The Works of Alexander Pope.
by Alexander Pope.
Volume 1.
INTRODUCTION.
In his will, dated December 12, 1743, not quite six months before he died, Pope bequeathed his printed works to Warburton, on condition that he published them without "future alterations." Warburton states that the object of the proviso was to relieve him from the obloquy he might incur by reproducing offensive strokes of satire. A few slight alterations which had not the sanction of any prior edition were nevertheless introduced by Warburton into some of the poems, and he announced on the t.i.tle-page and in the preface, that they were taken from a corrected copy delivered to him by Pope. Mr. Croker mistrusted the genuineness of the "alterations," and he intended to reject the text of Warburton, and adopt in the main the text of the last octavo edition which had appeared during the lifetime of the poet. The honour of Warburton is not above suspicion, but Mr. Croker was misled by erroneous inferences when he accused him of tampering with the text, and falsely pleading the authority of "a copy corrected by the author himself."
Fantastic in his conceptions, violent in his animosities, hasty and imperious in the expression of his opinions, Warburton sometimes repented his rashness, and cancelled numerous leaves in his Shakespeare and Pope after the volumes were printed off. Mr. Kilvert, who edited his Literary Remains, found among his papers a cancelled leaf of the Pope, containing the commencement of the Prologue to the Satires. On the first page Warburton had inserted among the "Variations" a couplet which he said was copied from the ma.n.u.script of Pope:
And now vile poets rise before the light, And walk, like Margaret"s ghost, at dead of night.
The allusion was to the ballad of William and Margaret, written by Mallet. He was the ally of Pope and Bolingbroke, and when Pope was dead he was employed by Bolingbroke to blast the memory of their former friend.[1] The mention of Margaret"s ghost gave Warburton the opportunity of appending a bitter note upon Mallet, whom he accused of "arraigning his dead patron for a cheat," and the leaf was cancelled to get rid of both note and variation. Mr. Croker believed that Warburton "forged" the variation to gratify his spleen against Mallet, whom he detested, and that before the volume was published "either his own conscience, or some prudent friend, suggested that such manifest fraud would not be tolerated." The conjecture was unfounded. Pope presented several of his ma.n.u.scripts to the son of Jonathan Richardson, the portrait-painter, for his trouble in collating them with the printed text. Richardson"s interlined copy of the first quarto volume of Pope"s poetry pa.s.sed into the hands of Malone, and was ultimately bought by Mr.
Croker. The ma.n.u.scripts which Richardson possessed in the handwriting of Pope were purchased by Dr. Chauncey, and are still the property of his descendants. Among them is the Prologue to the Satires, and it contains the couplet Mr. Croker believed to have been forged. In every instance where the ma.n.u.scripts exist the variations printed by Warburton are found to be authentic.
The inference of Mr. Croker from the variations must be reversed. They do not invalidate, but attest, the fidelity of Warburton, and the "alterations" in the text of the poems must pa.s.s unchallenged unless there is some direct proof of their inaccuracy. The arguments, on the contrary, are altogether in their favour. Four printed pages of the first Moral Essay, with the corrections in ma.n.u.script, were discovered by Mr. Kilvert among Warburton"s papers. "Some of the words," says Mr.
Croker, "are so neatly written as to leave a strong impression on my eye of their being Pope"s; other portions of the ma.n.u.script are more like Warburton"s looser hand." The faint doubt expressed by Mr. Croker would hardly have arisen if his suspicion had not been previously awakened, for the corrections are all indubitably in the handwriting of the poet.
Nor was the ma.n.u.script in this instance the guide of Warburton. He followed a copy of the Moral Essays printed by Pope in his last illness, though never published. "Warburton has the propriety of it as you know,"
wrote Bolingbroke to Lord Marchmont, one of the executors; "alter it he cannot by the terms of the will."[2] This of itself is an answer to Mr.
Croker. The executors had access to Pope"s latest printed version of the Moral Essays, which was Warburton"s avowed authority, and he could not alter a single word without certain detection, and the consequent forfeiture of his legacy. He was alive to the risk. A portion of Pope"s revised edition of his poetical works was pa.s.sing through the press at the time of his death, and Warburton directed the printer to give the sheets, when the executors inquired for them, to their colleague the celebrated Murray, who was afterwards Lord Mansfield, adding, "Pray preserve all the press copy to the least sc.r.a.p."[3] The terms of the will bound the editor to be faithful to his trust, under a penalty of 4,000_l._, the estimated value of the bequest,[4] and he saw the necessity of having the voucher of the poet"s handwriting for the minutest departure from the previous text in such of the proofs as had not received Pope"s final imprimatur. A more ample guarantee could not be desired for the authenticity of the particulars in which Warburton"s text differs from the printed copies superintended by Pope. All the displaced readings, which are not utterly insignificant, are preserved in the notes to the present edition, as well as numerous unpublished variations, which are taken from the ma.n.u.scripts of Pope, or the transcripts of Richardson.
The text of Pope"s poems is more easily settled than elucidated. No other poet so near to our own time presents equal difficulties. His satires abound in uncertain allusions, and controverted topics which require a large amount of ill.u.s.tration and discussion. His philosophy was not understood by himself, and it is a study to disentangle his confused arguments, and interpret his doubtful language. He often expressed his opinions with wilful ambiguity, took refuge in equivocations, or had recourse to falsehoods, and we are constantly forced upon perplexing investigations to recover the truth he endeavoured to conceal. Fortunately his best poems and choicest pa.s.sages are least inc.u.mbered with puzzling questions, and his obscurities have not much interfered with his popularity because the ma.s.s of readers are content to enjoy the beauties and leave the enigmas unsolved.
