The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is out of the question in fine society. It is perfectly true that almost every door we pass in the street closes upon its private tragedy, but the moment a great passion enters a man he passes at once out of the artificial into the human. So long as he continues artificial, the sublime is a conscious absurdity to him. The mock-heroic then is the only way in which the petty actions and sufferings of the fine world can be epically treated, and the contrast continually suggested with subjects of larger scope and more dignified treatment, makes no small part of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the wit. The invocation is admirable:—
“Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel,
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle?
O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored,
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord?”
The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not a parody of the heroic style, but only a setting it in satirical juxtaposition with cares and events and modes of thought with which it is in comical antipathy, and while it is not degraded, they are shown in their triviality. The “clouded cane,” as compared with the Homeric spear, indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane of emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, is equally good:—
“Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray,
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day,
Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake,
And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake;
Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground,
And the pressed watch returned a silver sound.”
The mythology of the Sylphs is full of the most fanciful wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is Pope’s peculiar merit. The Sylph is addressing Belinda:—
“Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly,
The light militia of the lower sky;
These, though unseen, are ever on the wing,
Hang o’er the box and hover round the ring.
As now your own our beings were of old,
And once enclosed in woman’s beauteous mould;
Think not, when woman’s transient breath is fled,
That all her vanities at once are dead;
Succeeding vanities she still regards,
And, though she plays no more, o’erlooks the cards.
For when the fair in all their pride expire,
To their first elements their souls retire;
The sprites of fiery termagants in flame
Mount up and take a salamander’s name;
Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away
And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea;
The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome,
In search of mischief still on earth to roam;
The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair
And sport and flutter in the fields of air.”
And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machinery:—
“He said: when Shock, who thought she slept too long,
Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue;
’Twas then, Belinda, if report say true,
Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux.”
Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in describing the toilet-table, he says:—
“Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux.”