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TRANSCRIPT
LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITYFACULTY OF LETTERS AND ARTS
DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES
English Literature:The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
– Lecture Notes –
BY
ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER
SIBIU 2010
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Table of Contents
By Way of Introduction: Course Description ………………………………… 3
Lecture I: Introductory; Contexts ..…………………………………………… 6
Lecture II: Literary Criticism ………………………………………………… 12
Lecture III: The English Drama after Shakespeare ..………………………... 20
Lecture IV: Seventeenth-century Poetry ……………………………………… 27
Lecture V: The 18th-century Essay ……………………………………………. 40
Lecture VI: The Novel …………………………………………………………. 46
Lecture VII: Preromanticism ………………………………………………….. 57
Handouts ………………………………………………………………………… 59
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DEPARTMENT OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES
COURSE AND SEMINAR IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY
BRITISH LITERATURE
Lecturer ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER, PhD, Room 54
FIRST YEAR, ENGLISH MAJORS AND MINORS
ACADEMIC YEAR 2010-2011
SECOND SEMESTER: 14 weeks, fortnightly meetings.
DESCRIPTION OF THE COURSE AND SEMINAR
The course and seminar in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century British Literature are essentially designed to survey several major literary works and schools of criticism. The main emphasis is on the relationship between the literary text and paratext, on the narratorial techniques, and on literary ideas and mentalities in general – focussing on the distinctive literary personality of each of the authors discussed, as well as on their contribution to the advancement of English literature.
Besides providing a highlighting coverage of the most important authors and works, the course and the seminar are also meant to encourage the students to view English literature in the larger context of British culture and European literature – of an author’s relationship with the writers preceding him/her and with those being influenced by him/her. A constant focus of the seminar is on the introducing of modern, specialised critical terms. The texts that are discussed offer an excellent opportunity for such an application of the theoretical notions or technical issues that are tackled in the introductory phase of each course and seminar.
The students’ attendance of and participation in the seminar will be carefully monitored and will count for up to 30% of their final mark. The list of topics for the seminar comprises compulsory reading for the students, from which they will be periodically tested. Moreover, students will choose topics from the list below and give class reports.
LECTURE TOPICS
1. Introduction to the literary works of the 17th and 18th century in England. The political and economic context; aesthetic ages; literary genres, innovation and tradition.
2. The beginnings of English criticism in the late 16th and the 17th centuries: from Ascham to Dryden (via Sidney, Bacon, Jonson and Milton).
3. The English drama after Shakespeare: the Jacobean blood and thunder tradition; Ben Jonson’s comedy of humours; Restoration drama (Dryden and Congreve).
4. The poetry of the 17th century: sacred and profane, public and private: John Donne and the Metaphysical poets; Andrew Marvell; Ben Jonson encomia; John Milton’s sacred and occasional poetry.
5. The Restoration and the Augustan Age (Neo-Classicism): the essay in verse and prose (Pope, Swift, Johnson).
6. The Age of Sensibility and the rise of the novel: from Swift and Defoe, through Richardson, Fielding and Goldsmith, to Laurence Sterne.
7. Preromanticism: the revaluation of folklore, the exaltation of the senses. Corollary.
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LIST OF TOPICS FOR THE SEMINAR
1. 16th- and 17th-century English criticism: Roger Ascham (The Scholemaster: “Imitatio”/ “Of Imitation”), Sir Philip Sidney (The Defence of Poesy).
Critical bibliography: D.-I. Cenuser, Notes on Elizabethan Criticism (Chapters on Ascham and Sidney); W.J. Bate, Prefaces to Criticism (chapters on Ascham and Sidney).
2. John Dryden: Essay of Dramatic Poesie (the ancients vs. the moderns)Critical bibliography: Jennifer Brady, “Dryden and negotiations of literary succession and procession” (fragments); W.J. Bate, Prefaces to Criticism (chapter on Dryden).
3. Ben Jonson: Volpone (the theory of humours); “To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare: and What He Hath Left Us” (the commendatory poem)
Critical bibliography: James Hirsh, “Cynicism and the Futility of Art in Volpone”; Sara van den Berg, “‘The Paths I Meant unto Thy Praise’: Jonson’s Poem for Shakespeare.”
4. John Donne: Sonnet 14 (The Holy Sonnets), “The Good Morrow,” “The Flea” (Metaphysical Poetry)
Critical bibliography: T.S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets”; John Carey, “The Art of Apostasy.”
5. John Milton: Paradise Lost (Religion and Neoclassicism)Critical bibliography: (Dr.) Samuel Johnson on Milton (vide The Norton Anthology of English Literature).
6. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews and especially the “Preface” to the novel (the poetics of the modern novel)
Critical bibliography: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (chapter on Fielding).
7. Laurence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (the fantasia novel)Critical bibliography: Jonathan Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle (fragments); Ana-Karina Schneider, “Tristram Shandy: a Postmodern Novel avant la lettre” (ABC Journal, vol. 4).
NOTE: The compulsory critical bibliography listed above will be available in the form of xerox copies with our secretary, Miss Angela Cozma. Most of the primary texts are available in anthologies and readers, with the exception of the two novels. If you have any trouble finding them, please feel free to contact your teacher for advice. The additional bibliography listed below is available in the British and American sections of the Central University Library and will help you study for the final exam as well as prepare your class reports.
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ADDITIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bate, W.J., Prefaces to Criticism. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959.Bear, R., “Introduction” to Sir Philip Sidney’s “Defence of Poesie,” electronic text (see American
Library).Booth, Wayne C., The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second Edition. Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1983.Burgess, A., English Literature: A Survey for Students. Longman Group, 1991 (compulsory reading).The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740. Edited by Steven N. Zwicker.
