POPE'S HOMER.
Pope's uneasy relations with the wits at Button's were no obstacle to
his success elsewhere. Swift, now at the height of his power, was
pleased by his _Windsor Forest_, recommended it to Stella, and soon made
the author's acquaintance. The first letter in their long correspondence
is a laboured but fairly successful piece of pleasantry from Pope, upon
Swift's having offered twenty guineas to the young Papist to change his
religion. It is dated December 8, 1713. In the preceding month Bishop
Kennet saw Swift in all his glory, and wrote an often quoted description
of the scene. Swift was bustling about in the royal antechamber,
swelling with conscious importance, distributing advice, promising
patronage, whispering to ministers, and filling the whole room with his
presence. He finally "instructed a young nobleman that the best poet in
England was Mr. Pope, a Papist, who had begun a translation of Homer
into English verse, for which he must have them all subscribe; 'for,'
says he, 'the author shall not begin to print till I have a thousand
guineas for him!'" Swift introduced Pope to some of the leaders of the
ministry, and he was soon acquainted with Oxford, Bolingbroke,
Atterbury, and many other men of high position. Pope was not disinclined
to pride himself upon his familiarity with the great, though boasting
at the same time of his independence. In truth, the morbid vanity which
was his cardinal weakness seems to have partaken sufficiently of the
nature of genuine self-respect to preserve him from any unworthy
concessions. If he flattered, it was as one who expected to be repaid in
kind; and though his position was calculated to turn the head of a youth
of five-and-twenty, he took his place as a right without humiliating his
own dignity. Whether from principle or prudence, he judiciously kept
himself free from identification with either party, and both sides took
a pride in supporting the great literary undertaking which he had now
announced.
When Pope first circulated his proposals for translating Homer, Oxford
and Bolingbroke were fellow-ministers, and Swift was their most
effective organ in the press. At the time at which his first volume
appeared, Bolingbroke was in exile, Oxford under impeachment, and Swift
had retired, savagely and sullenly, to his deanery. Yet, through all the
intervening political tempest, the subscription list grew and
flourished. The pecuniary result was splendid. No author had ever made
anything approaching the sum which Pope received, and very few authors,
even in the present age of gold, would despise such payment. The details
of the magnificent bargain have been handed down, and give the pecuniary
measure of Pope's reputation.
The Iliad was to be published in six volumes. For each volume Lintot was
to pay 200_l._; and, besides this, he was to supply Pope gratuitously
with the copies for his subscribers. The subscribers paid a guinea a
volume, and as 575 subscribers took 654 copies, Pope received altogether
5320_l._ 4_s._ at the regular price, whilst some royal and distinguished
subscribers paid larger sums. By the publication of the Odyssey Pope
seems to have made about 3500_l._ more,[6] after paying his assistants.
The result was, therefore, a total profit at least approaching 9000_l._
The last volume of the Odyssey did not appear till 1726, and the
payments were thus spread over eleven years. Pope, however, saved enough
to be more than comfortable. In the South Sea excitement he ventured to
speculate, but though for a time he fancied himself to have made a large
sum, he seems to have retired rather a loser than a gainer. But he could
say with perfect truth that, "thanks to Homer," he "could live and
thrive, indebted to no prince or peer alive." The money success is,
however, of less interest to us than the literary. Pope put his best
work into the translation of the Iliad. His responsibility, he said,
weighed upon him terribly on starting. He used to dream of being on a
long journey, uncertain which way to go, and doubting whether he would
ever get to the end. Gradually he fell into the habit of translating
thirty or forty verses before getting up, and then "piddling with it"
for the rest of the morning; and the regular performance of his task
made it tolerable. He used, he said at another time, to take advantage
of the "first heat," then correct by the original and other
translations; and finally to "give it a reading for the versification
only." The statement must be partly modified by the suggestion that the
translations were probably consulted before the original. Pope's
ignorance of Greek--an awkward qualification for a translator of
Homer--is undeniable. Gilbert Wakefield, who was, I believe, a fair
scholar and certainly a great admirer of Pope, declares his conviction
to be, after a more careful examination of the Homer than any one is now
likely to give, that Pope "collected the general purport of every
passage from some of his predecessors--Dryden" (who only translated the
first Iliad), "Dacier, Chapman, or Ogilby." He thinks that Pope would
have been puzzled to catch at once the meaning even of the Latin
translation, and points out proofs of his ignorance of both languages
and of "ignominious and puerile mistakes."
