RAPE OF THE LOCK.

AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM.

WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1712.

THE RAPE OF THE LOCK.

AN HEROI-COMICAL POEM.

Printed for Bernard 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 for Bernard 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.—Pope in Spence.

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 so well, 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 example of 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 help and 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 their power 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,

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,

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:

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 not written at 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 not published at her request, for in the Dedication of the second edition to Miss Fermor, 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 appear to 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 shocked for 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 "first opened his eyes to the character of Addison," and by consequence 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." Pope adopted 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,

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:

These are just the beings who hover round Belinda. But though Johnson's claim for Pope is over-stated, his supernatural agents are the 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

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 is mixed 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

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:

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 absurd excrescence. "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 any assistance 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 the same 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 the popish clergy, and the moral is, that when christians, and especially the clergy, run into great heats about religious trifles, their animosity proceeds from the want of that religion which 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,—

The moral here summed up pervades the poem, which is a continuous satire on a tinsel existence. The injunction to be sweet-tempered is indignantly rejected by Belinda, for the piece was professedly founded on a subsisting feud, but the common sense of the admonitions shames the folly which rejects them. Dennis undertook an impossible task when he laboured to demonstrate the superiority of Boileau. The Lutrin is stilted, extravagant, and prosaic by the side of the Rape of the Lock.

Dennis's pamphlet against the Rape of the Lock consisted of seven letters and a preface. Of four of these letters, Pope has written, in his copy, sarcastic summaries, which throw no light on his poem, but which betray by their exaggeration, his soreness at the criticisms. Letter 1. "Proving that Boileau did not call his Lutrin, Poeme Héroi-Comique, that Bossu does not say [anything of] the machines, and that Butler [wrote][327] the notes to his own Hudibras." Letter 2. "Mr. Dennis's positive word that the Rape of the Lock can be nothing but a trifle, and that the Lutrin cannot be so, however it may appear." Letter 3. "Where it appears to demonstration that no handsome lady ought to dress herself, and no modest one to cry out or be angry." Letter 5. "Showeth that the Rosicrucian doctrine is not the christian, and that Callimachus and Catullus were a couple of fools." Catullus and Callimachus are not mentioned by Dennis. He had only condemned a passage in Pope which was imitated from these poets. In the third letter Dennis said nothing against handsome women dressing themselves, or against modest women crying out, but maintained that simplicity of dress was more becoming than lavish adornments, and that "well-bred ladies," when joyful or angry, did not fill the skies and surrounding country with their shoutings and roarings. In the first letter the note of some commentator on Hudibras was ascribed by Dennis to Butler, and in the second letter he asserted that Boileau showed more judgment in styling the Lutrin an "heroic poem" than did Pope in terming the Rape of the Lock "heroi-comical." Dennis was not aware that Boileau in 1709 had replaced "héroique" by "héroi-comique," and that the English poet borrowed the epithet from his French precursor. Pope's manuscript annotations are not behind Dennis's text in petty cavils. The combatants were both too angry to be candid; or if Dennis shows candour, it is in his undisguised disregard of it. He fulminated against Pope for calling the objects of his dislike "fool, dunce, blockhead, scoundrel." "Nothing," he continues, "incapacitates a man so much for using foul language as good sense, good-nature, and good-breeding; and nothing qualifies a man more for it than his being a clown, a fool, and a barbarian." Therefore, said he, "I shall call A. P——E neither fool nor dunce, nor blockhead; but I shall prove that he is all these in a most egregious manner."[328] For boasting a virtue in the act of violating it Dennis had no competitor.

