‘Cou’d all our care elude the greedy Grave,
Which claims no less the Fearful than the Brave,
For Lust of Fame I shou’d not vainly dare
In fighting Fields, nor urge thy Soul to War.
But since, alas, ignoble Age must come,
Disease, and Death’s inexorable Doom;
The Life which others pay, let Us bestow,
And give to Fame what we to Nature owe;
Brave, tho’ we fall; and honour’d, if we live;
Or let us Glory gain, or Glory give!’ Either
Poet-translators from Marlowe to Shelley experienced ancient literature as
modern; its relevance was what made it classic. Thus, English gentlemen can be
heroes too. Given this essential continuity, the task of the translator was, as Dryden
said, ‘to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he main-
tains his character’. The chief thing was ‘the spirit which animates the whole’.
Pope’s Iliad begins:
Achilles’Wrath, to Greece the direful spring,
Ofwoes unnumber’d, heav’nly Goddess, sing!
That Wrath which hurld to Pluto’s gloomy reign i.e. Hades
The Souls of mighty Chiefs untimely slain;
Whose limbs unbury’d on the naked shore
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore:
Since Great Achilles and Atrides strove, Atrides: Agamemnon
Such was the sov’reign doom, and such the will of Jove.
Pope maintains this impet us. John Keats says that it was ‘On first looking into
Chapman’s Homer’ that he first breathed Homer’s ‘pure serene’. But readers of the
whole thing may find Pope’s idiom more breathable. His range includes stark phys-
ical act ion,as shown in the elegant third couplets of each of the above quotations.
Johnson was less keen on the Essay on Man,a work of Deist Christian philosophy,
deriving from reason not revelation. It is ‘what oft was thought’ after Locke had
proposed that ‘Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern
our conduct.’ Epistle II begins:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Man swings between angel and animal on the scale of creation:
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great ...
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest and riddle of the world!
Human peril makes sanity and proportion essential. Epistle I had ended rather too
sedately: ‘One truth is clear: Whatever is, is RIGHT.’ This line is too often quoted
without its predecessor: ‘And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite’.The Rape of the Lock
The Rape of the Lockcombines the wit of the Essay on Criticism with the beauty of
the Pastorals. It is a high-spirited masterpiece, the most entertaining longer poem in
English between Dryden and Byron. It concerns the quarrel between two families192 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790
The Rape of the Lockwas
published in two cantos in
- Rape (Lat. raptus)
means ‘taking away by force’,
‘abduction’. The abduction of
Helen caused the Trojan War,
and the seizure of Briseis
caused the wrath of Achilles.
Pope expanded the poem to
five cantos in 1714, adding
the ‘machinery’ of the Sylphs
and other epic furniture.