Chapter VI: Part 6

In the collection of 1735 there appeared a letter to Digby, which is dated September 10, 1724, and is compounded from two letters, to Caryll of November 23 and December 25, 1725. In the letter of November 23, Pope says to Caryll, "My time has been spent in a trembling attendance upon death, which has at last seized one of our family,--my poor old nurse." This sentence was inserted in the letter to Digby, but as the nurse did not die till November 5, 1725, the information could not have been communicated to him in September, 1724. The motive of the poet in altering the dates of his letters when he assigned a fanciful address to them was probably to adapt the chronology to the circumstances of his new _dramatis personae_. His earliest letter to Edward Blount is dated August, 1714, and when he transferred the moonlight reverie from 1713 to 1716, he may have been influenced by the consideration that in the former year his correspondence with Blount had not commenced. The letter to Caryll of November 23, and the letter to Digby of September 10, both open with the same compliment on their return from the Continent, and the date may have been altered from 1725 to 1724 to make it harmonise with Digby's travels abroad. In remedying one inconsistency, Pope fell into another. A new use was found for the letter in the quarto of 1737. Arbuthnot died in February, 1735, at the very time when there is reason to suppose that the poet printed the P. T. collection. The final letter in the volume is from the Doctor, and it was apparently added at the last moment. It was then too late to be thinking of a re-distribution of the materials, and the idea was not executed, or perhaps conceived till 1737, when the address, which had been changed from Caryll to Digby, was once more changed from Digby to Arbuthnot. In the interval Pope appears to have detected the anachronism. He retained the day of the month, but struck out the year. He preserved the announcement, "death has seized one of our family," but dropped the words "my poor old nurse." Her death nevertheless could alone have been meant; for in the letters to Caryll, as in the letter to Digby, several contemporaneous particulars are mentioned, which being repeated in the letter to Arbuthnot, limit its date to the period of the poor old nurse's decease. In both cases Pope's time had been spent in attending upon the dying patient, in both cases he and his mother had been ill together, in both cases these incidents had hindered his writing, in both cases he had been questioned respecting the effect produced upon his mind by the attacks upon his translation of the "Odyssey," and in both cases he had been less troubled by the criticisms upon his writings than by the imputations upon his morals, in consequence of some reports which had been spread of his intrigues with Martha Blount. It follows that the letter to Arbuthnot, though dated September 10, must have been written subsequent to the death of the nurse on November 5. But there is unanswerable evidence that at that time, and for weeks and months afterwards, he had constant personal intercourse with the poet. He was at his elbow, and not on the Continent,[165] and the event could not have been communicated to him as news upon his return from any journey he ever made to France. The year was omitted by Pope exactly because he could fix upon none which would bear the test of examination.[166] When it is plain that the letter could not have been addressed to Arbuthnot, it is superfluous to dwell upon the improbability that he and Caryll should have put the same question with regard to the "railing papers about the 'Odyssey,'" or to enumerate the other coincidences which are beyond the range of belief. The letter in all its shapes contains a passage which forms a strange comment upon Pope's proceedings, and is the bitterest sentence that will ever be pronounced upon them: "Falsehood is folly, says Homer, and liars and calumniators at last hurt none but themselves, even in this world. In the next, it is charity to say, God have mercy on them. They were the devil's vice-regents upon earth, who is the father of lies, and, I fear, has a right to dispose of his children."

On June 12, 1713, Pope wrote to Caryll, "As I hope, and would flatter myself, that you know me and my thoughts so entirely as never to be mistaken in either, so it is a pleasure to me that you guessed so right in regard to the author of that 'Guardian' you mentioned." On June 23 he wrote again, and said, "Your last is the more obliging as it hints at some little niceties in my conduct which your candour and affection prompt you to recommend to me." Both these sentences are inserted in an undated letter to Addison, which is compiled from three letters to Caryll, and no one could credit that Caryll and Addison had independently, and almost simultaneously communicated their guesses to Pope that he was the author of a particular essay in the "Guardian," and at the same time "hinted at little niceties in his conduct." The remainder of the letter to Addison is full of inconsistencies. The result of the imposition is to confound dates, events, opinions, and persons. Addison knows Pope and his thoughts so entirely as never to be mistaken in either; Addison's candour and affection prompt him to advise Pope in little niceties of conduct, and the perfect knowledge, the affection, the candour, and the advice, which are represented as proceeding from the most exquisite genius of the age, all appertain to an obscure country gentleman whose intimacy could not confer, in the eyes of the world, any lustre upon his friend. The whole of the letters to Addison are an absolute fiction. Four out of the five are from the Caryll correspondence, and the internal evidence is opposed to the genuineness of the fifth. The deception is aggravated by the erroneous aspect it imparts to the celebrated quarrel. In the letters which preceded the commencing rupture Pope appears as the zealous champion and bosom associate of the man he afterwards maligned, and we are left to suppose that the vaunted generosity on one side had been met by envy and hostility on the other. It is of virtual forgeries like these, which were specially concocted for the public, that the poet had the hardihood to say in his preface, "Many of them having been written on the most trying occasions, and all in the openness of friendship, are a proof what were his real sentiments, as they flowed warm from his heart, without the least thought that ever the world should be witness to them." He not only pretended that they derived a value from being the spontaneous expression of his feelings as they rose, but pledged his word that his motive in treasuring them up was to supply an authentic register of historical, literary, and personal events, and especially to provide a corrective to the misrepresentations of less scrupulous chroniclers. "I think more and more of it," he said to Lord Oxford, September 15, 1729, when dwelling upon the value of the collected letters and the importance of preserving them, "as finding what a number of facts they will settle the truth of, both relating to history and criticism, and parts of private life and character of the eminent men of my time." In the preface to the quarto of 1737 he made a statement of the same nature, and protested that the letters he kept were selected from the letters he destroyed, "merely as they preserved the memory of some friendships which would be ever dear to him, or set in a true light some matters of fact from which the scribblers of the times had taken occasion to asperse either his friends or himself." He volunteered the declaration to Lord Oxford when he was engaged in the manufacture of the correspondence which was to falsify the facts he pretended it "would settle the truth of," and he renewed the assertion in public as a prelude to the fabrications themselves.

