Nearly half a century after the death of the poet, Hawkins and Warton, who evidently derived their statements from a common source, produced a legend, which instead of being drawn from the elegy is directly opposed to it. Pope says that the unfortunate lady destroyed herself with a sword, Warton that she put an end to her life with a rope; Pope says that she had beauty, Warton that she was deformed: Pope says that she had titles, Warton that she was simply one Wainsbury; Pope says that she had fame, and Warton has quoted a name so obscure that nobody has been able to discover her lineage, her connections, her residence, or that she was ever known to a single human being of the time. The Warton form of the romance has been jotted down by the Duchess of Portland in her note book, from which it appears that the narrators did not agree among themselves; for Warton declares that the lady was beloved by Pope; the duchess that Pope was beloved by the lady, and that he did not return her affection. In his Essay on the Genius of Pope, Warton states that her first suitor was the Duke of Buckingham, that on his deserting her she retired into a convent in France, and that her retreat into a nunnery prompted the poet, "who had conceived a violent passion for her," to express his feelings in the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard.[533] The Duke of Buckingham, on March 16, 1705, married his third wife, who survived him. The tone and details of the Elegy forbid the notion that it could have been written on a cast-off mistress of the duke, and the incidents must, therefore, have occurred before March 16, 1705, when Pope was barely sixteen years and ten months old. The fable thus requires us to suppose that the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard was the production of a lad of seventeen, that it was composed several years before the translation of the letters existed from which he has borrowed a considerable part of the phraseology as well as the ideas, and that his virulent denunciation of the "false guardian," was for not allowing a ward "with beauty, titles, wealth, and fame," to wed the son of a linen-draper,—a mere boy without money, reputation, or prospects, and who was deformed and stunted in an extreme degree.
In 1806, Bowles promulgated a tradition which contradicts the representations both of Ayre and Warton. The hero of Warton is Pope himself; the hero of Bowles is the Duke of Berry. The heroine of Warton in one version, for he is not consistent, was forced into a convent; and the heroine of Bowles withdrew there of her own accord. The unfortunate lady of Ayre and Ruffhead is driven abroad by her uncle, that she may be weaned from an English attachment; the unfortunate lady of Bowles falls in love with a foreigner on the continent; the lady of Ayre and Ruffhead is thwarted in her matrimonial schemes because she has fixed her heart upon a person beneath her; and the lady of Bowles is reduced to despair because she aspires to the hand of a person above her. Bowles maintains that the latter view must be received or the Elegy is unintelligible. Johnson has shown that the Elegy is contradictory, and if the verses which represent the lady's fate to have been the consequence of her ambition favours the theory that she was enamoured of some superior in rank, the passage which represents the uncle as steeling his heart against his niece out of pride equally favours the rival hypothesis that she was devoted to an inferior.
At variance in nearly every particular, the conflicting histories of the unfortunate lady have the common quality, that they are unsupported by a single circumstance which could warrant the smallest measure of belief. Bowles heard his version, for which he declined to vouch, from an unnamed gentleman, who heard it from Condorcet, who heard it from Voltaire, who heard it nobody knows where. Ayre and the rest cite no witnesses whatever, for the obvious reason that they had none of any value to cite. The only accounts which give the lady's name report it differently, and not one of the investigators of her story,—not even Warton after his "many and wide enquiries,"—can tell us where she was born or died, or where she lived, or to whom she was related or known. The veriest phantom that ever flitted in darkness before the eye of credulous superstition could not be more illusive and impalpable.
The biographers and editors who went about enquiring after the unfortunate lady had no suspicion that she might be altogether a poetical invention, nor could they have shown that here was the solution of the mystery unless they had been in possession of the Caryll correspondence. Pope, in a posthumous note, which was published by Warburton, directs us to the letters to several ladies at p. 206 of the quarto edition, for the indications that the unfortunate lady of the Elegy was also the heroine of the Duke of Buckingham's Verses to a Lady designing to retire into a Monastery. There are no letters to ladies at p. 206 of the quarto, but some are inserted from p. 86 to p. 95, and 206 is a palpable misprint for 86, where, in conformity with the title of the duke's poem, we have a letter to a lady who was meditating a retreat to a convent. The preceding letter is addressed to Mr. Caryll, and, in the table of contents, is said to be "Concerning an unfortunate lady." The letter which relates to the monastic project is said, in the table of contents, to be "To the same lady," and thence it appears that the lady who thought of withdrawing to a nunnery was the same unfortunate lady who was the subject of the letter to Caryll. From the Caryll correspondence we discover that she was the wife of John Weston, Esq., of Sutton, in the county of Surrey; but, instead of dying by her own hand in a foreign country, she died a natural death in her native land on the 18th of October, 1724, several years after the poet had commemorated the suicide of the unfortunate lady.[534] It follows that he has falsely represented the unfortunate lady of his letters to have been the same individual with the unfortunate lady of the Elegy, and since he was driven to conjure up a fictitious victim we may be sure that there was no real victim in the case. This explains Pope's omission to answer Caryll's inquiry who the unfortunate lady was;[535] this explains why the tragical death of a woman "with beauty, titles, wealth, and fame," was unknown to her contemporaries; this explains why the histories of her differ from each other, and why in every one of them she remains a shadowy being whose very existence cannot be traced; this explains why, as Johnson observes, it is not easy to make out from the poem the character of either the heroine or her guardian: and this accounts for the contradictions which have crept into the Elegy. Pope adopted the common incident of a miserable girl having recourse to self-destruction, and he wished to have it believed that he had a personal interest in her fate. His disposition to talk of himself in his poetry has been noticed by Johnson. Windsor Forest, the Essay on Criticism, the Temple of Fame, the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard, and the Rape of the Lock, all ended egotistically. The Elegy was an inviting occasion for the indulgence of his propensity. He had got, as he thought, a romantic heroine, and yielding to the temptation to blend his name with her story, he wound up his verses with the celebration of his devoted attachment to her. He laid the scene of her death abroad to account for English ignorance of the tragedy, and he endeavoured to authenticate the fable for posterity by a posthumous note which involved the assumption that the unfortunate lady of his letters was the same lady commemorated in his poem. The note which was designed to accredit the tale has answered the opposite purpose, and convicted him of a puerile deception, not the mere impulse of youthful vanity, but renewed on the brink of the grave, with a final sense of satisfaction in propping up and perpetuating the petty fraud.
