Friendship has no tendency to secure veracity; for by whom can a man so much wish to be thought better than he is, as by him whose kindness he desires to gain or keep? Even in writing to the world there is less constraint; the author is not confronted with his reader, and takes his chance of approbation among the different dispositions of mankind; but a letter is addressed to a single mind, of which the prejudices and partialities are known; and must, therefore, please, if not by favouring them, by forbearing to oppose them.
To charge those favourable representations which men give of their own minds with the guilt of hypocritical falsehood, would show more severity than knowledge. The writer commonly believes himself. Almost every man’s thoughts, while they are general, are right; and most hearts are pure while temptation is away. It is easy to awaken generous sentiments in privacy; to despise death when there is no danger; to glow with benevolence when there is nothing to be given. While such ideas are formed, they are felt; and self-love does not suspect the gleam of virtue to be the meteor of fancy.
If the letters of Pope are considered merely as compositions, they seem to be premeditated and artificial. It is one thing to write, because there is something which the mind wishes to discharge; and another to solicit the imagination, because ceremony or vanity requires something to be written. Pope confesses his early letters to be vitiated with “affectation and ambition:” to know whether he disentangled Himself from these perverters of epistolary integrity, his book and his life must be set in comparison.
One of his favourite topicks is contempt of his own poetry. For this, if it had been real, he would deserve no commendation; and in this he was certainly not sincere, for his high value of himself was sufficiently observed; and of what could he be proud but of his poetry? He writes, he says, when “he has just nothing else to do;” yet Swift complains that he was never at leisure for conversation, because he had “always some poetical scheme in his head.” It was punctually required that his writing-box should be set upon his bed before he rose; and lord Oxford’s domestick related, that, in the dreadful winter of forty, she was called from her bed by him four times in one night, to supply him with paper, lest he should lose a thought.
He pretends insensibility to censure and criticism, though it was observed, by all who knew him, that every pamphlet disturbed his quiet, and that his extreme irritability laid him open to perpetual vexation; but he wished to despise his criticks, and, therefore, hoped that he did despise them.
As he happened to live in two reigns when the court paid little attention to poetry, he nursed in his mind a foolish disesteem of kings, and proclaims that “he never sees courts.” Yet a little regard shown him by the prince of Wales melted his obduracy; and he had not much to say when he was asked by his royal highness, “How he could love a prince while he disliked kings.”
He very frequently professes contempt of the world, and represents himself as looking on mankind, sometimes with gay indifference, as on emmets of a hillock, below his serious attention; and sometimes with gloomy indignation, as on monsters more worthy of hatred than of pity. These were dispositions apparently counterfeited. How could he despise those whom he lived by pleasing, and on whose approbation his esteem of himself was super-structed? Why should he hate those to whose favour he owed his honour and his ease? Of things that terminate in human life, the world is the proper judge; to despise its sentence, if it were possible, is not just; and if it were just, is not possible. Pope was far enough from this unreasonable temper: he was sufficiently “a fool to fame,” and his fault was, that he pretended to neglect it. His levity and his sullenness were only in his letters; he passed through common life, sometimes vexed, and sometimes pleased, with the natural emotions of common men.
His scorn of the great is too often repeated to be real; no man thinks much of that which he despises; and, as falsehood is always in danger of inconsistency, he makes it his boast, at another time, that he lives among them.
It is evident that his own importance swells often in his mind. He is afraid of writing, lest the clerks of the post-office should know his secrets; he has many enemies; he considers himself as surrounded by universal jealousy: “after many deaths, and many dispersions, two or three of us” says he, “may still be brought together, not to plot, but to divert ourselves, and the world too, if it pleases:” and they can live together, and “show what friends wits may be, in spite of all the fools in the world.” All this while it was likely that the clerks did not know his hand; he certainly had no more enemies than a publick character like his inevitably excites; and with what degree of friendship the wits might live, very few were so much fools as ever to inquire.
Some part of this pretended discontent he learned from Swift, and expresses it, I think, most frequently in his correspondence with him. Swift’s resentment was unreasonable, but it was sincere; Pope’s was the mere mimickry of his friend, a fictitious part which he began to play before it became him. When he was only twenty-five years old, he related that “a glut of study and retirement had thrown him on the world,” and that there was danger lest “a glut of the world should throw him back upon study and retirement.” To this Swift answered with great propriety, that Pope had not yet either acted or suffered enough in the world to have become weary of it. And, indeed, it must be some very powerful reason that can drive back to solitude him who has once enjoyed the pleasures of society.