Pope and Berkeley: The Language of Poetry and Philosophy. By TOM JONES.

Although his title suggests something a little different, Tom Jones's purpose in this book is to trace out the possible impact of George Berkeley's philosophical writing on the poetry of Alexander Pope: to reread Pope through Berkeley, focussing on their shared ideas about linguistics and ethics. This is, certainly, an original approach—few have ever claimed that Pope read Berkeley closely and sympathetically. Jones is certainly well-informed about early eighteenth-century British thought, and the virtue of his experiment is that it takes the connections between philosophy and literature in the period seriously. If there is a unifying idea here, it is that Berkeley's stress on the importance of custom and experience in interpreting signs is the best way to understand Pope. In Chapter 1, Jones sets up a polemic about linguistics at the end of the seventeenth century, pointing out the widely recognised limitations of John Locke's ‘Of Words,’ the third book of An Essay concerning Human Understanding , which treats words as names of ideas and emphasizes the arbitrariness of language. Jones then explores a range of other thinkers, including Plato, Montaigne, Hobbes and Berkeley, whose views on language differ from Locke's, and who help him construct a performative, instrumental language theory more friendly to poetry. Berkeley, with Locke in view, argued in several places that ‘the communicating of ideas marked by words is not the chief and only end of language’, and he lists, among other functions of words, ‘the raising of some passion, the exiting to, or deterring from an action, the putting the mind in some particular disposition’ (quoted by Jones, p. 22). Chapter 2 takes Berkeley's view that sensory phenomena are signs from God, particularly as worked out in A New Theory of Vision , as a context for understanding Pope's poetic pictorialism, especially in the Epistle to Burlington . Focussing here on the psychology of reading Pope's poetry, Jones finds Lockean linguistics of no help: ‘The operation of Pope's pictorial verse … cannot be described by saying that the words Pope uses refer to ideas that are pictures of things in the mind’ (p. 71). Berkeley, more helpfully, emphasizes ‘naturalised relationships between different kinds of signs, relationships that people come to understand as part of the meaning of the world’ (p. 78). Pope and Berkeley share a complex conservative understanding of the role of custom and tradition in how we interpret both words and the natural signs of sense experience. In Chapter 3, Jones turns to consider Berkeley's comments on money in The Querist —how the value or meaning of a coin is sustained by custom—as illuminating for Pope's thought on money and on literary value. Pope, interestingly, emerges from this discussion less as a nostalgic Tory, lamenting the emergence of a the new speculative money economy, and more as a fiscal sceptic, attuned, like Berkeley, to money's central function as ‘the means of transferring power’ (p. 98). Chapter 4 offers a comparison of Berkeley's Alciphron and Pope's An Essay on Man as studies in Providence, exploring their shared sense of the divine design of the cosmos and their comparable psychologies of ethical action. This is a difficult case to argue, given that Pope seems to rely on Shaftesbury's Characteristicks in his poem, where Berkeley demonizes Shaftesbury in Alciphron , casting him with such dangerous thinkers as Toland and Mandeville. But Jones is at pains to separate Shaftesbury's disinterested ethical aesthetics from Pope and Berkeley's position that moral actions are driven by self-love, which posits happiness as a product of entering ‘into conversation with the world through benevolent and yet self-interested action’ (pp. 147–8). It is this practical approach to the coherent and reliable world of sense experience that Jones proposes may be Berkeley's most important intellectual legacy, attractive even to a thinker like Hume: Jones's epilogue argues that from his reading of An Essay on Man ‘Hume develops a desacralized version of Berkeley's providentially meaningful world’ (p. 149).

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