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

by Alexander Pope

The poet made the volume of 1735 the plea for pressing Swift to return him his letters. He had ceased to smile at the thought how Curll would be bit by getting hold of them, and earnestly demanded that the Dean should "secure him against that rascal printer."[128] If it is admitted that Pope was the publisher of the P. T. collection, his accusations against the rascal printer were groundless, and his fears were feigned. He was endeavouring, under cover of a false pretence, to obtain possession of his letters to Swift, and it was easy to foresee that when he had succeeded in his object the secret store would soon be laid open to the public. He had previously forced his other friends to surrender his correspondence by the clamorous apprehensions he expressed of Curll. The letters which were safe in their guardianship had not been long committed to his keeping when they came forth from the shop of this very individual, and Pope was now urging the fact as a reason why fresh letters should be transferred from a custody which had been effectual to a custody which had proved to be insecure. Swift, perhaps, by this time, had begun to penetrate the designs of his friend, and he declined to comply with his request. "You need not fear any consequence," he wrote September 3, 1735, "in the commerce that hath so long passed between us, although I never destroyed one of your letters. But my executors are men of honour and virtue, who have strict orders in my will to burn every letter left behind me. Yet I am loth that any letters from you and a very few friends should die before me." No answer could have been less pleasing to Pope than to be told that his letters were doomed to destruction. His eagerness to rescue them must have been increased by the announcement, and he offered, if Swift would let him have them at once, to send him copies. The poet's excuse for a proposal which defeated his professed purpose, was "merely that the originals might not fall into the hands of Curll, and thereby a hundred particulars be at his mercy."[129] The particulars would have been as much at Curll's mercy in the copies as in the originals they replaced, unless Pope intended to disavow the transcripts he had himself furnished, which shows how much value is to be attached to his assertion that parts of the collection of 1735 were forged. His remonstrances induced Swift to promise that the letters should not be committed to the flames; but he persevered in refusing to surrender them while he lived. "As to what you say of your letters," he wrote April 22, 1736, "my resolution is to direct my executors to send you all your letters well sealed and pacquetted, and leave them entirely to your disposal. These things are all tied up, endorsed and locked in a cabinet, and I have not one servant who can properly be said to write or read. No mortal shall copy them, but you shall surely have them when I am no more." Since Swift persisted in believing that he could protect private papers from Curll quite as efficiently as the poet, who had signally failed in the attempt, Pope reversed his petition, and disclosing his real intention, begged that he might have them to print. "I told him," he says, in his account to Lord Orrery, "as soon as I found myself obliged to publish an edition of my letters to my great sorrow, that I wished to make use of some of these, nor did I think any part of my correspondence would do me a greater honour, and be really a greater pleasure to me, than what might preserve the memory how well we loved one another. I find the Dean was not quite of the same opinion, or he would not, I think, have denied this." When Pope affected in 1729 to depreciate his correspondence with Swift, that he might mask his design in gathering together his other letters, he had even smiled to reflect "how gloriously our epistles would fall short of every ingenious reader's expectations." He now maintained that "our epistles" would confer upon him a vast deal of honour, which he could not suppose would be obtained by balking expectation. But though none of these inconsistencies are immaterial, the most important circumstance, and one which bears upon the whole of the subsequent evidence, is that Pope was pining for the publication of the letters, and Swift would not consent to it.

