The Idea of Nature in Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

  

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in  parentheses refer either to lines in the “Essay on Criticism” or the “Essay on Man” or to Canto and stanza in Dryden’s translation of Boileau’s “L'Art poétique.” I use the text of the “Essay on Criticism” available online at https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o3675-w0010.shtml.

 

     The distinction between the natural and the artificial is among the bipolar oppositions most commonly invoked in the discussion of poetry.  The ancient “Asiatic” rhetorical style, Occitanian trobar clus, and Euphuism, for instance, revel in language that is pointedly artificial in contrast to the Attic style, trobar leu, and Philip Sidney who concluded sonnet 1 in Astrophel and Stella with the line: “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”  His pose, of course, is as much a convention as any. 

    There is nothing “natural” about even such direct and simple lyrics as those of A. E. Housman.  All poetry is simply sounds in the air or marks on a page, with no necessary correspondence to lived experience of the world.  Every work of art is oblique and conventional in signification, relying on sound, symbolism, and allusion.  Though no story is “realistic,” since every narration is “made-up,” some have “seeming reality,” while others strike readers as fantasy, and in poetry some writers seem to rely more heavily on nature and inspiration, while others seem more consciously craftsmanlike.  Each is a pretense, an equally manufactured impression created by the author. 

      Still, a poet’s expressed reaction to nature signifies a whole complex of accompanying attitudes.  Nature is a critical element in the contrast constructed by literary historians between Classical and Romantic ideals.  The Classical artist is associated with inspiration through imitation, achieving effects through mastery of rhetoric, and a general attachment to urbane sophistication, while the Romantic is stimulated by direct experience, expressed in a “spontaneous overflow” of words, responding with “natural” emotion to beauty.  

     While Pope is often considered the prime exponent of a neo-Classical poetics, and his “Essay on Criticism” is intended as an English counterpart of Boileau’s L'Art poétique (itself a revision of Horace), in fact both Pope’s poetic theory and practice are far from doctrinaire.  In numerous important ways, Pope contains the embryo of Romanticism in his own writing, though the meaning his gave to the word “nature” was quite different from later usage including our own. 

     The “Essay” does indeed prescribe rules, but also allows for their violation.  While he cautions “Discretion” (163) in violating traditional artistic practices, he recognizes that “Great Wits may sometimes gloriously offend” (153) and please readers with “lucky LICENCE” (149), constructing   “Nameless Graces, which no Methods teach” (145).  To Pope “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,/ For there's a Happiness as well as Care” (142-3).  The aesthetic effects beyond those taught in the schools are not necessarily unknown only because of their novelty; according to Pope, they may be in fact beyond analysis.  “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare.” (142)

     A source of inspiration beyond the models of the ancients, beyond even their conscious understanding, was nature, though for Pope the word had a meaning rarely used today.  The most reductive formulations of the Classical-Romantic dualism would premise a Classical preference for civilization, typified, perhaps, by Samuel Johnson’s comment (according to Boswell) “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." [1]  The Romantic answer would be a reverence for nature as equivalent to “the fair and open face of heaven” as  Keats put it in “To one who has been long in city pent.”

     The word nature to a modern suggests trees and streams, a landscape unshaped by people, but Johnson’s dictionary, which offers eleven definitions, never quite includes this one.  Johnson begins with Nature as a mythological personification and ends with “physics.”  This last comes close to what Pope had in mind when he declared “First follow NATURE” (68).  The “Essay on Criticism” could hardly be more emphatic about the value of nature in the composition of poetry.  To him “That Art is best which most resembles Her” (74) as nature is “At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art” (73). 

     The character of Pope’s concept of nature emerges in his justification for literary convention which insists that  “Rules are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d” (88).   The next line insists “Those RULES of old [are] discover’d not devis’d” (89), though, of course, in fact, works of art are always culturally constructed. 

     Nature impresses Pope’s sensibility not as the picturesque but as a beautifully functioning system.  He loves not the nighttime stars, but the patterns of their movements, not the lily but the annual death and rebirth of vegetation as a whole.  Thus to him nature is the spectacle of the system, miraculous in complexity, that animates the universe.  The analogy with literary “rules” or conventions is natural, reinforced by the veneration for the ancients in which it seems that “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same” (136).