The number and eminence of the commentators on Pope, the diversity of their attainments, and the extent of their annotations appear to promise all the help which knowledge, acuteness, and taste could supply. The result is far below what might reasonably have been antic.i.p.ated.
Warburton, Pope"s first editor, had a vigorous understanding, and possessed the enormous advantage that he carried on the work in concert with the poet, and could ask the explanation of every difficulty. A diseased ambition rendered his talents and opportunities useless.
Without originality he aspired to be original, and imagined that to fabricate hollow paradoxes, and torture language into undesigned meanings was the surest evidence of a fertile, penetrating genius. He employed his sagacity less to discover than to distort the ideas of his author, and seems to have thought that the more he deviated from the obvious sense the greater would be his fame for inventive power. He has left no worse specimen of his perverse propensity than the spurious fancies, and idle refinements he fathered upon Pope. They are among his baldest paradoxes, are conveyed in his heaviest style, and are supported by his feeblest sophistry. His lifeless and verbose conceits soon provoke by their falsity, and fatigue by their ponderousness. Lord Marchmont said laughingly to Pope that "he must be the vainest man alive, and must want to show posterity what a quant.i.ty of dulness he could carry down on his back without sinking under the load."[5] The exuberant self-sufficiency of Warburton deluded him into the belief that the text derived its princ.i.p.al l.u.s.tre from the commentary. He selected for the frontispiece to his edition a monument on which were hung medallions of himself and the poet, and Blakey, the draughtsman, told Burke that "it was by Warburton"s particular desire that he made him the princ.i.p.al figure, and Pope only secondary, and that the light, contrary to the rules of art, goes upwards from Warburton to Pope." A gentleman remarked, when Burke related the anecdote, that they were drawn looking in opposite directions.[6] The sarcasm summed up the opinion which has always prevailed. The clumsy inventions of Warburton had not the semblance of plausibility, and scarce anybody except his shadow, and fulsome echo, Bishop Hurd, ever doubted that the text and commentary looked different ways.[7]
Proud of his dreary paradoxes, Warburton scorned the humble office of furnishing useful information. Pope had said, in his Imitations of Horace, that because three ladies liked a luckless play, a spendthrift had taken the whole house upon the poet"s night,[8] which drew from Warburton the following note:--"The common reader, I am sensible, will be always more solicitous about the names of these three ladies, the unlucky play, and every other circ.u.mstance that attended this piece of gallantry, than for the explanation of our author"s sense, or the ill.u.s.tration of his poetry, even where he is most moral and sublime. But had it been in Mr. Pope"s purpose to indulge so impertinent a curiosity, he had sought elsewhere for a commentator on his writings. Which defect in these notes, the periodical scribblers, however, have been stupid and shameless enough to object to them."[9] Warburton"s reserve was praiseworthy when his motive was respect for private feelings. His general neglect to clear up the allusions in Pope"s poems did not admit of this apology, and in default of a better defence he called his critics "stupid and shameless." His habit when reasons failed him was to supply their place with abuse.
The edition of Warburton was published in 1751, and no attempt was made to supersede it till Gilbert Wakefield commenced a new edition in 1794.
He was "labouring," he says, "for a subsistence," and the cost of the work, which was printed at his own expense, obliged him to bring out a volume at a time. Before the first volume was quite through the press he learned that Joseph Warton was engaged on a similar undertaking. Warton had the support of the London booksellers, and the edition of Wakefield ended with his opening volume. The world did not lose the benefit of his annotations. He published in 1796 his Observations on Pope, which consist of notes on the remaining poems, and of supplemental notes to the poems he had previously edited. Wakefield said that an "inculpable perfection pervaded the whole body of Pope"s compositions," and in the extravagance of his admiration he overlaid the volume of his unfinished edition with weak rhapsodies which masked the useful part of his labours. He restrained his eulogistic excesses in his Observations, and kept more closely to his main design of tracing Pope"s "imitations of his predecessors." All persons tolerably read in poetry could perceive that the obligations Pope acknowledged in his notes were but a fraction of the whole, and in 1740, Bowyer, the printer, with the a.s.sistance of Mr. Clarke, a clergyman, commenced a collection of parallel pa.s.sages.
From the letters of Clarke to Bowyer it appears that Pope was annoyed.
Bowyer profited by his irritation, and offered to treat with him. "I think," wrote Clarke in 1742, "you buy his friendship cheap with a whole hecatomb of notes, essays, ill.u.s.trations, and the mob of commentators."[10] The progress of the negociation is not recorded. The result is revealed in the fact that Bowyer shortly afterwards became Pope"s printer. The sensitiveness which was disturbed at the gleanings of Bowyer would have shuddered at the abundant harvest of Wakefield. He himself had no intention of depreciating the merits of Pope. He only wished to ill.u.s.trate a favourite author. Many of the parallelisms are too slight to be applicable, or they are common phrases the property of every Englishman. A vast number remain which are a curious exhibition of Pope"s patience and skill in the art of poetical mosaic, and of the large amount of borrowed beauties he intermixed with his undoubted originality. The interpretation of the text, though subordinate with Wakefield, was not neglected by him. He and a friend who a.s.sisted him, Dr. William Bennet, Bishop of Cloyne, have explained more allusions than all the other commentators, and the least known and appreciated of the editors of Pope is the man who has done the most for his author.
The edition of Warton appeared in 1797. "His reason," he says in his preface, "for undertaking the work was the universal complaint that Dr.