An event happened opportunely to assist the solicitations of the poet. Towards the close of 1736 Curll printed a couple of letters to Swift, of which the first was written by Pope, and the second by Bolingbroke. The bookseller announced that they were transmitted to him from Ireland, together with several other valuable originals, and Pope on the 30th of December employed this practical proof to convince the Dean that the correspondence was not safe in his custody. The two letters, as they were called, were in fact a joint epistle; for not only does the portion of Bolingbroke purport to be a continuation of the portion of the poet, but Swift, who had been absent, says in the reply, which on his return home he addressed to Pope, "I found a letter from you with an appendix longer than yours from Bolingbroke." The letter and its appendix were printed by Curll at the period when Pope had exhausted his arguments to induce Swift to resign the correspondence, and the occurrence was so well timed for the purposes of the poet, and the device so much in accordance with his practices, that it is impossible not to suspect that he contrived the injury as a means of extorting the redress. The original of his share of the epistle still exists,[130] and shows that the published version has been edited in his usual fashion. The variations, in the aggregate, could not have arisen from carelessness, and they are not of a kind which an independent person could have had any motive to introduce from design. The appendix of Bolingbroke had been in the power of Pope, who might have transcribed it, together with his own contribution, before it was sent; but he declared that he never possessed a copy of either,[131] and small as is the credit due to his protestations, he may have spoken the truth in this particular, and been guilty not the less. The Dean was accustomed to lend his acquaintances a volume in which he had stitched specimens of the letters of his eminent friends.[132] The joint letter of August, 1723, was preserved,[133] when the letters of Pope to Swift for a considerable period before and after were lost or destroyed, and it is likely that it escaped the common fate by its insertion in the volume of selections. There it was easily accessible, and as Worsdale, the reputed mock-clergyman, who had personated Smythe, was sometimes resident in Dublin, his old employer had a trusty, or at any rate a trusted agent, ready to his hand. Curll did not print any more of his boasted originals, and he probably only spoke on the faith of promises which had been made him with a view to compel compliance from the Dean, by persuading him that traitors had admission to his cabinet.

The announcement of the publication by Curll of the joint letter of August 23 had not the desired effect upon Swift. In his reply he took no notice of the circumstance, and Pope, finding that nothing he could urge would shake his resolution, addressed, in the beginning of March, 1737, a statement of the case to Lord Orrery, who was then in Ireland, and engaged him to second his entreaties. Lord Orrery obtained a promise from Swift that the correspondence should be returned, and offered to be the bearer of it. The Dean accordingly acquaints Pope, July 23, 1737, that "when his lordship goes over, which will be, as he hopes, in about ten days, he will take with him all the letters I preserved of yours." "I cannot," said Swift, in making the communication, "trust my memory half an hour," and this passage was a proof that he did not exaggerate his infirmity. Lord Orrery had set sail in the middle of June, and under the same date that Swift wrote from Ireland that his lordship would go over in about ten days, his lordship wrote to Swift from England, "Your commands are obeyed long ago. Dr. King has his cargo, Mrs. Barber her Conversation, and Mr. Pope his letters." Mrs. Barber's Conversation was the manuscript of the "Polite Conversation" of Swift, which she had asked permission to print for her own advantage, and the cargo for Dr. King was the manuscript of the "History of the Four Last Years of Queen Anne," which the Dean was anxious to print for his own credit. But much as it was in his thoughts at this time, he only remembered his settled intention to send the papers—whether history, conversation, or letters—by Lord Orrery, and the act by which the intention was fulfilled had already faded from his mind. The understanding of Swift was rapidly yielding to his mournful malady, and the first faculty to suffer was his memory.

