Nature is also incarnated through the canonization of the classics: Pope identifies Homer as Nature, and he canonizes a series of arch-critics from Aristotle to William Walsh in Part III of “An Essay on Criticism.” As the models for all critics, they demonstrate the universally ideal learning and personality: “pleased to teach, and not yet proud to know” (632), unbiased (633), well-bred and sincere (635), willing to praise the merits of a foe (638), owning exact taste (639), not proud (641), and reasonable (642). Their supreme status is supposed to remain permanently unchanged and universally accepted because they reveal the eternal light of Nature—they devoted themselves to topics of universal values, not to those of particular issues.17 He encourages all would-be poets and critics to study Homer day and night, and thus indirectly promotes the conclusive and closed worldview. In epic, tradition must be accepted as totally sacred and authoritative (Morson and Emerson 421). Bakhtin indicates this closedness:
17 Pope’s veneration of the canon, as well as his glorification of critical rules, can be traced back to Aristotle’s quest for the “unmoved.” Unlike his teacher Plato, Aristotle does not label the “unmoved” as
“Ideal,” nor does he reject the changing world as illusory and false. He conceives the ultimate principle as dynamic: “The only continuous motion, then, is that which is caused by the unmoved movement:
and this motion is continuous because the movement remains always invariable, so that its relation to that which it moves remains also invariable and continuous” (Physics 162). Numerous literary works are continuously created, and readers must rely on some ultimate guidance in order to appreciate the truly valuable. Canonical works and critics are affirmed because their value is presumed to be permanently valid like the “unmoved.” Therefore, “when Aristotle defined poetry as an ‘imitation of nature,’ he did not mean the indiscriminate copying of any individual, but rather the selective imitation of what is general and representative in man” (Bate 10). Pope echoes this by stating that the general order “[i]s kept in nature, and is kept in man” (“An Essay on Man” 1.171-72). For Pope, the reliance on critical rules and the identification of canonical critics can illustrate Nature; Nature constantly sheds light on all beings, a “continuous motion” in Aristotle’s words.
There is no place in the epic world for any openendedness, indecision, indeterminacy. There is no loophole in it through which we glimpse the future; it suffices unto itself, neither supposing any continuation nor requiring it. . . . Absolute conclusiveness and closedness is the outstanding feature of the temporally valorized epic past. (“Epic and Novel” 16) Therefore, Pope announces that a poet and a critic cannot expect to create anything
“new” under the sun, but only “[w]hat oft was thought” (298). With this closed worldview, Pope detests the academic debates between Scotists and Thomists (444), and means to silence all disrupted voices in “An Essay on Man”: “Cease then, nor order imperfection name.” Nature, tradition, classical rules, and classics are valued as eternally stable, authoritative, and sacred; it is not allowed in Pope’s discourse to question their validity and authority. The world governed by Nature operates essentially in order, and thus he maintains that “Whatever is, is right” (“An Essay on Man” 1.294). Disharmony and chaos do not really exist in the fundamentally systematic, peaceful universe. Heteroglossia is thus suppressed and neglected in this static, monologic discourse. Popean Nature is hostile to dialogism: dialogue in such a condition is rejected, and the clash among various voices is considered deviation from Nature.
