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The Meaning of “Grace” in Pope's Aesthetic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Ronald L. Bogue
Ronald L. Bogue*
Affiliation:
University of Georgia, Athens
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Abstract

Pope’s “Grace beyond the Reach of Art” is not an irrational, inexplicable poetic effect, as critics often assume, but an essential, vitalizing illusion: a seemingly incomprehensible deviation from a norm of expectation that proves harmonious and coherent in the context of a work’s overall design. Poetry imitates Nature, and rules are “Nature methodiz’d,” but rules are incomplete formalizations of Nature’s order that gain systematic coherence only in relation to the ends of specific poems. Thus, grace breaks rules yet conforms to Nature; its aberrance is a function of the limitations that readers necessarily have before they arrive at aesthetic comprehension. Analyses of Pope’s “Preface to the Iliad,” Epistle to Burlington, and Essay on Man show that the movement from initial confusion to final understanding that informs grace is also central to his perception of Homer’s art, his theory of landscape design, and his conception of cosmic order.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 94 , Issue 3 , May 1979 , pp. 434 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1979

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References

Notes

1 Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, Vol. i (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; London: Methuen, 1961). All quotations from An Essay on Criticism are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

2 Monk, “A Grace beyond the Reach of Art,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), 131–50; rpt. in Essential Articles: Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, rev. ed. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1968), pp. 38–62.

3 Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1953).

4 Even Pope's remarks on grace are fragmented, for of the thirty-nine lines that concern grace in An Essay on Criticism (11. 141–80), Monk and Abrams deal with only eleven (11. 141–45, 152–57).

5 In “‘At Once the Source, and End’: Nature's Defining Pattern in An Essay on Criticism,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 861–73, Douglas B. Park does briefly suggest that traditional interpretations of grace do not coincide with Pope's understanding of the concept. He argues, as I do, that grace appears anomalous because it is viewed from a limited perspective and that “the ‘Freer Beauties’ and ‘nameless Graces’ for which ‘Great Wits’ (1. 152) may transgress the Rules are, therefore, not, as they are often regarded, a balancing admission of inspired irregularity into an essentially rational aesthetic. Rather, they manifest the ultimate End of Art to draw from the ‘Life, Force, and Beauty’ of Nature, to trace the ‘living Grace‘ that precept cannot declare” (p. 868).

6 The effort in modern criticism to distinguish poetic language from “normal” (one might say “functional”) language is so pervasive as to defy documentation, but one might consider, for instance, the New Critics, who, following I. A. Richards' lead, oppose poetic, or emotive, language to scientific, or referential, language; the Russian formalists, who seek the peculiar elements of “literariness” that distinguish literature from other forms of verbal communications; the linguists and critics who join Roman Jakobson in the search for the linguistic features that make a verbal message a work of art; and the transformational grammarians and computer stylisticians who characterize literature as a deviation from normal linguistic usage. For an analysis of the New Critics' assumptions about poetic language, see Ronald S. Crane, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1953), pp. 80–114. For a critique of the definition of literature as a deviation from a norm, particularly as it is used by linguists and stylisticians, see Stanley E. Fish, “How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language?” New Literary History, 5 (1973), 41–54. See also Mary Louise Pratt, “The ‘Poetic Language’ Fallacy,” in Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 3–37.

7 Hooker, “Pope on Wit: The Essay on Criticism,” in Richard Foster Jones et al., The Seventeenth Century (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1951), pp. 225–46; rpt. in Essential Articles, pp. 185–207. See also William Empson (“Wit in the Essay on Criticism,” Hudson Review, 2 [1950], 559–77; rpt. in Essentia! Articles, pp. 208–26) and Williams, pp. 213–19.

8 See John Locke: “And hence perhaps may be given some reason of that common observation,—that men who have a great deal of wit, and prompt memories, have not always the clearest judgment or deepest reason. For wit lying most in the assemblage of ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant pictures and agreeable visions in the fancy; judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, ideas wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by similitude, and by affinity to take one thing for another” (An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Frazer [1894; rpt. New York: Dover, 1959], I, 203. This republication of the first edition was collated and annotated by Frazer).