Wordsworth, writing to Mr. Dyce says, "Pope, in that production of his boyhood, the Ode to Solitude, and in his Essay on Criticism, has furnished proofs that at one period of his life he felt the charm of a sober and subdued style, which he afterwards abandoned for one that is, to my taste at least, too pointed and ambitious, and for a versification too timidly balanced."[329] Southey and Coleridge accused Pope of debasing the public taste, but they agreed in laying the blame on his "meretricious" Homer, and excepted from their condemnation works which Wordsworth included in his censure. "The mischief," says Southey, "was effected not by Pope's satirical and moral pieces, for these entitle him to the highest place among poets of his class; it was by his Homer. No other work in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry."[330] "In the course of one of my lectures," says Coleridge, "I had occasion to point out the almost faultless position and choice of words in Pope's original compositions, particularly in his Satires, and Moral Essays, for the purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which I do not stand alone in regarding as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction."[331] Wordsworth loved simplicity of composition, and language not ornate. His preference for the Essay on Criticism would be intelligible if the piece had been free from adorned passages, and the strained attempt to be pointed in some of the similes; or if the style, in the quieter passages, had been consummate of its kind. Cowper has described the qualities which are essential to the highest excellence in this species of poetry. "Every man," he says, "conversant with verse-making, knows by painful experience that the familiar style is of all styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake."[332] Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, did not reach Cowper's standard, and far happier specimens of the style will be found in some of his Satires.

The Rape of the Lock greatly surpasses in execution the Essay on Criticism; and austere, indeed, must be the taste which could condemn it. The "position of the words" is not always "faultless," for Pope admitted too many of his usual inversions, but the phraseology is beautiful in itself, and exquisitely adapted to the subject. The language, simple in its units, is rich in combination, without ever being florid or profuse. The poet had to depict empty glories made up of outward pageantry, and as rainbows cannot be painted with grey, so Pope dipped his pen in the glowing colours which represented the things. He could not have employed his radiant tints with greater delicacy and power. Few as are the details, the scenic effect is complete. He displayed his judgment in eschewing minuteness which would have been tedious and prosaic; the frail, superficial show could only be imposing in a general view. The pointed lines which offended Wordsworth, are not more numerous than befit the theme. A certain sparkle of style accorded best with the glitter of the world described. Dennis denounced the "puns." He said, "they shocked the rules of true pleasantry, and bore the same proportion to thought which bubbles held to bodies."[333] Two or three of the double-meanings are offensive from that grossness which is the single serious flaw in the brilliant gem. The few which remain are legitimate in a lively poem, when thus sparingly introduced. Nor are they common puns, but words used at once in their literal and metaphorical sense:

Johnson has pointed out that Denham's verses on the Thames, "O! could I flow like thee," are marked by the same property, and no one would call them punning lines.[334]

The enlarged edition of the Rape of the Lock had a rapid popularity. "It has in four days' time," wrote Pope to Caryll, March 12, 1714, "sold to the number of three thousand, and is already reprinted." "The sylphs and the gnomes," says Tyers, "were the deities of the day."[335] Much of the relish, with the herd of readers, has passed away with the novelty. "Of the Rape of the Lock," says Professor Reed, "I acknowledge my inability of admiration,"[336] and numbers who admire would qualify the superlative language of De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Bowles. The conventional elegancies of a particular class do not appeal to universal sympathy. Many persons can enter no better into the fanciful beauty which is thrown around routine trivialities. The facts with them are too strong to admit of fiction. To these inaptitudes it must be added that the subtle delicacies of humour, satire, language, and invention, which mingle largely with the obvious beauties of the Rape of the Lock, can only be perceived when the taste has been quickened by the early culture of letters. De Quincey remarks that, with all orders of men, the elementary passions and principles are easiest understood, for the seeds of them are sown in every mind, and Milton and Shakespeare speak to understandings which are impervious to the refined and airy graces of Pope's artificial world.[337]

