Pope's to Bathurst and the Mandevillian State

Abstract

idea of the entire Essay [To Bathurst] is borrowed from Mandeville, said W. J. Courthope, referring to Pope's apparent use of the paradox expressed in the sub-title of The Fable of the Bees- private vices, public benefits. Courthope regretted this influence, for Mandeville was a low-spirited materialist, while Pope himself was not deficient in generous instincts and noble ideas.1 Courthope's mistake-leaving aside the name-calling-was to assume that Pope agrees with Mandeville. On the contrary, To Bathurst indicates a fundamental opposition to Mandeville which has been overlooked only because Pope's friend and editor Warburton magnified the poet's pretensions to systematic philosophy. To Bathurst is not a moral essay (which was Warburton's title, not Pope's), but a Horatian epistle-a brilliant satiric poem and not a curio from the Age of Reason. It is worth more attention than it has received simply because the -type and range of social observation are unique in Pope's poetry: he has more of the novelist's interests in this poem than in any other. In his response to realities harsher than those of Grub Street and high society, one can see the rationale of the cataclysmic denunciations which climaxed his career as a satirist. The Fable of the Bees is important in understanding To Bathurst, not because of a direct influence on Pope, but because it used contemporary ethical assumptions and dispositions in such a way as to challenge every Augustan writer on man in society. Mandeville shocked his time by challenging rigoristic ethical concepts and the notion that the health of the state is