Literary Authority by Claude Willan

Author:Claude Willan
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

When Pope published the Epistle to Cobham in 1733, Walpole had just dismissed Cobham and several other high-profile critics from government, and Cobham’s political profile, perversely, had begun to rise. The Epistle to Cobham was published in the same year as An Essay on Man, and must be viewed as part of the same political and literary movement. Pope thought very highly of the Epistle to Cobham, and, in wanting it to be placed at the end of his four moral epistles, imagined himself to “imitate those cunning tradesmen, who show their best silks last.”41 These four epistles, taken with An Essay on Man, were designed in Pope’s words, to comprise “a system of Ethics.”42

Pope’s attempt of a systematic survey of ethics and men’s characters shows how deeply the Whig intellectual project of systematization had penetrated contemporary British culture. In this sense at least the modality of Pope’s project owed to Whiggish forerunners. Christine Gerrard documents the careful distance Pope kept between himself and the opposition “patriot” Whigs, but Pope nonetheless chooses to praise Cobham in particular. Pope’s praise of the patriot Whig as, specifically, a patriot signifies either a genuine alliance or the desire to feign one.43 Part of Pope’s “system” in his moral epistles was to show the public that he had managed to cultivate a highly exclusive circle of friends and admirers.

Just as Pope’s prefatory note to The Pastorals boasted of the number and prominence of the poem’s readers, so too the titles and dedications of the “system of Ethics” proclaim the quality of his connections. Pope dedicated An Essay on Man to Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, and the Epistle to a Lady to Martha Blount. Richard Boyle, third earl of Burlington and the dedicatee of an eponymous Epistle, was a prominent Whig nobleman and grand patron of the arts and architecture.44 Allen Bathurst, first Earl Bathurst, was a high-profile Tory and critic of Walpole’s policies. Dr. John Arbuthnot, was, among many other things, head of the Royal College of Physicians. Taken as a group, Arbuthnot, Boling-broke, Burlington, Bathurst and Cobham make up a pantheon of political vitality and social exclusivity. The fondness and intimacy of Pope’s address to each dedicatee advertises just how rarified Pope’s acquaintance is. Pope takes the Horatian imitations as an opportunity publicly to fashion an elite group of cognoscenti.

Pope’s fashioning of a quasi-coterie, along with the depth and range of his allusions in his “system of Ethics,” make An Essay on Man and his Horatian imitations a decidedly tricky proposition for readers looking for inclusive enlightenment and pleasure. Where Pope’s earlier works foster a dynamic of included cognoscenti and excluded others, the moral and ethical system of the Horatian imitations works much harder to subordinate the reader to Pope’s intellectual law-giving and his moral integrity.

The ending of the Epistle to Cobham displays one element of Pope’s debt to Jacobite writing. The poem closes with a peroration on the “ruling passion” and then with a series of portraits, the last of which is Cobham’s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.