Chapter 16

“The shining leather that encased the limb”;

coffee became

“The fragrant juice of Mocha’s berry brown”;

and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal christening of proper names. Two in every verse, one to balance the other, was the smallest allowance. Here are four successive verses from “The Vanity of Human Wishes”:—

“Theencumberedoar scarce leaves thedreadedcoastThroughpurplebillows and afloatinghost.TheboldBavarian in alucklesshourTries thedreadsummits ofCæsarianpower.”

This fashion perished also by its own excess, but the criticism which laid at the door of the master all the faults of his pupils was unjust. It was defective, moreover, in overlooking how much of what we call natural is an artificial product, above all in forgetting that Pope had one of the prime qualities of a great poet in exactly answering the intellectual needs of the age in which he lived, and in reflecting its lineaments. He did in some not inadequate sense hold the mirror up to nature. His poetry is not a mountain-tarn, like that of Wordsworth; it is not in sympathy with the higher moods of the mind; yet it continues entertaining, in spite of all changes of mode. It was a mirror in a drawing-room, but it gave back a faithful image of society, powdered and rouged, to be sure, and intent on trifles, yet still as human in its own way as the heroes of Homer in theirs.

For the popularity of Pope, as for that of Marini and his sect, circumstances had prepared the way. English literature for half a century after the Restoration showed the marks both of a moral reaction and of an artistic vassalage to France. From the compulsory saintship and cropped hair of the Puritans men rushed or sneaked, as their temperaments dictated, to the opposite cant of sensuality and a wilderness of periwig. Charles II. had brought back with him from exile French manners, French morals, and above all French taste. Misfortune makes a shallow mind sceptical. It had made the king so; and this, at a time when court patronage was the main sinew of authorship, was fatal to the higher qualities of literature. That Charles should have preferred the stately decorums of the French school, and should have mistaken its polished mannerism for style, was natural enough. But there was something also in the texture of the average British mind which prepared it for this subjugation from the other side of the Channel.No observer of men can have failed to notice the clumsy respect which the understanding pays to elegance of manner andsavoir-faire, nor what an awkward sense of inferiority it feels in the presence of an accomplished worldliness. The code of society is stronger with most persons than that of Sinai, and many a man who would not scruple to thrust his fingers in his neighbor’s pocket would forego green peas rather than use his knife as a shovel. The submission with which the greater number surrender their natural likings for the acquired taste of what for the moment is called the World is a highly curious phenomenon, and, however destructive of originality, is the main safeguard of society and nurse of civility. Any one who has witnessed the torments of an honest citizen in a foreign gallery before some hideous martyrdom which he feels it his duty to admire, though it be hateful to him as nightmare, may well doubt whether the gridiron of the saint were hotter than that of the sinner. It is only a great mind or a strong character that knows how to respect its own provincialism and can dare to be in fashion with itself. The bewildered clown with his “Am I Giles? or am I not?” was but a type of the average man who finds himself uniformed, drilled, and keeping step, whether he will or no, with the company into which destiny or chance has drafted him, and which is marching him inexorably away from everything that made him comfortable.

The insularity of England, while it fostered pride and reserve, entailed also that sensitiveness to ridicule which haunts pride like an evil genius. “The English,” says Barclay, writing half a century before the Restoration, “have for the most part grave minds and withdrawn, as it were, into themselves for counsel; they wonderfully admire themselves and the manners, genius, and spirit of their own nation. In salutation or inwriting they endure not (unless haply imbued with foreign manners) to descend to those words of imaginary servitude which the refinement (blandities) of ages hath invented.”[41]Yet their fondness of foreign fashions had long been the butt of native satirists. Every one remembers Portia’s merry picture of the English lord: “How oddly he is suited! I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behavior everywhere.” But while she laughs at his bungling efforts to make himself a cosmopolite in externals, she hints at the persistency of his inward Anglicism: “He hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian.” In matters of taste the Anglo-Saxon mind seems always to have felt a painful distrust of itself, which it betrays either in an affectation of burly contempt or in a pretence of admiration equally insincere. The young lords who were to make the future court of Charles II. no doubt found in Paris an elegance beside which the homely bluntness of native manners seemed rustic and underbred. They frequented a theatre where propriety was absolute upon the stage, though license had its full swing behind the scenes. They brought home with them to England debauched morals and that urbane discipline of manners which is so agreeable a substitute for discipline of mind. The word “genteel” came back with them, an outward symptom of the inward change. In the last generation, the men whose great aim was success in the Other World had wrought a political revolution; now, those whose ideal was prosperity in This World were to have their turn and to accomplish with their lighter weapons as great a change. Before the end of the seventeenth century John Bull was pretty well persuaded, in a bewildered kind of way, that he had been vulgar, and especiallythat his efforts in literature showed marks of native vigor, indeed, but of a vigor clownish and uncouth. He began to be ashamed of the provincialism which had given strength, if also something of limitation, to his character.

Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing the life out of ten lines to be written in the Tasso of the Duchess of York, expresses the prevailing belief as regarded poetry in the prologue to his “improvement” of the “Maid’s Tragedy” of Beaumont and Fletcher. He made the playreasonable, as it was called, and there is a pleasant satire in the fact that it was refused a license because there was an immoral king in it. On the throne, to be sure,—but on the stage! Forbid it, decency!

“Above our neighbors’ our conceptions are,But faultless writing is the effect of care;Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste,Polished like marble, would like marble last.. . . . .Were we but less indulgent to our fau’ts,And patience had to cultivate our thoughts,Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rageWould honor this than did the Grecian stage.”

It is a curious comment on these verses in favor of careful writing, that Waller should have failed even to express his own meaning either clearly or with propriety. He talks of “cultivating our thoughts,” when he means “pruning our style”; he confounds the Muse with the laurel, or at any rate makes her a plant, and then goes on with perfect equanimity to tell us that a nobler “rage” (that is, madness) than that of Greece would follow the horticultural devices he recommends. It never seems to have occurred to Waller that it is the substance of what you polish, and not the polish itself, that insures duration. Dryden, in his rough-and-ready way, has hinted at this in his verses to Congreve on the“Double Dealer.” He begins by stating the received theory about the improvement of English literature under the newrégime, but the thin ice of sophistry over which Waller had glided smoothly gives way under his greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water ere he is aware.

“Well, then, the promised hour has come at last,The present age in wit obscures the past;Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ,Conquering with force of arm[42]and dint of wit.Theirs was the giant race before the Flood;And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood;Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured,With rules of husbandry the rankness cured,Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude,And boisterous English wit with art endued;Our age was cultivated thus at length,But what we gained in skill we lost in strength;Our builders were with want of genius curst,The second temple was not like the first.”

There would seem to be a manifest reminiscence of Waller’s verse in the half-scornful emphasis which Dryden lays on “cultivated.” Perhaps he was at first led to give greater weight to correctness and to the restraint of arbitrary rules from a consciousness that he had a tendency to hyperbole and extravagance. But he afterwards became convinced that the heightening of discourse by passion was a very different thing from the exaggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that genius, like beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dryden, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps never reached by any other of our poets, and above all because it is never long before the sunshine of his cheerful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric,and gilds the clipped hedges over which his thought clambers like an unpruned vine,—Dryden, one of the most truly English of English authors, did more than all others combined to bring about the triumphs of French standards in taste and French principles in criticism. But he was always like a deserter who cannot feel happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who would go back if he could to the camp where he naturally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more French words, I believe, were directly transplanted into our language than in the century and a half since. What was of more consequence, French ideas came with them, shaping the form, and through that modifying the spirit, of our literature.

Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the theories of art which had been inherited as traditions of classicism from the preceding generation. He had lived in England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a very good notion of the tone which was prevalent there in his time, an English version of the criticism imported from France. He tells us that Mr. Addison was the first Englishman who had written areasonabletragedy. And in spite of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose sandy pedantry was not without an oasis of refreshing sound judgment here and there, this was the opinion of most persons at that day, except, it may be suspected, the judicious and modest Mr. Addison himself. Voltaire says of the English tragedians,—and it will be noticed that he is only putting, in another way, the opinion of Dryden,—“Their productions, almost all barbarous, without polish, order, or probability, have astonishing gleams in the midst of their night; ... it seems sometimes that nature is not made in England as it is elsewhere.”Eh bien, the inference is that we must try and make it so! The world must be uniformin order to be comfortable, and what fashion so becoming as the one we have invented in Paris? It is not a little amusing that when Voltaire played master of ceremonies to introduce thebizarreShakespeare among his countrymen, that other kind of nature made a profounder impression on them than quite pleased him. So he turned about presently and called his whilomeprotégea buffoon.

The condition of the English mind at the close of the seventeenth century was such as to make it particularly sensitive to the magnetism which streamed to it from Paris. The loyalty of everybody both in politics and religion had been put out of joint. A generation of materialists, by the natural rebound which inevitably follows over-tension, was to balance the ultra-spiritualism of the Puritans. As always when a political revolution has been wrought by moral agencies, the plunder had fallen mainly to the share of the greedy, selfish, and unscrupulous, whose disgusting cant had given a taint of hypocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from a burning conviction of the soul, had grown to be with both parties a political badge, as little typical of the inward man as the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character. There seems to have been an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, that is, with an outward conformity in the interest of decorum and order. There was an unbelief that did not believe even in itself.

The difference between the leading minds of the former age and that which was supplanting it went to the very roots of the soul. Milton was willing to peril the success of his crowning work by making the poetry of it a stalking-horse for his theological convictions. What was that Fame

“Which the clear spirit doth raiseTo scorn delights and live laborious days,”

to the crown of a good preacher who sets

“The hearts of men on fireTo scorn the sordid world and unto heaven aspire”?

Dean Swift, who aspired to the mitre, could write a book whose moral, if it had any, was that one religion was as good as another, since all were political devices, and accepted a cure of souls when it was more than doubtful whether he believed that his fellow-creatures had any souls to be saved, or, if they had, whether they were worth saving. The answer which Pulci’s Margutte makes to Morgante, when asked if he believed in Christ or Mahomet, would have expressed well enough the creed of the majority of that generation:—

“To tell thee truly,My faith in black’s no greater than in azure,But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli,And in good wine my faith’s beyond all measure.”[43]

It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when men could be Protestant or Catholic, both at once, or by turns, or neither, as suited their interest, when they could swear one allegiance and keep on safe terms with the other, when prime ministers and commanders-in-chief could be intelligencers of the Pretender, nay, when even Algernon Sidney himself could be a pensioner of France. What morality there was, was the morality of appearances, of the side that is turned toward men and not toward God. The very shamelessness of Congreve is refreshing in that age of sham.

It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, great on the moral and emotional as well as the intellectual side, should be produced by such a generation. But something intellectually great could be and was.The French mind, always stronger in perceptive and analytic than in imaginative qualities, loving precision, grace, and finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical power to the scientific regulation whether of politics or religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts of society to as great perfection as was possible by thea priorimethod. Its ideal in literature was to conjure passion within the magic circle of courtliness, or to combine the appearance of careless ease and gayety of thought with intellectual exactness of statement. The eternal watchfulness of a wit that never slept had made it distrustful of the natural emotions and the unconventional expression of them, and its first question about a sentiment was, Will it besafe? about a phrase, Will it pass with the Academy? The effect of its example on English literature would appear chiefly in neatness and facility of turn, in point and epigrammatic compactness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society rather than to human nature. Its influence would be greatest where its success had been most marked, in what was called moral poetry, whose chosen province was manners, and in which satire, with its avenging scourge, took the place of that profounder art whose office it was to purify, not the manners, but the source of them in the soul, by pity and terror. The mistake of the whole school of French criticism, it seems to me, lay in its tendency to confound what was common with what was vulgar, in a too exclusive deference to authority at the expense of all free movement of the mind.

