SOURCE: “Moving Cities: Pope as Translator and Transposer,” in The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope Tercentenary Essays, edited by G. S. Rousseau and Pat Rogers, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 151-70.

[In the following essay, Nuttall attributes the dynamic elements of Pope's literary style to his use of the poetic techniques of Virgil as evidenced by his youthful translations of Homer's Odyssey.]

The criticism of Pope has never been the same—or ought never to have been the same—since Empson declared that he would enter ‘the very sanctuary of rationality’ and applaud the poets of the eighteenth century ‘for qualities in their writings which they would have been horrified to discover’.¹ Empson had critical designs on Popean zeugma which, he saw clearly, worked through a tension between apparent or formal symmetry and a latent asymmetry. The result is wit (not rationality), a contained wildness of the mind. My own design in this essay is to follow Empson's lead, to pursue further the idea of instability in stability, the dynamic imagination within the static.

It might be thought that the very last place in which we should look for such tensions is eighteenth-century translations of classical authors: to look, as Empson looked, for the fluid within the fixed is surely to seek the anti-Augustan within the Augustan; what is hinted at in such an enterprise is the possible presence of proto-Romantic elements in an otherwise firmly classical body of work; that part of the work which is actually derived by direct translation from classical antiquity will scarcely exhibit the required character. ‘Classic’ and ‘Romantic’ are terms which criticism can neither define nor do without. I will content myself here with a single observation and make no further use of them in this essay. It is impossible absolutely to confine either term to a given historical period. Broad areas of literature may seem to fall under one flag or the other, but then a narrower scrutiny of a single area will cause us to make the same distinction again, and then again. Thus it might be argued that the eighteenth century is classic while the nineteenth is Romantic, but then that, within the eighteenth century, the Graeco-Roman materials are alone truly classic. Or, to cast one's net differently, one might urge that the whole of European literature from the Middle Ages constitutes a Romantic antithesis to the authentic classicism of Homer and Virgil; but move back into the ancient period and Virgil with his celebrated ‘subjective style’, his dream-like fluidity, his sense of landscape becomes Romantic to Homer's classic; move back once more and the magical Odyssey is Romantic when set not with but against the austere Iliad. We shall do better if we drop these terms altogether and confine ourselves to the contrast between stability and flux, and in particular the literary extension of flux to that which is itself properly stable, as a means of expressing movement in the subject.

Let us begin, not with a Greek but a Roman. A strange poem called the Dirae (either ‘Curses’ or ‘Furies’) has been handed down to us as one of the works of Virgil. It appears in many good early manuscripts of Virgil and is listed as Virgil's by both Servius and Donatus. The Renaissance scholar Scaliger (who thought this poem was the work of Virgil's friend Varius) classed it separately, with certain other minor poems, as part of what he called the Appendix Vergiliana. Most modern scholars regard much of the Appendix as non-Virgilian. Although the Dirae is almost certainly not by Virgil himself, it is concerned with the special Virgilian experience of dispossession. Virgil, unlike Shakespeare, say, but like Dante, perceived a significant shape in his own life and projected it on the whole of human history in his major work.² Like Aeneas he was first expelled from his own land and then brought home. Virgil never forgot the traumatic loss of his farm, requisitioned for veterans returning after the Battle of Philippi. ‘Traumatic’ is not too strong a word. The picture of Virgil which has come down to us is of one gauche in all things but poetry, at once rustic and over-educated, almost neurotically attached to a certain landscape. In Virgil's Aeneid the hero is unparadised from Troy and finds his way, through varying images of ruined pastoral and spectral cities to a home more anciently his than Troy had ever been. In the Dirae (as in certain of the Eclogues) we have the personal story. Grief and imprecation are strangely mixed. The poet does not curse those who threw him off his land. Instead in a sort of hysteria he curses the land itself, as certain suicides seek to involve their own loved ones in their self-destruction. The rough usurping soldiers are barely glimpsed, in a single, Marvellian line (I accept the conjecture succidet in place of the impossible succedet):

Militis impia cum succidet dextera ferro …
When with his iron the soldier's impious hand shall fell …

(l. 31)

The lines which follow accelerate the impending destruction of the sweet especial rural scene and then, abruptly, seek to retard the process of change:

Tardius a miserae descendite monte capellae
Ah, slowly, slowly now, my goats, come down from the hill.

(l. 91)

The most remarkable lines of all (and the more Latin poetry one reads the more startling they become) are those in which the poet describes his own departure from the place:

Hinc ego de tumulo mea rura novissima visam,
hinc ibo in silvas: obstabunt iam mihi colles,
obstabunt montes, campos audire licebit:
‘dulcia rura valete, et Lydia dulcior illis,
et casti fontes et, felix nomen, agelli’.

(ll. 86-90)

From this mound I shall look for the last time at my lands and then go into the woods, now hills will block, now mountains, but the levels will still be able to hear, ‘Goodbye, sweet country places and Lydia sweeter still, goodbye, chaste springs and you little fields of happy name’.

These lines stand out from the relatively coarse, sub-Virgilian versification of the Dirae. Eduard Fraenkel went so far as to say that whoever wrote these lines, it could not be the poet of the Dirae, and to stress a connection, indirect but nevertheless intimate, with the authentically Virgilian fifth Eclogue.³ The passage is remarkable for its subtle hypallage from subject to object, not all of which can be conveyed straightforwardly in an English version. For example, the Latin does not actually say, ‘I shall look for the last time at my lands’; it says, ‘I shall look at my newest (latest) lands’; the character of the looking (looking for the last time) is ascribed to the thing looked at. This is not a mere trick or metrical convenience. It is used poetically.

