The Rape of the Lock, and Other Poems
Lady Mary had been for years acknowledged as one of the wittiest, most
learned, and most beautiful women of her day. Pope seems to have met her
in 1715 and at once joined the train of her admirers. When she
accompanied her husband on his embassy to Constantinople in the
following year, the poet entered into a long correspondence with her,
protesting in the most elaborate fashion his undying devotion. On her
return he induced her to settle with her husband at Twickenham. Here he
continued his attentions, half real, half in the affected gallantry of
the day, until, to quote the lady's own words to her daughter many years
after, "at some ill-chosen time when she least expected what romancers
call a declaration, he made such passionate love to her, as, in spite of
her utmost endeavours to be angry and look grave, provoked an immoderate
fit of laughter," and, she added, from that moment Pope became her
implacable enemy. Certainly by the time Pope began to write the
'Dunciad' he was so far estranged from his old friend that he permitted
himself in that poem a scoffing allusion to a scandal in which she had
recently become involved. The lady answered, or the poet thought that
she did, with an anonymous pamphlet, 'A Pop upon Pope', describing a
castigation, wholly imaginary, said to have been inflicted upon the poet
as a proper reward for his satire. After this, of course, all hope of a
reconciliation was at an end, and in his satires and epistles Pope
repeatedly introduced Lady Mary under various titles in the most
offensive fashion. In his first 'Imitation of Horace', published in
February, 1733, he referred in the most unpardonable manner to a certain
Sappho, and the dangers attendant upon any acquaintance with her. Lady
Mary was foolish enough to apply the lines to herself and to send a
common friend to remonstrate with Pope. He coolly replied that he was
surprised that Lady Mary should feel hurt, since the lines could only
apply to certain women, naming four notorious scribblers, whose lives
were as immoral as their works. Such an answer was by no means
calculated to turn away the lady's wrath, and for an ally in the
campaign of anonymous abuse that she now planned she sought out her
friend Lord Hervey. John Hervey, called by courtesy Lord Hervey, the
second son of the Earl of Bristol, was one of the most prominent figures
at the court of George II. He had been made vice-chamberlain of the
royal household in 1730, and was the intimate friend and confidential
adviser of Queen Caroline. Clever, affable, unprincipled, and cynical,
he was a perfect type of the Georgian courtier to whom loyalty,
patriotism, honesty, and honor were so many synonyms for folly. He was
effeminate in habits and appearance, but notoriously licentious; he
affected to scoff at learning but made some pretense to literature, and
had written 'Four Epistles after the Manner of Ovid', and numerous
political pamphlets. Pope, who had some slight personal acquaintance
with him, disliked his political connections and probably despised his
verses, and in the 'Imitation' already mentioned had alluded to him
under the title of Lord Fanny as capable of turning out a thousand lines
of verse a day. This was sufficient cause, if cause were needed, to
induce Hervey to join Lady Mary in her warfare against Pope.
The first blow was struck in an anonymous poem, probably the combined
work of the two allies, called 'Verses addressed to the Imitator of
Horace', which appeared in March, 1733, and it was followed up in August
by an 'Epistle from a Nobleman to a Doctor of Divinity', which also
appeared anonymously, but was well known to be the work of Lord Hervey.
In these poems Pope was abused in the most unmeasured terms. His work
was styled a mere collection of libels; he had no invention except in
defamation; he was a mere pretender to genius. His morals were not left
unimpeached; he was charged with selling other men's work printed in his
name,--a gross distortion of his employing assistants in the translation
of the 'Odyssey',--he was ungrateful, unjust, a foe to human kind, an
enemy like the devil to all that have being. The noble authors, probably
well aware how they could give the most pain, proceeded to attack his
family and his distorted person. His parents were obscure and vulgar
people; and he himself a wretched outcast:
with the emblem of [his] crooked mind
Marked on [his] back like Cain by God's own hand.
And to cap the climax, as soon as these shameful libels were in print,
Lord Hervey bustled off to show them to the Queen and to laugh with her
over the fine way in which he had put down the bitter little poet.
In order to understand and appreciate Pope's reception of these attacks,
we must recall to ourselves the position in which he lived. He was a
Catholic, and I have already (Introduction, p. x) called attention to
the precarious, tenure by which the Catholics of his time held their
goods, their persons, their very lives, in security. He was the intimate
of Bolingbroke, of all men living the most detested by the court, and
his noble friends were almost without exception the avowed enemies of
the court party. Pope had good reason to fear that the malice of his
enemies might not be content to stop with abusive doggerel. But he was
not in the least intimidated. On the contrary, he broke out in a fine
flame of wrath against Lord Hervey, whom he evidently considered the
chief offender, challenged his enemy to disavow the 'Epistle', and on
his declining to do so, proceeded to make what he called "a proper
reply" in a prose 'Letter to a Noble Lord'. This masterly piece of
satire was passed about from hand to hand, but never printed. We are
told that Sir Robert Walpole, who found Hervey a convenient tool in
court intrigues, bribed Pope not to print it by securing a good position
in France for one of the priests who had watched over the poet's youth.