It is hard to understand at the present day the audacity which could
lead a man so ill qualified in point of classical acquirements to
undertake such a task. And yet Pope undoubtedly achieved, in some true
sense, an astonishing success. He succeeded commercially; for Lintot,
after supplying the subscription copies gratuitously, and so losing the
cream of the probable purchasers, made a fortune by the remaining sale.
He succeeded in the judgment both of the critics and of the public of
the next generation. Johnson calls the Homer "the noblest version of
poetry the world has ever seen." Gray declared that no other translation
would ever equal it, and Gibbon that it had every merit except that of
faithfulness to the original. This merit of fidelity, indeed, was
scarcely claimed by any one. Bentley's phrase--"a pretty poem, Mr. Pope,
but you must not call it Homer"--expresses the uniform view taken from
the first by all who could read both. Its fame, however, survived into
the present century. Byron speaks--and speaks, I think, with genuine
feeling--of the rapture with which he first read Pope as a boy, and says
that no one will ever lay him down except for the original. Indeed, the
testimonies of opponents are as significant as those of admirers.
Johnson remarks that the Homer "may be said to have tuned the English
tongue," and that no writer since its appearance has wanted melody.
Coleridge virtually admits the fact, though drawing a different
conclusion, when he says that the translation of Homer has been one of
the main sources of that "pseudo-poetic diction" which he and Wordsworth
were struggling to put out of credit. Cowper, the earliest
representative of the same movement, tried to supplant Pope's Homer by
his own, and his attempt proved at least the position held in general
estimation by his rival. If, in fact, Pope's Homer was a recognized
model for near a century, we may dislike the style, but we must admit
the power implied in a performance which thus became the accepted
standard of style for the best part of a century. How, then, should we
estimate the merits of this remarkable work? I give my own opinion upon
the subject with diffidence, for it has been discussed by eminently
qualified critics. The conditions of a satisfactory translation of Homer
have been amply canvassed, and many experiments have been made by
accomplished poets who have what Pope certainly had not--a close
acquaintance with the original, and a fine appreciation of its
superlative beauties. From the point of view now generally adopted, the
task even of criticism requires this double qualification. Not only can
no man translate Homer, but no man can even criticize a translation of
Homer without being at once a poet and a fine classical scholar. So far
as this is true, I can only apologize for speaking at all, and should be
content to refer my readers to such able guides as Mr. Matthew Arnold
and the late Professor Conington. And yet I think that something remains
to be said which has a bearing upon Pope, however little it may concern
Homer.
We--if "we" means modern writers of some classical culture--can claim to
appreciate Homer far better than the contemporaries of Pope. But our
appreciation involves a clear recognition of the vast difference
between ourselves and the ancient Greeks. We see the Homeric poems in
their true perspective through the dim vista of shadowy centuries. We
regard them as the growth of a long past stage in the historical
evolution; implying a different social order--a different ideal of
life--an archaic conception of the world and its forces, only to be
reconstructed for the imagination by help of long training and serious
study. The multiplicity of the laws imposed upon the translator is the
consequence of this perception. They amount to saying that a man must
manage to project himself into a distant period, and saturate his mind
with the corresponding modes of life. If the feat is possible at all, it
requires a great and conscious effort, and the attainment of a state of
mind which can only be preserved by constant attention. The translator
has to wear a mask which is always in danger of being rudely shattered.
Such an intellectual feat is likely to produce what, in the most obvious
sense, one would call highly artificial work. Modern classicism must be
fine-spun, and smell rather of the hothouse than the open air.
Undoubtedly some exquisite literary achievements have been accomplished
in this spirit; but they are, after all, calculated for the small circle
of cultivated minds, and many of their merits can be appreciated only by
professors qualified by special training. Most frequently we can hope
for pretty playthings, or, at best, for skilful restorations which show
learning and taste far more distinctly than a glowing imagination. But
even if an original poet can breathe some spirit into classical poems,
the poor translator, with the dread of philologists and antiquarians in
the back-ground, is so fettered that free movement becomes almost
impossible. No one, I should venture to prophesy, will really succeed in
such work unless he frankly accepts the impossibility of reproducing
the original, and aims only at an equivalent for some of its aspects.
