Two Poems Against Pope / One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast

by Mr. Welsted; Anonymous

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.

II.

One Epistle To Mr. A. Pope, Occasion’d By Two Epistles Lately Published appeared, according to the Daily Journal, on 28 April 1730.[2] Pope’s mention of it in Appendix II to The Dunciad A, his “List of Books, Papers, and Verses, in which our Author was abused” which is our best guide to Popiana, is somewhat confusing and made more difficult because the first part dates from 1729, the second from 1735: “Labeo, A Paper of Verses written by Leonard Welsted. [1729 a-d], which after came into One Epistle, and was publish’d by James Moore. 4to. 1730. Another part of it came out in Welsted’s own name in 1731, under the just Title of Dulness and Scandal, fol. [1735a].”[3]

The Labeo reference is mysterious. Pope in his note on Welsted to The Dunciad A II.293 had said in a sentence omitted in all editions from 1735a, “The strength of the metaphors in this passage is to express the great scurrility and fury of this writer, which may be seen, One day, in a Piece of his, call’d (as I think) Labeo.”[4] Since no Labeo has ever turned up, it seems reasonable to conclude with Fineman that, though Welsted may have toyed with the idea of writing one, “he either never did enough with it to warrant its publication, or discarded it entirely in favor of writing the collaborative One Epistle to Mr. Pope that appeared in 1730. Naturally, he would not broadcast his plans, and as a result the enemy camp continued to believe--or at any rate, to say--that Welsted would retaliate with a Labeo.”[5] This was in 1729; by 1735 Pope had realized no Labeo would appear and deciding, apparently on no evidence, that it had been incorporated into Welsted’s One Epistle and Of Dulness and Scandal (1732), made the appropriate changes in The Dunciad.

Pope did not at first realize that One Epistle was by Welsted. It had been announced as early as 1 Feb. 1729 in The Universal Spectator “as the due Chastisement of Mr. Pope for his Dunciad, by James Moore Smythe, Esq; and Mr. Welsted.” The poem must have been circulated privately before publication at least by October, 1729 at which time Pope believed it to be Lady Mary’s, since we find Lady Mary writing to Dr. Arbuthnot twice in October 1729 denying Pope’s accusation that she had written it.[6] There is no evidence that she was not telling the truth, but on 21 May 1730 The Grub-Street Journal reported that Lady Mary had “some hand in the piece.”

Like most Pope attacks, the poem was published anonymously. The preface, a defence of the Dunces, is, with probably intentional ambiguity, written in the first person singular but ends by referring to “the Writers of the following Poem” (p. viii). One hand seems responsible for the preface, but we can only conclude that a Dunce collaborating with other Dunces produced the poem. Four days after its publication Pope wrote to Broome that it was “by James Moore and others,” and a few weeks later wrote to Bethel that “James Moore own’d it but was made by three others, and he will disown it whenever any man takes him for it.”[7] It was Moore Smythe who was attacked in The Grub-Street Journal for several months as the poem’s chief author.[8]