The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1 / Poetry - Volume 1

by Alexander Pope

The letters to Cromwell were published in Curll's "Miscellanea," of which the title-page says "Printed in the year 1727;" but the dedication to the letters themselves is dated June, 1726, and it was in 1726 that they appeared. The incidental and scanty notices of them at the time are sufficient to indicate the impression they produced. Thompson, writing in October to Aaron Hill, says that "though careless and uncorrected, they are full of wit and gaiety." There may have been many who thought that they did as much credit to the heart as to the head of the poet. "I have read the collection of letters you mention," Fenton wrote to Broome in September, 1726, "and was delighted with nothing more than that air of sincerity, those professions of esteem and respect, and that deference paid to his friend's judgment in poetry which I have sometimes seen expressed to others, and I doubt not with the same cordial affection. If they are read in that light, they will be very entertaining and useful in the present age; but in the next, Cicero, Pliny, and Voiture may regain their reputation." The comments on Pope's sincerity were plainly ironical. Fenton considered him to be extremely hypocritical, and some person concerned in the publication of 1726 must have formed the same opinion of his character, if the ludicrous tail-piece is intended to be typical of the letters. A little man whose diminutive stature did not permit him to clasp the taller figure in his arms while they stood upon a level, is represented as having jumped off the ground and seized his companion round the waist, who, with his hands thrown into the air at the painful vehemence of the embrace, is struggling to get loose. Undiscerning persons, who judged the poet by his words, would form a different estimate, and would perceive only proofs of his excellence where Fenton saw examples of his habitual insincerity. "His correspondence," says Johnson, of the later collection of 1735, "filled the nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship."[16]

The letters to Cromwell had more than an ephemeral success. Curll, in his reply in 1729 to the attack on him in the Dunciad, after noticing Pope's affected depreciation of them, says, "However, they sell very well; price 5s."[17] The poet had already devised an excuse for following them up by a second set. Theobald, who had earned his lasting enmity by pointing out the errors in his edition of Shakespeare, was employed by some booksellers to edit the posthumous papers of Wycherley, which had been purchased from his heir. The work appeared in 1728. Pope saw in this circumstance a pretence for dragging his own letters before the world, and an opportunity of gratifying his spleen against Theobald. He said that the poems were disreputable to the memory of his early friend, and that the correspondence was published because it showed that it was his last resolution to have suppressed them.[18] It showed the reverse. The last printed letter of Wycherley exhibits him as intent as ever upon preparing his poems for the press, and if we are to believe that he subsequently abandoned the design, we must accept the fact upon the bare assertion of Pope, which derives no support from any part of the correspondence. But though it failed to answer the purpose avowed by its editor, it answered purposes not avowed which were much nearer to his heart. It shows that the verses of Wycherley were rugged, feeble, and full of repetitions, and that whatever they possessed of strength and harmony was due to the revision of Pope. It shows that he furnished entire passages, and where the text is not explicit on the point he is careful to reclaim his contributions in the notes. It displays on the one hand the "first sprightly runnings" of the precocious young poet, and on the other the "last dull droppings" of the veteran author, who was verging upon his dotage. "If we were to judge," says Warburton, "of this set of letters by the manner of thinking and turn of expression, we should conclude that they were all mistitled, and that those given to the boy of sixteen were written by the man of seventy, and the contrary,—such sober sense, such gravity of manners, and so much judgment and knowledge of composition, enlivened with manly wit, distinguish those of Mr. Pope, while a childish jealousy, a puerile affectation, a lying at catch for points, together with a total contempt of method, make up the character of those of Mr. Wycherley." Warton transcribes the judgment of Warburton, and adds his testimony to the superiority of the letters of Pope. He says that he "has excelled Wycherley in his own way of striving to be always witty," and that "the perpetual attempt of the vain old man to be brilliant, the accumulation of simile upon simile, the antithesis, the cant of satire, the severity on authors, critics, and women, are sufficiently disgusting." In short, the whole effect of the correspondence was to display the infirmities of Wycherley and the merits of Pope; and his mode of relieving his departed friend from the reproach of the posthumous poems was to reveal the secret that the only portions of them which might have done him credit were not his own, but the work of this zealous vindicator of his fame.

