AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 2)

Leibnitz divided evil into moral evil or sin, physical evil or suffering, and metaphysical evil or the limitation of our endowments. He addressed men who were satisfied from the evidence of their internal nature and the external world that God was absolute in power, wisdom, and goodness. Hence, whatever is, is right. "We judge," says Leibnitz, "by the event; since God has so done it would not be possible to do better."[813] Pope starts from the premise of Leibnitz. He assumes the infinite wisdom of the Deity, and concludes that this wisdom must have formed the best possible system. But to a great extent he differed from Leibnitz with regard to the cause of the several kinds of evil, and his optimism was of an adulterate, untenable kind. He did not allow that moral evil was the pernicious abuse of a free will, with which we are endowed because men are preferable to automatons, moral agents to passive machines. He held that moral evil was in itself a good, and that God was the author of it. He it is who "pours fierce ambition into Cæsar's mind," and nature no more requires "men for ever temperate, calm, and wise," than "eternal springs and cloudless skies."[814] Since the sin of men is imposed upon them by God they must be machines after all, and of a debased and often devilish species. An inexorable fatalism becomes the law of humanity, and Borgias, Catilines, and Cæsars are destructive wheels which simply obey the motion impressed upon them by the omnipotent architect. God can do no wrong; man is the puppet of God; and whatever is, is consequently right, the villanies of miscreants included. The Essay swarms with contradictions, and in other passages Pope treats man as an accountable being who departs from the commands of his Maker.

Of physical evil, or suffering, Pope notices only "plagues, earthquakes, and tempests," which he justifies by the remark that God "acts not by partial, but by general laws."[815] Bolingbroke gave the same explanation. Either, he said, such visitations are "rational chastisements," or they are "the mere effects, natural though contingent, of matter and motion in a material system, put into motion under certain general laws."[816] Individuals, that is, must suffer that the laws of matter may not be infringed. Leibnitz rejected the principle. "That which is an evil," he said, "for me would not cease to be an evil because it would be good for some one else. The good which pervades the universe consists, among other things, in this, that the general good is the particular good of every one who loves the author of all good." So, he says again, "we suffer often from the misdeeds of others, but when we have no share in the crime we may hold it for certain that the sufferings procure us a greater happiness."[817] The system of Pope subordinates moral agents to physical, and he finds it a sufficient vindication that the mechanical law is general, and the injury to men only occasional. Whatever may be the worth of particular persons, he believes that they are properly sacrificed to the regularity of material laws, which roll on with undistinguishing, terrific might, crushing any thinking, sentient, virtuous being who may happen to cross their path. He supposes, nevertheless, that these unbending, undiscerning laws have undergone a "change," and, what is singular, the alteration has been from better to worse, whereby he accounts for a portion of the prevalent physical evil.[818] Another portion he at one time ascribed to "chance," which had intruded itself into the arrangements of the Almighty, and overruled his designs.[819] The optimism which represented man to be the sport of mechanical laws, of deteriorating changes in the physical system, and of blind, ungovernable chance, was not an optimism to clear away difficulties, and silence objections.

Metaphysical evil, or the limitation of endowments, is inevitable in every being below the Godhead, and Pope contends that the best system must manifestly consist in an infinite series of creatures, from the greatest to the least. The notion is found in Locke and Leibnitz. There are beings, said the latter, above and below us, or there would be a void in the order of species.[820] The idea was more fully developed by Archbishop King, and is simply an extension to the universe of the terrestrial system, where a gradation of beings on a connected plan is the law. Pope carried the principle to extravagance. He contends that the omission of the smallest creature would break the chain, would throw the universe into confusion, and involve all creation in a common ruin.[821] To keep the universe from tumbling to pieces, "it is plain," according to him, that "there must be somewhere such a rank as man,"[822] and the rule holds equally of the minutest animalcule on the globe. There is a flaw in his premises. It is not apparent that the extinction of the flea would upset the universe, nor that the scale of beings must necessarily be the same which at present prevails. The facts are against the "must be" of Pope. There was a time when other creatures were, and man was not, and when animated nature was able to dispense with the human race. Infinite wisdom must form the best possible system and a gradation of beings, which now includes man, is an actual part of the scheme. Pope's argument breaks down when, to justify the creation of man, he supposes that a chain of beings and an orderly universe could not have existed unless man had been a link in the series. His argument is equally weak when he maintains that the infinite wisdom of God is a guarantee that there will not be a gap in the endless chain of existences, but that it is a question whether infinite wisdom may not have made a mistake with respect to man's proper place in the series, and erred in the after sorting of the gradations which it had previously conceived and created on an infallible plan.[823] The poet was inconsistent to childishness. Johnson believed that when Pope talked of man's place he did not attach any meaning to the term. The words would seem to imply that it was a question whether man was placed in the circumstances which were best adapted to his moral, mental, and physical nature. But if Pope had thoroughly comprehended his borrowed phrases, he would not have proposed the enquiry under a form which stultified his premises.

There were errors enough in Pope's doctrine without the misinterpretations of Voltaire, who has falsified the views of the poet, as he had previously misstated the profounder system of Leibnitz. "Those," says Voltaire, "who exclaim that all is good are charlatans. Shaftesbury, who brought the fable into fashion, was a very unhappy man. I have seen Bolingbroke devoured with chagrin and rage, and Pope, whom he induced to put the mockery into verse, was as much to be pitied as any man I have ever known,—deformed in body, unequal in his temper, always ill, a burthen to himself, and harassed by a hundred enemies to his dying hour. Quote me at least some happy men who say that all is good. Any one who had seen the beautiful Ann Boleyn, and the still more beautiful Mary Stuart, in their youth, would have said that is good, but would he have said it when he saw them perish by the hand of the executioner? would he have said it when he saw the grandson of the beautiful Mary die the same death in the midst of his capital? would he have said it when he saw the great-grandson more unfortunate still, since he lived longer?"[824] Pope, in his imperfect theory, did not deny the existence of sorrow, but asserted, or implied, that the sorrow was an advantage either to the sufferer or others. Voltaire looked singly at the misery without heeding the gain. Mary Queen of Scots at the block was superior to the radiant beauty who was starting on a profligate career. Charles I., penitent for his murderous abandonment of Strafford, and, perhaps, for his creed that duplicity is a virtue when employed by kings to circumvent subjects, was a vastly better man on the scaffold than on the throne. James II. was in a more advantageous position with the inducement to repentance which his long exile supplied than if he had succeeded in his fraudulent attempts to subvert the English church and constitution. The rage of Bolingbroke, and Pope's fretful temper, were certainly inexplicable on the pretence that they were poured into the mind by the Deity. They did not militate against the truer optimism which saw in them self-imposed vice and pain, rendered possible by the free-will which is a privilege to mankind.

Pope filled up the outline of his system with declamatory invectives against objectors, and with reflections intended to prove that the imperfections of man befitted his position in the universe. There is little force in the poet's reasoning. He passes over difficulties, and replies to cavils which no one worth answering ever urged. Some of his remarks are obscure, some erroneous, some common-place. Such as they are they have not been woven into a consecutive argument. M. Crousaz says he knew persons who were persuaded that Pope had tacked together a number of fragments he had composed at different times, before he had the idea of an Essay on Man, which was a contrivance to work up his collection of odds and ends. He understood, in fact, little beyond the separate thoughts, and was insensible to the want of coherence, consistency and purpose. It would be lost labour to search, like Warburton, for a strength and closeness of reasoning which were not in the mind of the author.

The second epistle treats of man "with respect to himself as an individual." The Bible is a revelation of God, and a perpetual summons to mankind "to know and understand" him. "Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me."[825] The divinity at last descended upon earth, and lived our life, acting and speaking under our circumstances, that God might be clearly manifested to the world. "He that hath seen me," says our Lord, "hath seen the Father."[826] The divine light appeared darkness and imposture to Pope. He was even blind to the light which his natural understanding would have furnished, and, taught by Bolingbroke, he abjured all pretension to a knowledge of the Almighty under the plea of reverencing his inscrutable grandeur. Man must not venture to scan God; his only proper study is to learn to know himself.[827] This second epistle exhibits the kind of self-knowledge to which Pope attained, when, renouncing the knowledge of God, he determined to limit his investigations to man.

He draws a desolate picture. Man is in doubt whether he is a god or a beast; whether he ought to prefer his body or his mind. He is a confused chaos of thought and passion, he reasons only to err, and is only born to die.[828] The general incapacity, we are told, extended to Newton, and it might have occurred to the poet that it was a useless task to study our nature when the deductions of reason in its highest estate are uniformly wrong. He committed the oversight from his habit of borrowing fragments he was not at the pains to understand. His caricature was a partial and distorted copy from Pascal, who with wonderful energy of language, amplified the helplessness of fallen man that he might insist the more strongly on the necessity of his restoration through the Gospel. He overcharged the evil to exalt the remedy. Pope had not any remedy to suggest. He leaves the "confused chaos" in its primitive impotence, and calls upon mankind to embark in a deceptive study, with the warning that they will wander from error to error.

