The truth is, that the Dunces are there, not for the business of saying what they think of themselves, or not that alone, but they must say that which we think of them. They must act from motives from which men do not act. They must aspire to be dull, and be proud of their dulness. They must emulate one another's dulness, or they are unfaithful votaries. In short, they are poetically made, and should be so made, to do, consciously and purposely, that which, in real life, they do undesignedly and unawares.
Lord Kames goes wrong—and very far wrong indeed—though Warburton was not the man to set him right—through applying to a composition extravagantly conceived—an epic extravaganza—rules of writing that belong to a sober and guarded species. In a comedy, you make a man play the fool without his knowing that he is one; because that is an imitation of human manners. And if you ironically praise the virtues of a villain, you keep the veil of irony throughout. You do not now and then forget yourself, and call him a villain by that name. But the spirit and rule of the poem here is, that discretion and sobriety are thrown aside. Here is no imitation of manners—no veil. The persons of the poem, under the hand of the poet, are something in the condition of the wicked ghosts who come before the tribunal of the Gnossian Rhadamanthus; and whom he, by the divine power of his judgment-seat, constrains to bear witness against themselves. The poor ghosts do it, knowing that they condemn themselves. Here the mirth of the poet makes the Dull glorify themselves by recounting each misdeed under its proper appellation.
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 pains
Made 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 head
With 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."