deals was not a thing of sudden
growth is evident from a letter more outspoken than the prefaces. "Not
much less than thirty years since," he writes in 1788, "Alston and I
read Homer through together. The result was a discovery that there is
hardly a thing in the world of which Pope is so entirely destitute as a
taste for Homer.... I remembered how we had been disgusted; how often we
had sought the simplicity and majesty of Homer in his English
representative, and had found instead of them puerile conceits,
extravagant metaphors, and the tinsel of modern embellishment in every
possible position."[457]

Cowper's "discovery," startling, almost heretical at the time when it
was made, is now little more than a commonplace. We have long recognized
that Pope's Homer is not the real Homer; it is scarcely an exaggeration
to say, as does Mr. Andrew Lang, "It is almost as if he had taken
Homer's theme and written the poem himself."[458] Yet it is surprising
to see how nearly the eighteenth-century ambition, "to write a poem that
will live in the English language" has been answered in the case of
Pope. Though the "tinsel" of his embellishment is no longer even
"modern," his translation seems able to hold its own against later verse
renderings based on sounder theories. The Augustan translator strove to
give his work "elegance, energy, and fire," and despite the false
elegance, we can still feel something of true energy and fire as we read
the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_.

The truth is that, in translated as in original literature the
permanent and the transitory elements are often oddly mingled. The fate
of Pope's Homer helps us to reconcile two opposed views regarding the
future history of verse translations. Our whole study of the varying
standards set for translators makes us feel the truth of Mr. Lang's
conclusion: "There can be then, it appears, no final English translation
of Homer. In each there must be, in addition to what is Greek and
eternal, the element of what is modern, personal, and fleeting."[459]
The translator, it is obvious, must speak in the dialect and move in the
measures of his own day, thereby very often failing to attract the
attention of a later day. Yet there must be some place in our scheme for
the faith expressed by Matthew Arnold in his essays on translating
Homer, that "the task of translating Homer into English verse both will
be re-attempted, and may be re-attempted successfully."[460] For in
transl