Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845

Joseph Warton mistakes the whole matter as much as Lord Kames. "Just criticism," says he, "calls on us also to point out some of the passages that appear exceptionable in the Dunciad. Such is the hero's first speech, in which, contrary to all decorum and probability, he addresses the goddess Dulness, without disguising her as a despicable being, and even calls himself fool and blockhead. For a person to be introduced speaking thus of himself, is in truth unnatural and out of character." Would that the Doctor had been alive to be set at ease on this point by our explanations—but he is dead. They would have quieted his mind, too, about the celebrated speech of Aristarchus. "In Book IV.," he adds, "is such another breach of truth and decorum, in making Aristarchus (Bentley) abuse himself, and laugh at his own labours.

"The mighty scholiast, whose unweary'd painsMade Horace dull, and humbled Maro's strains,Turn what they will to verse, their toil is vain,Critics like me shall make it prose again.For Attic phrase in Plato let them seek,I poach in Suidas for unlicens'd Greek.For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the headWith all such reading as was never read:For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it,And write about it, Goddess, and about it."

If Bentley has turned Horace and Milton (Warton blunderingly reads Maro) into prose by his emendations, (Milton assuredly he has—Pope may be wrong about Horace?) he has rendered vast service to the empire of Dulness; and it would be quite unreasonable that he should not claim of the goddess all merited reward and honour, by announcing exactly this achievement. With what face could he pretend to her favour by telling her that he had restored the text of two great poets to its original purity and lustre? She would have ordered him to instant execution or to a perpetual dungeon.

Finally, how happened it that such perspicacious personages as Lord Kames and Dr Warton, to say nothing of their hoodwinked followers, should have thus objected to the passages and speeches singled out for condemnation, as if they alone deserved it, without perceiving that the whole poem, from the first line to the last, was, on their principle, liable to the same fatal objection? And what, on their principle, would they have thought, had they ever read it, of Mac-Flecnoe?

Pope takes the name Dulness largely, for the offuscation of heart and head. He said, long before,

"Want of decency is want of sense;"

and he now seems to think himself warranted in attributing vices and corruptions to a clouded understanding—so to Dulness. At least, the darkness and weakness of the moral reason came under the protection of the mighty mother—the daughter of Chaos and of Night. She fosters the disorder and the darkness of the soul. Mere bluntness and inertness of intellect, which the name would suggest, he never confines himself to. Of sharp misused power of mind, too, she is the tutelary goddess. Errors which mind arrives at by too much subtlety, by self-blinding activity, serve her purpose and the poet's; and so some names of powerful intellects are included, which, on a question of their merits, indeed, had better been left out. So the science of mathematics, far overstepping, as the poet conceives, the boundary of its legitimate activity—

"Mad Mathesis alone–Now running round the circle, finds it square."

The real foe of Dulness, then, is Truth—not simply wit or genius. The night of mind is all that Dulness labours to produce. Misdirected wit and genius help on this consummation, and therefore deserve her smile—all the more that they are her born enemies, turned traitors to their native cause; and most formidable enemies too, had they remained faithful. Needs must she load them with dignity and emoluments. Trace the thought. The poem begins from the real dull Dunces; and their goddess is Dulness, inevitably: nothing can be gainsaid there. This is the central origin. Go on. Pert or lively dunces, who are not real dull, will come in of due course. And from that first foundation the poet may lawfully go on to bring in perverted intelligence and moral vitiation of the soul. Reclining on our swing-chair—and waiting for the devil—with the Æneid in the one hand and the Dunciad in the other, we have this moment made a remarkable discovery in ancient and in modern classic poetry. Virgil, in his eighth book, tells us that the pious Æneas, handling and examining with delight the glorious shield which the Sire of the Forge has fabricated for him, wonders to peruse, storied there in prophetical sculptures, the fates and exploits, and renown, of his earth-subduing descendants. In one of these fore-shadowing representations—that of the decisive sea-fight off the promontory of Actium—you might believe that, under the similitude of the conflict and victory which delivered the sovereignty of the Roman world into the hand of Augustus, the sly Father of the Fire has willed by hints to prefigure an everlasting war of light and darkness, the irreconcilable hostility of the Wits and Dunces, and the sudden interposition of some divine poet, clothed with preternatural power, for the "foul dissipation and forced rout" of the miscreated multitude.

The foe, whose pretensions to the empire of the world are to be signally defeated, advances to the combat—"ope barbarica"—helped with a confederacy of barbarians. Queen Dulness herself is characteristically described as heartening and harking forward her legions with pure noise.

"Regina in mediis patrio vocat agminasistro,"

that is, rather with her father Chaos's drum, or the drum native to the land of Dulness. Either interpretation forcibly marks out the most turbulent and unintellectual of all musical instruments; and we think at once of her mandate on a later day,

"'Tis yours to shake the soulWith thunder rumbling, from the mustard-bowl."

The contending powers are presented under a bold allegory.

"Omnigenumque Deûm Monstra et Latrator Anubis,

Contra Neptunum et Venerem, contraque Minervam,

Tela tenent."

