James Sutherland’s edition for the "Twickenham Pope" was reviewed by John
Davy Hayward in the TLS of December 4, 1943.
Pope, who was almost neurotically sensitive to criticism of his own writings
and keenly, not to say maliciously, critical of the labours of editors and
publishers, could have found no cause for complaint or denigration in the
painstaking and sympathetic work of the scholars responsible for the
“Twickenham” edition of his poems. If he were alive today he might well
despair of correcting “the taste of the town in wit and criticism” in
another and greater Dunciad, ridiculing the “Party writers, Dull poets, and
Wild critics” of our own time; but with the general excellence of this
edition and, more particularly, of the latest volume to be added to it, it
would be impossible for him to quarrel. Professor James Sutherland’s text of
the Dunciad and his commentaries are a notable contribution to English
scholarship. This judgment, we believe it is safe to say, will not be
reversed by the higher court of specialist critics. A discursive recollation
of Professor Sutherland’s text with the original editions confirms the
accuracy and intelligence of his editorial methods. A latterday Theobald,
scrutinizing Professor Sutherland’s edition with the critical eye which saw
through Pope’s “Shakespeare”, would have no fault to find with it;
commending it for its definitiveness, he might share with those best
qualified to appreciate its worth a single regret that current restrictions
have forced the publisher and printer to issue it on poor, discoloured paper.
This is essentially a learned edition for the scholar and student; the general
reader (if indeed there is still such a person to read the Dunciad for
pleasure), will hardly relish its elaborate, yet indispensable, apparatus of
notes and variants. That the satire is largely unintelligible without a
commentary on the obscure persons ridiculed in it is not, however,
necessarily more of a bar to its enjoyment now than it was in Pope’s
lifetime, when the point of some of his sharpest fleers must have escaped a
fair number of his readers. The sheer aesthetic appeal of the poem, to which
critics have paid too little attention and given too little credit,
transcends, time and time again, what may be called its ad hoc purpose and
interest. This pleasure still remains undiminished after 200 years, when the
“ insects”, to rid himself of whom Pope wrote the Dunciad, are no more than
dim shapes in the amber of his verse. Only a few professed students will be
in a position to estimate the value of Professor Sutherland’s two texts –
the Dunciad Variorum in Three Books of 1729 and the much revised Cibber
Dunciad in Four Books of 1743 – his judicious but mercifully unpedantic
selection of textual variants and his informed additions and corrections in
Pope’s own dazzling commentary. Their approval, doubtless, is all the reward
he looks for.
Pope was not attempting anything new when he dropped hints among his friends
that he was contemplating an attack on “Dullness”. The operative stimuli are
not, however, the most important factors in the characteristically secretive
and complicated story of the writing and publication of the Dunciad. The
stinger himself had been stung – by the Grub street midges, by the gossips,
and notably by Theobald’s humiliating examination of Pope’s edition of
Shakespeare. While these were immediate reasons for his wishing to sting
back, they were not, it may be suggested, the most important provocation. If
they had been, if is doubtful if Pope would have needed to be prodded and
encouraged so much by Swift during the latters visits to Twickenham in the
summer vacations of 1726 and 1727. The Dunciad was part of a larger design
that had been shaping itself in his mind as far back, possibly, as 1712,
when an anonymous proposal, suspected to be his, appeared in the Spectator,
announcing “An account of the Works of the Unlearn’d”. And that larger
design was itself only part of the glorious crusade against pedantry and all
its works planned by the Scriblerus Club. The project was nothing
extraordinary. In the urge he felt to strike out against pedantry and piffle
he was simply reacting as other poets in other countries in former ages had
reacted to the abasement of literary values. Like Homer (supposedly in the
lost satire “Merg’tes”), Juvenal, Boileau and Dryden (the Dryden of
“Macflecknoe”) before him, Pope had an impulsive desire to set up as a
reformer and corrector of the literary follies and ineptitudes of his age.
The epic frame he worked in, along with his mockery and parody of its
conventions, presented no such difficulties to the ordinary educated reader
then as they must do now; the appeal would have been immediate and
enormously enjoyable to those who, if they could not read Homer easily, knew
their Virgil backwards and were familiar with a long tradition of epic and
heroic verse. They would have recognized, delightedly, as only a scholar
will today, the later literary allusions to and echoes of writers of the
preceding generation – Waller, Dryden, Rochester and so on – and to the
buzzings of the little insects themselves, the Dunces of the hour. For all
this, it is indeed remarkable, as Professor Sutherland remarks, that Pope
managed to keep up “his ridicule and abuse for almost 2,000 lines”. “The
effect”, he says, “ought to be monotonous; it is not. He has succeeded in
imposing his values on almost all his Dunces.” (Bentley and Defoe are
notable exceptions to those whom he ridiculed to death only to immortalize
in couplets.) There is, one suspects, more truth than the history of the
genesis of the Dunciad appears at a superficial study to suggest in Pope’s
statement that “the Poem was not made for these Authors, but these Authors
for the Poem”. Certainly it is the poem and not Pope’s victims which is
still capable of delighting the cultivated reader exactly two hundred years
after the publication of the final revision.