Without tying Pope down to the rhetorical exaggerations in the opening paragraph of his second epistle, we find from a passage in the first epistle that he reduced to insignificance the self-knowledge attainable by mankind. He said that when the proud horse and dull ox knew why man put them to this use or that, then would proud and dull man comprehend the end and use of his being, passions, sufferings, and actions.[829] The amount of knowledge possessed by the horse and ox is not discoverable by us. The only nature adequately known to man is his own, and his nature reveals his end. The ideas which ought to govern him proceed from his Maker. They are the voice of God speaking to him, and telling him the purpose for which he lives. He learns, above all, that he is the servant of the Almighty, that his passions are to be ruled by his conscience, that duty is supreme, that his sufferings are the discipline to perfect his character, that earth is the school for a higher existence. He may be negligent and perverse; he may refuse to look into his nature, and may, in part, defy it; may thence arrive at false conclusions, and adopt a false course of conduct, which are the abuses of a free-will that can sink or soar, but the grand outlines of his nature are plain to every honest and earnest enquirer, and blank ignorance on the end of his being, passions, sufferings, and actions is not the inevitable condition of man.

The conviction that we are ignorant of the use of our being and actions did not keep Pope from acknowledging that "good" is the end to which we aspire.[830] The nature of this good, and the means of obtaining it, is the main subject of the second epistle, "which contains," says Warburton, "the truest, clearest, shortest, and consequently the best system of ethics that is anywhere to be met with."[831] The system which Warburton thought "true and clear" appears to be eminently false and contradictory.

Man has certain implanted tendencies, physical, intellectual, and sympathetic,—the craving for food, for knowledge, for society, etc. None of our primitive endowments can be termed moral, since they are bestowed upon us independently of our will, and it is not till will interposes that morality begins, but in their purity they are all advantageous, and many of them are directed to the identical end which morality prescribes. They are part of the stock-in-trade with which man starts in his career, and he is charged with the wise administration of them. A brief experience teaches him that an instinctive tendency may be carried to excess. His craving for food and drink may turn to gluttony and drunkenness; his passion for knowledge may convert him into a solitary student without any care for his kind; his love of society and affection may unfit him for the business and drudgery of life. Or he may yield to a propensity till satiety succeeds, and he is left listless and jaded. Or he may indulge a lawful propensity by lawless methods. Or he may be hurried away by successive impulses, and be too unstable to put his gifts to a profitable use. In any of these ways his proper nature becomes mutilated and degraded. His reason informs him that to enjoy the full advantage of his tendencies he must not consent to be drifted along by the current which is strongest for the moment. He must curb the lower propensities, and foster the higher; he must regulate the several unities in a manner to derive the greatest benefit from the whole; he must substitute for the reign of impulse what moralists call his interest well understood. He does not stop at self-interest. He rises above his personal good into the impersonal sphere of good in itself. He perceives that there is a law superior to his individual interests, a law of universal obligation, and which is immutable and eternal.

Of these three motives, the instinctive, the prudential, and the law of independent morality, Pope rejects the last. He believes that self is the single spring of action in men, and he seriously adopts the old sarcastic saying, "Every man for himself, and God for us all."[832] He divides this selfish nature into two parts,—self-love, which designates the impulsive propensities, and reason, which governs them on the behalf of interest well-understood.[833] Already there is an inconsistency in his phraseology when he puts self-love in direct opposition to reason. Reason in his theory is simply the selfishness of calculation; self-love the selfishness of impulse. Self-love is absolute in both, and is not the less self-love because we deliberate upon the means which are best adapted to secure the selfish end.

The erroneous phraseology signifies little. The important point is the radical falsity of the system. The three grand duties of man,—his duty to God, his neighbour, and himself,—are resolved by Pope into the single duty of man to himself. In the first epistle the poet rebuked the pride which supposed the heavens and the earth to be created for its use.[834] In his second epistle he teaches us that they are totally indifferent to us under any other aspect. He will tell us that the way to promote our personal interest is to love God and our neighbour, but the end and motive of the love must on his system be our individual interest still. The gospel precepts must be set aside; for in place of loving our neighbour equally with ourselves we are to love him simply for the sake of ourselves; and in place of loving God with all our hearts, and minds, and souls, we are to love him solely as a tributary who ministers to our absorbing love of self. When we practically think and act as though we were the centre of the universe; when, horrible to say, we view the Deity merely as an instrument to promote our selfishness; when we discover nothing in the Creator to adore, nothing in his creation to admire, apart from their fitness to advance the interests of one puny mortal, we invert the actual constitution of things, we base our morality upon a lie, and we only cheat ourselves with delusive terms when we talk of our duty to God and our neighbour.

The test of the system is in the phenomena of consciousness which are open to universal observation. When our moral principle is an unalloyed selfishness we seek our private good alone, and there can be no obligation to consult the interests of our neighbours. I pay a debt because it is to my advantage, and not from any sense of what is due to my debtor. I forbear to kill, and maim, and torture, not in the least because I am bound to consider the rights and feelings of my fellow-creatures, but because it would be present or future pain to myself. Owning no law, except the law of selfishness, I should be dishonest and cruel if I could believe that the balance of personal pleasure was on the side of inhumanity and roguery. When I blame murderers and thieves, I inconsiderately distinguish between the guilt and folly of the crime, which is a vulgar mistake. The selfishness which respects nothing beyond the requirements of self is the law of our race, and the miscalled criminal has obeyed the governing principle of mankind. He owed no duty to others, and his sole fault was not to have judged wisely for his interests. I talk of patriotism and public spirit, of sacrifice and disinterestedness, but they are words which convey a false impression. Sacrifice and disinterestedness do not exist, and the apparent devotion to country and public is at bottom a complete devotion to self.

Common experience is too powerful for bad philosophy, and it is plain that this is not a true description of the moral man. Pope puts a part for the whole. The Creator has endowed us with a desire for happiness, which is inseparable from our being. The individual is a portion of the universe, and though he is only an atom, his interests are cared for in common with the rest. But he has a consciousness that the good of others must be cared for likewise, that Providence has enjoined him to contribute to the result, and that his refusal to recognise the duty he owes to his neighbour would be guilt. He has a conviction that the great source of all being and all good is to be adored for his infinite perfections, and that to love him solely for the sake of the blessings he communicates to ourselves is a maimed, derogatory, and impious idea. Man has been constructed to perceive things as they are, and to act in conformity with his knowledge. He is the creature of his Maker, a unit in a multitude, and could not be permitted to consider Maker and multitude subordinate to the creature and unit, without a complete perversion of the facts. With the desire for our own good there has been instilled into us that law of good in itself which embraces the universe,—a law which, while it includes our individual concerns, extends infinitely beyond them, and to which we do homage under its aspect of good in itself, as well as under its aspect that it is good for me. Our personal pleasure is not therefore, as Pope asserts, "the whole employ of body and mind."[835] Happiness in the long run is dependent upon well-doing, and we consult our interest when we adhere to duty. But our rule of duty must not be bounded by our self-interest, which, reducing our motives to a petty egotism, corrupts the nature of man, and contaminates duty at its source.

The prevalent habit of abandoning duty for personal pleasure begets the mistaken idea that where there is pleasure there is absolute selfishness. The degree of selfishness must be determined by our motives, and not by the feelings which accompany our acts. Whatever is done for self-gratification is selfish; and everything in which our end is external to ourselves is disinterested, in so far as the accompanying gratification is not the motive to the deed. Although the benevolent man has a satisfaction in reflecting that the sufferings of the needy are removed, his predominant motive to benevolence is the relief of the wretched, and not his own personal pleasure. His intention terminates in the objects of his charity, with little return upon himself, and unless his sympathy with them was real the gratification would not be felt. Happiness is the proper effect of pure goodness, and if the junction of perfect happiness and perfect goodness was incompatible with disinterestedness, the celestial spirits would be more selfish than men. Men, in turn, would grow selfish in the same proportion that perseverance in well-doing rendered duty delightful. "I find a pleasure in serving my friends," said Schiller in refutation of the doctrine; "it is agreeable to me to fulfil my duties. This troubles me, for then I am no longer virtuous."[836] The love which is capable of the utmost sacrifice is not less generous because no sacrifice may chance to be required, any more than a man who is proof against all temptations to steal, is less honest because he is not exposed to temptation. From our proneness to self-deceit we are accustomed to estimate disinterestedness by actual sacrifices, which both test our motives, and inure us to self-denying love, but disinterestedness is the cause of self-denial and must precede it, and the disposition remains when the call for self-denial may have ceased. Qualities are what they are, whatever may happen to be the surrounding circumstances. Grant that a man can love his neighbour and himself with an equal love, and the same proportion will be preserved whether his love procures him unadulterated pleasure, or entails on him a vast amount of pain. Happiness and disinterestedness are not in their essence mutually destructive; they co-exist and coalesce.

