know
enough of the solution to know his duty, to see his way, to justify
God; and as much as he knows he tells. There were in that diseased
sensitive cripple no vain repinings, no moon-struck howls, no impious
cries against God: "Why hast thou made me thus?" To him God is a
righteous God, a God of order. Science, philosophy, politics,
criticism, poetry, are parts of His order--they are parts of the
appointed onward path for mankind; there are eternal laws for them.
There is a beautiful and fit order, in poetry, which is part of God's
order, which men have learnt ages ago, for they, too, had their
teaching from above; to offend against which is absolutely wrong, an
offence to be put down mildly in those who offend ignorantly; but
those who offend from dulness, from the incapacity to see the
beautiful, or from carelessness about it, when praise or gain tempts
them the other way, have some moral defect in them; they are what
Solomon calls fools: they are the enemies of man; and he will "hate
them right sore, even as though they were his own enemies"--which
indeed they were. He knows by painful experience that they deserve
no quarter; that there is no use giving them any; to spare them is to
make them insolent; to fondle the reptile is to be bitten by it.
True poetry, as the messenger of heavenly beauty, is decaying; true
refinement, true loftiness of thought, even true morality, are at
stake. And so he writes his "Dunciad." And would that he were here,
to write it over again, and write it better!

For write it again he surely would. And write it better he would
also. With the greater cleanliness of our time, with all the
additional experience of history, with the greater classical,
aesthetic, and theological knowledge of our day, the sins of our
poets are as much less excusable than those of Eusden, Blackmore,
Cibber, and the rest, as Pope's "Dunciad" on them would be more
righteously severe. What, for instance, would the author of the
"Essay on Man" say to anyone who now wrote p. 137 (for it really is
not to be quoted) of the "Life Drama" as the thoughts of his hero,
without any after atonement for the wanton insult it conveys toward
him whom he dares in the same breath to call "Father," simply because
he wants to be something very fine and famous and self-glorifying,
and Providence keeps him waiting awhile? Has Pope not said it
already?

Persist, by all divine in man unawed,
But learn, ye dunces, not t