With such a futile excuse for printing the letters, Pope was anxious to throw the responsibility upon some other person. He was the intimate friend of Edward, the second Earl of Oxford, who, without being possessed of much ability, courted the society of eminent men, and who, with no great tincture of literature, had inherited from his father a passion for collecting books and manuscripts. His correspondence with the poet descended, with the rest of his personal papers, to his only child, who married the Duke of Portland in 1734. From the Duchess the papers passed to her eldest daughter, Lady Elizabeth, wife to the third Viscount Weymouth, who subsequently became the first Marquess of Bath. The Oxford manuscripts were consequently removed to Longleat, where they have remained ever since among the treasures of a library which is worthy of the regal edifice it adorns.[19] In Pope's letters to his friend we have his own record of the device he adopted. He wrote to Lord Oxford in September, 1729, and complained that the publication of Wycherley's posthumous poems was derogatory to their author, as well as to the critic who had advised him to re-cast them. "Something," he said, "will be necessary to be done to clear both his and my reputation, which the letters under his hand will abundantly do; for which particular reason I would desire to have them lodged in your lordship's hands." He had been slow in discovering that something was necessary to be done to clear the reputation of his deceased friend; for Theobald's book had come forth in 1728, and it was now the autumn of 1729. His tardy zeal appears to have been entirely begotten by the idea that it could be made the pretext for producing the correspondence; but having once conceived the scheme, he did not allow it to languish. On the 6th of October he advanced a step further, and began to shadow forth the real object of the request. He informed Lord Oxford that some of the letters were to be printed, and asked permission to state that they were already in his library, "which," says he, "they shall be as soon as you will give orders to any one to receive them." "I would not," he went on, "appear myself as publisher of them, but any one else may, or even the bookseller be supposed to have procured copies of them,—formerly or now, it is equal. Certain it is that no other way can justice be rendered to the memory of a man to whom I had the first obligations of friendship, almost in my childhood." Lord Oxford merely replied that if the documents were left in a box with the porter, the man had orders to place it in the library, and that any mention of that library would be agreeable to its owner;[20] but he took no notice of the intimation that the poet designed to ascribe the publication to an imaginary agent. Pope now considered him to be sufficiently prepared, and his next letter disclosed the whole of the scheme, and at the same time announced its execution. It then appeared that his noble dupe, who, as he was both weak and amiable, was expected to prove a submissive tool, had been asked to become the keeper of the manuscripts, that he might be held up to the world as their publisher. "I am extremely obliged to you," Pope wrote to him, "for your kind permission to quote your library, and to mention it in what manner I pleased. I consulted Mr. Lewis upon the turn of the preface, and have exceeded perhaps my commission on one point, though we both judged it the right way; for I have made the publishers say that your lordship permitted them a copy of some of the papers from the library, where the originals remain as testimonies of the truth. It is indeed no more than a justice due to the dead and to the living author."[21] In other words, his lordship was asserted to have permitted the bookseller to print the papers in his library, when they were not even sent to his house till after they were printed, and this fiction was fathered upon him without so much as his leave being asked, or his having been suffered to read a single line of the work he was stated to have authorised. When Pope alleged that the proceeding was "no more than a justice due to the dead and the living author," he must have hoped that the outrage to Lord Oxford of which he had been guilty in committing the act, would appear to be diminished by the assurance with which he communicated it. His deceptions were not confined to the preface. He shortly afterwards wrote to Swift, and contrived to mention that he had contracted a friendship at sixteen with a man of seventy. "I speak," he said, "of old Mr. Wycherley, some letters of whom, by-the-bye, and of mine, the booksellers have got and printed, not without the concurrence of a noble friend of mine and yours. I do not much approve of it, though there is nothing in it for me to be ashamed of, because I will not be ashamed of anything I do not do myself, or of anything that is not immoral, but merely dull."[22] The booksellers had printed the letters with the concurrence of a noble friend, and the noble friend had never heard a word on the subject till the printing was completed. Pope did not much approve of it, and he had protested to Lord Oxford that in no other way could justice be rendered to the memory of a man to whom he had the first obligations of friendship. He would not be ashamed of what he did not do himself, and he alone had edited the work and sent it to the press. The value of his asseverations may be measured by the triple falsehood he volunteered to Swift. He was aware that the arguments by which he hoped to persuade Lord Oxford to become his dupe would not impose upon the penetrating understanding of the Dean, and he therefore openly repudiated what he was unable to excuse. If the publication had vindicated Wycherley, it would have been its own justification; but as it was put forth to do honour to Pope, he sacrificed his veracity to avoid the imputation of vanity. He cruelly sneered, in his "Prologue to the Satires" at the poor garretteer, who urged the plea for printing his compositions that he was "obliged by hunger and request of friends." The poet had not the excuse of hunger, and he improved upon the model he satirised when he pretended that his friends had taken his papers, and printed them against his will.