The perception of this change will enable us to realize Pope's mode of
approaching the problem. The condemnatory epithet most frequently
applied to him is "artificial;" and yet, as I have just said, a modern
translator is surely more artificial, so far as he is attempting a more
radical transformation of his own thoughts into the forms of a past
epoch. But we can easily see in what sense Pope's work fairly deserves
the name. The poets of an older period frankly adopted the classical
mythology without any apparent sense of incongruity. They mix heathen
deities with Christian saints, and the ancient heroes adopt the manners
of chivalrous romance without the slightest difficulty. The freedom was
still granted to the writers of the renaissance. Milton makes Phoebus
and St. Peter discourse in successive stanzas, as if they belonged to
the same pantheon. For poetical purposes the old gods are simply
canonized as Christian saints, as, in a more theological frame of mind,
they are regarded as devils. In the reign of common sense this was no
longer possible. The incongruity was recognized and condemned. The gods
were vanishing under the clearer light, as modern thought began more
consciously to assert its independence. Yet the unreality of the old
mythology is not felt to be any objection to their use as conventional
symbols. Homer's gods, says Pope in his preface, are still the gods of
poetry. Their vitality was nearly extinct; but they were regarded as
convenient personifications of abstract qualities, machines for epic
poetry, or figures to be used in allegory. In the absence of a true
historical perception, the same view was attributed to Homer. Homer, as
Pope admits, did not invent the gods; but he was the "first who brought
them into a system of machinery for poetry," and showed his fertile
imagination by clothing the properties of the elements, and the virtues
and vices in forms and persons. And thus Pope does not feel that he is
diverging from the spirit of the old mythology when he regards the gods,
not as the spontaneous growth of the primitive imagination, but as
deliberate contrivances intended to convey moral truth in allegorical
fables, and probably devised by sages for the good of the vulgar.
The old gods, then, were made into stiff mechanical figures, as dreary
as Justice with her scales, or Fame blowing a trumpet on a monument.
They belonged to that family of dismal personifications which it was
customary to mark with the help of capital letters. Certainly they are a
dismal and frigid set of beings, though they still lead a shivering
existence on the tops of public monuments, and hold an occasional wreath
over the head of a British grenadier. To identify the Homeric gods with
these wearisome constructions was to have a more serious
disqualification for fully entering into Homer's spirit than even an
imperfect acquaintance with Greek, and Pope is greatly exercised in his
mind by their eating and drinking and fighting, and uncompromising
anthropomorphism. He apologizes for his author, and tries to excuse him
for unwilling compliance with popular prejudices. The Homeric theology
he urges was still substantially sound, and Homer had always a distinct
moral and political purpose. The Iliad, for example, was meant to show
the wickedness of quarrelling, and the evil results of an insatiable
thirst for glory, though shallow persons have thought that Homer only
thought to please.
The artificial diction about which so much has been said is the natural
vehicle of this treatment. The set of phrases and the peculiar mould
into which his sentences were cast, was already the accepted type for
poetry which aimed at dignity. He was following Dryden as his own
performance became the law for the next generation. The style in which a
woman is called a nymph--and women generally are "the fair"--in which
shepherds are conscious swains, and a poet invokes the muses and strikes
a lyre, and breathes on a reed, and a nightingale singing becomes
Philomel "pouring her throat," represents a fashion as worn out as hoops
and wigs. By the time of Wordsworth it was a mere survival--a dead form
remaining after its true function had entirely vanished. The proposal to
return to the language of common life was the natural revolt of one who
desired poetry to be above all things the genuine expression of real
emotion. Yet it is, I think, impossible to maintain that the diction of
poetry should be simply that of common life.
