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Concealing and Revealing: Pope's 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot'Author(s): Ian DonaldsonReviewed work(s):Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 18, Pope, Swift, and Their Circle SpecialNumber (1988), pp. 181-199Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3508197 .Accessed: 19/11/2011 03:51

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Concealing and Revealing: Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot

IAN DONALDSON The Australian National University

Shut, shut the door, goodJohn! fatigu'd I said, Tye up the knocker, say I'm sick, I'm dead.1

Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot is a poem built upon contradictions. It opens paradoxically with the closing of a door, with a lively protestation of fatigue, with a small mendacity from the author who is soon to speak soberly of the

primacy of truth. He is not at home, he cries, ushering us genially inside the house. He exposes the predicaments of his life while declaring that he cannot bear another moment's exposure; speaks publicly of his wish to avoid

publicity. The poet seems at once to conceal and to reveal himself, to praise retirement yet watch with interest the advancement of his public reputation. He describes the invasion of Twickenham with a perceptible twinge of

proprietorial satisfaction, furtively displaying the estate that he wishes to

keep from the public gaze. ('In his Letters and in his Poems', noted Dr

Johnson, well attuned to the complexities of Pope's social aspirations, 'his garden and his grotto, his quincunx and his vines, or some hints of his

opulence, are always to be found.')2 The Epistle as a whole appears to commend the contrary values of forbearance and anger, of coolness and warmth, of holding back and striking out; while celebrating friendship, it offers a virtuoso display of poetic hostility. How can so contradictory a poem ultimately hold together? How far is it destroyed by the paradoxes it seeks to maintain?

An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot was a favourite poem of Byron's, and might in turn be regarded as Pope's most Byronic performance: passionate yet nonchalant, engaged yet aloof, spurning in verse the mere writing of verse, watchful of fame while outwardly contemptuous of it, modulating with wonderful suppleness through diverse and at times contradictory moods and

1 An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, Imitations of Horace, The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, edited by John Butt and others, I I vols (London and New Haven, 1939-69), iv (revised 1961), 96-127. All quotations are from this edition. I have found the most helpful studies of the poem to be those of Thomas R. Edwards,Jr, This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley and Los Angeles, I963), pp. 102-I ; Thomas E. Maresca, Pope's Horatian Poems (Columbus, Ohio, I966), Chapter 3; J. P. Hardy, Reinterpretations: Essays on Poems by Milton, Pope andJohnson (London, 197 I), pp. 8 I-I 02;J. Paul Hunter, 'Satiric Apology as Satiric Instance: Pope's Arbuthnot', JEGP, 68 (I969), 625-47; and Howard D. Weinbrot, Alexander Pope and the Traditions of Formal Verse Satire (Princeton, NewJersey, 1982), Chapter 8.

2 Lives of the English Poets, edited by George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols (Oxford, I905), III, 204.

Pope's 'Epistle to DrArbuthnot'

opinions. About his own changeability and love of paradox Byron was often

cheerfully explicit: Temperate I am, yet never had a temper;

Modest I am, yet with some slight assurance; Changeable too, yet somehow idem semper;

Patient, but not enamoured of endurance; Cheerful, but sometimes rather apt to whimper;

Mild, but at times a sort of Herculesfurens; So that I almost think that the same skin For one without has two or three within.3

Pope would not have confessed so humorously to his own temperamental variability, any more than he would have allowed his verse to degenerate as

recklessly as Byron does here. Like Byron, however, Pope was deeply interested in what Montaigne had called 'the inconstancy of our actions', in the moment by moment, day by day fluctuations of human feeling, opinion, and behaviour.4 The self-portrait that Pope offers in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, like the self-portrait that Byron offers in Don Juan, is that of a

person endearingly, and humanly, various and inconsistent in his moods and attitudes; a person in whom the demands of good breeding are in

perpetual, and losing, battle with the impulses of natural feeling; a person who consequently appears more fully alive and responsive than the

single-minded scribblers (Drury Lane dunces, Lakeland poets) who afflict him. In this sense it could be argued that the paradoxicality of An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot is an essential part of Pope's larger strategy of self-characterization and self-defence. The apologia that Pope devises in the Epistle does not

depend solely or primarily upon logical argumentation; its persuasive power derives instead in large measure from its subtle shifts and modulations, contrasts and contradictions; from the skilful evocation of a complex mood of emotional conflict and intellectual dilemma. The poet (and with him the

poem) moves not in a linear fashion, but this way and that, through a range of registers, feelings, and behavioural possibilities.

Yet if many of the contradictions of the poem seem carefully controlled there are moments none the less in this supremely accomplished Epistle when

conflicting elements and intentions appear to pull against each other, suggesting in turn the existence of larger contradictions in Pope's thinking about his role as a poet, and about the ultimate aims of his work. I want to look more closely at some of these complex tensions in the poem that

3 Don Juan, xvII. i I, edited by T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W. W. Pratt (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 557. Byron quotes extensively from different parts of the Epistle throughout his correspondence, and seems to have had much of the poem by heart: see Leslie A. Marchand's edition of Byron's Letters and Journals, I2vols (London, I973-82), xII (Index), 139. 4 Pope drew freely upon Montaigne's essay 'De l'inconstance de nos actions' (probably in Charles Cotton's translation) for his first Moral Essay (see F. W. Bateson's edition of Epistles to Several Persons (Twickenham, II, i6), and was more generally affected by Montaigne's thinking: see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope. A Life (New Haven and London, I985). Byron described Don Juan as resembling 'Montaigne's Essays with a story for a hinge' (Marchand, Letters andJournals, x, 150).

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contribute at times to its poise, at times to its ambivalence. I shall consider in turn three related and overlapping questions: (I) the nature of the audience to whom the poem is seemingly directed; (ii) the poem's varying attitudes to expressiveness and restraint; and (III) the poem's relative valuations of private and public life.