The Wycherley correspondence furnishes fresh illustrations of the malpractices of the poet. For Pope's own share in it the published version is our only authority. The originals of Wycherley's part in it were placed in Lord Oxford's library in October, 1729, and withdrawn in June, 1735; but there still exist among the Oxford papers copies of six out of the eighteen published letters, besides six which are unpublished.[167] Imperfect as is the series, it is sufficient to show the infidelity of the work Pope put forth to the world. The letter borrowed from the Caryll group may conveniently be considered in connection with the rest. It was probably not included in the original volume of the Wycherley correspondence, which Pope published in 1729, for it is printed in the edition of 1735 on an interpolated half sheet signed * C. This is placed between sheet B and sheet C, and the numbers of its four pages--11 to 14--are repeated on sheet C. The space being greater than was required the letter has been divided into an unusual number of paragraphs, which are double the ordinary distance from each other, and as this device for spreading out the matter only brought it three or four lines over the top of the fourth page the remainder is left blank, contrary to the plan adopted in the rest of the book.[168] Pope we may presume had not completed in 1729 his task of reconstructing his letters to Caryll, and first introduced the manufactured letter into the old sheets of the Wycherley when he incorporated them into the volume of 1735. A single circumstance is enough to prove that the letter is fictitious. It is made up of extracts from two letters to Caryll of July 31, 1710, and January 25, 1711, and in the former of the two the poet quotes a remark from the "Tatler" on the reason why women are vainer than men. The passage is repeated in the letter to Wycherley which is dated June 23, 1705, nearly four years before the "Tatler" commenced, and Pope imagined he had obliterated the anachronism by changing the phrase "the 'Tatler' observes of women" into the general formula "it is observed of women."

The concoction of the letter to Wycherley out of the letters to Caryll is attended by the usual distortion of facts. The extract from the letter of July 31 is an expostulation against Caryll's extravagant compliments. A few months after the date which Pope assigned to the passage when he applied it to Wycherley, the old dramatist had addressed a kindred remonstrance to Pope. "I must confess," he wrote March 22, 1705-6, "you try my patience, as you say in the beginning of your letter, not by the many lines in it, but the too many compliments you make me for nothing, in which you prove yourself, though a sincere friend, a man of too much fiction; for I have not seen so much poetry in prose a great while, since your letter is filled with so many fine words and acknowledgments of your obligations to me, the only asseverations of yours I dare contradict; for I must tell you your letter is like an author's epistle before his book,--written more to show his wit to the world than his sincerity or gratitude to his friend, whom he libels with praise, so that you have provoked my modesty even whilst you have soothed my vanity; for I know not whether I am more complimented than abused, since too much praise turns irony, as too great thanks for small favours turns ingratitude, or too much ceremony in religion hypocrisy."[169] Pope thought fit in the published letters to reverse the parts. He ascribed the adulation to Wycherley, and the rebuke of it to himself. He gives a false air of manly independence to his youthful character, and does it at the expense of his friend.