Warburton had disfigured and disgraced his edition with many forced and far-sought interpretations, totally unsupported by the pa.s.sages which they were brought to elucidate." Warton had the stimulus of a second motive. He published in 1756 the first volume of his Essay on Pope, and his criticisms were roughly attacked in many pa.s.sages of Ruffhead"s Life of the poet, which was prompted and partly written by Warburton. While Warburton lived Warton did not venture to retaliate. The thirty years which intervened had not extinguished his resentment, and he seized the opportunity to revenge the ancient grudge. His consciousness of Warburton"s defects did not keep Warton from repeating the error of filling page upon page with irrelevant matter. His Essay on Pope had been a receptacle for his store of miscellaneous reading, and in a separate work there was no objection to a medley of anecdote and criticism. He was seventy-five when he published his edition of Pope, and to save himself trouble he apportioned out the old farrago in notes.
Profuse in digressions, he is sparing of needful explanations. His turn was for the lighter portions of criticism and biography, and most of his apposite remarks are critical opinions. They are often just, but never profound, for he had neither fervid feelings nor a robust understanding, and his highest qualities are a fair poetical taste, and a tolerable acquaintance with ancient and modern authors.
Bowles was a school-boy at Winchester when Warton was head-master, and he intimated that this early connection was the cause of his being employed to revise the next edition of Pope. It appeared in 1806. His poetic sensibility was exquisite, and he was well-read, shrewd, and candid. His failing was a hurry of mind which disqualified him for a painstaking commentator. He was content to jot down in a careless, colloquial style the off-hand thoughts of his quick and cultivated intellect, and he did not add much to the scanty explanations of Warton and Warburton. The chief merit of his edition is his excellent literary criticism, which is truer, deeper, and more refined than that of his old Winchester master. The estimate Bowles formed of the poetry and character of Pope was allowed to pa.s.s unchallenged for thirteen years, when some remarks of Campbell, in his Specimens of British Poets, commenced a controversy which lasted from 1819 to 1826. In the series of pamphlets he published to vindicate his opinions, Bowles exhibited his wonted acuteness, courage, and negligence. With all his slips in minor points the fresh facts which have come to light have more than confirmed his view of Pope"s moral obliquities, and in the discussion on the principles of poetry he reduced the whole of his adversaries to silence.
He and Hazlitt were the only persons among the disputants, eminent or obscure, who showed any real comprehension of the subject.
The next edition of Pope, justly considered by Mr. Croker to be the worst, came out in 1824, and was superintended by Roscoe, the author of the Life of Lorenzo de Medici, and Leo X. He barely contributed a single ill.u.s.trative note, his criticisms are plat.i.tudes, and his vindications of Pope a tissue of blunders. He was misled by his credulous faith in his hero, by the rashness with which he imposed his own guesses for facts, and above all by his want of penetration and research. His half-knowledge was worse than ignorance. A few of his mult.i.tudinous errors were exposed by Bowles whom he had attacked. Roscoe replied in a feeble, disingenuous pamphlet, which drew from Bowles his taunting and crushing retort, Lessons in Criticism to William Roscoe, Esq. This ended the Pope controversy.
The faults of plan and execution in the editions of Warburton, Warton, Bowles, and Roscoe stand out in strong relief, and Mr. Croker resolved, as far as possible, to correct the mistakes, retrench the superfluities, and supply the omissions. Warton and Bowles dismissed a large proportion of the barren, oppressive commentaries of Warburton.
Roscoe put back the whole of the bulky excrescence. Most of it had been adopted by Pope, and to relieve the text, without excluding interpretations sanctioned by the poet, Mr. Croker determined to print the pedantic lumber in appendixes. The notes of the other editors rested upon their intrinsic merits, and he intended to sift out the surplusage, and only retain what was pertinent. To curtail is easy. The difficulty was to clear up the many obscurities which remained, and Mr. Croker was anxious to furnish his share of explanation, though he was convinced that numerous contemporary allusions would always baffle curiosity. His chief attention was directed to the satires, and he continued for many years to pursue his investigations, and acc.u.mulate materials. His busy life was succeeded by failing health, and he died before he had prepared his notes for the press. The results of his research have luckily all been preserved, for his habit was to write them out in full at the time.
He was an acute and eager enquirer into political, personal, and social history, and no man could have been more competent to bring to the surface the under-current of forgotten circ.u.mstances.
I have kept to the plan sketched out by Mr. Croker. "A commentary," says Johnson, "must arise from the fortuitous discoveries of many men in devious walks of literature," and few poets have had more commentators than Pope. I have borrowed whatever I met with in previous writers that throw light upon his meaning, faults, and beauties, have cast aside what was plainly inapplicable and erroneous, and have done what I could to fill up deficiencies. My own notes will be recognised by the absence of any signature; all other notes throughout the work have the names of their authors attached, even when a note is by the same author as the text. The extracts from Warton are sometimes taken from his Essay, and both in his case and that of Bowles I have occasionally joined together scattered fragments which were connected in their subject. The rest of the arrangements will be understood at a glance.
The letters of Pope demand a more particular discussion. Estimated by their intrinsic merits they would call for little notice. "He laboured them," says Horace Walpole, "as much as the Essay on Man, and as they were written to everybody they do not look as if they had been written to anybody."[11] Their dry and frigid generalities could not be more happily exposed. The chief importance of the correspondence is in its relation to the morality of Pope, and the fame of men whose reputation is involved in the question of his uprightness. His real nature has always been hotly debated. "His detractors," says De Quincey, "fancy that in his character a basis of ign.o.ble qualities was here and there slightly relieved by a few shining spots; we, on the contrary, believe that in Pope lay a disposition radically n.o.ble and generous, clouded and overshadowed by superficial foibles; or, to adopt the distinction of Shakespeare, they see nothing but "dust a little gilt," and we "gold a little dusted.""[12] Pope boasted loudly of his virtue, and his champions judge him by his own representations. His accusers hold that his professions were hypocritical, as when Lord Macaulay speaks of his "spite and envy, thinly disguised by sentiments as benevolent and n.o.ble as those which Sir Peter Teazle admired in Mr. Joseph Surface."[13] The charges brought against him are thickly scattered over his life, and either the guilty appearances are deceptive, or we must admit that his mind was essentially corrupt. His correspondence brings up the ever-recurring enquiry, and we have to decide whether his letters are not many of them fraudulent, and the circ.u.mstances attending their publication a series of ignominious plots, infamous false accusations, and impudent lies.
