“Mere Despair”: Pope and the Death of Hope Allan Ingram (bio) On 7 May 1724, Harry Mordaunt shot himself.1 He had been an officer in the guards and a nephew of Charles Mordaunt, Third Earl of Peterborough, the Whig politician, military leader, and, over many years, close friend of Pope. Mordaunt left a suitably grim note: “But the truest laudanum of all / Is resolution and a ball” (qtd. in Mack 416). Not long afterwards, Pope composed a short poem on the subject of his own birthday, the twenty-first of May, which that year happened also to be the day on which Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford and father to another close friend, Edward, died, though Pope did not discover the fact until his arrival in London on the twenty-second. Pope’s poem is unusually bleak: On a Late Birth Day. 1724. With added Days, if Life bring nothing new, But, like a Sieve, let ev’ry Pleasure thro’; Some Joy still lost, as each vain Year runs o’er, And all we gain, some pensive Notion more! Is this a Birth-Day? ah! ’tis sadly clear ’Tis but the Fun’ral of the former Year. If there’s no Hope, with kind, tho’ fainter ray To gild the Evening of our future Day; If ev’ry Page of Life’s long Volume tell The same dull Story—Mordaunt! thou dids’t well. (6: 247) Death, in Pope, is always moral. As we live, so shall we die, and Pope rarely introduces a death without its being made an appropriate commentary on the life that preceded it, or even produced it. The Duke of Buckingham, “Sir Balaam,” Anne Oldfield (“Narcissa” in the “Epistle to Cobham”), “The Man of Ross,” even Hector, Patroclus, and Priam in The Iliad, all provide in their mode of dying some form of summary and judgment on their lives, manners, and morals.2 Suicide, supremely, would be expected to cap the life and temperament that brought it to pass. Suicide, after all, is the last refuge of the self, the self that cannot face, or that cannot forget, or that has been brought to despair so great that the ultimate [End Page 1] act seems to provide the only escape. Yet the sentiment expressed with regard to Mordaunt is, in spite of its being couched in conditional terms, unusually bleak: this death was well done. Moreover, the weight of evidence built up over the nine preceding “if” lines sufficiently diminishes the force of the conditional to render the last couplet well nigh conclusive. “If” life is indeed like this, then Mordaunt’s decision is not only understandable, it is the only rational one. Pope does not often write about suicide. Eustace Budgell, for example, killed himself in 1737, between the two Dunciads, yet the lines referring to him in 1743 are identical to those in 1728 (5: A.ii.365; B.ii.397). He does, though, enter into circumstances in which writing about suicide might seem a logical course of action. One of his earliest is in the prologue that Joseph Addison invited him to write for his play, Cato, an occasion that could well have lent itself to reflection on the rationality of suicide. But here Pope is content to confine himself to a confirmation of Cato’s status as a true patriot in the Roman republican mode: Cato is described as “godlike” (18); he is “A brave man struggling in the storms of fate, / And greatly falling with a falling state” (21–22); and, his corpse displayed in triumph by Caesar, he is recognized as Rome’s “dead Father’s rev’rend image,” which darkens the “pomp” and causes tears to gush “from ev’ry eye” (31–33). Above all, though, Pope is concerned with transposing the effect of Cato’s death from ancient Rome to the London stage of 1713. So, “He bids your breasts with ancient ardour rise / And calls forth Roman drops from British eyes” (15–16). This play, he asserts, will display “no common object to your sight” but “what with pleasure heav’n itself surveys” (19–20). In particular, he attempts to predict the audience’s response...