declamatory tirade which is deliberately indiscriminate and
extreme (for he has not a good word for any member of the
sex) and in which, whatever moral point may be implicit in the
particular parts, the whole force of the satire lies in the wit.
The ‘Epistle to Burlington’ about taste and the use of riches
is conceived and written within a similar moral framework.
Praise of the noble lord at the opening and the close provides
the occasion for a declaration of a central thesis:
Tis use alone that sanctifies expense,
And splendour borrows all her rays from sense.
(ll. 179–80)As he asserts the civic utility of poetry in the ‘Epistle to
Augustus’, so here the visual arts are to serve greater human
ends than to express pride and vanity or even merely to
gratify the aesthetic impulse. The patriotic idealism of
‘Windsor Forest’ which had celebrated imperial peace in the
political order is transmuted in Pope’s maturity into a vision
of an ideal order in which artistic endeavours like those of
Burlington serve the cause of civilization by imposing man’s
dominion over nature. But if this artistic dominion is to be
exercised wisely, it must itself be the expression of good sense,
a prerequisite even of taste, which will ensure that the
improvement of art works with and not against the grain of
nature. In the monstrous grandeur of Timon’s villa
The suffering eye inverted Nature sees.
(l. 119)The dismal regularity of the gardens, finely suggested in the
rhythm and arrangement of the couplet here:
Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother
And half the platform just reflects the other
(ll. 117–18)betrays the aesthetic ideal of ‘Windsor Forest’ where order in
variety, as well as expressing the stylistic ideal Pope developed
in his use of the couplet and in the structuring of his poems,
reflects a greater concordia discors in nature herself. Needless
to say, the life lived in the interior of this stupendous pile is an
inversion of the truly civilized and the antithesis of good sense.