Every examination into the history of the letters was slight before Mr.
Dilke engaged in the laborious task. His familiarity with the books, pamphlets, and periodicals of the time could not be exceeded, and his doubts once awakened he accepted nothing upon trust. With an immense amount of research and skill he proceeded to track Pope through his tortuous courses. He laid bare the ramifications of the plot against Curll, which was only known in a few of its prominent particulars. He detected, what none of the editors and biographers had perceived, the base manoeuvres and deceit which accompanied the publication of the "Letters to and from Dr. Swift." He was originally put upon his investigations by the ma.n.u.script collection of Pope"s letters to Caryll, and these revealed a new set of frauds in the evidence they supplied of letters converted into a fict.i.tious correspondence. His inclination was to favour Pope whenever there was an opening for a liberal interpretation, and it was not from hostility that he exposed the net-work of fraud, and brought out the dark traits of a dishonourable disposition with new and terrible force. He printed his discoveries in the Athenaeum[14], and after studying the facts afresh by the light of his essays, I am compelled to adopt his conclusions. The evidence upon which they rest is often circ.u.mstantial and intricate, and cannot be followed to the end without steady attention, and some trial of patience.
The letters of the poet which were first sent to the press were given by Cromwell to his mistress, Elizabeth Thomas, who sold them in her distress to Curll for ten guineas. She was a shameless woman, and boldly justified her conduct. "Everyone," she said, "knows that the person to whom a letter is addressed has the same right to dispose of it as he has of goods purchased with his money." The right which originally belonged to Cromwell, of publishing to the world whatever had been written to him in the confidence of friendship, he had, by his gift, transferred to herself; and thus it appeared that Cromwell had a right to be treacherous to Pope, and Mrs. Thomas a right to be treacherous to both Pope and Cromwell. With more reason she inferred that neither of them at heart would be vexed at the proceeding. Cromwell, she urged, could not be angry that the world should know "the professions of love, grat.i.tude, and veneration made him by so celebrated an author," and Pope could not resent the exhibition of the "early pregnancy of his genius." "And yet,"
she continued, "had either of you been asked, common modesty would have obliged you to refuse what you would not be displeased with if done without your knowledge."[15] There can be little doubt, from his subsequent conduct, that this was the light in which the publication was viewed by the poet, notwithstanding his a.s.sertion in a note to the Dunciad, "that he was ashamed of the letters as very trivial things, full not only of levities, but of wrong judgments of men and books, and only excusable from the youth and inexperience of the writer." Mrs.
Thomas did him an incalculable injury, not by revealing his secrets, but by flattering his vanity. The favourable reception of his correspondence originated the desire to give some further specimens to the world, and led him into the miserable series of falsehoods and frauds by which he endeavoured to accomplish his design without seeming to be privy to it.
The letters to Cromwell were published in Curll"s "Miscellanea," of which the t.i.tle-page says "Printed in the year 1727;" but the dedication to the letters themselves is dated June, 1726, and it was in 1726 that they appeared. The incidental and scanty notices of them at the time are sufficient to indicate the impression they produced. Thompson, writing in October to Aaron Hill, says that "though careless and uncorrected, they are full of wit and gaiety." There may have been many who thought that they did as much credit to the heart as to the head of the poet. "I have read the collection of letters you mention," Fenton wrote to Broome in September, 1726, "and was delighted with nothing more than that air of sincerity, those professions of esteem and respect, and that deference paid to his friend"s judgment in poetry which I have sometimes seen expressed to others, and I doubt not with the same cordial affection. If they are read in that light, they will be very entertaining and useful in the present age; but in the next, Cicero, Pliny, and Voiture may regain their reputation." The comments on Pope"s sincerity were plainly ironical. Fenton considered him to be extremely hypocritical, and some person concerned in the publication of 1726 must have formed the same opinion of his character, if the ludicrous tail-piece is intended to be typical of the letters. A little man whose diminutive stature did not permit him to clasp the taller figure in his arms while they stood upon a level, is represented as having jumped off the ground and seized his companion round the waist, who, with his hands thrown into the air at the painful vehemence of the embrace, is struggling to get loose. Undiscerning persons, who judged the poet by his words, would form a different estimate, and would perceive only proofs of his excellence where Fenton saw examples of his habitual insincerity. "His correspondence," says Johnson, of the later collection of 1735, "filled the nation with praises of his candour, tenderness, and benevolence, the purity of his purposes, and the fidelity of his friendship."[16]
The letters to Cromwell had more than an ephemeral success. Curll, in his reply in 1729 to the attack on him in the Dunciad, after noticing Pope"s affected depreciation of them, says, "However, they sell very well; price 5_s._"[17] The poet had already devised an excuse for following them up by a second set. Theobald, who had earned his lasting enmity by pointing out the errors in his edition of Shakespeare, was employed by some booksellers to edit the posthumous papers of Wycherley, which had been purchased from his heir. The work appeared in 1728. Pope saw in this circ.u.mstance a pretence for dragging his own letters before the world, and an opportunity of gratifying his spleen against Theobald.