Canonization, however, depends on value judgment, which, in Pope’s words, works “as our watches, none / Go just alike, yet each believes his own” (9-10). The evaluation of the so-called canon varies from generation to generation, and no decisive comment can be placed on any single masterpiece. In the process of canonization, the valued elements are preserved and glorified, while the heteroglot voices are rejected and marginalized. Still, it is difficult to decide the canonized element of the literary language and that of heteroglossia; it is especially so in the analysis of ancient works (Bakhtin, “Discourse” 418). A reader must possess the knowledge of “the shifting dialogizing background” in order to discern what was canonized at a particular time (Morson and Emerson 363). Canonization “blurs heteroglossia” and “facilitates a naïve, single-voiced reading” (Holquist 425). In “An Essay on Criticism,” Pope’s neglect of Sidney’s achievement18 in literary criticism is
18 Beginning from Renaissance, the significance of Nature gradually became diversified, but generally her superior power and status were still widely acknowledged. With the rise of humanism, human creativity was affirmed to the extent that sometimes a poet’s glory can rival that of Nature—a situation which is not found in classical critics and which is suppressed in “An Essay on Criticism.” Sidney represents the typical humanist voice when he praises poetic imagination: a poet can create “better than nature bringeth forth” and deliver a golden world, while nature only set forth a brazen (145). “He mixes Platonic ideals with an Aristotelian mimesis in order to convey . . . how the poetic world is analogous to an intricate natural one by means of varying perspectives” (Kinney 9). In Bakhtinian terms, Sidney’s poetics is essentially polyphonic and heterogeneous. His ideal poet “produces works for the Tudor century distinctive in the pluralism and plenitude they harbor. Such writing opens things up rather than closes them down, forever inviting readers to join in the production of meaning” (Kinney 9). In other words, although the court functioned as the center of all cultural activities in the Tudor dynasty,
perhaps an attempt to blur heteroglossia: since this Renaissance courtier exalts poet’s creativity above Nature’s power, Pope must reject this voice in order to present an apparently consistent western critical tradition. Pope inherited Renaissance humanism in assuming the necessity of learning from the Greek and Roman writers, but he excludes Sidney, an arch-humanist who dares to regard as brazen the world brought forth by Nature.19
Renaissance was actually pluralistic, hostile to all forms of monologic discourse that meant to render all its disparate voices into harmony. Therefore, Sidney does not propose nature to be as authoritative and transcendental as Popean Nature. Although he still recognizes poesy as “an art of imitation,” he does not encourage poets to follow nature; in his eyes the best poets can “imitate the inconceivable excellencies of God” (146). Sidney’s discourse here demonstrates the integration of the classical tradition and Christian belief—the concept of nature originated from the Greco-Roman culture, while the representation of “excellencies of God” in poetry is alien to Aristotelian poetics. Likewise, Hobbes defines Nature as “the Art whereby God hath made and governes the World” (9). This is the result of the dialogue between two heterogeneous cultures, and both Sidney and Hobbes do not even attempt to justify the co-existence of God and nature, a pagan deity, in his defense. This co-existence may derive from the cultural background of Renaissance. Renaissance was simultaneously the “rebirth” of the Greco-Roman culture and the “revolution” of medieval heritage. Medieval Christianity did not totally pass away, while the pagan voices poured into Europe. The veneration of Mother Nature was introduced into Renaissance. Pope himself also blends God and Nature: “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body nature is, and God the soul” (“An Essay on Man” 1.267-68). Since the humanist learning, which requires the study of Greek and Roman classics, may easily lead to heteroglossia in one’s language and discourse, we can anticipate that Pope, who studied Homer day and night, also speaks with a heteroglot voice. Nevertheless, he attempts to present a systematic, harmonious discourse by excluding heterogeneous voices like that of Sidney.
19 No other Renaissance writers except Sidney dare to claim that Nature can only bring forward a brazen world, but the affirmation of the poet’s imagination still continues in the humanism-inspired culture. It does not follow that Renaissance generally remained unified and single-voiced. It was the time when “many strands of authority coexist[ed] and occasionally struggle[d] against each other”—while such a struggle is often reflected in literature (Burrow 19). A dialogic milieu also stimulated the literary production of this age: “London writers read each others’ works, imitated each others’ styles, and tried eagerly to overgo each other . . . . Genres developed and died with an almost unhealthy rapidity” (Burrow 24). The Aristotelian sense of imitation—the representation of nature—was interpreted and practiced so variously as to arouse the nature-art debate. With regard to the relationship(s) between nature and art, both Shakespeare and Jonson had their unique viewpoints which can hardly be rendered in a totally consistent, harmonious “system.” Shakespeare emphasizes the dramatist’s autonomous artistry when indicating the mimetic feature of drama: plays must hold “the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her own feature, scorn her image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (Hamlet 3.2.19-23). It is a humanist declaration of the artist’s independence: Not that a writer should follow Nature passively, but that she must follow the creativity of the artist in order to show the true essence of virtue or vice. However, Shakespeare does not belittle the power of Nature at all: “Yet nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean; so over that art / Which you say adds to nature, is an art / That nature makes” (The Winter’s Tale 4.4.89-92).
