A History of English Literature

pedant Bentley to a young milord on the Grand Tour: ‘Europe he saw, and Europe

saw him too.’ The Queen of Dullness (i.e. Queen Caroline) blesses them all: ‘Go, chil-

dren of my care! / To practice now from theory repair. / All my commands are

easy, short, and full: / My sons! be proud, be selfish, and be dull!’ She reminds the

Court that ‘princes are but things / Born for first ministers, as slaves for kings’ (a

crack at Sir Robert Walpole, the Whig First Minister).

More had she spoke but yawned – All Nature nods:

What mortal can resist the yawn of Gods?

Churches and chapels instantly it reached

(St James’s first, for leaden Gilbert preached) ....

Lost was the nation’s sense, nor could be found

While the long solemn unison went round: ...

The vapour mild o’er each committee crept;

Unfinished treaties in each office slept;

And chiefless armies dozed out the campaign;

And navies yawned for orders on the main.

Pope asks the Muse to tell ‘who first, who last resigned to rest’. A line of asterisks

follows: the Muse is asleep. Dullness is at hand.

In vain, in vain – the all-composing hour

Resistless falls: the Muse obeys the pow’r.

She comes! she comes! the sable throne behold

Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!

Thus at her felt approach, and secret might,

Art after art goes out, and all is night,

Se e skulking Truth to her old cavern fled,

Mountains of casuistry heaped o’er her head!

Philosophy, that leaned on Heaven before,

Shrinks to her seco nd cause and is no more ....

Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,

And unawares morality expires.

Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine,

Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine!

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;

Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,

And universal darkness buries all.

The ‘uncreating word’ inverts the Creation by the divine Logos, returning the

universe to Chaos. Pope’s is a 17th-century reaction to an 18th-century mechanical

universe, and an apocalyptic indictment of Hanoverian obliviousness as to the role

which humanism had assigned to literature. Pope, an enlightened Catholic Deist,

feared that wine was turning into water.

John Gay

Pope, by his genius, and his intense cultivation of it, dominated the literary scene.

His circle included his friend John Gay (1685–1732),who had an up-and-down

career, losing in the South Sea Bubble the money made by his Poems. Of his works

only The Beggar’s Opera lives today, a parody of the Italian Opera, popular in

196 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790