He said that the poems were disreputable to the memory of his early friend, and that the correspondence was published because it showed that it was his last resolution to have suppressed them.[18] It showed the reverse. The last printed letter of Wycherley exhibits him as intent as ever upon preparing his poems for the press, and if we are to believe that he subsequently abandoned the design, we must accept the fact upon the bare a.s.sertion of Pope, which derives no support from any part of the correspondence. But though it failed to answer the purpose avowed by its editor, it answered purposes not avowed which were much nearer to his heart. It shows that the verses of Wycherley were rugged, feeble, and full of repet.i.tions, and that whatever they possessed of strength and harmony was due to the revision of Pope. It shows that he furnished entire pa.s.sages, and where the text is not explicit on the point he is careful to reclaim his contributions in the notes. It displays on the one hand the "first sprightly runnings" of the precocious young poet, and on the other the "last dull droppings" of the veteran author, who was verging upon his dotage. "If we were to judge," says Warburton, "of this set of letters by the manner of thinking and turn of expression, we should conclude that they were all mist.i.tled, and that those given to the boy of sixteen were written by the man of seventy, and the contrary,--such sober sense, such gravity of manners, and so much judgment and knowledge of composition, enlivened with manly wit, distinguish those of Mr. Pope, while a childish jealousy, a puerile affectation, a lying at catch for points, together with a total contempt of method, make up the character of those of Mr. Wycherley." Warton transcribes the judgment of Warburton, and adds his testimony to the superiority of the letters of Pope. He says that he "has excelled Wycherley in his own way of striving to be always witty," and that "the perpetual attempt of the vain old man to be brilliant, the acc.u.mulation of simile upon simile, the ant.i.thesis, the cant of satire, the severity on authors, critics, and women, are sufficiently disgusting." In short, the whole effect of the correspondence was to display the infirmities of Wycherley and the merits of Pope; and his mode of relieving his departed friend from the reproach of the posthumous poems was to reveal the secret that the only portions of them which might have done him credit were not his own, but the work of this zealous vindicator of his fame.
With such a futile excuse for printing the letters, Pope was anxious to throw the responsibility upon some other person. He was the intimate friend of Edward, the second Earl of Oxford, who, without being possessed of much ability, courted the society of eminent men, and who, with no great tincture of literature, had inherited from his father a pa.s.sion for collecting books and ma.n.u.scripts. His correspondence with the poet descended, with the rest of his personal papers, to his only child, who married the Duke of Portland in 1734. From the d.u.c.h.ess the papers pa.s.sed to her eldest daughter, Lady Elizabeth, wife to the third Viscount Weymouth, who subsequently became the first Marquess of Bath.
The Oxford ma.n.u.scripts were consequently removed to Longleat, where they have remained ever since among the treasures of a library which is worthy of the regal edifice it adorns.[19] In Pope"s letters to his friend we have his own record of the device he adopted. He wrote to Lord Oxford in September, 1729, and complained that the publication of Wycherley"s posthumous poems was derogatory to their author, as well as to the critic who had advised him to re-cast them. "Something," he said, "will be necessary to be done to clear both his and my reputation, which the letters under his hand will abundantly do; for which particular reason I would desire to have them lodged in your lordship"s hands." He had been slow in discovering that something was necessary to be done to clear the reputation of his deceased friend; for Theobald"s book had come forth in 1728, and it was now the autumn of 1729. His tardy zeal appears to have been entirely begotten by the idea that it could be made the pretext for producing the correspondence; but having once conceived the scheme, he did not allow it to languish. On the 6th of October he advanced a step further, and began to shadow forth the real object of the request. He informed Lord Oxford that some of the letters were to be printed, and asked permission to state that they were already in his library, "which," says he, "they shall be as soon as you will give orders to any one to receive them." "I would not," he went on, "appear myself as publisher of them, but any one else may, or even the bookseller be supposed to have procured copies of them,--formerly or now, it is equal. Certain it is that no other way can justice be rendered to the memory of a man to whom I had the first obligations of friendship, almost in my childhood." Lord Oxford merely replied that if the doc.u.ments were left in a box with the porter, the man had orders to place it in the library, and that any mention of that library would be agreeable to its owner;[20] but he took no notice of the intimation that the poet designed to ascribe the publication to an imaginary agent. Pope now considered him to be sufficiently prepared, and his next letter disclosed the whole of the scheme, and at the same time announced its execution. It then appeared that his n.o.ble dupe, who, as he was both weak and amiable, was expected to prove a submissive tool, had been asked to become the keeper of the ma.n.u.scripts, that he might be held up to the world as their publisher. "I am extremely obliged to you," Pope wrote to him, "for your kind permission to quote your library, and to mention it in what manner I pleased. I consulted Mr. Lewis upon the turn of the preface, and have exceeded perhaps my commission on one point, though we both judged it the right way; for I have made the publishers say that your lordship permitted them a copy of some of the papers from the library, where the originals remain as testimonies of the truth. It is indeed no more than a justice due to the dead and to the living author."[21] In other words, his lordship was a.s.serted to have permitted the bookseller to print the papers in his library, when they were not even sent to his house till after they were printed, and this fiction was fathered upon him without so much as his leave being asked, or his having been suffered to read a single line of the work he was stated to have authorised. When Pope alleged that the proceeding was "no more than a justice due to the dead and the living author," he must have hoped that the outrage to Lord Oxford of which he had been guilty in committing the act, would appear to be diminished by the a.s.surance with which he communicated it. His deceptions were not confined to the preface. He shortly afterwards wrote to Swift, and contrived to mention that he had contracted a friendship at sixteen with a man of seventy. "I speak," he said, "of old Mr. Wycherley, some letters of whom, by-the-bye, and of mine, the booksellers have got and printed, not without the concurrence of a n.o.ble friend of mine and yours. I do not much approve of it, though there is nothing in it for me to be ashamed of, because I will not be ashamed of anything I do not do myself, or of anything that is not immoral, but merely dull."[22] The booksellers had printed the letters with the concurrence of a n.o.ble friend, and the n.o.ble friend had never heard a word on the subject till the printing was completed. Pope did not much approve of it, and he had protested to Lord Oxford that in no other way could justice be rendered to the memory of a man to whom he had the first obligations of friendship. He would not be ashamed of what he did not do himself, and he alone had edited the work and sent it to the press. The value of his a.s.severations may be measured by the triple falsehood he volunteered to Swift. He was aware that the arguments by which he hoped to persuade Lord Oxford to become his dupe would not impose upon the penetrating understanding of the Dean, and he therefore openly repudiated what he was unable to excuse. If the publication had vindicated Wycherley, it would have been its own justification; but as it was put forth to do honour to Pope, he sacrificed his veracity to avoid the imputation of vanity. He cruelly sneered, in his "Prologue to the Satires" at the poor garretteer, who urged the plea for printing his compositions that he was "obliged by hunger and request of friends." The poet had not the excuse of hunger, and he improved upon the model he satirised when he pretended that _his_ friends had taken his papers, and printed them against his will.