The aesthetic appeal of the Dunciad, which, we have suggested, is still
undervalued, is its capital claim on the modern reader. Granted, however
regretfully, that its classical form, its allusions and its characters will
mean little, if anything, to him, there remains – and it is very far from
being a mere residuum – the brilliant versification, the extraordinary
mastery of language and impeccable choice of the mot juste, the frightful
verve and infallible precision of the satire even when the motive is obscure
or lost. These qualities are more remarkable and more immediately attractive
in the version of 1729 – The Dunciad Variorum to which Pope added a
fantastic embroidery of Proems, Prolegomena, Prefaces, Notes, Errata, &c, by
way of ridiculing the apparatus criticus of the pedants, than in the heavily
revised version of 1743, which was extended by the addition of a fourth
book. Professor Sutherland, incidentally, suggests that Pope’s prose
commentary would nevertheless repay more study than is generally accorded to
it by the student. This is pertinent advice and, though the common reader
may feel dismay at the prospect of plunging into the swirl of small type
that often encroaches far up the page, worth taking; for, like Bayle and
Gibbon, Pope frequently relegates some of his best obiter scripta to the
footnotes as well as the kind of sotto voce aside which would sound
dangerously outspoken in the text.
Compared with the final version, the Dunciad Variorum is altogether a lighter,
gayer, and, artistically, more perfect satire – a dashing frontal attack on
personalities whom Pope was determined to make fools of. Doubtless reforming
zeal was the driving power behind his pen, but the effective impression is
that of a brilliant skirmish; it is very different in scope and purpose from
the formidable, objective satire – the savage indignation at human folly
that lacerates the heart-of Gulliver’s Travels, the only other major
production of the ambitious Scriblerus Club. Victim though he was of wanton
and scurrilous attacks, Pope was, one feels, enjoying himself in
connter-attack. There is, as if to confirm this, a pleasing record of him
collecting ammunition on the lawn of his Twickenham villa while Swift was
staying with him during the summer of 1727; covering the backs of envelopes
and odd scraps of paper with ideas and couplets and interlining his
jottings, as inspiration bubbled up. until it was almost impossible for him
to decipher what he had written.
During the 1730s he did little with his poem beyond making a few insignificant
changes; the publication, however, in 1742 of an additional book – The New
Dunciad – revealed how deeply he was still preoccupied with it, or rather
with the whole subject of “Dulness” as distinct from individual “fools and
scoundrels”. “The satire of 1742”, Professor Sutherland writes, goes far
beyond the pedantries of Theobald, who (though he was still alive) is not
even mentioned. Pope is looking critically at contemporary England after
twenty years of Walpole’s administration, and exposing the nation’s follies
and stupidities one after another: The decay of the theatres, of the schools
and universities, of the aristocracy, of the arts and sciences, of the
Church, of public and private morality, of liberty; the growth of luxury, of
free-thinking, of political corruption; the follies of the virtuosi, of
young peers who patronize the Opera or who make the Grand Tour, of pedantic
scholars, of gourmets, of freemasons. The tone is graver, the satire (with
one or two notable exceptions) less purely personal in its application. Like
almost all his later work, it shows clearly his sharpened interest in
politics. The heavy hand of Warburton, on whose encouragement and assistance
Pope had relied during its composition, as he had on Swift’s counsel and
stimulus while writing the original draft, can be traced everywhere in the
text and in the commentary.
Professor Sutherland’s volume offers a choice of both texts and, for the
curious, the best opportunity available for comparing one with the other. We
have already suggested in which of the two the ordinary reader will find the
purer delight and the less cause for regretting his defective or
insufficient technical knowledge. It would be tedious to account for and
justify the impression one receives of a higher polish and a more
diamond-cut precision and effectiveness from single couplets (eveh single
puns) in the elegant rococo setting of the Dunciad Variorum than one does
from these same couplets incorporated in the later recension of the text. It
is partly a matter of context, but also and more significantly a change of
mood in the poet, a reorientation which goes a good deal deeper than the
mere substitution of names and the apotheosis of Cibber as the champion
Dunce in Theobald’s place. It is interesting to recall that contemporary
readers found the New Dunciad obscure and flat, one hostile critic going so
far as to say that its want of “Perspicuity is so notorious . . . that it is
a Darkness to be felt in every Line” and that even they, with all the
advantages they had over us in being able to recognize topical allusions
were baffled by the apparent irrelevance of some of the additions and
adaptations forced on the first three books in the edition of 1743.
“Wonderful it is”. wrote Pope in the character of Martin Scriblerus, “that so
few of the moderns have been stimulated to attempt some Dunciad!” His
surprise, half-assumed, no doubt, in order to draw attention to his own
attempt, should surely find its echo in a few fastidious minds at the
present time. Professor Sutherland’s presentation of the greatest of English
satires against the debasement of literature would be more than a fine piece
of scholarship if it should by chance inspire some yet unformed genius to
emulate Pope with a masterly and merciless scourge of the pedants, the
poetasters and the “bawling criticks”, who, with the money-changers,
currently throng the Temple of the Muses.