Partly, the effect is of an extreme subjectivism: where the pathos of the viewer is as strong as this it can, so to speak, appropriate the object in act of wilful perceptual tyranny, but at the same time this is a poem about expropriation and we are aware that this small, defiant movement of the imagination is futile. The notion of a last embrace, hackneyed in English, but poetically powerful in the Aeneid, may lie behind the thought here. Thus, together with the rhetorical appropriation we sense the opposite of appropriation: that the subject is drained, that a richness of identity properly his has passed into the landscape. There is even a faint paradox within the single word novissima, where, because this is a time poem, we hear for an instant the basic sense, ‘newest’, before it is contested and defeated by the dominant sense ‘last’. But then we have a firmly personal assertion: ibo in silvas, ‘I shall go into the woods’, followed at once by obstabunt iam mihi colles. I translated these words, with all the inelegance of a studied neutrality, as ‘now hills will block’. In ordinary Latin obstabunt following ibo must mean ‘will bar my path’. But the context of intense subjective perception, of looking and listening (or being heard) ensures that we do not take it so. It is as if the poet is walking with head turned, so that obstabunt can mean (as the Loeb translator takes it) ‘will block my view’. The agency is mysteriously transferred, once more, from the subject moving through the landscape, to the landscape itself. We cannot quite say that the poet makes the hills move (these hills are not like the striding mountain in the first book of Wordsworth's The Prelude (1850, 1, l. 412). Yet the repetition of the verb and the changing scale of its subject (first hills then mountains) suggest as it were a covert action on the part of the landscape, as if the ground moves to interpose its masses when the poet is not looking. In these lines we have, then, a certain linguistic and logical oddity, deployed to a subtle literary effect. These hints are then allowed to flower in the full-blown poetical figure of the levels still hearing the poet's melancholy valediction, a version of the quintessentially Virgilian trope of the pathetic fallacy, since we infer sympathy in the listening fields.

If these lines are not by Virgil they are by someone who, as they used to say in the sixteenth century, was deeply inward with his work—though the Dirae never lost its place in the Virgilian corpus, it seems to have been little taught in the Roman schools and to have escaped the kind of learned commentary which accreted round his Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. These lines especially are thoroughly Virgilian in their subtle manipulation of subject and object and in their heart-tearing sense of place. Virgil is rightly famous as the poet of idem in alio, who reworked the war and the wanderings of Homeric epic until they became instinct with futurity, with the divine history of a single city, Rome. At the same time, as I have suggested, Virgil was aware of a correlative personal history, of his own eviction, wandering and home-coming. This is picked up and accented in the Dirae, together (it must be confessed) with a quantity of sub-standard writing of quite another order.

I have explored this passage in some detail because it is a peculiarly rich example of something rare in Latin literature: a kind of poetry in which the moving subject implicitly imputes his own movement to the landscape, producing a strange effect of exacerbated, disorienting subjectivity. It is an effect which without further apology we may agree to call Virgilian, not least because it is given audacious expression in the Aeneid, where Italy flies before a pursuing Aeneas through a world of evanescent visions and ghost cities which rise and fall before our eyes. I chose the Dirae as my main specimen in preference to the more opulent tropes of the Aeneid because of the very smallness of the scale and the sharpness of the visual/spatial effect which go with such intimacy. I chose it because it is more Popean. Yet we cannot be quite certain that Pope ever read it. The Dirae is excluded from Daniel Heinsius's edition of the Works of Virgil (Leyden, 1636) which Pope is known to have possessed.⁴ It is included in Michael Maittaire's Opera et Fragmenta Veterum Poetarum Latinorum, a book Pope is again known to have owned (p. 459). But the Opera et Fragmenta did not appear until 1713, ascribes the Dirae not to Virgil but to the more readily negligible Valerius Cato and, most infuriatingly of all, prints nec adire in place of audire at line 88.⁵ This changes the sense from ‘the levels will be able to hear’ to ‘it will not be possible to reach the levels’, which in its turn reduces obstabunt, ‘will block (my vision)’ to the commonplace ‘will bar my path’. It would really be more to the point to ask whether the Dirae was known to Sir William Trumbull, the friend and mentor (especially in matters classical) of Pope's youth. Pope refers on a number of occasions to the Appendix Vergiliana but always to the Culex (never the Dirae).⁶ One particular early reference, in a letter of 11 November 1710, suggests (though we may remind ourselves that Pope liked to wear his learning heavily) a serious engagement with Virgilian dubia; he points out that a borrowing from the conclusion of the Culex occurs in the Prolusiones Academicae (1622) of Famianus of Strada (Correspondence I, p. 103). The question remains uncertain. I therefore offer the lines from the Dirae not as a source for Pope but as a remote, early parallel—another example of the fertilizing effect of Virgil's poetry. Of Pope's awareness of the grander, epic versions there can be no doubt, for these had been imperiously transposed and integrated in English literary culture through Dryden's translation.

… arva … Ausoniae semper cedentia retro

(Aeneid III, l. 496)

appears in Dryden as:

‘Fields of flying Italy
to chase’

(Virgil's Aeneis III, l. 643)⁷

and:

Italiam sequimur fugientem et volvimur undis

(Aeneid V, l. 629)

appears as:

‘Through stormy sea
We search in vain for flying Italy’

(Virgil's Aeneis V, l. 819)⁸

The ancient poet who is not like this at all is, of course, Homer.

When Pope was about nineteen he worked up a free translation of a number of neighbouring passages in the thirteenth book of Homer's Odyssey. This we now know as ‘The Arrival of Ulysses in Ithaca’. By the second couplet we can see Pope Virgilianizing his author:

At once they bend, and strike their equal oars,
And leave the sinking Hills, and lessening Shores.

(ll. 4-5)

The first line is Homerically objective, the second is like a Virgilian antiphony, at once mirroring and modifying the first, with its insinuation of a projected subjectivity. There is nothing in the Greek about sinking hills or lessening shores, nor is there in the English versions of Hobbes, Ogilby or Chapman.⁹ In a similar manner at lines 21-4 one couplet conveys the objective splendour of Homer (weakened only marginally by the faint personification of ‘promis'd’) while the next counters with a Virgilian moving landscape—not a diminuendo this time, but a crescendo:

But when the morning Star with early Ray
Flam'd in the Front of Heav'n, and promis'd Day
Like distant Clouds the Mariner descries
Fair Ithaca's emerging Hills arise.

There is, again, no warrant in Homer for the second of these couplets but, as Audra and Williams observe,¹⁰ Pope may actually have had Dryden's Virgil in mind at this moment:

When we from far, like bluish Mists, descry
The Hills, and then the Plains, of Italy.

