A letter Pope published as having been addressed to Addison is made up of fragments
of three letters actually written to Caryll. Another imaginary letter to Addison contains the following not inapt passage from a letter to Caryll:—
‘Good God! what an incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his best part, his soul, and how changing and variable in his frame of body. What is man altogether but one mighty inconsistency?’
What, indeed! The method subsequently employed by Pope to recover his letters from Swift, and to get them published in such a way as to create the impression that Pope himself had no hand in it, cannot be here narrated. It is a story no one can take pleasure in. Of such an organized hypocrisy as this correspondence it is no man’s duty to speak seriously. Here and there an amusing letter occurs, but as a whole it is neither interesting, elevating, nor amusing. When in 1741 Curll moved to dissolve the injunction Pope had obtained in connection with the Swift correspondence, his counsel argued that letters on familiar subjects and containing inquiries after the health of friends were not learned works, and consequently were not within the copyright statute of Queen Anne, which was entitled, ‘An Act for
the Encouragement of Learning;’ but Lord Hardwicke, with his accustomed good sense, would have none of this objection, and observed (and these remarks, being necessary for the judgment, are not mere obiter dicta, but conclusive):
‘It is certain that no works have done more service to mankind than those which have appeared in this shape upon familiar subjects, and which, perhaps, were never intended to be published, and it is this which makes them so valuable, for I must confess, for my own part, that letters which are very elaborately written, and originally intended for the press, are generally the most insignificant, and very little worth any person’s reading’ (2 Atkyns, p. 357).
I am encouraged by this authority to express the unorthodox opinion that Pope’s letters, with scarcely half-a-dozen exceptions, and only one notable exception, are very little worth any person’s reading.
Pope’s epistolary pranks have, perhaps, done him some injustice. It has always been the fashion to admire the letter which, first appearing in 1737, in Pope’s correspondence, and there attributed to Gay, describes the death by
lightning of the rustic lovers John Hewet and Sarah Drew. An identical description occurring in a letter written by Pope to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and subsequently published by Warton from the original, naturally caused the poet to be accused of pilfering another man’s letter, and sending it off as his own. Mr. Thackeray so puts it in his world-famous Lectures, and few literary anecdotes are better known; but the better opinion undoubtedly is that the letter was Pope’s from the beginning, and attributed by him to Gay because he did not want to have it appear that on the date in question he was corresponding with Lady Mary. After all, there is a great deal to be said in favour of honesty.
When we turn from the man to the poet we have at once to change our key. A cleverer fellow than Pope never commenced author. He was in his own mundane way as determined to be a poet, and the best going, as John Milton himself. He took pains to be splendid—he polished and pruned. His first draft never reached the printer—though he sometimes said it did. This ought, I think, to endear him to us in these hasty days, when authors high and low think nothing of emptying the slops of their