Indeed the whole history of the mock-heroic,
and the work of Tassoni, Boileau, and Pope, the three chief masters in
that kind, was a reassertion of sincerity and nature against the stilted
conventions of the late literary epic. The _Iliad_ is the story of a
quarrel. What do men really quarrel about? Is there any more
distinctive mark of human quarrels than the eternal triviality of the
immediate cause? The insulting removal of a memorial emblem from an
Italian city; the shifting of a reading-desk from one position to another
in a French church; the playful theft of a lock of hair by an amorous
young English nobleman--these were enough, in point of fact, to set whole
communities by the ears, and these are the events celebrated in _The Rape
of the Bucket_, _The Rape of the Lectern_, _The Rape of the Lock_. How
foolish it is to suppose that nature and truth are to be found in one
school of poetry to the exclusion of another! The eternal virtues of
literature are sincerity, clarity, breadth, force, and subtlety. They
are to be found, in diverse combinations, now here and now there. While
the late Latin Christian poets were bound over to Latin models--to
elegant reminiscences of a faded mythology and the tricks of a
professional rhetoric--there arose a new school, intent on making
literature real and modern. These were the Romance poets. If they
pictured Theseus as a duke, and Jason as a wandering knight, it was
because they thought of them as live men, and took means to make them
live for the reader or listener.
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