This is Polixenes’s response to Perdita, who has heard that art may corrupt Nature; in short, the latter denies the transcendental power of Nature, while the former affirms it. Nature predetermines art, and artists’ creativity and judgment miraculously echo the work of nature. Shakespeare leaves the nature-art debate with no conclusive remarks, but the image of nature as a universal life giver is recognized. For further discussion of nature-art debate in Shakespeare, see Colie; Orgel; Wilson; Kermode. For Ben Jonson, on the other hand, Nature “is always the same,” but “Men are decayed” (“Timber” 402). The guidance of Nature, therefore, is indispensable for artists. Generally speaking, nevertheless, he holds that Nature and art work together in harmony, as it is expressed in his praise of Shakespeare—“Nature herself was proud of his designs, / And joy’d to wear the dressing of his lines” (“To the Memory”
47-48); “a good Poet’s made as well as born” (“To the Memory” 64). Nature gives birth to the artistry of poets, and poets can reach her through their creation. Besides, “without art, nature can never be perfect; and, without nature, art can claim no being” (“Timber” 416). The mutual dependence of art and
Reader’s understanding will definitely be biased with the rejection of heteroglossia. Nowadays “An Essay on Criticism” has been canonized, and readers tend to treat Pope’s discourse as the genuine representative voice in the eighteenth-century England. Pope satirizes Dennis, and we may be led to treat the latter as a genuine dunce, to believe in the supremacy of Nature in the production of neoclassical writers, and to take for granted the correspondence of Pope’s practice and preaching. Nevertheless, Dennis was a dominant and important critic among his contemporaries, and Pope, a minor figure when he started to mock Dennis, never forgave his enemy like the generous critic portrayed in “An Essay on Criticism.” The canonization of Pope’s poetry may thence misdirect our understanding and evaluation of Dennis’s works; it distorts Dennis’s true image and suppresses his voice. Pope’s description of his enemy manifests the ideology of dominance, which tends to
“dehumanize people by stereotyping them, by denying them their variousness and complexity” (Christian 2263). To regard Dennis as a dunce is simply “a naïve, single-voiced reading.” Pope’s mockery does not shine like the sun and demonstrates nothing but his own prejudice.
Also, Pope’s extol of William Walsh (725-44) amounts not to the general consensus but to his own biased judgment. The young poet owes his own artistry to the deceased critic in a language that seems to elevate the latter to the status of Nature, with the tone which sounds like that of a Christian’s prayer to God. Nowadays, Walsh
nature implies their equal status—here nature is not deified as the supreme guide for poets and critics.
Jonson also avers the poet’s creativity. In his praise of Shakespeare’s achievement, he exposes the contrast between Nature and art: “For though the Poet’s matter Nature be / His art doth give the fashion.
And that he / Who casts to write a living line, must sweat / (Such as thine are), and strike the second heat / Upon the Muses’ anvil, turn the same / (And himself with it), that he thinks to frame” (“To the Memory” 57-62). This episode, agreeing with that from Hamlet, proclaims the independent creativity of a poet. Nature herself engenders no masterpiece; it is only through the labor of poets that her glory may come into being. “Ars corona (i.e. “Art is the crown”),” he argues, and art can make nature and imitation perfect (“Timber” 416). Moreover, Jonson adds, Shakespeare’s art can match Nature (“To the Memory” 55-56). With different talents, both Shakespeare and Jonson—though not so provocative like Sidney as to belittle Nature—harbor the humanist idea that an individual poet can reach beyond the grasp of Nature with independent creativity. For both dramatists, Nature represents the transcendental power that finds incarnation in literary works, a view that Alexander Pope also agrees in his statement that Nature and Homer are the same. In both Shakespeare and Jonson, artists and Nature were held to complement each other. Pope also recognizes such a relationship: “True wit is nature to advantage dressed; / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed” (297-98). Yet Pope does not conceive the poetic creativity as the equal of Nature: a poet as a humble servant of Nature must always follow Her instructions. Moreover, Shakespeare is regarded as a poet with “the natural wit” because of his
“‘wildness,’ his non-conformity to the conventional rules, the spontaneous freedom of his imagination and his expression, that proved him Nature’s true pupil” (Lovejoy, “Discrimination” 12). In “An Essay on Criticism,” by contrast, Nature and the critical rules are identified the same (140). Deviation of those rules, consequently, offends Popean Nature. The contrast between these two types of Nature reflects different viewpoints on human potential: Shakespeare composed at the time when humanism was on the rise, and therefore the artist’s creativity was highly affirmed (the same can be found in Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry”); Pope’s voice characterizes the typical neoclassical evaluation of human capacity: “So vast is art, so narrow human wit” (61). With this wit, a poet can only demonstrate
“[w]hat oft was thought” (298). For Popean Nature, therefore, tradition is far more important than invention.
is not universally ranked as important as Aristotle, Horace, or Erasmus; Pope’s canonization of a minor critic, again, illustrates the absence of a generally accepted aesthetic standard. His own “peculiar” evaluation reveals that his “watch” goes different from the others’, and that his personal appreciation of Walsh corrupts his own critical judgment. His condemnation of Dennis and his encomium of Walsh originate actually from his communication with both, not from a mysterious source of Art. As the self-appointed spokesman for Nature, Pope attacks those who deviate from the monologic, static ideal, but his life-long interaction with his contemporaries illustrates the inevitability of dialogue—he did not really practice what he preached.
