Introduction: Pope and Berkeley
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Notes Introduction: Pope and Berkeley 1. The study of iconic relations in language and literature is ongoing in, for example, The Motivated Sign: Iconicity in Language and Literature 2, ed. Olga Fischer and Max Nänny (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001). 2. ‘An Essay on Translated Verse’, l. 345, in Augustan Critical Writing, ed. David Womersley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. 118. 3. Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, trans. George Sandys (London: W. Stansby, 1626), pp. 54–5. This is one of the first books Pope read, and one that he ‘liked extremely’. See Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), I, 14, No. 30. 4. Rousseau’s emphasis on the difficulty of ‘inventing’ language serves the important rhetorical purpose of forcing his readers to consider just how long and complex a process human evolution is. See A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 92–7, p. 93. 5. Gregory A.F. Hollingshead, George Berkeley and English Literature of the Eight- eenth Century 1710–1770 With Special Reference to Swift, Pope, Blackwell, and Smart, PhD, University of London, 1974, p. 39. Hollingshead offers an overview of the friendship, pp. 35–45. 6. For attributions of Guardian papers to Pope and Berkeley, see The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1982), pp. 26–8, and David Berman, George Berkeley: Idealism and the Man (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 77. 7. Benjamin Rand, ed., Berkeley and Percival: The Correspondence of George Berkeley afterwards Bishop of Cloyne and Sir John Percival afterwards Earl of Egmont (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), p. 110, 7 March 1712/3. 8. Hollingshead, pp. 10, 22, 34. 9. See Guardian No. 172, Monday 28 September 1713, and New Theory of Vision, Works I (1948), 229. 10. Letters of Mr Alexander Pope and Several of His Friends (London: J. Wright et al., 1737), p. 203. 11. Charles Mordaunt, the third Earl of Peterborough, a famous general, later became a close ally of Pope in his altercations with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. See Correspondence III, 352. 12. Correspondence, I, 221–2, Berkeley to Pope, 1 May 1714. 13. See Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, in association with W.W. Norton, 1985), pp. 274–6. 14. Spence, Observations, I, 153, No. 344. The translation is not thought to have survived. 15. Spence, Observations, I, 135–6, No. 305. 16. See Andrew Keogh, ‘Bishop Berkeley’s Gift of Books in 1733’, Yale University Library Gazette 8 (1933), 1–26, esp. pp. 12, 26. 161 162 Notes 17. British Library, Add, MS 39311: 27–8. Alexander Campbell Fraser, Life and Letters of George Berkeley, D.D (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1871), prints this letter, pp. 235–6. A.A. Luce quotes part of the allusion to Pope, but does not note its context in the letter, The Life of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne (London: Thomas Nelson, 1949), p. 59. 18. Correspondence III, 358, Pope to Caryll, 20 March 1732/3. 19. See R.I. Aaron, ‘A Catalogue of Berkeley’s Library’, Mind, n.s. 41:164 (October 1932), 465–75. 20. A Catalogue of the Valuable Library of the late Right Rev. Dr. Berkeley, Lord Bishop of Cloyne. Together with the libraries of his Son and Grandson, the late Rev. GEORGE BERKELEY, D.D. PREBENDARY of CANTERBURY, and the late GEORGE MONK BERKELEY, Esq. To be sold by Leigh and Sotheby, Monday June 6, 1796, and the Five following days, p. 5, No. 141. The annotated copy of this catalogue is in the British Library, S.C.S.28. These volumes were brought by Stanley for a shilling. The other two Pope items are a 1752 Works and a 1760 Homer. Berkeley died in 1753. 21. Hollingshead, George Berkeley and English Literature, pp. 44–5. 22. George Berkeley and English Literature, pp. 363, 370. See also Gregory Hollingshead, ‘Pope, Berkeley, and the True Key to the Dunciad in Four Books’, English Studies in Canada 10 (1984), 141–55. 1 Reading about language 1. John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 1–22, presents this as Milton’s likely relationship to Adamic and Cratylic theories of language. 2. Stephen K. Land, From Signs to Propositions: The Concept of Form in Eighteenth- Century Semantic Theory (London: Longman, 1974), p. 22. Other writers who refer to Locke when providing a philosophical context for the interpretation of Pope include David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 154–5 and Blanford Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 107, 111, 132–3. 3. Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 1640–1785 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 60. 4. Berkeley, unlike Pope, had a formal education, attending Kilkenny College and Trinity College, Dublin. Marilyn Francus remarks on the prominence of the comparative study of languages in the Kilkenny system in the years just prior to Berkeley’s attendance, The Converting Imagination: Linguistic Theory and Swift’s Satiric Prose (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), pp. 8, 12. R.B. McDowell and D.A. Webb, with a fore- word by F.S.L. Lyons, Trinity College Dublin 1592–1952: An Academic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) note, p. 31, that ‘There is scarcely any evidence extant from which we can deduce the nature of the teaching given in Trinity College in the late seventeenth century’, although they suggest a new emphasis on linguistics and mathematics. They record, p. 32, an undergraduate’s complaint in 1703, when Berkeley was also Notes 163 at the College, that ‘philosophical teaching consists of a farrago of conflicting hypotheses from Aristotle, Descartes, Colbert, Epicurus, Gassendi, Malebranche and Locke’. 5. See, for example, Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Early Eighteenth-Century Britain (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988). Kenneth MacLean, John Locke and English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1936), states in his preface, v, that Pope, as Sterne, was influenced by no two books more than the Bible and the Essay, yet mostly quotes from Scriblerian parodies of Locke’s work, e.g. p. 105. Leopold Damrosch, Jr, The Imaginitive World of Alexander Pope (London and Berkeley, LA: University of California Press, 1987), p. 139, suggests that one may ‘deduce the foundations of literary practice’ from the third book of Locke’s Essay. 6. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane at the Penguin Press, 2000), pp. 67–8. I would like to thank my excellent colleague Alex Davis for pointing me to this passage. 7. For example, Lawrence Lipking, ‘Quick Poetic Eyes: Another Look at Literary Pictorialism’, in Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. Richard Wendorf (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 3–25, suggests that Locke’s account of words referring to mental images and his description of wit as the combination of images are highly influential, pp. 6, 18–19. 8. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, Collected from Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), I, 19, No. 42. Pope’s copy of Locke’s Essay, the fourth edition of 1700, was given to him by Bolingbroke, see Maynard Mack, Collected in Himself: Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1982), p. 423. 9. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), III.i.2, p. 402. Further references will be given in brackets in the text. 10. See Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays in the Study of Language and Intellectual History (London: Athlone Press, 1982), p. 25. Land, From Signs to Propositions, p. 13, reminds readers of the unverifiable nature of the relation- ship between a word and an idea that must hold if the word is to be used meaningfully. 11. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, 2nd edn 1967, repr. 1988), pp. 287–8, II.27. 12. ‘The Epistemology of Metaphor’, Critical Inquiry 5 (1978–79), 13–30, p. 13. De Man also claims that Locke offers an analysis of tropes, not of the under- standing, p. 16. Other critics in this strand include John J. Richetti, Philosophical Writing: Locke, Berkeley, Hume (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 11–16, 116; Geoff Bennington, ‘The Perfect Cheat: Locke and Empiricism’s Rhetoric’, in The Figural and the Literal: Problems of Language in the History of Science and Philosophy, 1630–1800, ed. Andrew E. Benjamin, Geoffrey N. Cantor and John R.R. Christie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 103–23, p. 107; Jules David Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism: 164 Notes Language and Perception from Locke to I.A. Richards (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 13; William Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 208. They all suggest that philosophy’s attempt to describe the understanding is desta- bilised by language, rhetoric and tropes. 13. See Law, The Rhetoric of Empiricism, pp. 44–6. Law’s major interest is in the interdependence of visual and linguistic modes in the Essay.