There are certain defects of taste which correct themselves by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, is more apt to be reformed by the charm of some master of it, like Milton, than by any amount of precept. The influence of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephemeral, for true style, the joint result of culture and natural aptitude, is always in fashion, as fine manners always are, in whatever clothes. Perhaps some reform was needed when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy, could write,

“My passion has no April in her eyes:I cannot spend in mists; I cannot mizzle;My fluent brains are too severe to drizzleSlight drops.”[44]

Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself to its own rightful province of the proprieties, but when it attempts to correct those profound instincts out of whose judgments the higher principles of æsthetics have been formulated, its success is a disaster. During the era when the French theory of poetry was supreme, we notice a decline from imagination to fancy, from passion to wit, from metaphor, which fuses image and thought in one, to simile, which sets one beside the other, from the supreme code of the natural sympathies to the parochial by-laws of etiquette. The imagination instinctively Platonizes, and it is the essence of poetry that it should be unconventional, that the soul of it should subordinate the outward parts; while the artificial method proceeds from a principle the reverse of this, making the spirit lackey the form.

Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue to the “Maid’s Tragedy”:—

“Nor is’t less strange such mighty wits as thoseShould use a style in tragedy like prose;Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage,Should speak their virtue and describe their rage.”

That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to speak in anything but rhyme can only be paralleled by Mr. Puff’s law that a heroine can go decorously mad only in white satin. Waller, I suppose, though with so loose a thinker one cannot be positive, uses “describe” in its Latin sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear confined to this go-cart! Phillips touches the true point when he says, “And the truth is, the use of measure alone, without any rime at all, would give more scope and liberty both to style and fancy than can possibly be observed in rime.”[45]But let us test Waller’s method by an example or two. His monarch madereasonable, thus discourses:—

“Courage our greatest failings does supply,And makes all good, or handsomely we die.Life is a thing of common use; by heavenAs well to insects as to monarchs given;But for the crown, ’t is a more sacred thing;I’ll dying lose it, or I’ll live a king.Come, Diphilus, we must together walkAnd of a matter of importance talk.”[Exeunt.

Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, but commonplace set to this rocking-horse jog irritates the nerves. There is nothing here to remind us of the older tragic style but theexeuntat the close. Its pithy conciseness and the relief which it brings us from his majesty’s prosing give it an almost poetical savor. Aspatia’s reflections upon suicide (or “suppressing our breath,” as she calls it), in the same play, will make few readers regret that Shakespeare was left to his own unassisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet’s soliloquy on the same topic:—

“‘T was in compassion of our woeThat nature first made poisons grow,For hopeless wretches such as IKindly providing means to die:As mothers do their children keep,So Nature feeds and makes us sleep.The indisposed she does inviteTo go to bed before ’tis night.”

Correctness in this case is but a synonyme of monotony, and words are chosen for the number of their syllables, for their rubbishy value to fill-in, instead of being forced upon the poet by the meaning which occupies the mind. Language becomes useful for its diluting properties, rather than as the medium by means of which the thought or fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon a connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may feel fully the difference between the rude and the reformed styles. This also shall be a speech of Aspatia’s. Antiphila, one of her maidens, is working the story of Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older masters loved a picturesque background and knew the value of fanciful accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of Ariadne not sad enough:—

“Do it by me,Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia,And you shall find all true but the wild island.Suppose I stand upon the seabeach now,Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind,Wild as that desert; and let all about meBe teachers of my story. Do my face(If ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow)Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to make me lookLike sorrow’s monument; and the trees about meLet them be dry and leafless; let the rocksGroan with continual surges; and behind meMake all a desolation.”

What instinctive felicity of versification! what sobbing breaks and passionate repetitions are here!

