Note 1225 — AN ESSAY ON MAN, IN FOUR EPISTLES (continued 3)
Reading edition
Here follows in the MS.:
To strangle in its birth each rising crime Requires but little,—just to think in time. In ev'ry vice, at first, in some degree We see some virtue, or we think we see. Our vices thus are virtues in disguise, Wicked but by degrees, or by surprise.
Of the last couplet there is a second version:
Thus spite of all the Frenchman's witty lies Most vices are but virtues in disguise.
The witty Frenchman was La Rochefoucauld. Pope's counter-maxim is only a form of La Rochefoucald's principle, converted into an apparent contradiction by an equivocal use of the phrase "virtues in disguise." Those who pursue vicious objects are reluctant to allow that they are the slaves of vice. "Hence," says Hutcheson, in a passage quoted by Warton, "the basest actions are dressed in some tolerable mask. What others call avarice, appears to the agent a prudent care of a family or friends; fraud, artful conduct; malice and revenge, a just sense of honour; fire and sword and desolation among enemies, a just defence of our country; persecution, a zeal for truth." Pope assumes that the vice is inspired by genuine virtue, whereas the virtue is a pretence, a flimsy pretext to excuse wrong-doing. The vice is real, the virtue fictitious, and this is the principle of La Rochefoucauld.