I A Word in Whose Ear?: The Poem's Audience

On 25 August I734 Pope wrote affectionately from Southampton to his dying friend John Arbuthnot in London, enquiring solicitously after his health and remarking by the way that a new poem was in the offing; or, to

speak more accurately, a poem newly put together from a number of earlier

writings. The poem was to be addressed to Arbuthnot himself; its tone would be set by Arbuthnot's own counsel that Pope should strive to moderate the harshness of his satire: I took very kindly your Advice, concerning avoiding Ill-will from writing Satyr; and it has worked so much upon me (considering the Time and State you gave it in) that I determine to address to you one of my Epistles, written by piece-meal many years, and which I have now made haste to put together; wherein the Question is stated, what were, and are, my Motives of writing, the Objections to them, and my answers. It pleases me much to take this occasion of testifying (to the public at least, if not to Posterity) my Obligations and Friendship for, and from, you, for so many years: That is all that's in it; for Compliments are fulsome and go for nothing.5

'That is all that's in it': Pope's casual phrase seems modestly to reduce a

complex situation, in much the same manner as do certain phrases within the poem he was currently writing (' "To live and die is all I have to do"'). Pope means, of course, that the Epistle will be a poem with no false flourishes, just a plain and sober testimony to his friendship with Arbuthnot. The

poem's testimony will be public, but its theme is essentially private. 'That is all that's in it': by this phrase Pope seems also to imply that the poem will be

primarily concerned with this celebration of friendship. There is little indication that it will contain other more various and more hostile elements, such as the portrait of Sporus; that it will treat of enmity as well as friendship; and that it will be addressed to Arbuthnot only in a peculiarly circuitous manner.

The 'Advertisement' prefixed to the first edition of An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot in I734 describes the poem in rather different terms. The 'Adver- tisement' is naturally pitched for the general reader, while the letter of

25 August is intended simply for the eyes of a friend: some differences of tone and presentation are only to be expected. Yet it is precisely in this veering between a public and a private voice, between formal 'advertisement' and intimate epistle, that the most interesting tensions of the poem itself are to be found. The epistle which Pope had said in his letter of 25 August would be

5 The Correspondence ofAlexander Pope, edited by George Sherburn, 5 vols (Oxford, I 956), III, 428.

13

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Pope's 'Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot'

'addressed' to Arbuthnot is now said in the 'Advertisement' to be 'inscribed' to him, as though Arbuthnot were seen now not as the recipient of the poem but merely as its dedicatee. The primary audience is located elsewhere: This Paper is a Sort of Bill of Complaint, begun many years since, and drawn up by snatches, as the several Occasions offer'd. I had no thoughts of publishing it, till it pleas'd some Persons of Rank and Fortune [the Authors of Verses to the Imitator of Horace, and of an Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity from a Nobleman at Hampton Court,] to attack in a very extraordinary manner, not only my Writings (of which being publick the Publick judge) but my Person, Morals, and Family, whereof to those who know me not, a truer Information may be requisite. Being divided between the Necessity to say something of Myself, and my own Laziness to undertake so awkward a Task, I thought it the shortest way to put the last hand to this Epistle.6

The poem according to this account has been constructed over many years as 'a Sort of Bill of Complaint' (a formal plea or indictment for presentation in a court of law) yet with no thought of publication; it is only the recent attacks of Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that have spurred the reluctant poet to move at last into the public arena. The poem is thus at once a public and a private document, addressed in its earliest form to an

imagined court of fair-minded citizens, yet patiently retained amongst the

poet's personal writings: expressed but suppressed, spoken but not spoken. Even now, as the bill of complaint is finally lodged, the poet insists upon his indifference to the final outcome of his plea: 'Neque sermonibus Vulgi dederis te' is the Ciceronian tag Pope calmly attaches as epigraph to the Epistle: 'Let what others say of you be their own concern; whatever it is, they will say it in any case.'7 He cares, but does not care; speaks now to the public, but knows better than to value the public's verdict.

The 'Advertisement', like the Epistle itself, is especially sensitive to the distinction between public and private life; what finally goads the poet into action is the failure of his adversaries and of his would-be friends to observe and value that distinction. Lord Hervey and Lady Mary have attacked 'not only my Writings (of which being publick the Publick judge) but my Person, Morals, and Family, whereof to those who know me not, a truer Information may be requisite'. Pope stresses that he plays by other rules: at Arbuthnot's

request he has been silent about such personal details as might cause his enemies distress. For all the seeming meticulousness with which these distinctions are formulated, both in the 'Advertisement' and in the Epistle itself, there is a curious confusion, as a contemporary reader complained, in the way the poem is addressed apparently in confidence to a friend but actually to another audience standing behind and beyond that friend. 'The

Epistle to Dr. ARBUTHNOT is improperly called an Epistle', declared Thomas Bentley in I735: "Tis a Satire throughout. HORACE made a

6 The square-bracketed interpolation is in the text quoted. The I735 quarto edition carries a briefer statement in place of the 'Advertisement' (see Twickenham, iv, 95). 7 Cicero, De Re Publica, vi. 23; C.W. Keyes's translation from his Loeb edition (Cambridge and London, I977).

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IAN DONALDSON

Difference. His Epistles to his polite Friends are not stuffed with Bills of

Complaint and cruel Descriptions, like Mr. POPE's.'8 One of the curious narrative contradictions of the poem is that Arbuthnot,

the absent friend to whom the Epistle is seemingly addressed, is figured as

though he were actually present: he is the adversarius holding direct and strenuous disputation with the poet, anxious to protect him from possible harm, eager to conceal what the poet threatens fearlessly to reveal.9 The

poet's own dilemma (whether to publish or withhold) is thus externalized in a series of small dramatic exchanges between the two men. A further and

equally remarkable contradiction is that 'Arbuthnot's' actual function within the poem is not to conceal Pope's satirical intentions at all but rather to make them more explicit. Consider for example the effect of this intervention during the poet's narration of the story of Midas's ears:

'Tis sung, when Midas' Ears began to spring, (Midas, a sacred Person and a King) His very Minister who spy'd them first, (Some say his Queen) was forc'd to speak, or burst. And is not mine, my Friend, a sorer case, When ev'ry Coxcomb perks them in my face? "Good friend, forbear! you deal in dang'rous things, "I'd never name Queens, Ministers, or Kings; "Keep close to Ears, and those let Asses prick, '"Tis nothing" - Nothing? if they bite and kick? Out with it, Dunciad! let the secret pass, That Secret to each Fool, that he's an Ass: The truth once told (and wherefore shou'd we lie ?) The Queen of Midas slept, and so may I.

