The letter of Bolingbroke to Swift, in which the poet had no share, was commenced at Aix-la-Chapelle on August 30, 1729, and completed at Dawley on October 5. Pope appears not to have seen it before it was sent; for four days later, on October 9, he says to Swift, "Lord Bolingbroke has told me ten times over, he was going to write to you. Has he or not?" The elaborate epistle of Bolingbroke was a reply to a letter which Swift had addressed to Pope, and the consequent interest that Pope would have had in the answer, may have induced the author, proud of his production, to provide him with a copy; but however he came by it, a copy was deposited by him in Lord Oxford's library, where, as in the quarto of 1741, it is the single example of an epistle by Bolingbroke alone. Swift had by him a quantity of Bolingbroke's correspondence, some of which would have been full as appropriate as the specimen that is given, and it is a weighty fact in the question whether the Dean or the poet furnished the materials to the printer, that the one letter selected was the one letter that Pope possessed. The three letters which are inserted from Swift to Bolingbroke incline the scale to the same side. The first relates in part to Pope, the conclusion of the second is addressed to him, and the third is the answer to the letter of August 30, 1729. It was never pretended that the Dean received back his letters to Bolingbroke, and it was not his habit to make copies; but with our knowledge that the poet and Bolingbroke had much of their correspondence with Swift in common, we may be sure that these three letters, at least, had been in the hands of Pope, and if he did not retain the originals, it would in 1729, the year to which they all belong, have been in accordance with his common practice to transcribe them.
Thus what was printed of the correspondence, and what was not printed, concur to show that Pope must have been the source from which it was derived. The history of the circumstances under which the publication took place will confirm this inference. Pope asserted that the quarto was "copiedfrom an impression sent from Dublin." There is now proof in abundance that the Dublin edition, which came out as the seventh volume of Swift's works, was copied from an impression sent from England. Mr. Deane Swift, a cousin of his famous namesake, and the son-in-law of Mrs. Whiteway, informed Mr. Nichols, in 1778, that "he was the only person then living who could give a full account how Faulkner's seventh volume, that is, how Swift's and Pope's correspondence came to be, notfirst printed, but first published in Ireland."[142]The italics are Mr. Swift's own, and the fact on which he laid such especial emphasis is at once attested and explained by the statement of Faulkner himself to Dr. Birch in August, 1749. "Mr. Pope," he said, "sent to Ireland to Dr. Swift, by Mr. Gerrard, an Irish gentleman, then at Bath, a printed copy of their letters, with an anonymous letter, which occasioned Dr. Swift to give Mr. Faulkner leave to reprint them at Dublin, though Mr. Pope's edition was published first."[143]Faulkner also solicited the sanction of Pope, and we have the poet's summary of the application, in the letter he wrote to Mr. Nugent on August 14, 1740: "Last week I received an account from Faulkner, the Dublin bookseller, that the Dean himself has given him a collection of letters of his own and mine, and others, to be printed, and he civilly asks my consent, assuring me the Dean declares them genuine, and that Mr. Swift, Mrs. Whiteway's son-in-law, will correct the press, out of his great respect to the Dean and myself. He says they were collected by some unknown persons, and the copy sent with a letter importing that it was criminal to suppress such an amiable picture of the Dean, and his private character appearing in those letters, and that if he would not publishthem in his lifetime others would after his death." It is manifest from these particulars that Faulkner was not then aware that Pope himself had sent the correspondence to Swift, and the conviction was only forced upon his mind by subsequent events. But the bookseller could not be mistaken on the point that the letters were handed to him in print. As he later told Dr. Birch that the Dean had given him leave to reprint them because they were printed already, so he proclaimed that his volume was a reprint at the time. He inserted at the end of hisfirstedition the few new letters which were added in the quarto of 1741, and says that he found them in the London impression "after he hadreprintedthe foregoing sheets." Faulkner had no sort of motive to deceive. Whether the letters were in type or in manuscript he had equally received them from Swift, and obtained his authority to publish them.
If further testimony is required it is supplied by Pope. To the mention of Mrs. Whiteway in Lord Orrery's letter of 1738 the poet appended a note in which he says, "This lady since gave Mr. Pope the strongest assurances that she had used her utmost endeavours to prevent the publication—nay, went so far as to secrete the book, till it was commanded from her, and delivered to the Dublin printer, whereupon her son-in-law, D. Swift, Esq., insisted upon writing a preface to justify Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it, and to lay it upon the corrupt practices of the printers in London; but this he would not agree to, as not knowing the truth of the fact." It was therefore a book, and aprintedbook, which was delivered to Faulkner, since if the collection transmitted to the Dean had been in manuscript, Mrs. Whiteway and her son-in-law would not have laid it upon the corrupt practices of the printers, and it must have been transmitted from England, or they would neither have laid it upon the printers of London, nor have proposed "to justify Mr. P. from having any knowledge of it." The story was told him while it could be refuted if it was false; but he did not venture to question the existence of the printed volume, and had nothing more to say than that he did not personally know that it was due to the corrupt practices of the Londonbooksellers. He might have gone further, and stated that he knew the booksellers to be innocent.