The letters of Pope were therefore in his own keeping, and out of the power of Swift, before July 23, 1737. The Dean, however, informed him that "by reading the dates he found a chasm of six years," and that he had searched for the missing correspondence in vain. Pope did not abandon the hope of recovering it, and Swift, apparently in reply to his applications, wrote on August 8, 1738, to acquaint him that every letter received from him for twenty years and upwards had been sealed up in bundles, and consigned to the custody of Mrs. Whiteway, whom he describes as "a very worthy, rational, and judicious cousin of mine." Mrs. Whiteway, who had none of the papers, had a short time before kept Swift from sending a similar fictitious account, but the idea had taken deep root in his mind, and rightly conjecturing that he would reiterate it, she engaged Lord Orrery to inform Pope that she had neither got any of the correspondence herself, nor had the slightest knowledge where it was.[134] On the present, as on the former occasion, Swift showed her what he had written, and on the 24th of August he subjoined a postscript in which, after saying that he would correct, if it were possible, the blunders committed in his letter, he simply added that his cousin had assured him that "a great collection of your/my letters to me/you are put up and scaled, and in some very safe hand." The counter-assurance of Mrs. Whiteway to Lord Orrery that she had no knowledge of the collection, shows that the corrected version was as fanciful as the original statement. Swift's language in 1738 would imply that the chasm in the correspondence no longer existed, and that no part of the series had yet been transmitted to England; but it was the language of a man labouring under the misapprehension and obliviousness produced by disease, and could have little weight in opposition to the testimony that Pope had received back a packet of his letters in the previous year. Any doubt which could have existed on the point is done away by the admission of Pope himself. Mrs. Whiteway had refused in 1740 to send back some of his letters by the mother of the Mr. Nugent, who afterwards became Lord Clare, because the poet had authorised her to entrust them to a Mr. M'Aulay. "I believe," Pope wrote to Mr. Nugent, "they had entertained a jealousy of you, as the same persons did before of my Lord Orrery. They then prevented the Dean from complying to any purpose with my request. They then sent a few just to save appearances, and possibly to serve as a sort of plea to excuse them of being taxed with this proceeding, which is now thrown upon the Dean himself."[135] The "proceeding" was the committing the correspondence to the press, and Pope, on his own part, to avoid being taxed with it, was privately putting forth the plea that the bulk of his letters had not been returned to him. The confession that he had received a few is a complete answer to the delusion of Swift, and they must have been more than a very few, or they would not have been sufficient "to save appearances." Setting aside the representations of the poet, upon which no dependence can be placed, except when he bears witness against himself, there is nothing to oppose, and much to confirm the idea that they were the identical "few" which were published in the quarto of 1741.

When Swift first collected the letters in May, 1737, he mentioned that they were not much above sixty, and in July, when they had been sent away, and he described his past act in the language of intention, he said they were not above twenty-five. His account in July, when the correspondence was no longer under his eye, and when his failing memory made him forget the departure of Lord Orrery, is far less reliable than his account in May when he was fresh from the task of sorting the letters. A smaller number than he specified appeared in the quarto which, exclusive of the answers of the Dean, contains only forty. This upon an average does not amount to two a year, and the poet, when he had an end to serve, would not have scrupled to call even sixty "few" in comparison with the many that had been written. Swift imagined that the missing letters might have been lost on some of those occasions when he had been compelled to entrust his papers to friends, and Pope may honestly have believed that they were detained by designing persons; but they were never published, while those which were printed have a chasm of seven years, from June, 1716, to August, 1723, or only one year more than the Dean detected in the series he got ready to despatch to Twickenham. The new correspondence, like Pope's previous volumes, was merely a selection, and there is but a single letter of the poet to Swift in 1714, none whatever in 1715, and again but a single letter in 1716. The suppression of the letters in 1717, as in 1715, or even a slip of memory or a slip of the pen with the Dean, both of which had become a frequent occurrence, will account for the slight discrepancy between the chasm in the printed volume, and the chasm which Swift announced. The letter of August, 1723, is the joint letter of Pope and Bolingbroke, which was sent corrected to Curll, and this is followed by a second gap from August, 1723, to September 14, 1725. The extensive hiatus in the correspondence of which Pope was forewarned by Swift, must in all reason be supposed to be the chief deficiency of which Pope complained, though in language coloured to suit his purpose; and when a similar blank exists in the quarto, there is a strong presumption that the letters which he acknowledged had been sent to save appearances, were the same letters of which the book was composed. A kindred circumstance supports the conclusion. The last letter of Pope in the quarto is dated March 23, 1737, which falls in with the fact that the collection was gathered together in May and transmitted to him in June; but if the volume of 1741 had proceeded from Swift, it would be a curious coincidence, that not a single line written by the poet since the time when his correspondence was returned to him should have found its way into the work.