     The same privilege Pope grants to generalities underlies his opening passage in which he maintains, somewhat counter-intuitively, that incompetent critics do more harm than bad writers.  By suggesting the wrong general principles, a misguided critic will deny the order that constitutes nature.  

     Among the notions that might seem to be Romantic, but which Pope affirms is the existence of the natural “true Genius” (11) among poets as well as critics.  To him the greatest writers are “Poets, a Race long unconfin'd and free” (652).  To such gifted artists the rules that govern most artistic practice appear as “vulgar Bounds” and the poet flouting them exhibits “brave Disorder,” enabling  by this violation “a Grace beyond the Reach of Art” (155-156).

     Yet in much of what Pope maintains, he is seconding the views of Boileau, the législateur du Parnasse, who, though he said  “A hundred times consider what you've said:/ Polish, repolish” (I, 11), also prescribed  “To study nature be your only care” (III, 49) and insisted the writer should “Strive to be natural in all you Write” (III, 50).  His treatise opens by  declaring that only those born under a “Poetic Influence” should attempt poetry and that “In all you Write, observe with Care and Art/ To move the Passions, and incline the Heart” (III, 30).

     Furthermore, both Boileau and Pope praise Longinus, the author of On the Sublime, who focuses on the reader’s reaction and allows for subjective intuitive judgements.  Boileau had himself translated Longinus, and Pope hails him enthusiastically. 

 

Thee bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire,

And bless their critic with a poet's fire.

An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust,

With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just:

Whose own example strengthens all his laws;

And is himself that great sublime he draws.

                                                           (675-680) 

The language here emphasizes the reader’s emotional response to a text with word like “fire,”, “ardent,” and “warmth,” and justifies Longinus’ judgment, not through logical reasoning, but because his own writing is powerfully moving.  

     The view of nature that underlies Pope’s literary criticism is expressed as well in his more generally philosophical “An Essay on Man” where nature is divinely inspirited. 

All are but parts of one stupendous Whole,

Whose Body Nature is, and God the Soul

                                            (259-260)

 This holy universal nature is then identified with the aesthetic: “All nature is but art unknown to thee.” (281).  As the godhead is the supreme artist, the order of creation is the ultimate work of art, the model for all human poets.  To him the ancients were able to conform to the dictates of an all-but-deified nature that they borrowed from it some flames of “Coelestial Fire” (198). 

     This nearly numinous concept of nature underlies Pope’s literary theory, allowing him to contain in  embryo significant elements of what came to be Romantic assumptions about art.  His reliance on authority, on the “unities” attributed to Aristotle and other prescriptive rules, and his claim that "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance" (362–363) are quite real, but they arise from the conviction that reliance on literary tradition and drawing from nature itself are similar processes.   For Pope the contemplation of the phenomenal world and the appreciation of earlier poetry both lead, not through rational processes but through a kind of spiritual apprehension, to an understanding of beauty.  Pope’s conflation of art and nature allows him simultaneously allegiance to the natural and the artificial; for him there is little difference since god is an artist like himself.  In the study of nature and of poetry (and of the divine as well) Pope finds an ineffable element, revelatory yet resistant to analysis, known only by the afflatus Longinus called the sublime.

 

 

1.  This is consistent with the Biblical attitude in which the wilderness is regularly opposed to the garden.

2.  For Boileau reason often stands in place of what Pope calls nature.  “Always let sense accompany your Rhyme” (I, 2).

The Use of Convention in “The Floure and the Leafe”

 

Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes; those in parentheses are line numbers. 

 

     Justification of literary valuation is notoriously elusive.  Works rise and fall in the estimation of readers over time based on a number of factors, including the older text’s real or imagined similarity to current writing or to either the critic’s (or the society’s) ideology.  A reader’s perception of beauty may be explained but cannot be proven.  Analysis of fluctuations in the prestige of specific poems and novels is likely to reveal as much or more about readers as about the works in question.

