'An Essay on Man' and the Tradition of Satires on Mankind
| Autor: | Thomas P. Tierney, Douglas H. White |
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| Rok vydání: | 1987 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Modern Philology. 85:27-41 |
| ISSN: | 1545-6951 0026-8232 |
| Popis: | Students of Pope's work are so accustomed to treating An Essay on Man as a philosophical construct that they are in danger of neglecting some of its most persistent and effective functioning: much of the poem is what it is and does what it does through the agency of wit rather than dialectic. It is curious that we should neglect the wit of the poem since, in truth, Pope's primary credentials are not philosophical. It is difficult to imagine a student of philosophical profundity who, in making a list of the 100 or 500 or 1,000 greatest philosophical minds in history, would find room for Pope on the list, though he might well include one or two of his own professors. On the other hand, it is equally difficult to imagine a student of the world's great wits who, in making a similar list, would not put Pope very near the top. In this latter category Pope is among the greatest performers in all of recorded history. As a wit, Pope is not merely distinguished in his time or his language. He is not comparatively or topically great, shining partly because he is surrounded by a gray dimness; instead, he is clearly one of the great wits of any age or any language. Yet we still tend to treat the Essay on Man as if what recommends it to us is its philosophy. We concentrate on what Pope was competent at while paying relatively little attention to what embodies his true genius. Presumably this state of affairs is the result of the persistent tendency in both academic and nonacademic circles to rate wit and comedy lower on the scale of importance than the "profound," and this despite the fact that philosophical profundity is not a particularly scarce commodity, and its practitioners are not few in number. An intrinsic value is, however, widely assumed that has little to do with richness or rarity but stems entirely from weight. If pressed to do so, we would be prepared to defend the proposition that wit is often more profound than philosophy, at least if the word profound signals a connection with the realities of human experience. Far from agreeing that interpreting Fielding through Aristotle enhances the "complexity and interest" of Tom Jones or that Fielding's involvement with the paradoxes and ironies of moral imperatives would render the novel "rather trivial," we note that Fielding in the comic mode of wit is more profound than Aristotle, not less so.1 Students who have gotten their bearings from Swift or Fielding or Hobbes or Sterne can hardly be expected to agree that a "philosophical" source or label for An Essay on Man furnishes much guarantee of its profundity. In this essay we do not intend to challenge the use of the word "philosophical" as the appropriate label for some of the chief ideas employed in the poem, but we wish to attend more closely to several crucial passages of the poem that employ manipulations of wit to produce their effect and, specifically, the particular repertory of witty strokes that had already been established as belonging to satires on mankind. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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