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

by Alexander Pope

There is another inconsistency which makes it very doubtful whether the poet could have sent back the earlier letters of Swift any more than the later. After informing the Dean, on December 30, 1736, that the joint letter of August, 1723, had been recently printed by Curll, Pope went on to say, "Your answer to that letter, he has not got; it has never been out of my custody; for whatever is lent is lost, wit as well as money, to these needy poetical readers." Here we have Pope avowing that he retained in 1736 an answer of the Dean, which belonged to the year 1723. There is no indication that it was an exception to the rest of the correspondence, and the presumption therefore is that none of the letters which Pope received from Swift had been restored upon the death of Gay in 1732. The poet's assertion is rendered more suspicious by the absence of all allusion to the circumstance in the arguments which he addressed through Lord Orrery to Swift, in March, 1737, with a view to convince him that his refusal to return Pope's own letters was unjust. No plea could have had greater force than the statement that Pope had already sent back the letters of Swift, and was only asking the Dean to deal by him as he had dealt by the Dean.

Although we were to suppose, against the evidence, that the poet had given up the whole of the originals, he must still have retained copies. He avowedly inserted six letters of the Dean in the quarto to clear up the history of the publication, and four of the number belong to the years 1732 and 1733, which shows that Pope continued to have the command of the correspondence at the period of its appearance in 1741. Indeed copies of five of the published letters of Swift to Pope, with eight that are unpublished, are in the Oxford papers, and since none of the six, which the poet contributed to the quarto, are among them, more must have existed, unless he had kept the originals. That he had never parted with them is the just conclusion from the facts,[139] and his note is one of those instances in which he had recourse to the licence he allowed himself of "equivocating genteelly." The letters of Swift to Gay may be presumed to have been returned to Swift, when the Duke of Queensberry examined Gay's papers after his death. The expressions in the Dean's child-like postscript of August 24 gave a colour to the notion that he had also got back his letters to Pope. The admission suggested to the poet to draw up a note which, read by the ordinary rules of language, affirms that the letters to himself were returned, as well as the letters to Gay, but in which the return of the letters, by a forced construction, might be made to apply to Gay alone, who is the immediate antecedent. This accounts for the death of Gay having been fixed upon for the era of the alleged restoration to the Dean of his correspondence with Pope, though there was no connection between the events, and though the choice of so early a date left unexplained the appearance in the quarto of the subsequent letters of Swift. That "any mention made by Mr. P. of the return or exchange of letters should be industriously suppressed" by Mr. P. "in the publication," was a necessary consequence, or it would have been manifest that the only letters which had been returned were those of Gay. By evasions like these the poet satisfied a conscience that held a lie to be justifiable, provided it was couched in language which could be wrested by the deceiver into a different sense from what it bore to the deceived.

The correspondence between Swift and Bolingbroke completed the series, which Pope complained was printed without his consent. Of the eight letters from Bolingbroke, seven were written in conjunction with the poet. These joint compositions, like the partnership letters of Gay, are exactly those which would have been returned to Pope. One of the number furnishes evidence, which almost amounts to a demonstration, that the collection of 1741 proceeded from himself. When he brought out the avowed edition of his letters in 1737, he inserted at the end of the volume a letter of Swift, a letter of his own, and the joint letter from himself and Bolingbroke, of which Curll had obtained a copy. This little supplement was ushered in by a notice which says, "Since the foregoing sheets were printed off, the following letters having been published without the consent of their writers, we have added them, though not in the order of time." Whatever the motive the announcement was deceptive. The letter of Swift was his reply to the joint letter of Pope and Bolingbroke—that very reply which the poet boasted a month or two before could not be produced surreptitiously, because it had never been out of his custody. Nobody else, by his own showing, had the power to make it public, no earlier impression of it is known to exist, and, as will be seen by comparing it with the copy from the Oxford papers, it was printed with omissions and variations, which must have been the act of the poet, or he would have restored the genuine readings when he included it in his appendix. In juxtaposition with it is a letter from Pope to Swift, dated December 10, 1725, which in like manner has never been found in any prior publication, and which of all his letters to the Dean is the single one we are certain was in his power when the quarto of 1737 was in the press. He transcribed the original at the time it was written, and sent a copy to Lord Oxford, ostensibly to let him see the way in which he was mentioned in it, but partly, perhaps, because the poet thought well of the production.[140] This letter of December, 1725, reappears in tho quarto of 1741, with the addition for the first time of a postscript by Bolingbroke. A copy of the entire performance is among the Oxford papers, and reveals the fact that the Pope portion, and the Bolingbroke portion, are both abridged in the published version. Yet although the persons who brought out the collection of 1741, had the manuscript before them, or they could not have given Bolingbroke's share of the letter, they nevertheless, by a marvellous coincidence, print Pope's share precisely as it had been printed by Pope himself in 1737. The conclusion is irresistible that the editor of the quarto of 1737, was the editor of the collection of 1741. The postscript of Bolingbroke was not written when he was in the house with Pope, but was added subsequently when he got back to Dawley,[141] and its omission from the volume of 1737 was due to the circumstance, that the poet had not then received back his correspondence from Swift, and only possessed a copy of his own carefully composed essay.

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 "copied from 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, not first 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 publish them 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 his first edition the few new letters which were added in the quarto of 1741, and says that he found them in the London impression "after he had reprinted the 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 a printed book, 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 London booksellers. 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 edition was 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 to return 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.