(1.69)

'Goodfriend, forbear!': 'Arbuthnot's' concern serves in effect to activate the

particular and topical applications which have hitherto remained dormant in the poet's account of the classical fable, reminding us that there are indeed a queen, a minister, and a king now living to whom that fable might equally refer. 'Arbuthnot' would 'never name' those whom he has effectively now named.10 The warning, seemingly uttered in private, is skilfully transferred

by Pope into his public 'bill of complaint'. For whose ears is the warning really intended; and how it is to be heard? The question brings us directly to the fable itself, which is concerned with ears and what they are capable of

hearing; secrets and whether they can be kept; and concealments that lead to revelations.

8 A Letter to Mr. Pope, Occasion'd by Sober Advicefrom Horace, &c. ( 735), cited in Pope: The Critical Heritage, edited byJohn Barnard (London and Boston, Massachusetts, I973), p. 324, n. 3.

9 On the role of Pope's satiric adversary, see John M. Aden, Something Like Horace: Studies in the Art and Allusion of Pope's Horatian Satires (Nashville, Tennessee, I969), Chapter I. For the change in Arbuthnot's role in Warburton's 1751 edition of the poem, see John Butt's textual note, Twickenham, IV, 93. 10 'Arbuthnot's' intervention after the mention of 'Sapho' at line IoI ('"Hold! for God-sake - you'll

offend: | No Names - be calm- learn Prudence of a Friend"', etc.) has a similar effect, alerting the reader to the fact that the generic name 'Sapho' has reference to a particular person.

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In Ovid's account (Metamorphoses, XI. 146-93) the story of Midas's ears follows immediately upon the more familiar story of his craving for the

golden touch. Both stories turn on the stupidity of Midas, which in each case receives its appropriate physical punishment. Hearing a musical contest between Pan and Apollo, Midas, alone of all the listeners, prefers the music of Pan and rudely challenges the verdict of Tmolus, who hasjudged in favour of Apollo. Tmolus contemptuously bestows upon Midas a pair of ass's ears, a

fitting symbol both of his temerity and of his inability properly to hear the music that has just been played. Midas, in shame, attempts to conceal his ears beneath a purple turban. The secret is discovered by his barber, who dares tell no one else but cannot keep it to himself. He therefore digs a hole, whispers the secret into it, and fills the hole up again. But reeds grow up from the place and, stirred by the wind, whisper the secret which the barber

thought he had successfully hidden. What has been concealed is once again revealed.

In Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, which Pope knew in Dryden's version, it is Midas's wife and not his barber who is entrusted with the shameful secret of the ass's ears; the secret presses upon her like a physical compulsion: 'she must burst, or blab'.

A marshy Ground commodiously was near, Thither she ran, and held her Breath for fear, Lest if a Word she spoke of any Thing, That Word might be the Secret of the King. Thus full of Counsel to the Fen she went, Grip'd all the way, and longing for a vent: Arriv'd, by pure Necessity compell'd, On her majestic mary-bones she kneel'd; Then to the Waters-brink she laid her Head, And, as a Bittour bumps within a Reed, To thee alone, O Lake, she said, I tell (And as thy Queen command thee to conceal) Beneath his Locks the King my Husband wears A goodly Royal pair of Asses Ears: Now I have eas'd my Bosom of the Pain Till the next longing Fit return again!

(1. I85)11

The story is one of opposing imperatives: it is about the need to conceal certain facts for reasons of diplomacy (a 'Monarch's Vices must not be reveal'd' (1. 60) ) and the greater and more urgent need to reveal those facts. In Chaucer's (and in Dryden's) version the natural force that brings such secrets to light is female indiscretion, the lust for gossip: 'for our Sex is frail'; 'Like leaky Sives no Secrets we can hold' (11. I53, 155; compare Chaucer, 11. 945-5 ). In the Wife of Bath's mouth such phrases are of course ironical:

11 'The Wife of Bath Her Tale', Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), in The Poems ofJohn Dryden, edited by James Kinsley, 4vols (Oxford, 1958), iv, 708-o9. Compare 'The Wife of Bath's Tale', 11. 970-82, in The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, edited by F. N. Robinson, second edition (Boston, Massachusetts, I957), p. 85.

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the apparent 'frailty' of the female sex is in fact a source of power, a component in the struggle between the sexes for 'maistrie', or for what Dryden calls 'Soveraignty'.

But it was in Persius's more subtle and suggestive reworking of the Midas story in his first Satire that Pope would have found something closer to his present purpose.12 For Persius is concerned in this Satire with a question that also exercises Pope in An Epistle to DrArbuthnot. For whose benefit does a

poet actually write? Who will really listen to what he says? 'Vel duo vel nemo' is Persius's gloomy answer: a couple of people, or no one at all. Public recitations of poetry are mere vanity; public acclamation is flattering but worthless. The poet is finally accountable to himself alone; 'nec te

quaesiveris extra' is his stoical watchword ('look to no one outside yourself). The ears of the public are not capable of hearing what the poet utters; they are like Midas's ears, deaf to the music of Apollo: the ears of ajackass. But if this is indeed the truth, how and to whom can it ever be told? Must the poet keep it always to himself? Like Midas's barber, he is bursting to speak:

men muttire nefas? nec clam? nec cum scrobe? nusquam? his tamen infodiam. vide, vide ipse, libelle: auriculas asini quis non habet? hoc ego opertum, hoc ridere meum, tam nil, nulla tibi vendo Iliade (1. I g9)

('And may I not mutter one word? Not anywhere, to myself, nor even to a ditch? Yes -here will I dig it in. I have seen the truth; I have seen it with my own eyes, O my book: Who is there who has not the ears of an ass? this dead secret of mine, this poor little joke, I will not sell for all your Iliads!)

Persius, like Pope, expresses and suppresses the central truth of his satire with a single movement, burying his secret, but burying it within verses which he chooses to expose to a public readership. Auriculas asini quis non habet? For

many years it was believed that the line that Persius originally wrote was more particular: auriculus asini Mida rex habet ('King Midas has the ears of an ass'). Fearing that this remark would be thought to apply to the Emperor Nero, Persius's friend and tutor Cornutus (it is said) substituted the more

general formulation, thus burying the satire's central revelation even more

deeply than the poet himself had chosen to do.13 It is unlikely that Persius's satire was originally directed against Nero. The larger theme of the satire is indeed not the folly of kings and emperors but the relationship of the poet to his public. If the public are asses, for whose ears does the poet write? Does he write simply for private relief? Does he address himself only to a friend? If he looks to no one outside himself why should his private thoughts and

perceptions ever pass into the public domain? These questions are central not merely to Persius's first 'Satire' but also to Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot.