The deception which Pope practised was never suspected till it was revealed by his correspondence with Lord Oxford, which has hitherto remained in manuscript. The repetition of the attempt on a more elaborate scale was less successful, and it has always been believed by the immense majority of inquirers that the promulgation of the collection of 1735, which the poet vehemently denounced as an act of intolerable treachery, was from first to last his own deed. "It seems," says Johnson, "that Pope being desirous of printing his letters, and not knowing how to do, without imputation of vanity, what has in this country been done very rarely, contrived an appearance of compulsion, that when he could complain that his letters were surreptitiously published, he might decently and defensively publish them himself."[23] Fresh facts have rendered the evidence against him stronger than ever, and the whole derives increased force from the information we now possess that he had previously had recourse to a kindred falsehood. In the first case he made a tool of a friend; in the second, he varied his plan, and made a tool of an enemy.

Pope tells us, in the preface to the authorised edition of his correspondence, which he brought out in quarto in 1737, that his disgust at the publication of his letters to Cromwell, and "the apprehension of more treatment of the same kind, put him upon recalling as many as he could from those who he imagined had kept any."[24] He applied to his friend Caryll, in December, 1726, to surrender his collection; and, on renewing the request a few days later, he added, "I have desired the same thing of Mrs. Blount, with whose late worthy husband I entertained so long a correspondence, and of all others." It was more than two years before Caryll could be induced to comply with the demand, and it would seem that Mrs. Blount was little less backward; for, on November 28, 1729, Pope wrote to Swift, "I lately received from the widow of one dead correspondent, and the father of another,[25] several of my own letters of about fifteen and twenty years old." When the poet had gleaned together all the letters he could extort, "he immediately," he says, "lessened the number by burning three parts in four of them: the rest he spared, not in any preference of their style or writing, but merely as they preserved the memory of some friendships which will ever be dear to him, or set in a true light some matters of fact from which the scribblers of the time had taken occasion to asperse either his friends or himself." He was not more anxious to destroy the three parts than to secure the fourth from destruction. "He laid by the originals together with those of his correspondents, and caused a copy to be taken to deposit in the library of a noble friend, that in case either of the revival of slanders, or the publication of surreptitious letters during his life or after, a proper use might be made of them."[26] The noble friend was Lord Oxford, and the request to be allowed to place the letters in his library was made by Pope in September, 1729, when he stated that "he had had it at heart for half a year and more." Upon obtaining Lord Oxford's consent, he had the correspondence transcribed under his own inspection; and on October 16 he says, "I am causing the manuscripts to be fairly written, and hope at your lordship's return to be the presenter of them in person." By his own avowal he had carefully culled his letters, had prepared the selected portions for some public purpose, and had taken the unusual precaution of preserving them in duplicate. The end which he declared they were intended to serve was a palpable pretence. He never specified any slanders they refuted, and he could have had little idea of employing them to test the truth of surreptitious letters when he began by burning three parts of the collection, and only retained a fourth. The manifest fact was, that, while he was desirous of consigning to oblivion those portions of his correspondence which would not add to his reputation, he was eager to circulate the picked specimens which he imagined would promote his fame.

No advance seems to have been made towards the accomplishment of his design till 1733, when Curll advertised a life of Pope. An unknown person who wrote a feigned hand, and who signed his letters with the initials P. T., then opened a correspondence with the bookseller, and furnished some information upon the genealogy of the poet. He vindicated him from the charge of plebeian descent, and affirmed that he sprung from the same stock as Lord Downe.[27] This assertion was repeated by Pope in one of the notes to his "Prologue to the Satires," though Mr. Pottinger, his cousin, ridiculed the "fine pedigree," which had never been heard of in the family, and which there is nothing to confirm.[28] There is thus at starting a curious identity between the apocryphal statements of P. T. and the apocryphal statements of Pope. But as P. T. must have had access to the manuscripts in the keeping of Lord Oxford, he might be supposed to have found the account among the memoranda of the poet, and no great stress could be laid upon the coincidence to prove that P. T. was Pope in disguise, if the general tenor of the correspondence did not indicate its origin.

There was a feud between Pope and Curll. The bookseller believed that the poet had drugged him with an emetic, he had been subsequently satirised in the Dunciad, and he had lost no opportunity of retaliating. An uncompromising panegyric upon his antagonist would have run counter to his prejudices, and while P. T. is careful to tell nothing which is not for the honour of Pope, he has the precaution to consult the antipathies of Curll. He pretends that the poet, with whom he was formerly well acquainted, has treated him like a stranger, and that he cannot give so good an account of his manners as of his parentage. He promises, if he receives encouragement, to make these moral deficiencies the subject of a future letter, "without entering into anything in anywise libellous." He omitted, however, in his next communication, to keep this part of his engagement, and never reverted to it. He had spoken of Pope's family in the same flattering and perhaps fictitious terms as Pope himself; but, in spite of his pledge, and his animosity, he forbore to relate the minutest particular to the discredit of the poet. The inconsistency between the assumed character and the actual conduct of P. T. is much too glaring. An enemy would have been far less partial and considerate.

