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LITERATURE

The Works of Alexander Pope. New Edition, including several hundred Unpublished Letters, and other New Materials. Collected in part by the late Rt. Hon. John Wilson Croker. With Introductions and Notes by the Rev. Whitwell Elwin. Vol. I.-Poetry, Vol. I. With Portraits and other Illustrations. (Murray.)

It must be sixteen or seventeen years since the first advertisement appeared in the Quarterly Review, announcing a new edition of the works of Pope, under the joint editorship of the Right Hon. John Wilson Croker and Mr. Peter Cunningham. In literary circles, and among all readers capable of enjoying the exquisite workmanship, the splendid wit, and the graceful fancy of our greatest poetical satirist, this announcement was received with no common interest. Pope, it is true, had never been neglected by editors and commentators. From the time when Warburton edited his friend's poetry, not so much that he might do honour to the poet as that he might exhibit his own cleverness, until the day when Roscoe displayed his editorial incapacity by producing a bulky and blundering edition of his works, the attempts made to elucidate the text of Pope were numerous and unsatisfactory. No English poet except Shakspeare has received so much attention from men of letters, as well as from such writers as are condemned to everlasting notoriety in the Dunciad.' Some of the commentators have covered the poet's pages with learned dust; some of them, catching the pugilistic spirit of their master, fought wordy battles, in which success was scarcely more honourable than defeat; and the best of them, however able and discriminative, could but vaguely guess at what the larger knowledge of the present day enables us to pronounce with certainty. More recently, Mr. Carruthers and Mr. Ward have produced the results of intelligent and conscientious labour, but neither of them has exhausted, or attempted to exhaust, a subject which could not be treated thoroughly within the limited space at their disposal as the editors of cheap and popular editions. What they have done is done well, but it is only a part of what remains to be accomplished, and is left to Mr. Elwin to fulfil. Our acquaintance with the personal history of Pope has increased rapidly within living memory; and our aids to an intelligent understanding of his poetry have grown in a like proportion. When Mr. Croker commenced his labours upon the poet, he was able to make use of many new materials; but during the long period that has elapsed since he undertook the work, so much information has been accumulated, that a modern editor of Pope starts with advantages undreamt of by his predecessors. The necessity that existed for a new library edition of the works was keenly felt twenty years ago; but by every one interested in the literature of the Queen Anne men, it is more keenly felt now; and the reason for this may perhaps be alluded to without presumption in the pages of the Athenæum. A critic now no more undertook in these columns to grapple with several of the difficulties which for more than a century and

a half have perplexed all Pope students. After much conscientious research, after minute investigations, the value and labour of which can only be appreciated by those who have attempted to follow in his track, our critic was able to throw a flood of light upon much that had been hitherto obscure. He solved some difficulties altogether; he suggested a reasonable explanation of others; and he proved beyond all question the falsehood of many of the theories advanced by previous critics. "There is probably no English author," said the late Prof. Conington, "whose life can be compared with Pope's as a succession of petty secrets and third-rate problems." But small though any one of these secrets or problems may be, their cumulative importance is considerable, both as respects the personal character of the poet and the character of the age. The labour therefore of our critic in this field of investigation, painful and wearisome though it must have often proved, was not labour in vain, and the worth of it was frankly acknowledged by Mr. Carruthers, and is now even more strongly acknowledged by Mr. Elwin. The Athenæum, according to the former, " has proved a perfect mine of unprinted materials for illustrating the biography of Pope"; and how generously Mr. Elwin acknowledges his indebtedness to the same source of information may be seen from the following passage, which will be found in the Introduction to the present edition :—

