333 We have now surely lost much of the delay, and much of the rapidity. But to shew how little the greatest master of numbers can fix the principles of representative harmony, it will be sufficient to remark that the poet, who tells us that 'When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main ''; when he had enjoyed for about thirty years the praise of Camilla's lightness of foot, tried another experiment upon sound and time, and produced this memorable triplet : 'Waller was smooth; but Dryden taught to join The varying verse, the full resounding line, Here are the swiftness of the rapid race and the march of slow- 834 Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied; and when real are technical and nugatory, not to be rejected and not to be solicited. 335 To the praises which have been accumulated on The Rape of the Lock by readers of every class, from the critick to the waiting-maid, it is difficult to make any addition. Of that which is universally allowed to be the most attractive of all ludicrous compositions, let it rather be now enquired from what sources the power of pleasing is derived. Dr. Warburton, who excelled in critical perspicacity, has 336 remarked that the preternatural agents are very happily adapted to the purposes of the poem 2. The heathen deities can no longer gain attention: we should have turned away from a contest between Venus and Diana. The employment of allegorical persons always excites conviction of its own absurdity 3: they may produce effects, but cannot conduct actions; when the phantom is put in motion, it dissolves; thus Discord may raise a mutiny, but Discord cannot conduct a march, nor besiege a town. Pope brought into view a new race of Beings, with powers and passions proportionate to their operation. The sylphs and gnomes act at the toilet and the tea-table, what more terrifick and more powerful phantoms perform on the stormy ocean or the field of battle; they give their proper help, and do their proper mischief. Pope is said by an objector not to have been the inventer 337 of this petty nation'; a charge which might with more justice have been brought against the author of the Iliad, who doubtless adopted the religious system of his country; for what is there but the names of his agents which Pope has not invented? Has he not assigned them characters and operations never heard of before? Has he not, at least, given them their first poetical existence? If this is not sufficient to denominate his work original, nothing original ever can be written. In this work are exhibited in a very high degree the two 338 most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. A race of aerial people never heard of before is presented to us in a manner so clear and easy, that the reader seeks for no further information, but immediately mingles with his new acquaintance, adopts The reader of Warburton's notes on Shakespeare would think that Johnson sufficiently praised him when he said: Warburton may be absurd, but he will never be weak; he flounders well.' Boswell's Johnson, v. 93 n. 2 Warburton, i. 169, iv. 28; ante, POPE, 59. 3 Ante, MILTON, 256; BUTLER,41. 'He took the idea of these invisible beings from a little French book entitled Le Comte de Gabalis. 339 340 their interests and attends their pursuits, loves a sylph and detests a gnome. That familiar things are made new every paragraph will prove. The subject of the poem is an event below the common incidents of common life; nothing real is introduced that is not seen so often as to be no longer regarded, yet the whole detail of a female-day is here brought before us invested with so much art of decoration that, though nothing is disguised, every thing is striking, and we feel all the appetite of curiosity for that from which we have a thousand times turned fastidiously away. The purpose of the Poet is, as he tells us, to laugh at 'the little unguarded follies of the female sex. It is therefore without justice that Dennis charges The Rape of the Lock with the want of a moral, and for that reason sets it below The Lutrin, which exposes the pride and discord of the clergy. Perhaps neither Pope nor Boileau has made the world much better than he found it; but if they had both succeeded, it were easy to tell who would have deserved most from publick gratitude. The freaks, and humours, and spleen, and vanity of women, as they embroil families in discord and fill houses with disquiet, do more to obstruct the happiness of life in a year than the ambition of the clergy in many centuries 3. It has been well observed that the misery of man proceeds not from any single crush of overwhelming evil, but from small vexations continually repeated *. ''It was intended only to divert a few young ladies, who have good sense and good humour enough to laugh not only at their sex's little unguarded follies, but at their own.' Dedication. 2 666 Remarks on The Rape of the Lock, p. 8. "The Rape of the Lock," said Dennis, "is an empty trifle, which cannot have a moral." The Lutrin, he maintains, is "an important satirical poem upon the luxury, pride, and animosities of the popish clergy, and the moral is, that when Christians, and especially the clergy, run into great heats about religious trifles, their animosity proceeds from the want of that religion which is the pretence of their quarrel." Pope [in his copy of Dennis's Remarks] erased the epithet "religious," and substituting" female sex" for "po pish clergy," "ladies" for "clergy," and " sense for "religion" claimed the description for The Rape of the Lock. Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), ii. 132. See also ib. v. 101. Warburton quotes a letter of Voltaire's dated Oct. 15, 1726, in which he says:- The Rape of the Lock is, in my opinion, above The Lutrin Warburton, iv. 41. 3 'Johnson,' writes Warton, 'might have recollected that Grotius in his Annals relates that more than 100,000 Protestants perished in the Netherlands by the executioner of Charles V. Warton, i. 341 n. 4 Johnson seems to be quoting himself. In his Journey to the Hebrides (Works, ix. 89) he wrote:'Misery is caused for the most part not by a heavy crush of disaster, but by the corrosion of less visible evils, It is remarked by Dennis likewise that the machinery is 341 superfluous; that by all the bustle of preternatural operation the main event is neither hastened nor retarded'. To this charge an efficacious answer is not easily made. The sylphs cannot be said to help or to oppose, and it must be allowed to imply some want of art that their power has not been sufficiently intermingled with the action. Other parts may likewise be charged with want of connection; the game at ombre might be spared, but if the lady had lost her hair while she was intent upon her cards, it might have been inferred that those who are too fond of play will be in danger of neglecting more important interests. Those perhaps are faults; but what are such faults to so much excellence! The Epistle of Eloise to Abelard3 is one of the most happy 342 productions of human wit: the subject is so judiciously chosen that it would be difficult, in turning over the annals of the world, to find another which so many circumstances concur to recommend. We regularly interest ourselves most in the fortune of those who most deserve our notice. Abelard and Eloise were conspicuous in their days for eminence of merit. The heart naturally loves truth. The adventures and misfortunes of this illustrious pair are known from undisputed history. Their fate does not leave the mind in hopeless dejection; for they both found quiet and consolation in retirement and piety. So new and so affecting is their story that it supersedes invention, and imagination ranges at full liberty without straggling into scenes of fable+. which canker enjoyment and undermine security. The visit of an invader is necessarily rare, but domestick animosities allow no cessation.' In 1762 he wrote:-'We all have good and evil, which we feel more sensibly than our petty part of publick miscarriage or prosperity. Boswell's Johnson, i. 381. Two years later he put the same thought into a couplet for Goldsmith's Traveller :'How small of all that human hearts endure That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.' Ib. ii. 6. ''They neither promote nor retard the danger of Belinda,' wrote Dennis. Remarks, p. 24. For Mr. 343 The story thus skilfully adopted has been diligently improved. Pope has left nothing behind him which seems more the effect of studious perseverance and laborious revisal. Here is particularly observable the 'curiosa felicitas,' a fruitful soil, and careful cultivation. Here is no crudeness of sense, nor asperity of language. 344 The sources from which sentiments which have so much vigour and efficacy have been drawn are shewn to be the mystick writers by the learned author of the Essay on the Life and Writings of Pope; a book which teaches how the brow of criticism may be smoothed, and how she may be enabled, with all her severity, to attract and to delight. 345 The train of my disquisition has now conducted me to that poetical wonder, the translation of the Iliad; a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal 3. To the Greeks translation was almost unknown; it was totally unknown to the inhabitants of Greece. They had no recourse to the Bar 'Petronius [118. 5] says of him [Horace], "Et Horatii curiosa felicitas." Dryden's Works, iv.235. See also ib. xii. 299, xiii. 33, xvii. 332, for repetitions of this. "Horatii curiosa felicitas" is surely a very unclassical inversion; for he ought to have called it the happy carefulness of Horace rather than his careful happiness.' WARTON, Essay, p. 172. Gibbon translated curiosa felicitas 'Some beauties yet no precepts can For there's a happiness as well as POPE, Essay on Criticism, 1. 141. And finish'd more through happi- Epistle to Mr. Jervas, 1. 67. poetical use hath Pope here made of the opinions of the mystics and quietists. Essay on Pope, i. 319. Johnson, reviewing the Essay in 1756, praises it as a just specimen of literary moderation.' Works, vi. 46. Before the Lives of the Poets were published the two men were estranged. Boswell's Johnson, i. 270 n., ii. 41 n. Johnson nevertheless -perhaps all the more on that account-repeats the praise. Warton in his edition of Pope's Works frequently carps at Johnson. Warton's brother says in his edition of Milton's Poems, Preface, p. 10, that through their father Pope first discovered Milton's minor poems. 'We find him soon afterwards sprinkling his Eloisa and Abelard with epithets and phrases pilfered from Comus and the Penseroso.' See also ante, MILTON, 59 n. |