A more celebrated feud, if we are to trust the account of Warburton, took its rise from the Rape of the Lock. The success of the first edition "encouraged the author to give it a more important air" by the addition of the supernatural machinery. "Full," says Warburton, "of this noble conception he communicated it to Mr. Addison, who he imagined would have been equally delighted with the improvement. On the contrary, he had the mortification to see his friend receive it coldly; and even to advise him against any alteration, for that the poem in its original state was a delicious little thing, and, as he expressed it, merum sal. Mr. Pope was shocked for his friend, and then first began to open his eyes to his character."[309] The charge has been exposed by Johnson, Macaulay, and Croker. Mr. Croker denies that the machinery was a plausible suggestion. "I believe Addison's advice," he says, "to have been a sincere and just opinion, and such as I should have expected from the purity of his taste. The original poem tells the actual story and exhibits a picture of real manners with so much wit and poetry, but also with so much simplicity and clearness, that I can well imagine that Addison might be alarmed at the proposition of introducing sylphs and gnomes into a scene of common life already so admirably described. Even now, with the advantage of seeing all the brilliancy with which Pope has worked out what Addison thought an unfortunate conception, I will not deny that such is the charm of truth that I have lately read the first sketch with more interest, though certainly with less admiration than its more fanciful and more gorgeous successor, which really seems something like a beauty oppressed with the weight and splendour of her ornaments. The game at cards, the most ingenious and beautiful of all the additions, is only reality splendidly embellished, and would have been equally well placed in the first sketch." Macaulay vindicates the counsel of Addison upon a general principle, irrespective of the apparent want of fitness between supernatural agents and the frivolities of fashion,—a principle "the result of wide and long experience," which is, that a successful work of imagination is injured by being recast. "We cannot at this moment," he says, "call to mind a single instance in which this rule has been transgressed with happy effect, except the instance of the Rape of the Lock. Tasso recast his Jerusalem. Akenside recast his Pleasures of the Imagination, and his Epistle to Curio. Pope himself, emboldened no doubt by the success with which he had expanded and remodelled the Rape of the Lock, made the same experiment on the Dunciad. All these attempts failed. Who was to foresee that Pope would once in his life be able to do what he could not himself do twice, and what nobody else has ever done? Addison's advice was good, but if it had been bad, why should we pronounce it dishonest? Scott tells us that one of his best friends predicted the failure of Waverley. Herder adjured Goethe not to take so unpromising a subject as Faust. Hume tried to dissuade Robertson from writing the History of Charles the Fifth. Nay Pope himself was one of those who prophesied that Cato would never succeed on the stage, and advised Addison to print it without risking a representation.[310] But Scott, Goethe, Robertson, Addison, had the good sense and generosity to give their advisers credit for the best intentions. Pope's heart was not of the same kind with theirs."[311] Of the examples, which Macaulay quotes, of poems marred in the attempt to mend them, the Jerusalem of Tasso was the only one which existed in the days of Addison; and the Jerusalem was not a parallel case, for the mind of Tasso was diseased when he remodelled his work, and he yielded, against his judgment, to the cavils of critics instead of obeying the self-born calls of imagination. Most men nevertheless would instinctively recommend that whatever was beautiful should be let alone, lest it should be deteriorated in the effort to make it better. When Pope boasted that the adaptation of the new parts to the old, in the Rape of the Lock, was the greatest triumph of his skill, he himself confessed the risk and difficulty of the process, and justified the misgivings of Addison. But besides the general hazard, we should expect, with Mr. Croker, that Addison would have thought the particular project for improving the poem to be essentially bad. Pope had shown a predilection for heathen mythology, and his management of it had been clumsy and lifeless. His scheme would have called up to Addison's mind the interposition of the gods and goddesses in Homer and Virgil. The conjunction of these obsolete figments, under new names, with the trivialities of modern society, would have seemed incongruous and pedantic,[312] and the previous works of Pope would have compelled the conclusion that he had not the skill to deal with ethereal fiction. Addison could neither have divined from a conversational description how perfectly the agents would be adapted to their office, nor from Pope's existing poetry how delicious they would be rendered by the felicity of the execution. Unless there was the strongest presumption that the recommendation to leave the poem unaltered was made in good faith, we should not be warranted in believing the story, for no reliance could be placed on the unsupported testimony of Pope when he was safe from contradiction, and his object was to damage the reputation of a rival.