“The services rendered by Mr. Dilke require to be noticed here. Until he published his articles in the Athenæum little had been added to our knowledge of Pope since Johnson produced his masterly Life. The truths which Mr. Dilke established and the errors he dissipated were not more important investigations. His rigid scrutiny became the than the change he gave to the former superficial standard for every subsequent inquirer. He loved his studies for their own sake, and never did a man of letters work less for personal ends. He at once placed at my disposal the Caryll correspondence, which he had carefully annotated, and the explanation of all its obscure allusions are due to him. He supplied me with a multitude of letters which were widely scattered through books and periodicals, and collated others with the originals in the British Museum and Bodleian Library. Large masses of the letters are undated, or dated falsely, and he was at the labour of fixing dates which sometimes appeared to defy conjecture. He lent me his rare editions, was unwearied in answering questions, in solving difficulties, in revising proofs, and in communicating without reserve his stores of information. He was then suffering from a long and painful illness, and he died when only the first volume of correspondence was printed, or I should have had his generous and invaluable aid

to the end."

Mr. Elwin, it is well known, has been engaged for many years in this great literary undertaking. He has ventured, assuredly not unprepared, upon a task of extreme labour. There is not, we think, a poet in the language whose works are so difficult to edit as the works of Pope. They demand such a profound knowledge of the times and of the man, they contain so many enigmas, they exact so much critical sagacity, they so often lead one off the main thoroughfares into by-paths and intricate labyrinths, out of which it is hard to find the way, that the editor who can do justice to them must be blessed with consummate patience, and endowed with no ordinary qualifications. It would be premature perhaps to judge decisively of Mr. Elwin's editorial capacity from a single volume of an extensive publication; but

since in this preliminary volume the mystery of the correspondence, which is by far the most difficult of all the Pope mysteries, is elaborately discussed, and, to our thinking, satisfactorily explained, we are justified in anticipating that the work as it progresses will fulfil the promise of its opening pages. It may be questioned,

indeed, whether Mr. Elwin has done well to give his driest matter first. It was imperative that the controversy about the letters should be fully discussed and, as far as possible, settled; and there is nothing in the editor's careful handling of the subject that can be deemed superfluous. But the discussion is infinitely painful; and for all (save Pope enthusiasts) it is, as Mr. Elwin himself observes, necessarily wearisome. It exhibits the poet in the meanest and most contemptible light; it shows, what was never so clearly seen before, that in his miserable anxiety to enhance his literary fame he was willing, not only to play the dirtiest tricks upon the public, but was also ready to deceive and to libel his most intimate friends; it proves, in the stern but just language of the editor, that "audacity was the chief characteristic of his contrivances, and equivocation and lying his weapons of defence." To show all this was, no doubt, essential; but why open the campaign with it? especially as the discussion is not followed by the Correspondence, but by the Poetry; so that, in fact, several volumes of the works might have been issued before publishing this melancholy record of the poet's turpitude. With many of the facts here recorded, readers of the Athenæum may be already familiar; for the way in which Pope manufactured his published letters was exposed as long ago as 1854, in a careful examination of the unpublished Caryll correspondence, which was the property of the late Mr. Dilke, and is about to be presented to the nation.

66

In following Mr. Elwin's argument, therefore, it is necessary that we should re-traverse much of the old ground. The letters of Pope, though extremely valuable in other respects, have scarcely any interest as letters, and it is easy to understand Cowper's aversion to them as expressed to his friend Unwin. "Pope," he said, seems to have thought that unless a sentence was well turned, and every period pointed with some conceit, it was not worth the carriage. Accordingly, he is to me, except in very few instances, the most disagreeable maker of epistles that I ever met with.” Cowper, who knew nothing of Pope's fabrications, and of the workmanship expended on his correspondence, nevertheless hit the mark exactly. Pope was not, like his critic, a letterwriter, he was simply a "maker of epistles," and it must be added that the manufacturer, in the effort to conceal his manœuvres, blundered clumsily over his work. "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." This is not all, for to attain his end he shrank from no equivocations; and the result is, that instead of raising his reputation he has done more to lower it than all his enemies put together. "Nearly every act of Pope's life," it has been said, "was coloured by equivocation, nearly every assertion by mental reservation"; and in nothing is this more obvious than in his artifices with regard to the published correspondence. No

man of genius, it may be safely affirmed, ever acted a more despicable part, or had his shamelessness more thoroughly exposed. We shall not fatigue our readers by dwelling at any length upon the whole course of treachery practised by Pope: it will suffice if we glance cursorily at one or two of Mr. Elwin's counts against him which appear of special impor

tance.