The assertion of Faulkner, that it was Pope who sent this volume to Swift, is equally supported by unexceptionable evidence. The collection of 1735 was secretly printed and sold to Curll, and when a secretly printed work turns out to be the origin of the collection of 1741, the nature of the device proclaims its author. But the circumstance which most implicates Pope is his anxiety that it should not transpire that a printed volume had been sent to Swift at all. He informed his friend Allen that he had endeavoured to put a stop to the work, and that this had drawn forth replies from the "Dean's people—the women and the bookseller." With their statements before him, he kept back from Allen the main fact that the Dublin volume was taken entirely from a printed copy, and speaks instead as if it was taken from the originals. He adds that it is too manifest to admit of any doubt how many tricks have been played with the Dean's papers, and accused his "people" of secreting them as long as they feared he would not permit them to be published. This dishonest substitution of "originals" and "papers" for the printed book is a convincing proof that Pope had some motive, incompatible with innocence, for his studious perversion of the truth. The desire to obliterate the traces of his delinquency reappears in the preface to the quarto. He writes with implied censure of Swift for his sanction of the Dublin edition, and has the disingenuousness to conceal that he had merely allowed Faulkner to reproduce in Ireland a volume which had been printed in England—a volume over which the Dean had no control, and which being printed, he knew would inevitably be published.
The artful wording of the very note in which Pope refers to the printed book betrays his desire to keep the fact out of sight. His statement could enlighten no one who was previously ignorant. It was not from choice that he promulgated, however obscurely, the allegation of Mrs. Whiteway that the work had its origin in London. But he was forced upon one of two evils, and he selected the least. Mrs. Whiteway knew that the letters must either have been printed by Pope,or have found their way to the press by the corruption of those who had access to his papers. She acquitted Pope, out of courtesy, perhaps, to his own protestations, and accepted the second conclusion, that the London booksellers had procured the manuscripts by bribes, though she could hardly have entertained the serious belief that the Curlls had been at the expense of purchasing and printing them, for no other purpose than to ship a solitary copy to Ireland. She was eager to be cleared from any possible imputation of abusing the trust which devolved on her through the imbecility of Swift,[144]and her anxiety to absolve herself and the Dean, is the secret of her son-in-law insisting upon writing a preface to prove that the traitors must have been in England and not in Ireland. He alone would have been responsible for the facts and arguments he adduced, and they would have appeared in the edition of Faulkner, where they would not have claimed the sanction of Pope. His ignorance could be no reason why an independent person should not tell what he knew and believed, and his unwillingness to be justified was in direct opposition to his conduct through life. It was for a different cause that he interfered with the execution of the design. Mr. Swift would have disclosed the fact that the letters of the poet had been returned to him through Lord Orrery, in 1737, that he had exclusive possession of the letters of the Dean, that the ground-work of the collection was at Twickenham, that it had been printed at London, and had come printed to Dublin. When he insisted upon fulfilling his intention, Pope, to divert him from it, must have been driven to propose the insertion of the exculpatory note. He drew it up in a form which would bear one meaning to those who were acquainted with the facts, and another to the multitude who were in the dark. He had the contradictory ends to answer of propitiating Mrs. Whiteway and concealing the truth, and his language, like everything he wrote on the question, is consequently vague and evasive.
In the same letter in which Pope ignored the existence of the printed book to Allen, and pretended that the Irish editionwas taken directly from the originals, he further asserted that the "Dean's people" had at length consented to give up the manuscripts. If the originals were really in their possession there would be strong grounds for concluding that the conspirators were at Dublin. If, on the contrary, the allegation of the poet was a wilful untruth, this additional misrepresentation must lead us to conclude that he was the author of a fraud from which he defended himself by falsehood. Mrs. Whiteway had, it is true, commissioned Mr. Nugent to acquaint him that she had secured several of his letters. Mr. Nugent, having delivered the message in March, 1740, informs her in April that he was authorised to receive them, and begs her to transmit them to him in London by a safe hand.[145]She evidently preferred that they should go direct to their owner, and wrote to Pope in May, that she would forward them by the first trustworthy messenger who would deliver them to Pope himself. It was agreed between them that Mr. M'Aulay should be the person; but they were ultimately sent to Lord Orrery, at his country seat in Ireland, in January or February, 1741, and were, no doubt, conveyed by him to their final destination when he visited England in March. The critic in the Athenæum plausibly conjectures that they were the letters which had been written since the transmission of the collection in June, 1737, and the late period at which they were received would account for none of them appearing in the quarto, which was published by the middle of April, 1741.