The true principle would rather seem to be that any style becomes bad
when it dies; when it is used merely as a tradition, and not as the best
mode of producing the desired impression; and when, therefore, it
represents a rule imposed from without, and is not an expression of the
spontaneous working of minds in which the corresponding impulse is
thoroughly incarnated. In such a case, no doubt, the diction becomes a
burden, and a man is apt to fancy himself a poet because he is the slave
of the external form instead of using it as the most familiar
instrument. By Wordsworth's time the Pope style was thus effete; what
ought to be the dress of thought had become the rigid armour into which
thought was forcibly compressed, and a revolt was inevitable. We may
agree, too, that his peculiar style was in a sense artificial, even in
the days of Pope. It had come into existence during the reign of the
Restoration wits, under the influence of foreign models, not as the
spontaneous outgrowth of a gradual development, and had therefore
something mechanical and conscious, even when it flourished most
vigorously. It came in with the periwigs, to which it is so often
compared, and, like the artificial headgear, was an attempt to give a
dignified or full-dress appearance to the average prosaic human being.
Having this innate weakness of pomposity and exaggeration, it naturally
expired, and became altogether ridiculous, with the generation to which
it belonged. As the wit or man of the world had at bottom a very
inadequate conception of epic poetry, he became inevitably strained and
contorted when he tried to give himself the airs of a poet.
After making all such deductions, it would still seem that the bare fact
that he was working in a generally accepted style gave Pope a very
definite advantage. He spoke more or less in a falsetto, but he could at
once strike a key intelligible to his audience. An earlier poet would
simply annex Homer's gods and fix them with a mediæval framework. A more
modern poet tries to find some style which will correspond to the
Homeric as closely as possible, and feels that he is making an
experiment beset with all manner of difficulties. Pope needed no more to
bother himself about such matters than about grammatical or philological
refinements. He found a ready-made style which was assumed to be
correct; he had to write in regular rhymed couplets, as neatly rhymed
and tersely expressed as might be; and the diction was equally settled.
He was to keep to Homer for the substance, but he could throw in any
little ornaments to suit the taste of his readers; and if they found out
a want of scrupulous fidelity, he might freely say that he did not aim
at such details. Working, therefore, upon the given data, he could
enjoy a considerable amount of freedom, and throw his whole energy into
the task of forcible expression without feeling himself trammelled at
every step. The result would certainly not be Homer, but it might be a
fine epic poem as epic poetry was understood in the days of Anne and
George I.--a hybrid genus, at the best, something without enough
constitutional vigour to be valuable when really original, but not
without a merit of its own when modelled upon the lines laid down in the
great archetype. When we look at Pope's Iliad upon this understanding,
we cannot fail, I think, to admit that it has merits which makes its
great success intelligible. If we read it as a purely English poem, the
sustained vivacity and emphasis of the style give it a decisive
superiority over its rivals. It has become the fashion to quote Chapman
since the noble sonnet in which Keats, in testifying to the power of the
Elizabethan translator, testifies rather to his own exquisite
perception. Chapman was a poet worthy of our great poetic period, and
Pope himself testifies to the "daring fiery spirit" which animates his
translation, and says that it is not unlike what Homer himself might
have written in his youth--surely not a grudging praise. But though this
is true, I will venture to assert that Chapman also sins, not merely by
his love of quaintness, but by constantly indulging in sheer doggerel.
If his lines do not stagnate, they foam and fret like a mountain brook,
instead of flowing continuously and majestically like a great river. He
surpasses Pope chiefly, as it seems to me, where Pope's conventional
verbiage smothers and conceals some vivid image from nature. Pope, of
course, was a thorough man of forms, and when he has to speak of sea or
sky or mountain generally draws upon the current coin of poetic
phraseology, which has lost all sharpness of impression in its long
circulation. Here, for example, is Pope's version of a simile in the
fourth book:--
As when the winds, ascending by degrees
First move the whitening surface of the seas,
The billows float in order to the shore,
The waves behind roll on the waves before,
Till with the growing storm the deeps arise,
Foam o'er the rocks, and thunder to the skies.
Each phrase is either wrong or escapes from error by vagueness, and one
would swear that Pope had never seen the sea. Chapman says,--
And as when with the west wind flaws, the sea thrusts up her waves
One after other, thick and high, upon the groaning shores,
First in herself loud, but opposed with banks and rocks she roars,
And all her back in bristles set, spits every way her foam.
