INTRODUCTION

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The Rape of the Lock is not merely the most felicitous and characteristic of its author's productions; an eminent critic has said that, 'taken all in all, it is the most perfect poem in the language.'/ Lowell, from whom this remark is quoted did not, of course, mean that Pope's genius was comparable, in what concerns the essentials of poetry, with the greatest or even with many of the secondary names in English literature. Indeed, he commends a criticism of Addison's which ' tacitly excludes him from the position of poet in the highest sense'. But he considers that in this poem Pope, unquestionably a genius in his own kind, found a subject exactly level with his genius. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet of man as God made him, dealing with great passions and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives which may be called acquired, whose spring is in habits and institutions of purely worldly origin.' Or, as another American critic has put it, rather less kindly: 'In The Rape of the Lock Pope has caught and fixed for ever the atmosphere of the age. . . no great English poem is at once so brilliant and so empty, so artistic and yet so devoid of the ideals on which all high art rests.'

To understand the possibility of a great poem such as is here described, one must consider the whole character of the age in which Pope lived—a task that cannot in these pages be attempted at any length. It was a time in which society

B

was gradually recovering from the licence which had marked the days of the Stuart Restoration, though the reaction from Puritan times had not yet spent itself; and the civilizing influence of France, a closer connexion with which our country owed to the Restoration, resulted in a veneer of politeness and punctilious etiquette which overlay a good deal of sensualism and brutality The celebrated Letters to his Son of Pope's occasional correspondent, Lord Chesterfield, give an idea, albeit, perhaps, an unduly favourable one, of the social and moral code of the period. The example of the 'Grand Siècle' was everywhere felt, and nowhere more strongly than in the department of literature. A salutary and inevitable reaction against the degenerate Elizabethanism of later Jacobean days had been carried to extravagant lengths in the direction of the worship of correctness, sense, and wit, with a corresponding loss of the simple sensuous and passionate' quality which Milton regarded as the essential of poetry. Looking back from a time when the Elizabethan age seems if anything less remote from us in point of feeling than the Augustan, we can nevertheless see the value to English literature of the discipline it then received, and realize how much the poetry, and still more the prose, of the nineteenth century owes to the age of Pope and Addison: we can appreciate the higher qualities it failed to see in what it dismissed as barbarism, and yet do justice to the measure and lucidity it so powerfully imposed on our style, and not unfairly found lacking in its predecessor. But when Pope wrote, Wordsworth, Goethe, Byron, and the whole cataclysm of the French Revolution were undreamed of.

To have given in a single poem what we may call the maximum expression to the social and moral characteristics,

the manners and literary taste, of an epoch, is a feat that few have been able to perform/ One might perhaps predicate something of the kind of all truly great writers, in the sense that we feel their works to be at once of their own age and for all time: Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, presumably could not have been what they were, had not the genius of each found its most congenial and appropriate material in the period and circumstances in which its lot was cast. But notwithstanding, or perhaps because of, its vastly profounder scope and significance, such a work as Faust is far less 'perfect', in Lowell's sense, than The Rape of the Lock: so\ brilliant, so faithful, and so complete a reflection of an epoch was only possible perhaps on a lower plane, where an artificial style was brought to the description of a correspondingly artificial society and ways of thought. Such a work must always be in the truest sense unique.

The Rape of the Lock is the most dramatic of all Pope's poems.

The story of its origin has been often told. In the summer of 1711, Robert, the seventh Lord Petre, a young man of twenty-two, had greatly offended his kinswoman, Mistress Arabella Fermor, by cutting off a lock of her hair. She was already an acknowledged beauty', and not sufficiently nearly related to him for the liberty to be overlooked or pardoned as a youthful frolic, and a quarrel accordingly ensued between the two families. A friend of Pope's, Mr. John Caryll, who was a second cousin of Lord Petre's, anxious to make peace, suggested to the poet the idea of writing an