Pope is convicted on his own evidence. He admits that the incident "first opened his eyes to the character of Addison," and by consequence that Addison's conduct had been hitherto blameless. He thus bears witness against himself of his readiness to impute the basest motives upon the most trumpery pretexts. Being "shocked" at the moral turpitude of "his friend," he could never again have treated him with cordiality and confidence, and the alienation which ensued, must, on Pope's own showing, have had its origin in Pope's morbid suspicions. But there was an earlier transaction, which turns the tables with fatal force upon Pope. Anterior to the conversation on the Rape of the Lock,[313] he urged Lintot the bookseller to persuade Dennis to criticise Addison's Cato.[314] Dennis published his Remarks, and Pope followed with his anonymous pamphlet, Dr. Norris's Narrative of the Phrenzy of J.D.,—a coarse, dull production, consisting of nothing but low, intemperate abuse. Pope's device pointed to three results. He would damage the reputation of Addison's play; he would provoke him into turning his wrath upon Dennis; and he would secure an opening for venting his own spleen against the critic without seeming to be actuated by personal spite. Addison was disgusted with the pamphlet; and, ignorant probably of its parentage, he let Dennis know that he repudiated and condemned it.[315] The worst was to come. More than twenty years afterwards Pope dressed up a letter which he had written to Caryll, on the occasion of an attack in the Flying Post, and pretended that it had been written to Addison when his play was assailed by Dennis. In this fraudulent document Pope congratulates him on his share in "the envy and calumny, which is the portion of all good and great men," and declares that "he felt more warmth" at the Remarks on Cato than when he read the Reflections on the Essay on Criticism.[316] Having prompted the abuse, he published a fictitious letter to persuade the world that he had overflowed with generous indignation. He wanted posterity to believe that he had poured out these magnanimous sentiments to Addison, who returned him envy and malice. His object was to magnify his own virtues, and transfer his meanness and jealousy to the amiable genius he had formerly wronged. "Addison," he said, "was very kind to me at first, but my bitter enemy afterwards,"[317] and with the consciousness of guilt, he tried to conceal that he had forfeited the kindness by misconduct. He was bold with his forgeries and falsehoods in the confidence that a dead man could tell no tales. Happily there are flaws in the best-laid dishonest plots, and the hour of retribution comes at last. At what period or in what degree Addison himself detected Pope's practices is not definitely known, but he discovered enough to avoid him. "Leave him as soon as you can," he said to Lady Mary W. Montagu;[ "he will certainly play you some devilish trick else. He has an appetite to satire."]
Up to the Rape of the Lock, Pope had only put borrowed thoughts into verse. He now broke out into originality, but not without some obligation to his predecessors. In one place De Quincey maintains that the Rape of the Lock was not suggested by the Lutrin, because Pope did not read French with ease to himself, and in another place that Voltaire must have been wrong in saying that "Pope could hardly read French," inasmuch as there are "numerous proofs that he had read Boileau with so much feeling of his peculiar merit that he has appropriated and naturalised some of his best passages."[319] The second statement of De Quincey was the latest and the truest. Pope refers to the Lutrin in his manuscript notes on the Remarks of Dennis, and certainly had it in his mind when he framed the scheme of his poem. "The treasurer," it is said, in the summary prefixed to Boileau's work, "is the highest dignitary in the chapter. The precentor is the second dignitary. In front of the seat of the latter there was formerly an enormous reading-desk, which almost concealed him. He had it removed, and the treasurer wanted to put it back. Hence arose the dispute which is the subject of the present poem." Boileau converted the squabble into a satire on the indolence, the sensuality, and pride of the cathedral clergy in the licentious reign of Louis XIV. Pope converted the quarrel between Miss Fermor and Lord Petre into a satire on the frivolities of a young lady of fashion from her morning toilet to the close of her giddy day. Boileau called the Lutrin a new species of burlesque, "because," he said, "in other burlesques Dido and Æneas speak like fishwomen and scavengers; here a barber and his wife speak like Dido and Æneas." Pope adopted a similar vein, and invested the trifles of a gay and frivolous life with an adventitious importance. Boileau parodied some well-known passages of Virgil. Pope parodied both Virgil and Homer. The Lutrin opens with Discord appearing to the sleeping treasurer, and warning him against the encroachments of the rebellious precentor. The enlarged Rape of the Lock opens with Ariel appearing, in a dream, to Belinda, and beseeching her to beware of some disastrous impending event. The raillery on the foibles of women, which is the central idea in Pope's poem, was caught up from the exquisite pleasantry of Addison, who, in the Tatlers and Spectators, had endeavoured to laugh the fair sex out of their levities of behaviour, and extravagances of dress. Through his delicate humour, it had become the popular topic in the light literature of the day.
