Chapter 6

Nolueram, Belinda, tuos violare capillos,Sed juvat hoc præcibus me tribuisse tuis.Mart. Lib. 12. Ep. 86.

Printed forBernard Lintott. 1712. 8vo.

This is the title-page of the original Rape of the Lock, in two cantos, which appeared anonymously in Lintot's Miscellany. The poem begins on p. 353 of the volume, and the previous piece ends at p. 320. What purported to be a second edition of the Miscellany came out in 1714, but except that the gap between p. 320 and p. 353 had been filled up, and that the Essay on Criticism is inserted at the end of the book, the work is merely a reissue, with a new title-page, of the first edition, and the Rape of the Lock, like the rest, is the old impression of 1712. Even the primitive "Table of Contents" was retained, though it omits the additional pieces, which were chiefly poems by Pope. His contributions to the Miscellany are, however, enumerated on the title-page of the second edition.

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK.

AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM. IN FIVE CANTOS.

Written by Mr.Pope.

——A tonso est hoc nomen adepta capillo.—Ovid.

London: Printed forBernard Lintott, at the Cross Keys in Fleet Street.

1714. 8vo.

The first enlarged edition. A second and third edition followed in the same year. After the Rape of the Lock had been included in the quarto of 1717, it was still printed in a separate form, and a "fifth edition corrected" was published by Lintot in 1718. He also inserted the work in the four editions of his Miscellanies, which appeared in the twelve years from 1720 to 1732. Lintot paid Pope £7 on March 21, 1712, for the Rape of the Lock in its first form, and gave £15 for the enlarged poem on February 20, 1714.

* * * * *

The first sketch of this poem was written in less than a fortnight's time in 1711, in two cantos, and so printed in a Miscellany, without the name of the author. The machines were not inserted till a year after, when he published it, and annexed the dedication.—Pope, 1736.

The stealing of Miss Belle Fermor's hair was taken too seriously, and caused an estrangement between the two families, though they had lived so long in great friendship before. A common acquaintance, and well-wisher to both, desired me to write a poem to make a jest of it, and laugh them together again. It was with this view that I wrote the Rape of the Lock, which was well received, and had its effect in the two families. Nobody but Sir George Brown was angry, and he was a good deal so, and for a long time. He could not bear that Sir Plume should talk nothing but nonsense. Copies of the poem got about, and it was like to be printed, on which I published the first draught of it (without the machinery) in a Miscellany of Tonson's. The machinery was added afterwards to make it look a little more considerable, and the scheme of adding it was much liked and approved of by several of my friends, and particularly by Dr. Garth, who, as he was one of the best natured men in the world, was very fond of it. The making the machinery, and what was published before, hit so well together is, I think, one of the greatest proofs of judgment of anything I ever did.—PopeinSpence.

It appears by the motto "Nolueram," etc., that the following poem was written or published at the lady's request. But there are some further circumstances not unworthy relating. Mr. Caryll (a gentleman who was secretary to Queen Mary, wife of James II., whose fortunes he followed into France, author of the comedy of Sir Solomon Single, and of several translations in Dryden's Miscellanies) originally proposed the subject to him, in a view of putting an end, by this piece of ridicule, to a quarrel that was risen between two noble families, those of Lord Petre and of Mrs. Fermor, on the trifling occasion of his having cut off a lock of her hair. The author sent it to the lady, with whom he was acquainted; and she took it so well as to give about copies of it. That first sketch, we learn from one of his letters, was written in less than a fortnight, in 1711, in two cantos only, and it was so printed; first, in a Miscellany of Bern. Lintot's, without the name of the author. But it was received sowell, that he made it more considerable the next year by the addition of the machinery of the sylphs, and extended it to five cantos. We shall give the reader the pleasure of seeing in what manner these additions were inserted, so as to seem not to be added, but to grow out of the poem. See Notes, Cant. I. ver. 9, etc. This insertion he always esteemed, and justly, the greatest effort of his skill and art as a poet.—Warburton.

I hope it will not be thought an exaggerated panegyric to say that the Rape of the Lock is the best satire extant; that it contains the truest and liveliest picture of modern life; and that the subject is of a more elegant nature, as well as more artfully conducted than that of any other heroi-comic poem. If some of the most candid among the French critics begin to acknowledge that they have produced nothing, in point of sublimity and majesty, equal to the Paradise Lost, we may also venture to affirm that in point of delicacy, elegance, and fine-turned raillery, on which they have so much valued themselves, they have produced nothing equal to the Rape of the Lock. It is in this composition Pope principally appears a poet, in which he has displayed more imagination than in all his other works taken together. It should, however, be remembered, that he was not the first former and creator of those beautiful machines, the sylphs, on which his claim to imagination is chiefly founded. He found them existing ready to his hand; but has, indeed, employed them with singular judgment and artifice.—Warton.

