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Introduction
In his Essay on Man, Alexander Pope has been reflecting on the part played in society by folly and vice. There is vice and virtue in every man, he says, and human life is like a canvas of blended light and shade: but if vice ought to excite pity and friendship rather than judgment and anger, that should not dupe us into thinking that society can survive if we turn vices into virtues, and virtue into a vice.
FOOLS! who from hence into the notion fall,
That vice or virtue there is none at all.
If white and black blend, soften, and unite
A thousand ways, is there no black or white?*
Ask your own heart, and nothing is so plain;
’Tis to mistake them costs the time and pain.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien*
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
But where th’ extreme of vice was ne’er agreed:
Ask Where’s the North? at York, ‘tis on the Tweed!*
In Scotland, at the Orcades;* and there,
At Greenland, Zembla,* or the Lord knows where.
No creature owns it in the first degree
But thinks his neighbour farther gone than he;
Ev’n those who dwell beneath its very zone,
Or never feel the rage, or never own;*
What happier natures shrink at with affright,
The hard inhabitant contends is right.
* Pope has been saying that human life is made up of shades of grey rather than black and white, but now he reminds us that this does not mean there is no black and white, no vice and virtue. Virtue and vice are rarely seen in the purest state, but they are real: virtue is no vice, and vice is no virtue.
* ‘Mien’ (pronounced like ‘mean’) is a poetic word for one’s facial expression.
* Pope’s point is that people always think that there is a worse form of vice than their own, just as people in London think York is in the North, whereas people in York think Berwick-upon-Tweed is in the North, people in Edinburgh think the North means the Orkneys, and so on.
* The ‘Orcades’ is an ancient Roman name for the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, and still used in French.
* Zembla is Novaya Zemlya, an archipelago in the Barents Sea north of Russia. Dutch navigators led by Willem Barentsz (?1550-1597) had explored it in 1596-97. Pope uses it as an example of a region in the extreme north, though short of the North Pole itself.
* ‘Or... or’ here means the same as ‘either... or’. Pope means that many people sunk in vice either do not feel disgust at what they are doing, or do not admit (‘own’) they are doing it at all.
Précis
In his Essay on Man, poet Alexander Pope acknowledged that all human life is a confusion of virtue and vice, but insisted that virtue and vice are nonetheless very different things. It is easy, he said, to let familiarity so blind us that we think our own vices are too slight to matter, or that vice is itself a virtue. (60 / 60 words)
In his Essay on Man, poet Alexander Pope acknowledged that all human life is a confusion of virtue and vice, but insisted that virtue and vice are nonetheless very different things. It is easy, he said, to let familiarity so blind us that we think our own vices are too slight to matter, or that vice is itself a virtue.
Variations: 1.increase the length of this precis to exactly 65 words. 2.reduce the length of this precis to exactly 55 words. 3.introduce one of the following words into the precis: although, despite, if, may, must, unless, whether, who.
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