[ELOISA TO ABELARD.]
ELOISA TO ABELARD.
Written by Mr. POPE.
The second edition, 8vo.
London: Printed for Bernard Lintot, at the Cross-keys between the Temple Gates in Fleet Street. 1720.
The Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard first appeared in the quarto of 1717. The second edition was accompanied by other poems on kindred subjects—"Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady; Florelio, a Pastoral, lamenting the Death of the late Marquis of Blandford, by Mr. Fenton; Upon the Death of her Husband, by Mrs. Elizabeth Singer; A Ballad, by Mr. Gay,—''Twas when the Seas were roaring;' and Richy and Sandy, a Pastoral on the Death of Mr. Joseph Addison, by Allan Ramsay." The Epistle was reprinted in Lintot's Miscellany in 1720, 1722, 1727, and 1732. In the Miscellany of 1727 there was added for the first time a motto from Prior's Alma:
O Abelard ill-fated youth!
Thy fate will justify this truth;
But well I weet, thy cruel wrong
Adorns a nobler poet's song:
Dan Pope, for thy misfortune grieved,
With kind concern and skill has weaved
A silken web, and ne'er shall fade
Its colours; gently has he laid
The mantle o'er thy sad distress,
And Venus shall the texture bless.
He o'er the weeping nun has drawn
Such artful folds of sacred lawn,
That Love, with equal grief and pride,
Shall see the crime he strives to hide,
And softly drawing back the veil,
The god shall to his vot'ries tell
Each conscious tear, each blushing grace
That decked dear Eloisa's face.
Lord Bathurst told Warton that Pope was not pleased with these lines, in which the poet is accused of palliating Eloisa's guilt, and complimented for the skill with which he did it; but we learn from a letter of Pope to Christopher Pitt that he himself corrected the sheets of his own pieces in the Miscellany of 1727, and if the passage from Prior had been distasteful to him, he would not have prefixed it to the Epistle. The motto was repeated in the Miscellany of 1732, and was omitted by him in the later editions of his works.
Of the Epistle from Eloisa to Abelard I do not know the date. Pope's first inclination to attempt a composition of that tender kind arose, as Mr. Savage told me, from his perusal of Prior's Nut-brown Maid. How much he has surpassed Prior's work it is not necessary to mention, when perhaps it may be said with justice that he has excelled every composition of the same kind. The mixture of religious hope and resignation gives an elevation and dignity to disappointed love which images merely natural cannot bestow. The gloom of a convent strikes the imagination with far greater force than the solitude of a grove. This piece was, however, not much his favourite in his latter years, though I never heard upon what principle he slighted it. The Epistle is one of the most happy 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 fortunes of those who most deserve our notice; Abelard and Eloisa 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. 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.—Johnson.