A close scrutiny into the motives of moral men will satisfy us that the love of our neighbour is not wholly or chiefly a disguised love of self; that we love God for what he is, transcendent in goodness and wisdom, as well as for what he is to us; that we do not bow down to duty solely because it is our interest well understood, but much more because it has an illimitable authority independent of our individual interests, and binds the conscience by its right to supreme dominion. God, man, duty are external objects which, over and above the consideration of self-interest, are served by morality as an end. Bishop Butler even maintained that all our instinctive impulses "are particular movements towards particular external objects," and cannot be ascribed to self-love. He instances the desire produced by hunger, of which "the object and end," he says, "is merely food."[837] But there is a further object for which alone the food is desired,—the removal of painful sensations, or the gratification of the palate, or the prolongation of life. All these objects are often purely selfish, and always in their ordinary unreflecting state.[838] The uneasy sensation of hunger begins and ends with the individual; the single purpose for which he covets the food is to allay his particular physical craving; outside self there is no object left to attract the mind,—no over-plus to which our thoughts can be directed. There is not, as in the case of God, man, and law, an object which has a claim upon our hearts and understandings distinct from the special benefit to ourselves. The desire for food is a selfish, but not an evil instinct, for self-love is part of the duty and constitution of man. Pope's error was in putting a fragment for the whole, and merging duty in selfishness.

There is a second part to Pope's system. He has told us that the function of reason is to "advise and check" the instinctive impulses; that she "mixes the passions with art, and confines them to due bounds;" that she "compounds and subjects, tempers and employs them;" and that her "well-accorded" combination of jarring elements "gives all the strength and colour to our life."[839] The instant after he lays down a directly opposite theory. He says that every man brings into the world a "ruling passion," which is "cast and mingled with his very frame;" that this master passion "grows with our growth," and "swallows up" all the other passions; that whatever "warms the heart or fills the head" goes to feed the one despotic desire. When we fancy we curb a passion we are deceived; we have only resigned a lesser passion in favour of a greater.[840] Reason, which lately mixed the passions in their proper proportions, and confined them to due bounds, is suddenly stripped of her prerogative, and becomes the slave of the master passion.

Reason in this new theory is worse than helpless; she deserts to the side of her enemy, gives the monster propensity "edge and power," and exerts herself to exasperate the "mind's disease."[841] Such contradictions were the natural consequence of the perfunctory manner in which Pope had picked up his scraps of philosophy.

The slightest acquaintance with the world is fatal to the hypothesis that an exclusive ruling passion is the universal characteristic of mankind. Each person has various appetites, desires, and affections, and it is rare to see a man in whom "one master passion has swallowed up the rest." Propensities intermingle and take their turn. Characters are notoriously complex, and every individual is not the incarnation of a single unattended passion. A desire for power may be joined with sensuality, a love of fame with covetousness, an eagerness for knowledge with affection. In the play of passions one may preponderate, but all the rest are not reduced to nullity. Allow the existence of the ruling passion, and Pope's account of its origin could not be correct. A passion which is cast in our frame from our birth, and continues thenceforward to grow with our growth, must be permanent and unalterable. The individual must be governed by the same passion in childhood and age, in the season of thoughtlessness and of wisdom, in dissoluteness and virtue, in all the possible changes of condition. This is not the scene which life presents. "Every observer," says Johnson, "has remarked, that in many men the love of pleasure is the ruling passion of their youth, and the love of money that of their advanced years."[842]

With an inherited ruling passion, and reason helpless to restrain it, we should be altogether the creatures of fate on Pope's hypothesis, if he had not furnished reason with a last resource, which, as is evident from several parallel passages, was chiefly suggested to him by the works of his contemporary, Mandeville. This shallow thinker put forth a system of morality and political economy in his Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits. The book, which was philosophically weak, attracted much notice at the time from the liveliness of his coarse illustrations, the vigorous ease of his inaccurate style, and the cynical parade of his licentious doctrines. He had the folly to imagine that commerce could only flourish when the wealth of a nation was consumed by the idle, the sensual, the luxurious. Hence, he argued that their wasteful vices were a national gain. This was his political economy. His morality consisted in denying the reality of virtue. He held that every apparent virtue was prompted by an underlying frailty, and that all ostensible goodness was the false mask worn over inward weaknesses. The indignation his system provoked induced him subsequently to throw in some qualifying phrases, but his faint, and always equivocal concessions, are forms of speech, and did not prevent his repeated avowal that genuine virtue had no existence on earth. "I often," he says, "compare the virtues of good men to your large China jars; they make a fine show, but look into a thousand of them, and you will find nothing in them but dust and cobwebs."[843]

Pope, like Mandeville, founds virtue upon vice. The ruling passion is evil, but reason gives it a bias towards good.[844] "Spleen, obstinacy, hate, and fear," each produce "crops of wit and honesty;" "anger" is the parent of "zeal and fortitude;" "avarice" of "prudence;" "sloth" of "philosophy;" and every virtue under heaven may issue from "pride or shame."[845] The ruling passion having engulphed the whole family of affections and desires, this individual is a personification of anger, that individual of hate; a third of fear; a fourth of sloth; a fifth of pride. The sole moving principle of man is his giant passion.[846] The function of reason is only to foster it,[847] and select the means for its gratification. Whatever these means may be, the motive of the incarnate monster lust, is to feed sensuality; of the monster sloth to secure ease; of the monster pride to inflate self-importance. "The same ambition," says Pope, "may make a patriot, as it makes a knave."[848] But the incarnation of an all-pervading ambition can be only a patriot in appearance, and uses patriotism to serve the ends of ambition. Let the two diverge, and by the law of his nature he must fling the patriotism to the winds. "Either," says our Lord, "make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else, make the tree corrupt and his fruit corrupt."[849] On Pope's theory, to make the tree good is impossible. Man has no escape from the ruling passion he brings into the world. He must be angry, avaricious, or slothful, according to the seed which was sown in him at his birth, and the tree must remain corrupt to the last.

The fruit would inevitably betray the taint of its origin, and Pope was mistaken in supposing that a vitiated motive could keep steady to outward virtue. "Hate," to which Pope ascribes the singular power of producing "crops of wit and honesty," must repudiate love, or whatever else did not subserve the one unamiable passion; and a man all hate,—a frantic enemy to every kind and tender emotion,—would be hateful, however honest and witty. "Anger" would renounce the meek and charitable, "pride" the humble virtues, together with any other virtue which did not minister to inordinate anger and pride. Neither passion would assume a moral aspect. "I observe," says Baxter, "that almost all men, good and bad, do loathe the proud, and love the humble." "Zeal" is the prerogative ascribed to "anger," and the zealot who was urged on by fierce unflagging anger would be a terror and a scourge. Pope himself has drawn a horrible picture of the miseries inflicted upon humanity when "zeal, not charity, became the guide" of the teachers of religion.[850] "Sloth" supplies us with "philosophy," or the apathetic submission to evils we are too lazy to correct, which is the virtue that induces thousands to live in dirt and ignorance, because cleanliness and knowledge are not to be had without industry. "Avarice" is credited with the faculty of "supplying prudence," which is as true as to say that a burning fever supplies a moderate, healthy temperature. The moral system which confines man to the counterfeit "virtue nearest allied to his vice," or ruling passion, is an extravagant libel upon the virtuous, and outrageous flattery of the vicious.[851]

Mandeville took his morality from La Rochefoucauld, and Pope took hints from both. The principle common to the three is the motto which La Rochefoucauld placed at the head of his Maxims, "Our virtues are usually vices in disguise." The doctrine, when expressed in La Rochefoucauld's language, was condemned by Pope.

"As L'Esprit," he said, "La Rochefoucauld, and that sort of people, prove that all virtues are disguised vices, I would engage to prove all vices to be disguised virtues. Neither, indeed, is true: but this would be a more agreeable subject; and would overturn their whole scheme."[852] He repeated the criticism in a suppressed passage of the Essay on Man,[853] with a complete unconsciousness that the "scheme" he fancied he could "overturn," was the very soul of his system. "Heaven," he said, "can raise virtue's ends from the vanity which seeks no reward but praise,"[854] and for man to be virtuous solely out of vanity was exactly the virtue which La Rochefoucauld called "vice in disguise." He who feeds the hungry from vanity alone is not moved by sympathy for suffering. Charity is merely the pretence which his vanity pleads. Each of the other ruling passions acts according to its own exclusive nature, and the virtue which is adopted to humour anger, hate, sloth, and avarice, is by general consent called delusion or imposture. La Rochefoucauld has the advantage over Pope. The succession of selfish passions he discovered too uniformly in man is less odious than the concentrated anger, hate, or sloth which never pauses or turns aside; and the satirist who lashes the deceptive vices of mankind is to be preferred to the moralist who teaches that vice in disguise is virtue.

The contradictions are not at an end. Pride, folly, "even mean self-love," have all, says Pope, some good in them.[855] He forgot that self-love is, with him, the principle of every virtue and vice, their essence and life, their origin and end, and to call self-love meaner than pride and folly is either to assert that self-love is meaner than itself, or to abandon the foundation of his moral systems. He goes on to ascribe an influence to self-love which is incompatible with his second system, or theory of the ruling passion. "Self-love," he says, "is the scale to measure others' wants by thine," or, as he remarked to Spence, "self-love would be a necessary principle in every one, if it were only to serve each as a scale for his love to his neighbour."[856] On Pope's second system this love of each for his neighbour must be extinct, unless love chanced to be the ruling passion. Unmixed anger, hate, and sloth retain no trace of affection. When we are reduced to a single passion, and for selfish purposes "measure others' wants by our own," anger can but have an intellectual, unsympathising perception of rival passions, and will only assist them in the degree which will serve its irritable instincts. Sloth, anger, hate, and the rest will act according to their kind, and to call upon them to love their neighbours as themselves is to enjoin the deaf to hear, and the blind to see.

