Pope’s “Un-learn’d” and Unambitious Father: The Contrasts

Pope’s “Un-learn’d” and Unambitious Father: The Contrasts

The theme of integrity and morality persists at the core of Pope’s usage of the “heart” in referring to Cowley as well as to his own father. Griffin reads Pope’s description of Cowley as him looking up to his predecessor as a “poetic father” and Wordsworth’s adaptation of Pope’s “language of the heart” as Wordsworth considering Pope to be a sort of (poetic) father (Griffin, 1995, pp. 98-99). The author argues that there were more personal, rather than literary, sentiments involved for Wordsworth when he decided to adopt Pope’s “language of the heart.” As ambitious poets striving for success in a growing commercial world that was at times rife with misgivings and treachery, both Pope and Wordsworth stand at opposite ends with the family members whose “hearts” they mention. Though living righteously, neither Pope senior nor Dorothy made much of their lives. A resolute Catholic in Anglican England, Pope’s father lost much of his fortune before his sudden death in 1717. Dorothy, possibly in large part due to her unerring devotion to her brother, was inclined to stay by Wordsworth’s side to offer support in his writing routine and family life. Lack of erudition and ambition marked the two figures.

Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey is as much an autobiographical poem as is Pope’s Epistle to Arbuthnot. By the time of its publication in 1735, shortly before Arbuthnot’s death, 17 years had elapsed since the death of Pope’s father. The poem contains a passage about his father, which is a sympathetic recollection, not necessarily of their time spent together but rather, of him as a person:

The good Man walk’d innoxious thro’ his Age. No Courts he saw, no Suits would ever try, Nor dar’d an Oath, nor hazarded a Lye: Un-learn’d he knew no Schoolman’s subtle Art, No language, but the Language of the Heart. By nature honest, by experience wise, Healthy by Temp’rance and by Exercise. (ll. 395-401)

Pope offers a eulogizing tribute to his late father. Alexander Pope senior (1646-1717) was a successful linen merchant who, with his brother William as his business partner, exported commodities as far as the American colonies. The son of an Anglican vicar, converted to the Catholic faith as an adult, possibly in Holland. Though flourishing in his trade, Pope senior was no educated man. Nor was he a poet, but his wife and Pope’s mother, Edith, recalled him sitting down his son from a very early age to learn and compose verses (Spence, 1966, pp. 1.11). The “language” that his father knew does not entail erudition or literary propensities

254 POPE’S “LANGUAGE OF THE HEART” IN WORDSWORTH’S TINTERN ABBEY of his own. It is not, as it were, the “language” of Shakespeare or Milton that Pope associates with his father.

Instead, Pope lays emphasis on the “heart.” According to the poet, his father was “good,” “innoxious [innocuous],” never told “a Lye [lie],” and was, “By nature honest.” Pope senior never crossed the thresholds of Chancery nor filed a lawsuit in his life. Yet his son embarked on a different path. Pope and the poet stood on the witness stand to give testimony on behalf of John Atterbury who was tried for, and later convicted of treason. A series of litigations marked Pope’s own adulthood, as he struggled time and again to protect copyrights to his own works against piracy and, at one point, even sued his own publisher Lintot. Despite the disparities in the lives of father and son, the image which Pope paints of his father is one of a genial man of honorable conduct.

However, the virtues of the father did not come without their side effects. Following the death of Queen Anne, the Hanoverian King George acceded to the throne in 1714. He ordained new laws, one of which required that all Catholics take the oath of loyalty. This practice may be traced back to the English Reformation in which Parliament recognized King Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church of England and the Acts of Supremacy of 1534 and 1559 included the Oath of Supremacy. Pope’s father refused to take the oath. One may even say that he remained true to his heart in matters of faith and, albeit in a passive and peaceable manner, stood against unjust and, certainly by today’s standards, discriminatory laws. Though seemingly of a nonbelligerent nature, in this case Pope senior, and his obstinate refusal of the oath cost the entire Pope family. For reasons related to religious persecution, the family had already relocated from Pope’s birthplace of Plough Court in the commercial district of London to Hammersmith, and then to Binfield in 1700. Pope’s father was able to purchase a landed home in Binfield, but, this too, he had to renounce upon the new prohibition of property ownership by Catholics. The younger Pope particularly lamented the departure from Binfield, as he wrote to a Catholic neighbor and friend: “I write this from Windsor Forest [Binfield], which I am come to take my last look and leave of. We here bid our papist-neighbours adieu” (Pope, 1956, p. 336). In poetry, too, Pope recalled the turbulent years he lived through as one of persecuted faith, a marginalized citizen in his own country (Pope, 1737, ll. 58-62). At the time of his early retirement in 1688, Pope’s father was worth a handsome sum of £10,000, but by the time of his untimely death in 1717, his fortunes had been reduced to £4,000.

Pope’s reminiscence over his late father is centered on his moral rectitude. He commends his father’s decency and ethics as a man. However, it is significant that the poet does not exclude the mention of lack of education in his father. He even divulges the fact, and that the man was “Un-learned” and “knew no Schoolman’s subtle Art” occupies one entire line. It is seemingly in an attempt to accentuate his integrity, to remark that it was in spite of the lack of a gentleman’s education, but it in fact produces the contrary effect of striking the reader with the impression that, despite all of the commendable qualities listed, the father was after all an uneducated man. Unlike Edith, Pope senior rarely appears in Pope’s correspondence and poetry. There is thus a dearth of information from which we can conclude more accurately on Pope’s view towards his own father, but his unhesitating note on his father’s lack of education contains a hint of condescension. Pope himself makes the disparity clear. Pope the poet mastered Latin, Greek, French, and Italian, as well as classical and contemporary European literatures, but Pope senior did not.

In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the father did not possess the ambition to fight to protect his hard-gained wealth and status. Pope did this in striking a fortune independently from the sales of his poetry, without support from a formal patron nor the title of, or even the hope to ever become, Poet Laureate. He also

POPE’S “LANGUAGE OF THE HEART” IN WORDSWORTH’S TINTERN ABBEY 255 albeit largely through self-education, and ambition, or the spirit of a warrior, are characteristics of Pope and are

factors which the poet attempts to differentiate himself from his dear family member. A similar process of contrast occurs in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.