This is both clumsy and introduces the quaint and unauthorized image of
a pig, but it is unmistakably vivid. Pope is equally troubled when he
has to deal with Homer's downright vernacular. He sometimes ventures
apologetically to give the original word. He allows Achilles to speak
pretty vigorously to Agamemnon in the first book:--
O monster! mix'd of insolence and fear,
Thou dog in forehead, but in heart a deer!
Chapman translates the phrase more fully, but adds a characteristic
quibble:--
Thou ever steep'd in wine,
Dog's face, with heart but of a hart.
Tickell manages the imputation of drink, but has to slur over the dog
and the deer:--
Valiant with wine and furious from the bowl,
Thou fierce-look'd talker, with a coward soul.
Elsewhere Pope hesitates in the use of such plain speaking. He allows
Teucer to call Hector a dog, but apologizes in a note. "This is literal
from the Greek," he says, "and I have ventured it;" though he quotes
Milton's "dogs of hell" to back himself with a precedent. But he cannot
quite stand Homer's downright comparison of Ajax to an ass, and speaks
of him in gingerly fashion as--
The slow beast with heavy strength endued.
Pope himself thinks the passage "inimitably just and beautiful;" but on
the whole, he says, "a translator owes so much to the taste of the age
in which he lives as not to make too great a compliment to the former
[age]; and this induced me to omit the mention of the word _ass_ in the
translation." Boileau and Longinus, he tells us, would approve the
omission of mean and vulgar words. "Ass" is the vilest word imaginable
in English or Latin, but of dignity enough in Greek and Hebrew to be
employed "on the most magnificent occasions."
The Homeric phrase is thus often muffled and deadened by Pope's
verbiage. Dignity of a kind is gained at the cost of energy. If such
changes admit of some apology as an attempt to preserve what is
undoubtedly a Homeric characteristic, we must admit that the "dignity"
is often false; it rests upon mere mouthing instead of simplicity and
directness, and suggests that Pope might have approved the famous
emendation "he died in indigent circumstances," for "he died poor." The
same weakness is perhaps more annoying when it leads to sins of
commission. Pope never scruples to amend Homer by little epigrammatic
amplifications, which are characteristic of the contemporary rhetoric. A
single illustration of a fault sufficiently notorious will be
sufficient. When Nestor, in the eleventh book, rouses Diomed at night,
Pope naturally smoothes down the testy remark of the sleepy warrior;
but he tries to improve Nestor's directions. Nestor tells Diomed, in
most direct terms, that the need is great, and that he must go at once
and rouse Ajax. In Pope's translation we have--
Each single Greek in this conclusive strife
Stands on the sharpest edge of death or life;
Yet if my years thy kind regard engage,
Employ thy youth as I employ my age;
Succeed to these my cares, and rouse the rest;
He serves me most, who serves his country best.
The false air of epigram which Pope gives to the fourth line is
characteristic; and the concluding tag, which is quite unauthorized,
reminds us irresistibly of one of the rhymes which an actor always
spouted to the audience by way of winding up an act in the contemporary
drama. Such embroidery is profusely applied by Pope wherever he thinks
that Homer, like Diomed, is slumbering too deeply. And, of course, that
is not the way in which Nestor roused Diomed or Homer keeps his readers
awake.