An evil fatalism, therefore, remains the leading principle of Pope's second system. A man must be avaricious, slothful, or angry as nature appoints. He cannot select his passion, or divert, or repress it. The sole power reserved to his will is a certain latitude in choosing the diet upon which the passion feeds. This meagre and polluted freedom dwindles to nothing with such passions as sloth and avarice, and if there was room for prayer, when our nature is fixed for us by an irreversible decree, we ought to petition for the "pride and vainglory" against which we pray in the Litany, since, if Pope is right, they permit more variety of specious virtue than the griping prudence of avarice, and the corrupting philosophy of sloth.

The poet passes from his review of individual man to the designs of God, and his degenerate morality sinks lower as he proceeds. "The ends of Providence," he says, "and general good are answered in our passions and imperfections," and he goes on to show "how usefully" the Deity, acting in the interests of the "whole,"[857] has "distributed" imperfections to "orders of men, to individuals, and to every state and age of life."[858] Pope refuses to ascribe our evil passions to the abuse of that freedom of will which is inseparable from the idea of a moral being. He retains the doctrine laid down in his first epistle, and involved in his ruling-passion hypothesis, that our evil passions are the immediate gift of God. "Heaven applies" what Pope calls "happy frailties to all ranks,—fear to statesmen, rashness to commanders, and presumption to kings."[859] "Pride is bestowed on all, a common friend,"[860] which overthrows his theory that the ruling is our only passion, and pride incompatible with avarice, sloth, &c. The blessing he imputes to pride is that it takes possession of the "vacuities of sense," and prevents self-knowledge.[861] "The proper study of mankind is man," but the desirable effect of the study is that man should be self-deceived,—that he should be soothed into complacency by ignorance of his individual defects, and by a conceited dream of imaginary excellence. The "bubble joy" is ordained by Providence "to laugh in the cup of folly," that folly may be cheered in its career, and fast as "one prospect is lost" may be lured on by "another."[862] The poet had already furnished an illustration of his doctrine, in the consolatory fact that "the sot" fancies himself "a hero!"[863] "Pleasure," says Pope, is "our greatest evil or our greatest good," and these were among his good pleasures,—the contrivances of a beneficent Deity for the comfort and encouragement of vice and folly. Bolingbroke was better informed. "The man," he says, "who neglects the duties of natural religion, and the obligations of morality, acts against his nature, and lives in open defiance to the author of it. God declares for one order of things, he for another. God blends together the duty and interest of his creature; his creature separates them, despises the duty, and proposes to himself another interest."[864]

Pope is not satisfied with applauding moral imperfections. He degrades and ridicules religious aspirations. Every period, he says, of life is provided with "some fit passion,"[865] and as a "rattle, by nature's kindly law," is the "plaything" of the "child," so "beads and prayer-books are the toys of age." The new toy, like the old, is but a "bauble," which "pleases," as the rattle had done before, till "tired" of the game we "sleep, and life's poor play is over."[866] The whole is an idle entertainment arranged by the Deity, who has "usefully distributed" the "fit" and frivolous passions which amuse our hollow existence. The worst writer has never given a more debased description of the moral government of God, and of the nature and ends of rational man. Ignorant of our Creator, presumptuous when we dare to study him, involved in a whirl of endless error when we study ourselves, the victims of a pre-ordained and irresistible passion, prayer is but a beguiling "toy," and not the reasonable, elevated language of belief, trust, and repentance. The goal of morality is the discovery that "life is a poor play," a paltry mimic scene, which leaves us only this barren consolation—that though we, the actors, are "fools," "God," who has cast our empty part for us, "is wise."[867] The wisdom is not apparent in Pope's deplorable travestie of man's moral nature. Happily, true morality teaches that life is a grand school in which, knowing the adorable perfections of God, we learn to imitate his goodness. The moral man is occupied with noble realities, and not with mimic shows. He fights against destroying passions, struggles to conform to immutable verities, and finds, amid many bitter failures, that human weakness and littleness can continuously approximate to the divine exemplar. The life, which seemed to Pope a "poor play," is to the moral and religious man a mighty privilege, an awful responsibility, a sublime preparation,—the prelude to a holy and happy eternity.

The third epistle treats "of the nature and state of man with respect to society." The details of our duty to our neighbour were kept for the portion of the Essay which was never written. In the present epistle Pope discusses the general relation of man to man, or the foundation of society and government. A third of his dissertation is a renewal of the argument in the previous epistles that all things have a mutual dependence, that every creature is made both for others and for itself. This desultory introduction is succeeded by the remark that "self-love and social love began with the state of nature,"[868] which is an allusion to the argument of Hobbes, much canvassed in Pope's day, that "the state of nature was a state of war." Pope and Hobbes agreed that human motives were entirely selfish. They differed in their opinion of the direction which the selfishness took. Hobbes contended that each would desire all things for himself, and would endeavour to despoil his neighbour; Pope, that self-love would seek its gratification in social love. But the poet says and unsays, and is soon involved in a labyrinth of inconsistencies. He tells us that in the patriarchal period, "before the name of king was known,"[869] "man, like his Maker, saw that all was right;" "trod to virtue in the paths of pleasure;" and recognised no "allegiance" or "policy" except "love."[870] A few lines earlier he asserted that in the same patriarchal period, before monarchy was known, and when all was love and virtue, some states were compelled to join others through "fear;" and "foes," tempted by trees laden with fruit, went forth "to ravish" the orchards of their neighbours. And when the robbers desisted from their intended spoliation, it was not out of love or compassion, but only because they were persuaded by the proprietors that "commerce" would prove as profitable as "war."[871]

Both these clashing theories are espoused by Pope with equal confidence, but the greatest prominence is given to the theory that social love was perfect in the patriarchal times. The whole of the sentient world was included in the happy brotherhood. The human race were the companions of the beasts, and walked, fed, and slept with them. The disastrous circumstance which broke up the reign of universal love was the craving of man for animal food. He yielded to the temptation to eat flesh, and from a meek, was changed into a pugnacious, sanguinary creature. The inflammatory diet generated the "fury passions," till then unknown, and "turned man on man."[872] "Force" was now employed to make "conquests," and war and rapine were introduced.[873] Pope once more lapses into his habitual contradictions. He represents the patriarchs as teaching their families to "draw monsters from the abyss," and "fetch the eagle to the ground" during the innocent era when the lives of beasts were held sacred.[874] He has thus adopted two opposite versions of the patriarchal treatment of the animal creation, and the later version, which teaches that the slaughter of animals was prevalent under the reign of love and virtue, is inconsistent with his genealogy of the "fury passions." He has likewise two opposite opinions on the destruction of brutes,—the one, that to take their lives was murder; the other, that the art of killing them was among the laudable discoveries which entitled the patriarchs to be esteemed "a second Providence" by their children.[875] Pope has not done with his contradictions. "It might, perhaps," he says in his first epistle, "appear better for us that all were harmony and virtue, and that never passion discomposed the mind." "But all," he replies, "subsists by elemental strife, and passions are the elements of life," which, he urges to show the necessity for the "fierce ambition" of Cæsar, and the misdeeds of Borgia and Catiline.[876] In the third epistle we are told that "the virtue and harmony" actually lasted for many generations, that the strife of bad passions was not in the slightest degree requisite for sustaining the system established on earth, and that the aggressive vices of Cæsars, Catilines, and Borgias were only the pernicious consequence of eating meat.

The hypothesis is puerile, that force, conquest, and rapine originated in a meat diet. Equally puerile is the theory that the arts of government, navigation, agriculture, and manufactures were copied from animals.[877] Man is specially distinguished by his inventive capacity. Through this gift the arts and sciences are continuously progressive, and there is no plausibility in the supposition that his characteristic power was originally in abeyance. The gratuitous fancy that the arts of human civilisation were acquired from the brutes, could not be supported by less appropriate examples. Mankind are said by Pope to have been pre-eminently social, and he would have us believe that neither sociality nor convenience could teach them to construct their dwellings in proximity, till "reason late" suggested to them the reflection, that some birds, such as rooks, built their nests in clusters.[878] He acknowledges that a community of families perceived it would be for their interest to have a single ruler; but the principle that the subjects under a monarchy should retain their right to their houses and property, was discovered by observing that every bee in a hive had its separate cell, and separate honey,[879] which was a fiction of some unobservant naturalist, who credited bees with our usages. From the silk-worm we learn to "weave," and from, the mole to "plough," notwithstanding that the silk-worm only spins silk, and never weaves it, and that the subterranean scratchings of the mole have no resemblance to our contrivance, the plough. The remaining instances cited by Pope are just as absurd. He strung together fragments of ancient fables, which, in a modern copy, are neither poetry nor philosophy.

