Rape of the Lock and Other Poems | Page 8

for a priest.
The dying man replied that he did not believe it essential, but thanked
him for the suggestion. When the priest appeared, Pope attempted to
rise from his bed that he might receive the sacrament kneeling, and the
priest came out from the sick room "penetrated to the last degree with
the state of mind in which he found his penitent, resigned and wrapt up
in the love of God and man." The hope that sustained Pope to the end
was that of immortality. "I am so certain of the soul's being immortal,"
he whispered, almost with his last breath, "that I seem to feel it within
me, as it were by intuition." He died on the evening of May 30, so
quietly that his friends hardly knew that the end had come. He was
buried in Twickenham Church, near the monument he had erected to
his parents, and his coffin was carried to the grave by six of the poorest
men of the parish.
It is plain even from so slight a sketch as this that the common
conception of Pope as "the wicked wasp of Twickenham," a bitter,
jealous, and malignant spirit, is utterly out of accord with the facts of
his life. Pope's faults of character lie on the surface, and the most
perceptible is that which has done him most harm in the eyes of
English-speaking men. He was by nature, perhaps by training also,

untruthful. If he seldom stooped to an outright lie, he never hesitated to
equivocate; and students of his life have found that it is seldom possible
to take his word on any point where his own works or interests were
concerned. I have already (p. x) attempted to point out the probable
cause of this defect; and it is, moreover, worth while to remark that
Pope's manifold intrigues and evasions were mainly of the defensive
order. He plotted and quibbled not so much to injure others as to
protect himself. To charge Pope with treachery to his friends, as has
sometimes been done, is wholly to misunderstand his character.
Another flaw, one can hardly call it a vice, in Pope's character was his
constant practice of considering everything that came in his way as
copy. It was this which led him to reclaim his early letters from his
friends, to alter, rewrite, and redate them, utterly unconscious of the
trouble which he was preparing for his future biographers. The letters,
he thought, were good reading but not so good as he could make them,
and he set to work to improve them with all an artist's zeal, and without
a trace of a historian's care for facts. It was this which led him to
embody in his description of a rich fool's splendid house and park
certain unmistakable traces of a living nobleman's estate and to start in
genuine amazement and regret when the world insisted on identifying
the nobleman and the fool. And when Pope had once done a good piece
of work, he had all an artist's reluctance to destroy it. He kept bits of
verse by him for years and inserted them into appropriate places in his
poems. This habit it was that brought about perhaps the gravest charge
that has ever been made against Pope, that of accepting £1000 to
suppress a satiric portrait of the old Duchess of Marlborough, and yet
of publishing it in a revision of a poem that he was engaged on just
before his death. The truth seems to be that Pope had drawn this
portrait in days when he was at bitter enmity with the Duchess, and
after the reconcilement that took place, unwilling to suppress it entirely,
had worked it over, and added passages out of keeping with the first
design, but pointing to another lady with whom he was now at odds.
Pope's behavior, we must admit, was not altogether creditable, but it
was that of an artist reluctant to throw away good work, not that of a
ruffian who stabs a woman he has taken money to spare.

Finally Pope was throughout his life, and notably in his later years, the
victim of an irritable temper and a quick, abusive tongue. His
irritability sprang in part, we may believe, from his physical sufferings,
even more, however, from the exquisitely sensitive heart which made
him feel a coarse insult as others would a blow. And of the coarseness
of the insults that were heaped upon Pope no one except the careful
student of his life can have any conception. His genius, his morals, his
person, his parents, and his religion were overwhelmed in one
indiscriminate flood of abuse. Too high spirited to submit tamely to
these attacks, too irritable to laugh at them, he struck back, and his
weapon