Alexander Pope's 'Epistle to Burlington'

Taste, sense and vanity
Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle to Burlington’

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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IN 1730 RICHARD BOYLE, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694-1753) published, under the title Fabbriche Antiche disegnate da Andrea Palladio, a collection of drawings by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio of ancient Roman buildings, which he had acquired while traveling in Italy in 1718.[1] Burlington was by this time well-known as a promoter and practitioner of the Palladian style in architecture, and was seen by many contemporaries, including his friend the poet Alexander Pope, as a leader of taste.[2] The following year Pope published ‘An Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard, Earl of Burlington’ which was occasioned by Burlington’s publication of Palladio’s drawings and which dealt directly with the issues of aesthetic taste and judgment at the heart of the Burlingtonian movement in architecture.

The poem is preceded by a quotation from the Satires of the Roman poet Horace (Book I, Satire X) which bears upon the central theme of the work, urging simplicity and clarity in place of elaborateness and complexity, and the Horatian tradition of satire informs the entire poem. The style is unforced and conversational, but rich in allusion and pointed observation and creates an impression of cultivated elegance combined with sharp wit.[3] Opening with what is almost a throwaway, musing observation, the poem gives the reader the impression of having entered a conversation already under way:

’Tis strange, the Miser should his cares employ
To gain those riches he ne’er can enjoy (lines 1-2)

This tone is continued throughout the poem and lends itself well to the varying rhythms - again reminiscent of conversation - and divisions of the whole, producing ‘a great variety of rhythmic and dramatic effect with swift changes of irony and brilliant contrasts of image’.[4] The rhyme scheme is simple, clear and unvarying, following a pattern of AABB throughout which gives structure to the whole and allows the reader to anticipate the resolution of each section of the lyric, which comes in pointed observation or witty comment. As is the case with the Horatian satires that are Pope’s inspiration, an over-arching structure binds the poem together, carrying the reader sequentially through to the resolution of the final passage.

The intention of the ‘Epistle’ is to direct the reader’s intention towards what Pope sees as the aesthetic abominations perpetrated by the tasteless and vulgar, before finding the remedy for such errors of taste in a hymning of Burlington’s vision which forms the climax of the poem. As one scholar has noted, ‘The development runs from a description of violation, through a consideration of what has been violated, to a positive definition of a noble role for man to play in the life of nature’.[5]

In following this trajectory, the poem falls into three main sections. The opening section, lines 1-98, which sees the poet considering the general principles of good and bad taste in architecture and gardening, is followed by the celebrated passage containing the description of Timon’s villa and grounds, lines 99-176, which are held up as an example of vulgarity and bad taste in both; while the concluding section from line 177 to the end portrays a future in which great patrons bring taste and elegance to ‘happy Britain’ (line 203).

The poem’s primary purpose has been described as ‘the minute dissection of false taste and vanity of expense, and the promotion of positive artistic and moral values’.[6] The fundamental distinction in the poem is between true and false taste in architecture and its companion enterprise of landscape gardening. Burlington is held up as the exemplar of good taste, an inheritor of the true Roman values of simplicity, elegance, strength through restraint, and a concern with truth rather than falsity in aesthetic judgment:

You show us, Rome was glorious, not profuse,
And pompous buildings once were things of use (lines 22-3).

For Pope this marks out Burlington as characterized by both wealth and taste, the ideal of the noble patron and a rarity in a society in which, he suggests, the possession of wealth is not normally accompanied by any sense of taste:

For what his Virro painted, built, and planted?
Only to show, how many tastes he wanted.
What brought Sir Visto’s ill got wealth to waste?
Some daemon whisper’d, ‘Visto! have a taste.’
Heav’n visits with a taste the wealthy fool,
And needs no rod but Ripley with a rule. (lines 13-18)

The ‘Ripley’ mentioned here is Thomas Ripley (1682-1758), who was appointed Comptroller of the Board of Works by the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, in 1726. Not only was this a rejection of Burlington’s own preferred candidate for this highly influential and important architectural post, William Kent, but it was a particularly shameless instance of patronage favoring the career of an individual unmarked by talent.[7] Ripley, for Pope, typified the rise of the tasteless, inept, but well-connected mediocrities who were doing so much to damage contemporary architectural style.

Ripley is notable for being picked out by name in the ‘Epistle’, while Pope’s other targets are disguised behind classicized names such as Timon, Visto, Bubo and Virro, but is perhaps less significant for Pope in terms of his own architectural efforts than he is as an exemplar of all that is wrong with the British architectural scene which he is satirizing.[8] Similarly, the other figures satirized have elements of many contemporary figures and their houses and gardens that would have been familiar to Pope’s readers. Among the targets of the ‘Epistle’ are James Brydges, Duke of Chandos, who possessed a vast and extravagant country estate at Cannons, Middlesex; the Duke of Devonshire and his great house at Chatsworth, Derbyshire; the Duke of Marlborough’s palace at Blenheim, Oxfordshire; and the Prime Minister himself, Sir Robert Walpole, and his great house at Houghton Hall, Norfolk.[9] These estates were all, in Pope’s view, characterized by grandiose size, conspicuous consumption, extravagant and vulgar decoration, a lack of harmony and elegance, and a complete failure of taste and judgment on the part of those responsible for them. They were monuments to wealth, political patronage, and vulgarity.