The extract from the letter to Caryll of January 25, 1711, which forms the second portion of the made-up letter to Wycherley of June 23, 1705, is a comment on the eulogy lavished by Caryll on some verses of the poet. The change of name and date flattered in a double manner the vanity of Pope,--the applause appeared to proceed from a celebrated wit instead of from a country squire, and to be bestowed upon a lad of seventeen instead of upon a man who was nearly twenty-three. He always aspired to the credit of precocity, and some of his falsifications seem to have had no other purpose than to exaggerate his juvenile fame. Wycherley wrote to him on February 19, 1708-9, and spoke of the genius which promised him immortality, of his great, vigorous and active mind. In a postscript it is mentioned that the "Miscellany," which contained Pope's Pastorals, would not be out for three weeks.[170] Pope suppressed, amongst other passages, the allusion which fixed the period at which the panegyric was penned, and altered the year to 1706-7, for no perceptible reason except that he wished to antedate the praise. There can be little doubt that his opening letter to Wycherley was manufactured or misplaced with a similar object. It is printed in the edition of 1735 on an interpolated half sheet, marked *B, the pages of which are correctly numbered from 1 to 4. As the first page of sheet B which follows is numbered 3, it is evident that it was originally preceded by only two pages, which must have been cancelled, and the present letter put in their place.[171] This new letter is dated December 26, 1704, and contains his reflections on a compliment which he alleges had been paid to him by Wycherley--that his compositions were above the attacks of envious critics. "It is pleasant to remark," says Dr. Johnson, "how soon Pope learned the cant of an author, and began to treat critics with contempt, though he had yet suffered nothing from them."[172] He did not in fact publish a single line till more than four years later, and with our present evidence that the letter was an interpolated after-thought, we cannot but suspect that Wycherley's premature compliment, and Pope's premature cant both belonged to a subsequent period, or perhaps were fabricated for the press. "The author's age then sixteen," says the poet in a note, and in this ostentatious announcement we have the motive to the act. The opinion of Warburton, that the letters of the boy displayed all the characteristics of the man, is an argument the more that they were the productions of the man and not of the boy.

"I have received," writes Wycherley, in an unpublished letter, dated December 6, 1707, "yours of the 29th of November, which has so much overpaid mine in kindness that, as Voiture says, I doubt whether the best effects of those fine expressions of your friendship to me can be more obliging than they themselves; and for my humility you talk of, you have lessened while you magnify it, as by commending my good nature with so much more of yours you have made me almost incapable of being grateful to you; for you have said so many kind things of me you have hardly left me anything of the same kind to return you, and the best actions are not capable of making you amends for so many good words you have given me, by which you justly magnify them and yourself by saying they are sincere, so that you have obliged me to be vain rather than not think you a Plain Dealer. Thus, even against your own opinion, your freedom with me proves not you a fool, but me so, especially if I could think half the good you say of me my due. As for the good book you sent me I took it as kindly as the reprimand from the good man, which I think you heard, and was that I should not stand in my own light."[173] Pope printed his letter of November 29, to which this letter was a reply, and it touches upon none of the topics to which Wycherley refers. There are none of the fine expressions of friendship, none of the many honied words, none of the encomiums on his correspondent's good nature and humility. He reproves him, on the contrary, in rather a lofty tone for his excessive acknowledgments for trifling services, tells him he will continue the revision of the poems the old dramatist had submitted to him, insists that he must be permitted to alter and add as well as omit, and in answer to an observation of Wycherley, that "the sprightliness of wit despises method," assures him that if method is neglected his verses had better be converted into separate maxims in prose. As Pope's letter does not contain one syllable upon the subjects to which Wycherley alludes in his reply, so the reply takes no notice of the subjects which monopolise the epistle of Pope. Though he had discoursed exclusively upon the remodelling of Wycherley's poems, Wycherley himself disdains to offer in return a single word of thanks, of encouragement, of acquiescence, or dissent. The omission cannot be explained by the supposition that the copy was abridged. Whatever passages might have been left out, those would certainly have been retained which confirmed under Wycherley's own hand the particulars which were Pope's professed justification for printing the letters, and his excuse for depositing them in the library of Lord Oxford.

The Wycherley correspondence concludes with a letter from Pope dated May 2, 1710. A coldness then ensued of which Dr. Johnson gives this account: "The fondness of Wycherley was too violent to last. His esteem of Pope was such that he submitted some poems to his revision, and when Pope, perhaps proud of such confidence, was sufficiently bold in his criticisms and liberal in his alterations, the old scribbler was angry to see his pages defaced, and felt more pain from the detection than content from the amendment of his faults. They parted, but Pope always considered him with kindness, and visited him a little time before he died."[174] The statement is incomplete. Pope engaged in the revision as early as April, 1706, when he describes to Wycherley the nature of the emendations he has made: "Some parts I have contracted as we do sun-beams to improve their energy and force; some I have taken quite away, as we take branches from a tree to add to the fruit; others I have entirely new expressed, and turned more into poetry." In November, 1707, he informs his friend that he has subjected the poem on "Dullness" to the same process, that he has condensed the piece one half, suppressed deficiencies, heightened the language, and smoothed the versification. Far from being angry at these "bold criticisms and liberal alterations," the old scribbler was profuse in his thanks, and replied to Pope's request, that he would keep the assistance a secret, by declaring that he always does, and always will own to whose genius and judgment he is indebted for the improvement of his unmusical numbers and harsher sense. Between three and four years afterwards he submitted a fresh set of poems to Pope's castigation, and in two successive letters of April 1 and April 11, 1710, entreats him to show no mercy in his corrections; "for I had rather," he says, "be condemned by my friend in private, than exposed to my foes in public." Pope answered that the repetitions were more numerous than he anticipated, and that crossing them out defaced the copy to a degree that he feared would be displeasing. "Let me know," he added, "if I am to go on at this rate, or if you would prescribe any other method." Wycherley rejoined that tautology was the last fault of which he would be guilty, that he thought with care he could remove the blemish, and that he would not occupy Pope in a task which might "prevent his writing on new subjects of his own." "All," he continues, "that I desire of you is to mark in the margin, without defacing the copy at all, any repetition of words, matter, or sense, which if you will be so kind as to do for me, you will supply my want of memory with your good one, and my deficiencies of sense with the infallibilities of yours,--which if you do you will most infinitely oblige me, who almost repent the trouble I have given you, since so much." The comment on Pope's strong criticism is equally cordial: "As to what you call freedom with me, which you desire me to forgive, you may be assured I would not forgive you unless you did use it; for I am so far from thinking your plainness a fault or an offence to me that I think it a charity and an obligation, which I shall always acknowledge with all sort of gratitude to you for it, who am therefore, dear Mr. Pope, your most obliged humble servant." Dr. Johnson overlooked the rude ordeal to which Wycherley's vanity had been exposed in April, 1706, and the proof he then gave that he had not in his character the slightest tincture of irritable impatience at the wholesale correction of his works. He implored a renewal of the rigour when he invoked, with full experience of the treatment he was to expect, the same good offices in April, 1710, and the anger which Johnson imputes to him on that occasion at the detection of his faults is not only in singular contradiction to the whole of his previous conduct, but is belied, as we have seen, by his letter to Pope. The notion that he was offended at the freedom of his friend's remarks was an inference drawn from the tone of Pope's reply, and not from the language of Wycherley himself.

