show the ways in which 17th-century esthetics tend to mix Neoplatonic and Christian images and concepts of Nature and Beauty with their Aristotelian and Stoic counterparts. See also Aubrey Williams' brief summary of the many ideas and possible sources that may go into Pope's concept of Nature, pp. 219–22; and also M. H. Abrams' discussion of the tangled growth of organic theories of art, pp. 184–201. In spite of the complicated mixing of these esthetic currents, I suspect that yet more thorough research into the intellectual backgrounds of An Essay on Criticism may yield a more precise definition of Pope's understanding and use of his sources.
16 The omitted lines do concern more than capacity. I deal with them below, p. 867.
17 Spacks, discussing An Essay on Man, comes to a similar conclusion, that man's “acceptance of the necessary limits of perception and expression may lead him to transcendence” (p. 83).
18 Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago : Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 61.
19 The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), i.
20 For a Neoplatonic version of this idea that seems appropriate, compare Spenser's “An Hymne in Honour of Beautie,” The Complete Poetical Works of Spenser, ed. R. E. Neil (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1936):
And then conforming it unto the light,
Which in it selfe it hath remaining still,
Of that first sunne, yet sparckling in his sight,
Thereof he fashions in his higher skill
An heavenly beautie to his fancies will,
And it embracing in his mind entyre,
The mirrour of his owne thought doth admyre.
(11. 218–24)
Much of the imagery in Spenser's two Hymnes is equally suggestive for An Essay on Criticism. An even closer version of the idea and the imagery Pope works with here and throughout the poem is this description of the relationship between Art and the “first Light” by André Félibien from Entretiens sur les vies des Peintres (1666) quoted in Bredvold, p. 103, from the 1705 London edition: “Si vous voulez prendre la peine de faire reflexion sur les diverses parties de cet Art, vous avouerez qu'il fournit de grands sujets de méditer sur l'excellence de cette premiere Lumiere, d'où l'esprit de l'homme tire toutes ces belles idées, et ces nobles inventions qu'il exprime ensuite dans ses Ouvrages.
“Car si en considerant les beautez et l'art d'un Tableau, nous admirons l'invention et l'esprit de celui dans la pensée duquel il a sans doute été conceû encore plus parfaitement que son pinceau ne la pu executer; combien admirerons-nous davantage la beauté de cette source où il a puisé ses nobles idées ?”
21 Compare John Dennis' “But, as in some of the numberless Parts, which constitute this beauteous All, there are some appearing Irregularities, which Parts, notwithstanding, contribute with the rest, to compleat the Harmony of Universal Nature … so, if we may compare great Things with small, in the Creation of the accomplish'd Poem, some Things may at first Sight be seemingly against Reason, which yet, at the Bottom, are perfectly regular, because they are indispensably necessary to the admirable Conduct of a great and just Design” (quoted in Twickenham Ed., notes to An Essay on Criticism, 11. 158–60, n.).
22 In “A Grace beyond the Reach of Art,” Samuel Holt Monk traces two Renaissance concepts of Grace: One, Aristotelian, sees it as a special exception to the Beauty gained through the Rules. So Roger de Piles, often quoted as a source for Pope in this passage, declares of Grace, “Tis what pleases, and gains the Heart, without concerning itself with the Understanding. Grace and Beauty are two different things, Beauty pleases by the Rules only, and Grace without them” (quoted in Monk, p. 39). The other concept, Neo-platonic, refuses to separate them, presenting Grace as an attribute of the divine Beauty the artist follows. It is not likely that Pope is choosing sides in this old argument whose lines blurred over the centuries. And his language does indeed appear to echo that of de Piles—but only to a point, for his basic tendency is to see Grace and Beauty as unified manifestations of Nature, itself an image of God. The theological overtones of “Grace” also add to this effect.
23 I owe this observation, and many stimulating conversations and useful criticisms, to my colleague John D. C. Buck.
24 Boileau, Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Ch. Gidel (Paris: Gamier Frères, 1873), iii, 437, 442.
25 Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford: Clarendon, 1907), i, 202; ii, 12.
26 Earl Wasserman's discussion in The Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), p. 4, of the assumptions about poetic meaning that can grow from seeing poetry as possessing a “mode of existence analogous to that of God's creation” seems appropriate here.
27 See Twickenham Ed. notes to An Essay on Criticism, 1. 391, n.
28 Cf. John Donne: “Nil admirari, is but the Philosophers wisdome; He thinks it a weaknesse, to wonder at any thing, That any thing should be strange to him: But Christian Philosophy that is rooted in humility, tels us, in the mouth of Clement of Alexandria, Principium veritatis est res admirari” (“Preached at St. Paul's, in the Evening, upon Easter-day, 1625,” The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1953, vi, 265).
29 The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), i. The immediately following lines of To the Earl of Roscommon suggest Pope's conscious imitation and modification of Dryden's terms here:
For all the needful Rules are scatter'd here;
Truth smoothly told, and pleasantly severe;
(So well is Art disguis'd, for Nature to appeare.)
Nor need those Rules, to give Translation light;
His own example is a flame so bright;
That he, who but arrives to copy well,
Unguided will advance; unknowing will excel.
(11.32–38)