CHAPTER VII.

POPE'S RELATIONS WITH WOMEN.

Mrs. Nelson Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady'-Lady M. W. Montagu and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard '-Correspondence with Lady M. W. Montagu-Correspondence with Teresa and Martha Blount.

1708-1718.

THE publication later in the year-1717-of Pope's first volume of collected poems, including, as it did, the 'Elegy on the Unfortunate Lady,' the 'Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard,' and the poetical Epistles to the Blounts, and nearly coinciding in time with the most dramatic portion of the correspondence with the latter, and with the letters to Lady M. W. Montagu, brings us naturally to the consideration of the delicate and difficult question of Pope's relations with women. By some of his biographers these have been represented in the light most convenient for the purposes of romance. They have treated his poems and letters alike with sober seriousness, investing his character with the dark colours of seduction, and his life with the incidents of passion and melodrama. An examination of the alleged facts, in the dry light of dates and probability, will reduce the element of the marvellous in these legends to very modest limits, and will relieve Pope of some of the odium which has been too hastily attached to his reputation. In considering the whole question we must always bear three things in mind: his sensitive, fanciful, and romantic disposition; his love of mystification; and his inveterate habit of using every incident for the purposes of composition, whether in prose or verse. He himself has recorded his experience of the activity of his imagination in one of his letters from Binfield :

"I believe," says he, "no mortal ever lived in such indolence and inactivity of body, though my mind be perpetually rambling-it no more knows whither than poor Adrian's did when he lay a-dying. Like a witch, whose carcass lies motionless on the floor, while she keeps her airy sabbaths, and enjoys a thousand imaginary entertainments abroad, in this world and in others, I seem to sleep in the midst of the hurry, even as you would swear a top stands still, when it is in the whirl of its giddy motion. It is no figure, but a serious truth I tell thee, when I say that my days and nights are so much alike, so equally insensible of any moving power but fancy, that I have sometimes spoke of things in our family as truths and real accidents, which I only dreamt of; and again, when some things that actually happened came into my head, have thought, till I enquired, that I had only dreamed of them."

Such was the temper of Pope at the period when his correspondence with the two Blounts begins, and that it was such when he was writing to Lady M. W. Montagu may be inferred from the elaborate romance of his letter, describing to her the death of John Hughes and Sarah Drew, as well as from the more or less ideal picture of Stanton Harcourt, which he professes to be painting from what was actually before him. His imagination craved for objects suitable for poetical composition, and as he was of an age when love is the most natural theme for verse, he delighted to exalt his female correspondents into divinities, and to make the realities associated with them the starting points for the free excursions of his fancy.

The first woman mentioned by him is a certain 'Sappho,' whom he speaks of to Cromwell as 'staying behind him in town,' though she might have been expected to follow him into the country. She is here described as 'a very orthodox lady,' and as 'an unmerciful virtuous dame!' Since it would appear from the name given her that she was a poetess, there is good reason to suppose that the lady spoken of is Mrs. Nelson, who wrote a panegyric in verse on Pope's genius, which was published with his Pastorals in Tonson's 'Miscellany.' She was probably a member of the family of

Pope to Caryll Junr., Dec. 5, 1712.

VOL. V.

2 Letter from Pope to Cromwell of March 18, 1708.

K

3

Nelson of Chaddleworth, near Newbury. The poet calls her, in a letter to Caryll, 'a zealous Catholic,' citing her authority against some of the fanatical detractors of his Essay on Criticism.' The attractions she possessed must have been rather intellectual than physical, for in a subsequent letter to Cromwell, Sappho's 'oratory and gesture' are contrasted disadvantageously with the fine eyes of some other lady, perhaps Martha Blount. In letters to Caryll of a later date Mrs. Nelson's name more than once reappears: it is evident that there had been a quarrel between her and the poet; and her eulogistic verses are not included with those prefixed to the collected poems published in 1717. Their quarrel was caused by the conduct of the lady (who appears, from other evidence, to have been a person of meddlesome and mischief-making temper) in a matter closely connected with the composition of the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' a poem which, having, as usual, been treated by most of Pope's biographers as founded on historical matter of fact, has accumulated about itself a legend which presents one of the strangest comedies in the history of literary criticism.

