“Here his first lays majestic Denham sung,
There the last numbers flowed from Cowley’s tongue;
O early lost, what tears the river shed
When the sad pomp along his banks was led!
His drooping swans on every note expire,
And on his willows hung each muse’s lyre!”
In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit that,
“Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue,
And learn of man each other to undo”;
and in the succeeding verses gives some striking instances of that
artificial diction, so inappropriate to poems descriptive of natural
objects and ordinary life, which brought verse-making to such a depth of
absurdity in the course of the century.
“With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves
Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves;
Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o’ershade,
And lonely woodcocks haunt the watery glade;
He lifts the tube and levels with his eye,
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky:
Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,
The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death;
Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare,
They fall and leave their little lives in air.”
Now one would imagine that the _tube_ of the fowler was a telescope
instead of a gun. And think of the larks preparing their notes like a
country choir! Yet even here there are admirable lines,--
“Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath,”
* * * * *
“They fall and leave their little lives in air,”
for example.
In Pope’s next poem, the “Essay on Criticism,” the wit and poet become
apparent. It is full of clear thoughts, compactly expressed. In this
poem, written when Pope was only twenty-one, occur some of those lines
which have become proverbial; such as
“A little learning is a dangerous thing”;
“For fools rush in where angels fear to tread”;
“True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”
“For each ill author is as bad a friend.”
In all of these we notice that terseness in which (regard being had to
his especial range of thought) Pope has never been equalled. One cannot
help being struck also with the singular _discretion_ which the poem
gives evidence of. I do not know where to look for another author in
whom it appeared so early, and, considering the vivacity of his mind and
the constantly besetting temptation of his wit, it is still more
wonderful. In his boyish correspondence with poor old Wycherley, one
would suppose him to be the man and Wycherley the youth. Pope’s
understanding was no less vigorous (when not the dupe of his nerves)
than his fancy was lightsome and sprightly.
I come now to what in itself would be enough to have immortalized him as
a poet, the “Rape of the Lock,” in which, indeed, he appears more purely
as poet than in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has shown
more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but nowhere such a truly
artistic combination of elegance and fancy. His genius has here found
its true direction, and the very same artificiality, which in his
pastorals was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the general
keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man, as God made him,
dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the
poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those
motives which may be called _acquired_, whose spring is in institutions
and habits of purely worldly origin.
The “Rape of the Lock” was written in Pope’s twenty-fourth year, and the
machinery of the Sylphs was added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth,--a
circumstance for which we can feel a more unmixed gratitude to him than
for writing the “Dispensary.” The idea was taken from that entertaining
book “The Count de Gabalis,” in which Fouquè afterward found the hint
for his “Undine”; but the little sprites as they appear in the poem are
purely the creation of Pope’s fancy.
The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is out of the question
in fine society. It is perfectly true that almost every door we pass in
the street closes upon its private tragedy, but the moment a _great_
passion enters a man he passes at once out of the artificial into the
human. So long as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious
absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the only way in which the
petty actions and sufferings of the fine world can be epically treated,
and the contrast continually suggested with subjects of larger scope and
more dignified treatment, makes no small part of the pleasure and
sharpens the point of the wit. The invocation is admirable:--
“Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel,
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?
O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored,
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?”
The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able to put ourselves
in tune with it. It is not a parody of the heroic style, but only a
setting it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and modes of
thought with which it is in comical antipathy, and while _it_ is not
degraded, _they_ are shown in their triviality. The “clouded cane,” as
compared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of scale, the
lower plane of emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, is
equally good:--
“Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray,
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day,
Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake,
And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake;
Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,
And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.”
The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most fanciful wit; indeed,
wit infused with fancy is Pope’s peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing
Belinda:--
“Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly,
The light militia of the lower sky;
These, though unseen, are ever on the wing,
Hang o’er the box and hover round the ring.
As now your own our beings were of old,
And once enclosed in woman’s beauteous mould;
Think not, when woman’s transient breath is fled,
That all her vanities at once are dead;
Succeeding vanities she still regards,
And, though she plays no more, o’erlooks the cards.
For when the fair in all their pride expire,
To their first elements their souls retire;
The sprites of fiery termagants in flame
Mount up and take a salamander’s name;
Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away
And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea;
The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome,
In search of mischief still on earth to roam;
The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair
And sport and flutter in the fields of air.”
And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also perfectly in
keeping with all the rest of the machinery:--
“He said: when Shock, who thought she slept too long,
Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue;
’Twas then, Belinda, if report say true,
Thy eyes first opened on a _billet-doux_.”
Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in the
pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing the
toilet-table, he says:--
“Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, _billet-doux_.”
Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed,
“Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,
And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies,
Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast
When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last
Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high,
In glittering dust and painted fragments lie!”