When Pope, at the beginning of August, 1740, heard from Faulkner that the Dean had given him permission to print, or rather to reprint, the correspondence, he expressed his conviction to Mr. Nugent, who was still meddling in the business, that the offer of returning the letters was a feint. "I presume now," he added, "that she would have sent but a few of no consequence, for the bookseller tells me there are several of Lord Bolingbroke's, &c., which must have been in the Dean's own custody."[146]Mrs. Whiteway had merely undertaken toreturn to Pope the letters which were written by Pope, and it is not apparent why the printing of several of the letters of Bolingbroke should have involved the conclusion that she was practising a feint, and would only have sent a few of no consequence. The incongruity of the observation seems to have been the result of the guilt which dictated it. The poet was aware that the originals promised him were a comparatively small number, which had no connection with the printed letters, and he was meeting the circumstance by anticipation, in the probable event of its reaching the ears of Mr. Nugent. The rest of the correspondence was already in his possession, and he assigned a foolish reason why Mrs. Whiteway would not have sent it, because the real reason could not be stated.
It was several months subsequent to this communication to Mr. Nugent, and after he had received the comments of Mrs. Whiteway on the volume which came from England, that he opened his griefs to Mr. Allen. The letter is not dated; but a letter to Warburton, which gives a portion of the same information as a piece of novel intelligence, bears the date of February 4, 1741. "They now offer," Pope tells Allen, "to send me the originals, which have been so long detained, and I will accept of them, though they have done their job." A few months later he reverted to the subject and says to Allen, "It will please you to know that I have received the packet of letters safe from Ireland by the means of Lord Orrery."[147]He has not the candour to acknowledge that the letters were voluntarily tendered him by Mrs. Whiteway long before the printed collection had been heard of. He wished to have it believed that they had only been offered to him since the booksellers "had done their job," and the motive for this deception must have been the desire to identify the letters from Mrs. Whiteway with the letters in Faulkner's volume, while he had a secret consciousness that they had nothing in common. It might be conjectured, indeed, that he was speaking of a distinct occurrence, and that Lord Orrery was the bearer of two sets of letters, though Pope mentions only one, if it were not certain, as I shall now proceed to show, that theoriginals of the printed collection sent to Dublin were never offered to him at all.
After the collection had been consigned to Faulkner, Mrs. Whiteway wrote her sentiments at large to Lord Orrery. She asked him, with reference to a letter of Pope's, if he believed the collection genuine, and slight as were her doubts, the question would have been absurd if she had professedly the originals of the correspondence in her hands. She declared her conviction that the poet had been betrayed by his own servants, and since the letters extended over three and twenty years, she could not have imagined that they had all the while been intercepted on their road to the post, but must have assumed that they had been abstracted from the cabinets in which they were stored away at Twickenham. The main stress of her argument against the theory that the work had been concocted in Ireland, was laid upon the presence of the letters of the Dean, which Pope alone could command, and not upon the letters of Pope, which might have been copied while they remained in the possession of Swift; but she pointed out the improbability of the supposition by remarking that no use had been made of the book in which Swift had stitched specimens of the correspondence of various eminent men, and which was peculiarly accessible from his habit of circulating it among his friends. In particular, she noticed that she had formerly his permission to take from it a letter of Pope, and she triumphantly remarks that this letter had not been printed. The boast could have had no force if all the printed correspondence had been the same correspondence she had promised to return. The notion that she had offered to send back the originals of the collection of 1741 is inconsistent with every part of her defence—a defence in which she was not afraid to challenge contradiction, since she authorised Lord Orrery to pass it on to Pope. Neither could the originals have been offered by Faulkner; for both at the time and afterwards he asserted that his volume was only a reprint. Pope may even be said to bear testimony against himself. He was eager to make it appear that the work was composed of materials which must have been drawn from the papers of Swift, and he took advantage of the erroneousphrase in Swift's postscript of August 24, to add, in a note, "The book that is now printedseemsto be part of the collection here spoken of." The announcement that the "Dean's people" had acknowledged that they possessed a large proportion of the originals would have decided the question, and the silence of the poet is an admission that he dared not repeat in public, where it would meet the eye of the persons implicated, the fable he had palmed off upon Allen in private. Nay, when stating in the quarto that Mrs. Whiteway and her son-in-law charged the whole proceeding upon the corrupt practices of the London printers, he still did not venture to retort that the originals had never left the custody of the "Dean's people," who detained them in Dublin until, according to his own expression, the Dublin printers had "done their job." The fact was, that Allen had intimated his apprehension that Pope would be suspected of being concerned in the publication, and Pope replied that "the whole thing was so circumstanced that this could never be the case." To stifle the suggestion, he based a falsehood upon a foundation of truth, and spoke of the letters which Mrs. Whiteway had offered to send him, in the beginning of 1740, as though they had been the originals of the printed correspondence. His invention of a fiction to establish his innocence, is a sure indication of his guilt.