A few have gone into the opposite extreme, and placed Pope on a level with Shakespeare and Milton themselves. His strongest claim to the distinction is the Rape of the Lock, but wide is the interval, whether the test is character, passions, manners, descriptions, or machinery. The characters in Pope's poem are slight and superficial. There is a miniature sketch of an empty-headed fop, and an outside view of a beautiful young lady fond of dress, amusements, and admiration; the rest of the human personages are shadows. Passions, says Bowles, are the soul of poetry, and in poetry of the highest order they are grand, terrible, pathetic, or lovely; the grovelling, ludicrous, and trivial passions are of a less poetical species. The passions of Belinda belong to this lower class. Her grief and anger at the loss of her curl are professedly mock-heroic. They are disproportioned to the frivolous cause, and neither kindle, nor are meant to kindle, sympathy. The manners are not the index to inner depths,—the outward expression of the noble, the awful, or the tender. They are an exterior varnish, the mere formalities of fashion. The descriptions, apart from the sylphs, are chiefly of the toilet, the card-table, and such-like things, which have no kin-ship with the strong, abiding emotions. The very sylphs, by their employments, are, poetically, of an inferior race to the fairies who met

The beings who luxuriate in the everlasting beauties of nature have a deeper charm for us than creatures whose chief delight is in the little artifices of a woman's toilet. The skill is exquisite by which the ephemeral nothings of gay fashion are coloured with the hues of poetic fancy, but in spite of the brilliancy they remain nothings still, and cannot compete with strains which are struck from the profoundest chords in the heart and mind of man. Lord Byron, to save the supremacy of Pope, asserted that "the poet is always ranked according to his execution."[339] Bowles maintained that the test of poetical excellence was the subject and execution combined.[340] He admitted that the loftiest theme in feeble hands would be eclipsed by insignificant topics when treated by a master, but he said that no genius could render subordinate topics equal in poetry to the highest where the execution, as in Shakespeare and Milton, was worthy of the subject. Lord Byron stultified himself. He had no sooner completed his proof that execution was the sole criterion of poetry, than he went on to argue that "the highest of all poetry is ethical poetry, as the highest of all earthly objects must be moral truth."[341] His paradox did not deserve a reply, even if he had not contradicted it the moment it was uttered. Hume wisely recommended that words should not be wasted upon theories which it is inconceivable that any human being could believe.

In his Observations on the Poetry of Pope, Bowles put the modes and incidents of artificial life, the secondary passions, and descriptions of outward objects in a lower grade than the development of the impressive passions.[342] What he said of manners and passions was suppressed by Campbell, who based his reply upon his own misstatements, and proceeded to protest against "trying Pope exclusively by his powers of describing inanimate phenomena."[343] No one could be more emphatic than Bowles in placing souls before things. Of "inanimate phenomena," he had said that "all images drawn from what is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature, are more beautiful and sublime than any images drawn from art." Again, his antagonists misrepresented him, and arguing as though he had asserted that all images drawn from nature were beautiful, and that there was no beauty in any image drawn from art, they imagined they refuted him by adducing natural objects which were unsightly, and artificial objects which were the reverse. The canal at Venice, without the buildings and gondolas "would be nothing," said Lord Byron, "but a clay-coloured ditch."[344] The illustration did not touch the position of Bowles, who had never pretended that the ugly in nature eclipsed the beautiful in art. His principle was that, beauty for beauty, Solomon in the richest products of the loom was not arrayed like the flowers of the field. Campbell did not reason better than Byron. He selected the launching of a ship of the line for an instance of the sublime. Admitting, what nobody could deny, that his ship was poetical, it did not follow that the wooden structure had the grandeur of the ocean. His language was a virtual confession that it was inferior. He endowed his "vast bulwark" with attributes borrowed from nature, human and inanimate. He thought "of the stormy element on which the vessel was soon to ride, of the days of battle and nights of danger she had to encounter, of the ends of the earth which she had to visit, of all that she had to do and suffer for her country." He found the sublimity, not in the ship, but in the associations,—in the stormy waves of the mighty deep which was to be her home; in the terrors of darkness when she was tempest-driven; in the vast distances she had to traverse; in the perils and patriotism of the crew; in the fierce heroic contention of the battle. Campbell was self-refuted. He fell into the same error with respect to some fragments he quoted from the poets. Images derived from nature and art were mixed together, and he did not perceive that the passages owed their principal beauty to the nature. The fallacies of disputants who wrote without thinking were easily exposed, and Bowles got a signal victory over the whole of his numerous opponents.

