Summary
Book IV, the longest of the four, diverges from the present narrative to which we have been introduced in Books I-III of The Dunciad. Though it acts as an extension of these early books, Book IV jumps to a future in which the prophecies that King Cibber envisioned in Book III have come to pass. This, the speaker tells us, requires a new invocation, which we have not seen since Book I. While in Book I, the invocation is given to Dulness, this invocation shrouds Dulness in a much darker aura, referring to her as “dread Chaos” (ln. 1).
As Cibber envisioned, Chaos has come to conquer Order. As always, Cibber sits on the Goddess’ lap, but now there are new figures that surround her as well. Under her footstool, anthropomorphized Science is chained, and he is not alone. Wit sits nearby fearing torture and exile, Logic is depicted as gagged, Rhetoric lies naked on the ground, and Morality is killed after being “drawn” or stretched at either end of her body by ropes. Math is alone left untied, but only because she has been driven so mad that she need not be restrained. The most carefully bound captives are the Muses, acting as the definitive symbol that all the Arts and Sciences have been taken over by Chaos and Dulness.
A harlot, one of Chaos’ followers, cries that soon the stubborn and resistant Muses will be tortured into submission and then Chaos shall reign fully, but she warns about the dangers of music, which may make Sense and Order seductive, and asks Dulness to banish great musicians like Handel from the shores of Britain, which Dulness does. Following the harlot, all of Dulness’ followers are compelled to gather around her and follow in the harlot’s footsteps by discouraging the spread of the arts and sciences.
They bring with them famous writers and thinkers who had not fallen under the spell of Dulness, like Shakespeare, Milton, and Johnson. Dulness decrees that her followers shall “revive the Wits” but only after having unleashed other writers and critics to murder and cut them up into pieces, an allegory for the over-analysis of these writers’ works by Pope’s contemporaries, thus degrading the artfulness they bring the intellectual community.
As more figures vie to be the ones to address Dulness, fighting each other in the process, Dulness comforts them, saying all are encouraged to come forward. The first speaker whose full address we are given is that of a young man called to speak for the grammar schools. He says that by packing the brains of young people with words alone, they are never granted access to true knowledge and thus remain dull and safely within the Goddess’ grasp for the rest of their lives. She commends their work and wishes their teachings could be spread into every hall and institution, be it the Universities, the court, the Senate, or the throne.
Following her address, the Universities appear to take up the call, led by Aristarchus, who speaks to Dulness next. He elaborates on how this focus with mere words with young people is sustained in the Universities by obsessing over tiny details of spelling, grammar, and history, arguing that by forever splitting hairs, no knowledge is achieved. He is interrupted by the arrival of a group of young men who have been studying abroad with tutors. One of these young men relates to the goddess how they have learned nothing, lost much of their earlier knowledge, and have succeeded only in broadening their palates as opposed to their minds while abroad, which pleases her greatly. She blesses him with the “Want of Shame” by wrapping him in her veil.
As she does so, she notices the many lazy individuals scattered around her. Annius, a crafty and duplicitous antiquities collector and dealer, asks Dulness to make these men skilled in his work so that he might best use dullness. Overhearing this, however, his competitor Mummius declares that he should be the one blessed by the Goddess and given use of these people. Dulness ultimately appeases them both without giving them control over these lazy people, and the two leave hand in hand.
A strange tribe arrives bearing gifts for Dulness. One member of this tribe cries out to her and relates how his flower named Caroline, which had so long fascinated him and others, was killed by another member of the tribe and ought to be punished. This other member defends himself well, however, and Dulness asks that they both take the aimless people around her and have them study these small bits of nature, from flowers to butterflies, with them. This comes with a warning: don’t let these people study anything more than the small and dull bits of nature which never hint at the larger happenings within the universe.
A clerk then comes forward to speak on behalf of the “Minute Philosophers and Freethinkers,” calling for the death of morality and faith so that dull men might be deemed the creators of all. Silenus then brings a group of young people to Dulness. Dulness’ high priest Magus brings forward a cup containing a mixture that will rid the drinker of all of their obligations and duties to those he has once known. After the youth have drunk from the cup, the Goddess “confers her Titles and Degrees” upon her servants, including priests, botanists, Freemasons, and more, telling them their new responsibilities under her new and vast reign. She then yawns, and it is this yawn which sets about the final collapse of Order, bringing about the total rule of Chaos. As the last bit of light dies, the poem is concluded as “universal Darkness buries all.”
Analysis
Pope's fourth book in the Dunciad transports readers to a different time than that of the first three books. Readers are now in a chaotic future, and it is as a result of this that we see certain key stylistic changes appear in this book. The Pope scholar B.W. Young argues that these changes are signs of the "rigorous commitment that the poem makes to the past," its "moralistic" stance, and its "appeal to classically grounded humanism" (Young 436). In a poem that, on the whole, expresses a desire to honor past virtues and traditions, this final book thrusts us into a dark future, producing certain vital shifts in the poem's form, speaker, and imagery.
The speaker himself is a key place to see how these changes begin. The invocation of Book I says that it was called by Dulness to tell the story of the new King Cibber. Book IV, however, is a plea, saying "Indulge, dread Chaos ... Suspend a while your force inertly strong, / Then take at once the Poet and the Song" (ln. 2, 7-8). The speaker's position as the poet is now tenuous and delicate. There is a fragility in this future for writing that did not exist in the past or the earlier books. This shows that there is, in fact, a threat even to the telling of the story of Dulness. The speaker is also present far less in this book than in others. Here, more than in any other book, Pope elects to have characters within the text speak for long stretches of time as figures address Dulness or as Dulness addresses her followers. It is as though the voice that has guided the reader, the voice that earned the reader's trust, is slowly disappearing along with the ways of the past.
In the personification of the Sciences, Arts, and Virtues who serve Order, we can see the importance of the past. While most of these figures are described as bound, broken, or even dead, "sober History restrain'd her rage, / And promis'd vengeance on a barb'rous age" (ln. 39-40). It is the past here who is the figure with the power to cripple Dulness, who promises that this darkness will not last. The traditions which Pope honors are also those that, when anthropomorphized in the poem, remain level-headed, rational, and capable of envisioning a different future.
While personification in the text takes what Pope thinks is happening to the arts and sciences in his contemporary age and exacts these fates on human-like figures, the opposite can be said of other moments in the text. Dulness advocates that the best plan for treating great writers like Shakespeare and Milton who are brought forward in this imagined realm be to "murder first, and mince them all to bits; ... Let standard authors thus, like trophies borne, / Appear more glorious as more hack'd and torn" (ln. 120, 123-124). In this case, what happens to the authorial figure in the "imagined" realm is then afterward projected into the "real" world. As a result, however, we must question which world shows the effects of the other.
In the past, the realm the speaker described seemed to be a symbolic and classical allegory for Pope's contemporary moment. But as the prophecies of the past have become present, it is now less clear which realm is a reflection of which. This confusion mirrors the Chaos we are told is descending upon Pope's literary world, and his writing drags the reader into this confusion. Pope plays out this mirroring within the text, using effects like chiasmus, a rhetorical device that inverts phrases, words, or other syntactical structures to reflect one another. One example is when Pope writes, "Whate'er of mongrel no one class admits, / A Wit with Dunces, and a Dunce with Wits" (ln. 89-90). Lines like these heighten the circuitous and dizzying nature of this final chaotic book, reinforcing the distressing and often overwhelming imagery of hoards of Dulness' followers with which the Dunciad's readers are already familiar.
