Alexander Pope's opus magnum as Palladian monument

259 Pages·2015·2.14 MB·English

University of South Florida
Scholar Commons
Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School
4-4-2003
Alexander Pope's Opus Magnum as Palladian
Monument
Cassandra C. Pauley
University of South Florida
Follow this and additional works at:https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd
Part of theAmerican Studies Commons
Scholar Commons Citation
Pauley, Cassandra C., "Alexander Pope's Opus Magnum as Palladian Monument" (2003).Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/1449
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in
Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected].
ALEXANDER POPE’S OPUS MAGNUM AS PALLADIAN MONUMENT

by

CASSANDRA C. PAULEY

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
College of Arts and Sciences
University of South Florida

Major Professor: Pat Rogers, Ph.D., Litt. D.
William Heim, Ph.D.
Laura Runge, Ph.D.
Sape Zylstra, Ph.D.

Date of Approval:
April 4, 2003

Keywords: Moral Essays, poetry,
eighteenth-century, architecture, reconciliation

© Copyright 2003, Cassandra C. Pauley
Table of Contents

List of Figures .....................................................................................ii
Abstract ............................................................................................ iii
Preface...............................................................................................v
Chapter 1- Clearing the Site and Laying the Foundation ............................1
Chapter 2 - The Architectural Background............................................. 13
Chapter 3 - Arcuated Articulation......................................................... 48
Chapter 4 - Best Intentions................................................................. 56
Chapter 5 - Order from Confusion........................................................ 69
Chapter 6 - Seesaw or Fulcrum?.......................................................... 79
Chapter 7 - Strife and a Wife: To a Lady..............................................100
Chapter 8 - A Proper Study: To Cobham ..............................................135
Chapter 9 - Between the Ends: To Bathurst..........................................167
Chapter 10 - Building Bridges: To Burlington ........................................199
Chapter 11 - Carrying the Dome.........................................................235
Works Cited.....................................................................................244
About the Author.......................................................................End Page

i
List of Figures

Figure 1 – Man in Proportion ..............................................................239
Figure 2 – Palladio and Pope in Four Books...........................................240
Figure 3 – Index to the “Ethic Epistles” (1734)......................................241
Figure 4 – Arches in Elevation ............................................................242
Figure 5 – Pendentive to Dome...........................................................243
ii
Alexander Pope’s Opus Magnum as Palladian Monument
Cassandra C. Pauley
ABSTRACT

The overarching goal of this study is to suggest that Alexander Pope did
not abandon his project for a “system of ethics in the Horatian way,” but
rather that in his final days he did find a way to unite the parts at hand into a
viable whole. Constructing such an argument, however, requires a similar
building up from the parts, and so the core focus becomes a study on the
way the image of an arch can serve as a metaphor for Pope’s reconciliation
scheme in his Moral Essays as he “steers betwixt” seeming opposites.
To justify this approach, I note the works of critics who have studied
Pope’s use of the sister arts, the works of architectural theorists and
historians, as well the works of critics who focus on various reconciliatory
strategies. Perhaps more importantly, I look back to Pope’s correspondence
and Joseph Spence’s record to establish not only Pope’s interest in
architecture, but also his actual architectural endeavors.
From this foundation, I relate Pope’s intentions for his opus magnum
and indicate the connections that can be drawn between the four epistles of
Essay on Man and the four epistles that Pope selected to comprise the
“death-bed” edition of his ethic work, namely To a Lady, To Cobham, To
iii
Bathurst, and To Burlington. Finally, I examine Pope’s method of reconciling
the extremes he presents by exemplum in the Moral Essays by comparing
the personal and societal pressures that form the basis of Pope’s satire to the
vertical and lateral thrusts that enable an arch to stand, even as they
threaten its destruction should the forces become unbalanced.
From such an architectural perspective, one can trace Pope’s
conception of man in his middle state as he makes the transition from the
abstract plan established in Essay on Man, through the pendentive formed by
the arches of the Moral Essays, and ultimately to the ideal state of existence
that is represented by the dome. The final result can be conceived of as no
less than a monument to Pope’s life and art.