Many a work of man, like the ship, impresses us less by its intrinsic qualities than by the train of ideas it suggests. Until the errors of controversialists called for fuller explanations Bowles did not draw the distinction, and Lord Byron was misled by overlooking it. "The Parthenon," he said, "is more poetical than the rock on which it stands."[345] "Not," replied Hazlitt, "because it is a work of art, but because it is a work of art o'erthrown."[346] Prostrate and broken columns, rent walls, and mouldering stone, exercise a more potent sway over the feelings than temples in the freshness of their artistic beauty. Hazlitt tells the obvious cause. Relics of departed glory, dilapidated monuments of intellectual splendour, are mementos of the fate which awaits the proudest works of man. With the thoughts of mighty reverses mingle the reflections which are always engendered by antiquity. The imagination reverts to shadowy, remote generations, to a people and power long ago laid in dust, and the ruins have a pathos which is the result of the centuries that have swept over them,—of the mysteries, vicissitudes, and havoc of time. When Lord Byron asked if there was an image in Gray's Elegy more striking than his "shapeless sculptures," his own question might have revealed the truth to him.[347] Whatever poetry may be embodied in the matchless art of Greece, there can be none in the "shapeless sculptures" of country tomb-stones; but they are memorials set up by poor cottagers to protect the bones of kindred from insult, and the whole force of the phrase in the Elegy arises from the prominence given to the tenderness and affection of which "the shapeless sculptures" are the symbols. The emotion is extrinsic to the rude, prosaic, and often ludicrous art. The same image becomes poetical or unpoetical according to the associations with which it is linked. The rusting, disused needles of Cowper's Mary, stricken by paralysis, are associated, Byron says, "with the darning of stockings, the hemming of shirts, and the mending of breeches."[348] This is the ordinary, mechanic association, and had it been the association called up by Cowper's lines they would not have been, what Byron pronounced them, "eminently poetical and pathetic." The associations are of another kind. The thousands who have shed tears over the lines to Mary did not pay a tribute to the needles, or the uses to which the needles were applied. They were melted by the representation—true and strong as the living facts—of love, of decay, of desolation, and of anguish. The different aspect of the same incident through the influence of association is exemplified in the description of the tea in the Rape of the Lock, and in the Task. The passage of Pope is not united to any sentiment, and only pleases from the elegance of the verse and language. Cowper sets the heart in a glow with the delicious picture he presents of "fire-side enjoyments, and home-born happiness."

Out-door nature, and the imposing or beautiful passions, were not "the haunt and main region of Pope's song," and Bowles, after saying that the representation of nature demanded a susceptible heart, and an observing eye, goes on to state that "the weak eyes and tottering strength" of Pope were the reason that he seldom excelled in depicting natural appearances. His legs would not serve him to walk nor his eyes to see, and he was limited to the particulars which "could be gained by books, or suggested by imagination." "From his infirmities," Bowles continues, "he must have been chiefly conversant with artificial life, but if he had been gifted with the same powers of observing outward nature, I have no doubt he would have evinced as much accuracy in describing the appropriate and peculiar beauties such as nature exhibits in the Forest where he lived, as he was able to describe in a manner so novel, and with colours so vivid, a game of cards."[349] The premises are erroneous. Pope's vision was not bad; his eyes, says Warburton, were "fine, sharp, and piercing;"[350] and though he was too feeble for long walks, he could, and did, ramble through woods and meadows, and along the banks of streams. Nine-tenths of the finest descriptions from nature in the poets are of sights and sounds which were within the range of his common experience. The decision of Bowles must be reversed, and we must ascribe the little nature in Pope's works to his want of mental "susceptibility," and not to physical infirmity. His love of the country was the cursory admiration which is seldom wanting. He had none of the exceptional enthusiasm which could lead him to revel in nature, to scrutinise it, and enrich his mind with its memories. His strongest sympathies and antipathies were directed to the society of his day,—to the men who praised or abused, caressed or defied him.