The Dean's people promised Pope the copy of the correspondence, that he might correct and expunge what he pleased. "I dare not," he wrote to Allen, "even do this, for they would say I revised it." His mind immediately veered from decision to uncertainty, and in the next sentence but one he states that "he knows not whether to make any use of the permission or not." A little further, and he comes to the conclusion that until he sees the letters he can form no judgment of the proper measures to be pursued. "The excessive earnestness," he adds, "the Dean has been in for publishing them makes me hope they are castigated in some degree; or he must be totally deprived of his understanding." Lord Mansfield deposed, from the personal information of Pope, that his imperfect memory of their contents increased his anxiety to stop the publication.[148]In the midst of his apprehensions, his knowledge of Swift's incapacity, and his conviction that it would be insanity to allow the correspondence to go forth in its integrity, he yet resolved not to expurgate the copy, and then doubted whether he would expurgate it or not. This easy kind of hesitation, which has none of the appearance of genuine alarm, was what might be expected in a man who had already revised the letters to his heart's content, and was poorly performing a borrowed part. Though he ended by refusing to retouch a text of his own preparing, he employed the interval while the sheets were submitted to his criticism in forestalling the Dublin edition. Mr. D. Swift believed that the correspondence was first published in Ireland. Faulkner asserted that it was first published in England, and Faulkner, who could not well be mistaken, was right. No advertisement of the Irish volume is to be found in the "Dublin News Letter" till some time after the English volume was on sale, and no copy exists in the public libraries, or after long search could be heard of from the second-hand booksellers, which does not contain the additional matter inserted in the quarto.[149]In the prefatory notice to the quarto itself we are told that the letters are taken "from an impression sent from Dublin, and said to be printed by the Dean's direction." This was the impression which had been privately forwarded to Pope, and the language seems to have been carefully selected to avoid the assertion that there had been a publication of the work. The poet's scheme may be discerned in the account he gave to Allen. He informed him that the book, being most of it printed, was "put past preventing," but that he was "trying all the means possible to retard it." In plain words, he was manœuvring to keep back the Irish edition till his rival reprint was in the market. When he had succeeded in his device, he repeated his old tactics of advertising that the surreptitious collection was the cause of his own, and at the same time bespoke the preference for his reprint by announcing that it would contain "several additional letters."[150]
Apart from these additions, the quarto of Pope is a reproduction, with some variations, of the Dublin impression, and a few notes which Faulkner had doubtless found in the volume sent from England, are said in the quarto to be taken from Faulkner. Nevertheless there is strong internal evidence that a portion of the quarto had an independent origin, and had been printed off before the Irish edition was received. The correspondence consists of 209 pages, which are numbered consecutively from 1 to 115. At this point the letters of Swift to Gay commence, and instead of the numbers proceeding in regular order, they go back to page 89, and are thence continued without any break to the final page, 182. That the arrangement is not a typographical mistake is clear from the signatures of the sheets being in accordance with the paging,—a coincidence which was barely possible if the figures had been a misprint. The correspondence of Swift with Gay begins on sheet N, which is the letter of the alphabet that answers to page 89 in a quarto volume, and this keeping between the letters and the figures is preserved throughout. But there is a second coincidence which is absolutely fatal to the idea that the confusion in the paging was an error of the press. The quarto edition was accompanied by an edition in folio, which was the same impression with the matter parcelled out into pages of greater length, and with the requisite changes in the numbering of the pages and the signatures of the sheets. In spite of the change there is the identical peculiarity that distinguishes the quarto. The numbers run on unbroken from 1 to 108, when we arrive at the letters to Gay. Here we recommence with page 85, and starting from this new basis the figures proceed in regular succession to the end. The sheet at page 85 is marked Y, the proper letter for thefolio size, and as in the quarto the signatures, in every instance, correspond with the pages. The defect cannot be explained by the supposition that the work had been divided into portions, which were printed separately for the sake of expedition. With the text of the Dublin copy to guide his calculations, no compositor could have committed the error of pronouncing that matter which covers 115 pages could he contained in 88. The evident cause of the anomaly is that, after the quarto in its original form had passed through the press, Pope saw reason to cancel the opening part of the volume which preceded Swift's correspondence with Gay. The materials in their second form occupied more space than in their first, and instead of filling only 88 pages in the quarto, and 84 in the folio, run on to 115 in the one, and 108 in the other. The consequence is that the pages in excess bear the same numbers with the succeeding uncancelled pages which could not be altered. The process is rendered further apparent by the signatures to the sheets. In both folio and quarto, those on the surplus pages, in the cancelled division of the volume, have an asterisk affixed to denote that the signatures had been already employed;[151]but though the sheets have this mark of repetition, they are placed in the volume before the uncancelled sheets which retain the primitive signatures, and which did not admit of any change. In the quarto, again, a half sheet precedes the letters to Gay, which could not have happened unless it had been a subsequent interpolation, when the matter was insufficient to make the sheet complete. The half-sheet, the duplicate paging, and the duplicate signatures, are all the result of the insertion of fresh materials after thework was struck off, and betray that there was an earlier form of the quarto of 1741, which contained less than the Dublin edition, and which, therefore, being prior to it, is a proof that the correspondence was originally printed by Pope. The letters in the quarto are numbered, and since the series is unbroken throughout, the original cancelled division must ostensibly have comprised as many letters as when it was subsequently enlarged. But a letter to Gay, dated Nov. 23, 1727, is found by the copies preserved in the Oxford papers, to be compounded of three distinct letters, and this system of fusion would have permitted the introduction of large additions without deranging the continuity Of the numbers, which Pope would have been anxious to preserve. The cancels he made to suit his varying views were in accordance with his practice. The miscellaneous prose works, which follow the letters, have in one place alone a cancel of upwards of a hundred pages. Equally characteristic was the desire to preserve any of the old sheets which could be retained, regardless of the blemish to the book, and the trace they might afford of his manœuvres. It was a repetition of the paper-sparing policy which led him to incorporate the suppressed sheets of his Wycherley into the volume of 1735.[152]
