Here social and aesthetic judgments are supported by suggestions of religious ones: not only the poet's cursing and swearing, but also his pain and discomfort, declare the ideal proximity of his host's residence to Hell itself. Pope supports this declaration by echoing a reminder of the fall of Milton's Mulciber, the architect of Hell's palace in
Paradise Lost
. As Milton had put it, "from morn / To noon he fell, from noon to dewy eve, / A summer's day." And, indeed, if Milton's Satan was damned for the pride that set him against God, so Pope's Timon is damned for the civil version of that deadly sin. That Pope should want us to hear this sudden resonance of his "moral essay" with Milton's Christian epic tells us that, as between the civil and the deadly sin, even a secular age sometimes found less difference than we might have supposed.
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Moreover, if we had any doubt that the good taste, the sociability, and the modernity of the Enlightenment could sometimes find accord with its religious past, we might consider what Timon's library, in its own gesture of mistaken sociability, excludes: "His
Study!
with what Authors is it stord? / In Books, not Authors, curious is my Lord . . . / For
Locke
or
Milton
'tis in vain to look, / These shelves admit not any Modern book." Locke is the great philosopher of empiricism, Milton the great epic and prophetic poetbut Pope strikingly links them together as modern authors. Their union in Pope's line of verse (and presumably on the shelves of the libraries inside the fine houses to which Timon would receive no welcome) tells of the ideal accord some sought for between secular and religious habits of mind.
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Perhaps the most profound sign of Dryden's and Pope's originality was in their invention and re-creation of imaginative structures in which that difficult accord could be attempted and scrutinized: the verse essay, the epistle, the imagined dialogue, the mock-heroic, the imitation, the sublime but still polite "great ode" (examples of which are Dryden's
Alexander Feast
, his
Ode to the Pious Memory of Anne Killigrew
, and Pope's
Ode for St. Cecilia's Day
)these were the forms in which they worked, along with others harder to classify, like the polemical, heroical, satirical, journalistic, and philosophical composition of Dryden's
Absalom and Achitophel
. But common to all these kinds of poems is the opportunity they open for the voice of a modern sensibility. This was a critical sensibility, alert to the discoveries and engaged with the controvertists of the time; it revealed itself in a voice that might approve of or excoriate them, but that still spoke conversably in
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