the beginning his craftsmanship was perfect; from the beginning he took his subject-matter from others as he found it and worked it up into aphorism and epigram till each line shone like a cut jewel and the essential commonplaceness and poverty of his material was obscured by the glitter the craftsmanship lent to it.  Subject apart, however, he was quite sure of his medium from the beginning; it was not long before he found the way to use it to most brilliant purpose. The Rape of the Lock and the satirical poems come later in his career.

As a satirist Pope, though he did not hit so hard as Dryden, struck more deftly and probed deeper.  He wielded a rapier where the other used a broadsword, and though both used their weapons with the highest skill and the metaphor must not be imagined to impute clumsiness to Dryden, the rapier made the cleaner cut.  Both employed a method in satire which their successors (a poor set) in England have not been intelligent enough to use.  They allow every possible good point to the object of their attack.  They appear to deal him an even and regretful justice.  His good points, they put it in effect, being so many, how much blacker and more deplorable his meannesses and faults!  They do not do this out of charity; there was very little of the milk of human kindness in Pope.  Deformity in his case, as in so many in truth and fiction, seemed to bring envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness in its train.  The method is employed simply because it gives the maximum satirical effect.  That is why Pope’s epistle to Arbuthnot, with its characterisation of Addison, is the most damning piece of invective in our language.

The Rape of the Lock is an exquisite piece of workmanship, breathing the very spirit of the time.  You can fancy it like some clock made by one of the Louis XIV. craftsmen, encrusted with a heap of ormulu mock-heroics and impertinences and set perfectly to the time of day.  From no other poem could you gather so fully and perfectly the temper of the society in which our “classic” poetry was brought to perfection, its elegant assiduity in trifles, its brilliant artifice, its paint and powder and patches and high-heeled shoes, its measured strutting walk in life as well as in verse. The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic poem; that is to say it applies the form and treatment which the “classic” critics of the seventeenth century had laid down as belonging to the “heroic” or “epic” style to a trifling circumstance—­the loss by a young lady of fashion of a lock of hair.  And it is the one instance in which this “recipe” for a heroic poem which the French critics handed on to Dryden, and Dryden left to his descendants, has been used well-enough to keep the work done with it in memory.  In a way it condemns the poetical theory of the time; when forms are fixed, new writing is less likely to be creative and more likely to exhaust itself in the ingenious but trifling exercises of parody and burlesque. The Rape of the Lock is brilliant but it is only play.