It is against the innocence of Pope that in his public statements he kept out of sight the fact that he had received back a certain portion of the correspondence, and designedly conveyed the impression that the whole of it remained with Swift. In the advertisement to the quarto it is said that Pope could not be prevailed upon to revise the volume printed in Dublin; but that he had furnished the London booksellers with a few more of the letters of the Dean a little to clear up the history of their publication. The reader is informed that he will see this history in one view if he observes the passages marked by inverted commas. The story they reveal is that Swift ultimately promised to send the correspondence, that he collected it for the purpose, and ended by sending none of it. The Dean's communication of August 8 is produced as exhibiting the final result, and Pope marked with inverted commas the declaration, "I can faithfully assure you that every letter you have favoured me with, these twenty years and more, are sealed up in bundles and delivered to Mrs. Whiteway." The sense in which the poet wished the passage to be understood is defined in the table of contents. "The entire collection of his and Mr. Pope's letters for twenty years and upwards found, and in the hands of a lady, a worthy and judicious relation of the Dean's.—This a mistake, not in hers, but in some other safe hands." A note was added by Pope to the letter for the purpose of strengthening the case against Swift; but not one syllable did he let drop to indicate that the Dean was deceived in supposing that the series remained unbroken, and that no part of it had been sent back. The testimony of another witness, which had the appearance of corroborating the error, was produced by the poet. The assertion in the postscript that Mrs. Whiteway vouched for "a great collection being in some very safe hand," seems to have beguiled him into the belief that the missing letters had turned up, and Lord Orrery having lately come from Ireland he applied to him on the subject. Lord Orrery answered, that Mrs. Whiteway knew nothing of the letters, that he was satisfied they were neither lost nor burnt, and that his attempts to discover where they were deposited had been fruitless. To us, who are aware that Lord Orrery had been the bearer of an instalment of the correspondence, it is plain that he is referring to that portion of it which could not be found when he carried over the remainder. To those who had only before them the version contained in the quarto, and who merely read of an intention to send letters by him in July, 1737, which had not been forwarded in August, 1738, his general expressions in answer to Pope would appear to apply to the whole of the correspondence, and seem a confirmation of the delusion of Swift. The poet made himself responsible for the misconceptions of the Dean by marking them with inverted commas, by supporting them with specious subsidiary evidence, and attesting that they embodied the history of the publication; and since they leave an impression which he knew to be false upon the precise particular which implicates himself, his disingenuous sanction of the error must be considered to be the act of conscious guilt.

"I should think with you, madam," Lord Orrery wrote to Mrs. Whiteway, "that some of Mr. Pope's servants had stolen the letters, did not many appear from various people to the Dean, of which Mr. Pope cannot be supposed either to have seen the copies or originals." With our present information, the letters in the collection which are not from the pen of Pope tell the other way, and contribute in a powerful degree to fix the publication on him. The replies of Swift, together with much of Swift's correspondence with Gay, are included in the volume, and it will be found upon examination that all these materials were likely to have been furnished by the poet, and that part of them could have been furnished by nobody else. He has twice touched upon the subject in the annotations to the quarto. The first note is attached to the heading, "Letters of Dr. Swift to Mr. Gray," and states that they were "found among Mr. Gay's papers, and returned to Dr. Swift by the Duke of Queensberry and Mr. Pope." The second note is appended to that portion of the postscript of August 24, 1738, in which the Dean mentions "a great collection of your/my letters to me/you." "It is written," subjoins the poet, "just thus in the original. The book that is now printed seems to be part of the collection here spoken of, as it contains not only the letters of Mr. Pope, but of Dr. Swift, both to him and Mr. Gay, which were returned him after Mr. Gay's death, though any mention made by Mr. P. of the return or exchange of letters has been industriously suppressed in the publication, and only appears by some of the answers."

