No More Learning

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 Pope, who had been encouraged by Addison
to begin his long task, felt at once that he had been betrayed. His
resentment was all the more bitter since he fancied that Addison, now at
the height of his power and prosperity in the world of letters and of
politics, had attempted to ruin an enterprise on which the younger man
had set all his hopes of success and independence, for no better reason
than literary jealousy and political estrangement.
We know now that Pope
was mistaken, but there was beyond question some reason at the time for
his thinking as he did, and it is to the bitterness which this incident
caused in his mind that we owe the famous satiric portrait of Addison as
Atticus.

The last volume of the 'Iliad' appeared in the spring of 1720, and in it
Pope gave a renewed proof of his independence by dedicating the whole
work, not to some lord who would have rewarded him with a handsome
present, but to his old acquaintance, Congreve, the last survivor of the
brilliant comic dramatists of Dryden's day. And now resting for a time
from his long labors, Pope turned to the adornment and cultivation of
the little house and garden that he had leased at Twickenham.

Pope's father had died in 1717, and the poet, rejecting politely but
firmly the suggestion of his friend, Atterbury, that he might now turn
Protestant, devoted himself with double tenderness to the care of his
aged and infirm mother. He brought her with him to Twickenham, where she
lived till 1733, dying in that year at the great age of ninety-one. It
may have been partly on her account that Pope pitched upon Twickenham as
his abiding place. Beautifully situated on the banks of the Thames, it
was at once a quiet country place and yet of easy access to London, to
Hampton Court, or to Kew. The five acres of land that lay about the
house furnished Pope with inexhaustible entertainment for the rest of
his life. He "twisted and twirled and harmonized" his bit of ground
"till it appeared two or three sweet little lawns opening and opening
beyond one another, the whole surrounded by impenetrable woods. "
Following the taste of his times in landscape gardening, he adorned his
lawns with artificial mounds, a shell temple, an obelisk, and a
colonnade. But the crowning glory was the grotto, a tunnel decorated
fantastically with shells and bits of looking-glass, which Pope dug
under a road that ran through his grounds. Here Pope received in state,
and his house and garden was for years the center of the most brilliant
society in England. Here Swift came on his rare visits from Ireland, and
Bolingbroke on his return from exile. Arbuthnot, Pope's beloved
physician, was a frequent visitor, and Peterborough, one of the most
distinguished of English soldiers, condescended to help lay out the
garden. Congreve came too, at times, and Gay, the laziest and most
good-natured of poets. Nor was the society of women lacking at these
gatherings.