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. The key lies in a receptivity to what Pope calls ‘sense’:

Something there is more needful than expense,
And something previous e’en to taste - ’tis sense:
Good sense, which only is the gift of Heav’n. (lines 41-3)

This ‘sense’ underlies and makes possible true taste. The consequences of false taste are made all to clear in Pope’s account of Timon’s villa, in the central section of the ‘Epistle’. Pope’s critique of the wealthy Timon’s estate is summarized in the phrase ‘Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!’ (line 109). The villa and its grounds are vast in scale, but pitiful in aesthetic sense and taste. They violate one of Pope’s fundamental precepts: ‘In all, let Nature never be forgot’ (line 50). Nature must be respected in scale, in conception, in spirit, or the whole enterprise, however grand, will fail. Thus Timon’s artificial lake is so positioned that it is exposed to the north wind, while the fussiness and incoherent planning of his gardens mean that ‘On ev’ry side you look, behold the wall!’ (line 114) so that no pleasing views or varied vistas attract the eye. The entire garden is forced, rigid, symmetrical - ‘Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, / And half the platform just reflects the other’ (lines 117-8) - with no heed played to the true natural character of the location, the ‘genius of the place’ (line 57). As for the house, it too is built for show, not use, and exhibits artificiality, contrivance, superficiality and vulgarity. The representative image here is of the study, filled with books that are chosen for their appearance, not their content: ‘In books, not authors, curious is my Lord’ (line 134). In a dramatic inversion, the chapel is devoid of spiritual purpose, being full of comfort and indulgence, ‘To rest, the cushion and soft dean invite, / Who never mentions Hell to ears polite’ (lines 149-50), while the dining room is full of cold ceremony and meaningless ritual:

Is this a dinner? this a genial room?
No, ’tis a temple, and a hecatomb.
A solemn sacrifice, perform’d in state,
You drink by measure, and to minutes eat. (lines 155-8)

The entirety of Timon’s vast house and its huge elaborate grounds is a vacuous monument to vulgar use of wealth, ostentatious show, lack of sense, and false taste, leading the poet to conclude with disgust, ‘I curse such lavish cost, and little skill, / And swear no day was ever pass’d so ill’ (lines 167-8).

Pope’s criticism of Timon is fundamentally based upon the latter’s alienation of expense from use and sense - a rejection, he believes, of the true virtues of Roman restraint and utility taught by Burlington: ‘’Tis use alone that sanctifies expense, / And splendour borrows all her rays from sense’ (lines 179-80). Pope praises Burlington for developing his estates for the good of the nation and for the benefit of the public rather than for non-productive, hollow display:

Whose rising forests, not for pride or show,
But future buildings, future navies, grow’ (lines 187-8).

This is the authentic Palladian spirit: one of virtue, usefulness, and truth. It is this spirit that holds hope for the future of the country; whereas Timon’s vanities will ultimately vanish, reclaimed by the Nature whose spirit they corrupted (lines 173-6), Burlington’s works will endure and create a landscape characterized by a harmony of man and nature which will bring forth the greatest benefits for all:

These honours, peace to happy Britain brings,
These are imperial works, and worthy kings. (lines 203-4)

© Ralph Harrington 2007. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

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Cite as: Ralph Harrington, ‘Taste, sense and vanity: Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington”’ (2007)
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Notes

1. James Stevens Curl, Georgian Architecture (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1993), p. 28.

2. Pat Rogers (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978), pp. 213-4.

3. Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 191.

4. Brower, Alexander Pope, p. 240.

5. Thomas R. Edwards, This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963), p. 67.

6. Philip Ayres, ‘Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington”: the Vitruvian analogies’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 30, no. 2 (1990), p. 429.

7. Curl, Georgian Architecture, p. 200.

8. James R. Aubrey, ‘Timon’s villa: Pope’s composite picture’, Studies in Philology, vol. 80, no. 3 (1983), p. 334.

9. Aubrey, ‘Timon’s villa’, pp. 325-6.

Bibliography

James R. Aubrey, ‘Timon’s villa: Pope’s composite picture’, Studies in Philology, vol. 80, no. 3 (1983), pp. 325-348.

Philip Ayres, P. (1990), ‘Pope’s “Epistle to Burlington”: the Vitruvian analogies’, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol. 30, no. 2 (1990), pp. 429-444.

F. W. Bateson (Ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope: The Twickenham Edition (London: Methuen, 1951).

Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959).

James Stevens Curl, Georgian Architecture (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1993).

Thomas R. Edwards, This Dark Estate: A Reading of Pope (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963).

Netta Murray Goldsmith, Alexander Pope: The Evolution of a Poet (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).

Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: English Society 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1982).

Pat Rogers (ed.), The Eighteenth Century (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).