 | | Let Courtly Wits to Wits afford supply,
As Hog to Hog in Huts of
Westphaly
;
If one, thro' Nature's Bounty or his Lord's,
Has what the frugal, dirty soil affords,
From him the next receives it, thick or thin,
As pure a Mess almost as it came in;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
From tail to mouth, they feed, and they carouse. . . .
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Yet, from this ''low" rhetoric, Pope, in hardly fifty lines, will build the rhythms and the sentiments making possible the heightened and rapturous claims for satire immediately to follow. This is an act he manages by constructing an agon with his interlocutor, whose sense of decorum, literary and social, is offended by the impassioned satirist's obscenity, and whose brand of civility is defined entirely by his insistence on the "decorums":
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| | This filthy Simile, this beastly Line,
Quite turns my Stomach
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But his case is hopeless against the satirist's lightning riposte:
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| | So does Flatt'ry mine;
And all your Courtly Civet-Cats can vent,
Perfume to you, to me is Excrement.
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And then the attack will quicken to the moment of its rapture, in which the person of the satirist, just now capable of a stinging obscenity, will be represented as sacred to the gods themselves. It is an act rivalling Milton's in
The Second Defense of the English People
.
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From such rhetorical virtuosity and daring, Pope's definition of the heroic emerges; it is embodied in the wide range of role, of tone, of diction he commands to produce an image of a being both free and generously bound to others. But the heroic claims of these poems are authenticated also by the scrutiny Pope imposes upon those claims. His speaker is always aware of an alternative to the stance he chooses, always aware that his literary heroism has had its costs, and that its sources in his personality are perhaps less admirable than the poet's crafted image of himself would suggest. This self-questioning is apparent in the irony the endings of Pope's poems can generate when considered against their major statements. How, for example, are we to evaluate the satirist's grand assertion of his generous link to "all mankind" in the poem just cited, as against his closing statement not many lines later of his isola-
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