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.
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