St John, Henry, styled first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678-1751)

Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq.

London

1754

"When they have really such ideas in their minds, they must remember too that figures and comparisons are varnish still. It must not be used to alter the intellectual picture, it must only serve to give a greater lustre, and to make it better seen."

When amusement alone is concerned, and not instruction, this may be pardonable on both sides, in the author and in the reader. But in more serious studies, where one writes to instruct, and the other reads to be instructed, it is pardonable in neither. One rule therefore, ought to be observed inviolably, the rule I mean of admitting or rejecting figures as they are justified, or not justified by their application. Their application is their criterion. Metaphysicians and divines, therefore, who have made figures and comparisons of so great consequence by their use of them, should consider that the principal and most proper use of them, is like that of varnish on a picture. As a painter would be thought mad who should varnish an unpainted canvas, so must they be exposed to this censure, or to one more severe, if it appears at any time that they had no clear and determinate ideas in their minds, concerning intellectual subjects, and spiritual natures and operations, when they employed, under pretence of explaining them, so many others borrowed from the objects of sense. When they have really such ideas in their minds, they must remember too that figures and comparisons are varnish still. It must not be used to alter the intellectual picture, it must only serve to give a greater lustre, and to make it better seen. Intellectual ideas and notions, in the mind of the philosopher or divine, should lead them to the invention of figures, and these figures should lead the scholar to these intellectual ideas and notions. When the latter is not so led, easily and almost unavoidably, the figures are improper, or he has a right to conclude that the philosopher or divine had no such ideas nor notions in his mind. Now the first of these proceedings is impertinent, and the second an arrant fraud. Figures in general, these of speech, and all others that do not typify determinately, are unworthy of rational creatures, how much more of God? and figures that typify nothing, are nothing, or they are worse than nothing; they are so many lies, since they pretend to denote something real, when nothing real exists. How the sight of that brazen serpent, which Moses erected in the desart, cured the Israelites of the venomous bites of real serpents, I know not. Miraculously, say our divines. Just as other images work cures at this day, say your divines. Be this as it will, the figure typified very determinately what God intended it should typify, when he said, "pone eum pro signo." But when your divines and ours agree to make it a sign of the Christ lifted up on the cross, and crucified, he must be very cabalistical indeed who can discover the same determination. Real serpents had caused a real plague. A brazen serpent was the figure that signified this event to be over. It signified, therefore, at the same time, that the Son of God himself was to come into the world near two thousand years afterwards, to deliver mankind from the allegorical plague of sin, which he did not most certainly cause. How reasonable is one, how absurd the other application of this figure? How necessary is it therefore to examine scrupulously the application of every figure, that we may not be imposed on by false appearances? But I will conclude these reflections by an example taken from figurative speech. It will be thus more close to my purpose, and that it may be the stronger to shew the abuse of figures, it shall be taken from one that has a real, and be contrasted with one that has an imaginary application.
(Essay I, §5; vol. iii, pp. 454-6)

Visual Arts::Picture::Varnish

Reading

At least 5 entries in ESTC (1754, 1777, 1793).

See "Letters or Essays Addressed to Alexander Pope, Esq." in the third volume of David Mallet's The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (London : [s.n.], Printed in the Year 1754). <Link to ESTC><Link to ESTC>

Text from the third volume of The Works of the Late Right Honorable Henry St. John, Lord Viscount Bolingbroke, 5 vols. (Dublin: Printed by P. Byrne: 1793). <Link to Google Books>

Reading also in the 1967 reprint of The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1844).

03/14/2014