12 For Persius's influence on the poem, seeJ. C. Maxwell, 'Pope's Use of the First Satire of Persius in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot', N&Q, 213 (1968), 207-o8, and Weinbrot, Chapter 8. 13 See R. A. Harvey, A Commentary on Persius (Leiden, 1981), p. 5I; OttoJahn, Auli Persii Flacci Satirarum

Liber (Hildesheim, I967), p. 2o; and Weinbrot, Chapter 8.

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ii Blowing Hot and Cold: The Poet's Feelings

Pope's allusion to the story of Midas in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, like Persius's allusion in his first 'Satire', has sometimes been read as though its

primary interest was political: it is seen as a (not entirely covert) attack on

George II, who was known for his habit, when aroused, of kicking those about him ('Nothing? if they bite and kick?' (1. 78) ).14 But what the passage has to say about politics is rather less interesting than what it has to say about poetry, and in particular about the vital link (which nineteenth-

century critics accused Pope of by and large ignoring) that exists between

poetry and human feeling.15 The poet, as Pope describes him, writes because he cannot help writing; moved by passion he is 'forc'd to speak or burst'.

The epistle that Pope addresses to his friend Dr Arbuthnot resembles (in this one, limited, respect) the epistle that Pope's Eloisa addresses to her former lover Abelard: it is presented as the product of powerful feelings which cannot be held back.

Dear fatal name! rest ever unreveal'd, Nor pass these lips in holy silence seal'd. Hide it, my heart, within that close disguise, Where, mix'd with God's, his lov'd Idea lies. Oh write it not, my hand - The name appears Already written - wash it out, my tears! In vain lost Eloisa weeps and prays, Her heart still dictates, and her hand obeys.

(Eloisa to Abelard, 1. 9; Twickenham, II, 291-349)

Eloisa struggles to hide, to keep 'ever unreveal'd', the feelings which move

irresistibly to self-expression: 'Her heart still dictates, and her hand obeys.' Her writing is instinctive and involuntary; prompted by the accidental discovery of a letter from Abelard, it is an essentially private act which is made public through further accidental discoveries; like her passion it is revealed despite itself: In Eloisa Pope depicts the struggle of'grace and nature, virtue and passion' ('The Argument'). It is in the rapid alternations of her

feelings from saintly to sexual desires, from coolness to warmth, that the life of the poem consists. 'Hot ice' was Fuseli's apt comment on the poem. In Eloisa in Deshabille a contemporary parodist unkindly mimicked the mode:

Through what painful extremes of sensation I run! Now boiling - a lover, now freezing - a nun.16

In An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot Pope depicts himself as similarly caught between opposing imperatives, longing for retirement and silence but feeling 14 See Weinbrot (pp. 272-74), drawing on Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics

in the Later Poetry ofPope, i73i-43 (Toronto, 1969), pp. I 30, 138, 297-98. 15 See Ian Donaldson, 'Pope and Feeling', in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, 5, edited byJ. P. Hardy and J. C. Eade (Oxford, 1983), pp. 33-50.

16 John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (1831), quoted in Alexander Pope, edited by F. W. Bateson and N. A.Joukovsky (Harmondsworth, 197 ), p. I 74; Eloisa in Deshabille, in Eloisa to Abelard. With the Letters of Heloise to Abelard in the Version of John Hughes (1713), edited by James E. Wellington (Coral Gables, Florida, i965), p. 143.

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IAN DONALDSON

more powerfully the impulse to speak out. Though the emotional territory of the Epistle is quite different from that of Eloisa to Abelard, the conflicts that the two poems explore are not dissimilar: the poet's 'dire Dilemma' in the Epistle is a lighter, more knowing, more socialized version of Eloisa's turbulent plight: he is 'divided between the Necessity to say something of Myself, and my own Laziness to undertake so awkward a Task' ('Advertisement'). Like her, he experiences rapid alternations of feeling as he moves from indifference to anger, from amusement to distress: blowing cold and blowing hot. The sense of emotional struggle is, once again, all-important:

Seized and ty'd down tojudge, how wretched I! Who can't be silent, and who will not lye; To laugh, were want of Goodness and of Grace, And to be grave, exceeds all Pow'r of Face. I sit with sad Civility, I read With honest anguish, and an aking head; And drop at last, but in unwilling ears, This saving counsel, 'Keep your Piece nine years'.

(1.33)

The advice to 'Keep your Piece', as Pope himself has peaceably held back his piece - this very Epistle - for many years, drops into ears that (like Midas's) are not attuned to hear. These writers, like the poet himself, are certainly driven by passion, but they experience no struggle, no countervail- ing sense of reality or decorum; their lusts, ambitions, and fantasies find an immediate vent in their poetry. Between the private and public spheres they perceive no distinction: they impose their verses on the poet whether he wants to hear them or not. The little struggle that Pope shows himself undergoing here is to be played over more intricately in the poem as a whole: it is a struggle between 'civility', a consciousness of the courtesies and forms that are necessary to the maintenance of polite society, and the more urgent need to speak one's mind, to tell the truth, to give vent to honest feelings. The impertinence of the writers drives the poet temporarily to abandon 'civility' for a sudden show of passion:

Glad of a quarrel, strait I clap the door, Sir, let me see your works and you no more.

(1.67)

The slamming of the door decisively re-establishes the boundaries of the private domain and simultaneously marks the poet as a man of feeling. It is a moment of enjoyable heat.

About his adversaries Pope is apt to imply two, somewhat contradictory, things. First, they are deficient in ordinary human feeling; in the common everyday impulses that are manifested, in the poet himself, in fatigue, laughter, headaches, embarrassment, and the banging of doors. The poet's own warmth ("'be calm"', counsels Arbuthnot fearfully (1. I02) ) is contrasted to their cool insensitivity:

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You think this cruel? take it for a rule, No creature smarts so little as a Fool. Let Peals of Laughter, Codrus! round thee break, Thou unconcern'd canst hear the mighty Crack. Pit, Box and Gall'ry in convulsions hurl'd, Thou stand'st unshook amidst a bursting World.

