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 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).
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