     The history of the reputation of the anonymous fifteenth century poem “The Floure and the Leafe” illustrates a particularly dramatic alteration in status.  Attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer since at least the end of the sixteenth century [1], the poem was highly appreciated for several hundred years.  Dryden lauded it and wrote a modernization, Keats wrote a sonnet in response, and the poem was praised as well as by Hazlitt, Campbell, and others, but, by the middle of the nineteenth century, doubts had begun to appear about its authorship [2] and in 1900 W. W. Skeat not only decisively completed the case for a later and anonymous author (whom he regarded as a woman [3]), but also denigrated the poem in withering terms.  He realized he was going against the grain noting “this poem has so frequently been praised that I feel some diffidence in saying that too much has been made of it” yet he was sufficiently hostile to those who maintained the traditional view to use inverted commas when he called them “critics.” [4]

     The drop in value following the discovery that the poem had not been written by an accepted “great” is, however dramatic, surely not surprising.  The weight which readers give to authority has led to a host of pseudepigrapha, including the ascription of the Pentateuch to Moses and over a hundred texts once falsely attributed to Aristotle, and the art market demonstrates in a clear monetary metric the loss of value when a painting has been shown to be not by a master, but by his school or, worse yet, by a forger.  Yet these decisions are socially rather than aesthetically driven, and have nothing to do with the value of the artwork itself. 

     Shifts in literary taste also influenced the poem’s standing.  Many moderns, in fact, many post-Romantics, would, of course, be put off by a defunct genre like the medieval dream visions.  A superficial view conflates literary convention with lack of imagination and privileges “realism” (as though any collection of marks on a page is a direct representation of lived experience).  At the time when Skeat wrote, a leading edge of literature was realism and an archaic fantasy vision hardly will appeal to one for whom verisimilitude is important. 

     Yet the curious fact is that those who valued the poem prior to Skeat’s comments regularly stressed not its well-wrought artifice but its outstandingly “realistic” descriptions of nature.   In spite of the fact that the language is highly formulaic with most phrases being closely paralleled by antecedents so numerous that no one instance can be seen as the poet’s model, appreciation for “The Floure and the Leafe” was most often based on the poet’s successful representation of a nature that corresponds to lived experience.  Because of Chaucer’s date, early readers also often characterized the poem as simple” and “childlike,” ignoring the poem’s sophistication. 

     Just as Dryden, in an age that favored didacticism found the poem’s moralizing its chief appeal [5] during the Romantic era, when readers prized natural description, they found it in “The Floure and the Leafe.”  For William Hazlitt, one of the most acute critics of the day, Chaucer’s “characteristic excellence, what might be termed gusto” lies in his “descriptions of natural scenery,” so true-to-life that they give “the very feeling of the air, the coolness or moisture of the ground,” and the poem which best exemplifies this outstanding quality is “The Flower and the Leaf.” [6]  Thomas Campbell found in it “fresh and joyous descriptions of external nature.”  The setting of the vision, which seems to moderns so distant from lived experience, is for him “like the recollection of an actual scene.” He comments, “Here is no affected rapture, no flowery sentiment.” [7]  For Keats , reading “this pleasant tale" is an experience that feels natural, like strolling into “a little copse.” [8]

     The principal effect of the conventionality apparently invisible to these earlier readers is that scenes and individuals are highly generic with little specificity.  They are largely interchangeable -- one poet could wander into the locus amoenus of another and scarcely notice the difference, nor would their ladies find much to motivate a choice between the men.  Detail is replaced by superlatives in a pattern so pervasive it requires no exhaustive demonstration.

     Hyperbolic convention appears from the outset with the glorious chariot of Apollo whirling across the sky far above a beautiful scene.  Reverdie is in progress and “every wight/ Of this season wexeth glad and light.” (13-14)  The speaker, ”glad of the season swete” (15) enjoys “heart’s ease.”(20)  She steps out into a very “plesaunt” (36) sight.   Indeed, the poet who devised the entire setting says it “it was more pleasaunt then I coud devise.” (97)  The medlar tree is “the fairest.” (86)  The poet thought herself in Paradise. (115)

 

                         . . . sith the beginning

Of the world was never seen or than

So pleasant a ground of none earthly man.

