Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll!
Charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.
The moral here summed up pervades the poem, which is a continuous satire on a tinsel existence. The injunction to be sweet-tempered is indignantly rejected by Belinda, for the piece was professedly founded on a subsisting feud, but the common sense of the admonitions shames the folly which rejects them. Dennis undertook an impossible task when he laboured to demonstrate the superiority of Boileau. The Lutrin is stilted, extravagant, and prosaic by the side of the Rape of the Lock.
Dennis's pamphlet against the Rape of the Lock consisted of seven letters and a preface. Of four of these letters, Pope has written, in his copy, sarcastic summaries, which throw no light on his poem, but which betray by their exaggeration, his soreness at the criticisms. Letter 1. "Proving that Boileau did not call his Lutrin, Poeme Héroi-Comique, that Bossu does not say [anything of] the machines, and that Butler [wrote][327] the notes to his own Hudibras." Letter 2. "Mr. Dennis's positive word that the Rape of the Lock can be nothing but a trifle, and that the Lutrin cannot be so, however it may appear." Letter 3. "Where it appears to demonstration that no handsome lady ought to dress herself, and no modest one to cry out or be angry." Letter 5. "Showeth that the Rosicrucian doctrine is not the christian, and that Callimachus and Catullus were a couple of fools." Catullus and Callimachus are not mentioned by Dennis. He had only condemned a passage in Pope which was imitated from these poets. In the third letter Dennis said nothing against handsome women dressing themselves, or against modest women crying out, but maintained that simplicity of dress was more becoming than lavish adornments, and that "well-bred ladies," when joyful or angry, did not fill the skies and surrounding country with their shoutings and roarings. In the first letter the note of some commentator on Hudibras was ascribed by Dennis to Butler, and in the second letter he asserted that Boileau showed more judgment in styling the Lutrin an "heroic poem" than did Pope in terming the Rape of the Lock "heroi-comical." Dennis was not aware that Boileau in 1709 had replaced "héroique" by "héroi-comique," and that the English poet borrowed the epithet from his French precursor. Pope's manuscript annotations are not behind Dennis's text in petty cavils. The combatants were both too angry to be candid; or if Dennis shows candour, it is in his undisguised disregard of it. He fulminated against Pope for calling the objects of his dislike "fool, dunce, blockhead, scoundrel." "Nothing," he continues, "incapacitates a man so much for using foul language as good sense, good-nature, and good-breeding; and nothing qualifies a man more for it than his being a clown, a fool, and a barbarian." Therefore, said he, "I shall call A. P——E neither fool nor dunce, nor blockhead; but I shall prove that he is all these in a most egregious manner."[328] For boasting a virtue in the act of violating it Dennis had no competitor.
Wordsworth, writing to Mr. Dyce says, "Pope, in that production of his boyhood, the Ode to Solitude, and in his Essay on Criticism, has furnished proofs that at one period of his life he felt the charm of a sober and subdued style, which he afterwards abandoned for one that is, to my taste at least, too pointed and ambitious, and for a versification too timidly balanced."[329] Southey and Coleridge accused Pope of debasing the public taste, but they agreed in laying the blame on his "meretricious" Homer, and excepted from their condemnation works which Wordsworth included in his censure. "The mischief," says Southey, "was effected not by Pope's satirical and moral pieces, for these entitle him to the highest place among poets of his class; it was by his Homer. No other work in the language so greatly vitiated the diction of English poetry."[330] "In the course of one of my lectures," says Coleridge, "I had occasion to point out the almost faultless position and choice of words in Pope's original compositions, particularly in his Satires, and Moral Essays, for the purpose of comparing them with his translation of Homer, which I do not stand alone in regarding as the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction."[331] Wordsworth loved simplicity of composition, and language not ornate. His preference for the Essay on Criticism would be intelligible if the piece had been free from adorned passages, and the strained attempt to be pointed in some of the similes; or if the style, in the quieter passages, had been consummate of its kind. Cowper has described the qualities which are essential to the highest excellence in this species of poetry. "Every man," he says, "conversant with verse-making, knows by painful experience that the familiar style is of all styles the most difficult to succeed in. To make verse speak the language of prose, without being prosaic, to marshal the words of it in such an order as they might naturally take in falling from the lips of an extemporary speaker, yet without meanness, harmoniously, elegantly, and without seeming to displace a syllable for the sake of rhyme, is one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake."[332] Pope, in his Essay on Criticism, did not reach Cowper's standard, and far happier specimens of the style will be found in some of his Satires.
