Reforming the Mind

Abstract

Perhaps no truer comment on the nature of Pope’s genius has ever been made than Dr Johnson’s — that Pope’s mind was

active, ambitious, and adventurous, always investigating, always aspiring; in its widest searches still longing to go forward, in its highest flights still wishing to be higher; always imagining something greater than it knows, always endeavouring more than it can do.¹

To possess such a mind is its own punishment, a thought that might have consoled the Dunces, had they known: inherent in it are perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction with the achievement of the day before; its dreams are Napoleonic, and of their nature incapable of fulfilment. We might suppose that after finishing the Dunciad, Pope felt he had completed his major statement on the theme he had spent his life investigating, man’s use of art; but from here his mind only leapt to the wider context, the question of man’s happiness as a whole, and began to conceive the comprehensive undertaking he came to call, with a conscious reference to Milton, his poem to ‘vindicate the ways of God to Man’.²