The Rape of the Lock is the most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all Pope's compositions. At its first appearance it was termed by Addison "merum sal." Pope, however, saw that it was capable of improvement; and having luckily contrived to borrow his machinery from the Rosicrucians, imparted the scheme, with which his head was teeming, to Addison, who told him that his work, as it stood, was "a delicious little thing," and gave him no encouragement to retouch it. This has been too hastily considered as an instance of Addison's jealousy; for as he could not guess the conduct of the new design, or the possibilities of pleasure comprised in a fiction of which there had been no examples, he might very reasonably and kindly persuade the author to acquiesce in his own prosperity, and forbear an attempt which he considered as an unnecessary hazard. Addison's counsel was happily rejected. Pope foresaw the future efflorescence of imagery then budding in his mind, and resolved to spare no art or industry of cultivation. The soft luxuriance of his fancy was already shooting, and all the gay varieties of diction were ready at his hand to colour and embellish it. His attempt was justified by its success. The Rape of the Lock stands forward, in the classes of literature, as the most exquisite exampleof ludicrous poetry. Berkeley congratulated him upon the display of powers more truly poetical than he had shown before. With elegance of description and justness of precepts he had now exhibited boundless fertility of invention. He always considered the intermixture of the machinery with the action as his most successful exertion of poetical art. He indeed could never afterwards produce anything of such unexampled excellence. Those performances which strike with wonder are combinations of skilful genius with happy casualty; and it is not likely that any felicity, like the discovery of a new race of preternatural agents, should happen twice to the same man.

Of this poem the author was, I think, allowed to enjoy the praise for a long time without disturbance. Many years afterwards Dennis published some remarks upon it with very little force and with no effect; for the opinion of the public was already settled, and it was no longer at the mercy of criticism.[303]

To the praises which have been accumulated on the Rape of the Lock by readers of every class, from the critic to the waiting-maid, it is difficult to make any addition. Of that which is universally allowed to be the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions, let it rather be now inquired from what sources the power of pleasing is derived. Dr. Warburton, who excelled in critical perspicacity, has remarked that the preternatural agents are very happily adapted to the purposes of the poem. The heathen deities can no longer gain attention: we should have turned away from a contest between Venus and Diana. The employment of allegorical persons always excites conviction of its own absurdity; they may produce effects, but cannot conduct actions: when the phantom is put in motion it dissolves. Thus Discord may raise a mutiny, but Discord cannot conduct a march, nor besiege a town. Pope brought in view a new race of beings, with powers and passions proportionate to their operation. The sylphs and gnomes act at the toilet and the tea-table, what more terrific and more powerful phantoms perform on the stormy ocean or the field of battle; they give their proper helpand do their proper mischief. Pope is said by an objector,[304]not to have been the inventor of this petty nation; a charge which might with more justice have been brought against the author of the Iliad, who doubtless adopted the religious system of his country; for what is there but the names of his agents which Pope has not invented? Has he not assigned them characters and operations never heard of before? Has he not, at least, given them their first poetical existence? If this is not sufficient to denominate his work original, nothing original ever can be written.

In this work are exhibited, in a very high degree, the two most engaging powers of an author. New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. A race of aerial people, never heard of before, is presented to us in a manner so clear and easy, that the reader seeks for no further information, but immediately mingles with his new acquaintance, adopts their interests, and attends their pursuits, loves a sylph and detests a gnome. That familiar things are made new, every paragraph will prove. The subject of the poem is an event below the common incidents of common life; nothing real is introduced that is not seen so often as to be no longer regarded; yet the whole detail of a female day is here brought before us, invested with so much art of decoration, that, though nothing is disguised, everything is striking, and we feel all the appetite of curiosity for that from which we have a thousand times turned fastidiously away.

The purpose of the poet is, as he tells us, to laugh at "the little unguarded follies of the female sex." It is therefore without justice that Dennis charges the Rape of the Lock with the want of a moral, and for that reason sets it below the Lutrin, which exposes the pride and discord of the clergy. Perhaps neither Pope nor Boileau has made the world much better than he found it, but, if they had both succeeded, it were easy to tell who would have deserved most from public gratitude. The freaks, and humours, and spleen, and vanity of women, as they embroil families in discord, and fill houses with disquiet, do more to obstruct the happiness of life in a year than the ambition of the clergy in many centuries. It has been well observed, that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated.