When families spread, patriarchal government is said by Pope to have been invariably merged in monarchical. He makes no mention of another elementary system which prevailed among the ancient Germans, and which was too natural to have been unfrequent. The tribe was composed of contiguous families, or clans, each of which had its separate territory. The head of every clan was ruler within his own domain, and the affairs which concerned the entire tribe were managed by a general assembly of the heads of clans. Under this arrangement the representative of the clan preserved his patriarchal power, and had an equal voice with his brother chiefs in regulating the common interests of the tribe. Pope completed his single genealogical principle of government by a rapid summary of the transitions through which monarchy passed. Conquest led to tyranny. An ambitious priesthood first threatened the despot with spiritual terrors, then went shares with him, and the double yoke of secular and ecclesiastical tyranny was fastened on the necks of mankind. The oppressed subjects at last rebelled against their rulers, kings were "forced into virtue by self-defence," and the world returned to the dominant principle of the state of nature, that "self-love and social are the same." These meagre doctrines were derived from Bolingbroke, whose political philosophy was hardly more profound than his moral and metaphysical; but Pope shows, here and there, that he had read Locke's treatise on Civil Government, and the passages from Hooker which Locke quoted, and with such masters to guide him the flimsiness of his views is without excuse.

The investigations of Pope conducted him to the final conclusion that "the true end of all government" is unity among mankind, and he prescribes the methods by which harmony is to be preserved both in politics and religion. The panacea which was to cure political divisions is contained in the couplet,

Good government, that is, depends on good administration; the form of government is immaterial, and those who battle for one form in preference to another, are fools. The accusation of folly was thrown back upon the poet, who grew ashamed of his maxim, and in 1740 he gave an interpretation to his verses which they cannot be made to bear. "The author of these lines," he said, "was far from meaning that no one form of government is, in itself, better than another (as that mixed or limited monarchy, for example, is not preferable to absolute), but that no form of government, however excellent or preferable in itself, can be sufficient to make a people happy unless it be administered with integrity. On the contrary, the best sort of government, when the form of it is preserved, and the administration corrupt, is most dangerous." The concord which was to have been produced by indifference to forms of government, vanishes with the admission that the form is important. The qualifying remark, that forms are insufficient when their spirit is violated, was a truism denied by no one. A corrupt legislature, a corrupt executive, and corrupt tribunals, would neutralise the benefit of any constitution with which they could subsist.

Pope retracted his maxim under the pretence of explaining it. His new version showed that he did not yet understand the value of forms of government, or he would not have said that when the administration is corrupt the best form of government is the most detrimental to the public. A slight reflection on the History of England, and the nature of man, must have convinced him that a chief virtue of good forms of government is the security they afford for the prevention, limitation, and cure of corruption,—for the subordination of private selfishness to the common weal. His own epistle would have informed him that when governors have absolute dominion they "drive through just and unjust" to gratify their "ambition, lust, and lucre;" and when the power is with the governed, they will not suffer their rights to be extensively invaded, but will oblige kings and ministers to "learn justice."[881] There was a stage of feudalism when the territorial, legislative, and judicial functions were centered in the lord of the fief. He taxed and punished his serfs and vassals at pleasure. His covetousness, his cruelty, his passionate caprices, all developed by uncontrolled habit and the spirit of the age, could only be resisted by rebellion, and rebellions he quenched in blood. The sufferings of his people were atrocious. Pope lived under a vastly superior constitution, which he believed was corruptly administered, and the detriment to the public should have been greater, on his principle, than the despotism of feudal times. The fact was signally the other way. The mediæval enormities were no longer possible; person and property were safe, and loyal citizens lived in peace and security. Laws were not always just, religious and civil liberty was incomplete, purity in ministers and legislators was often defective. But there was a limit to corruption, or ministers and legislators would have been indignantly discarded. They were compelled in the main to consult the supposed interests of the country, that they might preserve the power to gratify their private aims. Many of the evils which existed kept their ground through remaining imperfections in the constitution. The popular element was too restricted, and the abuses were diminished when the form of government was improved.

Pope's receipt for putting an end to political rancour was that the public should accept his assurance that only fools troubled their heads about forms of government. His remedy for religious discord was that the world should receive his dictum that only bad men could attach importance to religious beliefs:

Since no one, he says, can have a wrong faith whose life is in the right, all who fight for modes of faith must be graceless zealots. Two conclusions are involved in his principle,—the first, that religious belief and worship are not any necessary part of a life in the right; the second, that the mode of faith has not the faintest influence upon moral practice. Without stopping to consider the first point, we have only to glance at the history of christianity for a decisive refutation of the second. Thousands upon thousands of "graceless zealots" contended, at the cost of their lives, for a mode of faith which changed the face of the world. Pope must have argued that the effect would have been equal, nay, superior, if christian ethics had been divorced from christian theology. Apostles and martyrs, then martyrs no more, should have said to pagans, "Accept our moral precepts, and it matters not whether you believe that there is one god, or many gods, or no god. It does not signify whether you believe that the divine nature, and divine mission of Jesus Christ, was a truth or a pretence, his resurrection a fact or a fable. It does not even signify whether you believe that there is any resurrection at all, whether you are convinced that there is an everlasting reward for the righteous, or are persuaded that wicked and righteous will both be annihilated. These are only 'modes of faith' which do not affect morality, and we should be 'graceless zealots' to insist upon them." Pope produces an additional reason in support of his principle. "The world," he says, "will disagree in their religious hopes and faith, but charity is the concern of everybody. Everything which thwarts this charity must be false, and all things must be of God which bless or mend mankind."[883] Consequently, Pope's idea of charity was never to struggle for a doctrine which would provoke disagreement; and whoever roused opposition by warring against ignorance and error, proclaimed himself a false teacher by his very zeal to disseminate the truth. The christian who exposed polytheism could not be a minister of God, nor could any doctrine "bless and mend" heathens which did not leave their idolatrous superstitions undisturbed. The principle cannot be limited to religion. The world disagree in their conceptions of a "life in the right;" the charity which is "all mankind's concern," would be violated by questioning the lax ideas which abound; and the moralists who "fight" for a pure system of ethics, must be classed, in turn, with "graceless zealots." The triumph of Pope's system would be the destruction of morality, religion, and charity; for religion and morality must be dead already when it is acknowledged that zeal for their purity and propagation is a sin, and the check of religion and morality being withdrawn, the charity which remained would be that of the savage and felon.

Pope set at nought his own maxims. In the name of charity he demanded that men should not contend for their faith, and he declined to exercise the charity he enjoined. Everyone with him was a "graceless zealot" who ventured to dissent from his private decree. This decree, which was to bind the rest of the world, was not to bind Bolingbroke and himself. They were both privileged to "fight for modes of faith." Bolingbroke, a scurrilous deist, whose writings are stuffed with frenzied invectives against the religious "faith and hope" of the vast majority of the English people, and who was the true type, in the worst sense, of a "graceless zealot," is lauded by Pope to the skies for his philosophic wisdom. Pope, on his own part, maintained in the Essay a controversial discussion on the origin of evil, and other mysterious topics, which most of the "zealots" he upbraided were content to leave undetermined. He laid down the law with dictatorial self-sufficiency, treated the difficulties of humbler inquirers with scorn, and denounced, in taunting, contumelious language, the impugners of the government of God. He offered no reason for excepting the deistical "mode of faith" from his law, unless we suppose him to have tacitly relied on his assertion that those who shared his deism were "slaves to no sect, took no private road, but looked through Nature up to Nature's God."[884] The plea avails nothing. All who are honest in their opinions believe that they hold the truth, and that they are not bigoted slaves to private delusions. Few men could urge the claim with less plausibility than Pope. His tenets discredited his pretensions. If he looked up to Nature's God, he, nevertheless, stigmatised those who presumed to study the God they adored. He believed that God infused wicked passions into men, that his physical laws were deteriorated by change, and overruled by chance.[885] He held that the same wicked passions which God poured into the human mind were originally generated by animal food; his theory of morals was licentious and contradictory; his opinions in general incoherent and irreconcileable. He had little cause to boast that he "took no private road" when there probably did not live a second person who would have subscribed to his creed.

The fourth epistle treats of Happiness, and was a supplement imposed on the poet by Bolingbroke. The professed object was to refute the atheist, who maintained that the condition of mankind was not regulated by the rules of justice, and thence inferred that there could be no superintending Providence. The real intention of the "guide, philosopher, and friend" was to deprive divines of the argument for the immortality of the soul which they built upon the want of proportion between men's conduct and happiness. Pope was partly the dupe of Bolingbroke, and partly his accomplice. He may not have seen the full scope of his instructor's lessons, but he knew that they favoured annihilation, and, to please "the master of the poet and the song," the poet forbore to assert the opposite belief. His orthodox friends complained of the omission, and Pope was driven to deny that there was any connection between the purpose of his Essay and the doctrine of a future state. After mentioning to Spence that he had omitted the address to our Saviour by the advice of Berkeley, he added, "One of our priests, who are more narrow-minded than yours, made a less sensible objection to the epistle on Happiness. He was very angry that there was nothing said in it of our eternal happiness hereafter, though my subject was expressly to treat only of the state of man here."[886] He subsequently extended the remark to the entire poem. "Some wonder why I did not take in the fall of man in my Essay, and others how the immortality of the soul came to be omitted. The reason is plain: they both lay out of my subject, which was only to consider man as he is in his present state, not in his past or future."[887] When Pope told Spence that he could not discuss the fall of man in his Essay, because the "past state" of man was foreign to his subject, he had forgotten the contents of his third epistle, which treats of primitive man, the age of innocence, and the depravation of mankind through eating meat. When he said that a future state "lay out of his subject," he did not perceive the true bearings of his promise to "vindicate the ways of God to man,"[888] nor the force of his own admission that to pronounce upon the fitness of man's nature, to judge "the perfection or imperfection of any creature whatsoever, it is necessary first to know what relation it is placed in, and what is the proper end and purpose of its being."[889] This is the language of common sense. Man's condition on earth is adapted to his destiny, which can alone explain and justify his position in the world. The justice and goodness of the Deity wear a totally different aspect according as we discover evidence that life is a discipline for immortality, or a sorrowful transit to annihilation. The first epistle, again, is on the "nature and state of man with respect to the universe;" and in this relation of man to the universe, the one inquiry which gives importance to the rest, is whether we are to have a share in the eternal system of things, or whether, as the poet says of vegetables, we are mere "bubbles which rise from the sea of matter, break, and return to it."[890] The destiny of man was at the root of Pope's subject, and he could not have thought otherwise unless he had been bent upon accommodating his philosophy to the infidelity of Bolingbroke.

