times in which he lived. In his Life, Johnson, while admiring
Pope’s art and applauding his genius, does not gloss over
what he considered to be defects in his character, pointing to
a tendency in Pope to deception of himself and of others, to
affectation, snobbery, and aggression in dispute. He admired
The Dunciad as ‘the best specimen that has yet appeared of
personal satire ludicrously pompous’ but was not convinced
that its design was moral, feeling that it owed its origin in
part to a petulance and malignancy in Pope.^29
Pope himself asserted the integrity of his intentions:
Ask you what provocation I have had?
The strong antipathy of good to bad.
‘Epilogue to the satires’, Dialogue II, 197–8
It would be churlish not to recognize a ruling passion here.
But was he always undeceived? What of the morals of the
moralist? In judging his particular character we may bear in
mind his own general account of the elusive paradox of
human character, when judging and when judged, in the first
Moral Essay, the ‘Epistle to Cobham’:
Know, God and Nature only are the same:
In Man, the judgement shoots at flying game;
A bird of passage! gone as soon as found,
Now in the moon, perhaps, now underground.
(ll. 154–7)As judges, the poet argues, we are prevented from seeing the
object clearly because our vision is coloured by our own
passions and imagination:
All manners take a tincture from our own;
Or come discoloured through our passions shown.
Or fancy’s beam enlarges, multiplies,
Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes.
(ll. 25–8)We often do not know our own motives:
Oft in the passions’ wild rotation tossed
Our spring of action to ourselves is lost.
(ll. 41–2)