Such faults have been so fully exposed that we need not dwell upon them
further. They come to this, that Pope was really a wit of the days of
Queen Anne, and saw only that aspect of Homer which was visible to his
kind. The poetic mood was not for him a fine frenzy--for good sense must
condemn all frenzy--but a deliberate elevation of the bard by
high-heeled shoes and a full-bottomed wig. Seas and mountains, being
invisible from Button's, could only be described by worn phrases from
the Latin grammar. Even his narrative must be full of epigrams to avoid
the one deadly sin of dulness, and his language must be decorous even at
the price of being sometimes emasculated. But accept these conditions,
and much still remains. After all, a wit was still a human being, and
much more nearly related to us than an ancient Greek. Pope's style, when
he is at his best, has the merit of being thoroughly alive; there are no
dead masses of useless verbiage; every excrescence has been carefully
pruned away; slovenly paraphrases and indistinct slurrings over of the
meaning have disappeared. He corrected carefully and scrupulously, as
his own statement implies, not with a view of transferring as large a
portion as possible of his author's meaning to his own verses, but in
order to make the versification as smooth and the sense as transparent
as possible. We have the pleasure which we receive from really polished
oratory; every point is made to tell; if the emphasis is too often
pointed by some showy antithesis, we are at least never uncertain as to
the meaning; and if the versification is often monotonous, it is
articulate and easily caught at first sight. These are the essential
merits of good declamation, and it is in the true declamatory passages
that Pope is at his best. The speeches of his heroes are often
admirable, full of spirit, well balanced and skilfully arranged pieces
of rhetoric--not a mere inorganic series of observations. Undoubtedly
the warriors are a little too epigrammatic and too consciously didactic;
and we feel almost scandalized when they take to downright blows, as
though Walpole and St. John were interrupting a debate in the House of
Commons by fisticuffs. They would be better in the senate than the
field. But the brilliant rhetoric implies also a sense of dignity which
is not mere artificial mouthing. Pope, as it seems to me, rises to a
level of sustained eloquence when he has to act as interpreter for the
direct expression of broad magnanimous sentiment. Classical critics may
explain by what shades of feeling the aristocratic grandeur of soul of
an English noble differed from the analogous quality in heroic Greece,
and find the difference reflected in the "grand style" of Pope as
compared with that of Homer. But Pope could at least assume with
admirable readiness the lofty air of superiority to personal fears and
patriotic devotion to a great cause, which is common to the type in
every age. His tendency to didactic platitudes is at least out of place
in such cases, and his dread of vulgarity and quaintness, with his
genuine feeling for breadth of effect, frequently enables him to be
really dignified and impressive. It will perhaps be sufficient
illustration of these qualities if I conclude these remarks by giving
his translation of Hector's speech to Polydamas in the twelfth book,
with its famous +eis oiônos aristos amynesthai peri patrês+.
To him then Hector with disdain return'd;
(Fierce as he spoke, his eyes with fury burn'd)--
Are these the faithful counsels of thy tongue?
Thy will is partial, not thy reason wrong;
Or if the purpose of thy heart thou sent,
Sure Heaven resumes the little sense it lent--
What coward counsels would thy madness move
Against the word, the will reveal'd of Jove?
The leading sign, the irrevocable nod
And happy thunders of the favouring God?
These shall I slight? And guide my wavering mind
By wand'ring birds that flit with every wind?
Ye vagrants of the sky! your wings extend
Or where the suns arise or where descend;
To right or left, unheeded take your way,
While I the dictates of high heaven obey.
Without a sigh his sword the brave man draws,
And asks no omen but his country's cause.
But why should'st thou suspect the war's success?
None fears it more, as none promotes it less.
Tho' all our ships amid yon ships expire,
Trust thy own cowardice to escape the fire.
Troy and her sons may find a general grave,
But thou canst live, for thou canst be a slave.
Yet should the fears that wary mind suggests
Spread their cold poison through our soldiers' breasts,
My javelin can revenge so base a part,
And free the soul that quivers in thy heart.
The six volumes of the Iliad were published during the years 1715-1720,
and were closed by a dedication to Congreve, who, as an eminent man of
letters, not too closely connected with either Whigs or Tories, was the
most appropriate recipient of such a compliment. Pope was enriched by
his success, and no doubt wearied by his labours. But his restless
intellect would never leave him to indulge in prolonged repose, and,
though not avaricious, he was not more averse than other men to
increasing his fortune. He soon undertook two sufficiently laborious
works. The first was an edition of Shakspeare, for which he only
received 217_l._ 10_s._, and which seems to have been regarded as a
failure. It led, like his other publications, to a quarrel to be
hereafter mentioned, but need not detain us at present. It appeared in
1725, when he was already deep in another project. The success of the
Iliad naturally suggested an attempt upon the Odyssey. Pope, however,
was tired of translating, and he arranged for assistance. He took into
alliance a couple of Cambridge men, who were small poets capable of
fairly adopting his versification. One of them was William Broome, a
clergyman who held several livings and married a rich widow.