It is remarked by Dennis likewise that the machinery is superfluous; that by all the bustle of preternatural operation the main event is neither hastened nor retarded. To this charge an efficacious answer is not easily made. The sylphs cannot be said to help or to oppose, and it must be allowed to imply some want of art, that theirpower has not been sufficiently intermingled with the action. Other parts may likewise be charged with want of connection; the game at ombre might be spared; but if the lady had lost her hair while she was intent upon her cards, it might have been inferred that those who are too fond of play will be in danger of neglecting more important interests. These perhaps are faults, but what are such faults to so much excellence?—Johnson.

The Rape of the Lock at once placed Pope higher than any modern writer, and exceeded everything of the kind that had appeared in the republic of letters. Dr. Johnson truly says that it is the most airy, the most ingenious, and the most delightful of all Pope's compositions. Indeed, upon this subject there cannot be two opinions. This poem is founded, however, upon local manners. And of all poems of that kind it is undoubtedly far the best, whether we consider the exquisite tone of raillery, a certain musical sweetness and suitableness in the versification, the management of the story, or the kind of fancy and airiness given to the whole. But what entitles it to its high claim of peculiar poetic excellences?—the powers of imagination, and the felicity of invention displayed in adopting, and most artfully conducting, a machinery so fanciful, so appropriate, so novel, and so poetical. The introduction of Discord, &c., as machinery in the Lutrin, &c., is not to be mentioned at the same time. Such a being as Discord will suit a hundred subjects; but the elegant, the airy sylph,

Loose to the wind, whose airy garments flew,Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew,Dipped in the richest tincture of the skies,Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes:

such a being as this, is suited alone to the identical and peculiar poem in which it is employed. I will now go a step farther in appreciating the elegance and beauty of this poem, and I would ask the question, Let any other poet,—Dryden, Waller, Cowley, or Gray,—be assigned this subject, and this machinery: could they have produced a work altogether so correct and beautiful from the same given materials? Let us, however, still remember, that this poem is founded on local manners, and the employment of the sylphs is in artificial life. For this reason the poem must have a secondary rank, when considered strictly and truly with regard to its poetry. Whether Pope would have excelled as much in loftier subjects of a general nature, in the "high mood" of Lycidas, the rich colourings of Comus, and the magnificent descriptions and sublime images of Paradise Lost; or in painting the characters and employments of aerial beings,

That tread the ooze of the salt deep,Or run upon the sharp wind of the north,

is another question. He has not attempted it: I have no doubt he would have failed. But to have produced a poem, infinitely the highest of its kind, and which no other poet could perhaps altogether have done so well, is surely very high praise. The excellence is Pope's own, the inferiority is in the subject. No one understood better that excellent rule of Horace:

Sumite materiam vestris, qui scribitis, æquamViribus.[305]—Bowles.

From the statement of Pope in the edition of 1736, it would be inferred that the Rape of the Lock in its second form was prepared and published in 1712. As usual he ante-dated his work. The original sketch came out in 1712; the machinery was added in 1713, and the enlarged poem was not published till the spring of 1714. Warburton's narrative, which in some editions had Pope's initial affixed by an error of the press,[306]is in part derived from Pope, and the rest is erroneous. The person who bespoke the Rape of the Lock was not Mr. Secretary Caryll, but his nephew, the Sussex squire, and for years the correspondent of Pope. The assertion of Warburton, that Pope, when he wrote the work, was acquainted with his heroine, is discredited by his letter to Caryll on May 28, 1712. "Mr. Bedingfield," he there says, "has done me the favour to send some books of the Rape to my Lord Petre and Mrs. Fermor," and unless the poet had been a total stranger to them he would have presented the copies himself. The language of the motto can only bear the interpretation of Warburton, that the Rape of the Lock "was written or published at the lady's request," but Warburton ought to have seen that the motto was a deception. The piece was notwrittenat Miss Fermor's request, for it was absurd to imagine that she would ask any one to compose a poem to allay her own resentment against Lord Petre, and there is the direct statement of Pope in the body of the work, and in his conversation with Spence, that the suggestion did not come from her.[307]The piece was notpublishedat her request, for in the Dedication of the second edition to MissFermor, Pope says of the first edition, "An imperfect copy having been offered to a bookseller, you had the good nature for my sake to consent to the publication of one more correct. This I was forced to before I had executed half my design, for the machinery was entirely wanting to complete it." Warburton reversed the parts. The requester was Pope, and Miss Fermor gave a consent which it was vain to refuse when the sole alternative presented to her was whether the poem should be printed surreptitiously, or under the supervision of its author. The miserable farce of circulating copies of a work, and then alleging that the publication had become a necessary measure of self-defence, was one of those transparent pretences which deceived no one except the person who fancied that he was deceiving. Pope never wrote a line of the smallest value which was not intended for the printer.

