Most-read this week: Alexander Pope
Thursday, October 18th, 2007
The most popular paper on greycat.org for this week, say the site statistics, is ‘Taste, sense and vanity: Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington”‘.
Burlington stands as the epitome of good taste but, Pope warns, there is a danger that those who do not have his innate judgment and aesthetic sense will misinterpret the lessons he has to teach. Pope thus seems to be suggesting that even the efforts of men of taste such as Lord Burlington are doomed to failure if the undiscriminating and vulgar are free to misinterpret and pervert the values they have to impart:
Yet shall (my Lord), your just, your noble rules
Fill half the land with imitating fools;
Who random drawings from your sheets shall take,
And of one beauty many blunders make … (lines 25-28)If that is the case, the reader may ask, what hope is there for the progress of taste in art, architecture and landscape gardening? Pope places his faith in men of innate sense such as Burlington, appearing to argue that although many will ignore or distort their precepts of taste and elegance, their practice of those ideas will nevertheless stand as inspiration to those who are capable of understanding true aesthetic and moral values.
For more, see ‘Taste, sense and vanity: Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington”‘. I have more to say about Pope in chapter II of my essay on William Shenstone; in particular, I take issue with the notion that Pope can be credited with the invention of the English landscape garden, or ever conceived of garden design as being ‘landscape-painting … Just like a landscape hung up’.
Picture: Engraving of Alexander Pope by George Vertue (1726). [Source]