Monologic as his argument appears, his works still highlights more dialogic awareness than those of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He prefers to speak directly to the others rather than indulge in his emotion recollected in tranquility. This dialogic inclination runs counter to his attempt to canonize his own favorite poets and critics once for all.
Actually Pope recognizes diverse voices with regard to the canonized works and western world in general, a recognition that denies his own belief in the existence of general order in Nature and humanity20. Homer and Dryden are continually attacked in every generation (458-65); Horace suffers from “wrong translations” and “wrong quotations” (663-64); tyranny and superstition ruined arts when Roman had declined and fallen (685-88); monks destroyed civilization like Goths (692). All the disorder and destruction theoretically do not and should not exist in the harmonious universe proposed by Dryden and Pope. Yet their existence challenges the myth of harmony and unity in Pope’s ideal, and questions the stability of Nature and canon as well.
20 “Nature” in the eighteenth century carried various meanings—“It is a landscape, but it is also a way of feeling—of feeling about native soil, of feeling about the past, of feeling about Englishness itself”
(Fulford 109); it is also “an exact reproduction of every-day life and manners, as opposed to anything wild or extravagant, or that existed only in the writer’s imagination. Nature meant . . . Common-Sense”
(Phelps 11). “The conception of ‘nature’ as the ultimate standard . . . underlies the classical conviction that the end of art is the revelation to man and the rational, ethical inculcation in him of that ideal perfection of which . . . he as a particular is only a faulty image” (Bate 10). Pope’s glorification of Nature, perhaps stemming from Boileau’s argument that she actively bestows talents among authors (242; 249-50), “made nature the place where God’s order . . . could be observed” (Fulford 111). This glorification also emerges in his “An Essay on Man,” in which he admonishes human beings to be content in “the hand of one disposing Power” and not to question mysterious, “unknown” Nature (1.285-89). He announces that “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body nature is, and God the soul” (1.267-68). All the seemingly contradictory elements in Nature actually exist in harmony, and she “is but art unknown to thee” (1.289). She guides wit and reason (2.161-64), shaping everything according to various laws (3.1-9) and remaining “unvaried” and “fixed” (3.189-90). In other words, the faith in the source of Art in “An Essay on Criticism” echoes the religious belief in “An Essay on Man”—both refer to the same divine power, which governs all creatures and activities. In “Epistle I: To Sir Richard Temple,” Pope even identifies Nature as God (95)—a manifestation of the blending of Christianity and pagan cultures. “Nature” in the eighteenth century, as Morris argues, held “an inseparable connection with religion and with religious feeling” (230). She was presumed to guide not only literature but also the whole universe, and Pope’s glorification of her governance manifested his yearning for a universal and transcendental order.
Moreover, Pope praises the “great injur’d name” of Erasmus (693-96). This humanist philosopher was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church because of his tolerance of different voices in faith. Pope should have had supported the action of the church, since the “unity” and “order” in religion must be maintained by the suppression of heterogeneous voices, and this is what Pope attempts to achieve in his discourse. However, he violates his monologic inclination in his canonization of Erasmus, a man who embraced heteroglossia. Perhaps Pope appreciated Erasmus because of his own social status in England: as a marginalized Catholic, who had been denied a college education and many public rights, Pope meant to challenge the contemporary authoritative culture with the publication of An Essay on Criticism, speaking as if he alone were the authority who could regulate the rules and interpret
Moreover, Pope praises the “great injur’d name” of Erasmus (693-96). This humanist philosopher was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church because of his tolerance of different voices in faith. Pope should have had supported the action of the church, since the “unity” and “order” in religion must be maintained by the suppression of heterogeneous voices, and this is what Pope attempts to achieve in his discourse. However, he violates his monologic inclination in his canonization of Erasmus, a man who embraced heteroglossia. Perhaps Pope appreciated Erasmus because of his own social status in England: as a marginalized Catholic, who had been denied a college education and many public rights, Pope meant to challenge the contemporary authoritative culture with the publication of An Essay on Criticism, speaking as if he alone were the authority who could regulate the rules and interpret