The motto from Martial was doubtless attached to the Rape of the Lock in the belief that Miss Fermor would be proud to countenance the misrepresentation. The poet was mistaken. "A few years ago," says Dr. Johnson, "a niece of Mrs. Fermor, who presided in an English convent at Paris, mentioned Pope's work with very little gratitude, rather as an insult than an honour; and she may be supposed to have inherited the opinion of her family."[308]Pope told Spence that "nobody but Sir George Brown was angry," and Warburton says that Miss Fermor "took the poem so well as to give about copies of it," but we now know that Johnson was right in his inference. "Sir Plume blusters, I hear," wrote Pope to the younger Caryll, Nov. 8, 1712, five months after the Rape of the Lock appeared; "nay, the celebrated lady herself is offended, and, which is stranger, not at herself, but me. Is not this enough to make a writer never be tender of another's character or fame?" Respect for the fame and feelings of his heroine was not an act of grace; it was an imperious duty. At the request of a common friend he had composed a poem for an amiable purpose upon an incident of private life, and it would have been a hateful abuse of his commission, a slanderous violation of domestic sanctities, if he had penned a word which could sully the reputation of an innocent maiden. He is not free from reproach. Without intending to transgress he offended from inherent want of delicacy. He made Belinda the subject of some gross double meanings, which provoked the ribald comments of the critics, and, unless a morbid love of notoriety had extinguished feminine purity, she must have been deeply outraged by being associated with these licentious allusions. Her indignation may appearto have come too late, for though her consent to the publication of the work, when there was no real choice, does not involve approval, she might, through her friends, have effectually demanded the suppression of degrading couplets. Her very resentment, however, when she read the work in print, is a presumption that they were not in the manuscript which was sent her, and indeed it is incredible that she, or her family, could ever have sanctioned such revolting personalities. They are a sad exhibition of the ingrained coarseness of Pope's taste,—of his incapacity to conceive the idea of womanly homage to outward decency, to say nothing of innate refinement and modesty.

In the interval between the first and second edition of the Rape of the Lock, Pope was compelled to acknowledge that he had inflicted an injury on Miss Fermor. "I have some thoughts," he wrote to Caryll, Dec. 15, 1713, "of dedicating the poem to her by name, as a piece of justice in return to the wrong interpretations she has suffered under on the score of that piece." He tried a preface "which salved the lady's honour without affixing her name," but she preferred the dedication. She wished to be dissociated from his heroine, and he propitiated her by saying, all the incidents are "fabulous except the loss of your hair; and the character of Belinda, as it is now managed, resembles you in nothing but beauty." "I believe," he wrote to Caryll, January 9, 1714, "I have managed the dedication so nicely that it can neither hurt the lady nor the author. I writ it very lately, and upon great deliberation. The young lady approves of it, and the best advice in the kingdom, of the men of sense, has been made use of in it, even to the treasurer's." Plainer understandings will be puzzled to discover what scope there could be for the "great deliberation" of the poet, and the advice of all the ablest men throughout the kingdom, including the prime minister, Lord Oxford, in making a simple declaration of a simple fact. To complete the absolution of Miss Fermor, Pope substituted another motto for the lines from Martial, and when their temporary withdrawal had answered his purpose he restored them in the quarto edition of his works.

