earticle

영어

The essay examines Pope’s “Epistle to Cobham” as an epistle about character. The poem opens with an implied discussion with Lord Cobham about human character. Pope presents two viewpoints about the character of man. One is the sceptical attitude of Montaigne who thinks that human character is unintelligible. The other is the positive attitude of philosophers, who claim that we can know about human character. Pope discusses whether or not we can get a true knowledge of human character. On the one hand, Pope insists that men are “Contraries.” On the other hand, he insists that he can account for human character by his theory of the ruling passion. For Pope the only stable element in man is his ruling passion. This thesis is supported by the portrait of Wharton, whose ruling passion is lust of praise. The portraits of the seven men back up the statement. But if we focus on the statement that we can understand the ruling passion of a living person only when he dies, it paradoxically implies that we cannot understand the character of a person when he is alive. In conclusion, Pope insists that we can understand people’s character through the ruling passion of a dying person. But the poem seems to say the opposite fact that human character is unintelligible.