No More Learning

It would seem that the modern critics who have undertaken to champion
Miss Fermor against what they are pleased to term the revolting behavior
of the poet are fighting a needless battle. A pretty girl who would long
since have been forgotten sat as an unconscious model to a great poet;
he made her the central figure in a brilliant picture and rendered her
name immortal. That is the whole story, and when carping critics begin
to search the poem for the improprieties of conduct to which they say
Pope alluded, one has but to answer in Pope's own words.

If to her share some female errors fall,
Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.

Pope's statement in the dedication that he had been forced into
publishing the first draft of the poem before his design of enlarging it
was half executed is probably to be taken, like many of his statements,
with a sufficient grain of salt. Pope had a curious habit of protesting
that he was forced into publishing his letters, poems, and other
trifles, merely to forestall the appearance of unauthorized editions. It
is more likely that it was the undoubted success of 'The Rape of the
Lock' in its first form which gave him the idea of working up the sketch
into a complete mock-heroic poem.

Examples of such a poem were familiar enough to Pope. Not to go back to
the pseudo-Homeric mock epic which relates the battle of the frogs and
mice, Vida in Italy and Boileau in France, with both of whom Pope, as
the 'Essay on Criticism' shows, was well acquainted, had done work of
this kind. Vida's description of the game of chess in his 'Scacchia
Ludus' certainly gave him the model for the game of ombre in the third
canto of 'The Rape of the Lock'; Boileau's 'Lutrin' probably suggested
to him the idea of using the mock-heroic for the purposes of satire.

Now it was a dogma of the critical creed of the day, which Pope devoutly
accepted, that every epic must have a well-recognized "machinery. "
Machinery, as he kindly explained to Miss Fermor, was a "term invented
by the critics to signify that part which the deities, angels, or demons
are made to act in a poem," in short for the whole supernatural element.
Such machinery was quite wanting in the first draft of the Rape; it must
be supplied if the poem was to be a true epic, even of the comic kind.
And the machinery must be of a nature which would lend itself to the
light satiric tone of the poem. What was it to be?
The employment of
what we may call Christian machinery, the angels and devils of Tasso and
Milton, was, of course, out of the question. The employment of the
classic machinery was almost as impossible. It would have been hard for
such an admirer of the classics as Pope to have taken the deities of
Olympus otherwise than seriously. And even if he had been able to treat
them humorously, the humor would have been a form of burlesque quite at
variance with what he had set out to accomplish. For Pope's purpose,
springing naturally from the occasion which set him to writing the
'Rape', was not to burlesque what was naturally lofty by exhibiting it
in a degraded light, but to show the true littleness of the trivial by
treating it in a grandiose and mock-heroic fashion, to make the quarrel
over the stolen lock ridiculous by raising it to the plane of the epic
contest before the walls of Troy.

In his perplexity a happy thought, little less in fact than an
inspiration of genius, came to Pope. He had been reading a book by a
clever French abbe treating in a satiric fashion of the doctrines of the
so-called Rosicrucians, in particular of their ideas of elemental
spirits and the influence of these spirits upon human affairs. Here was
the machinery he was looking for made to his hand. There would be no
burlesque in introducing the Rosicrucian sylphs and gnomes into a
mock-heroic poem, for few people, certainly not the author of the 'Comte
de Gabalis', took them seriously. Yet the widespread popularity of this
book, to say nothing of the existence of certain Rosicrucian societies,
had rendered their names familiar to the society for which Pope wrote.
He had but to weave them into the action of his poem, and the brilliant
little sketch of society was transformed into a true mock-epic.

The manner in which this interweaving was accomplished is one of the
most satisfactory evidences of Pope's artistic genius. He was proud of
it himself. "The making the machinery, and what was published before,
hit so well together, is," he told Spencer, "I think, one of the
greatest proofs of judgment of anything I ever did. " And he might well
be proud. Macaulay, in a well-known passage, has pointed out how seldom
in the history of literature such a recasting of a poem has been
successfully accomplished.