Chapter I

_One Epistle To Mr. Pope_, complained Pope to Bethel, "contains as many Lyes as Lines." But just for that reason it is not, as Pope also says in the same letter, "below all notice."[1] _The Blatant Beast_, published twelve years later, is another attack on Pope almost as compendious and quite as virulent. They are here presented to the modern student of Pope as good examples of their kind. The importance of the pamphlet attacks on Pope for a full understanding of his satiric art is universally admitted, but the pamphlets themselves were cheap and ephemeral, and copies are now rare and not easily come by. Both in the comprehensiveness of their charges and in the slashing hatred which informs them (however feeble the verse), _One Epistle_ and _The Blatant Beast_ offer as fair a sample as any two such pamphlets can of the calumny, detraction, and critical misunderstanding Pope endured, for the most part patiently, from the publication of his _Essay on Criticism_ to the year of his death. "Welcome for thee, fair Virtue! all the past," (_Epistle to Arbuthnot_, l. 358) he exclaimed in his role as Satirist.

It was this public proclamation of Virtue that confused and enraged the Dunces. We have again learned to read satire as something quite other than an expression of personal malice and misanthropy. What the present pamphlets amply testify to is that most of the Dunces were no more able to read satire properly than were Pope's nineteenth-century critics. They were, as Pope quite properly kept pointing out, very bad writers and very dull men. The _ethos_ of the satiric _persona_ was something they could not understand. Although some of the Dunces knew their classics well and although all of them, we may presume, read the Roman satirists, one did not, typically, in Grub Street consult one's Horace with diurnal hand; one consulted the public. Literature to them was sold. They were not deeply concerned about absolute standards of right and wrong, about works of imagination which justify an entire civilization, about the problem of tradition and the individual talent. Accordingly, they explained satire, with the only vocabulary they had, as the expression of ingratitude, purely personal malice, and demonic pride, the product of a diseased heart and a misshapen body.

It would be misleading to suggest a narrow definition of Pope's Dunces. Some were critics of worth, such as Dennis and Gildon; some were not despicable minor poets, such as Welsted and Cooke. But if we leave these aside, as well as his aristocratic enemies, Lady Mary and Lord Hervey, some valid generalizations emerge. The very persistency of the Dunces' attacks on Pope (I have located over one hundred and fifty published during Pope's lifetime) and the large number of anonymous pamphlets that we cannot definitely ascribe to anyone Pope ever mentioned suggest that the Battle of the Dunces is best seen economically and sociologically. They were, for the most part, hack-writers, who were attempting the commercialization of literature that Pope recognized and deplored. Since they were authors to be let, they were neither fastidious about standards of taste nor filled with reverence for the Word. Yet Pope had succeeded in doing what they could not do--he had made himself a moderately rich man entirely by writing poetry. No theme recurs more insistently and suggestively in Popiana than Pope's wealth. Faced with the nasty fact that if one wrote well enough, there was a public to support one, they could only accuse Pope monotonously of venality and avarice.

In all of this there is a strong element of class antagonism. The Dunces were middle-class and Whiggish, their spirit capitalist. Pope, though middle-class by birth, was aristocratic in his sympathies, Tory in a loose sense, and firmly anti-Walpole. Perhaps verse satire is essentially aristocratic. Perhaps wit is, too. Certainly they never seem at home in a middle-class society. Wit comes to savor of indecency and blasphemy; satire in its incessant defence of moral value and centers of order comes to seem the expression of an arrogant disdain and a disquieting unease. His poise and verbal brilliance and hieratic commitment to the venerable tradition of classical and Christian ethical thought set the Satirist coolly apart from the _profanum vulgus_. Had Pope never mentioned one of the Dunces, although they would have done so less frequently, they would still have cried out against him.