(Virgil's Aeneis III, ll. 684-5)

¹¹Because feelings are freer than facts, a certain easy extremism of language enters with the subjective style; hyperbole, in a manner, becomes merely natural. One result of this is that, while it is clear in the Greek that the vessel which conveys Odysseus in a magic ship, moving with preternatural speed, we are unsurprised when Pope tells us that the ship flew faster than an eagle (13-14); any ship may seem to do that. Here what is perhaps the finest image of the Odyssey, the sleeping hero whirled across the sea, is unforgivably reduced.

In Pope's version the Phaeacians set Odysseus/Ulysses ashore, as they do in Homer, and he hides his treasure so that no one can steal it. Here Pope does not elaborate but instead curtails his author. Homer is much more interested than Pope in the practical business of concealing the treasure, telling us, as Pope does not, that it was in a place aside from the road, where no wayfaring man would come upon it (Odyssey XIII, 123).

At line 55 we have the minor but still significantly un-Homeric hypallage, ‘solitary shore’, for strictly speaking it is the hero who is alone, not the shore, and then, with almost no warrant from the original, five lines of studied art, in which grief is expertly mingled with visual perception:

Pensive and slow, with sudden Grief opprest,
The King arose, and beat his careful Breast,
Cast a long look o'er all the Coast and Main,
And sought around his Native Realm in vain;
Then with erected Eyes, stood fix'd in woe.

(ll. 68-72)

Homer says simply that Odysseus ‘looked upon his native land’ (XIII, 197). Otherwise, of these lines only the second can be said to occur in Homer at XIII, 198 (though there the hero smites not his breast but his thigh). At line 224 Pope again adds a note of Virgilian visual pathos with the words, ‘Now lift thy longing Eyes’. The intruded line 133,

Where Troy's Majestic Ruins strow the Ground

is, once more, Virgilian in tone, though here it is a different strand in Virgil which is being drawn upon.

But not all Pope's departures from Homer are Virgilian. The adjectives at lines 106-7:

Her decent Hand a shining Javelin bore,
and painted Sandals on her Feet she wore

are not in Homer but are, so to speak, Augustan-Homeric: ‘painted’ is influenced by Homer's ποικιλοs which happens not to be used here but easily could have been. ‘Decent’ is indeed a Latinism, but the influence here is Horace rather than Virgil (say, decentes malas, Horace, Odes III, xxvii, ll. 53-4, transmitted through Milton, Il Penseroso, l. 36, ‘decent shoulders’). Elsewhere Pope's changes are in the direction of gentility, as when he introduces the ‘Peasant’ at line 124. Here the result is that the interest in farming on Ithaca, which for Homer is immediate, is distanced as the proper province of subordinate persons. Or else he is sententious, as at lines 86-7 where he offers the reader an elevated reflection on the rarity of virtue in the Great. He omits entirely the conversation of Zeus and Poseidon together with the turning to stone of the Phaeacian ship (XIII, ll. 125-87). The full list of omissions and additions is a long one but it is the Virgilian changes which most crucially affect the atmosphere of the whole and colour the poetry. Homer's ancient, magic world is humanized, refined, imbued with sensibility.

All the while Pope, the craftsman, is learning from this crossing of cultures. Every translator knows occasions when he is tempted to convey not only the sense but the linguistic character of the original, to drop the game of equivalences and instead to transpose, by a kind of bodily violence, vocabulary, idiom or syntax from the source language to the receiving language.¹² Where a language is relatively poor, as was Middle English, say, when the Latin for ‘remorse of conscience’ had to be rendered by ‘again-bite of in-wit’, the receiving language is actually enriched and extended by such forcible incursions from the major culture. Later phases of transposition have subtler effects. The aureate diction of Sir Thomas Browne played the transposed polysyllables of Latin and Greek against Saxon simplicities to suggest a running ambivalence or balancing of equivalents in the world and in the mind. Milton's despotic transpositions of alien syntax and idiom created for all the poets who followed a strange secondary music in the given medium of literary English.

English-Augustan classicism is an altogether less radical, more urbane affair than Milton's. Its typical effect is a certain finesse, a precision which may look for a moment, but a moment only, like imprecision. Thus in calling his poem The Rape of the Lock Pope knew that the grosser, ordinary meaning of rape (which, by the way, the reader is never allowed quite to forget), inappropriate as it is to a lock of hair, must be swiftly replaced by the Latin sense, ‘seizure’ (now perfectly appropriate and free, after all, from any offence).

If all translators from the Latin and Greek had followed the implicit code of, say, the Penguin Classics, in which those quirks of linguistic and conceptual organization which may be deemed to be embedded in the ancient language as such are suppressed, the varying streams of more or less classicized diction would never have entered the language, to be poetically exploited in due course by such as Pope. Of course, as long as there were people about who knew the ancient languages, abrupt trans-linguistic allusions like Milton's ‘happy-making sight’ at line 18 of On Time were always possible (here the seemingly artless phrase is ponderously faux-naif; a Saxonised version of beatifica visio and so a small prize for the learned reader). But Pope, whose learning in ancient tongues was not profound, had nevertheless an ear sharply attuned to the literary effects of transposition, whether from Greek, Latin or from contemporary high-polish Romance cultures such as French. The writer of a radically classical style gives the reader a sense of an utterly hard infra-structure of meanings which are both alien to us and clear. Milton does so systematically and Pope does not. Jane Austen inherited certain verbal habits of precision from the classicizing eighteenth century but employed them without any sense of the original infra-structure. She is therefore classical in the comic form of her novels but not in their intimate verbal texture. In our own century Evelyn Waugh is found repellent by some not only because of his politics, but also because of the hard, alienating gloss of a radically, but not ostentatiously, classical style. Something must have gone into his head at Lancing College.

