That was the correct profession of faith. Yet as a good many Wits found Greek an obstacle, a translation was needed. Chapman had become barbarous; Hobbes and Ogilvie were hopelessly flat; and Pope was therefore handsomely paid to produce a book which was to be the standard of the poetical taste. Pope was thus the chosen representative of the literary spirit. It is needless to point out that Pope's Iliad is not Homer's. That was admitted from the first. When we read in a speech of Agamemnon exhorting the Greeks to abandon the siege,
'Love, duty, safety summon us away;
'Tis Nature's voice, and Nature we obey,'
we hardly require to be told that we are not listening to Homer's Agamemnon but to an Agamemnon in a full-bottomed wig. Yet Pope's Homer had a success unparalleled by any other translation of profane poetry; for the rest of the century it was taken to be a masterpiece; it has been the book from which Byron and many clever lads first learned to enjoy what they at least took for Homer; and, as Mrs. Gallup has discovered, it was used by Bacon at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and by somebody at the beginning of the twentieth. That it has very high literary merits can, I think, be denied by no unprejudiced reader, but I have only to do with one point. Pope had the advantage—I take it to be an advantage—of having a certain style prescribed for him by the literary tradition inherited from Dryden. A certain diction and measure had to be adopted, and the language to be run into an accepted mould. The mould was no doubt conventional, and corresponded to a temporary phase of sentiment. Like the costume of the period, it strikes us now as 'artificial' because it was at the time so natural. It was worked out by the courtly and aristocratic class, and was fitted to give a certain dignity and lucidity, and to guard against mere greatness and triviality of utterance. At any rate it saved Pope from one enormous difficulty. The modern translator is aware that Homer lived a long time ago in a very different state of intellectual and social development, and yet feels bound to reproduce the impressions made upon the ancient Greek. The translator has to be an accurate scholar and to give the right shade of meaning for every phrase, while he has also to approximate to the metrical effect. The conclusion seems to be that the only language into which Homer could be adequately translated would be Greek, and that you must then use the words of the original. The actual result is that the translator is cramped by his fetters; that his use of archaic words savours of affectation, and that, at best, he has to emphasise the fact that his sentiments are fictitious. Pope had no trouble of that kind. He aims at giving something equivalent to Homer, not Homer himself, and therefore at something really practical. He has the same advantage as a man who accepts a living style of architecture or painting; he can exert all his powers of forcible expression in a form which will be thoroughly understood by his audience, and which saves him, though at a certain cost, from the difficulties of trying to reproduce the characteristics which are really incongruous.
There are disadvantages. In his time the learned M. Bossu was the accepted authority upon the canons of criticism. Buckingham says he had explained the 'mighty magic' of Homer. One doctrine of his was that an epic poet first thinks of a moral and then invents a fable to illustrate it. The theory struck Addison as a little overstated, but it is an exaggeration of the prevalent view. According to Pope Homer's great merit was his 'invention'—and by this he sometimes appears to imply that Homer had even invented the epic poem. Poetry was, it seems, at a 'low pitch' in Greece in Homer's time, as indeed were other arts and sciences. Homer, wishing to instruct his countrymen in all kinds of topics, devised the epic poem: made use of the popular mythology to supply what in the technical language was called his 'machinery'; converted the legends into philosophical allegory, and introduced 'strokes of knowledge from his whole circle of arts and sciences.' This 'circle' includes for example geography, rhetoric, and history; and the whole poem is intended to inculcate the political moral that many evils sprang from the want of union among the Greeks. Not a doubt of it! Homer was in the sphere of poetry what Lycurgus was supposed to be in the field of legislation. He had at a single bound created poetry and made it a vehicle of philosophy, politics, and ethics. Upon this showing the epic poem is a form of art which does not grow out of the historical conditions of the period; but it is a permanent form of art, as good for the eighteenth century as for the heroic age of Greece; it may be adopted as a model, only requiring certain additional ornaments and refinements to adapt it to the taste of a more enlightened period. Yet, at the same time, Pope could clearly perceive some of the absurd consequences of M. Bossu's view. He ridiculed that authority very keenly in the 'Recipe to make an Epic Poem' which first appeared in the Guardian, while he was at work upon his own translation. Bossu's rules, he says, will enable us to make epic poems without genius or reading; and he proceeds to show how you are to work your 'machines,' and introduce your allegories and descriptions, and extract your moral out of the fable at leisure, 'only making it sure that you strain it sufficiently.'