"I am sorry," Pope commences, "you persist to take ill my not accepting your invitation, and to find, if I mistake not, your exception not unmixed with some suspicion." The letter of Wycherley is dated April 27, 1710, and if the contents of the letter of Pope, which is dated May 2, did not show that it was the answer, all doubt would be removed by the fact that it was headed "The Answer" by the poet, both in the octavo of 1735, and the quarto of 1737. This led to the conclusion that Wycherley, while professing to receive the strictures on his verses with kindness, had at the same time manifested in his letter some displeasure which his friend thought proper to omit, and which connected their quarrel with the secret soreness of the author at the candour of the critic.[175] Pope did indeed suppress the beginning and the end of Wycherley's communication; but the passages he kept back betray the falsity of his own insinuation. "I answered," the letter begins, "yours of the 15th, which I think was the last I had from you, about three days after my receiving it; but having not yet received any answer to it from you, I doubt your old pain of the head-ache has prevented it, which gives me a great deal of concern for you, insomuch that I have had thoughts of making you a visit before my journey into Shropshire, which has been delayed by delays and disappointments to me out of the country." The end is as follows: "My most humble service pray to Sir William Trumbull, and your good father and mother, whilst I can assure you from hence all the world here are your servants and friends. I know not but I may see you very suddenly at Binfield after all my broken promises."[176] Instead, therefore, of Wycherley being annoyed at Pope's refusal to accept his invitation, it was Wycherley who was designing to visit Pope; and instead of his persisting to take ill any part of his friend's conduct, his language was throughout expressive of cordiality and kindness.

The first intimation of a rupture is in a letter of Pope to Cromwell, on August 21, 1710, in which he says, "Since Mr. Wycherley left London, I have not heard a word from him, though just before, and once since, I writ to him, and though I know myself guilty of no offence but of doing sincerely just what he bid me." On October 28, he reverts to the subject, and protests by everything that is holy that he is not acquainted with the cause of the estrangement. He goes on, however, to state that he did not suppose any man could have been so suspicious as not to credit his own experience of a friend, and avers that he had done nothing which deserved to be concealed--a defence which seems to indicate a consciousness that Wycherley had heard some disparaging report. It was subsequently asserted by Pope's enemies, and never contradicted by Pope, that the alienation was produced by a copy of satirical verses he had written on the man he affected to caress. His offensive reply of May 2, to the genial letter of April 27, might alone explain the resentment of Wycherley, if the ungracious answer in its printed shape could be received as authentic. But I have shown that the opening sentence, in which Pope regrets that his correspondent persisted in taking ill his not accepting an invitation, is altogether fictitious, and with the evidence before us in the critical epistle of November 29, 1707, that he replaced his complimentary effusions by unvarnished truths, we may suspect that the uncompromising tone of his final letter was softened in the original, and that the published version is merely another instance of his anxiety to conceal the deference he had shown to Wycherley before the celebrity of the old dramatist had been eclipsed by the fame of the youthful poet. The almost eastern style which Pope adopted towards him a year and a half after the close of their correspondence, may be seen in one of his genuine epistles to Cromwell, which was printed by Curll. "I am highly pleased," the poet writes, November 12, 1711, "with the knowledge you give me of Mr. Wycherley's present temper, which seems so favourable to me. I shall ever have such a fund of affection for him, as to be agreeable to myself when I am so to him, and cannot but be gay when he is in good humour, as the surface of the earth, if you will pardon a poetical similitude, is clearer or gloomier, just as the sun is brighter or more overcast." Whatever may have caused the sun to be overcast, there could have been little ground of complaint against Wycherley, or Pope would not have fabricated the pretence that he had provoked his anger by declining an invitation.