The first communication of P. T. was dated October 1733. He directed Curll to signify the acceptance of his offer by inserting in the Daily Advertiser the notice, "E. C. hath received a letter, and will comply with P. T." This Curll did, and on the 15th of November got an answer from P. T., in which the true purpose of the manœuvre transpires. Instead of sending traits of the defects in Pope's manners, he announces that he has "a large collection of his letters from the former part of his days till the year 1727, which will alone make the most authentic memoirs of him that could be." He adds that they will form a four or five shilling volume, and "yet I expect no more," he says, "than what will barely pay a transcriber, that the originals may be preserved in mine or your hands to vouch for the truth of them." He appealed to the hatred as well as to the avarice of the bookseller. He again asserted that he had experienced bad treatment from Pope and that his sole motive was "to bestow upon him" the same "care" which Curll had done already.[29] Again his thirst for retaliation ended in homage, for the collection consisted of the identical letters which the poet had prepared for the press, and which were intended to raise instead of to lower his reputation. The conduct of P. T., who, having abjured profit and only feigned revenge, was to get nothing by his roguery, is altogether incomprehensible, if we are to suppose that he was what he professed; but his conduct ceases to be a mystery if P. T. was Pope, who, having finished editing his letters, may be presumed to have had the same desire to find a pretext for printing them as he had exhibited in the instance of the correspondence with Wycherley.

The point upon which the bargain went off for a time is equally significant. P. T. enclosed an advertisement of the letters, and required as a preliminary that it should be put forth by Curll, "for I shall not," he said, "be justified to some people on whom I have dependence, unless it seem to the public eye as no entire act of mine; but I may be justified and excused if, after they see such a collection is made by you, I acknowledge I sent some letters to contribute thereto."[30] This reasoning carries its own refutation. If his patrons could believe that Curll, without his aid, had got at the bulk of the correspondence, they would quite as readily have credited that he had not assisted the bookseller to the remainder. Nor is it likely that the men who would have renounced P. T. if he had been a principal in the business, would have connived at his becoming an accomplice. His plea was as fanciful as his desire for revenge; but assume that Pope was the real negotiator and his motive is transparent. The advertisement would have threatened that very surreptitious publication of his letters, against which he affirmed that he kept his own version in readiness. He would have repudiated the impending piracy, and hastened in self-defence to commit the genuine edition to the press. The promise contained in the advertisement, that "the originals would be shown at Curll's when the book was published," would have empowered him to give an air of imposture to the transaction, and to damage his foe, who when challenged would not have been able to produce the documents. According to the language which Pope uttered in the name of P. T. he did expect to be justified in his proceedings by means of the advertisement, but not at all in the manner which he wished the bookseller to believe.

All the conditions required by Pope seemed met together in Curll. He was an enemy, and could be denounced when he had been deceived. He had printed the letters to Cromwell without the consent of the poet, and it would readily be credited that he had repeated the act. He was not nice in his notions of honour, and he might be expected to catch at an offer, however discreditable, which promised both profit and revenge. But whatever might be his greediness and his malice, they had not swallowed up his caution, and notwithstanding that P. T. wrote again to express his dissatisfaction that no advertisement appeared, Curll forbore to announce letters he did not possess, at the bidding of a conspirator whose name and person he did not know. The subject in consequence slept from November 1733 till March 1735, when the poet was meditating some fresh proceeding respecting his correspondence, for on the third of that month, he requested Lord Oxford to send him by the hearer "the bound book of copies of letters," which, he wanted, he said, "to inspect for a day or two." There are transcripts among the Oxford papers of some of the letters of Wycherley to Pope, which appeared in 1729. There are transcripts of Pope's correspondence with Atterbury, which appeared in 1737. There are transcripts of a large part of the Swift correspondence, which appeared in 1741. But while the earlier and later letters are preserved on loose sheets the bound book has vanished, and there is not a single transcript of any letter which was first given to the world in the collection of 1735. The probability is that the book which Pope professed to require for a day or two was never returned. The circumstance is the more suspicious because he had the originals at home, which would have served him for reference, whereas if his object was to commit the letters clandestinely to the press he would use the copy which had been specially prepared for the purpose,—which had been expurgated, altered, and sometimes remodelled. Accordingly we find that P. T. reappears at this crisis with the correspondence in print. He had failed to lure Curll by a promise of letters which he would not produce. He now changed his tactics, and offered him an entire impression of the book.