Edges of Analogy

EDGES OF ANALOGY' Because it might seem tactless for a reviewer from the university where Maynard Mack began The Garden and Ihe City to say that the book has, in the language of the century it concerns, an uncommonly artful design, I ought to add at once that my comment is directed not just to Allan Fleming and EUen Hutchison of the UniverSity of Toronto Press, but primarily to Mr Mack himself, who created, partiCipated in, and (presumably) approved all the major and minor aspects of that design. It begins (I think) with the dust jacket, a MarveUian green, a little greyed perhaps by the years between Pope's Twickenham estate and the seventeenthcentury gardens to which it frequently looks back with nostalgia. There is an oval enclosing a picture of Pope's house, his grotto, and his Thames. Although the covers of the volume do not carry out the green, it reappears, modulated, in the endpapers. On the front of the volume, however, there is an oval like the one on the dust jacket. This one encloses Pope's signature. I assume that the designer meant these as reHecting devices, for he (or she) doubtless knew that Pope was as attentive to his calligraphy as he was to the poems it manifested, and to the house and gardens of which it was another visual version. The frontispiece is a crayon painting of Pope, done around 1743 by William Hoare. It is not much my favourite, although it may be meant, in its own way, to anticipate some dimension in the last plate in the volume, the 1722 Kneller showing Pope in meditation. This is an enlargement of a detail in the plate on the faCing page. I want to return to this plate later, because of Mr Mack's comment on it in his notes: 'The poet is here shown resting Cas it were,literally, with a volume of his Iliad under his elbow) on his achievements, eyes thoughtful and far away. The "poetic" character of the pose is very clear in the detail ... which somehow resembles in attitude and gaze Severn's miniature of Keats.' Given the argument of the book, there might have been some point C even a satirical one) in begimung with the Jervas portrait of 1714, or even, for a non-satirical point, with an early Richardson. In the list of plates on pages xv to xviii, one finds, however, that this painting is the property of Mr and Mrs Mack. The book is dedicated to the author's children and those to whom they are married. Just before Mr Mack explains this dedication, he invokes his own masters, 'the late Chauncey Brewster Tinker of Yale and the late George Sherburn of Chicago, Columbia and Harvard.' His reasons for dedicating to his children are 'partly because all six of them are teachers, holders of or candidates for graduate degrees ... partly because they ... can be counted upon to be tolerant of its faults, as they have always been tolerant of my own; and chieHy because I like them.' I cite tills dedicatory material because it establishes some emblems for the work to follow, one written much in the spirit which prompted Pope to give the famous defence of poetry from Cicero's Pro Archia as the epigraph for his Works in 1717. These are notable figures, ancient and modern. As "Maynard Mack, The Garden and the Cit{: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743. Toronto, University a Toronto Press 1969. Pp. xviii, 341. $10.00. EDGES OF ANALOGY 85 Mr Mack indicates at the end of the book (and as he has more recently done in his address to the Modem Language Association in December 1970, although with somewhat different recommendations), he feels that we 'have reached some sort of watershed' and that humane values are in danger. The names and places he records here function rather like those figures on eighteenth -century estates and buildings, looking down on and in some sense resisting the ruins which adorned, but were meant to remind those who saw them of the erosions and invasions of earlier gardens and cities. The preface raises other...