Two Poems Against Pope / One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast |
The Augustan Reprint Society TWO POEMS AGAINST POPE: ONE EPISTLE
TO MR. A. POPE LEONARD WELSTED
(1730) THE BLATANT BEAST ANONYMOUS
(1740) INTRODUCTION BY JOSEPH V. GUERINOT 
PUBLICATION NUMBER 114
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles 1965
GENERAL EDITORS Earl R. Miner, University of California, Los Angeles Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, Wm. Andrews Clark Memorial Library
ADVISORY EDITORS Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan John Butt, University of Edinburgh James L. Clifford, Columbia University Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles CORRESPONDING SECRETARY Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library
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 A letter from Welsted to Dodington, however, shows that though the poem was a collaborative effort and though others may have made suggestions and additions, Welsted felt himself responsible for the poem.9 In 1735 Pope attributed One Epistle finally to Welsted, with Moore Smythe as publisher, and in 1737 The Memoirs of Grub-Street said of Moore Smythe that he “reported himself author” of One Epistle, “but was only a publisher; it being written by Mr. Welsted and others.”10 As to the “others” we should remember Mallet’s caution that it would be vain, To guess, ere One Epistle saw the light, How many brother-dunces club’d their mite.11 Welsted himself had begun his quarrel with Pope with an attack on Three Hours after Marriage, that amusing and much-abused play, in Palaemon To Caelia at Bath; Or, The Triumvirate (1717). Pope is said to have collaborated with Gay not only in Three Hours, a play “so lewd,/ Ev’n Bullies blush’d, and Beaux astonish’d stood” (Second Edition, p. 11), but in The Wife of Bath and The What D’Ye Call It. Welsted also hits at God’s Revenge Against Punning, the First Psalm, praises Tickell, and finds Pope’s versification flat. All of these charges (except the one that Pope collaborated in The Wife of Bath) had appeared in print before, but Pope was to remember Palaemon To Caelia and include it in a note to The Dunciad A II.293, where it is neatly described as “meant for a Satire on Mr. P. and some of his friends.” In 1721 Welsted’s name appears in the title of a pamphlet containing an attack on Pope’s Homer, An Epistle To Mr. Welsted; And A Satyre on the English Translations of Homer, by that engagingly inept Dunce, Bezaleel Morrice. In 1724 in the “Dissertation concerning the Perfection of the English Language” prefixed to his Epistles, Odes, &c., Welsted quoted (not quite correctly) and criticized Pope’s “And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be” (p. x). The anonymous author of Characters of The Times (1728) thought that Welsted would have been spared Pope’s abuse if he had not in his “Dissertation” “happen’d to cite a low and false line from Mr. P[o]pe for the meer Purpose of refuting it, without seeming to know, or care who was the Author of it” (p. 24).12 In the Peri Bathous Pope included Welsted as a didapper and an eel. Pope then put him into The Dunciad in II.293-300 and, more memorably, in III.163-166: Flow Welsted, Flow! like thine inspirer, Beer, Tho’ stale, not ripe; tho’ thin, yet never clear; So sweetly mawkish, and so smoothly dull; Heady, not strong, and foaming tho’ not full. Unable to leave well enough alone, Welsted continued his attack on Pope with One Epistle and then again in January 1732 with Of Dulness and Scandal, which ran to three editions. The half-title of One Epistle had promised that it was to be continued, and the writer of the preface had said that he intended “in the preface to the next Epistle ... to state several Matters of Fact, in Contradiction to the Notes of the Dunciad” (p. viii). Of Dulness and Scandal, however, has no preface and is an independent attack. Its main charge is Pope’s ingratitude to the Duke of Chandos as shown in the Epistle to Burlington, a famous charge frequently to be repeated,13 but it claims as well that a lady named Victoria died as a result of reading Pope’s Homer and attacks once more The Rape of the Lock and the First Psalm. In February 1732 Welsted published his last attack on Pope, Of False Fame, in which he attacks Windsor Forest, The Rape of the Lock, Pope’s edition of Shakespeare, The Dunciad, and the Epistle to Burlington. Pope then mentioned him in the Epistle to Arbuthnot, at first in l. 49, although he altered this to “Pitholeon,” and then in l. 375, where most twentieth-century college students first meet his name. The charges in One Epistle are unusually comprehensive, but almost none of them is original. To help the reader to evaluate the more important, the following notes may be helpful. The denial in the preface of Pope’s statement that no one is attacked in The Dunciad “who had not before, either in Print or private Conversation, endeavour’d something to his Disadvantage” (p. v) is a reference to The Dunciad, p. 203, where, however, conversation is not mentioned. This sentence of Pope’s annoyed many of the Dunces.14 What the preface says about Swift and Arbuthnot and the Peri Bathous (p. vii) may well be true.15 Welsted’s charge that Pope wrote the Prologue to Cato and then “the Play decried” (p. 12) is simply Dennis’s old charge first made in A True Character of Mr. Pope (1716) and repeated in Remarks Upon ... the Dunciad (1729) that Pope had teased Lintot into publishing Dennis’s attack on Cato. The charge rests only on Dennis’s authority.16 The obscenity of The Rape of the Lock was an old story.17 So was the notorious First Psalm.18 Welsted’s attacks on the Pastorals, the Homer, the Peri Bathous, and The Dunciad are simply the commonplaces of Popiana. The charge that he libeled Addison only after the great man’s death is also familiar19 (Welsted seems to have been the first, though, to mention the libel on Lady Mary) and long since disproved by Sherburn and Ault. That Pope was a plagiarist is an idea that turns up constantly.20 Welsted’s other charges are more interesting. He seems to be the only Dunce who objected (p. 12) to