The series of letters described as the Cromwell letters were published without the connivance of Pope, although Cromwell's mistress, Elizabeth Thomas, who sold them to Curll, was no doubt right in saying that he would not be displeased with what had been done without his knowledge. Upon Pope, however, must fall the entire odium of publishing the Wycherley correspondence, in which all credit is done to the poet, and all discredit to the dramatist, and in which, in order to lessen the reputation of a dead friend, he made a tool of a living one.

Pope obtained the permission of his friend Lord Oxford to lodge the letters in his hands for the purpose of announcing upon publishing them that the originals were in his Lordship's library. Having gained this point, he went a considerable step further without asking permission, and made the publishers say that Lord Oxford had "permitted them a copy of some of the papers from the library, where the originals remain as testimonies of the truth." "In other words," says Mr. Elwin, "his Lordship was asserted 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 authorized." After saddling Lord Oxford with this falsehood, Pope wrote to Swift that the booksellers had "got and printed" some of the letters, "not without the concurrence of a noble friend of mine and yours." "I do not much approve of it," he adds, "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." Upon which Mr. Elwin observes, not too severely for the occasion,

"The booksellers had printed the letters with the concurrence of a noble friend, and the noble 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." This deception is laid bare by the Oxford correspondence, which has hitherto remained in manuscript, but will be printed in this

edition.

Everybody who has read any of the biographies of Pope will remember the plot against Curll: how the bookseller was communicated with by a mysterious personage known as "P. T.," who offered him for publication a large printed collection of the poet's letters, how a man in a clerical gown and lawyer's bands went to Curll's house at night, and showed him most of the sheets of the volume and some original letters,-how a large number of copies were taken by the bookseller, and

on the report that they contained letters from noblemen, were seized by an order from the House of Lords next day,-how by a knowing fraud of P. T., who tried in vain to make the bookseller prevaricate and give false evidence, the Committee of the Lords were compelled to drop the matter,-how a narrative was published which professed to reveal the whole story, but which revealed nothing about the purloiner of the correspondence, and how Pope finally published the letters on his own account, on the plea that he was forced to do Pope's story at the time was received, as Dr. Johnson tells us, with different degrees of credit, and the Doctor himself, although writing partly in the dark, had no doubt that Pope contrived the plot to serve his own purpose. That this was the case is now evident beyond all controversy; yet, despite the suspicions of his contemporaries, the foul act was never proved against Pope in his lifetime.

The poet professed that the letters flowed warm from his heart, without the least thought that ever the world should be witness to them. Pope allowed that he could prevaricate "pretty genteelly," but in this case, as in so many other cases where his correspondence was concerned, he told a direct falsehood. We now know that these letters were cooked and re-cooked; that he sometimes altered the opinions of his correspondents to suit his personal views; that in many cases the letters were not addressed to the persons whose names they bear,-the letters to Addison, for example, being a sheer forgery, and many of the Caryll letters being addressed on publication to more distinguished persons; that the dates were changed or omitted, to conceal the deception; that at the very time Pope was lamenting the publication of his letters he was "designing to send a fresh instalment of them to the press"; that "while the poet pretended that he could not own the P. T. collection, with its mutilated, interpolated and forged letters, he had secretly authorized a reprint, which was identical with the collection he denounced," and that "the Pope text and the P. T. text are identical in their origin, and neither of them are the text of the actual letters of the poet." When Pope requested Caryll to return his letters his friend did so, but, unknown to the writer, kept copies of them all. It is amusing, or would be, if the petty shifts of a great poet can afford amusement, to take up this old manuscript volume and trace the way in which some of the original correspondence was manipulated before publication. It contains more than 120 letters addressed by Pope to Caryll, but nevertheless he makes, as Mr. Elwin truly observes, a very poor figure in the published collection:

