Alexander Pope | Page 8

or repeat almost word for word some
previous composition of his own. To remove such repetitions
thoroughly would require a very free application of the knife, and Pope
would not be slow to discover that he was wasting talents fit for
original work in botching and tinkering a mass of rubbish.
Any man of ripe years would have predicted the obvious consequences;
and, according to the ordinary story, those consequences followed.
Pope became more plain-speaking, and at last almost insulting in his
language. Wycherley ended by demanding the return of his manuscripts,
in a letter showing his annoyance under a veil of civility; and Pope sent
them back with a smart reply, recommending Wycherley to adopt a
previous suggestion and turn his poetry into maxims after the manner
of Rochefoucauld. The "old scribbler," says Johnson, "was angry to see
his pages defaced, and felt more pain from the criticism than content
from the amendment of his faults." The story is told at length, and with
his usual brilliance, by Macaulay, and has hitherto passed muster with
all Pope's biographers; and, indeed, it is so natural a story, and is so far
confirmed by other statements of Pope, that it seems a pity to spoil it.
And yet it must be at least modified, for we have already reached one
of those perplexities which force a biographer of Pope to be constantly

looking to his footsteps. So numerous are the contradictions which
surround almost every incident of the poet's career, that one is
constantly in danger of stumbling into some pitfall, or bound to cross it
in gingerly fashion on the stepping-stone of a cautious "perhaps." The
letters which are the authority for this story have undergone a
manipulation from Pope himself, under circumstances to be hereafter
noticed; and recent researches have shown that a very false colouring
has been put upon this as upon other passages. The nature of this
strange perversion is a curious illustration of Pope's absorbing vanity.
Pope, in fact, was evidently ashamed of the attitude which he had not
unnaturally adopted to his correspondent. The first man of letters of his
day could not bear to reveal the full degree in which he had fawned
upon the decayed dramatist, whose inferiority to himself was now
plainly recognized. He altered the whole tone of the correspondence by
omission, and still worse by addition. He did not publish a letter in
which Wycherley gently remonstrates with his young admirer for
excessive adulation; he omitted from his own letters the phrase which
had provoked the remonstrance; and, with more daring falsification, he
manufactured an imaginary letter to Wycherley out of a letter really
addressed to his friend Caryll. In this letter Pope had himself addressed
to Caryll a remonstrance similar to that which he had received from
Wycherley. When published as a letter to Wycherley, it gives the
impression that Pope, at the age of seventeen, was already rejecting
excessive compliments addressed to him by his experienced friend. By
these audacious perversions of the truth, Pope is enabled to heighten his
youthful independence, and to represent himself as already exhibiting a
graceful superiority to the reception or the offering of incense; whilst
he thus precisely inverts the relation which really existed between
himself and his correspondent.
The letters, again, when read with a due attention to dates, shows that
Wycherley's proneness to take offence has at least been exaggerated.
Pope's services to Wycherley were rendered on two separate occasions.
The first set of poems were corrected during 1706 and 1707, and
Wycherley, in speaking of this revision, far from showing symptoms of
annoyance, speaks with gratitude of Pope's kindness, and returns the

expressions of goodwill which accompanied his criticisms. Both these
expressions, and Wycherley's acknowledgment of them, were omitted
in Pope's publication. More than two years elapsed, when (in April,
1710) Wycherley submitted a new set of manuscripts to Pope's
unflinching severity; and it is from the letters which passed in regard to
this last batch that the general impression as to the nature of the quarrel
has been derived. But these letters, again, have been mutilated, and so
mutilated as to increase the apparent tartness of the mutual retorts; and
it must therefore remain doubtful how far the coolness which ensued
was really due to the cause assigned. Pope, writing at the time to
Cromwell, expresses his vexation at the difference, and professes
himself unable to account for it, though he thinks that his corrections
may have been the cause of the rupture. An alternative rumour,[2] it
seems, accused Pope of having written some satirical verses upon his
friend. To discover the rights and wrongs of the quarrel is now
impossible, though, unfortunately, one thing is clear, namely, that Pope
was guilty of grossly sacrificing truth in the interests of