Edward William Johnston (aka Il Secretario): "American Letters," Part VII

Edward William Johnston under the pen name IL SECRETARIO, "American Letters -- Their Character and Advancement." The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art and Science. Volume I, Issue 6 (June 1845): pages 575-581.

[Continued page 579*]:

Now, all this certainly, is but the simplest common sense, and perfectly known to all men with manly heads, to all women with womanly breasts. But what then? The good old war of wit with folly is still to be waged, no matter how often won; for the one is as immortal as the other. We hear men continually say that Pope was a fool, and somewhat merciless into the bargain, to fall upon the blockheads of his day and commit the grand massacre of the innocents, his Dunciad. Of this, the English is, that after a battle, men are usually able to tell that they who were put to the sword were the weaker party. Yet, before the irritated bard took that sanguinary vengeance, Blackmoore was in esteem; Dennis sat a sort of Rhadaman-thus of criticism, acknowledged by more than half the world; and a court itself had conferred such honors to poetry as it could award on Cibber, in preference to him of Twickenham!  Sporus and Spondanus, Bavius and Mavius, could seem in their times Homers and Virgils and Horaces, until the angry Muses, abandoning each her proper instrument of sound, fell upon them with the scourge of satire and left them forever sacred spectacles of insulted sense. Dante was driven into exile, not (we may well imagine) by the blockheads of politics alone; Ariosto and Tasso were far less than honored by courts, which, affecting the praise of encouraging letters, caressed many a dunce. Voltaire was compelled to stoop to a war with Fréron; Milton, surviving his conte,porary popularity, found, with much ado a stationer; Dryden was, until he burst out in his Mac Flecnoe, worsted by the poppy-shedding Shadwell; and Della and Crusca and fiddle-faddle, like that now prevailing, reigned, until Gifford once more called back the public sense from the sweet inanity that it had learnt to love.
In a word, the fight, it won, has still to be renewed: 

“For, born a goddess, Dullness never dies.” [Alexander Pope]. 

Even in the moment of its extermination, ill taste springs up, with often but a ranker growth for your having swept it down with the scythe. Seldom, indeed, has any age failed to prefer to whatever is purest the literary enormities or crudities to which its own prevailing vices of the mind impelled the commonplace author; and it is for this reason more than all others  that the temporary success of writers is, for the greater part, in inverse proportion to that which makes them not of their age-genius.

Eras of a corrupt and feeble literature, like that in the midst of which we now are, occur naturally, through influences arising out of Literature upon itself; or, more artificially and violently, out of causes lying beyond it, in changes of the society of which that literature must ever be, in the main, an image, an expression. We will proceed with these, inverting the order in which we have mentioned them.

An original literature implies a race either not derivative from another since its refinement had reached the point of literary cultivation; or one which, if secondary, has, in new seats, under a new body of influences, formed for itself a fresh and complete identity of its own. Now, we are not te first of these; nor, though tending to it, have we yet become the second. Until our language -- which has, we suspect, passed through all the structural changes of which it is capable -- shall have taken a new genius and other forms, growing into quite a different dialect, our future Letters must be the same, at least in their vehicle, the instrument of speech they are to use. As yet, too, the mass of our individuality, so far as we have any, is English. Our ancestral memories, except those which (however bright) are, if not too few, yet too little remote greatly to affect the imagination, are but such as we nourish in common with England -- of Alfred, of Elizabeth, of Cromwell, of Cessy, of Poitiers [sic], of Naseby and of Worcester -- of what Shakespeare tells, of what Milton defended. What but a long line of glories of our own can ever efface these impressions? Until we have that, you might as well wish that the Greek colonies of Sicily, or Magna Gracia, or Cyrene coould have forgotten Homer's heroes and battles, Ilium and Scamander, and Silves Simois, for some local champion, some small fight, some neighboring stream of their own. Of these things, the very monuments of our tongue, and what must probably always be the monuments of our tongue, are full; they must crumble, then, or loftier ones be built for us, before then can cease to be to us that great Thought of the Past, that Religion of the Memory, which affects men as a race. [To be concluded].

Graphing the relative usage of the word "Blockhead" in British English texts on a Google Ngram. The same basic pattern holds for American English texts, though with about a five-year lag time. As for me, I'll always think of the word "blockhead" in relation to the immortal Peanuts characters created in the 20th century by Charles Schulz. Thanks to Peanuts, the term "blockhead" will live on for as long as someone is alive to read or watch.