Even the best lives are deceptive:
Unthought-of frailties cheat us in the wise.
(l. 128)This is part of the more general puzzle involving radical
human inconsistency wherein
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise,
And even the best, by fits, what they despise...
(An Essay on Man, II, 233–4)We owe it to the author of these lines not to take a simple
view.
The relation between morals, which we think of as a matter
of conscious intention, and wit, which originates in the
unconscious, is nowhere more complex than in The Dunciad,
in which the hint afforded by Dryden’s MacFlecknoe is
developed and magnified to portentous effect. If it is the office
of the satirist to unsettle and to shock, Pope succeeded here as
nowhere else and the work continues to be controversial. Some
contemporaries felt it to have been beneath the dignity of the
great poet, and Johnson criticized the grossness of its images.
Others felt that in the dunces Pope had succeeded in lionizing
and immortalizing countless insignificant figures who
otherwise would have been erased by time, and called into
question his judgement, his good sense, and his sense of
proportion in so doing. The exaggeration and distortion which
are so much a part of the satire offended those who took it
primarily as a joke and those who recognized in the joke a
serious critique of the cultural life of his day. Yet no other work
of Pope has exerted such a fascination subsequently, and the
difficulty and the paradoxical effect of its intense witty
seriousness (particularly in the fourth book) have had great
appeal in an age brought up on The Waste Land and Ulysses.
Of its subject Johnson remarked:
Dullness or deformity are not culpable in themselves but
may be very justly reproached when they pretend to the
honour of wit or the influence of beauty.^30The particular named dunces have had few defenders, except
perhaps Richard Bentley ‘Aristarchus’, who ‘made Horace dull