Rape of the Lock and Other Poems | Page 4

Swift introduced him to the brilliant Tories,
politicians and lovers of letters, Harley, Bolingbroke, and Atterbury,
who were then at the head of affairs. Pope's new friends seem to have
treated him with a deference which he had never experienced before,
and which bound him to them in unbroken affection. Harley used to
regret that Pope's religion rendered him legally incapable of holding a
sinecure office in the government, such as was frequently bestowed in
those days upon men of letters, and Swift jestingly offered the young
poet twenty guineas to become a Protestant. But now, as later, Pope

was firmly resolved not to abandon the faith of his parents for the sake
of worldly advantage. And in order to secure the independence he
valued so highly he resolved to embark upon the great work of his life,
the translation of Homer.
"What led me into that," he told a friend long after, "was purely the
want of money. I had then none; not even to buy books." It seems that
about this time, 1713, Pope's father had experienced some heavy
financial losses, and the poet, whose receipts in money had so far been
by no means in proportion to the reputation his works had brought him,
now resolved to use that reputation as a means of securing from the
public a sum which would at least keep him for life from poverty or the
necessity of begging for patronage. It is worth noting that Pope was the
first Englishman of letters who threw himself thus boldly upon the
public and earned his living by his pen.
The arrangements for the publication and sale of Pope's translation of
Homer were made with care and pushed on with enthusiasm. He issued
in 1713 his proposals for an edition to be published by subscription,
and his friends at once became enthusiastic canvassers. We have a
characteristic picture of Swift at this time, bustling about a crowded
ante-chamber, and informing the company that the best poet in England
was Mr. Pope (a Papist) who had begun a translation of Homer for
which they must all subscribe, "for," says he, "the author shall not
begin to print till I have a thousand guineas for him." The work was to
be in six volumes, each costing a guinea. Pope obtained 575
subscribers, many of whom took more than one set. Lintot, the
publisher, gave Pope £1200 for the work and agreed to supply the
subscription copies free of charge. As a result Pope made something
between £5000 and £6000, a sum absolutely unprecedented in the
history of English literature, and amply sufficient to make him
independent for life.
But the sum was honestly earned by hard and wearisome work. Pope
was no Greek scholar; it is said, indeed, that he was just able to make
out the sense of the original with a translation. And in addition to the
fifteen thousand lines of the 'Iliad', he had engaged to furnish an

introduction and notes. At first the magnitude of the undertaking
frightened him. "What terrible moments," he said to Spence, "does one
feel after one has engaged for a large work. In the beginning of my
translating the 'Iliad', I wished anybody would hang me a hundred
times. It sat so heavily on my mind at first that I often used to dream of
it and do sometimes still." In spite of his discouragement, however, and
of the ill health which so constantly beset him, Pope fell gallantly upon
his task, and as time went on came almost to enjoy it. He used to
translate thirty or forty verses in the morning before rising and, in his
own characteristic phrase, "piddled over them for the rest of the day."
He used every assistance possible, drew freely upon the scholarship of
friends, corrected and recorrected with a view to obtaining clearness
and point, and finally succeeded in producing a version which not only
satisfied his own critical judgment, but was at once accepted by the
English-speaking world as the standard translation of Homer.
The first volume came out in June, 1715, and to Pope's dismay and
wrath a rival translation appeared almost simultaneously. Tickell, one
of Addison's "little senate," had also begun a translation of the 'Iliad',
and although he announced in the preface that he intended to withdraw
in favor of Pope and take up a translation of the 'Odyssey', the poet's
suspicions were at once aroused. And they were quickly fanned into a
flame by the gossip of the town which reported that Addison, the
recognized authority in literary criticism, pronounced Tickell's version
"the best that ever was in any language." Rumor went so far, in fact, as
to hint pretty broadly that Addison himself was the author, in part, at
least, of Tickell's book; and