Neptune prefigures this island, the confessed ruler of the waves and the precise spot of the globe vindicated, as we have seen, by two great poets from the reign of Dulness. Venus is here understood in her noblest character, as the Alma Venus of Lucretius's invocation, as the Power of Love and the Beautiful in the Universe. The Goddess of Wisdom speaks for herself. Against them a heterogeneous rabble of monsters direct their artillery, under a dog-headed barking protagonist, (what a chosen symbol of an impudent, wide-mouthed, yelping Bayes!) the ringleader of the Cry of Dunces.

Behold the striking and principal figure of the poet himself, armed and ready to loose from his hand his unerring shafts.

"Actius hæc cernens arcum intendebat Apollo

Desuper."

The poet, impersonated in the patron god of all true poets, is high Virgilian; and the proud station and posture, and the godlike annihilating menace of that "Desuper" is equally picturesque and sublime.

The same verse continued brings out the effect of the god's, or of the poet's interposition, in the instantaneous consternation and utter scattering of the rascal rout.

"… Omnis eo terrore Ægyptus et Indus,

Omnis Arabs, omnes vertebant terga Sabœi."

The entire progeny of barbarism are off, in full precipitation, for a place of refuge, if harbour or haven may be had. Or, as the same inspired bard elsewhere has it—"fugêre feræ"—the wild beasts have fled.

The triumph is complete. The panic seizes their imperial mistress herself, who, turning her prow, sweeps with all sails set from the lost battle.

"Ipsa videbatur ventis Regina vocatis

Vela dare et laxos jam jamque immittere funes;

Illam inter cædes, pallentem morte futurâ,

Fecerat Ignipotens undis et Iapyge ferri."

And why is Augustus made Victor? Does not his name stand, to all time, as the emperor of good letters? Is an Augustan age a less precise and potential phrase for a golden age of the arts, than a Saturnian age for the same of the virtues? And why is Antony beaten? Surely, because he represents the collective Antony-Lumpkinism of literature. And what has the dear Cleopatra to do in the fight? The meretricious gipsy—the word is Virgil's own—by her illicit attractions, and by the dusk grain of her complexion, doubly expresses to the life the foul daughter of Night whom the Dunces obey and worship.

Vulcan, says Virgil, made the shield, like a god, knowing the future. But here Virgil makes Vulcan. And we have now seen enough fully to justify the later popular tradition of his country in steadfastly attributing to him the fame of an arch-wizard. Looking at the thing in this light, we derive extreme consolation from the final augurous words of our last citation—"pallentem morte futurâ"—which we oppose with confidence to the appalling final prophecy of Pope, and believe that the goddess is, as the nymphs were said to be, exceedingly long-lived, but not immortal.

1

Amongst the anecdotes which are told in this concluding portion of the pamphlet, we were struck with the following, which affords a striking instance of that tendency to run a-muck from time to time by which some men are unhappily afflicted:—"One of them, at length, showed strong indications of approaching insanity. He became moody, and twice attempted to destroy himself. I thought that possibly change of occupation and diet might benefit him; and I brought him to my own garden in consequence, and sought to feed him up. But he rather got worse. I remonstrated with him; and his answer was a striking one—'When I used to be in this way before, I could get into trouble, (commit an offence, and incur a severe punishment,) and that took it out of me; but now that I try to behave myself, I think that I am going mad altogether.'"

2

Why do not these universal rational religionists found colleges for themselves, and get an university established on a scale of splendour commensurate with their liberality, so as to cut out Oxford, with its antiquated notions, altogether? How very funny it would be! It must be the absurdity of the idea that prevents them—it cannot be stinginess as to the means. Fancy Oxford in the hands of the three denominations! the under-graduates hauled up for cutting meeting!—a Wesleyan proctor, delighting in black gowns, stopping by mistake a Quaker Freshman, with a reproof for being in broad-brim instead of academicals, and being answered with "Friend, I am not of thy persuasion!" Then the dissenting D.D.s flocking to the university sermon at Mount Pisgah Chapel, (late St. Mary's,) wherein all denominational topics were to be carefully avoided, and the sharp look-out that would be kept upon any preacher whose harangues savoured of bigotry! Then the boat-races; fancy the Independents' boat bumping the Particular Baptists', and the Quakers' colours—drab-and-all-drab—floating at the head of the flag-staff! And as to "tufts"—that vile distinction which independent M.P.s are so indignant at—why, if a dissenting nobleman—even the seventh son of an Irish peer—were to be had for love or money, what a price he would fetch in such an Utopia of nonconformity! Nay, if they could get even a Nova Scotia baronet—a Sir Anybody Anything—we know pretty well what a fuss they would make about him. There is no such fawner on the aristocracy, if he has but a chance of getting any thing out of them, as a parvenu by birth, a liberal in politics, and an Independent by "religious persuasion."

The great danger, I suppose, would be, lest some more than usually nonconforming under-graduate should start a "connexion" of his own, and proceed to argue that all the university authorities, heads of houses and all, were under an awful delusion, and that it was a necessary consequence of civil and religious liberty, that under-graduates should elect their own tutors and proctors, and be governed on the voluntary principle.