A more celebrated feud, if we are to trust the account of Warburton, took its rise from the Rape of the Lock. The success of the first edition "encouraged the author to give it a more important air" by the addition of the supernatural machinery. "Full," says Warburton, "of this noble conception he communicated it to Mr. Addison, who he imagined would have been equally delighted with the improvement. On the contrary, he had the mortification to see his friend receive it coldly; and even to advise him against any alteration, for that the poem in its original state was a delicious little thing, and, as he expressed it,merum sal. Mr. Pope was shockedfor his friend, and then first began to open his eyes to his character."[309]The charge has been exposed by Johnson, Macaulay, and Croker. Mr. Croker denies that the machinery was a plausible suggestion. "I believe Addison's advice," he says, "to have been a sincere and just opinion, and such as I should have expected from the purity of his taste. The original poem tells the actual story and exhibits a picture of real manners with so much wit and poetry, but also with so much simplicity and clearness, that I can well imagine that Addison might be alarmed at the proposition of introducing sylphs and gnomes into a scene of common life already so admirably described. Even now, with the advantage of seeing all the brilliancy with which Pope has worked out what Addison thought an unfortunate conception, I will not deny that such is the charm of truth that I have lately read the first sketch with more interest, though certainly with less admiration than its more fanciful and more gorgeous successor, which really seems something like a beauty oppressed with the weight and splendour of her ornaments. The game at cards, the most ingenious and beautiful of all the additions, is only reality splendidly embellished, and would have been equally well placed in the first sketch." Macaulay vindicates the counsel of Addison upon a general principle, irrespective of the apparent want of fitness between supernatural agents and the frivolities of fashion,—a principle "the result of wide and long experience," which is, that a successful work of imagination is injured by being recast. "We cannot at this moment," he says, "call to mind a single instance in which this rule has been transgressed with happy effect, except the instance of the Rape of the Lock. Tasso recast his Jerusalem. Akenside recast his Pleasures of the Imagination, and his Epistle to Curio. Pope himself, emboldened no doubt by the success with which he had expanded and remodelled the Rape of the Lock, made the same experiment on the Dunciad. All these attempts failed. Who was to foresee that Pope would once in his life be able to do what he could not himself do twice, and what nobody else has ever done? Addison's advice was good, but if it had been bad, why should we pronounce it dishonest? Scott tells us that one of his best friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles the Fifth. Nay Pope himself was one of those who prophesied that Cato would never succeed on the stage, and advised Addison to print it without risking a representation.[310]But Scott, Goethe,Robertson, Addison, had the good sense and generosity to give their advisers credit for the best intentions. Pope's heart was not of the same kind with theirs."[311]Of the examples, which Macaulay quotes, of poems marred in the attempt to mend them, the Jerusalem of Tasso was the only one which existed in the days of Addison; and the Jerusalem was not a parallel case, for the mind of Tasso was diseased when he remodelled his work, and he yielded, against his judgment, to the cavils of critics instead of obeying the self-born calls of imagination. Most men nevertheless would instinctively recommend that whatever was beautiful should be let alone, lest it should be deteriorated in the effort to make it better. When Pope boasted that the adaptation of the new parts to the old, in the Rape of the Lock, was the greatest triumph of his skill, he himself confessed the risk and difficulty of the process, and justified the misgivings of Addison. But besides the general hazard, we should expect, with Mr. Croker, that Addison would have thought the particular project for improving the poem to be essentially bad. Pope had shown a predilection for heathen mythology, and his management of it had been clumsy and lifeless. His scheme would have called up to Addison's mind the interposition of the gods and goddesses in Homer and Virgil. The conjunction of these obsolete figments, under new names, with the trivialities of modern society, would have seemed incongruous and pedantic,[312]and the previous works of Pope would have compelled the conclusion that he had not the skill to deal with ethereal fiction. Addison could neither have divined from a conversational description how perfectly the agents would be adapted to their office, nor from Pope's existing poetry how delicious they would be rendered by the felicity of the execution. Unless there was the strongest presumption that the recommendation to leave the poem unaltered was made in good faith, we should not be warranted in believing the story, for no reliance could be placed on the unsupported testimony of Pope when he was safe from contradiction, and his object was to damage the reputation of a rival.

Pope is convicted on his own evidence. He admits that the incident "firstopened his eyes to the character of Addison," and byconsequence that Addison's conduct had been hitherto blameless. He thus bears witness against himself of his readiness to impute the basest motives upon the most trumpery pretexts. Being "shocked" at the moral turpitude of "his friend," he could never again have treated him with cordiality and confidence, and the alienation which ensued, must, on Pope's own showing, have had its origin in Pope's morbid suspicions. But there was an earlier transaction, which turns the tables with fatal force upon Pope. Anterior to the conversation on the Rape of the Lock,[313]he urged Lintot the bookseller to persuade Dennis to criticise Addison's Cato.[314]Dennis published his Remarks, and Pope followed with his anonymous pamphlet, Dr. Norris's Narrative of the Phrenzy of J.D.,—a coarse, dull production, consisting of nothing but low, intemperate abuse. Pope's device pointed to three results. He would damage the reputation of Addison's play; he would provoke him into turning his wrath upon Dennis; and he would secure an opening for venting his own spleen against the critic without seeming to be actuated by personal spite. Addison was disgusted with the pamphlet; and, ignorant probably of its parentage, he let Dennis know that he repudiated and condemned it.[315]The worst was to come. More than twenty years afterwards Pope dressed up a letter which he had written to Caryll, on the occasion of an attack in the Flying Post, and pretended that it had been written to Addison when his play was assailed by Dennis. In this fraudulent document Pope congratulates him on his share in "the envy and calumny, which is the portion of all good and great men," and declares that "he felt more warmth" at the Remarks on Cato than when he read the Reflections on the Essay on Criticism.[316]Having prompted the abuse,he published a fictitious letter to persuade the world that he had overflowed with generous indignation. He wanted posterity to believe that he had poured out these magnanimous sentiments to Addison, who returned him envy and malice. His object was to magnify his own virtues, and transfer his meanness and jealousy to the amiable genius he had formerly wronged. "Addison," he said, "was very kind to me at first, but my bitter enemy afterwards,"[317]and with the consciousness of guilt, he tried to conceal that he had forfeited the kindness by misconduct. He was bold with his forgeries and falsehoods in the confidence that a dead man could tell no tales. Happily there are flaws in the best-laid dishonest plots, and the hour of retribution comes at last. At what period or in what degree Addison himself detected Pope's practices is not definitely known, but he discovered enough to avoid him. "Leave him as soon as you can," he said to Lady Mary W. Montagu;"he will certainly play you some devilish trick else. He has an appetite to satire."

