Johnson’s description a mind ‘active, ambitious and
adventurous, always investigating always aspiring’, conceived
the ambitious plan of writing ‘a system of ethics in the
Horatian way’,^24 of which An Essay on Man and The Moral
Essays were to be a part. He gave up the grand plan, but his
output in poetry was now almost exclusively devoted to the
didactic, the moral, and the satiric, as he seems to
acknowledge himself when reviewing his career first in An
Essay on Man (IV, 391–3) and then in the ‘Epistle to Dr
Arbuthnot’ (ll. 147–50; 340–1).
What is engaging in philosophical poems is the appeal of
the poetry as in the opening of An Essay on Man. With highly
appropriate figurative emphasis, Pope awakens his noble lord
to their philosophical enterprise as to an exciting day out on
the grouse moor where, away from ‘meaner things’, they (and
we) can
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man.The figure is extended in the dynamic verbs, ‘Together let us
beat’, ‘Try, explore, eye, shoot, catch’. The scene of man is
variously figured as a ‘maze’, a ‘wild’, and a ‘garden’, which
in their various contradictory associations of the hidden plan,
beauty amidst disorder, and tempting fruit even where nature
is ordered and dressed to advantage, suggest complexity,
variety, and paradox. The irresistible middle way between
those who ‘blindly creep’ and those who ‘sightless soar’ may
be said to be philosophical and also suggests the pitch of
Pope’s style which manages to be familiar without being low
and to be elevated without losing sight of the general reader.
The paragraph ends with a confident intention to ‘vindicate
the ways of God to man’, echoing Milton (Paradise Lost, I,
26), but the hint of absurdity in the second couplet and the
leaning to satire at the end suggest a radically unMiltonic
temper and perspective. Pope’s theodicy is conceived and
written very much in the terms of his age without reference to
the story of Adam and Eve, and indeed without any mention
of the divine revelation of truth through Christ at all. Yet in
the famous opening of the second epistle, ‘Know then thyself,
it is from the standpoint of a humanism firmly rooted in the
biblical conception of man as half-beast half-angel that he