We see what the direction of the new tendency was, but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest criticismthat should hold Pope responsible for the narrow compass of the instrument which was his legacy from his immediate predecessors, any more than for the wearisome thrumming-over of his tune by those who came after him and who had caught his technical skill without his genius. The question properly stated is, How much was it possible to make of the material supplied by the age in which he lived? and how much did he make of it? Thus far, among the great English poets who preceded him, we have seen actual life represented by Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shakespeare, the interior life by Milton. But as everything aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so conventional life, itself a new phenomenon, was waiting for its poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He stands for exactness of intellectual expression, for perfect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and is a striking instance how much success and permanence of reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as on native endowment. Butler asks,—

“Then why should those who pick and chooseThe best of all the best compose,And join it by Mosaic art,In graceful order, part to part,To make the whole in beauty suit,Not merit as complete reputeAs those who, with less art and pain,Can do it with their native brain?”

Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man as an artist is this power of finding out whatis“the best of all the best.”

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition that he was the greatest poet that ever lived; and when I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a moreesoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, without any regard to their artistic beauty, which characterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope was called a master of style? I felt, as Addison says in his Freeholder when answering an argument in favor of the Pretender because he could speak English and George I. could not, “that I did not wish to be tyrannized over in the best English that ever was spoken.” The young demand thoughts that find an echo in their real and not their acquired nature, and care very little about the dress they are put in. It is later that we learn to like the conventional, as we do olives. There was a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked him on principle as old Roger Ascham seems to have felt about Italy when he says, “I was once in Italy myself, but I thank God my abode there was only nine days.”

But Pope fills a very important place in the history of English poetry, and must be studied by every one who would come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since read over every line that Pope ever wrote, and every letter written by or to him, and that more than once. If I have not come to the conclusion that he is the greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in a condition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I have said that Pope as a literary man represents precision and grace of expression; but as a poet he represents something more,—nothing less, namely, than one of those eternal controversies of taste which will last as long as the imagination and understanding divide men between them. It is not a matter to be settled by any amount of argument or demonstration. There are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kantists, and there is nothing more to be said of the matter.

Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice.A man brought up in sublime mountain solitudes, and whose nature was a solitude more vast than they, walking an earth which quivered with the throe of the French Revolution, the child of an era of profound mental and moral movement, it could not be expected that he should be in sympathy with the poet of artificial life. Moreover, he was the apostle of imagination, and came at a time when the school which Pope founded had degenerated into a mob of mannerists who wrote with ease, and who with their congenial critics united at once to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous innovation of having a soul in it.

But however it may be with poets, it is very certain that a reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough to enjoy the natural school for its nature, and the artificial for its artificiality, provided they be only good of their kind. At any rate, we must allow that the man who can produce one perfect work is either a great genius or a very lucky one; and so far as we who read are concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And Pope has done this in the “Rape of the Lock.” For wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been surpassed. I do not say there is in it poetry of the highest order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure entertainment it is unmatched. There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understandit; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told. Let us find strength and inspiration in the one, amusement and instruction in the other, and be honestly thankful for both.

The very earliest of Pope’s productions give indications of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, which afterward so eminently distinguished him. The facility of expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect balance of metre, which he afterward carried so far as to be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his sixteenth year, and their publication immediately brought him into notice. The following four verses from his first pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic balance:—

“You that, too wise for pride, too good for power,Enjoy the glory to be great no more,And carrying with you all the world can boast,To all the world illustriously are lost!”

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future period of Pope’s Correspondence with his Friends, when Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of affecting indifference to the world by which it would have agonized them to be forgotten, and wrote letters addressed to each other, but really intended for that posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise.

In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. For example in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest:—

“Her fate is whispered by the gentle breezeAnd told in sighs to all the trembling trees;The trembling trees, in every plain and wood,Her fate remurmur to the silver flood:The silver flood, so lately calm, appearsSwelled with new passion, and o’erflows with tears;The winds and trees and floods her death deploreDaphne, our grief! our glory now no more!”

All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materializes and makes too palpably objective that sympathy which our grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before making the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings intune, as it were, and hints at his own imagination as the source of this emotion in inanimate things,—

“But, O the heavy change now thou art gone!”

