Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/505

Rh POPE 485 infelicitous. But the sting of the articles did not lie in the truth of the oblique criticisms. &quot;The pastorals of Mr Philips,&quot; published four years before, were again trotted out. Here was a true pastoral poet, the eldest born of Spenser, the worthy successor of Theocritus and Virgil ! Pope s pastorals have their defects, great defects, but it was an unkind cut to him to prefer such trash, and with such audacious emphasis. It was an affront, but so con trived that the sufferer could not retaliate without putting himself in the wrong, a mean backbiting provocation, the action of a critic &quot; willing to wound and yet afraid to strike. &quot; Pope took an amusing revenge, which turned the laugh against his assailants. He sent Steele an anonymous paper in continuation of the articles in the Guardian on pastoral poetry, reviewing the poems of Mr Pope by the light of the principles laid down. Ostensibly Pope was censured for breaking the rules, and Philips praised for conforming to them, quotations being given from both. The quotations were sufficient to dispose of the pretensions of poor Philips, and Pope did not choose his own worst passages, accusing himself of actually deviating sometimes into poetry. Although the Guardian s principles were also brought into ridicule by burlesque exemplifications of them after the manner of Gay s Shepherd s Week, Steele, misled by the opening sentences, was at first unwilling to print what appeared to be a direct attack on Pope, and asked Pope s consent to the publication, which was graciously granted. The relations between Pope and his Whig friends were further strained by one or two little incidents about the same time. The truculent Dennis attacked both Pope s Rape of the Lock and Addison s Cato. Pope said nothing in his own defence, but we were very obliging in those days defended his friend Addison in a Narrative of the Frenzy of John Dennis. The attack was so coarse that Addison sent Steele to Dennis to disclaim all connexion with it. Then Pope asked his friend Addison s advice about the enlargement of the Rape of the Lock, and Addison advised him to leave it as it was, which advice the man who had asked it attributed to jealousy. The estrangement was completed in connexion with Pope s translation of Homer. This enterprise was defini tively undertaken in 1713. The work was to be published by subscription as Dryden s Virgil had been. Men of all parties subscribed, their unanimity being a striking proof of the position Pope had attained at the age of twenty- five. It was as if he had received a national commission as by general consent the first poet of his time. But the unanimity was broken by a discordant note. A member of the Addison clique, Tickell, attempted to run a rival version. There was nothing criminal in this, but it was an irritating continuation of the cold grudging treatment that Pope had all along received from the same quarter. Pope suspected Addison s instigation ; Tickell had at least Addison s encouragement. Pope s famous character of Ad dison, if not true in the main, is at least a strictly fair description, inspired not by malignity but by legitimate resentment, if resentment is ever legitimate, of Addison s treatment of himself as he was rising into fame. 1 Pope afterwards claimed to have been magnanimous, and he is suspected of having supported this claim by petty inven tions in his account of the quarrel. Magnanimity he could not fairly claim ; but he did not attack without pro vocation. The translation of Homer was Pope s chief employment 1 A very different view is argued by Mr Ehvin (with strange blind ness, as the present writer thinks, to the cardinal circumstances here set forth), in his introductions to Windsor Forest, the Essay on Criticism, and the Rape of the Lock. See also Mr Leslie Stephen s Pope, and Mr Courthope s Addison. for twelve years. The new pieces in the miscellanies pub lished in 1717, his &quot;Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady&quot; and his &quot;Eloisa to Abelard,&quot; were probably written some years before their publication. The Iliad was delivered to the subscribers in instalments in 1715, 1717, 1718, and 1720. For the translation of the Odyssey he took Fenton and Broome as coadjutors, who between them translated twelve out of the twenty-four books. 2 It was completed in 1725. The profitableness of the work was Pope s chief temptation to undertake it. He cleared more than 8000 by the two translations, after deducting all payments to coadjutors a much larger sum than had ever been received by an English author before. Pope, with his economical habits, was rendered independent by it, and enabled to live nearer London. The estate at Binfield was sold, and he removed with his parents to Chiswick in 1716, and in 1718 to Twickenham, to the residence with which his name is associated. Here he held his little court, and was visited by his intimates Arbuthnot, Gay, Bolingbroke (after his return in 1723), and Swift (during his brief visits to England in 1726 and 1727), and by many other friends of political eminence. Martha Blount, after his mother s death in 1733, was occasionally domiciled in his house. The translation of Homer established Pope s reputation with his contemporaries, and has endangered it ever since it was challenged. It was the Homer chiefly that Words worth and Coleridge had in their eye when they began the polemic against the &quot;poetic diction&quot; of the 18th century, and struck at Pope as the arch-corruptor. They were historically unjust to Pope, who did not originate this diction, but only furnished the most finished examples of it. Mr Leslie Stephen has asked in what the much abused pseudo-poetic diction consists. A long analysis would be required to answer the question in detail, but in substance it consisted in an ambition to &quot; rise above the vulgar style,&quot; to dress nature to advantage a natural ambition when the arbiters of literature were people of fashion. If one compares Pope s &quot;Messiah,&quot; or &quot;Eloisa to Abelard,&quot; or an impassioned passage from the Iliad, with the originals that he paraphrased, one gets a more vivid idea of the consistence of pseudo-poetic diction than could be furnished by pages of analysis. But Pope merely used the established diction of his time. A passage from the Guardian, in which Philips was commended as against him, shows in a single example the great aim of fashion able poets in those days. &quot; It is a nice piece of art to raise a proverb above the vulgar style and still keep it easy and unaffected. Thus the old wish, God rest his soul, is very finely turned : &quot;Then gentle Sidney liv d, the shepherd s friend, Eternal blessings on his shade attend.&quot; Pope would have despised so easy a metamorphosis as this, for, just as dress is often valued for what it cost the wearer, so the poetic dress of nature was esteemed in pro portion to the poet s labour and ingenuity in devising it. The work of his coadjutors and imitators in the Odyssey may be distinguished by this comparative cheapness of material. Broome s description of the clothes-washing by Nausicaa and her maidens in the sixth book may be com pared with the original as a luminous specimen. The year 1725 may be taken as the beginning of the third period of Pope s career, when he made his fame as a moralist and a satirist. In point of sheer literary power the works then composed are his greatest, but the subjects chosen belong essentially to the lower levels of poetry. Why did Pope, when his independence was secured and he was free to choose, &quot;take to the plains,&quot; 2 1, 4, 19, and 20 are by Fenton ; 2, 6, 8, 11, 12, 16, 18, 23 by Broome.