may be deduced here shows at work all the faculties that in
Johnson’s analysis constitute Pope’s genius, in particular what
he has to say about judgement, imagination, and colours of
language. If Pope’s method does not quite seem to be
Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’,^15
we may again have recourse to Johnsonian wisdom and
experience, for the following account was doubtless how he
himself composed:
Of composition there are different methods.... It is related
of Virgil, that his custom was to pour out a great number
of verses in the morning, and pass the day in retrenching
exuberances and correcting inaccuracies. The method of
Pope, as may be collected from his translation, was to
write his first thoughts in his first words, and gradually to
amplify, decorate, rectify and refine them.^16The nightpiece was much admired in the eighteenth century
but much attacked in the next on the grounds of artificial
diction and lack of realism. An interesting ‘Romantic’ defence
is offered by Byron who praised it, not as it might have been
praised in the eighteenth century on the basis of its splendid
diction, but on the grounds that, in Arnold’s words, ‘it gives
us the emotion of seeing things in their truth and beauty’, for,
having visited the site of Troy, he believed it to be agreeable
to fact as he had experienced it:
it is no translation, I know, but it is not such a false
description as asserted. I have read it on the spot; there is a
burst and a glow about the night in the Troad, which
makes ‘the planets vivid’ and the ‘pole glowing’. The moon
is—at least the sky is, clearness itself; and I know no more
appropriate expression for the expansion of such a heaven
o’er the scene ...than that of a ‘flood of glory’.^17The manuscript lines given by Johnson enable us to catch a
glimpse of the workings of Pope’s imaginative processes. He
enlarged further upon the poetical character of Pope’s Homer
by remarking upon Pope’s greatest help in the arduous
undertaking which he found in the versions of Dryden. As the
debt extends beyond Homer to the whole of his poetry,
embracing diction and versification, further discussion of the