The Transforming Power

POPE'S POETIC CAREER began, as it ended, with the idea of the Golden Age-not with the myth only, but with its profoundest implications for the poet and the man, inheritor of the classicism that governed his conception of art and of the great Christian humanist tradition that conditioned his view of life. The butt of one of history's happier ironies, Pope found himself a Romanist Virgil in no very Augustan time. Like Virgil he began hopefully enough by celebrating the Golden Age in pastoral, recreating a lost ideal through the magical efficacy of artifice and the harmony of his numbers; but the promise of a second Aeneid which this beginning implied-an epic to immortalize the England of George Augustus-could be fulfilled in parody only, in satire proclaiming the grotesque apocalypse of Saturnian days of Lead and Gold. 1 The distance between the green world of the Pastorals (1709) and the dark estate of The Dunciad (1728-1743) is, to be sure, as immense as Pope's sad spiritual journey from the relative optimism of his youth (he began his eclogues when he was sixteen) to the utter disenchantment of his last years. But controlling and, in surprising ways, connecting both poems is the idea of the Golden Age-an idea comprehending both the Christian's conception of Time and History and, within this context, the poet's conception of the relationship of Art to Nature. Pope's Virgilian poems make clear a fundamental assumption of his art and theology: this is the belief-as much moral and meta

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