The distinction between translation and transposition is, it will be noticed, a rough and ready one, with further sub-distinctions lurking within it. The translator, unlike the transposer, selects from the receiving language equivalents which shall be wholly natural to the receiving language. Where the Latin poet says (indeed with no religious intention) that bulls ‘breathe Vulcan from their nostrils’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses VII, l. 104) the modern translator will say they ‘breathe fire’ (since that is what we would say). But at this point a certain sort of reader, curious as to how ancient poetry was actually pieced together, will resent the modification while another sort of reader will be gratefully acquiescent. It may be that this example artificially biases the argument in favour of the literalist transposer, for it is certainly true that an exaggerated fidelity to form and idiom can result in an utterly faithless and distorted rendering of meaning (now the notion of equivalence, the watchword of the translator, begins to look strong again). Yet—the argument oscillates more and more rapidly—this too can beget difficulties which arise from the fact that even fictional ancient literature is engaged at certain points with historical actuality. There will be times when praetor may be rendered ‘magistrate’ and times when the translator must write, even in English, ‘praetor’. In eighteenth-century England there was a perfectly clear cultural equivalent for Rome, namely London, yet to translate Juvenal's Roma, ‘London’, is to stretch translation so far as to turn it into what Dryden called ‘imitation’ (as opposed to ‘paraphrase’ or the still tighter ‘metaphrase’).¹³

The eighteenth century knew how to enjoy such ultra-translation just as it appreciated the opposite pleasure of linguistic transposition. If Johnson's London (a version of Juvenal's third Satire) may stand at one end of our continuum, the calque may stand as its polar opposite. A calque is a transference of a special, subordinate use of a given word in language ‘A’ to the corresponding word in language ‘B’ where that special use had not existed previously. ‘Foot’ in the sense of ‘metrical foot’ is a calque from Latin pes, which carried just such a subordinate technical sense. A calque is quite distinct from what is called borrowing, where the form of a word in language ‘A’ is simply replicated, with the minimum necessary adjustments, in language ‘B’. ‘Admonition’ is a borrowing from Latin ‘admonitio’ and preserves the form of the original almost exactly. Calques became less and less common as the English language developed and borrowings were felt to be more cultivated. They are most common in the Anglo-Saxon period.¹⁴ A learned freedom at the ‘imitation’ end of the spectrum (where the receiving culture is lavishly enfranchised) is answered at the other end by a tiny localized usurpation of the natural rights of the receiving language—not by the mere importation of the polysyllabic alien form of the word but by a more fundamental invasion of the seme, or meaning-structure. To refer to ‘the third foot’ of a line of verse is, even today, not quite natural English. Dickens makes a free and very coarse use of calques to convey the Frenchness of France in A Tale of Two Cities and at the beginning of Little Dorrit. Charlotte Brontë does the same thing, though less exuberantly, in Villette. Pope's touch is far too light for such gross effects.

Let us take, from nowhere, a Latin sentence: Et blaesa voce numeris locutus sum. This can be translated, ‘I lisped in verse-time.’ A bad case of form-transposition might give ‘I balbutiated metrically’ (where the borrowings are from other Latin words). Transposition of the subordinate sense gives, ‘I lisped in numbers’ and this, of course, is Pope. As soon as we read ‘in numbers’ we sense Augustanism and, if we enjoy it, what we are enjoying is a subtle counterpointing of semic systems. ‘Numbers’ is a calque, for here the English word is used in a way which is, still perceptibly, unnatural. It is used as numerus is used in Latin. For some learned readers the intuition of Latinity in ‘numbers’ would be strengthened by the fact that at this point in the Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot Pope happens to be echoing a particular passage of Ovid (Tristia IV, x, ll. 21-6). Of course calques may be gradually naturalized by frequent use in the receiving language until they are no longer felt as calques—for example certain uses of chair influenced by Latin cathedra; or left in the political sense, influenced by French gauche. It is characteristic of Pope that he should use a partly naturalized calque with a surviving stylistic sense of its linguistic nature. It is not for him but for hardier spirits to introduce wholly new calques.

When the young Pope essayed the translation of Homer he brought to the task not the self-abnegating, objectivist zeal of the scholar but a civil art of interwoven tones and nuances. Was he not soon to be the foremost social poet of the age? He knew perfectly well that his job was to temper style with style, to gain point and dynamism by modulating from austerity to urbanity. But as soon as he began to write he found that such modulation did not work through a simple encounter of the (severe) ancient and the (polished) modern; ancient literature itself prescribed a startlingly rich variety of tone. The matter is further complicated—almost beyond analysis—by the varying mediations of existing translations, but for all that we continue to find an intelligible music of styles rather than a mere chaos. Certainly the Odyssey, as we hinted earlier, is deeply different from the Iliad. The later poem is spatially indistinct, magical, humorous, and to bring this out Pope found himself drawing on Virgil, who is different again. The result is not a faithful rendering of Homer (a thing worth chasing but impossible to hit) but a shimmering of styles and languages. To the eighteenth century (and still, to some extent, to us) the ancient world was marble: Vitruvian, regular, arched, pillared, founded in reason and nature. Where the modern world presents an obscure flux, the ancient presents a sunlit stability. Such is the ‘mental set’, the elementary binary codification of material from which we must begin. Pope's way with English poetry was always subtly to thwart or undermine seemingly stable structures, restoring harmony only at the last (and not always then). But when he engaged directly with ancient literature he found his way to what is perhaps the most imaginatively original element in Virgil: the rendering fluid of that which is normally the very paradigm of the stable, the earth under our feet, the buildings through which we move.

To be sure in the England of Pope's day the baroque was very much a living force. In the great sotto in su paintings of the period heroes, saints and demigods fly up on clouds above our heads and the architecture from which they rise, columns and pediments seen in an aggressively perspectival manner from below, seems to be on the point of following the figures up, wildly, into the firmament. Giovan Battisti Gaulli had painted his Adoration of the Name of Jesus on the ceiling of the Gesù in Rome before Pope was born, but Sir James Thornhill's Painted Hall at Greenwich was not finished until 1727. Borromini, the great architect of the baroque, took the rectilinear classical façade and caused it to undulate in serpentine curves. Strictly speaking, a curving wall is as stable and unmoving as a straight one but imaginatively, perhaps because in general we expect straightness, undulation immediately suggests movement. But the architects and architectural painters were not placed quite as Pope was placed. There was no real analogue within ancient literature for the spectacular subversions of stability they sought to introduce. Nevertheless Pope found, primarily in Virgil, a non-baroque precedent for his own less grandiose, more intimate subversions. I began with the Dirae as something separate and unique, neglected in the commentaries and yet exhibiting in a curiously poignant manner the imaginative trope of movement imputed to the landscape. Latin is, after all, capable of such things. Pope, from his side, infuses his translation of Homer with an imaginative fluidity which is recognizably akin to what we find, first, in the Dirae and then more largely in the Aeneid.