"Though Pope did not wish to repeat in public his profuse professions in private, and appear as the familiar friend and constant correspondent of desired to suppress the choicer portions of the a Roman Catholic country gentleman, he as little

effusions he had addressed to him. He conceived

the idea of re-directing them, and compiled from them, in whole or in part, four fictitious letters to Blount, four to Addison, two to Congreve, and one each to Wycherley, Steele, Trumbull and Digby. A second letter to Digby, which appeared in the edition of 1735, was transferred to Arbuthnot in the quarto of 1737. Half-a-dozen letters at most were allotted to the initials of the Sussex squire, while fifteen were assigned to more imposing names, and a sixteenth was printed in a group of three to the Hon.

Mr. Elwin adds that, rather than credit an

imposition so childish and yet so unwarrantable. it would be reasonable to adopt the theory that Pope sometimes sent the same letter to different persons. He shows, however, by an examination of several passages, that this theory will not bear scrutiny. We can find space only for a single example :

"I know,' Pope wrote to Caryll, August 22, 1717, you will take part in rejoicing for the victory of Prince Eugene over the Turks, in the zeal you bear to the Christian interest, though your cousin of Oxford, with whom I dined yesterday, sars there is no other difference in the Christians beat

ing the Turks or the Turks beating the Christians than whether the Emperor shall first declare war against Spain or Spain declare it against the Emperor. In the published version the passage forms part of a letter to Edward Blount, dated September 8, 1717; and either we must admit that it was never written to him, or believe that Caryll and Blount had each an Oxford cousin; that the poet dined wtth the Oxford cousin of Caryll on August 21, and with the Oxford cousin of Blount on September 7; that both the cousins made at their respective dinners the same epigrammatic observation, in the very same words, and that the extraordinary coincidence struck Pope so little that he did not even remark upon it."

Pope was not content with endeavouring thus to deceive the public. Not only were the Wycherley letters, the letters of 1735, and the Swift letters all dishonestly published, but in each case the poet attempted to divert the blame or the responsibility from himself, and to fix it on his friends. We have seen in the case of the Wycherley correspondence with what impudence Pope fathered a lie upon Lord Oxford, and how he volunteered a "triple falsehood" to Swift; we have seen, too, a few of the artifices to which he had recourse to induce Curll to publish, and in order that he might also publish, the collection of 1735; but perhaps the basest of all Pope's base acts was his conduct to one of his oldest and best friends in the publication of the Swift correspondence. With regard to the previous letters, l'ope had not shrunk from casting a slur on a number of his friends for their "idle ostentation or weak partiality" in keeping "such wretched papers as they ought to have burned," when he himself, as Mr. Elwin points out, "had preserved them in duplicate and designed them for publication." In the case of the Swift letters, his conduct was even more odious, for it was not until his great contemporary was sinking into his dotage that he carried out his design. The story is told with much particularity by the editor; but as the whole of it was unfolded some years ago in our columns, we must be

content with a brief allusion to it now.

Years before, Swift, who cared little for literary fame, and had never in his life resorted to any artifice to promote it, had suspected of their correspondence, and the poet had exPope of a desire to make literary capital out cused himself according to his wonted fashion. After the publication by Curll, he begged Swift to return him his letters, lest they should fall into the bookseller's hands. The Dean replied, no doubt to Pope's infinite chagrin, that they were safe in his keeping, for he had given strict orders in his will that his executors should burn every letter left behind him. Afterwards he promised that Pope should eventually have them, but declined giving them up during his lifetime. Hereupon Fope changed his tactics, and begged that he might have the letters to print. The publication by Curll of two letters