brings to bear a traditional perspective upon the new science
of his day. Pope is sometimes thought of as the poet of the
Enlightenment, a view that might be encouraged by his
famous epitaph upon Isaac Newton, even if we see wit in it:
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night;
God said, ‘Let Newton be!’, and all was light.Certainly Pope was not one of those for whom new
philosophy cast all in doubt. Nevertheless he viewed progress
with a sceptical if not jaundiced eye (note the use of the prism
in An Essay on Criticism (l. 311) and the microscope in The
Dunciad (IV, 233)). Man is
A being darkly wise and rudely great.The emphasis in these oxymoronic couplings falls heavily
upon the qualifying adverbs impressing the idea of limitation.
And the passage as a whole in which the paradoxical ‘middle
state’ is created imaginatively by the balancing of opposites in
and between lines in the condensed dialectic of the Augustan
couplet, should be evidence enough that, however much he
believed the universe itself to be an expression of divine
reason, Pope’s view of man was far too complex to allow any
easy uncritical faith in the fruits of human reason. Though the
success of the whole poem is debatable, few would doubt the
brilliance of its parts.
In The Moral Essays Pope turned more explicitly to satire,
and this is perhaps the point at which to consider his satirical
intent, method, and practice. In the ‘Epistle to Augustus’, in
which like Horace before him he aims to assert the civic
utility of poetry, he traces the origin of satire to innocent
jesting at country festivals; when holiday licence turned
malicious, legal restraint became necessary, turning most
poets to flattery but the more discriminating were able to
distinguish between liberty and licence:
Hence satire rose that just the medium hit,
And heals with morals what it hurts with wit.
(ll. 261–2)In this justification of satire Pope is at one with Horace in
asserting an ideal, a moral balance between hurting and healing