Johnson says of the sylphs that they are "a new race of beings," and that there is nothing "but the names of his agents which Pope has not invented." This is an exaggeration. The names were a considerable part of the novelty; for, in the fundamental conception, the sylphs in the Rape of the Lock were the time-honoured fairies of English literature. Their immediate prototypes are the elves of Shakespeare. The sprites of Pope belong to the same family with the diminutive, joyous, ethereal creatures which anciently crept into acorn cups, couched in the bells of cowslips, or lived under blossoms; who sported in air, rode on the curled clouds, and flitted with the swiftness of thought over land and sea; who hung dew-drops on flowers, fetched jewels from the deep, shaded sleeping eyes from moonbeams with wings plucked from painted butterflies, and who mingled, benignly or maliciously, in all but the graver varieties of human affairs. Pope acknowledges the ancestry of his newly-named race when Ariel,—whose own name confesses his parentage,—addressing his subjects, says,
Ye sylphs and sylphids, to your chief give ear;
Fays, fairies, genii, elves, and demons hear.
The benevolent and mischievous fairies of old days were, in their turn, little more than the good and evil angels dwarfed to suit their lighter functions. For the precise outward aspect which Pope assigned to the sylphs, he was beholden to Spenser, with whose works he was well acquainted:
And all about her neck and shoulders flew
A flock of little loves, and sports, and joys,
With nimble wings of gold and purple hue,
[ Whose shapes seemed not like to terrestrial boys,]
But like to angels playing heav'nly toys.
These are just the beings who hover round Belinda. But though Johnson's claim for Pope is over-stated, his supernatural agents are the product of genius. The vividness with which they are described, the novel offices they fulfil, the poetic beauty with which they are invested, even when engaged in employments not in their nature poetic, constitute them a distinct variety, and they rise up before our minds like a fresh creation, and not as the reflection of antecedent familiar forms. The remark is true of the work throughout. What Pope borrowed he varied, embellished, and combined in a manner which leaves the poem unique. Some of the parts may be traced to earlier sources, but few master-pieces have more originality in the aggregate.
"The Rape of the Lock," says De Quincey, "is the most exquisite monument of playful fancy that universal literature offers."[320] "The Rape of the Lock," says Hazlitt, "is the most exquisite specimen of filigree work ever invented. It is made of gauze and silver spangles. The most glittering appearance is given to everything—to paste, pomatum, billets-doux, and patches. Airs, languid airs, breathe around; the atmosphere is perfumed with affectation. A toilet is described with the solemnity of an altar raised to the goddess of vanity, and the history of a silver bodkin is given with all the pomp of heraldry. No pains are spared, no profusion of ornament, no splendour of poetic diction to set off the meanest things. The balance between the concealed irony and the assumed gravity is as nicely trimmed as the balance of power in Europe. The little is made great and the great little. You hardly know whether to laugh or weep. It is the triumph of insignificance, the apotheosis of foppery and folly. It is the perfection of the mock-heroic."[321] The world of fashion is displayed in its most gorgeous and attractive hues, and everywhere the emptiness is visible beneath the outward splendour. The beauty of Belinda, the details of her toilet, her troops of admirers, her progress up the Thames, the game at cards, the aerial escort which attend upon her, are all set forth with unrivalled grace and fascination, and all bear the impress of vanity and vexation. Nothing can exceed the art with which the satire is blended with the pomp, mocking without disturbing the unsubstantial gewgaw. The double vein is kept up with sustained skill in the picture of the outward charms and inward frivolity of women. Ariel, describing the influence of the sylphs upon them, says, that
With varying vanities from ev'ry part,
They shift the moving toy-shop of their heart.