On the 22nd of March, 1741, Pope called upon Lord Orrery at his house in London, and found him writing to Swift. The poet took the pen from his hand, and continued the letter. After large professions of affection, he went on to say, "I must confess, a late incident has given me some pain; but I am satisfied you were persuaded it would not have given me any, and whatever unpleasant circumstances the printing our letters might be attended with, there was one that pleased me,—that the strict friendship we have borne each other so long is thus made known to all mankind. As far as it was your will, I cannot be angry at what, in all other respects, I am quite uneasy under. Had you asked me, before you gave them away, I think I could haveproposed some better monument for our friendship, or, at least, of better materials." Any words addressed to Swift were lost upon him now, and Pope in reality was speaking to Lord Orrery, and to those who might hereafter read his protestations. He had apparently forgotten that just four years before he had complained to the same Lord Orrery, that the Dean had denied his request when he wished to insert some of the letters in the quarto of 1737.[153]The monument he was eager to erect to their friendship in 1737, he repudiated in 1741. He affirmed that he could have proposed a better, but never hinted what it was; or at least of choicer materials, but never troubled himself further about them. This was the smallest part of the contradiction. He refused his consent to the reprint of the book sent to Dublin, and had even tried, he told Allen, to stop it by threats of law. It is true, he confessed to Mr. Nugent at the outset, and continued to confess to Allen, that he had no hope of prevailing; but his efforts are not the less the measure of his pretended disgust. Yet he instantly appropriated the correspondence he was anxious to stifle in its birth, contrived to anticipate the Dublin edition, incorporated the entire collection into his works, and published it simultaneously in folio, quarto, and octavo. He stated in the prefatory notice, that he had refused to revise the letters, because they were committed to the press without his consent; but the annoyance which would not permit him to revise the letters was no check to his haste in adopting, or to his zeal in circulating them. For a man who was "quite uneasy" at their appearance, his eagerness to countenance, to parade, and to propagate them was amazing, and the manifest duplicity is not the least forcible of the arguments which bring the whole contrivance home to Pope. Warburton applauded him for the little resentment "he expressed at the indiscretion of his old friend." He affected far more than his advocate supposed; but if it had been otherwise it is strange that Warburton should not have perceived that to talk of resentment was ridiculous when the poet was espousing "the indiscretion,"and was doing his utmost to disseminate the letters he feigned a wish to suppress.
Curll republished the letters under the title of "Dean Swift's Literary Correspondence." Pope filed a bill in Chancery against Curll on June 4, 1741. The poet not only demanded protection for his own letters, but desired that the bookseller should be restrained from vending the letters of Swift, who was not a party to the suit, nor had commissioned any one to interfere on his behalf. The case was memorable both from its intrinsic importance, and from the celebrity of the plaintiff. In his answer, on the 13th of June, Curll admitted that nobody had authorised his work. He rested his defence on three propositions. He maintained that private correspondence did not come within the Copyright Act of Queen Anne, because the Act was declared in the title to be for the "Encouragement ofLearning," whereas letters on familiar subjects were notlearnedproductions; and because the Act was designed to protect books which were avowedly composed for the press, whereas letters were written without the intention of converting them into a literary commodity. He said that he was informed, and believed, that the letters were first "printed"[154]at Dublin, and he contended that all persons in England had a right to reproduce books which were first "published" in Ireland. He finally argued that letters were in the nature of a gift to the receiver, and that after they were delivered to the Dean they became his property. On the motion to dissolve the injunction on these grounds, Lord Hardwicke decided that they were none of them valid. He refused to recognise a distinction between letters and other compositions. He denied that a prior publication in Ireland could deprive an English author of his English rights. He, above all, determined that though the paper on which the letter was written might possibly be the property of the receiver, the matter remainedthe property of the writer. For the same reason that he admitted Pope's title to his own letters, he declined to continue the injunction with respect to the letters addressed to him, which had never ceased to belong to the persons who penned them.[155]The celebrated Murray was one of the counsel for the poet,[156]and afterwards, when Lord Chief Justice, he quoted and confirmed the decision of the Chancellor. "The question," he said, "was whether the property was not transferred to the correspondent. Lord Hardwicke thought not, and that the writer was still the proprietor."[157]"Dean Swift," he said subsequently, "was certainly the proprietor of the paper upon which Pope's letters to him were written; but no disposition, no transfer of paper upon which the composition is written can be construed a conveyance of the copy, without the author's express consent to print and publish, much less against his will."[158]Just and valuable as is the rule of law which prohibits the publication of a letter without the permission of its author, the manner in which Pope invoked it was singular. According to his statement it was Swift that had prepared and put forth a correspondence, in which more of the letters were from the pen of the Dean than from the pen of the poet. Pope, while professing to be vexed beyond measure at this exposure of private papers, asked for an injunction, not for the purpose of suppressing them, but to obtain a monopoly of the sale. He was not even content to reclaim his personal share in the publication of the friend whom he upbraided forthe act. He tried to prevent any one except himself from profiting by Swift's part of the book, and at the same time that he was endeavouring to secure goods which did not belong to him, he reproached their owner for displaying them. His conduct once more betrayed the truth he laboured to conceal. He was the compiler of the collection, and instinctively regarded a rival edition as an invasion of his rights. His proceedings were unnatural, if Swift was the sole originator of the work; but if it had a different source we can perceive why Pope was jealous of the least interference with property which, from the outset, he considered to be exclusively his own.