The weak attempt to use language which would fit both infidelity and belief, led to sorry conclusions. Pope allowed that it was God who instilled into man a hope of immortality, with the object of soothing him during his earthly career; but the poet was careful to employ expressions which implied that the hope might be a delusion.[891] He thus vindicated the ways of God by acknowledging that the Creator of the universe might be a deceiver. As the hope, which he confessed to be a promise engraved on the heart of man by the finger of God, might be false, the fears of future punishment imprinted on the conscience could not be more trustworthy. The christian who died, exulting, at the stake, in the flower of his age, a martyr to conscience, and the miscreant, who went terrified to execution, oppressed by the sense of his crimes, might both be mocked by the lying voice which spoke through the nature bestowed on them by their Maker. The poet could see no objection to the supposition that the Governor of the world might rule by promises he never intended to keep, and by threats he never intended to enforce.

The more we look into the nature which the Deity has conferred upon man, the more untenable Pope's alternative appears. All our best aims,—the efforts after holiness, love, knowledge, and rational happiness,—are a progressive work in which the mind is increasingly fitted for the enjoyment of its aspirations, without once attaining to a satisfactory realisation of its desires. Especially the Deity is hidden from our sight; and devout souls would be baulked of the primary purpose of their existence unless they were to behold him at last. The legitimate deduction is strengthened when we consider the afflictive methods by which we advance towards the appointed ends of our being. The toils of virtuous men, their pangs of body, their anguish of mind, their sacrifices to duty, their heroic martyrdoms, are irreconcileable with the wisdom and goodness of the Deity if total extinction is the meed of victory to the suffering soldier. The painful education of the soul, which is unintelligible as an abortive preliminary to annihilation, becomes plain as a preparation to a higher state, in which the purified spirit enters upon the enjoyment of its regenerated faculties. Pope disregarded the fundamental principle of his Essay. The burthen of his argument in his first epistle is that the evils of the world are explained by the hypothesis that they have an ulterior end. The moral life of man is the sphere in which we can best perceive the necessity for the principle, and follow its wise operation; and it was just this instance of a clear exemplification of his law which Pope was willing to reject. He admitted that the life of the saint upon earth might require no sequel, that his brief and self-denying history might properly begin and end with his passage from the cradle to the grave, that his implanted hopes and fears might be a deception, the objects proposed to his faculties a vain enticement, his sufferings a fruitless discipline, his conquest over sin a barren triumph, his growth in holiness the signal for resolving him into dust.

These considerations are not affected by the question of the distribution of happiness. Rewards and punishments might be meted out with an even hand, and this life singly would still be quite incompetent to fulfil the conditions of man's nature. But the pretext of Bolingbroke is itself unfounded, and he yielded to the exigencies of his infidelity when he maintained that the world had never furnished examples of unequal happiness which could call for future redress. Pope's efforts to prove the paradox are a continuous series of contradictions, sophistries, and misstatements. "Virtue alone," he says, "is happiness below," and "God intends happiness to be equal."[892] It follows, from these premises, that Pope did not mean that all the world were equally happy. Happiness he holds to be proportioned to virtue; the best men are the richest in earthly felicity. The supposition is repugnant to innumerable appearances, and Pope endeavoured to evade them by contending that happiness is not placed in "externals."[893] "Virtue's prize," he says, "is the soul's calm sunshine which nothing can destroy;" and he justly calls men "weak and foolish" who imagine that a better reward would be "a crown, a coach-and-six, a conqueror's sword," or the gown which is the badge of official dignity.[894] The fallacy is upon the surface. "The soul's calm sunshine" may mean peace of conscience or complete felicity. In the first sense it cannot be "destroyed" by physical torture; in the second sense, physical torture overclouds the "sunshine" and disturbs the "calm." It is vain to pretend that a virtuous man upon the rack has the same amount of mental ease as when he is in bodily comfort. "Externals" are one element in human happiness, or the worst persecutions which have desolated the world could not have occasioned the smallest exceptional sufferings to the good. "If pain," says Mackintosh, "were not an evil, cruelty would not be a vice."[895] Pope, in his luxurious retirement at Twickenham, might exclaim, "Condition, circumstance, is not the thing."[896] He would have thought differently if he had been the slave of a brutal master, or had been immured in one of the dungeons called "little-ease," where a prisoner of stout frame and sturdy principles was sometimes maimed in the process of squeezing him into a space too small for his coffin.

Pope's reason for his opinion is weaker than the opinion itself. "Present ill," he says, "is not a curse, nor present joy a good," since joy and misery depend on our "future views of better or worse," and "the balance of happiness" is kept even while the seemingly fortunate are "placed in fear," and the unfortunate in "hope."[897] "Pope's sylphs," remarked Fox to Rogers, "are the prettiest invention in the world. He failed most, I think, in sense; he seldom knew what he meant to say."[898] Here we have an instance of the failing. His proposition is that present happiness is independent of "externals," and his argument asserts that it is not. If "fortune's gifts" invariably fill the virtuous with "fear," and unfortunate circumstances buoy them up with "hope," if happiness depends exclusively on "future views of better," and misery on apprehensions of "worse," it follows that virtue imprisoned and persecuted is "in joy," and when free and prosperous is distressed. "Externals" are not, as Pope pretends, indifferent; he has merely transferred the preponderating weight to the opposite scale. Adversity is a more exhilarating state than prosperity; the inmate of "little-ease" was happier than his brethren of kindred virtue who were at large. Rewards and punishments should be interchanged. Criminals should be condemned to a life of luxury, and public benefactors should be sent to jail. The feelings Pope ascribed to the human mind are fictitious. Fear of reverses which do not appear to be impending, has little influence in marring enjoyment, and hope alleviates torments without depriving them of their sting.

The poet proceeds to unfold more particularly "what the happiness of individuals is, as far as is consistent with the constitution of this world."[899] All the good that God meant for mankind, "all the joys of sense, all the pleasures of reason, lie in three words,—health, peace, and competence."[900] The passage was versified from Bolingbroke, who for "health" has "health of body," for "peace" has "tranquillity of mind," and for "competence" has "competency of wealth."[901] Social intercourse and liberty must be added to the list, or "all the joys of sense," and all "the pleasures of reason" are compatible with solitary confinement. Pope flings aside his previous doctrines. Four lines earlier every individual who had the misfortune to possess "all the joys of sense" was the slave of fear. Now these accompaniments are pronounced essential to happiness. Lately happiness was independent of externals, and now health of body and competency of wealth are declared to be indispensable. Pope's change of front did not strengthen his position. As health, peace, and competence are necessary to happiness they must be constant attendants on worth, or his paradox that happiness is proportioned to virtue falls to the ground. He accordingly affirmed, in a suppressed couplet, that "the blessings were only denied to error, pride, or vice," and the language in the text, to have any pertinency, must bear the same construction. But will virtue secure health? Yes, replies Pope, for "health consists with temperance alone," which, for the purpose of his argument, must mean that all the temperate are healthy. Safe from casualties, infection, and every other disorder, they bear about with them a charmed life, and die at last in a good old age. The poet passes over "competence," and in a subsequent part of his epistle allows that "virtue sometimes starves."[902]

He had no sooner resolved happiness into "health, peace, and competence," and claimed them for virtue, than he admits that vice may be "blessed" and virtue "cursed," or afflicted. A fresh assumption is introduced to restore the balance. "Contempt," he says, dogs "vice;" "compassion" attends upon "virtue."[903] The new powers are not more competent to the task assigned them than the hope and fear he had invoked before. Men who are not truly virtuous, and yet not infamous for vice, have frequently troops of friends, and meet with none of the contempt which is to bring down their happiness to the standard of their worth. Virtue, on the other hand, instead of rousing the compassion of those who could protect it, has, in numberless instances, provoked persecution, bonds, and death. Where the virtue is not the cause of the misery the sufferers are often not in contact with the compassion, or the sympathy is far from being an equivalent for the sorrow. Heaping fallacy upon fallacy Pope falls back upon the plea that "virtue disdains the advantages of prosperous vice."[904] Disdains the vicious means but constantly longs for the prosperous end. The martyr to conscience when shut up in "little-ease" was not indifferent to liberty. His compressed body, his cramped limbs, the deprivation of light, fresh air, books, and friends were horrible torture. There could be no stronger proof that happiness was not proportioned to virtue than that his "disdain of vice" should have compelled him to accept the alternative of a dungeon.