The supposition that the story was true has seduced Warton, Wakefield, and Roscoe into some weak critical fancies. Warton thinks the Elegy the most pathetic of Pope's writings, and says "that the cause of its excellence is that the occasion of it was real." Wakefield remarks that the text of the latest edition does not differ from the earliest, and conjectures that "the author's interest in the subject rendered the poem too affecting for his own perusal." Roscoe, to excuse the principles inculcated in the piece, alleges that it was "a spontaneous burst of indignation," and that "the first line demonstrates that Pope was no longer under the control of reason." Similar causes have dissimilar effects. Unfortunate ladies who are "no longer under the control of reason" are prone to stab or hang themselves. When Pope is "no longer under the control of reason" he sits down and writes an elegy which Roscoe says "is not exceeded in pathos and true poetry by any production of its author." Had the grief been as genuine as it was imaginary the apology is manifestly futile; for the man whose mind is sufficiently calm to permit him to sing his woes in polished verse, must have passed beyond the stage when he is incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. The plea might have justified the sentiments in a drama where the speaker was represented as pouring out his feelings while the calamity was fresh, but in an elegy the poet embodies his own opinions at the time of composition, and the bad morality becomes deliberate doctrine.
Vague and sounding verse could not lend a momentary speciousness to the sophistries of the Elegy. That the transgression of the angels was ambition is a common, though an unauthorised idea. That their sin was "glorious" is a notion peculiar to Pope. This "glorious fault" they infused into the unfortunate lady and "bade her soul aspire." The particular aspiration they suggested to her was to marry out of her sphere; her lofty ambition was an inordinate desire to make a good worldly match. Thwarted in the magnanimous purpose of her life, she had the second great merit of an heroic death; for to commit suicide was, in Pope's opinion, "to think greatly," "to die bravely," "to act a Roman's part." The exalted representation will not stand before the annals of suicide. They bear daily witness that self-destruction is the refuge of diseased, weak, pusillanimous, conscience-stricken minds.[536] The want of fortitude is proportioned to the slightness of the disaster which prompts the deed. What is remediable may be more readily endured than what cannot be cured, and there could be no stronger mark of a childish, self-indulgent, unhealthy character, without force or dignity, the slave of impulse, than that a woman should be guilty of suicide because her guardian refused his consent to an unequal marriage. There might be much room for pity; there could be none for admiration. The strength of affection which could be the only redeeming element is eliminated by the poet who, in this part of the Elegy, resolves the lady's love into the ignoble craving to marry into a higher station than her own. Her worldly disposition is the evidence to Pope that she had "a purer spirit" than such "kindred dregs" as had not sufficient grandeur of mind to worship rank. Out of compassion for her superiority "fate snatched her early away," that she might not be doomed to associate with the "dull souls" who love their equals, and bear their trials with resignation.
The opening lines of the Elegy have some of the indefiniteness which Johnson censured in the portrayal of the lady and her guardian. A female ghost with a gored and bleeding bosom, and bearing a visionary sword, beckons the poet to go with her into a glade. For what purpose does she beckon him? The apparition may be supposed to be the creature of a heated imagination, but there should be some significance in the act ascribed to her. The ghost of the King of Denmark did not beckon Horatio or the sentinels. It passed by them with "a slow and stately march," and made no sign, till Hamlet was present at its fourth appearance, and then
It beckoned him to go away with it
As if it some impartment did desire
To him alone.
The ghost of the unfortunate lady imparted no information to Pope, for he avows his ignorance of everything relating to her ghostly condition. A passage in Milton's Comus, separated from the context, might seem to countenance the indiscriminate use of the epithet "beckoning," as if it were a general characteristic of spectres.