Alexander Pope and the nature of language.

Recently, a number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary studies have explored in detail the relations between literary productions of the period and contemporary ideas and debates about the origin and nature of language. These studies have shown that understanding the period's beliefs or disagreements about language can be a vital factor in extending our critical understanding of its literary themes and literary practices:(1) literary themes, because the nature of language was itself often an important subject in literature at this time; and literary practices, because the linguistic and poetic choices made by writers and poets were often determined by their views on the nature of language. This article aims to show how the beliefs held by Pope about the nature of language provide a background and context for understanding his literary practice of imitative or iconic versification, in which (as Pope himself expressed it) `The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense'. But because Pope did not write widely and systematically on the nature of language, unlike his contemporary Swift, his views on language must first be sought out, an enterprise that has not yet been as fully pursued as it might be.(2) From what sources, then, can we suppose Pope gained his education about language?

One might begin by thinking about Pope's school years, and the linguistic orthodoxy likely to have been retailed at that time. Problems here, though, are twofold. First, we do not have enough information about Pope's schooling to determine accurately the sort of language training he received. Secondly, and more importantly, the very notion of a linguistic `orthodoxy' in this period (i.e. 1700-15) is especially problematic. While the work of Locke on words and that of the grammarians of Port-Royal is often conveniently used as a marker of a major shift in linguistic orthodoxies - a shift from a nominalist view of language to a mentalist one in which language stands only for ideas and not things - the extent to which this shift was reflected in contemporary textbooks and grammars is less easy to determine.(3) Consequently it is important not to rely on generalizations about either school language curricula in the period or supposed orthodox views on language, but instead to look for as much detail as possible concerning the nature and sources of the education about language available to Pope.

Pope's biographers recognize that his schooling is likely to have had relatively little influence on his later tastes and skills, and tend to stress Pope the auto-didact.(4) Maynard Mack's biography goes into some detail about seventeenth-century school curricula, but concludes of Pope at the time he left Thomas Deane's Catholic school in 1700, `he knew that much remained to be done. He would have to find a new and more demanding master, and that master would have to be himself.'(5) Mack goes on to try to reconstruct just what Pope's self-designed programme of education in his teenage years might have been like. The picture given by the Observations of Joseph Spence is of a period of several years' immersion in both English and foreign poetry, with little regard for other areas of study(6) Pope himself said that `In my first setting out I never read any art of logic or rhetoric. I met with Locke; he was quite insipid to me. I read Sir William Temple's Essays too then, but whenever there was anything political In them, I had no manner of feeling for it' ([sections] 42). Logic, rhetoric, language, and politics are all included here as gaps in formal knowledge or Interest, with pure, poetry apparently the beneficiary.

Pope's twenties, however, apparently brought an effort at `reeducation,' the details of which have been largely neglected by biographers. In this period, Pope set himself the task of broadening and systematizing his knowledge of issues both directly and indirectly related to poetry. Spence records how `Mr. Pope said that he was seven years unlearning what he had got' ([sections] 50), and Mack comments on this remark: `What he meant by this, one gathers, is that it cost him several years of further systematic study to correct, extend, and "methodize" the lopsided and haphazard education he had got at first' (p. 77). Yet there is more to it than this, if the biographical comments of Pope's friend and editor William Warburton are trustworthy. Warburton records:

at twenty, when the impetuosity of his spirits began to suffer his genius to be put under restraint, he went over all the parts of his education a-new, from the very beginning, and in a regular, and more artful manner. He penetrated into the general grounds and reasons of speech; he learnt to distinguish the several species of style; he …