Up to the Rape of the Lock, Pope had only put borrowed thoughts into verse. He now broke out into originality, but not without some obligation to his predecessors. In one place De Quincey maintains that the Rape of the Lock was not suggested by the Lutrin, because Pope did not read French with ease to himself, and in another place that Voltaire must have been wrong in saying that "Pope could hardly read French," inasmuch as there are "numerous proofs that he had read Boileau with so much feeling of his peculiar merit that he has appropriated and naturalised some of his best passages."[319]The second statement of De Quincey was the latest and the truest. Pope refers to the Lutrin in his manuscript notes on the Remarks of Dennis, and certainly had it in his mind when he framed the scheme of his poem. "The treasurer," it is said, in the summary prefixed to Boileau's work, "is the highest dignitary in the chapter. The precentor is the second dignitary. In front of the seat of the latter there was formerly an enormous reading-desk, which almost concealed him. He had it removed, and the treasurer wanted to put it back. Hence arose the dispute which is the subject of the present poem." Boileau converted the squabble into a satire on the indolence, the sensuality, and pride of the cathedral clergy in the licentious reign of Louis XIV. Pope converted the quarrel between Miss Fermor and Lord Petre into a satire on the frivolities of a young lady of fashion from her morning toilet to the close of her giddy day. Boileau called the Lutrin a new species of burlesque, "because," he said, "in other burlesques Dido and Æneas speak like fishwomen and scavengers; here a barber and his wife speak like Dido and Æneas." Popeadopted a similar vein, and invested the trifles of a gay and frivolous life with an adventitious importance. Boileau parodied some well-known passages of Virgil. Pope parodied both Virgil and Homer. The Lutrin opens with Discord appearing to the sleeping treasurer, and warning him against the encroachments of the rebellious precentor. The enlarged Rape of the Lock opens with Ariel appearing, in a dream, to Belinda, and beseeching her to beware of some disastrous impending event. The raillery on the foibles of women, which is the central idea in Pope's poem, was caught up from the exquisite pleasantry of Addison, who, in the Tatlers and Spectators, had endeavoured to laugh the fair sex out of their levities of behaviour, and extravagances of dress. Through his delicate humour, it had become the popular topic in the light literature of the day.

Johnson says of the sylphs that they are "a new race of beings," and that there is nothing "but the names of his agents which Pope has not invented." This is an exaggeration. The names were a considerable part of the novelty; for, in the fundamental conception, the sylphs in the Rape of the Lock were the time-honoured fairies of English literature. Their immediate prototypes are the elves of Shakespeare. The sprites of Pope belong to the same family with the diminutive, joyous, ethereal creatures which anciently crept into acorn cups, couched in the bells of cowslips, or lived under blossoms; who sported in air, rode on the curled clouds, and flitted with the swiftness of thought over land and sea; who hung dew-drops on flowers, fetched jewels from the deep, shaded sleeping eyes from moonbeams with wings plucked from painted butterflies, and who mingled, benignly or maliciously, in all but the graver varieties of human affairs. Pope acknowledges the ancestry of his newly-named race when Ariel,—whose own name confesses his parentage,—addressing his subjects, says,

Ye sylphs and sylphids, to your chief give ear;Fays, fairies, genii, elves, and demons hear.

The benevolent and mischievous fairies of old days were, in their turn, little more than the good and evil angels dwarfed to suit their lighter functions. For the precise outward aspect which Pope assigned to the sylphs, he was beholden to Spenser, with whose works he was well acquainted:

And all about her neck and shoulders flewA flock of little loves, and sports, and joys,With nimble wings of gold and purple hue,Whose shapes seemed not like to terrestrial boys,But like to angels playing heav'nly toys.

These are just the beings who hover round Belinda. But though Johnson's claim for Pope is over-stated, his supernatural agents arethe product of genius. The vividness with which they are described, the novel offices they fulfil, the poetic beauty with which they are invested, even when engaged in employments not in their nature poetic, constitute them a distinct variety, and they rise up before our minds like a fresh creation, and not as the reflection of antecedent familiar forms. The remark is true of the work throughout. What Pope borrowed he varied, embellished, and combined in a manner which leaves the poem unique. Some of the parts may be traced to earlier sources, but few master-pieces have more originality in the aggregate.