9 Preface, The Iliad of Homer: Books I-IX, ed. Maynard Mack, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, vii (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; London: Methuen, 1967), 3. All quotations are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

10 In 1714, the last phrase reads, “to which the invention must not contribute.”

11 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (1953; rpt. New York: Avon, 1965), p. 651.

12 In 1714 Pope writes “common Criticks” instead of “most Criticks.”

13 Ars Poetica, Il. 358–60: “Et idem / indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus, / verum operi longo fas est obrepere somnum” ‘And yet I also feel aggrieved whenever good Homer “nods,” but when a work is long, a drowsy mood may well creep over it’ (Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1926]).

14 An Essay on Man, ed. Maynard Mack, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, Vol. in, Pt. i (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; London: Methuen, 1950). All quotations are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

15 Windsor-Forest, in Audra and Williams.

16 Unified variety is directly related to the notion of concordia discors, which, Earl Wasserman argues, is a key concept in Pope's poetry. See Wasserman's discussion of concordia discors and Windsor-Forest in The Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), Ch. iv. See also Mack's introd. to An Essay on Man, and Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963).

17 The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Norman Ault (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1936), I, 149.

18 For more detailed accounts of Pope's gardening theory, see Christopher Hussey, English Gardens and Landscapes 1700–1750 (New York: Funk, 1967), pp. 40–48; Nikolaus Pevsner, “The Genesis of the Picturesque,” in From Mannerism to Romanticism, Vol. I of Studies in Art, Architecture and Design (New York: Walker, 1968), pp. 78–101; Edward Malins, English Landscaping and Literature, 1660–1840 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 26–48; Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), pp. 3–115; Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), pp. 34118; John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 58–103.

19 Epistles to Several Persons (Moral Essays), ed. F. W. Bateson, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, Vol. in, Pt. II (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press; London: Methuen, 1961). All quotations are from this edition and will be cited in the text.

20 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), I, 254.

21 Spence reports that Pope explicitly related variety and contrasts. After Pope states the three rules of gardening, Spence asks, “Should not variety be one of the rules?” and Pope replies, “Certainly, one of the chief, but this is included mostly in the contrasts” (p. 254).

22 Pope here echoes two common seventeenth-century justifications for variety in art: the psychological, based on the rhetorical tradition that views change as a natural source of mental pleasure, and the cosmic, grounded in the tradition of Christian optimism, which sees variety as one of the chief characteristics of the great chain of being. See H. V. S. Ogden, “The Principles of Variety and Contrast in Seventeenth Century Aesthetics,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 10 (1949), 159–82.

23 One “of the commonplace assumptions which the neoclassical poet or painter or sculptor [or gardener] inherited from the Renaissance was the idea of two levels of Nature: one, that perfect, orderly system of harmony and ideal beauty which God called into being at the beginning of time; the other, that imperfect, sublunary estate of flux and jarring multiplicity which is our wretched legacy from Adam” (Battestin, p. 50). The artist who saw Nature in this way believed that “it was through the imitation of ideal Nature … that Art improves upon actuality, restoring us, as it were, to Eden” (Battestin, p. 50). But it is also true that the belief in a fallen Nature came under increasing attack in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As Michael Macklem observes, a “revision of assumptions in the second half of the seventeenth century … created new possibilities of belief. It permitted the supposition that the creation is representative not of disorder but of order, and made it possible to believe that both the heavens and the earth testify not to the sin of Adam but to the wisdom of God” (The Anatomy of the World: Relations between Nature and Moral Law from Donne to Pope [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1958], p. 19). These two views of Nature appear to me to be mutually exclusive, and I assume that Pope adheres to the latter.

24 Martin Price makes essentially the same observation about Nature in Pope's Pastorals: “The Ordered garden' of the pastorals is a redeemed image of Nature, redeemed from the common eye's error, not Nature's own: the scale of Nature's art is too vast for comprehension and the order of Providence often too complex for merely rational conviction. This Art, then, is a straitening of Nature's true but invisible order, a reduction to smaller scale and greater clarity of what we cannot readily perceive in the macrocosm” (To the Palace of Wisdom [Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday, 1964], p. 146).

25 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, ed. and rev. Ralph N. Wornum (1876; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), iii, 81.