(1. 83)

On the other hand these people suffer from an alarming surplus of feeling, which they are unable to control: they bite and kick, 'they fume, and stamp, and roar, and chafe'; 'Furies, death and rage!', they exclaim; their wrath and their love, their anger and their repentance, are equally to be feared (11. 78, 191, 57, 30, I07-08). The poet's nonchalance is contrasted with this terrible heat:

Were others angry? I excus'd them too; Well might they rage; I gave them but their due.

(1. 173)

Yet then did Gildon draw his venal quill; I wish'd the man a dinner, and sate still: Yet then did Dennis rave in furious fret; I never answer'd, I was not in debt.

(1. I5I)

Pope's adversaries are depicted as fixed in one state or another: as forever

emotionally unresponsive, or forever emotionally out of control. Pope creates a subtler picture of his own emotional condition. He is a man whose forbearance is the product of control, not of Codrus-like insensitivity; who smiles wryly at the absurdity of others (11. 58, 281, 36) but is also capable of fiercer outbursts; whose anger is not, like Dennis's, chronic and egotistical, but occasional, judicious, the product of extreme provocation; whose head and heart are equally engaged in all he does and says.

An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot was occasioned (as the 'Advertisement' to the

poem makes clear) by the publication in March 1733 of the taunting Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey. The Verses accused Pope not

simply of artistic but (more radically) of emotional deficiencies: his heart was hardened and perverted; he lacked the passion and at the same time the nonchalance of a poet such as Horace.

Horace can laugh, is delicate, is clear; You, only coarsely rail, or darkly sneer: His Style is elegant, his Diction pure, Whilst none thy crabbed Numbers can endure; Hard as thy Heart, and as thy Birth obscure.

(1. i6)

Pope is coolly mocked as the hot and angry victim of feelings he cannot

adequately control:

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IAN DONALDSON

When fretful Porcupine, with rancorous Will, From mounted Back shoots forth a harmless Quill, Cool the Spectators stand; and all the while, Upon the angry little Monster smile. Thus 'tis with thee: - whilst impotently safe, You strike unwounding, we unhurt can laugh.

(1. 73)17

Pope's careful attempt throughout An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot to suggest his own tolerance, equanimity, and sang froid ('Were others angry? I excus'd them too') seems designed to answer the charges made by his aristocratic adversaries concerning his plebeian anger and ill will (the aristocratic Byron was defiantly to place Pope within 'an aristocracy of poets').18 Yet, as critics have noticed, Pope's Epistle does not remain uniformly in this 'Horatian' mode: its composure is disturbed by rougher, 'Juvenalian', elements;19 and it is an especially daring stroke on Pope's part to characterize Hervey himself, in the person of Sporus, in a passage marked not by authorial coolness and indifference but by contempt and indignation. The portrait is memorable precisely for the intensity of feeling that is expressed; for the sudden heat that blows up at this relatively late stage in the poem, after three hundred lines of quieter exasperation. The timing of the passage is superbly judged: placed early in the poem, or printed out of context, it would have

quite a different impact. Pope's deft and powerful modulation contrasts

notably with the emotionally undifferentiated attack of Lord Hervey's and

Lady Mary's verses, establishing precisely that confident range of feeling which they accuse him of lacking. It contrasts also with Pope's occasional

attempts elsewhere in his work to present himself as entirely unruffled by the attacks that have been made upon him: as one 'who ne'er car'd, and still cares not a Pin | What they said, or may say of the Mortal within'.20 The

power of the Sporus passage derives, on the other hand, from Pope's suddenly abandoning any such pose of cool indifference: the verse is animated instead by a telling show of anger.

The central dilemma of the poem (should the poet conceal his feelings, or reveal them? should he withhold his attack, or strike out?) is again played out in a small drama between 'Pope' and 'Arbuthnot' that serves as a prelimin- ary to the main attack:

17 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and 'Simplicity', a Comedy, edited by Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford, I977), pp. 265-70. William Windham may possibly have had a hand in these Verses. 18 'Further Addenda' to 'Observations upon "Observations": A Second Letter toJohn Murray, Esq. on

the Rev. W. L. Bowles's Strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope' (25 March 1821), in The Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, by Thomas Moore (London, 932), p. 712. 19 See, for example, Rachel Trickett, The Honest Muse: A Study in Augustan Verse (Oxford, 1967), p. 98;

Roger Lonsdale, 'Pope', in Dryden to Johnson, Sphere History of Literature, revised edition (London, I986), pp. 1o8-o9; Weinbrot, Chapter 8. 20 'Epitaph. On Himself' (1. 5), Twickenham, vi, 386.

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192 Pope's 'Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot'

Let Sporus tremble - "What? that Thing of silk, "Sporus, that mere white Curd of Ass's milk? "Satire or Sense alas! can Sporus feel? "Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?" Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings, This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings; Whose Buzz the Witty and the Fair annoys, Yet Wit ne'er tastes, and Beauty ne'er enjoys, So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite. Eternal Smiles his Emptiness betray, As shallow streams run dimpling all the way. Whether in florid impotence he speaks, And, as the Prompter breathes, the Puppet squeaks; Or at the Ear of Eve, familiar Toad, Half Froth, half Venom, spits himself abroad, In Puns, or Politicks, or Tales, or Lyes, Or Spite, or Smut, or Rymes, or Blasphemies. His Wit all see-saw between that and this, Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss, And he himself one vile Antithesis. Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part, The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart! Fop at the Toilet, Flatt'rer at the Board, Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord. Eve's Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest, A Cherub's face, a Reptile all the rest; Beauty that shocks you, Parts that none will trust, Wit that can creep, and Pride that licks the dust.