The object of Bowles in setting forth his critical principles, was not to condemn descriptions of artificial life or images taken from art, but to single out the circumstances which render one class of poetry more exalted than another. The bulk of Pope's works were satirical and didactic: and the affinity to the highest species of poetry in the Rape of the Lock, and the Epistle of Eloisa, was not so complete as to place him on a level with the mightiest masters. Warton and Bowles united in ranking him before Dryden and next to Milton.[351] Johnson doubtfully, and Cowper unhesitatingly, put Dryden before him.[352] Cowper states that he had "known persons of taste and discernment who would not allow that Pope was a poet at all," and the language of some writers implies that his claim to be called a poet was a serious moot-point with critics. Johnson gravely replied to the question "whether Pope was a poet," and Hazlitt said in 1818, that it was "a question which had hardly yet been settled."[353] Who the sceptics were does not appear, and it is probable that the opinion was never maintained by a single person of reputation. Pope was placed higher by Warton and Bowles, who were accused of depreciating, than by Johnson who defended him. Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge had "an antipathy to him," according to Byron;[354] but this was a false charge, originating in his own antipathy to Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. They all admitted that Pope had a brilliant poetical genius, and that many of his poems were of extraordinary excellence. Wordsworth, the one perhaps of the three who held him the cheapest, said he was "a man most highly gifted, who unluckily took to the plain when the heights were within his reach." Yet, while thinking that his poetry was not of the most poetical kind "he committed much of him to memory," acknowledged that "he succeeded as far as he went," and in mentioning the persons, dramatists omitted, who were the representatives of the "poetic genius of England," he specially named "Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, and Pope."[355] The real Pope controversy was with the zealots who maintained that he was of the same flight with Shakespeare and Milton. Their lofty estimate of his comparative excellence, did not arise from their keener appreciation of his merits; they were simply men of cold, unimaginative minds, who were insensible to merits which were greater still.

"Pope," said Hazlitt, "had none of the enthusiasm of poetry; he was in poetry what the sceptic is in religion."[356] This was a creed he sometimes avowed. "Poetry and criticism," he said in the preface to his works, "are only the affair of idle men who write in their closets, and of idle men who read there."[357] He talked later of his "idle songs," but in the same breath, with characteristic inconsistency, he set up to be the moral reformer of his age, and had undertaken a little before "to vindicate" in verse "the ways of God to man."[358] His views of his art are contradictory and irreconcileable. His disparagement of it was an affectation founded upon a common definition of poetry, that its end was to please. The premise, false from its incompleteness, led to degrading conclusions. Hurd, who studied poetry for the purpose of analysing its ingredients, and who should have known its true properties, adopted the usual pleasure theory, and at thirty-seven he was naturally ashamed of his frivolous pursuit. "He must not," he said, "pass more of his life in these flowery regions; the light food was not the proper nourishment of age." Verse was the amusement of youth, and unless very sparingly used, was unbecoming the gravity of mature minds.[359] Milton had another conception of the office of poetry, and he avowed that his purpose was "to inbreed and cherish in a great people whatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave." Wordsworth was of Milton's school. His aim was, "to make men wiser, better, and happier." "Every great poet," he said, "is a teacher; I wish to be considered as a teacher or as nothing."[360] The right doctrine was enforced by a critic whom Pope despised. "Poetry," wrote Dennis, "has two ends,—a subordinate and a final one: the subordinate one is pleasure, and the final one is instruction."[361] He had the sanction of Lord Bacon, who declared that "poesy" had three uses, of which two were to inculcate morality and heroism; the third alone was for "delectation."[362] Aristotle long before had contended that poetry was a more effective school of virtue than philosophy, and Horace avowed his conviction that right and wrong were taught better by Homer than by the sages. The least reflection upon the range of the noblest poetry must satisfy anybody that entertainment is its smallest function. The poet has the world of external things from which to cull his pictures. He gives definiteness to what was vague, fixes what was transitory, detects delightful resemblances, and brings to view unnoticed beauties. He invests the realities with the thoughts of his impassioned mind, creating in us sentiments, and supplying us with associations which we should not have derived from the actual objects. Nature, in itself enchanting, has meanings for us which were never dreamt of till we saw it through the medium of the poet's representations. He has the world of mankind for his province. He can take us the circuit of the passions; he can summon them from the inner recesses of the soul, and set them in open array; he can assign to each its rightful force, stripping corruption of its disguises, and displaying what is lovely in its unadulterated lustre. He can soar at pleasure into loftier regions, and when his main theme lies in a lower sphere can link it, openly or by implication, to the world of spirits,—to the divinity and the divine. Verse abounds in the strains which lift the soul to heaven, or bring down heaven to glorify earth, and sustain its weakness and woes. In a word, the poet treats of nature, man, the superhuman, and treats of them in a way which dilates our faculties and feelings, till through the contemplation of the ideal we attain to a grander real. "Poesy," says Lord Bacon, "was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."[363] The domain of high poetry is the sublime, the solemn, the terrible, the pathetic, the tender, the sweet, and the tranquil; the office of poetry is to purify, to ennoble, to humanise, to soften, to soothe, and to delight. Poetry is great, and participates of divineness in proportion as it employs these means, and attains these ends. The dry unprofitable seeds which lurk in the heart, are by poetry quickened into a resplendent growth. Through poetry, obscure vestiges of truth start into distinctness, and flash upon the inward eye. Through poetry, the ethereal elements of the mind, incessantly dissipated and deadened by common concerns, are renewed in their sanctity. In the reach and importance of the lessons no hard prosaic facts can go beyond exalted poetry. The lesser kinds have their lesser uses, and chiefly in this that they are often more attractive in youth than healthier inspirations, and prepare the way for them. Wordsworth, in his boyhood, was entranced by the false glitter of famous poems which in his manhood seemed to him "dead as a theatre fresh emptied of spectators."[364] Thrown aside when they had served their purpose, they were the initial sparks which kindled a spirit that took precedence even of Milton in the depth and compass of thoughts and feelings almost deserving the name of revelations.