Hitherto Pope has argued that our virtue is the measure of our happiness. He next descends to the subsidiary proposition that "no man is unhappy through virtue," which means that the disasters of the virtuous are never the consequences of their virtue; they are the "ills and accidents that chance to all."[905] The proposition contains two assertions,—the first that virtue never brings upon us "ills and accidents," the second that it cannot protect us from them. Under the first head Pope points to the heroes who perished fighting for their country, and tells us that they did not meet their fate from "virtue," but from "contempt of life."[906] The martyrs to conscience may be reckoned by hundreds of thousands, and Pope would have us understand that none of them braved death in obedience to duty; they were simply weary of existence. He would deprive humanity of its noblest triumphs that virtue may be absolved from its manifest effects. He glides lightly over the absurd pretence that virtue has never entailed suffering, and dwells upon the second half of his proposition,—his admission that virtuous and wicked are equally exposed to "ills and accidents." Good and bad men, he says, are alike subjected to the laws of nature, and God will not "reverse these laws for his favourites." A falling wall crushes passengers without regard to virtue or vice;[907] blind forces take no cognisance of morality. The doctrine is inadmissible; the laws of nature cannot supersede the providence of God. Man's welfare and very existence are at the mercy of many human and material agencies which man is unable to anticipate or control. The Almighty preserves a glorious order in his physical laws, and it is incredible that he should permit a chaos in the highest department of our globe. He would not guard against irregularities in the action of insensate matter, and allow good men to be the sport of the endless hazards of life. The conclusions of reason are confirmed by revelation. "Are not two sparrows," says our Lord, "sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows."[908] He who sees from the beginning the entire chain of causes and effects, can devise laws which will provide for particular cases without any subsequent interference. Or a man may be protected from a falling wall by a sudden impulse to his mind whereby he may forget to go, or have a motive to loiter, or to hasten forward, or to take another road.[909] Or there may be a temporary interference with mechanical laws; or the Almighty may use methods inconceivable by us. Not that his superintendence implies that his servants are safe from any of the ordinary operations of natural laws. Habitually to exempt the good would be to abolish prudence in their dealings with physical forces, and to engender presumption in the region of morals. The insecurity which keeps virtue vigilant and faithful, the hardy discipline which draws out ennobling energies, and corrects baser properties, would be turned to carelessness and corruption. The interests of the virtuous will not permit that they should be constant and conspicuous exceptions to the common lot. But the "ills and accidents" never strike at random. The human race is not with the Deity an abstract conception. He beholds every creature in its individuality, and shields and chastens each by the rules of a wisdom which can never be suspended. The idea we frame of his attributes negatives the hypothesis of Pope. God cannot fail to establish a harmony between physical laws, and the dispensation which befits each particular man.

In admitting that calamities befall mankind without reference to virtue and vice, Pope was drawn into statements which completely upset his principle that happiness is always proportioned to desert. He asks if virtue "made Digby, the son, expire, why his father lives full of days and honour?"[910] He might be asked in turn, why, if good men in this life have an equal share of happiness, the father should have lived fifty years longer than the son? For happiness to be equal there must be an equality of duration as well as of degree. He grants that "virtue sometimes starves," and thinks it enough to answer, in the face of historical facts, that virtue does not occasion the destitution. "Bread," he says, "is the price of toil, not of virtue, and the good man may be weak, be indolent."[911] Indolence is a vice, and irrelevant to the discussion. The weakness may be a misfortune, and Lazarus is not less deserving because he is covered with sores. Or the "good man" may be neither "indolent" nor "weak," and yet be starved, which happened to thousands of protestants who were driven from their homes and employments by the callous bigotry of Louis XIV. Whatever the cause of the starvation, the balance of happiness is disturbed, and Pope, to mask the flaw in his argument, added that the "claim" of starving virtue was not "to plenty, but content."[912] Now contentment is of two kinds. There is a contentment of happiness which is incompatible with excessive suffering, and a contentment of resignation which acquiesces in the severest dispensations of Providence. St. Paul said in the latter sense, "I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content,"[913] which does not prevent his speaking repeatedly of the afflictions he endured, or keep him from asserting that "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous."[914] Of this type is the contentment of starving virtue,—a patient submission to trial, and not the contentment which is required to produce equality of happiness. Human nature has been denied the capacity for neutralising all degrees of anguish. Pope straightway slides off into the subterfuge that the craving for bread is "a demand for riches." He inveighs against the rapacious desire, and insists that nothing will satisfy man.[915] He undertook to prove that happiness is proportioned to virtue, and finding his text too hard for him he substitutes an invective against insane discontent.

A few undoubted truths are appended to the main argument of Pope. He says that only a fool will think a man with health, and a clear conscience, hated by God because he lacks a thousand a year.[916] He tells us that genuine honour and shame are dependent on conduct, and not on high or low station,[917] and that titles, power, fame, etc., are insufficient to make bad men happy.[918] He comes to the instance of "superior parts," and the inconsistency recommences. He supposes the great intellect to be combined with learning, wisdom, and patriotic virtue.[919] Out of compliment to his "guide, philosopher, and friend," Pope takes Bolingbroke for the typical example of this imposing union of lofty qualities. In him we are to behold the universal fate of generous, philanthropic wisdom. He "is condemned to drudge in business or in arts" without any one to "second" him, or "judge" him rightly. He aspires "to teach truths, and save a sinking land; few understand, all fear, and none aid him." When he "drudged in arts" the world received coldly his wordy rhetoric. When he "drudged in business" the country only saw in him an intriguer for power. Novel ideas in politics, signal originality in literature, often work their way slowly. Genius and patriotism have faith in their conceptions, and are not daunted by opposition. The public spirit which has to battle at all can seldom be placed under softer conditions than Bolingbroke enjoyed. He had every luxury of a civilised age; he had health and energy; he had unbroken leisure; he had books at will; he had freedom to say and write what he pleased; he was safe from every injury to person and property. Virtuous patriotism, sitting at ease in a delightful library, and surrounded by blessings, might be expected to exert itself with cheerful hope to enlighten a tasteless and misguided nation. Quite the reverse. "Painful pre-eminence!" exclaims Pope, and he declares that Bolingbroke by being "above life's weakness" is above "its comforts too." The moral is that wisdom is not to be desired; the pain exceeds the benefit. Happiness is proportioned to virtue under the worst conditions of brutal persecution, and yet wise and virtuous patriots, in the midst of the comforts of life, are deprived of every comfort in life by the lamentable circumstance that they are "above life's weakness."

There are many more contradictions in Pope's epistle, which is a tissue of inconsistency and incoherence. He might have maintained a less absolute doctrine with complete success. He might have shown that the inequalities are less than they appear on a superficial view. He might have pointed out that ultimate happiness can only arise from the conduct which puts us at peace with ourselves and with God. He might have dwelt on the satisfaction which lifts up the mind when conscience asserts its majesty, and refuses to make the least concession to suffering. The remaining disproportion between happiness and virtue is vindicated by the moral blessing of affliction, which by fitting man for happiness prepares the way for perfect harmony between happiness and virtue in a blessed immortality. Trials, in the magnificent phrase of Shakespeare, are "our outward consciences."[920] The pains of the last sickness which precedes death are the consistent termination to the scheme. Good men die as they have lived, in more or less suffering, that the work of life may be completed,—that their better qualities may be developed and strengthened, the remains of evil laid bare and extinguished. And though all men are not submitted to the same tests either in their lives or their deaths, the endless variety in their dispositions accounts for the diversity in their circumstances. The Almighty Being who alone knows the secrets of the heart adapts the "outward conscience" to the inward.

There is a weightier question than the distribution of happiness. Of the innumerable discussions on the theory of morals by far the most important is whether the end we propose to ourselves should be self-interest or virtue. Pope adopted the selfish system without reserve. The two principles, he says, which govern man, "self-love and reason, aspire to one end, pleasure," and since their end is the same, he accused the schoolmen of being "at war about a name" when they refused to confound them.[921] He apparently had not a suspicion that schoolmen, or any one else, had ever imagined that reason could reveal another end to man than interest well understood. He reverts to his selfish system in the epistle on Happiness, and proclaims in the first line that "happiness is our being's end and aim." Virtue, the love of God and man, are only means to promote our individual happiness, and selfishness is, and ought to be, the supreme end of every creature. The doctrine, as we have seen, when discussing Pope's second epistle, contradicts the universal human conscience. The theoretical falsehood is fruitful in disastrous results. The moral law, the law of good in itself, is greater than the individual, and he bows down before its inviolable sanctity, its absolute right to dominion. He is raised above personal consequences. He knows that the universal law of good embraces his good, and the reflection helps to sustain him in his trials, but his main end is to fulfil a law which is superior to his individual happiness, and which binds him by its intrinsic sacredness, and independent authority. He dares not overrule it by his passing inclinations, and endures all things rather than be guilty of a sacrilegious encroachment on its integrity. The man, on the contrary, whose one end is happiness, and who considers virtue to be simply the means for compassing the end, has nothing outside himself which is of the least importance to him, except in so far as it can be made subservient to his personal felicity. Creator and creation are only viewed as ministers to his unmitigated selfishness. Governed by this single self-indulgent idea, and deriving no strength from the separate supremacy of the moral law, he is ill prepared for a life of sacrifice. He cannot forego in the present the happiness which he conceives to be the sole end of his being, and he prefers immediate ease to interest well-understood. The system of Pope was the doctrine of Epicurus. He, too, taught that pleasure was "the end and aim" of man, and virtue the only effectual means. His followers soon disregarded the means in their impatience to reach the end, and epicureanism became synonymous with grovelling sensuality. In vain we oppose the selfishness of a long-sighted prudence to the selfishness of the hour. "Prudence," as Kant says, only "counsels," and the steady ascendency over temptation is reserved for the virtue which "commands." Common language proclaims the intuitive principle of the mind. No man, not lost to shame, could venture to say, "I must tell truth because it is prudent;" he says, "I must be truthful because it is right."