Soon after the publication of the volume containing the poem, Caryll writes to the author on July 16, 1717: "Pray in your next tell me who was the unfortunate lady you address a copy of verses to;" and he repeats his question in a letter dated August 18, 1717. To neither enquiry did Pope reply, but in a note to the poem published, with Pope's name, after his death, Warburton says: "See the Duke of Buckingham's verses to a Lady designing to retire into a monastery, compared with Mr. Pope's letters to several ladies, p. 206, quarto edition. She seems to be the same person whose unfortunate death is the subject of this poem." This apparent clue to the identity of the person celebrated promptly set the inventions of the biographers to work, who built on the mystification a

Letter from Pope to Caryll of July 19, 1711.

2 Letter from Pope to Cromwell of

December 21, 1711.

3 Letters from Pope to Caryll of Jan. 8, 1712-13, and Feb. 1712-13.

structure which for audacity of fiction is worthy of the poet himself. The first to pronounce upon the subject was one Ayre known to his contemporaries as Squire Ayre, and by some supposed to be identical with Curll-who having, it is evident, no more knowledge of the facts than he could glean. from the poem, proceeded to turn these into a circumstantial narrative, alleging that this young lady was of quality, had a very large fortune, and was in the eye of our discerning poet of great beauty.' He continues in the following strain :

"But very young she contracted an acquaintance, and afterwards some degree of intimacy, with a young gentleman, who is only imagined, and, having settled her affections there, refused a match proposed to her by her uncle. Spies being set upon her, it was not long before her correspondence with her lover of lower degree was discovered, which, when taxed with by her uncle, she had too much truth and honour to deny. The uncle finding that she could not, nor would strive to withdraw her regard from him, after a little time forced her abroad, where she was received with all due respect to her quality, but kept from the sight or speech of anybody but the creatures of this severe guardian, so that it was impossible even for her lover to deliver a letter that might ever come to her hand, &c."

The curiosity of the reader having been aroused by the seemingly historical character of this narrative, Sir John Hawkins at a later date appears upon the scene with some information obtained from a gentleman well known in the literary world,' who had been himself informed on the subject by 'a lady of quality.' From these distinguished but nameless authorities the world learned "that the unfortunate lady's name was Withinbury, corruptly pronounced Winbury; that she was in love with Pope, and would have married him; that her guardian, though she was deformed in her person, looking upon such a match as beneath her, sent her to a convent, and that a noose, and not a sword, put an end to her life." The same circumstantial story is told by Warton, who turns the

Ayre's 'Life of Pope,' vol. i.,

2 See Vol. II., p. 198.

p. 76.

lady's name into Wainsbury -an apparent corruption of Hawkins's corruptly pronounced original.' These pathetic particulars, however, all paled before the splendour the romance acquired in the hands of Bowles:

"It is in vain," says he gravely, "after the fruitless inquiry of Johnson and Warton, perhaps, to attempt further elucidation; but I should think it unpardonable not to mention what I have myself heard, though I cannot vouch for its truth. The story which was told to Condorcet by Voltaire, and by Condorcet to a gentleman of high birth and character, from whom I received it, is this:-that her attachment was not to Pope, or to any Englishman of inferior degree, but to a young French prince of the blood royal, Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Berry, whom in early youth she had met at the Court of France."

2

The discovery of the Caryll correspondence by the late Mr. Dilke has destroyed these fantastic fictions, and has proved how slight is the basis of reality on which the poem rests. There was no attachment between the unfortunate lady and a mysterious lover princely or poetical, handsome or deformed; no confinement in a foreign convent; no suicide by sword or noose. There was a lady whom Pope held to be unfortunate, and a guardian whom he believed to be false to his trust, but it does not appear that the latter exercised any compulsion on his ward, and it is certain that the former died a natural death some years after the poem was published. The name of this lady,-and there is little doubt that she is the person addressed in the letter to which Pope refers in his note on the poem,-was Mrs. Weston, daughter of Joseph Gage, of Firle in Sussex, one of the prominent Roman Catholics of the day, and wife of John Weston, of Sutton in Surrey. She and her husband had quarrelled and lived apart, and it seems, from Pope's correspondence with Caryll, that Weston had thoughts of depriving his wife of their infant daughter. Pope, always ardent in the cause of the injured, espoused Mrs. Weston's cause, with an eagerness that led to a

1 Warton's edition of Pope's Works, vol. i., p. 336.

* Bowles' edition of Pope, vol. i.,

pp. xxxi., xxxii.

3 Letter from Pope to Caryll of June 25, 1711.