TO MRS.[365] ARABELLA FERMOR.

Madam,

It will be in vain to deny that I have some regard for this piece, since I dedicate it to you. Yet you may bear me witness, it was intended only to divert a few young ladies, who have good sense and good humour enough to laugh not only at their sex's little unguarded follies, but at their own. But as it was communicated with the air of a secret, it soon found its way into the world. 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.

The machinery, Madam, is a term invented by the critics, to signify that part which the deities, angels, or demons, are made to act in a poem. For the ancient poets are in one respect like many modern ladies, let an action be never so trivial in itself, they always make it appear of the utmost importance. These machines I determined to raise on a very new and odd foundation, the Rosicrucian doctrine of spirits.

I know how disagreeable it is to make use of hard words before a lady; but it is so much the concern of a poet to have his works understood, and particularly by your sex, that you must give me leave to explain two or three difficult terms.[366]

The Rosicrucians are a people I must bring you acquainted with. The best account I know of them is in a French book, called Le Comte de Gabalis, which both in its title and size is so like a novel, that many of the fair sex have read it for one by mistake. According to these gentlemen the four elements are inhabited by spirits, which they call sylphs, gnomes, nymphs, and salamanders. The gnomes or demons of earth delight in mischief; but the sylphs, whose habitation is in the air, are the best conditioned creatures imaginable. For they say, any mortals may enjoy the most intimate familiarities with these gentle spirits, upon a condition very easy to all true adepts, an inviolate preservation of chastity.

As to the following cantos, all the passages of them are as fabulous, as the vision at the beginning, or the transformation at the end, except the loss of your hair, which I always mention with reverence. The human persons are as fictitious as the airy ones; and the character of Belinda, as it is now managed, resembles you in nothing but in beauty.

If this poem had as many graces as there are in your person, or in your mind, yet I could never hope it should pass through the world half so uncensured as you have done. But let its fortune be what it will, mine is happy enough, to have given me this occasion of assuring you that I am, with the truest esteem,

Madam, Your most obedient, humble servant,

A. Pope.

THE

RAPE OF THE LOCK.

CANTO I.

CANTO II.

CANTO III.