Unfortunately his independence did not restrain him from writing poetry,
for which want of means would have been the only sufficient excuse. He
was a man of some classical attainments, and had helped Pope in
compiling notes to the Iliad from Eustathius, an author whom Pope would
have been scarcely able to read without such assistance. Elijah Fenton,
his other assistant, was a Cambridge man who had sacrificed his claims
of preferment by becoming a non-juror, and picked up a living partly by
writing and chiefly by acting as tutor to Lord Orrery, and afterwards in
the family of Trumball's widow. Pope, who introduced him to Lady
Trumball, had also introduced him to Craggs, who, when Secretary of
State, felt his want of a decent education, and wished to be polished by
some competent person. He seems to have been a kindly, idle, honourable
man, who died, says Pope, of indolence, and more immediately, it
appears, of the gout. The alliance thus formed was rather a delicate
one, and was embittered by some of Pope's usual trickery. In issuing his
proposals he spoke in ambiguous terms of two friends who were to render
him some undefined assistance, and did not claim to be the translator,
but to have undertaken the translation. The assistants, in fact, did
half the work, Broome translating eight, and Fenton four, out of the
twenty-four books. Pope was unwilling to acknowledge the full amount of
their contributions; he persuaded Broome--a weak, good-natured man--to
set his hand to a postscript to the Odyssey, in which only three books
are given to Broome himself, and only two to Fenton. When Pope was
attacked for passing off other people's verses as his own, he boldly
appealed to this statement to prove that he had only received Broome's
help in three books, and at the same time stated the whole amount which
he had paid for the eight, as though it had been paid for the three.
When Broome, in spite of his subservience, became a little restive under
this treatment, Pope indirectly admitted the truth by claiming only
twelve books in an advertisement to his works, and in a note to the
_Dunciad_, but did not explicitly retract the other statement. Broome
could not effectively rebuke his fellow-sinner. He had, in fact,
conspired with Pope to attract the public by the use of the most popular
name, and could not even claim his own afterwards. He had, indeed,
talked too much, according to Pope; and the poet's morality is oddly
illustrated in a letter, in which he complains of Broome's indiscretion
for letting out the secret; and explains that, as the facts are so far
known, it would now be "unjust and dishonourable" to continue the
concealment. It would be impossible to accept more frankly the theory
that lying is wrong when it is found out. Meanwhile Pope's conduct to
his victims or accomplices was not over-generous. He made over 3500_l._
after paying Broome 500_l._ (including 100_l._ for notes) and Fenton
200_l._, that is, 50_l._ a book. The rate of pay was as high as the work
was worth, and as much as it would fetch in the open market. The large
sum was entirely due to Pope's reputation, though obtained, so far as
the true authorship was concealed, upon something like false pretences.
Still, we could have wished that he had been a little more liberal with
his share of the plunder. A coolness ensued between the principal and
his partners in consequence of these questionable dealings. Fenton seems
never to have been reconciled to Pope, though they did not openly
quarrel and Pope wrote a laudatory epitaph for him on his death in 1730.
Broome--a weaker man--though insulted by Pope in the _Dunciad_ and the
Miscellanies, accepted a reconciliation, for which Pope seems to have
been eager, perhaps feeling some touch of remorse for the injuries which
he had inflicted.
The shares of the three colleagues in the Odyssey are not to be easily
distinguished by internal evidence. On trying the experiment by a
cursory reading I confess (though a critic does not willingly admit his
fallibility) that I took some of Broome's work for Pope's, and, though
closer study or an acuter perception might discriminate more accurately,
I do not think that the distinction would be easy. This may be taken to
confirm the common theory that Pope's versification was a mere
mechanical trick. Without admitting this, it must be admitted that the
external characteristics of his manner were easily caught; and that it
was not hard for a clever versifier to produce something closely
resembling his inferior work, especially when following the same
original. But it may be added that Pope's Odyssey was really inferior to
the Iliad, both because his declamatory style is more out of place in
its romantic narrative, and because he was weary and languid, and glad
to turn his fame to account without more labour than necessary. The
Odyssey, I may say, in conclusion, led to one incidental advantage. It
was criticized by Spence, a mild and cultivated scholar, who was
professor of poetry at Oxford. His observations, according to Johnson,
were candid, though not indicative of a powerful mind. Pope, he adds,
had in Spence, the first experience of a critic "who censured with
respect and praised with alacrity." Pope made Spence's acquaintance,
recommended him to patrons, and was repaid by warm admiration.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] See Elwin's Pope, Correspondence, vol. iii. p. 129.