                                                          (124-126)

 

     The women of the company of the leaf and men are not only themselves beautiful, they sing beautifully as well and, as if that were not enough, go about draped in gems, fine fabrics, and garlands.  The men and the flower party are much the same.  No attempt is made toward what most readers would mean by “realism.”  Yet such conventional superlatives, far from being limited to allegorical dream visions, are universal; the popularity of the device signifies that it has been found highly useful. 

Though such obviously artificial statements may seem to owe their origin to the mindless replication of prior models, the existence of hyperbole in the rhetorical figures of every nation suggests that they function as more than decorative ornaments.  In certain ways these extravagant statements are more “real” than the kind that passes for objective.

     Most obviously, they represent culturally accepted ideals to which, it is understood, living people only imperfectly aspire.  Achilles can exemplify the impossibly brave and competent warrior portrayed as the noblest among men, as can John Wayne.  Medieval romances have episodes as hyperbolic as any comic book action hero.  The dominant desirable qualities for women are illustrated by the countless surpassingly lovely ladies from Helen through the most recent film star, though there are supplementary models specifically for wives such as Penelope and Griselda.  All cultures transmit their beliefs and values through the symbolic systems of songs, dramas, and visual works.  Hyperbole in art defines very plainly the qualities admired by its makers.

     Furthermore, everyone experiences subjective states of mind which correspond closely to poetry’s immoderate claims.  An individual may really think his daughter is the smartest thing around, his sergeant is the bravest man on earth, and his lover the most beautiful.  Such sentiments seem true to parents, comrades, and lovers.  Art represents the human psyche more accurately than non-aesthetic forms of discourse specifically because it allows representation of the affective states so significant in lived experience. 

     Apart from their value in suggesting such cultural codes and individual passions, the hyperboles of poetry have a ludic value, providing the reader or listener with play and entertainment.  People turn to literature for experiences unobtainable otherwise.   The poster in the library that tells our children “reading is a magic carpet” does not lie.  The pleasure of seeing what is not and never can be is akin to that experienced by the contemporary film viewer watching special effects.  And when the depiction is rendered impossibly lovely, this seductive virtual reality can be dazzling in itself. 

     Finally, just as people in humble circumstances often enjoy reading about celebrities, there is likely some effect resembling sympathetic magic causing the reader to imagine herself as blissful as the fine ladies in a story.  The reader of “The Floure and the Leafe” thinking of a beautiful bower crowded with beautiful people resembles the Depression era movie-goer relishing and not resenting men on the silver screen in high top hats arm-in-arm with women sparkling with jewels.  One can almost imagine the ladies of the flower doing a Busby Berkeley number.

     Whereas the poem’s original readers knew the relevant codes and, far from being put off by the use of convention, they regarded it as prestigious as it connects a current work with the laudable models of the past.   For the original audience the use of convention was appreciated for both entertainment value and thematic function.  Once readers had forgotten the meaning of the old conventions, having traded them for new, the poem lost its appeal.  As it happens, the poem lost the authorial sanction of Chaucer’s name at a time when its conventions were already poorly understood, causing the poem to fall into an undeserved obscurity.

 

 

  

1.  Included in Thomas Speght’s 1598 The Workes of our Antient and learned English Poet, Geffrey Chaucer.

 2.  Skeat’s idea of female authorship may have influenced both his dismissal of the poem and later generations’ near-abandonment of it.  Though the author’s identity and gender remain uncertain, the persona of the text is female.  In this essay I shall use feminine pronouns for the unknown writer.

 3.  In his 1778 edition of Chaucer Thomas Tyrwhitt was the first scholar to doubt the attribution.  (Tyrwhitt also edited Chatterton’s Rowley poems with an appendix demonstrating their true authorship.)  In 1868 Henry Bradshaw’s arguments that the poem must be dated after Chaucer’s death were included in Furnivall’s A Temporary Preface to the Six-Text Edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  This view was strengthened by Bernhard ten Brink in Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwicklung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften (1870). 

