13. An Epistle to Allen, Lord Bathurst

That link is textually emphasized by clear cross-references, as in the first of the following extracts. These have been selected to describe, broadly, the shape of the poem’s argument.

The Maxim: Lines 161–62

Extremes in nature equal good produce,

Extremes in man concur to general use.

The Examples: Old Cotta and Young Cotta: Lines 187–92, 203–04, 209–12

Like some lone Chartreux stands the good old hall,

Silence without, and fasts within the wall;

No raftered roofs with dance and tabor sound,

No noontide-bell invites the country round:

Tenants with sighs the smokeless towers survey,

And turn the unwilling steeds another way:

lines 187–92

When Pope turns from general maxim to specific examples, his poetry shifts from abstract to concrete. His example of the tendency of generations to swing from one extreme to the opposite is a fictional one of Old and Young Cotta. We can feel Pope relaxing into a mode he finds congenial: the comic portrait. The verse expands from aphoristic economy into satirical extravagance. His language sparkles with the glee of inventing and representing, cartoon-like, the sights and sounds of human absurdity.

Old Cotta, alas, has mislaid his principles, abandoning ‘his fortune and his birth’ (line 177) as surely as his manor. His ‘good old hall’—Pope’s adjectives summon up the glib nostalgia of a creed conveniently agreeable to those favoured by fortune—instead adopts the isolationism (‘lone’) of a Carthusian monastery, whose contemplative austerity acts as an anti-type, rather daringly for a Catholic writer, however notionally so. ‘Silence’, appropriate for a place of prayer and meditation, is set against the ‘dance and tabor’ of social pleasures or the inviting ‘noontide-bell’. Everything at Cotta Hall is framed in negatives, in absences: no sounds, no merriment, no invitations, no warmth (the ‘smokeless towers’ that would indicate a once-vigorous and welcoming hearth). Repulsion replaces attraction, turning away displaces warm greeting. And it is not only his tenants who face rejection: Cotta is turning his back on the traditional role that alone can sustain and justify such a social model.

Cotta’s son, however, inverts his father’s frugality into flagrant displays of indulgence. But it is narrowly focussed indulgence:

Fill the capacious squire, and deep divine!

lines 203–04

Old Cotta’s monkish habits sink beneath ‘hecatombs’ (literally, the sacrifice of a hundred cattle or oxen in Greek or Roman feasts) and ‘floods of wine’. Young Cotta’s pagan rituals and extravagance replace his father’s austerity and isolationism. He shares his plenty with a narrow (in range, if not in girth) and dubious set, secular and ecclesiastical, far removed from the idealized society summoned up by long-lost country-house principles.

Nor is Young Cotta’s sense of national duty accurately aimed:

The sylvans groan—no matter—for the fleet:

Next goes his wool—to clothe our valiant bands,

Last, for his country’s love, he sells his lands.

lines 209–12

Pope’s language is also tellingly precise. The ‘sylvans groan’ in the multiple senses of the men and women who live in the woods as foresters, the creatures whose habitat is thereby destroyed, and the symbolic deities or spirits of the woods. The resonance of classical mythology joins with modern economic and environmental well-being to lament their destruction in the service of national naval and military glory. But what price a ‘country’ devastated at the altar of the ‘country’? Cotta’s own resultant bankruptcy follows logically: he has sold out, sacrificed himself for that chimera; his actions are both generally and personally destructive. The structure of the lines of verse, too, is put under stress. The dashes that appear in lines 210 and 211 break up the rhythm in stylistic sympathy with the plight of the groaning sylvan and the empty pastures.

To balance fortune by a just expense,

Join with economy, magnificence;

With splendour, charity; with plenty, health;

Oh teach us, BATHURST! yet unspoiled by wealth!

That secret rare, between the extremes to move

Of mad good nature, and of mean self-love.

The Exemplar: The Man of Ross: Lines 249–50, 263–68

But all our praises why should lords engross?

Rise, honest Muse! and sing the MAN of ROSS.

lines 249–50

The MAN of ROSS divides the weekly bread:

He feeds yon alms-house, neat, but void of state,

Where age and want sit smiling at the gate:

Him portioned maids, apprenticed orphans blessed,

The young who labour, and the old who rest.

lines 263–68

But is this all, well, idealized if not outright naïve? Yes, it is, in the way that pastoral presents an unpretentious and artless image of nature by means of a graceful and felicitous style. That is what makes an ideal standard by which any blemish or insufficiency can be measured. An exemplar is a model, a pattern for imitation, which is what the Man of Ross offers within the structure of the poem. Antithesis and severe logic demand an equivalent representation of a ruinous extreme, and the poem soon provides one.

The Warning: ‘great Villers’: Lines 299–310

In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half-hung,

The floors of plaster, and the walls of dung,

On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,

With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,

The George and garter dangling from that bed

Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,

Great Villers lies—alas! how changed from him,

That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!

Gallant and gay, in Cliveden’s proud alcove,

Or just as gay, at council, in a ring

Of mimicked statesmen, and their merry king.

Pope’s picture of the declined and debauched aristocrat is painted with precision and abundance perfectly matched to its structural role as encapsulating all that is the opposite of the Man of Ross. The latter, Pope tells us, performed his charitable actions on an income of ‘five hundred pounds a year’ (line 280). Buckingham’s fortune was a mathematically convenient hundred times greater (the adverb ‘about’ is Pope’s apologetic nod to the lure of approximation). So, the scene depicted is a distillation of anti-pastoral, ironically located against wry invocation of the language of its idealized opposite (‘gay’, ‘bower’).

Pope does not hold back, giving rein to his developed sense of the grotesque. It is not enough that the scene of the Duke’s degradation is the worst inn: it is the worst room you can find there. Think of the worst, then think of something worse. Everything is askew, a riot of imbalance and squalor. The mat, itself a coarse fabric, is precariously only ‘half-hung’. The flock-bed is bad enough, as a crude decline from fashionable feathers to bits of cloth of any sort; ‘repaired with straw’ takes it down a further step. Curtains need tape to keep them together, but then they can’t even be drawn, anyway. As for the walls, other products of the stable make do.