On the appearance of Theobald's edition of the Posthumous Works of Wycherley, the poet poured out his indignation to Lord Oxford. "I foresaw," he said, October 6, 1729, "some dirty trick in connection with my friend Wycherley's papers which they were publishing, and nothing can at once do justice so well to him and to me, who was by him employed in them, as the divulging of some parts of his and my letters." At the moment that he was penning this denunciation against "dirty tricks in relation to Wycherley's papers," though no trick had been practised, he was busily engaged in aspersing his friend by garbling the papers he professed to divulge out of justice to his memory. His motives were not malignant. He was simply desirous to do credit to himself, but to effect this end he did not scruple to falsify their private correspondence, and under the plea of justifying a man who was in his grave, took advantage of his death to libel him in safety. When with our scanty means of testing the fidelity of the letters, we find that part of them were misplaced, distorted, and invented, the rest of the series must be received with distrust, and some which cannot be proved to be fabricated are among the most suspicious of the whole.

Where the originals of Pope's letters were in hostile hands, as was the case with his letters to Cromwell and to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he was compelled to be sparing in his operations. He omitted sentences and altered phrases, but could not venture upon wholesale perversions of the truth. Of the bulk of the letters he published we have neither the originals nor reliable copies; but when we chance to light upon the materials from which he worked, we find, as might be expected, that he was not more conscientious in his use of them than in his reckless falsification of his correspondence with Wycherley and Caryll. The volume of 1735 concludes with a letter from Arbuthnot, dated July 17, 1734, and in the quarto of 1737 we have the pretended reply of the poet. Among the Arbuthnot papers in the possession of Mr. Baillie, is the actual answer sent by Pope, and it turns out that the printed substitute is an elaborate composition that has hardly any resemblance to the genuine text. He must have revised the letter of Arbuthnot as well as remodelled his own. "I am almost displeased," he remarks in the real, not in the counterfeit reply, "at your expression '_scarcely_ any of those suspicions or jealousies which affect the truest friendships;' for I know of _not one_ on my part." He accordingly erased from Arbuthnot's letter the expression he disapproved, and fathered upon him the unqualified assertion, "I think since our first acquaintance there has not been any of those little suspicions or jealousies that often affect the sincerest friendships." To what extent he may have carried this principle of altering the opinions of his correspondents to fit his personal views cannot be discovered. A single instance of the artifice in a man so unscrupulous destroys all confidence in the documents which rest on his unsupported authority, and there is often reason to suspect that he gives us not what others said, but what he thought it advantageous to himself that they should say.

In comparison with this perversion of facts, the attempt of Pope to improve his letters, regarded as literary productions, would be of trifling moment, if it did not present another example of the audacious falsehoods he imposed upon the world. Speaking in the preface to the quarto of 1737 of the correspondence he reprinted from what he calls the surreptitious editions, he says "for the chasms in it, we had not the means to supply them, the author having destroyed too many letters to preserve a series." He intends us to infer that the selection was not his own, though the passage is virtually an admission that the collection of P. T. was the collection deposited with Lord Oxford, or there could not have been such an identity between them as that none of the gaps in the P. T. volume could be filled up from the bound book in the Oxford library. "Nor," he continues, "would he go about to amend them, except by the omission of some passages improper, or at least impertinent to be divulged to the public, or of such entire letters as were either not his, or not approved of by him." He would have us believe that they had been dragged before the world in their first crude state, without a single subsequent touch from his pen, though he had previously amended them with studious care--had culled the best passages, blended extracts from two or three letters into one, and constantly corrected composition which had been originally laboured. Some of his ambitious epistles, like his letter to Arbuthnot of July 26, 1734, were no doubt mere essays, which were only written when they were committed to the press. In the quarto of 1741, he repeated the device he had employed in the quarto of 1737. He pretended in both cases that the correspondence he printed himself had been printed by others without his knowledge, and in defiance of his wish. He next adopted and republished the letters he affected to repudiate, and having already revised them to the uttermost, asserted that he could not be induced to revise them at all. So completely had truth with him been swallowed up in vanity. "Had he," he tells us in the preface to the quarto of 1737, "sat down with a design to draw his own picture, he could not have done it so truly, for whoever sits for it, whether to himself or another, will inevitably find his features more composed than his appear in these letters; but if an author's hand, like a painter's, be more distinguishable in a slight sketch than a finished picture, this very carelessness will make them the better known from such counterfeits as have been, and may be, imputed to him." He did everything he professed to have left undone. The careless sketch was a studied portrait got up for exhibition, and the minutest details had been disposed with a view to flatter the likeness and increase the effect.