 4.  His observation about “critics” appears in Chaucerian and other pieces (1897), lxi, the admission of diffidence from The Chaucer Canon (1900), 139.Lectures on the English Poets (1818), “On Chaucer and Spenser.”

 5.  See his preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern.

 6.  in British Poetry, quoted in The Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, March 1819 p. 474.

7.  Specimens of British Poets, 1819. 

8  “Written On The Blank Space Of A Leaf At The End Of Chaucer’s Tale Of ‘The Flowre And The Lefe.’”

A Note on Dryden and "Dramatick Poesy"

     One of the most significant attempts to pursue literary theory between Sidney and Peacock, Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy provides a thoughtful, if not systematic, account of neo-classical ideas. The frame of Dryden’s dialogue describes the party of four discussing literature while on a pleasure excursion as the British battle the Dutch at the mouth of the Thames. This dramatic situation not only emphasizes the provisional character of the “essay” form emphasizing relativism, dynamic truth, and a social nexus; it also introduces the patriotic motif that will be significant to Neander’s value judgments.
     Dryden’s fundamental error is his acceptance from his classical antecedents of the notion that art is imitation. He links his literary values to this unconvincing basic concept. Now even in common sense terms there would be little point in seeking to imitate a reality which is itself fully manifest always. Were art mimesis alone, it would never have taken such a central role in human culture. Plato would have been quite right in maintaining that art could only be second-rate were the imitation of lived reality its goal. He might have thought, though, that just as his form or idea of a chair or of love is related to, but not identical with, the chair in my living room, a chair or an affection represented in art will be similarly different from their kin in lived experience, though art’s image is richer in information. Whereas Plato’s “ideas” are simply generalizations, though weighted in the end with the burden of ultimate reality, art’s images suggest at once an individual object and the sum of its occurrences in the reader’s experience, as well as a host of implied, allusive, and symbolic associations.
     The representation of art not as imitation (a mirror in Abrams’ terms) but as creation (a lamp) is a Romantic one. As most of our assumptions remain Romantic today, Dryden’s ideas will find little sympathy from the modern reader. The very idea of “decorum,” which he assumes, has hardly survived into our time in which attempts to violate decorum are part of the stock in trade of the off-Broadway theater. As he finds the French style, so admired by Lisideius, “icy” with the beauty of a “statue” not a play (as though a statue could not be moving), we suspect that Dryden may have the same intuitive reactions as we, though he is bound to express them in terms acceptable to his theory. This assumption is strengthened by Dryden’s insightful analysis of The Silent Woman and his preference for Shakespeare over the more academic Jonson in contrast to many of his generation.
     Yet he then uses this same measure of faithfulness to nature and realism to justify what seem to us moderns as assertively artificial conventions. The notion of the “unities” figures prominently in the discussion, though the author is aware that its strict observance is based neither on Classical precept nor example. Indeed, he finds the French playwrights often violating the rules. What will strike the contemporary reader as odd is that to Dryden, the unities are good because they enhance verisimilitude: one place need not change into another, nor need time be manipulated. The very conventions that would seem to signal a highly conventionalized, unrealistic style are for him the opposite. Now, of course, no one could mistake the doings of actors on a stage for anything other than “fictional,” and the same is true a fortiori for words on a page. Neither competes with lived experience. The observer evaluates each in entirely different terms. When plays or poems are composed according to rule or convention, the first bit of information the consumer receives from the rule is in fact the work’s artificiality, its fictional character.
     Lisideius’ definition of drama, later adopted in shorter form by Neander is “a just and lively Image of Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and Instruction of Mankind.” Yet Dryden knows no likelier source for pleasure than plausibility, as though we do not also find entertainment in the unexpected, the wholly fantastic, in formal patterns and a host of other sources. While discussing the propriety of fights and “tumult” on stage, Neander sensibly comments that, if he can accept that the figures before him are kings and princes, he can equally accept that they strike blows in earnest, not to mention the supernatural pagan deities in Corneille. Where, then, is the boundary of the suspension of disbelief?
     Just as there is an inevitable relation but no direct correspondence between the literary description and the thing described, there can be no point before unintelligibility at which the gap between the two is too large.
     Dryden does no better with the other Horatian end of poetry: instruction. In his reductive view, this involves setting out the morally, perhaps in the end religiously, proper behavior for the benefit of the reader. His faith in the standard of imitation blinds him to any notion of art’s unique ability to investigate contradictions, ambiguities, ambivalences, and the unknown.
     Yet, in spite of our dissent from his conclusions, he has in this dialogue created a memorable scene in which the cultivated idlers toss ideas between them on a lazy afternoon, leaving sea battles to others, however satisfying one’s own nation’s victory may be. What better use for the human consciousness? And surely Britain’s rule on the waters must have seemed to reinforce the claims of her poets. One may regret the erosion of ancient authority whose decline has been more rapid than that of the British Navy in the years since Dryden, but perhaps critics have approached a bit closer to the grand and chryselephantine image of the muse herself in the sancta sanctorum of the reader’s mind.