As early as the Pastorals, written in 1704, the verbs, always revealing in Pope, show this distinctive quality. Often they are inchoative, either in form or in sense:

Here where the Mountains, less'ning as they rise
Lose the low Vales, and steal into the Skies.

(Autumn, ll. 59-60)

The first part of Windsor Forest, that ‘which relates to the country’, was written at about the same time as the Pastorals. Here too we find the same note struck. The phrasing of line 24, ‘blueish hills ascend’, may seem unremarkable but the sense that even here the Virgilian influence may be at work is strengthened by the odd and beautiful word ‘blueish’ used, as we have already seen, of hills in Dryden's Virgil. A couple of lines earlier we have an intuition of a landscape which seems to shift and redispose itself as we move through it in the words ‘interspersed in Lawns and opening Glades’, where the important word is ‘opening’. At line 213 we have the marvellously judged classicism of ‘pendant’ in:

The watry Landskip of the pendant Woods.

First there is the latent linguistic precision of ‘pendant’, a precision not quite natural in English. Then, behind that, we have the imaginative precision-within-a-seeming-inappositeness of woods seen as hanging. In Virgil's first Eclogue the shepherd apostrophizes his goats:

Non ego vos posthac viridi proiectus in antro
dumosa pendere procul de rupe videbo.

(ll. 75-6)

No more, stretched out in some green cave, shall I watch you in the distance, hanging from a bushy crag.

Wordsworth's comment on pendere is famous. He observes doggedly that goats do not in fact hang as parrots hang, that rather the word presents ‘to the mind something of such an appearance, the mind in its activity, for its own gratification contemplates them as hanging’.¹⁵ Wordsworth is right on the essential point: that the character proper to the act of seeing is imputed to the thing seen, so that the passage contrives to be both about goats and about seeing at the same time. But of course there is more to it than that. Things threatened can seem more precious than things secure: that which hangs can fall. At the same time there is a contrary sense of a diminished reality, of a black-cloth suspended before the eye (for a visual presentation of a goat, however intense, is somehow less than the goat itself). Virgil more than any other poet taught this art to the ages which followed and Pope was not the least apt of his pupils. Thus Pope's pendant woods may owe something to the landscape description at Aeneid I, l. 164. The famous phrase, silvis scaena coruscis, translated by R. G. Austin as ‘a backdrop of quivering woods’,¹⁶ where the sense of a painted curtain becomes explicit, is followed by horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra (l. 165), ‘The grove hangs dark over it with its bristling shade’ (imminet is parallel in Latin to impendet and pendentibus itself appears in the very next line, applied to the hanging rocks of the cave).

There is a lesson in all this for us. The twentieth-century reader of Pope needs in a manner to have his ear educated by Virgil if he is to read the English poet with full understanding. Sappho to Phaon belongs to the same year (1707) as The Arrival of Ulysses in Ithaea. Here the dominant influence is Ovid, but Virgil is not wholly absent. The silvis scaena coruscis passage is perhaps the most influential piece of natural description in all ancient literature and its fainter echoes persist even where direct influence is unprovable. Let us try to catch the more fleeting Virgilian affinities in the following lines:

As if once more forsaken, I complain
And close my Eyes, to dream of you again.
Then frantick rise, and like some Fury rove
Thro' lonely Plains, and thro' the silent Grove,
As if the silent Grove and lonely Plains
That knew my Pleasures, cou'd relieve my Pains.
I view the Grotto, once the Scene
of Love,
The Rocks around, the hanging Roofs above …

(ll. 157-64)

Here we do not have the trope of imputed movement, but the subject's progress through plains and conscious (in the old sense) woods is reminiscent of the Dirae, while the word ‘Fury’ evokes the stricken and sleepless Dido, roving maddened through the night at the beginning of Aeneid IV (uritur infelix Dido totaque vagatur / urbe furens, ‘Unhappy Dido burns and wanders fury-like through the whole city’). Meanwhile the ‘Grotto’, the ‘scene’ of love and the ‘hanging’ rocks take us back to silvis scaena coruscis, felt through Ovid, Heroides XV, ll. 135ff. We must concede, I think, that Pope's ‘scene’ is a degree or two less assertive of the theatrical metaphor than Virgil's scaena; one can watch the word weakening in successive English imitations of Virgil before Pope. Milton at Paradise Lost IV, l. 137, writes ‘sylvan scene’ and then goes out of his way to make sure that the image is kept alive by ‘woody theatre’ immediately afterwards. Dryden, translating Aeneid I, l. 164, writes ‘a Sylvan Scene’ / Appears above’¹⁷ and we sense that the word is paler than it was. But in both Dryden and Pope the word scene certainly retains the theatrical image more strongly than it does today. Virgil's poetry was then still feeding the word.

The case is similar with the (for us) unremarkable ‘Alps on Alps arise’ which occurs in the Essay on Criticism, l. 232, in a sharply visual context (‘tire our wandring Eyes’ ends the preceding line). The line about the Alps can be linked with Eloisa to Abelard, l. 290: ‘Rise Alps between us! and whole oceans roll’, where we are discernibly in the world of the Dirae (obstabunt montes, the mountains which interpose themselves between the subject and the loved object).

Sometimes indeed the effect is more full-blown and closer to the baroque. Take the ascending, swelling, bending architectural splendours of Windsor Forest, ll. 375-80:

Behold! th'ascending Villa's on my Side
Project long Shadows o'er the Chrystal Tyde.
Behold! Augusta's glitt'ring Spires increase,
And Temples rise, the beauteous Works of Peace.
I see, I see where two fair Cities bend
Their ample Bow, a new White-Hall
ascend!

It may be said that this is at best an impure specimen of the trope since the buildings to which Pope referred were actually rising. The point is less important than it appears. Even when a building is being raised the eye does not see it rising in the accelerated manner of these lines. When we come to the two fair bending cities, the reader is not sure whether the sense is that building works are joining them (as in fact they were) or whether they simply appear thus. It is characteristic of such poetry that questions of this sort do not trouble us but are instead merely suspended. Some may have been reminded of Aeneas at the site where Rome is later to rise, Aeneid, VIII, ll. 355-6, especially as in the Latin the word oppida, ‘towns’ is mildly surprising, occurring when, metre apart, we might rather have expected some such word as arces, ‘citadels’:

Haec duo praeterea disiectis oppida muris
reliquias veterumque vides monumenta virorum.