A fatality attended the correspondence of Pope. Curll, in defiance of him, printed his letters to Cromwell. Lord Oxford, in spite of his disapproval, printed his letters to Wycherley. An unknown person, by unknown means, obtained the whole of the collection of 1735, printed it secretly at his own expense, and sold it for a song. To render the history uniform and complete, Swift, who would not permit Pope to print their letters, printed them himself, while Pope, changing sides with him, remonstrated and threatened. That nothing might be wanting to the singularity of the case, the three last sets of letters stole into the world when they were under the vigilant guardianship of the poet, and the two last sets got abroad after the abiding paroxysm of terror, engendered by the indiscretion of a single dissolute friend, had induced him to wrest his correspondence from friends of every degree for the purpose of securing it from the possibility of publication. Mrs. Whiteway remarked to Lord Orrery, that among the letters in the Dean's stitched book were numbers from the greatest men in England for genius, learning, and power,—from Bolingbroke, Oxford, Bathurst, and Peterborough; from Addison, Congreve, Prior, Parnell, and Gay. She said these were as easily pilfered, and would have been as interesting to the world, as the letters of Pope and Swift;[159]but nobody invaded the sanctity of the private correspondence of the poet's contemporaries, even when the papers were open to half the gossips of Dublin. He stood alone in a misfortune which happened to him no less thanfour times, and which it is to be feared would have happened a fifth if he had lived long enough to accumulate the materials for a fresh volume. He relaxed his correspondence with Caryll in 1729, and with Swift in 1737, as a means to compel them to resign his former letters, and to both he used the same expression,—that "he did not write upon the terms of otherhonestmen."[160]The fallacy of the parallel was in the epithet. If he had resembled other men in their honesty he might have shared in their immunity from the alleged treachery of friends like Oxford and Swift, and of enemies like Curll.
Of all the deceptions which the poet practised to get his correspondence under the eye of the world, his dealings towards Swift are the worst. He had failed to gain his consent to putting forth the letters while any judgment yet remained to him; but no sooner had he sunk into dotage than, trusting to his inability to detect the cheat, Pope beguiled him into sanctioning the publication by sending him the volume ready printed, with a flattering exhortation, the echo of what he had written on a former occasion,[161]"importing that it was criminal to suppress such an amiable picture of the Dean and his private character."[162]The moment Swift fell into the pit his friend had dug for him, his friend denounced him for the act. "I think," he wrote to Mr. Nugent, "I can make no reflections upon this strange incident but what are truly melancholy, and humble the pride of human nature,—that the greatest of geniuses, though prudence may have been the companion of wit (which is very rare) for their whole lives past, may have nothing left them at last but their vanity. No decay of body is half so miserable!" Extraordinary language to come from the pen of the man whose vanity, without any excuse from the decay of his faculties, had made him eager to print the letters in 1737, and who had been only thwarted in his desire because Swift was wanting in the vanity by which he himself wasimpelled,—infamous language when the deed he reprobated was his own, and Swift the innocent dupe; and when having traded successfully in the mental afflictions of his friend, he proceeded to hold up his victim, as the criminal. But the simulated indignation is less revolting than the simulated fondness. "When the heart is full of tenderness," he said to the Dean, in the letter of March 22, 1741, "it must be full of concern at the absolute impotency of all words to come up to [it]. I value and enjoy more the memory of the pleasure and endearing obligations I have formerly received from you than the perfect possession of any other. Think it not possible that my affection can cease but with my last breath. If I could think yours was exhausted I should grieve, but not reproach you. If I felt myself even hurt by you I should be confident you knew not the blow you gave, but had your hand guided by another." The hand which guided him was the same hand that was at that moment aiming a blow at his reputation. Taking advantage of his cruel malady and prostrate understanding, Pope was even then endeavouring to fasten upon him the stigma of his own personal treachery, and this pretended magnanimity in forgiving a deed which he had contrived and instigated was in itself a calumny and a fraud.