In the conduct of Pope to Bolingbroke there are points of resemblance to his conduct in the case of the correspondence, which render the evidence a material supplement to the present inquiry. Bolingbroke allowed him to get put into type the political letters on "The Spirit of Patriotism," on "The Idea of a Patriot King," and on "The State of Parties," under the promise that the pamphlet should be confined to five or six persons, who were named by the author. Pope fulfilled his pledge by causing a separate edition of 1500 copies to be struck off, and enjoined the printer to lay by the sheets "with great secresy till further orders."[177] In the dangerous manoeuvre of printing covertly the original volume of the Swift correspondence which he sent to the Dean, he may, perhaps, have remained concealed from the inferior agents, and have conducted the details of the business through the medium of Worsdale. In the instance of the pamphlet he was not afraid to put himself into the power of the printer, who, says Bolingbroke, "kept his word with him better than he kept his with his friend."[178] The poet not only committed a breach of trust in preparing a work for sale which he received upon the condition that it should remain strictly private, but he had the boldness to tamper with the substance of the work, and in the impression, which was ultimately designed for the public, "he took upon him to divide the subject, and to alter and omit passages according to the suggestions of his own fancy."[179] From Warburton we learn that Pope "frequently told his acquaintance that Lord Bolingbroke would at his death leave his writings to his disposal,"[180] and the changes he introduced by anticipation into the single instalment within his power show the manner in which he designed to discharge his functions, and strengthen the suspicion that he may have falsified the letters of his correspondents as well as his own. Johnson, in censuring Lyttelton for publishing the posthumous edition of Thomson's poem on "Liberty," in an abridged form, condemns a practice "which, as it has a manifest tendency to lessen the confidence of society, and to confound the characters of authors, by making one man write by the judgment of another, cannot be justified by any supposed propriety of the alteration or kindness of the friend."[181] The freedom used by Pope was especially reprehensible from the concealment he practised. The copy of the pamphlet which he sent to Bolingbroke, and the other privileged persons, did not exhibit the modified text, and though the occurrence took place several years before the death of the poet he never, in all that time, whispered one word upon the subject to the author of the tracts, from which it is clear that he neither intended him to learn what he had done, nor expected him to approve the changes he had made. It was not till he was in his grave that his deception was divulged by the application of the printer to Bolingbroke for instructions how to dispose of the impression. Warburton argued that Pope must have wished his friend to have a knowledge of the clandestine edition and clandestine alterations, or he would have ordered the work to be destroyed during his final illness,[182] as if, in the lingering hope that life would be protracted a little longer, it had not happened times out of number that men had deferred burning tale-telling papers till their minds were diverted from the duty by the lassitude of sickness, and as if such procrastination was not in the highest degree probable when the poet had been first at the pains of revising the work, and next at the cost of an edition of 1500 copies.[183] He may even have believed that his secret, under any circumstances, was safe with the printer. A theory which has been verified by endless examples is a more credible alternative than to assume that Pope had designed to leave behind him evidences of a dishonesty which he had not dared to disclose during years of familiar intercourse, and which, notwithstanding that Bolingbroke was perpetually at his side, he did not venture to reveal in his dying hours when he might have palliated his motives, and obtained pardon for his fault. But if we admit the supposition of Warburton, and allow that he had ultimately arrived at the resolution of suffering the course of events to betray the misdoings he had not the courage to confess, there will still remain the facts, which Warburton never questioned, that he pretended to Bolingbroke that some half dozen copies had alone been printed, when he had printed a distinct edition of 1500; that he handed an impression to the author which was taken faithfully from the manuscript, while the impression he hid from him was garbled and adulterated; and that, having concealed the double treachery for years, he left the world without an allusion to the wrongful act he had committed. Johnson justly considered that the resentment of Bolingbroke at this violation of faith was with reason "more acrimonious in proportion as the violator had been more trusted or loved," for the professions which win confidence increase the baseness of betraying it; but with equal justice Johnson condemned the "thirst for vengeance" which excited Bolingbroke "to blast the memory" of the man who had lived with him in a constant interchange of affection, and who, both in public and private, had paid him the tribute of his heartiest homage and applause.[184]