Pope’s mentioning Bishop Hoadly in The Dunciad A II.368. It may just possibly be true that Gildon was dismissed by Buckingham because of Gildon’s dislike of Pope (p. 22).21 The most curious of the charges is that Pope, ... from the Skies, propitious to the Fair, Brought down Caecilia, and sent Cloris there. (p. 11) Welsted apparently means that Pope debased St. Cecilia in his Ode for Musick on St. Cecilia’s Day and glorified a suicide in his Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady. He is not saying, as did The Life of the late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn (1721), that the heroine of the Elegy died of her unrequited love for Pope. Pope’s note to l. 375 of the Epistle to Arbuthnot accusing Welsted of having “had the Impudence to tell in print, that Mr. P. had occasion’d a Lady’s death, and to name a person he never heard of” refers not to Cloris but to Victoria in Welsted’s Of Dulness and Scandal who died from reading Pope’s Illiad.22 The Grub-Street Journal for 21 May 1730 invited “any Person of Credit and Character to stand forth and attest any of the following Facts....” That the late Duke of Buckingham paid any Pension to Charles Gildon, which he took from him since his acquaintance with Mr. P. That the present Archbishop of Canterbury hath past any Censure on Mr. P. That Mr. F[ento]n and he ever were at distance on variance with each other. That the Rev. Mr. Br[oo]me ever asserted or complain’d, he was not gratify’d with a competent Sum for his Share in the Odyssey; nay did not own that he thought himself highly paid. That Mr. Addison or any other but Mr. P. writ, or alter’d, one line of the Prologue to Cato. Who will name any young Writer, allow’d to have Merit, that hath been personally discourag’d by him; or who hath not received either actual Services, or amicable Treatment from him? III. The Blatant Beast appeared in December 1742, according to The London Magazine; its authorship remains unknown. Pope had published The New Dunciad in March 1742, and Cibber had published his famous A Letter From Mr. Cibber, To Mr. Pope in July. Five other pamphlets attacking Pope appeared in August, obviously capitalizing on the Cibber attack. The Blatant Beast is pro-Cibber, of course, but it criticizes specifically only a few lines from The New Dunciad. The writer’s chief interest is in a general attack. The criticisms of the Shakespeare, of Three Hours and the Epistle to Burlington, and of Pope’s plagiarism are perfectly conventional. More interesting is the accusation (p. 6) that Pope wrote (as, of course, he did) his Homer on the backs of personal letters. Also interesting is the reference to Pope’s inscription on the Shakespeare monument in Westminster Abbey (p. 5). Pope was, with several others, responsible for the Latin inscription; it does not seem that he had anything to do with the lines from The Tempest IV. i. 152-156, which were added several months later. These lines are given in the first note to The Dunciad B I. and, in slightly different form, in The Gentleman’s Magazine, XI, 276. The last line reads, “Leave not a wreck behind.” Pope’s version of the lines in both his 1725 and 1728 editions of Shakespeare (Griffith 149 and 210) does not commit the errors of the inscription and prints, “Leave not a rack behind!”23 The bantering note about the monument which begins The Dunciad B may have been prompted by this passage in The Blatant Beast as well as by the comment of Theobald which Sutherland refers to. But it is the shrill personal abuse of Pope’s deformity and moral obliquity, The Morals blacken’d when the Writings scape; The libel’d Person, and the pictur’d Shape (Epistle to Arbuthnot, ll. 353-353) which is most impressive. The writer shows a talent for invective, but there is a good deal of evidence that he was well-read in other Pope attacks. The phrase, Pope’s “Mountain Shoulders,” (p. 5) recalls Pope’s “Mountain Back” in The Difference Between Verbal and Practical Virtue, p. 5, published in August 1742. The image of the wasp (pp. 6, 10) had appeared in Hervey’s and Lady Mary’s Verses Address’d to the Imitator Of ... Horace (1733), p. 7,24 as had the metaphor of Pope as Satan (pp. 5-6) with which The Blatant Beast opens.25 Pope had already been pictured as a mad dog (p. 7) in The Metamorphosis (1728), attributed by Pope to Smedley and one of the least pleasant of the pamphlets. Pope as Aesop’s toad bursting with spleen (p. 12) had been used in Codrus (1728), p. 12, attributed by Pope to Curll and Mrs. Thomas. Cibber’s prevention of Pope from peopling the isle with Calibans (p. 9) is a reference, of course, to Cibber’s famous anecdote about rescuing Pope in the bawdy-house; but in Mr. Taste, The Poetical Fop (1732) where Pope figures as the monkey-like poetaster Taste, the servant-maid who was to have married him is delighted the marriage is broken off, “for fear our children should have resembled Baboons, Ha, ha, ha!” (p. 73). Stern anti-sentimentalists sometimes point out that we react too squeamishly to the abuse of Pope’s deformity. I doubt it myself. The eighteenth century was probably a coarser and more outspoken age than ours, but scurrilous attacks on the physical appearance of distinguished poets do not otherwise seem to have been a prominent feature of the Augustan literary scene. It is hoped that both these pamphlets will prove useful to those who have little first-hand knowledge of what his enemies said of Pope and will help to warn the novice of the fatal ease with which we can read “with but a Lust to mis-apply,/ Make Satire a Lampoon, and Fiction, Lye” (Epistle to Arbuthnot, ll. 301-302). One Epistle was reprinted by John Nichols in his edition of The Works in Verse and Prose of Leonard Welsted (London, 1787). Nichols normalizes the text, spells out several names in full, and adds several unimportant notes. It is here reproduced from the copy in the Sterling Library, Yale University. The Blatant Beast has never been reprinted and is reproduced from the copy in the Huntington Library. Hunter College NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION |
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