No More Learning

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. 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.