(1.305)

'Who breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?' Aware of the risk that his attack

upon Hervey may seem excessive and overheated, Pope here fleetingly recalls a cooler epigram of Martial's (xII. 6I), also lightly remembered early in the poem (11. 19-20), in which the poet declares that it is not worth

expending emotional energy in castigating his enemy Ligurra. That epigram had been reworked by BenJonson in relation to his old rival and collaborator

Inigo Jones. Jonson's manner of striking and withholding, of blowing hot and cold, contrasts markedly with Pope's:

Sir Inigo doth feare it as I heare (And labours to seem worthy of that feare) That I should wryte upon him some sharp verse, Able to eate into his bones and pierce The Marrow! Wretch, I quitt thee of thy paine Thou'rt too ambitious: and dost fear in vaine! The Lybian Lion hunts noe butter flyes, He makes the Camell and dull Ass his prize. If thou be soe desyrous to be read, Seek out some hungry painter, that for bread With rotten chalk, or Cole upon a wall, Will well designe thee, to be viewd of all

IAN DONALDSON

That sit upon the Comon Draught: or Strand! Thy Forehead is too narrow for my Brand.21

The problem that Jonson's poem runs into is precisely the problem it is seemingly trying to avoid. If Libyan lions don't hunt butterflies, why then is this poem being written at all? Is the victim worth pursuing, or is he not? While insisting that he is quite unruffled the poet seems curiously agitated; while apparently withholding the brand he strikes with some ferocity. The difficulty arises partly from the central conceit of lions and butterflies, which acts well enough as a passing taunt but scarcely serves to describe the evidently complex relationship that exists between satirist and adversary, the feelings aroused in the one by the other, or the nature of the threat that is posed.

Pope proceeds with far greater subtlety. His strategic skill is apparent first and foremost in his choice of imagery. Byron was greatly taken by the sheer inventiveness of the entire Sporus passage, in which he counted no fewer than twenty-three separate images; such imaginative richness, he claimed, was typical of Pope's poetry as a whole, 'whether it be Satire or Epic': 'Now is there a line of all the passage without the mostforcible imagery? - (for his purpose) look at the variety at the poetry - of the passage - at the imagination - there is hardly a line <ofall that passage) -from which apainting might not be made and is (Letters and Journals, Marchand, vIII, 94). But the variety of Pope's writing here testifies notjust to the power of his pictorial imagination but also to his sense of tactics. Sporus is not merely a butterfly, he is a bug with gilded wings, a painted child of dirt that stinks and stings, a spaniel, a puppet, a toad, Eve's tempter, a serpent; he is not without the power to hurt, though quite how he hurts and why are matters which are deliberately left uncertain. Uncer- tainty is indeed an essential component in this passage: uncertainty as to

Sporus's true nature, identity, and sex. 'Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss';'Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord'. 'Now ... now ... now ... now .... Now ... now': the repeated word dramatizes this uncertainty, precipitating us from one possibility to another. The repetition of'whether', 'or', and 'half' intensifies this effect: 'Half Froth, half Venom'. Sporus is neither entirely trivial nor unequivocally dangerous, but veers uneasily between those two conditions; he is a freak, a neuter, a misfit, an undefinable irritation and threat; a reptile with the face of a cherub.22 Though he dare not bite, he has teeth; though impotent (Pope appropriates, then deftly varies, the insults that had been directed against himself) he waits menacingly by the ear of Eve.

The sense of uncertainty is compounded by Pope's open syntax in (for example) this slippery triplet.

21 Ungathered Verse, 36, in Ben Jonson, edited by C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, I I vols (Oxford, I925-52), VIII, 407-08 (u/v, i/j regularized, contractions expanded). See Ian Donaldson, 'Jonson and Anger', YES, 14 (I984), 56-71 (pp. 68-69). 22 On the tradition of the serpent with a human face, see Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (London, I973), p. I44.

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His Wit all see-saw between that and this, Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss, And he himself one vile Antithesis.

These lines may have been prompted (as scholars have suggested) by a couple of phrases in an earlier attack on Hervey, A Proper Reply To a Late Scurrilous Libel, by 'Caleb Danvers' (William Pulteney), who had spoken of 'the little, quaint, Antitheses, the labour'd Gingle of the Periods, the great Variety of rhetorical Flourishes, affected Metaphors, and puerile Wit- ticisms' in Hervey's writing, and had ironically observed that 'it would be barbarous to handle such a delicate Hermaphrodite, such a pretty, little, Master-Miss, in too rough a Manner'.23 Pope's skilful variation plays upon the verbal as well as the substantive meanings of'Master' and 'Miss', so that the phrase 'now Master up, now Miss' suggests at once Hervey's uncertain poetic power (now mastering, now missing) and his uncertain sexual nature. It is now no longer Hervey's poetry alone that is antithetical; he is himself 'one vile Antithesis': an innuendo oddly sharpened by Pope's failure to state what he is antithetical to (to a sexual norm? to Pope himself, and his 'manly ways'? to human nature? to himself?). Hervey is 'Amphibious' (1. 326) not merely in a sexual sense, for he is 'acting either Part' in Pope's cleverly open syntax, through a whole series of semantic doublets, behavioural possibilities, vile antitheses: with trifling head and corrupted heart, as fop and flatterer, at toilet and board, in tripping and strutting, as lady and lord, as cherub and reptile, with beauty and parts, with wit and pride, by creeping and licking.24

The total effect of this passage is not in any simple sense reductive, as is Jonson's (and Martial's) gibe about lions and butterflies: on the contrary, it constantly multiplies the possibilities concerning Hervey's character and proclivities, his mode and sphere of action, and the nature of the evil he represents. The ambiguities of image and syntax serve to make the portrait more mysterious and hence more sinister; veiling and shadowing those qualities which a lesser satirist might seek more crudely to 'expose'. Though the passage is obviously fired by indignation it does not therefore appear overheated, asJonson's epigram on 'Sir Inigo' arguably does; Pope's poetic energy is expended not upon breaking or branding a butterfly but in the exploration and adumbration of moral qualities which arouse not merely contempt but puzzlement, fascination, and a measure of appalled imaginative involvement. So powerful is the imaginative pull of Sporus that the moral recoil in the passage which immediately follows, describing the poet

23 Robert Halsband, Lord Hervey. Eighteenth-Century Courtier (Oxford, I973), pp. 109, 18. (For further background to the Sporus portrait, see Camille A. Paglia, 'Lord Hervey and Pope', ECS, 6 (i973), 348- 7I.) Pope's line 'His Wit all see-saw between that and this' may possibly allude to a stumbling line in Hervey's and Lady Mary's Verses: 'To this or that alike in vain we trust' (1. 42). 24 Captain Otter, 'A land, and sea-Captaine' in Jonson's Epicoene, is called 'animal amphibium' (I. 4. 26): the innuendo concerns sexual reversal. Addison, in the Spectator (no. 435), speaks of'Amphibious Dress': that is, suitable for either sex.