If any doubt could exist that it was Pope who put forth the collection of 1735, and the Swift collection of 1741, we have still in the quarto of 1737 his own avowed version of a large portion of his correspondence. He published it with the express object of correcting the corrupt text of spurious editions, and there remains the inquiry whether he published it truly. When he burnt three-fourths of it, and deposited copies of the rest in the library of Lord Oxford, he professed to have preserved the originals from which the copies were taken. Lord Bolingbroke discovered a great number of returned letters among his papers after his death, and told Dr. Heberden that they contained many alterations and corrections, which he supposed had been made with the intention of printing them some time or other.[163]From this it would be inferredthat those which had been printed were not part of the collection, and that the poet had found it inexpedient to retain vouchers, which would condemn if they did not acquit him. Unfortunately the whole of the manuscripts were destroyed by Lord Bolingbroke, and beyond the unsatisfactory information conveyed in his remark, nothing can now be known of them. The literal interpretation of his language is favoured by the evidence yet within our reach, and we should conclude that Pope had not kept originals which would have revealed alterations in the published letters of a far more serious nature than any which Bolingbroke appears to have suspected.
John Caryll, a Roman Catholic country gentleman residing in Sussex, was among the intimate correspondents of Pope for twenty-five years, from 1710 to 1735. The poet wrote to him on Nov. 19, 1712, and asked to have the "whole cargo of his epistles returned," which he said might be of use "in a design he had lately engaged in." This design was probably to furnish some essays to the "Guardian," which commenced on the 12th of March, 1713. He promised to restore the letters when he had done with them, and his friend at once complied with his desire. After the surreptitious publication of his correspondence with Cromwell, Pope, in December, 1726, renewed his petition to Caryll to make over to him "all such papers as he had too partially preserved;" but the object of the request this time was "to put them out of the power of Curll." The poet announced that he would send back those which could do no hurt to the character of himself, his friend, or any other person; that he would retain those which "would serve to bear testimony of his own love for good men, or theirs for him;" and implied, as a consequence, that he would destroy those which did not fall under either of these heads. By this division the insignificant letters alone would have been restored to Caryll, and whether he was mistrustful of the use to which Pope might apply the remainder, or whether he was anxious to preserve intact the memorials of his intimacy with a celebrated man, he did not think fit to accede to the demand. A diminution in the frequency and cordiality of their correspondence ensued, and lasted for upwards of two years. Caryll at length complained, and Pope replied in February 1729, thathe could not open his mind to his acquaintances unless they would return him at the end of every year "the forfeitures of his discretion, and commit to his justice what he trusted only to their indulgence." Upon this intimation that compliance was to be the condition of intimacy, Caryll yielded the point, and the receipt of the letters was acknowledged by the poet on the 8th of April. The Sussex squire defeated the purpose for which they were extorted by copying the greater part of the collection. He persevered in the practice till near the close of his life. The last letter from Pope which he caused to be transcribed is dated July 17, 1735, and he died on the 6th of April, 1736. When his grandson sold the hereditary estate in 1767, and retired from England to the continent, the family papers were left behind, stowed away in boxes, where they remained for nearly three quarters of a century. They then came into the possession of Mr. Dilke, and have since been presented by his grandson, Sir Charles W. Dilke, to the British Museum. Among the manuscripts were a dozen folio books, containing the farm and domestic accounts, and in a volume similar in appearance Mr. Dilke discovered the copies of the letters of Pope, together with copies of others from the Dukes of Berwick, Beaufort, and Norfolk, from Dryden, Wycherley, Steele, Roger Lestrange, St. Evremond, and Le Grand. The external and internal evidence leaves no doubt of their authenticity. One unexpected confirmation of their genuineness turned up in an autograph letter of Pope to the younger Caryll, dated Nov. 8, 1712, and which was sent by Mr. Tuckwell to Mr. Croker. The letters to the younger Caryll remained with his widow. The few which exist are originals in the custody of different collectors, and this letter of Nov. 8 is a link in a series of facts that are only known through the transcripts in the Caryll folio. The recovery of documents, which Pope did not suspect were in existence, discloses to us his mode of dealing with his correspondence when, having no idea that it could rise up against him, he ventured to use it without reserve.