The scrutiny to which the lives of celebrated men are subjected is one of the severest penalties they pay for fame. Their private weaknesses have often been exposed with wanton cruelty; but the delinquencies of Pope are public acts by which he himself has challenged inquiry. He endeavoured to pass off a sophisticated correspondence for genuine, and the interests of truth demand that the deception should be exposed. He laboured to throw his own misdoings upon innocent men, and justice requires that his victims should be absolved, and the discredit, augmented beyond measure by the perfidy and deceit, be laid where it is due. He was the bitter satirist of individuals out of an assumed indignation at everything base, and his claim to adopt this lofty strain, his sincerity in it, and his fairness, are all involved in his personal dealings. The office of an editor is neither that of an advocate nor of an accuser. He is a judge, whose only client is truth. I have endeavoured to investigate the facts with impartiality, and narrate them with fidelity, and if I have anywhere failed, it is from unconscious, not from wilful error; but having once been satisfied of the guilt of Pope, I do not pretend to think that genius is an extenuation of rascality. He rightly refused others the benefit of the plea, and said in the Essay on Man, whoever is "wickedly wise is but the more a fool, the more a knave." The sketch which Lord Macaulay has given of his character, when describing his conduct on the appearance of Tickell's version of the first book of the Iliad, is not too severe for the treacheries and falsehoods which were the instruments of his malevolence, cowardice and vanity. "An odious suspicion had sprung up in the mind of Pope. He fancied, and he soon firmly believed, that there was a deep conspiracy against his fame and his fortunes. The work on which he had staked his reputation was to be depreciated. The subscription, on which rested his hopes of a competence, was to be defeated. With this view, Addison had made a rival translation; Tickell had consented to father it, and the wits at Button's had consented to puff it. We do not accuse Pope of bringing an accusation which he knew to be false. We have not the smallest doubt that he believed it to be true; and the evidence on which he believed it he found in his own bad heart. His own life was one long series of tricks, as mean and as malicious as that of which he had suspected Addison and Tickell. He was all stiletto and mask. To injure, to insult, and to save himself from the consequences of injury and insult by lying and equivocating, was the habit of his life. He published a lampoon on the Duke of Chandos; he was taxed with it; and he lied and equivocated. He published a lampoon on Aaron Hill; he was taxed with it; and he lied and equivocated. He published a still fouler lampoon on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; he was taxed with it; and he lied with more than usual effrontery and vehemence. He puffed himself, and abused his enemies, under feigned names. He robbed himself of his own letters, and then raised the hue and cry after them. Besides his frauds of malignity, of fear, of interest, and of vanity, there were frauds which he seems to have committed from a love of fraud alone. He had a habit of stratagem, a pleasure in outwitting all who came near him. Whatever his object might be, the indirect road to it was that which he preferred. For Bolingbroke, Pope undoubtedly felt as much love and veneration as it was in his nature to feel for any human being. Yet Pope was scarcely dead, when it was discovered that from no motive, except the mere love of artifice, he had been guilty of an act of gross perfidy to Bolingbroke."[185] Many of the falsehoods and perfidies I have detailed have come to light since Macaulay wrote, and there are more behind which will appear in their proper place in Pope's life and works. There have been no lack of men whose moral conduct was in an almost inverse ratio with their intellectual gifts; but there never was an author of equal genius, who habitually practised such despicable deceptions for such paltry purposes;

"Who for this end would earn a lasting name,
Join moral infamy to mental fame,
Would tear aside the friendly veil of night
To stand degraded in a blaze of light."

His crooked policy was ineffectual, even when his worst devices were undetected. Few believed that he was vexed at the publication of his letters, or that they were careless effusions, or that the virtues he paraded in them were the just reflection of his mind. Both men and compositions will seem to be what they are, and the poet's protestations did not prevent the world from discovering that his epistles were laboured, that many of his sentiments were feigned, and that he eagerly promoted the publications he pretended to deplore.

Having finished a discussion which from its nature will be dull to many, and from its length will be wearisome to all, I turn to speak of the present edition of the Correspondence. The last edition published in the lifetime of Pope comprised, according to Mr. Croker's calculation, 354 letters. These, Mr. Croker states, were increased by Warburton to 384, by Warton to 502, by Bowles to 644, and by Roscoe to 708, or exactly double the number that were included in the last edition of the poet. The present edition will contain more new letters than were collected by Warburton, Warton, Bowles, and Roscoe combined, and many of them are of immeasurably greater importance in determining the character and conduct of Pope than any which have previously appeared. There are others among them which, under ordinary circumstances, would be too trivial to be printed; but particulars, which are separately insignificant, have assisted in dispelling some of the mystery or exposing some of the deceptions in which it was the poet's pleasure to involve his life, and as nobody can pronounce with certainty what facts may be of service to future inquirers, I have thought it better to add a few superfluous pages than to run the risk of rejecting materials which may prove useful hereafter. I have, in like manner, admitted letters which had a biographical value, although they were neither written by Pope nor to him. Second-hand statements cannot supply the place of authentic documents, and to have dissociated the subsidiary from the main correspondence would have frequently deprived both of the increased importance they derive from being read in connection.

In Pope's own, and every succeeding edition, the letters are divided into groups. The arrangement of the entire collection in one consecutive chronological series is, in his case, neither desirable nor possible. It is not desirable because a unity of subject often runs through his intercourse with particular persons, and the interposition of the topics upon which he touched with other friends, far from presenting a connected view of his thoughts and actions, would reduce the whole to a medley of disjointed fragments. It is not possible because many of his letters are undated, and, though we can frequently determine their place in each class, there are no means of settling their order when all the letters of doubtful date are thrown together. In numerous instances the year in which they were written can at most be discovered, and the attempt to fix their precedency within that period would be attended with as much uncertainty as if they were shuffled like a pack of cards.