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IAN DONALDSON

himself, is correspondingly energetic, marked by a series of steadying and emphatically contrasting 'not's and 'nor's and 'never's that runs for nearly twenty lines, contributing further through its negative suggestiveness to our sense not only of Pope but of the enemy he has just been castigating.

Not Fortune's Worshipper, nor Fashion's Fool, Not Lucre's Madman, nor Ambition's Tool, Not proud, nor servile, be one Poet's praise.

(1.334)

These vigorous swings of mood suggest an honest alternation of feeling in the poet that is quite different in nature from the quivering ambiguities of Sporus's emotional life. For Sporus leads only a half life, speaking and existing 'in florid impotence', skirting around pleasures he cannot fully experience; 'So well-bred Spaniels civilly delight I In mumbling of the Game they dare not bite' (1. 3 I 3). He is caught perpetually in the disabling civility of the polite world which he inhabits, where a true feeling cannot break

through. Pope pictures himself, on the other hand, as constantly aware of the double and conflicting demands of civility and passion, and answerable

finally (like his own Eloisa) to the latter. It is the presence of feeling that authenticates his satire, that allows it ultimately to bite, as the verses of the well-bred Sporus can never do.

The portrait of Atticus earlier in the poem describes another sort of emotional attrition:

Peace to all such! but were there One whose fires True Genius kindles, and fair Fame inspires, Blest with each Talent and each Art to please, And born to write, converse, and live with ease: Shou'd such a man, too fond to rule alone, Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne, View him with scornful, yet with jealous eyes, And hate for Arts that caus'd himself to rise; Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike, Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike; Alike reserv'd to blame, or to commend, A tim'rous foe, and a suspicious friend, Dreading ev'n fools, by Flatterers besieg'd, And so obliging that he ne'er oblig'd; Like Cato, give his little Senate laws, And sit attentive to his own applause; While Wits and Templars ev'ry sentence raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise. Who but must laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep, ifAtticus were he!

(1. I93)

The care, the caution, the suspicious hesitations of Addison are beautifully captured in the equal hesitations of Pope's own lines: 'Just hint a fault, and

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hesitate dislike.' The whole portrait is deliberately and mockingly couched in hypothetical constructions of lawyer-like caution: 'were there One', 'if such a man there be', 'if Atticus were he!' (Addison having been dead since

1719, 'such a man' did not literally exist). The picture that Pope draws here is of a man who cannot live decisively in or out of society. He is eternally suspicious of other people but feels compelled to surround himself by them; he assents 'with civil leer', gliding into anxious and deceptive harmony with those he fears to contradict; he smiles, not as Pope himself smiles in this

poem (nor as Addison's own Cato smiles, with stoical composure) but from timidity and bad faith (11.36, 158, 28I).25 Like Sporus he lives civilly, complying with the forms and conventions of polite society, yet paralysed by them. It is because of their perpetual civility that Atticus and Sporus are shown as men who crave power (literary, political, sexual) but are unable truly to achieve it, smothering as they do the feelings they long to express.

Sending the lines about Atticus to Addison himself, years earlier, Pope found (as he told Joseph Spence) that 'Mr Addison used me very civilly ever after'.26 The deeper response which the portrait is intended to evince is not 'civil' but passionate:

Who but must laugh, if such a man there be? Who would not weep, ifAtticus were he!

The compulsion to laugh and to weep is like the compulsion of Eloisa to

express her passion, to kiss the name ofAbelard, to summon her former lover to the convent in which she is immured. It is like the compulsion of Midas's wife, who 'was forc'd to speak, or burst'. It is like the compulsion felt by the poet himself to break with 'sad Civility', to write this epistle, and to include within it these lines about a man long dead. Feeling ultimately triumphs over social forms; the struggle for concealment leads finally to revelation.

in The Invisible Monarch: Ruling from Afar If Pope's Epistle encourages a sceptical view of the struggles for power in which such men as Sporus and Atticus engage, it seems also at a deeper level to be much fascinated by the nature of that power, and by the way in which it may be exerted not merely from the centre (from court and town, by king and

patron) but also, at times more subtly, more tellingly, from the periphery. It is not altogether surprising that a member of a powerless and excluded class should have shown such constant interest in the operations and manipula- tions of social power, nor is it surprising that he should simultaneously have protested that such matters were of negligible concern to him.27 Pope's

25 See Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, v. I, in Eighteenth-Century Plays, edited by John Hampden (London and New York, I928), p. 48, 26 Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men Collected From Conversation, edited

by James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford, I966), i, 72. 27 See Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, passim.

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decision to live at Twickenham was a response to anti-Catholic legislation which demanded that Catholics reside at least ten miles from the cities of London and Westminster. Through his careful recall of classical notions of retirement Pope artfully transformed necessity to virtue, presenting his distance from the capital, from the centre of 'civility' and power, not as an enforced liability but as an advantage, freely chosen.28

Pope's adversaries might choose to present the matter in a different light. In their Verses Address'd to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lord Hervey hyperbolically depicted Pope as 'an Out-cast, and alone', 'hated by Mankind', doomed to wander like Cain 'accursed through the Land' (11. Io1-I2). Society would

. . shun thy Writings like thy Company; And to thy Books shall ope their Eyes no more, Than to thy Person they wou'd do their Door.

(1.98)

In the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot Pope skilfully reverses all of these implications. So far from being shunned, his writings are avidly read and enquired after, his company earnestly sought. So far from wandering through the land, he is

firmly settled on his own estate (at the time he composed the Epistle Pope was

actually at Southampton on one of his 'rambles'; this fact is not alluded to within the poem). No one's door is closed to Pope; on the contrary it is he who, at the outset of the poem, is forced wearily to order that his door be closed upon those who flock to see him at Twickenham.29 While seemingly at the margins of society he is actually courted more persistently than Bufo or Atticus or King George himself. This courtship, Pope valiantly protests, he does not seek; his ambitions are merely private:

What tho' my Name stood rubric on the walls? Or plaister'd posts, with Claps in capitals? Or smoaking forth, a hundred Hawkers load, On Wings of Winds came flying all abroad? I sought no homage from the Race that write; I kept, like Asian Monarchs, from their sight: Poems I heeded (now be-rymed so long) No more than Thou, great GEORGE! a Birth-day Song.