"The Rape of the Lock," says De Quincey, "is the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers."[320]"The Rape of the Lock," says Hazlitt, "is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work ever invented. It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance is given to everything—to paste, pomatum, billets-doux, and patches. Airs, languid airs, breathe around; the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic."[321]The world of fashion is displayed in its most gorgeous and attractive hues, and everywhere the emptiness is visible beneath the outward splendour. The beauty of Belinda, the details of her toilet, her troops of admirers, her progress up the Thames, the game at cards, the aerial escort which attend upon her, are all set forth with unrivalled grace and fascination, and all bear the impress of vanity and vexation. Nothing can exceed the art with which the satire is blended with the pomp, mocking without disturbing the unsubstantial gewgaw. The double vein is kept up with sustained skill in the picture of the outward charms and inward frivolity of women. Ariel, describing the influence of the sylphs upon them, says, that

With varying vanities from ev'ry part,They shift the moving toy-shop of their heart.

This is the tone throughout. Their hearts are toy-shops. They reverse the relative importance of things, and, as Hazlitt says, the "little" with them "is great, and the great little." The Bible ismixed up with "files of pins, puffs, powders, patches, billets-doux." Chastity and china, prayers and masquerades, love and jewellery are put upon a nominal equality, but with a manifest preponderance in favour of the china, masquerades, and jewellery. The female passion is for carriages, dress, cards, rank, and it is an insoluble mystery that "a belle should reject a lord." The "grave Clarissa," who rebukes the "airs and flights" of Belinda, can offer no higher motive for intermixing solid with trifling qualities than

Thatmenmay say, when we the front-box grace,"Behold the first in virtue as in face!"

The continuous raillery against female foibles is playful in its poignancy. The whole wears a festive air, and has none of the ill-nature and venom which marked Pope's later satire.

In allotting their several functions to the sylphs, Ariel reserves Belinda's lap-dog for his own especial charge:

Ariel himself shall be the guard of Shock.

Dennis said it was "contrary to all manner of judgment and decorum" that the chief of the aerial train should be "only the keeper of a vile Iceland cur," instead of protecting "the lady's favourite lock."[322]Ruffhead repeated the futile objection.[323]"Black omens" announced that some misfortune would befall Belinda, but the precise calamity had been "wrapped by the fates in night." For aught Ariel knew, the attack might be directed against the favourite dog, which is neither "vile" nor "a cur" in Pope's poem, and which we may do Belinda the justice to believe was more precious in her eyes than even a favourite ringlet. She would rather have sacrificed her lock than her dog. Dennis from hostility, and Ruffhead from dullness, missed the meaning of the stroke. The climax of the omens which prefigured the coming disaster was that "Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind." The "shrieks" of the heroine, when the catastrophe arrived, were such as "when husbands or when lap-dogs breathe their last." A gnome bent upon mischief made pampered lap-dogs ill, and bright eyes wept over them. The undue fondness for dogs and parrots, to the depreciation of the higher claims of humanity, was no uncommon failing, and Pope's design was to ridicule it. Locks of hair did not usurp the same supreme dominion, and Ariel, ignorant where the danger would light, is properly represented as guarding the pet dog, which had the first place in the affections of heartless women of fashion.

To the distempered mind of Dennis the sylphs appeared an absurdexcrescence. "They neither promote," he says, "nor retard the danger of Belinda."[324]Johnson admits the force of the observation, and thinks it "implies some want of art that their power has not been sufficiently intermingled with the action." The criticism seems hasty. The sylphs have a large share in the fascination of Belinda. Their province is to heighten and protect her charms,—to preside at her toilet, to imprison essences, to save the powder from too rude a gale, to steal washes from the rainbow, to assist her blushes, and inspire her airs. They perform these offices up to the fatal moment, and are not an incumbrance to the narrative merely because they cannot avert the final stroke. Nay, their impotence to stay the crisis is in keeping with the general spirit of the poem. Belinda leads a life of vanity, and the sylphs are the ministers of vanity. They are lustrous with a butterfly beauty, the patrons of ephemeral folly, and it would be inconsistent with the moral if they could have ensured a perpetual triumph to weaknesses which inevitably terminate in mortification. Pope accounts for the failure of the watchful legion to turn aside the catastrophe. Ariel recognises that his power is gone when he perceives "an earthly lover lurking at Belinda's heart,"—an intimation, perhaps, that lovers are headstrong and incapable of guidance. Johnson asserts, and with as little reason, that the game of cards, like the machinery, has no connection with the subject of the poem. That subject is the exaltation of a beautiful young lady throughout a day of glittering fashion, till the hollow pomp ends in humiliation, anger, and tears. Whatever amusements and pageantry entered into a day of the kind belonged directly to the theme, provided they could be made subservient to poetic effect.