In Dryden:

Then saw two heaps of Ruins; once they stood
Two stately Towns, on either side the Flood.

(Virgil's Aeneis VIII, ll. 467-8)¹⁸

The same, more grandiose, manner appears but this time with a downward motion in:

… Tow'rs and Temples sink in Floods of Fire

(The Temple of Fame, l. 478)

Years later Pope could not resist a Virgilian expansion when he translated the lament of Andromache for Hector (Iliad XXIV, l. 725-45). Homer makes her say that, before her child will grow up, πóλιs ηδε κατ ακρηs / περsεται (ll. 728-9), literally ‘This city will be destroyed from the top down.’ The phrase which I have rendered, ‘from the top down’ is however less vivid in the Greek than in the English and Lang, Leaf and Myers have some justification in translating it simply as ‘utterly’.¹⁹ But Virgil, contrariwise, blew on the spark and made it blaze, not once but twice:

Ruit alto a culmine Troia.

(Aeneid II, l. 290)

Down from her high pinnacle Troy is falling.
… divum inclementia, divum
… sternitque a culmine Troiam.

(II, l. 603)

The gods, the merciless gods scatter and lay low Troy from her pinnacle down.

Translating the original Greek phrase, Pope writes, surely with a sense of the Latin ruit in his ‘Ruin’:

For Ilium now (her great Defender
slain)
Shall sink, a smoaking ruin on the plain.

(Pope's Iliad XXIV, ll. 916-17)

Compare with this Pope's Odyssey III, ll. 614-18 (the third book of the Odyssey is one of the books which Pope undertook to translate himself, without waiting for a prior version by Fenton or Broome):

Beneath the bounding yoke alike they held
Their equal pace, and smoak'd along the field.
The tow'rs of Pylos sink, its
views decay,
Fields after fields fly back, till close of day:
Then sunk the Sun, and darken'd all the way:

The Greek here is rendered, almost word for word, by Butcher and Lang as follows:

Nothing loth the pair flew toward the plain and left
the steep citadel of Pylos. So all day long they swayed
the yoke they bore upon their necks.
Now the sun sank and all the ways were darkened.(22)

In Pope's version the bounding yoke and the darkened way are both reasonably Homeric. The words ‘alike’ and ‘equal’ may look like a sheer importation of Augustan order and balance into the headlong motion of the original but in fact Pope may here be responding to the dual form of the verb and αμϕιs (= ‘both’ or ‘the pair’). The rest is a compound of Virgil and Pope's own, unsubduable gift. This passage is linked to the one previously cited by ‘smoak'd’, but its chief interest is that it returns us to the trope of imputed motion. The towers sink as Telemachus and Pisistratus leave them behind. Virgil's fields of flying Italy are somewhere in the penumbra of the poetry but meanwhile the startling phrase, ‘views decay’ is very much Pope's own. Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, with no lyric intent, called imagination itself ‘decaying sense’.²³ Pope's use of the word is full of lyric sensitivity but is at the same time in a manner neutral (there is no sinister suggestion). He may be writing in a classicizing mode, with an awareness of the word's remoter derivation from Latin decidere, ‘to fall’. What he writes is certainly poetry. Later the word is to appear again in the terrific conclusion of The Dunciad, in which creation itself runs backwards to a hell of un-being:

                                        Fancy's
gilded clouds decay,
And all its varying Rain-bows die away.

(1742, IV, ll. 631-2)

This time the implication of corruption and malaise is admitted by the poetry. Within five lines we have the finest, and the most disquieting line Pope ever wrote:

The sick'ning stars fade off th'ethereal plain.

(l. 636)

In The Dunciad Pope is no longer teaching himself by cross-breeding his predecessors but is writing at the height of his powers. The auditory relativity of Virgil is thoroughly transformed, appearing now in the fully Popean evocation of London, the sounding city, flooded and overwhelmed by a rising tumult:

But far o'er all, sonorous Blackmore's strain;
Walls, steeples, skies, bray back to him again.
In Tot'nam fields, the brethren, with amaze,
Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze;
Long Chanc'ry Lane retentive rolls the sound
And courts to courts return it round and round;
Thame wafts it thence to Rufus' roaring hall,
And Hungerford re-echoes bawl for bawl.

(1742, II, ll. 259-66)

Pope can be seen in training for this passage in his early version of Statius (1703), with its echoing cities and remurmuring riverbanks (ll. 164, 166) followed by the baroque exhilaration of the ‘guilty Dome’ and the bright pavilions invaded by obscuring clouds (ll. 172-3). That Statius should himself sound like Virgil is, of course, scarcely surprising. Now, however, the language is thoroughly naturalized, not least as a result of the London place-names. It will be said that they are there for bathetic effect and are intended to contrast, according to the ordinary rule of mock-heroic, with an implied array of Roman names. Yet the sheerly heroic energy of the lines is too strong. If ever Pope were, against all the odds, to be comparable with Blake, it would be here.

In The Dunciad the verbs are as important as ever:

Thro' Lud's fam'd gates, along the well-known
Fleet
Rolls the black troop, and overshades the street,
'Till show'rs of Sermons, Characters, Essays,
In circling fleeces whiten all the ways:
So clouds replenish'd from some bog below,
Mount in dark volumes, and descend in snow.

(1742, II, ll. 359-64)

The simple forward motion of ‘rolls’ is overtaken by the inchoative ‘whiten’. ‘Whiten’ is used many times in the translation of Homer, mostly in descriptions of the sea, and ‘blacken’ is commoner still (twenty-four instances), usually with reference to storm and clouds. In the early (1707) translation of ‘the Episode of Sarpedon’ from the Iliad, an army of warriors, likened to a storm, is seen as ‘black’ning in the field’ (l. 58). In the Dunciad passage, the recurrent Homeric formula, ‘All the ways were darkened’ is working somewhere in the back of Pope's mind. ‘Blacken’ is used most powerfully in The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717):

While the long fun'rals blacken all the way.