(1. 215)

The analogy that Pope draws between himself and great George is humorous

yet also quietly significant, implying, for all its contrastive irony, that Pope may have his own pre-eminence within the world of letters. He is like yet unlike Atticus, who can 'Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne'. While seeming to disdain such urban jostlings for literary supremacy Pope

28 See George Sherburn, The Early Career ofAlexander Pope (Oxford, 934), p. 35; Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, pp. 39-40, and The Garden and the City, passim. 29 Graham Bradshaw points out to me that the opening lines of the Epistle seem humorously to transgress the poetic principles of Dryden's Crites, who declares: 'What is more unbefitting the majesty of verse than to call a servant, or bid a door be shut, in rhyme?' See An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in Dryden's Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, edited by George Watson, 2 vols (London and New York, I962), i, 80.

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lets it be known that he has his own poetic kingdom which extends to and includes the metropolis.30 'Like Asian monarchs', he rules from afar, eliciting from the literary world a homage which he professes to despise. Leading a removed and seemingly eremetical life (' "To live and die is all I have to do"' (1. 262)), he is solicited and pursued by all. He is an invisible monarch, who is fleetingly revealed to his public as he passes in his barge or chariot, or claps shut his door.31

The ambivalence towards public life that Pope shows in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot resembles the ambivalence that has already been noted in the

poem's mode of address, as it wavers between intimate epistle and public bill of complaint. Is Pope disdaining or measuring his possible social power, hiding from public view or displaying himself to it?

This prints my Letters, that expects a Bribe, And others roar aloud, 'Subscribe, subscribe'.

(1. 113)

'This prints my Letters': as the Twickenham editor points out, Edmund Curll in 1726 had surreptitiously printed some of Pope's letters to Cromwell; Pope protests at Curll's impertinence in dragging these private documents into the public domain. Yet the full and subsequent story of the publication of Pope's letters is altogether more complex and altogether less creditable to

Pope than this passing reference (and its annotation) suggests. From 1729 Pope himself had been furtively enticing Curll into publishing more of his

personal letters, and at the time of composing An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot was

arranging and remodelling further letters between himself and his friends for

publication in May I735.32 'Indeed it is a mortifying prospect', he wrote to

Orrery inJanuary 1736/37 while angling for the return of his letters to Swift for publication in a subsequent volume, 'to have one's most secret opinions, deliverd under the Sacredness of Friendship, betrayed to the whole World, by the unhappy Partiality of one's own best Friends in preserving them' (Correspondence, Iv, 53). While seeming to shield Swift from the impertinent glare of'the whole World' Pope is doing all he can to bring their correspondence to the world's attention: concealing and revealing in the characteristic manner of An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot.

'Look to no one outside yourself, wrote Persius in his first Satire. Pope's Epistle, while seeming to endorse this general sentiment, looks also with an interested eye to a larger social world. Though it may appear to be the most

personal and self-revelatory of all Pope's poems, An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot is not a venture into the egotistical sublime, nor is it concerned with what Wordsworth, describing his own poetic subject, was to call 'the individual

30 The analogy has a rich background: see, for example, Alan Roper, Dryden's Poetic Kingdoms (London, I965). 31 Weinbrot (p. 255) points out that Pope also uses the metaphor of kingship in two other cancelled passages. 32 See Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, Chapter 25.

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mind that keeps its own | Inviolate retirement'.33 The 'retirement' of which Pope treats in the Epistle is less absolute. The poem is seldom if ever introspective in the Romantic manner, being as it is more deeply concerned with the relationship of the individual poet to the society in which he lives. To the central question 'Why did I write?' (1. 125) Pope's initial answer is one that might have satisfied a Romantic poet: writing for him is a natural impulse, coming like laughter or tears or (as Keats would put it) leaves to a tree:34 'I lisp'd in Numbers, for the Numbers came' (1. 128). But the poem moves at once to a more testing question that characteristically focuses upon the way in which the private individual utterance is ultimately transmitted to the world: 'But why then publish?'

Granville the polite, And knowing Walsh, would tell me I could write; Well-natur'd Garth inflam'd with early praise, And Congreve lov'd, and Swift endur'd my Lays; The Courtly Talbot, Somers, Sheffield read, Ev'n mitred Rochester would nod the head, And St. John's self (great Dryden's friends before) With open arms receiv'd one Poet more.

(1. 135)

Like the Epistle as a whole, the passage is crowded with the presence of other people, whose relationship to the poet is (as ever) precisely tested. Pope conjures into being a small society, polite, knowing, well-natured, courtly, mitred: a cultivated group of friends both to the poet himself and to poetry in general, judicious and authoritative in their tastes, decisive in their loyalties; a powerful elite, whose nods and gestures of approval confer power in turn upon the poet and ensure that his work is brought to the notice of a wider readership; that what was private and concealed will be publicly revealed.

If, as I have suggested, there is some uneasiness about the way in which Pope in the Epistle defines and negotiates his relationship with the public, professing indifference to its verdict which he seems simultaneously to solicit and await, it is an uneasiness that is evident also within the larger context of Pope's professional life. Many of the ambiguities and contradictions that have been traced in this essay are the result of a controlled and happy art; others bear testimony to the complex social pressures under which Pope lived and worked. Though the poem is deeply marked by its paradoxes it is scarcely in the end destroyed by them: Pope (who "'hardly drank tea without a stratagem"') was too brilliant a strategist, both in art and in life, not to be aware of the risks involved in his own rhetorical procedures.35 For all Pope's air of casual and innocent spontaneity in An Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, the strategies of the poem are pondered with the utmost care: which is not the least significant of the poem's many contradictions.

33 The Recluse, I. I. 764-65, in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, edited by E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire, 5 vols (Oxford, I940-49), v, 338. 34 The Letters ofJohn Keats, edited by M. B. Forman, fourth edition (London, I952), p. 107. 35 The quotation is from Lives of the English Poets, II, 200. Johnson is remembering Edward Young,

Satires, vi. 188.

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