Pope claimed he attacked only those who had attacked him. It seems strange that, among the inimical host who had indulged in verbal violence, he should have revised his satire against the one man who had not contributed to the paper war, and who had, in his Apology, made humble acknowledgment of Pope’s gifts: “How terrible a Weapon is Satyr in the hands of a great Genius?” Cibber asks, remarking on Pope’s acid portrait of Addison, and adds:
But the Pain which the Acrimony of those Verses gave me is, in some measure, allay’d in finding that this inimitable Writer, as he advances in Years, has since had Candour enough to celebrate the same Person for his visible Merit. Happy Genius! whose Verse, like the Eye of Beauty, can heal the deepest Wounds with the least Glance of Favour.[6]
Even stranger is that with such eminent and vocal enemies as Lord Hervey and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he should have been concerned with a seventy-year-old semi-retired player who was too ineffectual, it would appear, to be a proper target for his great satire, and whose words in print could never have been a real threat.
The words “in print” are important, especially with reference to Cibber. As far as direct attack in the form of broadsides, pamphlets and the like, Cibber is clearly innocent; however, like many actors, he was an expert improvisator of stage dialogue, and this in itself is a reason to believe that his side of the feud was kept up from the theater platform. A more potent and public method of ridicule would be difficult to devise.
Stage warfare was as prevalent as paper warfare, as Cibber’s mockery of Three Hours after Marriage suggests, and as the prologues and epilogues amply demonstrate. The Non-Juror (1719) with its anti-Catholic remarks and its Jesuit villain played by Cibber himself, has several barbs directed at Pope.[7]
If Pope’s wounds had been festering since 1715, he had a perfect opportunity to avenge them in the Dunciad Variorum of 1729. When Gay’s Polly was suppressed that year, Cibber was accused of being responsible (though it was never proved),[8] since he had first refused The Beggar’s Opera, and then failed miserably to imitate its success with his own Love in a Riddle. He was at this time more widely known than Theobald, and had been a favorite target for anti-Hanoverians since The Non-Juror.[9] It is very odd that Pope should have ignored this chance, particularly when so many of his dunces are playwrights, only to take it up fourteen years later under much less favorable circumstances—when he himself was mortally ill and Cibber out of the public eye—unless something else had provoked him.
One view is that the laureateship triggered the alteration, but while it is true that Cibber was one of the worst versifiers ever to wear the bays, that honor had been conferred in 1730, thirteen years before the last Dunciad. The flood of burlesque Odes that followed each of Cibber’s Birth-Day and New-Year efforts had ebbed by the mid-thirties, and in 1743 the laureate was a stale joke.
The Apology’s praise of Pope did not benefit Cibber; years before the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot had stated:
A Fool quite angry is quite innocent;
Alas! ’tis ten times worse when they repent (108-109).
and the minor slap on the wrist was misquoted by Pope, as the Letter points out. The exchange is interesting, for it is an indication that the man behind the actor’s mask might have been less thick-skinned than he liked to seem, that he was genuinely hurt by Pope’s shafts.