That was the point. The enlightened critic sees that the work of art embodies certain abstract rules; which may, and probably will—if he be a man of powerful intellectual power, be rational, and suggest instructive canons. But, as Pope sees, it does not follow that the inverse process is feasible; that is, that you construct your poem simply by applying the rules. To be a good cricketer you must apply certain rules of dynamics; but it does not follow that a sound knowledge of dynamics will enable you to play good cricket. Pope sees that something more than an acceptance of M. Bossu's or Aristotle's canons is requisite for the writer of a good epic poem. The something more, according to him, appears to be learning and genius. It is certainly true that at least genius must be one requisite. But then, there is the further point. Will the epic poem, which was the product of certain remote social and intellectual conditions, serve to express the thoughts and emotions of a totally different age? Considering the difference between Achilles and Marlborough, or the bards of the heroic age and the wits who frequented clubs and coffee-houses under Queen Anne, it was at least important to ask whether Homer and Pope—taking them to be alike in genius—would not find it necessary to adopt radically different forms. That is for us so obvious a suggestion that one wonders at the tacit assumption of its irrelevance. Pope, indeed, by taking the Iliad for a framework, a ready-made fabric which he could embroider with his own tastes, managed to construct a singularly spirited work, full of good rhetoric and not infrequently rising to real poetical excellence. But it did not follow that an original production on the same lines would have been possible. Some years later, Young complained of Pope for being imitative, and said that if he had dared to be original, he might have produced a modern epic as good as the Iliad instead of a mere translation. That is not quite credible. Pope himself tried an epic poem too, which happily came to nothing; but a similar ambition led to such works as Glover's Leonidas and The Epigoniad of the Scottish Homer Wilkie. English poets as a rule seem to have suffered at some period of their lives from this malady and contemplated Arthuriads; but the constructional epic died, I take it, with Southey's respectable poems.
We may consider, then, that any literary form, the drama, the epic poem, the essay, and so forth, is comparable to a species in natural history. It has, one may say, a certain organic principle which determines the possible modes of development. But the line along which it will actually develop depends upon the character and constitution of the literary class which turns it to account, for the utterance of its own ideas; and depends also upon the correspondence of those ideas with the most vital and powerful intellectual currents of the time. The literary class of Queen Anne's day was admirably qualified for certain formations: the Wits leading the 'town,' and forming a small circle accepting certain canons of taste, could express with admirable clearness and honesty the judgment of bright common sense; the ideas which commend themselves to the man of the world, and to a rationalism which was the embodiment of common sense. They produced a literature, which in virtue of its sincerity and harmonious development within certain limits could pass for some time as a golden age. The aversion to pedantry limited its capacity for the highest poetical creation, and made the imagination subservient to the prosaic understanding. The comedy had come to adapt itself to the tastes of the class which, instead of representing the national movement, was composed of the more disreputable part of the town. The society unable to develop it in the direction of refinement left it to second-rate writers. It became enervated instead of elevated. The epic and the tragic poetry, ceasing to reflect the really powerful impulses of the day, were left to the connoisseur and dilettante man of taste, and though they could write with force and dignity when renovating or imitating older masterpieces, such literature became effete and hopelessly artificial. It was at best a display of technical skill, and could not correspond to the strongest passions and conditions of the time. The invention of the periodical essay, meanwhile, indicated what was a condition of permanent vitality. There, at least, the Wit was appealing to a wide and growing circle of readers, and could utter the real living thoughts and impulses of the time. The problem for the coming period was therefore marked out. The man of letters had to develop a living literature by becoming a representative of the ideas which really interested the whole cultivated classes, instead of writing merely for the exquisite critic, or still less for the regenerating and obnoxious section of society. That indeed, I take it, is the general problem of literature; but I shall have to trace the way in which its solution was attempted in the next period.