After calling in his letters to his friends, Pope proceeded to arrange them in order, and said "they formed altogether an unimportant, but yet an innocent history of himself." "You make,I assure you," he wrote to Caryll, July 8, 1729, "no small figure in these annals from 1710 to 1720 odd. Upon my word, sir, I am glad to see how long, and how often, and how much I have been obliged to you, as well as how long, how often, and how much I have been sensible of and expressed it." Notwithstanding this assurance, Caryll made a very small figure indeed in the published collection. Four letters only were addressed to the "Hon. J. C., Esq." in the volume of 1735, and these initials, in the quarto of 1737, were added to a fifth letter which had previously been headed, "Mr. Pope to ----." One other letter, in the quarto, bore the title to "Mr. C——"; but it was separated from the former group, and it is from the Caryll copy that we learn how to fill up the blank. Both in the edition of 1735 and 1737 Pope published a letter to the "Hon. James Craggs, Esq.," which induced Roscoe to conclude that he was the person indicated by the initials, and it is not improbable that the poet designed to mislead his readers, especially as the claim of Caryll to be styled Honourable was only a Jacobite assumption, derived from his being heir to his uncle, who had been created a peer by the exiled James II. But though Pope did not wish to repeat in public his profuse professions in private, and appear as the familiar friend and constant correspondent of a Roman Catholic country gentleman, he as little desired to suppress the choicer portions of the effusions he had addressed to him. He conceived the idea of re-directing them, and compiled from them, in whole or in part, four fictitious letters to Blount, four to Addison, two to Congreve, and one each to Wycherley, Steele, Trumbull, and Digby. A second letter to Digby, which appeared in the edition of 1735, was transferred to Arbuthnot in the quarto of 1737. Half a dozen letters at most were allotted to the initials of the Sussex squire, while fifteen were assigned to more imposing names, and a sixteenth was printed in a group of three to the "Hon. ——" Rather than credit an imposition so childish, and yet so unwarrantable, we should have recourse to the theory that Pope sometimes sent the same letter to different persons. Swift assured him that the best system extant for the conduct of human life might be collected from his epistles, and they certainly abound in generalities which, like theclown's answer, that suited all questions, might have been written to anybody. But a comparison of the printed letters with the Caryll copies, shows that this solution is inadmissible, and the observation of the clown, when his answer proved inopportune, is equally applicable to the contrivance of Pope—"I see things may serve long, and not serve ever."[164]
The "Spectator" of the 10th of November, 1712, contained some remarks by Pope on the verses which the Emperor Hadrian composed when he was dying. The poet asked Caryll's opinion of the criticism, and the substance of his reply is embodied in the rejoinder of Pope. "The supposition you draw from the suspicion that Adrian was addicted to magic, seems to me a little uncharitable,—that he might fear no sort of Deity, good or bad,—since in the third verse he plainly testifies his apprehension of a future state by being solicitous whither his soul was going. As to what you mention of his using gay and ludicrous expressions, I have already owned my opinion that the expressions are not so, but that diminutives are often in Latin taken for expressions of tenderness and concern." This comment is introduced, in the printed correspondence, into the letter to Steele of November 29, 1712, and if it was sent to him as well as to Caryll both must have objected to the gay and ludicrous expressions of Hadrian, both must have spoken of the suspicion that he was addicted to magic, both must have inferred from it that he feared no sort of Deity, good or bad, and the language of both must have been as identical as their ideas.
"I know," Pope wrote to Caryll, August 22, 1717, "you will take part in rejoicing for the victory of Prince Eugene over the Turks, in the zeal you bear to the Christian interest, though your cousin of Oxford, with whom I dined yesterday, says there is no other difference in the Christians beating the Turks or the Turks beating the Christians, than whether the Emperor shall first declare war against Spain, or Spain declare it against the Emperor." In the published version the passage forms part of a letter to Edward Blount dated September 8, 1717, and either we must admit that it was never written to him, orbelieve that Caryll and Blount had each an Oxford cousin, that the poet dined with the Oxford cousin of Caryll on August 21, and with the Oxford cousin of Blount on September 7, that both these cousins made, at their respective dinners, the same epigrammatic observation in the very same words, and that the extraordinary coincidence struck Pope so little that he did not even remark upon it.
Another passage of a letter to Caryll, dated September 20, [1713] reappears in a letter to Blount dated February 10, 1716. "I am just returned from the country, whither Mr. Rowe did me the favour to accompany me, and to pass a week at Binfield. I need not tell you how much a man of his turn could not but entertain me; but I must acquaint you there is a vivacity and gaiety of disposition almost peculiar to that gentleman, which renders it impossible to part from him without that uneasiness and chagrin which generally succeeds all great pleasures. I have just been taking a solitary walk by moonshine in St. James's Park, full of reflections of the transitory nature of all human delights, and giving my thoughts a loose into the contemplation of those sensations of satisfaction which probably we may taste in the more exalted company of separate spirits, when we range the starry walks above." Thus Pope, who on his return to town in September, 1713, after a week's companionship with Rowe, took a solitary walk by moonlight and meditated on the transitory nature of human delights, and the happy intercourse of spirits, was led by the power of association, after another week spent at Binfield with Rowe in February, 1716, to renew the solitary walk by moonlight the instant he returned, and indulge in the old contemplation on the transitory nature of human delights, and the happy intercourse of separate spirits. What renders more singular the second moonlight walk is that the date assigned to it was the memorable season when the Thames was frozen over, and when the quantity of snow was as unusual as the intensity of the cold. The thaw commenced the day before the fragile little bard sallied out for his stroll, and he must indeed have been lost in contemplation "of the starry walks above" not to have been checked in his moonlight rambles by the deplorable condition of the walks below. None of the phenomenawhich were attracting the attention of the rest of the world,—the breaking up of the long and terrible winter, the deluge of melting snow, the chilling atmosphere, the dreary prospect,—received a passing notice from him. He saw nothing except the moonshine, despite its watery gleam, and thought of nothing except the spirits in the stars.
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 newdramatis personæ. 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 theannouncement, "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 andCaryll 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 whichpreceded 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 eighteenpublished 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 sheetband sheetc, and the numbers of its four pages—11 to 14—are repeated on sheetc. 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 to1706-7, 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 sheetbwhich 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 notcapable 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 whichDr. 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 hiswriting 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.