Pope had not the remotest idea that he was an epicurean. He believed that his system of ethics, with happiness for an end and virtue for the means, was new to philosophy, and he did not hesitate to state that all "the learned" who preceded him had been "blind."[922] He exemplified his assertion by the instance of the epicureans and stoics. The stoics reversed the terms of the epicurean formula; virtue alone was their end, and happiness, the spontaneous, unsought consequence. The real characteristics of these great rival schools were unknown to Pope. He described them by false contrasts, and ignorantly charged them with the folly of defining "happiness to be happiness." Greatest wonder of all, he alleged against the epicurean doctrine, which was his own, that it "sunk men to beasts."[923] He would naturally expound the systems he understood the best, and hence we may estimate the extent of his qualifications for dismissing every previous ethical theory with compendious contempt. A sentence from Bolingbroke bears witness to the scanty knowledge of Pope, and discloses the source of his scorn. "I think," writes Bolingbroke, "you are not extremely conversant in the works of Plato, and you may suspect therefore that I aggravate the impertinence of his doctrines."[924] The impertinent doctrines were a portion of the divine platonic ethics, and Pope, uninstructed in the most famous systems of the ancients, did but reiterate the superficial contempt of his master.

In place of the "mad opinions" of learned moralists, Pope enjoins us to "take nature's path,"[925] little dreaming that he was repeating the maxim of the sects he despised. "The perfection of man," says Diogenes Laertius, quoting Zeno, the founder of the stoic school, "is to follow nature, and that is to live virtuously, for nature leads us to that." All the moralists accepted nature for their oracle; but the scholars gave different versions of her responses. Pope in his second epistle insisted that man was too weak to interpret them. A Newton, he said, who could "climb from art to art" would inevitably be baffled in morals, for whatever "reason wove, passion would undo."[926] In the fourth epistle the difficulty has vanished; "all states can reach, all heads conceive" happiness, and its parent morality; "there needs but thinking right, and meaning well."[927] To think rightly and do rightly, which was before impossible for even the lords of human kind, is declared to be within easy reach of all the world. Nature spoke with two voices to Pope, and what one voice affirmed the other denied.

Able writers have sometimes ridiculed the precept, "Follow nature," which means the laws of human nature, not perceiving that they were the necessary foundation of morals. "The way to be happy," says the philosopher in Rasselas, "is to live according to nature, in obedience to that universal, and unalterable law, with which every heart is originally impressed." "Sir," answers the prince, "I doubt not the truth of a position which a man so learned has so confidently advanced. Let me only know what it is to live according to nature." The philosopher replies in unintelligible jargon, and Johnson adds, "The prince soon found that this was one of the sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer."[928] The unreflecting disdain shows poorly by the side of Butler's comment on the maxim. "The ancient moralists," he said, "had some inward feeling or other, which they chose to express in this manner, that man is born to virtue, that it consists in following nature, and that vice is more contrary to this nature than tortures or death. They had a perception that injustice was contrary to their nature, and that pain was so also. They observed these two perceptions totally different, not in degree, but in kind, and the reflecting upon each of them, as they thus stood in their nature, wrought a full intuitive conviction that more was due, and of right belonged to one of these inward perceptions than to the other; that it demanded in all cases to govern such a creature as man."[929] Apart from revelation we can have no other knowledge of morality than nature affords. Honestly interrogated nature does not put us off with unmeaning ambiguities. As we learn through our appetites that we are intended to eat and drink, so a higher faculty informs us that we are to govern our appetites, and the whole of our being, by the supreme principles we call duty. Every time we have a consciousness that our conduct is right or wrong, every time we condemn or applaud the vice and virtue of our fellow men, every time the law enforces justice and punishes injustice, we confess that duty is in accordance with nature. The precept, "follow nature," is the rational injunction to contemplate virtue in its inner source that we may see it in its purity, and recognise its right to supremacy. If Pope had kept to the precept, and remembered that for parents intentionally to train up children in iniquity is the height of infamy, he would hardly have imagined that "the Deity poured fierce ambition into Cæsar's mind." If he had reflected that we condemn follies and vanities, he would not have supposed that they were a provision of the Deity for our comfort. If he had consulted conscience, and noticed that it instructs us to love good in itself as well as our own good, to love God and our neighbour as an end as well as a means, he would not have taught that the motive to virtue was unmingled selfishness. If he had been at the trouble to remark that duty takes in the whole circle of existence, and imposes immutable laws, he would not have embraced the doctrine that moral government was carried on by ruling passions which set up different principles of action in different individuals, and in every instance narrow life to an exclusive, and usually vicious propensity. The observation of nature would have saved Pope from these, and many other errors, which were the consequence of his piecing together bits of theories from books without submitting them to the test he recommended to his readers.

The deepest ethical thinkers have seldom, in all things, been faithful interpreters of nature. Their errors, often momentous, had a different origin from those of Pope. Few persons trace back moral impressions to the principles from which they flow. They act on the intuitive conceptions which precede philosophy, and which, not being pared and twisted to fit a theory, are as comprehensive as nature. The philosopher classifies the implanted propensities and convictions, describes them with precision, and brings them into stronger relief. But what he gains in distinctness he is apt to lose in breadth; he curtails while he elucidates. His ambition is to discover simplicity in complexity, unity in variety, and he dismembers nature that he may reduce the phenomena within the limits of a general law. Zeno and Epicurus are examples of the tendency. They agreed that man had properly only a single end to which his whole being should be directed. The epicureans said that this end, or chief good, was pleasure, which depends on personal feeling; the stoic said it was virtue, the submission to the universal rule of right, which is above personal preferences. An ordinary mortal who does not philosophise, and has no care to force nature into the mould of an hypothesis, never questions that he is constituted for the double end of happiness and virtue. The two often clash, and he is not perplexed by the impossibility of satisfying both. When one must yield he knows that virtue is paramount, and he usually believes that the present sacrifice of happiness to virtue will be succeeded by a kingdom in which they will be finally reconciled. The partial doctrine set up by the stoic kept virtue on her high, heroic throne; the doctrine of the epicurean degraded her into the slave of pleasure: the first school ennobled, the second debased human nature, but both mutilated it. Each system came into contact with facts which compelled its adherents to be inconsistent or absurd, and enlightened disciples preferred inconsistency to absurdity. This passion for general laws at the expense of truth is conspicuous throughout the whole history of philosophy. The profoundest investigators have been prone to select single aspects of many-sided nature, and make the part the law for the whole. The false generalisation impels the theorist to suppress and distort refractory phenomena, or he endeavours to hide under transparent evasions his deviations from his hypothesis, or he lapses into contradictions from which he turns away his eyes, not wishing to perceive them. The spurious unity, which is the infirmity of philosophers, was not the vice of Pope. He adopted, on the contrary, a chaos of principles which were mutually destructive. He accepted contributions from any school, because he understood none. He was so unversed in philosophy that in the account which he drew up of his "Design," he asserted that the science of human nature was reduced to "a few clear points," and that the "disputes" were all on the details. His "design" was to keep to the "few clear points" which alone, in his opinion, were of much importance to mankind. They were principally the origin of evil, the theory of morals, the origin of government and society. The "clear points" had produced whole libraries of controversy, the "disputes" had descended in full vigour to Pope's day, and they have continued undiminished on to ours. His own solutions of the problems were contradictory, and he was hopelessly at war with himself on the very topics for which he claimed universal peace. He did not depart in his "Design" from his habit of self-contradiction, and the moment he had stated that there were no disputes on the general principles, he took credit for "steering betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite." He at the same time arrogated for his "system of ethics" the special "merit" that it was "not inconsistent." He had just enough knowledge to seduce him into an unconscious exposure of his ignorance. His delusions are intelligible when we learn the nature of his philosophical training. "I write to you, and for you," says Bolingbroke, "and you would think yourself little obliged to me if I took the pains of explaining in prose what you would not think it necessary to explain in verse, and in the character of a poetical philosopher who may dwell in generalities."[930] Bolingbroke wrote to instruct Pope, and Pope only cared to learn the "generalities" he was to put into verse. He never acquired the elements of philosophy; he had merely been furnished with materials for a philosophical poem. The few ideas he gleaned at random from other sources served no better end than to increase the confusion. He said "he chose verse" because it was more concise and impressive than prose.[931] The alleged choice was necessity. His meagre knowledge would have been ludicrous in a formal treatise. The ceremonious robe of verse was essential to conceal the deformed and diminutive body.