The deception which Pope practised was never suspected till it was revealed by his correspondence with Lord Oxford, which has. .h.i.therto remained in ma.n.u.script. The repet.i.tion of the attempt on a more elaborate scale was less successful, and it has always been believed by the immense majority of inquirers that the promulgation of the collection of 1735, which the poet vehemently denounced as an act of intolerable treachery, was from first to last his own deed. "It seems,"
says Johnson, "that Pope being desirous of printing his letters, and not knowing how to do, without imputation of vanity, what has in this country been done very rarely, contrived an appearance of compulsion, that when he could complain that his letters were surrept.i.tiously published, he might decently and defensively publish them himself."[23]
Fresh facts have rendered the evidence against him stronger than ever, and the whole derives increased force from the information we now possess that he had previously had recourse to a kindred falsehood. In the first case he made a tool of a friend; in the second, he varied his plan, and made a tool of an enemy.
Pope tells us, in the preface to the authorised edition of his correspondence, which he brought out in quarto in 1737, that his disgust at the publication of his letters to Cromwell, and "the apprehension of more treatment of the same kind, put him upon recalling as many as he could from those who he imagined had kept any."[24] He applied to his friend Caryll, in December, 1726, to surrender his collection; and, on renewing the request a few days later, he added, "I have desired the same thing of Mrs. Blount, with whose late worthy husband I entertained so long a correspondence, and of all others." It was more than two years before Caryll could be induced to comply with the demand, and it would seem that Mrs. Blount was little less backward; for, on November 28, 1729, Pope wrote to Swift, "I _lately_ received from the widow of one dead correspondent, and the father of another,[25] several of my own letters of about fifteen and twenty years old." When the poet had gleaned together all the letters he could extort, "he immediately," he says, "lessened the number by burning three parts in four of them: the rest he spared, not in any preference of their style or writing, but merely as they preserved the memory of some friendships which will ever be dear to him, or set in a true light some matters of fact from which the scribblers of the time had taken occasion to asperse either his friends or himself." He was not more anxious to destroy the three parts than to secure the fourth from destruction. "He laid by the originals together with those of his correspondents, and caused a copy to be taken to deposit in the library of a n.o.ble friend, that in case either of the revival of slanders, or the publication of surrept.i.tious letters during his life or after, a proper use might be made of them."[26] The n.o.ble friend was Lord Oxford, and the request to be allowed to place the letters in his library was made by Pope in September, 1729, when he stated that "he had had it at heart for half a year and more." Upon obtaining Lord Oxford"s consent, he had the correspondence transcribed under his own inspection; and on October 16 he says, "I am causing the ma.n.u.scripts to be fairly written, and hope at your lordship"s return to be the presenter of them in person." By his own avowal he had carefully culled his letters, had prepared the selected portions for some public purpose, and had taken the unusual precaution of preserving them in duplicate. The end which he declared they were intended to serve was a palpable pretence. He never specified any slanders they refuted, and he could have had little idea of employing them to test the truth of surrept.i.tious letters when he began by burning three parts of the collection, and only retained a fourth. The manifest fact was, that, while he was desirous of consigning to oblivion those portions of his correspondence which would not add to his reputation, he was eager to circulate the picked specimens which he imagined would promote his fame.
No advance seems to have been made towards the accomplishment of his design till 1733, when Curll advertised a life of Pope. An unknown person who wrote a feigned hand, and who signed his letters with the initials P. T., then opened a correspondence with the bookseller, and furnished some information upon the genealogy of the poet. He vindicated him from the charge of plebeian descent, and affirmed that he sprung from the same stock as Lord Downe.[27] This a.s.sertion was repeated by Pope in one of the notes to his "Prologue to the Satires," though Mr.
Pottinger, his cousin, ridiculed the "fine pedigree," which had never been heard of in the family, and which there is nothing to confirm.[28]
There is thus at starting a curious ident.i.ty between the apocryphal statements of P. T. and the apocryphal statements of Pope. But as P. T.
must have had access to the ma.n.u.scripts in the keeping of Lord Oxford, he might be supposed to have found the account among the memoranda of the poet, and no great stress could be laid upon the coincidence to prove that P. T. was Pope in disguise, if the general tenor of the correspondence did not indicate its origin.
There was a feud between Pope and Curll. The bookseller believed that the poet had drugged him with an emetic, he had been subsequently satirised in the Dunciad, and he had lost no opportunity of retaliating.