The liberties which Pope took with his correspondence in preparing it for publication diminish the authority of that extensive portion of it which we owe to his printed or manuscript copies alone, and have rendered it essential to specify the source from which, every letter is derived. Where the letter was sent to one person and was published by Pope as if it had been addressed to another, it is inserted in its proper place, and again in the group to which it was falsely assigned by the writer. Unless the correspondence was exhibited in its double form, a just idea could not easily be obtained of the shape and colour he imparted to it, or of the relations which he pretended to have maintained with his contemporaries. Where the direction was not changed, and we possess both the genuine and the corrected letter, the true version is given in the text, and any variations in his amended version which seemed worthy of notice are pointed out in the notes. Even here, from the nature and extent of the alterations, it has sometimes been necessary to preserve a letter in its twofold state.

The greater part of the collection of 1735 was reproduced in the quarto of 1737; but as the texts are not always identical the earliest has been followed, except where there is manifestly an error of the press, or where the quarto supplies passages which are not in the volume of P. T. I had once intended to subjoin the whole of the various readings at the foot of the page. I abandoned the design upon finding that the vast majority of them were verbal, and apparently unimportant changes, which could only have interested the few curious inquirers who would always have recourse to the original editions. I have not the less carefully collated these original editions throughout, and have thus got rid of numerous mistakes which had become traditional in the subsequent reprints. The notes signed "Pope, 1735," were first published in the P. T. collection, with the exception of a few in the Wycherley group, which, though they are only known to us through the P. T. volume, had undoubtedly appeared in 1729. Many of the P. T. notes were transferred to the authorised impression of 1737, and they were nearly all in the copies which the poet delivered to Warburton for posthumous publication. The notes signed "Pope, 1737," were added in the quarto of that year; and those signed "Cooper, 1737," are from the octavos which bear the name of this bookseller on the title-page.

Language was current in Pope's day which would be considered grossly indelicate in ours, and though he abounds in refined and elevated strains, he was yet among the worst offenders of his time. "He and Swift," says Dr. Johnson, "had an unnatural delight in ideas physically impure, such as every other tongue utters with unwillingness, and of which every ear shrinks from the mention." His correspondence is not altogether free from the defect; but no editor can now efface the blots which Warburton, Warton, and Bowles felt bound to preserve. Roscoe set aside a few sentences, and showed by his inconsistency the uselessness of the process. He confined his expurgations to the part of Pope's works which were little read, and where the omissions in consequence would rarely be remarked; but did not venture to disturb a single syllable of the far more numerous and more objectionable passages which occur in the pieces that are in the hands of all the world. The stains which sully so much of our beautiful literature are unhappily indelible, and it could answer no useful end to adopt the capricious principle of Roscoe in removing the lesser blemishes which are seldom noticed, and leaving the worst and most conspicuous defilements undisturbed. More freedom may be used with the unpublished letters; but I have exercised the discretion very sparingly, and have not excluded every coarse word, phrase, or idea, when it was characteristic of the age, the man, and his writings, and when, though an offence against taste, it could not be injurious to morals.

I have mentioned at the several places where their contributions are inserted, the numerous persons to whose liberality Mr. Croker and myself have been obliged for materials and assistance. The services rendered by Mr. Dilke require to be noticed here. Until he published his articles in the Athenaeum little had been added to our knowledge of Pope since Johnson produced his masterly Life. The truths which Mr. Dilke established, and the errors he dissipated, were not more important than the change he gave to the former superficial investigations. His rigid scrutiny became the standard for every subsequent inquirer. He loved his studies for their own sake, and never did a man of letters work less for personal ends. He at once placed at my disposal his Caryll correspondence, which he had carefully annotated, and the explanation of all its obscure allusions are due to him. He supplied me with a multitude of letters which were widely scattered through books and periodicals, and collated others with the originals in the British Museum and Bodleian Library. Large masses of the letters are undated, or dated falsely, and he was at the labour of fixing dates which sometimes appeared to defy conjecture. He lent me his rare editions, was unwearied in answering questions, in solving difficulties, in revising proofs, and in communicating, without reserve, his stores of information. He was then suffering from a long and painful illness, and he died when only the first volume of correspondence was printed, or I should have had his generous and invaluable aid to the end.

Mr. Bowles remarked in the course of the skirmish of pamphlets he provoked, that the editorship of Pope's works had been to no one a bed of roses. For the larger part of the discomforts his commentators may have endured, Pope himself was responsible. His mysteries, his double-dealings, his falsifications, and his quarrels have rendered half the acts of his life a fertile theme for debate. None of the angry controversialists who mingled fifty years ago in the fray had prepared properly for the contest, and the insolence and assumption, the virulence and the dogmatism, were commonly greatest with the persons whose acquaintance with the subject was the least. The intemperate, and usually ignorant warfare, left nearly all the vexed questions in confusion, and it is only in recent years that a new generation of dispassionate students have begun to replace the blunders of sciolism by facts. In the many battles yet to be fought over Pope there will be this advantage which will be certain to produce solid results, that the critic will be in possession of the materials for judgment, and will not have to write without knowledge of his cause.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ed. Cunningham, Vol. iii. p. 368.]

[Footnote 2: Marchmont Papers, Vol. ii. p. 335.]