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COPYRIGHT 2004 Rice University
A large amount of recent scholarly and critical writing on the various relationships between economics and literature in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has been based on the notion that financial innovations in the late seventeenth century precipitated anxiety about the form and nature of linguistic exchanges such as the writing and reading of poetry. The general thesis of such work is that the shift from fixed value in land to unstable and fluctuating value in paper money, stocks, and government bonds had an effect on, even a corollary in, language: linguistic signs could no longer be presumed to have a fixed referent because, just as the referents of signs in financial transactions may rise or fall in value at any time, the referent of a linguistic sign may vary and alter. Such a thesis is often combined with a recognition of the rise of the literary market place, in order to demonstrate the newly closer connection between economic and literary transactions: words themselves are now the objects of trade and even speculation. (1) I want to suggest that Alexander Pope is aware of the instability of value, not in new financial practices alone, but also in the idea of value itself, and that this extends to his awareness of linguistic value. Instability, however, is not meaninglessness, and Pope is concerned to show how instability of value becomes meaningful. In short, I believe the increasingly large literature surrounding eighteenth-century poetry and economics is founded on a false premise about the nature of language, literary language in particular, in relation to economy, and that it is precisely the way in which this premise is exposed as false in the Epistle to Bathurst that makes it such a good poem.
Early on in the Epistle Pope presents his readers with a crucial and memorable turn in his argument. He has been arguing that "What Nature wants, commodious Gold bestows," suggesting all the while that the benefits of gold are meager in comparison to the corruption it brings. (2) Eventually, gold "bribes a Senate, and the Land's betray'd" (line 34). Pope then seems to indulge in a form of nostalgia for older types of exchange, predating the valuation of everything in terms of gold, as this would make corruption physically more difficult.
Oh! that such bulky Bribes as all might see, Still, as of old, incumber'd Villainy! In vain may Heroes fight, and Patriots rave; If secret Gold saps on from knave to knave. Could France or Rome divert our brave designs, With all their brandies or with all their wines? What could they more than Knights and Squires confound, Or water all the Quorum ten miles round? (lines 35-42)
A list of examples furthers the condemnation of gold, until a peak is reached.
Blest paper-credit! last and best supply! That lends Corruption lighter wings to fly! Gold imp'd by thee, can compass hardest things, Can pocket States, can fetch or carry Kings; A single leaf shall waft an Army o'er, Or ship off Senates to a distant Shore; A leaf, like Sibyl's, scatter to and fro Our fates and fortunes, as the winds shall blow: Pregnant with thousands flits the Scrap unseen, And silent sells a King or buys a Queen. (lines 69-78)
The ease that paper money and credit bring to transactions is lamentable, as it makes the corruption and alienation of civic duty that is possible in any economic medium less open to detection. Paper credit is variable, scattered like the leaves of classical prophecy, and probably to be trusted only as far. It is associated with the feminine and the grotesque: the scrap of paper is not just pregnant, but pregnant with thousands, its fecundity monstrous. Wind and flight are prominent: corruption flies; armies are wafted; leaves, fates, and fortunes blow; and scraps flit. Paper credit, particularly on a public scale, introduces a state of uncertainty and incomprehension into the world, where established forms of government can be altered or changed at once and the people of a nation are never certain of their allegiances, as they are no longer obliged to a person or an institution, but to a credit slip. This passage illustrates thoroughly the thesis that Pope was staunchly opposed to the financial innovations that took place under William III, against whom and his Hanoverian followers much of the invective of the passage could be directed. It illustrates also Pope's distrust of paper credit, its association with feminine and dangerously variable characters and modes of understanding one's place in the world. It also suggests, in the preceding argument, that there was a time when things were better, when values and allegiances, fates and fortunes were somehow fixed. It might be added that Pope's tightly controlled couplets attempt to fix what has been rendered unstable by financial and political events, to give words a recognizable place and meaning despite apparent flux.
Such a reading of the passages I have just quoted undeniably illustrates aspects of Pope's political commitments and his attitudes toward women and market economics. I would like to suggest, however, that this position of extreme uncertainty and nostalgia is belied by the tone and indeed the logic of the rest of the poem, and that Pope's position is more sophisticated and skeptical than this line of reading proposes. Paul J. Alpers recognizes that Pope's nostalgia is qualified: "Surely Pope does not say that tangible oxen are better for man than intangible paper." (3) The old form of bribe is no more acceptable or less harmful than the new: the bribe in kind could certainly inebriate a nation, and drunken "Knights and Squires" are no more capable of civic virtue than are rich knights and squires, probably even less. Pope suggests that any bribe is an abuse of value, and that there are no incorruptible or invariable values. I will begin by giving an account of the grounds for the imputation of simple nostalgia from which I am trying to clear Pope.
Earl R. Wasserman, in his exemplary commentary on the poem, states that "the subject of his [Pope's] satire is not the limited one of the tastelessness and social indelicacy of conspicuous consumption, but the whole corruptness of the new moneyed society he sees mushrooming about him and invading his values." A good part of Wasserman's essay places this satirical attack in its theological context, noting that the form of capitalism Pope attacks was particularly...
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