believed all the maxims to be original; but people of fashion are seldom wide readers, and they gave Pope credit for much that they might have found, where he found it, in Quintilian, Rapin, and Bossu. "The truth is," Mr Elwin says, "that Addison, by his encomiums and authority, brought into vogue the exaggerated estimate entertained of the essay." Nothing could be more preposterously far from "the truth."
A better illustration could not be found of the critical vice that Pope censures of "forming short ideas" by attending to parts to the neglect of the whole. If the whole of Addison's paper is read, it stands out in its true colours as a kindly gentle attempt to throw cold water on the enthusiasm about a work which had been published for some months and was already, as the paper admits, "highly esteemed by the best judges." It is "a masterpiece in its kind"; but people expect too much from the kind originality, for instance. And again, it is "a masterpiece in its kind," worthy of a place beside Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse and Mulgrave's Essay on the Art of Poetry! Most exaggerated encomiums these! How kindly, too, the paper opens by giving prominence to trivial incidents in the essay, one or two passing strokes of satire at Blackmore and Dennis. Bad poets are given to detraction; they try to raise themselves by pulling down the reputation of their brothers in the art. A third of the whole paper is devoted to warning the young poet against a spirit of envy and detraction, all because he had thrown a stone in passing at two of the common butts of their generation. But this was Addison's kindliness; lie wished to give the promising youth a lesson against a bad habit. Read the whole paper (Spectator, No. 253) and judge.
The Rape of the Lock in its first form appeared in 1712 in Linton's Miscellany; the "machinery" of sylphs and gnomes was an afterthought, and the poem was republished as we now have it early in 1714. This was his first poem written on an inspiration from real life, from nature and not from books. A gentleman had in a frolic surreptitiously cut off a lock of a young lady's hair, and the liberty had been resented; Pope heard the story from his friend Caryll, who suggested that it might be a subject for a mock-heroic poem like Boileau's Lutrin. Pope caught at the hint; the mock-heroic treatment of the pretty frivolities of fashionable life just suited his freakish sprightliness of wit, and his studies of the grand epic at the time put him in excellent vein. The Rape of the Lock is almost universally admitted to be his masterpiece. English critics from his own time to the present have competed in lauding its airiness, its ingenuity, its exquisite finish. But M. Taine's criticism shows how much depends upon the spirit in which such humorous trifles are approached. The poem strikes M. Taine as a piece of harsh, scornful, indelicate buffoonery, a mere succession of oddities and contrasts, of expressive figures unexpected and grinning, an example of English insensibility to French sweetness and refinement. Mr Leslie Stephen objects on somewhat different grounds to the poet's tone towards women. What especially offends the French critic's delicate sense is the bearishness of Pope's laughter at an elegant and beautiful woman of fashion. Pope describes with a grin of amusement all the particulars of the elaborate toilet with which Belinda prepared her beauty for conquest, and all the artificial airs and graces with which she sought to bewitch the heart of susceptible man. The Frenchman listens without sympathy, without appreciation, with the contemptuous wonder of a well-bred man at clownish buffoonery. What is there to laugh at? Is she not preparing a beautiful picture? She cannot do this without powders and washes and paint-pots. What is there to laugh at in this? It is mere matter of fact The entire surrender of the female heart to little artifices for little ends does not apparently strike the Frenchman as ludicrous. Mr Stephen's laughter is checked by the serious thought that this is a misrepresentation of women, that women are spoken of in the poem as if they were all like Belinda. But the Frenchman is not moved to laughter at all; it would seem as if his delight in the finished picture, the elegant graceful captivating woman, hallowed every ingredient used in the making of it. Such are the differences in national humour. With English readers the change of manners since the fashionable party rowed up the river to spend a happy day at Hampton is more likely to be an obstacle to the enjoyment of Pope's airy extravagance.
In the interval between the first and the enlarged edition of the Rape of the Lock, Pope gave the finishing touches to his Windsor Forest, and published it in March 1713, with a flattering dedication to the secretary at war and an opportune allusion to the peace of Utrecht. This was a nearer approach to taking a political side than Pope had yet made. His principle had been to keep clear of politics, and not to attach himself to any of the sets into which literary men were divided by party. Although inclined to the Jacobite party by his religion, he was on friendly terms with the Whig coterie, so friendly indeed as to offend some of his co-religionists. He had contributed his poem "The Messiah" to the Spectator; he had written an article or two in the Guardian; and he wrote a prologue for Addison's Cato. But Pope's advances had not been received in a way to satisfy a man of his petulant and exacting temper. Mr Elwin is much mistaken in supposing that Addison helped to bring Pope into notice in the Spectator. We have seen how he treated the Essay on Criticism. When the Rape of the Lock was published, Addison is said to have praised it to Pope himself as merum sal, but he was much more guarded in the Spectator. There he dismissed one of the gems of English literature with two sentences of patronizing faint praise to the young poet whom he rejoiced to see getting on, coupled it with Tickell's "Ode on the Prospect of Peace," and devoted the rest of the article to an elaborate puff of "the pastorals of Mr Philips." We have only to look at the shameless puffery of the members of the little senate, not only in this article but throughout all the periodicals of the coterie, to see how little the young Mr Pope owed to Addison.
When Pope showed a leaning to the Tories in Windsor Forest, the coterie, so far from helping him, made insidious war on him—not open war but underhand war. Within a few weeks of the publication of the poem, and when it was the talk of the town, there began to appear in the Guardian a series of articles on "Pastorals." Not a word was said about Windsor Forest, but everybody knew to what the general principles referred. Modern pastoral poets were ridiculed for introducing Greek moral deities, Greek flowers and fruits, Greek names of shepherds, Greek sports and customs and religious rites. They ought to make use of English rural mythology—hobthrushes, fairies, goblins, and witches; they should give English names to their shepherds; they should mention flowers indigenous to English climate and soil; and they should introduce English proverbial sayings, dress, and customs. All excellent principles, and all neglected by Pope in Windsor Forest. The poem was fairly open to criticism in these points; there are many beautiful passages in it, showing close though somewhat professional observation of nature, but the mixture of heathen deities and conventional archaic fancies with modern realities is incongruous, and the comparison of Queen Anne to Diana was ludicrously