The Rape of the Lock greatly surpasses in execution the Essay on Criticism; and austere, indeed, must be the taste which could condemn it. The "position of the words" is not always "faultless," for Pope admitted too many of his usual inversions, but the phraseology is beautiful in itself, and exquisitely adapted to the subject. The language, simple in its units, is rich in combination, without ever being florid or profuse. The poet had to depict empty glories made up of outward pageantry, and as rainbows cannot be painted with grey, so Pope dipped his pen in the glowing colours which represented the things. He could not have employed his radiant tints with greater delicacy and power. Few as are the details, the scenic effect is complete. He displayed his judgment in eschewing minuteness which would have been tedious and prosaic; the frail, superficial show could only be imposing in a general view. The pointed lines which offended Wordsworth, are not more numerous than befit the theme. A certain sparkle of style accorded best with the glitter of the world described. Dennis denounced the "puns." He said, "they shocked the rules of true pleasantry, and bore the same proportion to thought which bubbles held to bodies."[333] Two or three of the double-meanings are offensive from that grossness which is the single serious flaw in the brilliant gem. The few which remain are legitimate in a lively poem, when thus sparingly introduced. Nor are they common puns, but words used at once in their literal and metaphorical sense:
Or stain her honour or her new brocade.
Or lose her heart or necklace at a ball.
He first the snuff-box opened then the case.
Johnson has pointed out that Denham's verses on the Thames, "O! could I flow like thee," are marked by the same property, and no one would call them punning lines.[334]
The enlarged edition of the Rape of the Lock had a rapid popularity. "It has in four days' time," wrote Pope to Caryll, March 12, 1714, "sold to the number of three thousand, and is already reprinted." "The sylphs and the gnomes," says Tyers, "were the deities of the day."[335] Much of the relish, with the herd of readers, has passed away with the novelty. "Of the Rape of the Lock," says Professor Reed, "I acknowledge my inability of admiration,"[336] and numbers who admire would qualify the superlative language of De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Bowles. The conventional elegancies of a particular class do not appeal to universal sympathy. Many persons can enter no better into the fanciful beauty which is thrown around routine trivialities. The facts with them are too strong to admit of fiction. To these inaptitudes it must be added that the subtle delicacies of humour, satire, language, and invention, which mingle largely with the obvious beauties of the Rape of the Lock, can only be perceived when the taste has been quickened by the early culture of letters. De Quincey remarks that, with all orders of men, the elementary passions and principles are easiest understood, for the seeds of them are sown in every mind, and Milton and Shakespeare speak to understandings which are impervious to the refined and airy graces of Pope's artificial world.[337]
A few have gone into the opposite extreme, and placed Pope on a level with Shakespeare and Milton themselves. His strongest claim to the distinction is the Rape of the Lock, but wide is the interval, whether the test is character, passions, manners, descriptions, or machinery. The characters in Pope's poem are slight and superficial. There is a miniature sketch of an empty-headed fop, and an outside view of a beautiful young lady fond of dress, amusements, and admiration; the rest of the human personages are shadows. Passions, says Bowles, are the soul of poetry, and in poetry of the highest order they are grand, terrible, pathetic, or lovely; the grovelling, ludicrous, and trivial passions are of a less poetical species. The passions of Belinda belong to this lower class. Her grief and anger at the loss of her curl are professedly mock-heroic. They are disproportioned to the frivolous cause, and neither kindle, nor are meant to kindle, sympathy. The manners are not the index to inner depths,—the outward expression of the noble, the awful, or the tender. They are an exterior varnish, the mere formalities of fashion. The descriptions, apart from the sylphs, are chiefly of the toilet, the card-table, and such-like things, which have no kin-ship with the strong, abiding emotions. The very sylphs, by their employments, are, poetically, of an inferior race to the fairies who met
on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
Or on the beached margin of the sea,
To dance their ringlets to the whistling wind.[338]