(l. 40)

In The Dunciad blackening and whitening are combined and the combination is at once brilliantly mirrored in the ascending darkness of the clouds followed by the falling pallor of the snow.

Both the passages I have cited from The Dunciad will stand as spectacular examples of dynamic townscape, but in neither of them do we find the radical figure of imputed movement. There is perhaps a kind of vertigo in the image (from the second passage) of flying manuscripts filling the streets, which links it to certain baroque conjurings of flying buildings, but in both passages London itself remains rooted, while the human chaos swirls through it. In the vision of the Fall of Rome in Book III the movement of the buildings is not imaginatively imputed but is actual, a real fall brought about by barbarian hands:

See, the Cirque falls, th' unpillar'd Temple nods,
Streets pav'd with Heroes, Tyber choak'd with Gods.

(1742, III, ll. 107-8)

Yet, even though all this actually happened, it is given a dreamlike quality, an air of licentious imagination by the surrealism of the second line.

Some thirty lines further on the poetry gathers to a head in the ancient figure, known as the adynata or impossibilia²⁴ (fishes in the trees, suns in the sea) in which nature herself runs lunatic. This special, cosmic version of imputed movement has its own literary history and I have done my best to keep it out of this essay. But six lines must be quoted:

Thence a new world to Nature's laws unknown,
Breaks out refulgent, with a heav'n its own:
Another Cynthia her new journey runs,
And other planets circle other suns.
The forests dance, the rivers upward rise,
Whales sport in woods, and dolphins in the skies.

(1742, III, ll. 241-6)

Here the landscape moves mightily, as it does in the Epistle to Burlington where the golden corn flows over and buries Timon's vanity (ll. 173-6). The splendour of the lines quoted is quite untouched by the distinctive colouring of subjective visual perception we found earlier. They are as much Greek as Roman (look at Herodotus v, 92a); they are as Horatian (look at Odes I, ii, ll. 5-10) or as Ovidian (Metamorphoses I, ll. 293-303) as they are Virgilian.

To rediscover the subjective inflection we must leave the major sonorities of The Dunciad and go back in time. In Eloisa to Abelard the shrines tremble (l. 112) with Eloisa's trembling consciousness and when Abelard's image rises in her mind,

Priests, Tapers, Temples, swim before my sight.

(l. 274)

Otherwise, we may turn to that almost perfect minor poem, the Epistle to Miss Blount, on her leaving the Town, after the Coronation, written in 1714. The poet, in a reverie, standing in a London street, imagines Miss Blount in her tedious country exile, imagining (in her turn) the metropolitan splendours of the court. The poem is thus an intricate Chinese box of imaginings within imaginings. Then, to represent the evanescence of an image as it is replaced by common perception, Pope uses the image of a suddenly moved fan, imputing the visual occlusion and revelation occasioned thereby, as movement, to the objects, imagined or perceived. So much for the hard, marble clarity of Augustan verse.

In some fair evening, on your elbow laid,
You dream of triumphs in the rural shade;
In pensive thought recall the fancy'd scene,
See coronations rise on ev'ry green;
Before you pass th' imaginary sights
Of Lords, and Earls, and Dukes, and garter'd Knights;
While the spread fan o'ershades your closing eyes;
Then give one flirt, and all the vision flies.
Thus vanish sceptres, coronets, and balls,
And leave you in lone woods, or empty walls.

(ll. 31-40)

I have argued that ‘scene’ in Pope carries a stronger theatrical connotation than is always perceived by modern readers. In these lines (perhaps because of their historical relation to the Coronation) Pope seems to be thinking partly of a pageant or masque and masques were of course remarkable for their transformation scenes. Stage scenery, unlike mental imagery, is part of the physical fabric of the public world, but that does not mean that the whole tenor of this passage is merely objectified, as when the falling towers really fall, toppled by the barbarian hordes. Because scenery consists of picturings, more or less flimsy and impermanent, it is naturally analogous to mental imagery. Several scholars have sensed an allusion to masque in the most famous of all the moving-architecture passages of English poetry, the rising to music of Pandemonium in Paradise Lost (I, ll. 710-17).²⁵ In Miss Blount's reverie it is not ‘Doric pillars overlaid / With golden architrave’ that whirl from her but ‘sceptres, coronets and balls’, things which are in any case mobile in themselves. When, however, we are returned to the consciousness of Pope himself, the very streets assail him and clamorously usurp his dream:

Gay pats my shoulder, and
you vanish quite;
Streets, chairs and coxcombs rush upon my sight.

(ll. 47-8)

I have at times in this essay written of these effects as if they were heroic or sublime. But where they are unequivocally placed as free-floating imaginings they are of course immediately diminished. Pope—jealous to preserve, especially in a potentially sexual context, his own lightness of manner—is often anxious to secure this very diminution. Gay's hand on Pope's shoulder enables him to show Miss Blount that he is not, after all, her abject slave but an urbane man with friends and interests of his own. Pope skilfully curtails the flirtation (remember that this word has to do, as the poem itself shows us, with the use of the fan) and contains his own, briefly vagrant imagination. But the rushing streets are not a dream or an illusion: they are reality itself, importunate and loud. Thus Pope resists the easy baroque sublimity which by his day was virtually inherent in the trope of imputed movement. It is common, everyday London, not heroes and palaces, which is here behaving so uncommonly. One searches in vain for a just analogue in painting: something like Thornhill's ceiling if it had been painted instead by Hogarth. Gillray was later to draw mock-baroque tableaux with caricatured political personages and I am sure that Pope would have been delighted by Cruikshank's picture of London spreading into the surrounding countryside, squirting smoke and bricks in fountains. But both these examples (quite apart from the fact that they post-date Pope) are far too coarse in their technique.