An uncompromising panegyric upon his antagonist would have run counter to his prejudices, and while P. T. is careful to tell nothing which is not for the honour of Pope, he has the precaution to consult the antipathies of Curll. He pretends that the poet, with whom he was formerly well acquainted, has treated him like a stranger, and that he cannot give so good an account of his manners as of his parentage. He promises, if he receives encouragement, to make these moral deficiencies the subject of a future letter, "without entering into anything in anywise libellous." He omitted, however, in his next communication, to keep this part of his engagement, and never reverted to it. He had spoken of Pope"s family in the same flattering and perhaps fict.i.tious terms as Pope himself; but, in spite of his pledge, and his animosity, he forbore to relate the minutest particular to the discredit of the poet. The inconsistency between the a.s.sumed character and the actual conduct of P. T. is much too glaring. An enemy would have been far less partial and considerate.
The first communication of P. T. was dated October 1733. He directed Curll to signify the acceptance of his offer by inserting in the Daily Advertiser the notice, "E. C. hath received a letter, and will comply with P. T." This Curll did, and on the 15th of November got an answer from P. T., in which the true purpose of the manoeuvre transpires.
Instead of sending traits of the defects in Pope"s manners, he announces that he has "a large collection of his letters from the former part of his days till the year 1727, which will alone make the most authentic memoirs of him that could be." He adds that they will form a four or five shilling volume, and "yet I expect no more," he says, "than what will barely pay a transcriber, that the originals may be preserved in mine or your hands to vouch for the truth of them." He appealed to the hatred as well as to the avarice of the bookseller. He again a.s.serted that he had experienced bad treatment from Pope and that his sole motive was "to bestow upon him" the same "care" which Curll had done already.[29] Again his thirst for retaliation ended in homage, for the collection consisted of the identical letters which the poet had prepared for the press, and which were intended to raise instead of to lower his reputation. The conduct of P. T., who, having abjured profit and only feigned revenge, was to get nothing by his roguery, is altogether incomprehensible, if we are to suppose that he was what he professed; but his conduct ceases to be a mystery if P. T. was Pope, who, having finished editing his letters, may be presumed to have had the same desire to find a pretext for printing them as he had exhibited in the instance of the correspondence with Wycherley.
The point upon which the bargain went off for a time is equally significant. P. T. enclosed an advertis.e.m.e.nt of the letters, and required as a preliminary that it should be put forth by Curll, "for I shall not," he said, "be justified to some people on whom I have dependence, unless it seem to the public eye as no entire act of mine; but I may be justified and excused if, after they see such a collection is made by you, I acknowledge I sent some letters to contribute thereto."[30] This reasoning carries its own refutation. If his patrons could believe that Curll, without his aid, had got at the bulk of the correspondence, they would quite as readily have credited that he had not a.s.sisted the bookseller to the remainder. Nor is it likely that the men who would have renounced P. T. if he had been a princ.i.p.al in the business, would have connived at his becoming an accomplice. His plea was as fanciful as his desire for revenge; but a.s.sume that Pope was the real negotiator and his motive is transparent. The advertis.e.m.e.nt would have threatened that very surrept.i.tious publication of his letters, against which he affirmed that he kept his own version in readiness. He would have repudiated the impending piracy, and hastened in self-defence to commit the genuine edition to the press. The promise contained in the advertis.e.m.e.nt, that "the originals would be shown at Curll"s when the book was published," would have empowered him to give an air of imposture to the transaction, and to damage his foe, who when challenged would not have been able to produce the doc.u.ments. According to the language which Pope uttered in the name of P. T. he did expect to be justified in his proceedings by means of the advertis.e.m.e.nt, but not at all in the manner which he wished the bookseller to believe.
All the conditions required by Pope seemed met together in Curll. He was an enemy, and could be denounced when he had been deceived. He had printed the letters to Cromwell without the consent of the poet, and it would readily be credited that he had repeated the act. He was not nice in his notions of honour, and he might be expected to catch at an offer, however discreditable, which promised both profit and revenge. But whatever might be his greediness and his malice, they had not swallowed up his caution, and notwithstanding that P. T. wrote again to express his dissatisfaction that no advertis.e.m.e.nt appeared, Curll forbore to announce letters he did not possess, at the bidding of a conspirator whose name and person he did not know. The subject in consequence slept from November 1733 till March 1735, when the poet was meditating some fresh proceeding respecting his correspondence, for on the third of that month, he requested Lord Oxford to send him by the hearer "the bound book of copies of letters," which, he wanted, he said, "to inspect for a day or two." There are transcripts among the Oxford papers of some of the letters of Wycherley to Pope, which appeared in 1729. There are transcripts of Pope"s correspondence with Atterbury, which appeared in 1737. There are transcripts of a large part of the Swift correspondence, which appeared in 1741. But while the earlier and later letters are preserved on loose sheets the bound book has vanished, and there is not a single transcript of any letter which was first given to the world in the collection of 1735. The probability is that the book which Pope professed to require for a day or two was never returned. The circ.u.mstance is the more suspicious because he had the originals at home, which would have served him for reference, whereas if his object was to commit the letters clandestinely to the press he would use the copy which had been specially prepared for the purpose,--which had been expurgated, altered, and sometimes remodelled. Accordingly we find that P. T. reappears at this crisis with the correspondence in print. He had failed to lure Curll by a promise of letters which he would not produce.
He now changed his tactics, and offered him an entire impression of the book.