iv
Preface

As this study develops in a way similar to that of the epistles that
make up Alexander Pope’s Moral Essays—that is, the argument develops
incrementally over the first two-thirds of the work, is then confirmed with
illustrations from the poems, and finally ends with what might be construed
as a compliment to its dedicatee—it might be helpful to have an overview
before proceeding. The core focus is on the image of an arch as a metaphor
for Pope’s reconciliation scheme in his Moral Essays as he “steers betwixt”
seeming opposites. However, from that fundamental structure a model can
be developed that will unite parts into a whole. Specifically, by conceiving of
these epistles as arches, or more specifically, as elevations of arches (in that
they are illustrations of the plan Pope set out in his Essay on Man), one can
see that Pope’s opus magnum was not a failed and forgotten project at all,
but rather that Pope did achieve a reasonable completion of this effort. In
fact, when seen through this architectural metaphor, Pope’s opus magnum
can be seen as no less than a monument to his enduring legacy.
Please note, too, that in referencing sources, I have cited primary
texts parenthetically, but have moved secondary sources and contextual
notes to footnotes.

v
Chapter 1- Clearing the Site and Laying the Foundation

“Here I am, like Socrates, distributing my Morality among my friends,
just as I am dying” the Rev. Joseph Spence records Pope as saying, as the
poet sorted out presentation copies of his “Ethic Epistles” to give to his
friends just weeks before his death (Correspondence, IV: 525). Pope was
not just distributing his morality, nor even a new set of poems, however; he
was actually trying to recover his life’s goal in his final days. He was trying
to resurrect his opus magnum, a project he had seemingly abandoned a
decade after it had begun.
While Pope was able to effect an approximation of this great work by
pairing four epistles with his Essay on Man, some especially written for the
occasion and others revised to fit it, critics have often discounted the finish of
the “finished” product, if even conceding there was one. Perhaps some of
the fault lies with Pope, himself, for having publicized his ever-changing
grand scheme in various forms over a number of years, but I think a reading
of the four epistles he did ultimately settle upon can put the success of his
opus magnum in a new light.
Pope first mentioned his plan for “a system of ethics in the Horatian
way” in a letter to Jonathan Swift dated November 28, 1729, partially in
response to Lord Bolingbroke’s enthusiastic letter to Swift wherein he
essentially leaked Pope’s plan. To Burlington was the first of the four epistles
1
published, and despite the fact that a revised edition of the poem proved to
be integral to what would later be called the Moral Essays, it was initially
planned to accompany one of Burlington’s editions of Palladio’s works.
While the number of epistles Pope planned for inclusion in Book II of
his ethic work varied over the years, it is actually most fitting that Pope
settled on four epistles to elaborate the four sections of Essay on Man. In
fact, Pope’s repeated use of four sections in his works implies an
understanding of four as representing completeness—wholeness—and the
concept of the whole was an important one in Pope’s work. One of his most
important revisions included adding a fourth book to The Dunciad, and his
Pastorals quite naturally, but not incidentally, were written to correspond to
the four seasons. Furthermore, while Pope described “three distinct tours in
poetry; the design, the language, and the versification,” Spence comments
that “he afterwards seemed to add a fourth, the expression; or manner of
painting the humours, characters, and things that fall within your design.”1
Pope further characterized his work in reference to the number four
when he outlined for Spence a four-part development of his body of work,
explaining:
My works are now all well laid out. The first division of
them, contains all that I wrote under twenty-six; which
may be called my Juvenilia.—The second; my translations
from different authors, under the same period.—The

1 Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations and Characters of Books and Men
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1964) 46.
2
third; my own works since.—And the fourth; my
Translations and Imitations.2

In addition, Pope would undoubtedly have been aware of the numerological
aspects of the number four, and a numerological significance might be
instructive to the works under consideration here, as well, since four is the
number of the builder, of construction, and of system and order. The
number four is also said to symbolize the act of putting ideas into form, and
this would accord well with a work that was conceived of a system of ethics
meant to set man in order with the universe. The architectural overtones
cannot be overlooked, either.
As Annemarie Schimmel and Franz Carl Endres note, Rome was called
“Roma quadrata” because of its shape, and thus “the square became the
symbol of [. . .] a civic center.”3 Moreover, Schimmel insists that “[f]our is
inseparably connected with the first known order in the world, and thus
points to the change from nature to civilization by arranging a confusing
multiplicity of manifestations into fixed forms.”4 This, too, supports the
contention that architecture is the defining feature of civilization, and
Pythagoreans similarly ascribed meaning to the number four in spatial terms.
As Schimmel notes, for Pythagoreans, four was the ideal number, and its
connection to the material world was expressed by the fact that “the fourth

2 Spence, 1964, 162.
3 Annemarie Schimmel and Franz Carl Endres, The Mystery of Numbers (New York:
Oxford UP, 1993) 102.
4 Schimmel 86.
3