for its sweet melody. ‘His version may be said to have tuned
the English tongue.’ This may be the point at which to cite his
judicious account of Pope’s versification:
Poetical expression includes sound as well as meaning.
‘Music’, says Dryden, ‘is inarticulate poetry’; among the
excellencies of Pope, therefore, must be mentioned the
melody of his metre. By perusing the works of Dryden, he
discovered the most perfect fabric of English verse, and
habituated himself to that only which he found the best; in
consequence of which restraint, his poetry has been censured
as too uniformly musical, and as glutting the ear with
unvaried sweetness. I suspect this objection to be the cant of
those who judge by principles rather than perception; and
who would even themselves have less pleasure in his works,
if he had tried to relieve attention by studied discords or
affected to break his lines and vary his pauses.^20Finally Johnson admits to failings in the version when it is
judged not as an English poem but as a translation of Homer.
He does not deny that there is some truth in the charge that it
does not represent Homer’s characteristic manner ‘as it wants
his awful simplicity, his artless grandeur, his unaffected
majesty’. Though eminently rapid, clear, and noble, Pope’s
Homer is not, of course, simple. Johnson believed that the
passage of two thousand years had put this simplicity beyond
the achievement of a modern poet, and defends Pope on the
grounds that a translator must make concessions to the age in
which he lives.^21
Comment on the Odyssey is complicated by the
circumstances of its composition for Pope had two
collaborators who between them translated twelve books,
though it appears that their work was submitted to Pope for
revision. (What is included in this selection is wholly
translated by Pope.) In his postscript he is concerned to stress
the very different poetical characters of the two works, the
Odyssey being political and moral, abounding in narrative
and fable, and written in a plain and sometimes familiar style.
The low subject-matter in many of the scenes involving the
suitors in the palace of Ulysses, particularly in the second half
of the poem when the hero is disguised as a beggar, caused the