This second act of the plot was opened by a communication of Curll to Pope on the 22nd of March, three weeks after the letters had been withdrawn from the library of Lord Oxford. He invited the poet to close their differences, and, as a proof of his readiness to oblige him, sent him the old advertis.e.m.e.nt of P. T. Curll a.s.serted that he took the step "by direction."[31] When he republished this statement he volunteered another, which seems to be inconsistent with it, and says that the discovery of the advertis.e.m.e.nt, when arranging his papers, determined him to propose a cessation of hostilities.[32] As he was unconscious, however, of any contradiction in the double account, it is probable that he may have been influenced by some concurring advice. It strengthens this view that Pope, in an anonymous "Narrative," which he subsequently put forth, reports what Curll told a few days later, "to persons who sifted him in the affair,"[33] which shows that the bookseller had people about him in the interest of the poet, and these sifters, as the critic in the Athenaeum remarks, might, when needful, become prompters.
The progress of events proved that the letter of Curll was at least singularly opportune, and if not written "by direction," was one of those fortunate chances which often contribute to the success of the best laid schemes. Pope replied to it by inserting an advertis.e.m.e.nt in the "Grub Street Journal," the "Daily Journal," and "The Daily Post Boy." He stated in this manifesto, that Curll "pretended that P. T. had offered him to print a large collection of Pope"s letters," that he would have no correspondence with Curll, that he knew no such person as P. T., that he believed the letters to be a forgery, and that he should not trouble himself in the matter.[34] The poet might not choose to have any intercourse with a former enemy of no good fame, but it was a strange return for his peace-offering that he should advertise an insult on him, and equally singular when he was incredulous, and had resolved not to trouble himself about the matter, that he should parade in the newspapers the contents of a private note. Yet extraordinary as was his conduct, if he had not any covert design, it was consistent enough if he was the agent in the plot for bringing his letters before the world. His advertis.e.m.e.nt would convey the impression that he could not have connived at the publication he was contriving; it would afford an opening for P. T. to come again upon the stage; and by infuriating Curll it would induce him to close at once with the proposal which was ready to be made to him. In conformity with this supposition P. T., who had not communicated with the bookseller for upwards of two years, saw the advertis.e.m.e.nt directly it appeared, and he lost not an instant in informing Curll that since their last negotiation he had printed the letters.[35] It was true that Curll had betrayed him to Pope, but P. T.
was generous and would still give him the preference. The game required that Pope should be incapable of being conciliated, and P. T. of taking offence.
P. T. demanded that Curll should show he was in earnest by putting forth the old advertis.e.m.e.nt. Curll complied, and the negotiation went forward.
An agent was sent to him who a.s.sumed the name of Smythe and professed to be a clergyman, but who was so little conversant with the character he personated that he wore a clerical gown and lawyer"s bands. On the 7th of May he went to Curll"s house at night; and, to bring the bargain to a conclusion, exhibited to him most of the sheets of the volume, and a dozen original letters.[36] Before Curll had published this statement Pope, for the purpose of discrediting the promise which had been made in the advertis.e.m.e.nt, that the originals should be produced when the book appeared, had committed himself to the a.s.sertion that they all remained in their proper place.[37] They must nevertheless, observes the critic in the Athenaeum, have been out of his possession, and doing service on the evening when Smythe trafficed with Curll. The bookseller was not likely to be deceived, for he had the Cromwell correspondence in his keeping, and knew the poet"s handwriting well.[38] He was as little likely to deceive, for he told the fact in the course of a straight-forward story, without perceiving, or at least without pointing out, its force in attesting the connivance of Pope.
Fifty copies of the letters were in the possession of Curll by the 12th of May, and were speedily sold. Smythe sent for him at one o"clock to a tavern in Leicester Fields, and half an hour afterwards one hundred and ninety additional copies were brought by a couple of porters, who were directed to carry them to the shop of the bookseller. There they were immediately seized by an order from the House of Lords, and Curll was commanded to attend next day.[39] The peers in 1722 had voted it a breach of privilege to publish the writings of any member of their body without his consent. Curll, in an advertis.e.m.e.nt which appeared for the first time that morning, had given a list of the persons to whom Pope"s letters were addressed, and among the names were those of the Earl of Halifax and the Earl of Burlington. To print letters to lords was no offence. It was necessary that there should be letters from them, and of this there was no other indication than that the list of names was followed by the words,--"with the respective answers of each correspondent."[40] Curll a.s.serted that the advertis.e.m.e.nt came to him through Smythe,[41] and the proceedings founded upon it in the hour that it issued wet from the press were, as Johnson states, instigated by Pope, "who attended to stimulate the resentment of his friends."[42] If he had never set eyes upon the book before it was published, curiosity would still have prompted him to turn over the leaves, and he must immediately have discovered that it did not contain a single letter from a peer. The wording of the advertis.e.m.e.nt may, therefore, be suspected to have been devised by him to afford a colour for what he must have known was a groundless prosecution. A committee was appointed to investigate the complaint. It met on the 14th of May, and the case would have ended as soon as it was begun, if Pope"s spokesman, Lord Hay, who resided at Twickenham, and was one of his a.s.sociates, had not adduced from a letter to Jervas a pa.s.sage which he alleged to be a reflection on Lord Burlington. But the person who furnished the work to Curll had, by an elaborate device, provided against a charge which no one except its contriver could have foreseen. The fifty copies, which were sold on the morning of the 12th, before the power of the House of Lords was put in motion, contained the letter. Those which were furnished in the middle of the day, as if to meet the messenger sent to seize them, were all defective, and in every case the letter to Jervas was among the omissions.[43] Nor had the leaves which contained it been simply kept back, but every trace of it had been obliterated by an alteration at the printing-press. In the complete work the missing letter commenced on p. 115 of vol. ii.[44] and ended on p. 117. In the imperfect books a note on Trumbull, which began at p. 114, is carried on to the top of p.