Some admirers of his earlier poetry felt that he was now
cultivating the least attractive of the Muses. Others thought
satire unchristian. One of his close friends, Arbuthnot, feared
for his safety and urged him not to be so combative. In his
prose reply, Pope defends the use of particular example: the
great end of satire is reformation of character, which can only
be accomplished if evil men are named. In the verse An Epistle
to Dr Arbuthnot, he acknowledges a weakness in this theory:
‘Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel,
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?’
Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings. (ll. 307–9)The victim will not be affected, but Pope will continue anyway,
and goes on to paint the most darkly passionate of all his
satirical portraits in which the human being, the gilded courtier
and would-be wit, is imaginatively transformed through the use
of animal imagery and Satanic association and by the
concentrated application of Pope’s favourite rhetorical figure
into something that is the reverse of what it seems to be: ‘one
vile antithesis’. We may admire the art with Byron:
Now is there a line in all the passage without the most
forceful imagery (for his purpose)? Look at the variety, at the
poetry, of the passage—at the imagination, there is hardly a
line from which a painting might not be made and is.^27Or the thought that an actual figure is submerged in the
portrait may make us uneasy, provoking the natural question:
was Pope fair? Johnson, who admired the elegance, spirit, and
dignity of Pope’s vindication of his own character at the close
of the epistle, nevertheless concluded: ‘The meanest passage is
the satire on Sporus.’^28
While admiring the persuasive arts of Pope in the epistle,
many have been prompted by its often strident tone to
wonder what relation the self-dramatization there of the
talented and forbearing poet innocently beset by fools and
malignant critics bears to the facts of the case. It is one thing
to ask whether the image of the poet is persuasive and
credible, another to ask whether it is entirely honest and true.
If we desire an answer to the second question, we must go
beyond the poem, to the life of Pope and the the history of the