In “Windsor Forest” we find the same thing again:—

“Here his first lays majestic Denham sung,There the last numbers flowed from Cowley’s tongue;O early lost, what tears the river shedWhen the sad pomp along his banks was led!His drooping swans on every note expire,And on his willows hung each muse’s lyre!”

In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that,

“Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue,And learn of man each other to undo”;

and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descriptive of natural objects and ordinary life, which brought verse-making to such a depth of absurdity in the course of the century.

“With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler rovesWhere frosts have whitened all the naked groves;Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o’ershade,And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade;He lifts the tube and levels with his eye,Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky:Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death;Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare,They fall and leave their little lives in air.”

Now one would imagine that thetubeof the fowler was a telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks preparing their notes like a country choir! Yet even here there are admirable lines,—

“Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,”. . . . .“They fall and leave their little lives in air,”

for example.

In Pope’s next poem, the “Essay on Criticism,” thewit and poet become apparent. It is full of clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In this poem, written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur some of those lines which have become proverbial; such as

“A little learning is a dangerous thing”;

“For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”;

“True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

“For each ill author is as bad a friend.”

In all of these we notice that terseness in which (regard being had to his especial range of thought) Pope has never been equalled. One cannot help being struck also with the singulardiscretionwhich the poem gives evidence of. I do not know where to look for another author in whom it appeared so early, and, considering the vivacity of his mind and the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, it is still more wonderful. In his boyish correspondence with poor old Wycherley, one would suppose him to be the man and Wycherley the youth. Pope’s understanding was no less vigorous (when not the dupe of his nerves) than his fancy was lightsome and sprightly.

I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalized him as a poet, the “Rape of the Lock,” in which, indeed, he appears more purely as poet than in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has shown more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His genius has here found its true direction, and the very same artificiality, which in his pastorals was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the general keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society,the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be calledacquired, whose spring is in institutions and habits of purely worldly origin.

The “Rape of the Lock” was written in Pope’s twenty-fourth year, and the machinery of the Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth,—a circumstance for which we can feel a more unmixed gratitude to him than for writing the “Dispensary.” The idea was taken from that entertaining book “The Count de Gabalis,” in which Fouquè afterward found the hint for his “Undine”; but the little sprites as they appear in the poem are purely the creation of Pope’s fancy.

The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is out of the question in fine society. It is perfectly true that almost every door we pass in the street closes upon its private tragedy, but the moment agreatpassion enters a man he passes at once out of the artificial into the human. So long as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the only way in which the petty actions and sufferings of the fine world can be epically treated, and the contrast continually suggested with subjects of larger scope and more dignified treatment, makes no small part of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the wit. The invocation is admirable:—

“Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel,A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored,Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?”

The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not a parody of the heroic style, but only a setting it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and modes of thought with which it is in comical antipathy, and whileitis not degraded,theyare shown in their triviality. The“clouded cane,” as compared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane of emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, is equally good:—

“Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray,And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day,Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake,And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake;Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.”

The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most fanciful wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is Pope’s peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing Belinda:—

“Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly,The light militia of the lower sky;These, though unseen, are ever on the wing,Hang o’er the box and hover round the ring.As now your own our beings were of old,And once enclosed in woman’s beauteous mould;Think not, when woman’s transient breath is fled,That all her vanities at once are dead;Succeeding vanities she still regards,And, though she plays no more, o’erlooks the cards.For when the fair in all their pride expire,To their first elements their souls retire;The sprites of fiery termagants in flameMount up and take a salamander’s name;Soft yielding nymphs to water glide awayAnd sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea;The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome,In search of mischief still on earth to roam;The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repairAnd sport and flutter in the fields of air.”

And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machinery:—

“He said: when Shock, who thought she slept too long,Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue;’Twas then, Belinda, if report say true,Thy eyes first opened on abillet-doux.”

Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, he says:—

“Here files of pins extend their shining rows,Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles,billet-doux.”

Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed,

“Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies,Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are castWhen husbands or when lapdogs breathe their lastOr when rich china-vessels, fallen from high,In glittering dust and painted fragments lie!”

And so, when the conflict begins:—

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