No More Learning

No one reads it now but professed students of the literature of Queen
Anne's time. And so artfully has the new matter been woven into the old
that if the recasting of 'The Rape of the Lock' were not a commonplace
even in school histories of English literature, not one reader in a
hundred would suspect that the original sketch had been revised and
enlarged to more than twice its length. It would be an interesting task
for the student to compare the two forms printed in this edition, to
note exactly what has been added, and the reasons for its addition, and
to mark how Pope has smoothed the junctures and blended the old and the
new. Nothing that he could do would admit him more intimately to the
secrets of Pope's mastery of his art.

A word must be said in closing as to the merits of 'The Rape of the
Lock' and its position in English literature. In the first place it is
an inimitable picture of one phase, at least, of the life of the time,
of the gay, witty, heartless society of Queen Anne's day. Slowly
recovering from the licentious excesses of the Restoration, society at
this time was perhaps unmoral rather than immoral. It was quite without
ideals, unless indeed the conventions of "good form" may be dignified by
that name. It lacked the brilliant enthusiasm of Elizabethan times as
well as the religious earnestness of the Puritans and the devotion to
patriotic and social ideals which marked a later age. Nothing, perhaps,
is more characteristic of the age than its attitude toward women. It
affected indeed a tone of high-flown adoration which thinly veiled a
cynical contempt. It styled woman a goddess and really regarded her as
little better than a doll. The passion of love had fallen from the high
estate it once possessed and become the mere relaxation of the idle
moments of a man of fashion.

In the comedies of Congreve, for example, a lover even if honestly in
love thinks it as incumbent upon him to make light of his passion before
his friends as to exaggerate it in all the forms of affected compliment
before his mistress.

In 'The Rape of the Lock' Pope has caught and fixed forever the
atmosphere of this age.
It is not the mere outward form and
circumstance, the manners and customs, the patching, powdering, ogling,
gambling, of the day that he has reproduced, though his account of these
would alone suffice to secure the poem immortality as a contribution to
the history of society. The essential spirit of the age breathes from
every line. No great English poem is at once so brilliant and so empty,
so artistic, and yet so devoid of the ideals on which all high art
rests. It is incorrect, I think, to consider Pope in 'The Rape of the
Lock' as the satirist of his age. He was indeed clever enough to
perceive its follies, and witty enough to make sport of them, but it is
much to be doubted whether he was wise enough at this time to raise his
eyes to anything better. In the social satires of Pope's great admirer,
Byron, we are at no loss to perceive the ideal of personal liberty which
the poet opposes to the conventions he tears to shreds. Is it possible
to discover in 'The Rape of the Lock' any substitute for Belinda's
fancies and the Baron's freaks? The speech of Clarissa which Pope
inserted as an afterthought to point the moral of the poem recommends
Belinda to trust to merit rather than to charms. But "merit" is
explicitly identified with good humor, a very amiable quality, but
hardly of the highest rank among the moral virtues. And the avowed end
and purpose of "merit" is merely to preserve what beauty gains, the
flattering attentions of the other sex,--surely the lowest ideal ever
set before womankind. The truth is, I think, that 'The Rape of the Lock'
represents Pope's attitude toward the social life of his time in the
period of his brilliant youth. He was at once dazzled, amused, and
delighted by the gay world in which he found himself. The apples of
pleasure had not yet turned to ashes on his lips, and it is the poet's
sympathy with the world he paints which gives to the poem the air, most
characteristic of the age itself, of easy, idle, unthinking gayety. We
would not have it otherwise. There are sermons and satires in abundance
in English literature, but there is only one 'Rape of the Lock'.

The form of the poem is in perfect correspondence with its spirit.