I have tried to show how, when Pope entered the altered landscape of another culture, he chose not only to translate classical meanings into English meanings but also to transpose certain alien habits of speech and thought. He did this because, like all great poets, he cared about language and form, and knew that the language of English poetry itself would be strengthened and enriched by the minor violations to which he was willing to subject it. He also found that the ancient world itself was far from being a uniform field. I have written about Pope's Virgilianizing of Homer as if it were a matter of strenuously artificial interference. In fact it would have required a most artificial vigilance on Pope's part to keep Virgil out. Pope, who never published a set translation of Virgil, had Virgil in his bones and accepted the consequence. This was a dynamic, ever moving modulation of tone. The whole can be seen, thus far, as a marvellously managed interplay of cultural perspectives. But then we notice that the Virgilian passages are all actually about individual, perspectival seeing and perceptual relativities. Pope found, in the ordinary practice of translation, that a Virgilian subjectivity could quicken his page. He had to make the landscape of the past live and move and, lo, there within that very landscape was a poet who made the natural landscape live and move. Meanwhile there is a certain analogy with the situation in English poetry. Johnson said that Dryden found English literature brick and left it marble.²⁶ Not, of course, that Dryden is uniformly marmoreal. Johnson himself observes, earlier in the same Life, ‘Sometimes the marble relents, and trickles in a joke.’²⁷ Elsewhere, one might add (a little more warmly) Dryden is full of life and energy. Nevertheless, Pope following Dryden may well have sensed that, stylistically, English poetry had been fixed in a classic mould. He knew that he must both defer to this and oppose it with his own more delicate genius, and the Virgilian infiltration of the objective epic showed him one way in which this might be done. There is, all the same, a certain irony in the fact that Virgil reached Pope partly through Dryden's version.

Pcpe was not the only poet to employ the trope of imputed movement any more than Virgil was the only Latin poet to do so. But there is a sense in which the fluid, subjective mode remains Virgil's property. If it is found in the Appendix Vergiliana it is because whoever wrote those passages loved and wished to be like Virgil. If it is in Ovid it is because he learned not only from the Hellenistic poets but also from Virgil. As for Statius, his debt to Virgil is immense. When Pope writes

Then Marble soften'd into life grew warm
And yielding metal flow'd to human form.

(The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated, i.e. ‘The Epistle to Augustus’, ll. 147-8)

he owes nothing to Horace, a little to Virgil (Aeneid VI, ll. 847-8) but most of all to Ovid (for example, Metamorphoses X, ll. 283ff.). Pope utterly lacks Virgil's love of his own soil, his religious intensity, his special pathos. Yet, in an age of mannered aggression and social vigilance Pope found a way to keep poetry alive, and Virgil helped.

Notes

1. Seven types of ambiguity (London, 3rd edn., 1963), pp. 68ff.

2. Many scholars now doubt the biographical reference of the first Eclogue. See the copiously documented discussion by I. M. le M. du Quesnay, ‘Virgil's First Eclogue’, in Francis Cairns (ed.), Papers of the Liverpool Latin Seminar 3 (1981), 29-182, esp. pp. 30-5.

3. ‘The Dirae’, Journal of Roman Studies 56 (1966), 142-55; p. 152.

4. See Collected in Himself, p. 424.

5. Michael Maittaire (ed.), Opera et Fragmenta Veterum Poetarum Latinorum, 2 vols. (London, 1713), II, [pp. 1588-9]. The sequence of pages 1525-1612 occur twice in this volume, the earlier run being distinguished by square brackets.

6. See, for example, Pope's Essay on Homer, TE, VII, p. 52, and his letter to Jervas of 29 November 1716, in Correspondence, I, p. 376.

7. In Dryden, Poems, III, p. 1136.

8. Dryden, Poems, III, p. 1193.

9. Thomas Hobbes, The Iliads and Odysses of Homer, 2 vols. in one (London, 1677); John Ogilby, Homer his Odysses (London, 1665); George Chapman's translation (complete version 1616, but preceded by earlier versions) is best consulted in Chapman's Homer, the Iliad, the Odyssey and the lesser Homerica, A. Nicoll (ed.) 2 vols. (London, 1957).

10. TE I, p. 466.

11. In Dryden, Poems, III, p. 1137.

12. See C. A. Martindale's admirable discussion in his ‘Unlocking the word-hoard. In praise of Metaphrase’, Comparative Criticism, 6 (1984), 47-72.

13. See his Preface to Ovid's Epistles, Translated by several hands (1680), in John Dryden, Of dramatic poesy and other critical essays, ed. George Watson, 2 vols. (London, 1962), I, 262-73.

14. See Barbara M. H. Strang, A history of English (London, 1970), esp. p. 316.

15. Preface to Poems (1815) in William Wordsworth, Stephen Gill (ed.), The Oxford Authors (Oxford, 1984), p. 631.

16. P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos, Liber Primus, with a commentary by R. G. Austin (Oxford, 1971), p. 73.

17. Virgil's Aeneis, I, ll. 233-4, in Dryden, Poems, III, p. 1070.

18. Dryden, Poems, III, p. 1274.

19. The Iliad of Homer, trans. A. Lang, W. Leaf and E. Myers (London, 1914), p. 500.

20. The Odyssey of Homer, trans. S. H. Butcher and A. Lang (London, 1903), p. 46.

21. Leviathan, Part I, chapter ii, A. R. Woller (ed.) (Cambridge, 1904), p. 3. Pope is known to have owned a copy of the Leviathan; see Collected in Himself, p. 414.

22. See Ernst Robert Curtius, European literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London, 1979), pp. 95ff. and A. D. Nuttall, ‘Fishes in the trees’, Essays in Criticism 24 (1974), 20-38.

23. See Fowler's note ad loc. in The poems of John Milton, Carey and Alastair Fowler (eds.) (London, 1968), p. 502.

24. Lives of the English poets, G. B. Hill (ed.), 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905), I, p. 469.

25. Lives of the English poets, I, p. 438.

Appendix

I am indebted for criticisms and suggestions to C. A. Martindale. All references, unless otherwise specified, are to John Butt (ed.), The poems of Alexander Pope, a one-volume edition of the text of the Twickenham Edition (London, 1968). References to Homer are to D. B. Monro and J. W. Allen (eds.), Homeri Opera (Oxford, 1917-19), those on Virgil are to R. A. B. Majors (ed.), P. Vergili Maronis Opera (Oxford, the corrected 1972 reprint of the 1969 edn.). References to the Dirae are, except for one specified case, to the edition by E. J. Kenney in the Appendix Vergiliana, W. F. Clausen, F. R. D. Goodyear, E. J. Kenney and J. A. Richmond (eds.) (Oxford, 1966).