No More Learning

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. But Pope's revision of 'The Rape of the Lock'
was so successful that the original form was practically done away with.
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.