The case of Gay is first to be considered. There is not an allusion in any of the "answers," either to the exchange of the letters which passed between Gay and Swift, or the return of the letters which Swift addressed to Gay. An exchange, at all events, had not taken place. The letters of Gay were retained by Swift, and after the death of the Dean they were printed from the originals. Three only are contained in the quarto of 1741, and these are joint productions of Gay and Pope,[136] which would naturally have been made over to the latter when he reclaimed the whole of his correspondence with Swift. If the Dean was the culprit we must believe that while publishing, or permitting others to publish, his own letters to Gay, he deliberately excluded every one of Gay's replies, with the exception of the three in which Pope had a share. If Pope was the culprit the peculiarity is explained. He published the three letters which, being in part his own writing, had been sent back to him in 1737, and he published no others because the rest of the letters of Gay were not in his possession.

As the Duke of Queensberry was living, the introduction of his name is a species of guarantee that Swift had received back his letters to Gay; but the conclusion does not follow, which Pope intended to be drawn, that the Dean must therefore have supplied them to the printer. "One thing," says Swift to Gay, Nov. 20, 1729, "you are to consider, because it is an old compact, that when I write to you, or Mr. Pope, I write to both." On the death of Gay the correspondence passed a second time through Pope's hands, and with his habit at that period of getting the letters of his intimates, as well as his own letters, transcribed for future use, it may readily be imagined that he would not miss the opportunity of securing a valuable collection, in which he may be said to have had a common property with his departed friend[137]. Hence it happens that copies of all Swift's letters to Gay, together with one that was not printed, are preserved among the Oxford manuscripts, and with this evidence that the entire series was not less in the power of Pope than of Swift, suspicion must incline to the one who had made elaborate preparations for publication, and who had shown himself eager for it. The suppression too of Gay's replies, contrary to the general rule observed in the work, would here again favour the opinion that the letters of Swift were sent to the press by the person to whom the replies were inaccessible, and not by the person who had the correspondence on both sides at his command.

The assertion that the letters were returned which Swift addressed to Pope, is next to be examined. According to the poet his surrender of them appears from some of the answers of Swift; but the single passage by which it is implied, is that in which the Dean speaks of "a great collection of [your/my] letters to [me/you]." The very letter in which the sentence occurs commences with a lament by Swift that he has "entirely lost his memory," and the strange double form in which he describes the correspondence seems chiefly to indicate a consciousness that his recollection of its nature was uncertain and confused. On one half of the subject he had manifested his misconceptions a few days before. He had forgotten the chasm in the series of Pope's letters, had forgotten that any of them had been restored to their author, had forgotten Mrs. Whiteway's denial that she possessed them, and when she again corrected him, continued to fancy they were deposited with some person he knew not whom, in some place he knew not where. His notions respecting his letters to Pope were not likely to be better founded than his notions respecting the letters of Pope to him. But more than this, he only professed to make the statement upon the authority of his cousin, and his cousin disavowed all knowledge of the collection. Far from being aware that the Dean had received back his letters to Pope, she expressed her conviction that the materials for the printed volume could not have been drawn from Ireland, just because those letters formed part of it.[138] The literal interpretation of a single phrase of Swift, in a letter which bears internal evidence of the grievous extent of his malady, being negatived by the authority upon which it claims to be based, there still exists the ambiguous assurance of Pope that he returned the correspondence after the death of Gay, which happened in December, 1732. The replies, however, of Swift in the quarto, instead of stopping at this date, extend to August, 1738, and those of the last half-dozen years must have remained with the poet. The Dean had said in 1717, that he kept no copies of letters. Mrs. Whiteway testified that he had never taken a copy during the twelve years she had been at his elbow, "excepting of a letter to a lord-lieutenant or a bishop, whom he feared might make an ill use of it;" and as for the letters to Pope she had seen him write them, and send them off immediately. Letters of which Pope had the originals, and Swift no copies, must plainly have owed their publicity to Pope.