When Ariel, baffled and weeping, is compelled to resign his charge, the gnomes rush upon the scene, and retain their ascendancy till near the end. They are but slightly sketched, and all we hear of the appearance they present is that they have "a dusky, melancholy" aspect, and "sooty pinions." Their functions are the opposite to those of the sylphs,—they give lap-dogs diseases, discompose head-dresses, raise pimples on beauteous faces, engender pride, and spoil graces. Dennis detected a flaw. Umbriel descends to the Cave of Spleen, and procures from the goddess a bag filled with the impetuous, and a phial with the depressing passions. The gnome empties the bag of "sighs, sobs, and the war of tongues" on Belinda, who immediately "burns with more than mortal ire." The gnome next breaks over her the phial of "fainting fears and soft sorrows," when she exchanges her expression of rage for "eyes half-languishing, half-drowned in tears." "Now," says Dennis, "what could be more useless, whether we look upon the bag or the bottle?"[325]Without anyassistance from the contents of the bag the "livid lightning had flashed from Belinda's eyes," and she had "rent the affrighted skies with her screams of horror." Without any assistance from the bottle she was found, on the gnome's return, sunk in the arms of a friend, "her hair unbound, and her eyes dejected." Pope replied on the margin of his copy of Dennis's pamphlet, that Juno in the Æneid summons Alecto from the infernal regions to stir up Amata, who was already burning with anger. This was no answer if the cases had been parallel, which they were not, for Amata's anger was only a passive irritation, and Alecto was sent to goad her into active fury. A few words would have obviated the criticism of Dennis, but the Cave of Spleen would still be out of place. The personifications of ill-nature, affectation, and diseased fancies are literal descriptions of men and women transferred from the surface of the globe to a pretended world at its centre. Where no invention is displayed, where there is nothing to gratify and beguile the imagination, the departure from fact is distasteful to the mind. Instead of copying classic fables, unsuited to modern times, Pope might have exhibited the inhabitants of his Cave of Spleen in the midst of that society to which they belonged, and ascribed their repulsive qualities to the instigation of the gnomes. These rather nugatory beings would have gained in importance, and the pictures of the peevish, the affected, and the splenetic would have gained in force and truth.

Dennis justly found fault with particular passages, which are equally false to social usages, and the general conception of the poem. The exultation of Belinda at winning a game of cards takes the form of "shouts which fill the sky," and which are echoed back from "the woods and long canals." The impertinence of the baron in cutting off her curl required a strong expression of indignation, but not that "the affrighted skies should be rent with screams of horror." At the conclusion of the battle, which in some of its incidents is a mere vulgar brawl, Belinda again manifests her stentorian propensities by "roaring in a louder strain than fierce Othello." There is no affinity between Belinda gentle, graceful, and captivating, and Belinda shouting, screaming, and roaring. Pope called his poem "heroi-comical," and it is evident that he attached different meanings to the word. It was "heroi-comical" to bring supernatural machinery to bear upon common-place life, and surround the toilet and card-table with a fairy brilliancy. It was equally "heroi-comical" to give vent to the ebullitions of tragic or jovial frenzy on trivial occasions. The first species of the "heroi-comical" lent a borrowed splendour to its objects; the second species was burlesque, and reduced the heroine in her angry moods, to the level of a coarse, plebeian termagant, and in her joyous moments to that of an unmannerly, low-bred romp. The two species of the "heroi-comical" could not be applied to thesame person without jarring discordance, and fortunately the burlesque and disenchanting element is only sparingly introduced.

"The Rape of the Lock," said Dennis, "is an empty trifle, which cannot have a moral." The Lutrin, he maintains, on the contrary, is "an important satirical poem upon the luxury, pride, and animosities of thepopish clergy, and the moral is, that when christians, and especially theclergy, run into great heats aboutreligioustrifles, their animosity proceeds from the want of thatreligionwhich is the pretence of their quarrel."[326]Pope erased the epithet "religious," and substituting "female sex" for "popish clergy," "ladies" for "clergy," and "sense" for "religion," claimed the description for the Rape of the Lock. Dennis quotes some lines in which Boileau, he says, gives "broad hints of his real meaning," and Pope writes on the margin the words, "Clarissa's speech,"—a speech which is more definite than any of the hints in the Lutrin. In delicious verse Clarissa dwells on the transitory power of a handsome face, insists on the superior influence of good humour, and concludes with the couplet,—

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