If this story be true, and we have Horace Walpole's authority for it, we
may well imagine that the entry of the bribe, like that of Uncle Toby's
oath, was blotted out by a tear from the books of the Recording Angel.
But Pope was by no means disposed to let the attacks go without an
answer of some kind, and the particular form which his answer took seems
to have been suggested by a letter from Arbuthnot. "I make it my last
request," wrote his beloved physician, now sinking fast under the
diseases that brought him to the grave, "that you continue that noble
disdain and abhorrence of vice, which you seem so naturally endued with,
but still with a due regard to your own safety; and study more to reform
than to chastise, though the one often cannot be effected without the
other." "I took very kindly your advice," Pope replied, "... and it has
worked so much upon me considering the time and state you gave it in,
that I determined to address to you one of my epistles written by
piecemeal many years, and which I have now made haste to put together;
wherein the question is stated, what were, and are my motives of
writing, the objections to them, and my answers." In other words, the
'Epistle to Arbuthnot' which we see that Pope was working over at the
date of this letter, August 25, 1734, was, in the old-fashioned phrase,
his 'Apologia', his defense of his life and work.
As usual, Pope's account of his work cannot be taken literally. A
comparison of dates shows that the 'Epistle' instead of having been
"written by piecemeal many years" is essentially the work of one
impulse, the desire to vindicate his character, his parents, and his
work from the aspersions cast upon them by Lord Hervey and Lady Mary.
The exceptions to this statement are two, or possibly three, passages
which we know to have been written earlier and worked into the poem with
infinite art.
The first of these is the famous portrait of Addison as Atticus. I have
already spoken of the reasons that led to Pope's breach with Addison
(Introduction, p. xv); and there is good reason to believe that this
portrait sprang directly from Pope's bitter feeling toward the elder
writer for his preference of Tickell's translation. The lines were
certainly written in Addison's lifetime, though we may be permitted to
doubt whether Pope really did send them to him, as he once asserted.
They did not appear in print, however, till four years after Addison's
death, when they were printed apparently without Pope's consent in a
volume of miscellanies. It is interesting to note that in this form the
full name "Addison" appeared in the last line. Some time later Pope
acknowledged the verses and printed them with a few changes in his
'Miscellany' of 1727, substituting the more decorous "A---n" for the
"Addison" of the first text. Finally he worked over the passage again
and inserted it, for a purpose that will be shown later, in the 'Epistle
to Arbuthnot'.
It is not worth while to discuss here the justice or injustice of this
famous portrait. In fact, the question hardly deserves to be raised. The
passage is admittedly a satire, and a satire makes no claim to be a just
and final sentence. Admitting, as we must, that Pope was in the wrong in
his quarrel with Addison, we may well admit that he has not done him
full justice. But we must equally admit that the picture is drawn with
wonderful skill, that praise and blame are deftly mingled, and that the
satire is all the more severe because of its frank admission of the
great man's merits. And it must also be said that Pope has hit off some
of the faults of Addison's character,--his coldness, his
self-complacency, his quiet sneer, his indulgence of flattering
fools--in a way that none of his biographers have done. That Pope was
not blind to Addison's chief merit as an author is fully shown by a
passage in a later poem, less well known than the portrait of Atticus,
but well worth quotation. After speaking of the licentiousness of
literature in Restoration days, he goes on to say:
In our own (excuse some courtly stains)
No whiter page than Addison's remains,
He from the taste obscene reclaims our youth,
And sets the passions on the side of truth,
Forms the soft bosom with the gentlest art,
And pours each human virtue in the heart.
'Epistle to Augustus, II'. 215-220.
If Pope was unjust to Addison the man, he at least made amends to
Addison the moralist.
The second passage that may have had an independent existence before the
'Epistle' was conceived is the portrait of Bufo, ll. 229-247. There is
reason to believe that this attack was first aimed at Bubb Doddington, a
courtier of Hervey's class, though hardly of so finished a type, to whom
Pope alludes as Bubo in l. 278. When Pope was working on the 'Epistle',
however, he saw an opportunity to vindicate his own independence of
patronage by a satiric portrait of the great Maecenas of his younger
days, Lord Halifax, who had ventured some foolish criticisms on Pope's
translation of the 'Iliad', and seems to have expected that the poet
should dedicate the great work to him in return for an offer of a
pension which he made and Pope declined. There is no reason to believe
that Pope cherished any very bitter resentment toward Halifax. On the
contrary, in a poem published some years after the 'Epistle' he boasted
of his friendship with Halifax, naming him outright, and adding in a
note that the noble lord was no less distinguished by his love of
letters than his abilities in Parliament.
The third passage, a tender reference to his mother's age and weakness,
was written at least as early as 1731,--Mrs. Pope died in 1733,--and was
incorporated in the 'Epistle' to round it off with a picture of the poet
absorbed in his filial duties at the very time that Hervey and Lady Mary
were heaping abuse upon him, as a monster devoid of all good qualities.