Notes on Recent Reading 10 [Voltaire, France, Dryden]

Philosophical Letters [Voltaire]

     Why is Voltaire considered a philosopher? He seems clearly a littérateur whose comments on politics and religion are no more systematic than those of his friend Benjamin Franklin. The eighteenth century civic-minded French intellectuals who called themselves philosophes had indeed a preference for reason over mindless faith as well as curiosity about many fields but their thinking was loose and metaphorical, motivated more by a guiding sense of potential human decency than by a show of rigor or a pursuit of metaphysical truth.
     What we call his Philosophical Letters was originally more accurately titled Letters concerning the English nation. Writing after a three-year exile following his imprisonment through a letter de cachet, Voltaire comments on a variety of English phenomena, often to the disadvantage of his native land.
     He is most concerned with the progressive advance of the middle class against the aristocratic privileges of feudalism and the consequent progress of civil and religious liberties. The modern reader is struck with Voltaire’s praise of the London Stock Exchange as a place where “representatives of all the nations” gather “for the profit of mankind.”
     He writes on inoculation, on Newton’s optics and physics and on Locke, celebrating the advance of science. To Voltaire such writers were assisting in the overdue demolition of superstition, contributing toward the development of a “natural philosophy.” (Of course, to Blake, “Newton's Particles of Light” were “sands upon the Red Sea shore,/ Where Israel's tents do shine so bright,” and Voltaire a mere “mocker.”)
     Among the other pleasure of the volume are Voltaire’s wit, reminiscent of Mark Twain, in his characterization of Quakers who had his admiration in spite of their enthusiasm. It is more salutary to read his criticism of Shakespeare (indeed his preference for Addison’s Cato) than a dozen third-hand praises by less original critics.


Penguin Island [France]

     Anatole France is certainly Voltaire’s literary and intellectual descendent. It is little wonder that France’s literary stock has declined since he received the Nobel prize in 1921. What the Swedish committee called his “nobility of style” and “true Gallic character” seemed to others to be heavy-handed thematic development ornamented only by dry wit and old-fashioned rhetorical turns. His rationality does not appeal to the modern infatuation with passion and the unconscious.
     Penguin Island presents a parody history of France from prehistory to a collapse following anarchist assaults. is clever in ideas and turns of phrase. One finds satiric accounts of European history including figures resembling Charlemagne, Napoleon, and such a detailed account of a Dreyfus-like controversy that all but experts will go running for footnotes.


Annus Mirabilis [Dryden]

     Sometimes I find that reading a poet for whom I feel I have little inclination is more productive than reading a settled favorite. Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis is fascinating simply for its implications about the role of poetry in the structure of culture. A verse account of striking recent news or a poetic tribute to a ruler and his generals would be unlikely in any country today yet was perfectly ordinary in the seventeenth century.
     The specific appeal of Dryden’s work, though, is technical. The repeated rhythm of each quatrain as it sets up and delivers again and again becomes hypnotic as a tide on a shore, and his confident and clever diction eventually acquires an almost “swinging” dance-like quality.