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