Ass Laden with Books: An Image in Changing Context

Abstract

1 Autumn 2008 Vol. XLI, No. 1 ASS LADEN WITH BOOKS: AN IMAGE IN CHANGING CONTEXT Niall Rudd The frontispiece of Pope’s Dunciad (1729) has a picture familiar to all Scriblerians: In his monumental biography of Pope, Maynard Mack tells how in 1706 Pope bought Charles Cotton’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais (1695–1693), admired them greatly, and found the Frenchman’s experience and personality strikingly akin 2 to his own. The last paragraph of ‘‘The Education of Children’’—a long essay crammed with classical references—begins, ‘‘Nothing succeeds like alluring Appetite and Affection, otherwise you make nothing but so many Asses loaded with Books. . . .’’ Somewhat overcautiously Mack continues, ‘‘One suspects that Pope may have had this passage among others in mind when commissioning for his Dunciad Variorum in 1729 a title-page plate. . . .’’1 I am not aware that Montaigne himself had any ancient precedent for the image in the context of education. (Plutarch’s De Liberis Educandis was the obvious place to look, but it does not occur there.) There is, however, a passage in which the image of a book-laden ass does occur, though in a very different context. In the thirteenth epistle of Horace’s first book, the poet asks a friend to take the first three books of the Odes to the emperor Augustus, but as the man’s father was named Asina (Ass), Horace warns his friend not to go crashing in on the emperor like a wild thing with his load, thus turning his family name of Ass into a joke (8-9). How literally this amusing situation should be taken has no relevance here. What does matter is that Montaigne was familiar with the first book of Epistles. He quotes from it on four occasions in this essay and more than a dozen times in the rest of the volume; it seems probable, then, that he may have drawn on Horace’s image, although changing its application. Pope apparently took the image of an ass laden with books from both Horace’s and Montaigne’s passages, but he also changed the context; by inscribing the authors’ names and a second quotation from Horace, he makes it clear that the books in question are rubbish, destined to become waste paper. In this, he draws on Horace’s Epistle to Augustus (Book 2.1) where, after a fulsome introduction (1-17), he goes on to argue that poetry has an important social (and hence political) function (18-244). He concludes with a deft apology: unlike Virgil, he is not capable of writing a tribute of appropriately epic proportions to the Emperor; moreover, an incompetent eulogy only annoys the recipient and causes laughter among readers rather than respect. By way of illustration he tactfully represents himself, instead of Augustus, as the subject of a wretched panegyric (not absurdly, for Horace too had to endure some unwelcome flattery in the form of imitations):2 I’ve no time for a favour that irks me, nor do I want to be shown in wax with a face that has taken a turn for the worse, or to have my virtues extolled in hideous lines. I’d probably flush on receiving so coarse a tribute; in no time I’d be laid in a closed box beside my poetic admirer, then carried down to the street that deals in perfume and incense and pepper and anything else that’s wrapped in useless paper (264-270). In v.269 the Latin is deferar in vicum vendentem tus et odores. Pope reproduces this line with two changes: he spells tus as thus, and he has the indicative deferor instead of the subjunctive deferar. So we now have the picture of a present action, taking place now, not something that would only happen if the poet encouraged flatterers. More importantly, he has made a small but crucial change in the sense. For the books in question have not been written by Pope or his flatterers, but by his enemies. So 3 Pope is not being carried down to the street in question; he is the carrier, the ass. And no one imagines that the ass is going to...