Cambridge U.P., 1998.The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell. Edited by Thomas N. Corns.
Cambridge U.P., 1994.The Cambridge Companion to John Milton. Cambridge U.P., 1994. Carey, J., John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, London: Faber & Faber, 1990.Ciocoi-Pop, D., Notes on the English Literature (17th- and 18th-century). Second Edition. Sibiu, 2002
(compulsory reading).Cenuser, D.-I., Notes on Elizabethan Criticism, Sibiu: U.P., 2001.The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Edited by E. Sampson. London: Bentley
House. Daiches, D., A Critical History of the English Literature. vol. 3. London: Secker and Warbourg, 1979.Daiches, D., Critical Approaches to Literature. London: Longman’s, 1964. Doody, Margaret Anne, The True Story of the Novel. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1997.Eliot, T.S., Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1964. (see especially “Four
Elizabethan Dramatists. A Preface to an Unwritten Book” and “The Metaphysical Poets”)Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton U.P., 1973.Lamb, Jonathan, Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle, Cambridge U.P., 1989.Legouis, E., A History of English Literature. J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1967.Literary transmission and authority: Dryden and other writers. Edited by Earl Miner and Jennifer
Brady, Cambridge U.P., 1993.The Literature of England. vol. 1. Scott, Foresman and Co., 1947.The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. vol. 2, 3, 4. Edited by Boris Ford. London:
Penguin Books, 1982.The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth edition. Norton, 1993.The Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.Platonism and the English Imaginary. Edited by Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton. Cambridge U.P.,
1996.Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. An Annotated Anthology. Edited by Terence Dawson and Robert
Scott Dupree. London: Harvest Wheatsheaf, 1994.Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel. Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1957.Weinbrot, Howard D., Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian. 1997.
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Lecture 1: Introductory; Contexts
Advice to Students: - Definitions – always mark and learn them by heart! - Always make chronological charts like the one in the appendix to Anthony Burgess’
book!
Today’s Agenda: the political and economic context; aesthetic ages; literary genres; innovation and tradition.
i. The political and economic context :
Ruler Political, Social, Religious Events Literary Events
Elizabeth I(1558-1603)
1587 – Mary Queen of Scots beheaded for alleged
treason;
1588 – Defeat of the Spanish Armada;
Religion in England represents a middle way
between Marian Catholicism and Lutheran
Protestantism, with the monarch as head of the
Church.
1577 – Holinshed’s Chronicles;
1578 – John Lyly’s Eupheus;
1586 – Sir Philip Sidney dies (b.
1554);
1590 – Marlowe’s Tamburlaine,
Sidney’s Arcadia, Spenser’s Faerie
Queene (first three books);
1593 – Marlowe killed;
1595 – Sidney’s Defense of Poesie;
1599 – Spenser dies;
James I (1603-25)(Protestant/
Episcopal/
Presbyterian)
1603 – England and Scotland are united under
James I;
1605 – The “Gunpowder Plot”: a failed Catholic
attempt to blow up Parliament and King Guy
Fawkes Day (5 Nov.) preserves anti-Cath.
feelings;
1611 – Authorised version of the Bible;
1620 – The Pilgrim Fathers land in Plymouth,
MA, New England, America. (ask ss.: What do
the Americans celebrate as a consequence of that
landing?)
1608 – Milton is born;
1616 – Shakespeare, Francis
Beaumont (b. 1584), and Cervantes
die; Chapman’s Homer appears;
1621 – Burton’s Anatomy of
Melancholy;
1625 – Bacon’s Essays; John Fletcher
dies (b. 1579)
Charles I (1625-49)(Anglican)
1629-40 – “Divine Right of Kings” – Charles
ruled without Parliament;
1642 – outbreak of Civil War;
1647 – Charles surrenders to Parliament;
1649 – 1st English King to be beheaded
1633 – Donne’s Poems;
1642 – all theatres are closed;
1645 – Milton’s Poems
The Interregnum(1649-1660)(Puritan)
The Commonwealth (i.e., military gov.) (1649-53)
The Protectorate (1653-60): Oliver Cromwell
becomes Lord Protector;
1657 – Cromwell declines English crown;
1658 – Cromwell dies, his son Richard is named
Protector;
Almost no literary productions are
published;
1654 – Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan
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1659 – Richard Cromwell resigns; England is
governed by Parliament
Charles II(1660-85)(quietly Catholic)
Etc. (see Burgess) 1663 – Butler’s Hudibras (Part I);
1667 – Milton’s Paradise Lost;
1678 – Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
James II (1685-88)(manifestly Cath)
1688 – King is deposed with the support of
Parliament – Glorious Revolution
1687 – Isaac Newton’s Principia
William and Mary of Orange(1688-1702)(Protestant)
1690 – John Locke’s Two Treatises of
Government and Essay Concerning
Human Understanding
Anne (1702-14)(Protestant)
1702 – First daily paper established:
The Daily Courant;
1709 – Steele begins The Tatler;
1711 – Addison and Steele begin The
Spectator
Recap: Political ages: The Elizabethan Age – last part of/ High Renaissance (politically, still Tudor “tyranny by consent,” at least until 1588 – Defeat of the Spanish Armada)The Jacobean Age / beginning of the Stuart Dynasty1
The Carolinian AgeThe Interregnum / Commonwealth + The ProtectorateThe RestorationThe Augustan Age / the Hanoverian Dynasty etc. (1688 – Glorious Revolution – beginning of constitutional monarchy)
Main issues: In religion: “How far should the reformation of the Protestant Church be carried?” – and the solution reached in 1688: “As far as each individual self-defined religious group wants.”
In constitutional politics: “How much authority should the monarch have independent of Parliament?” – and the solution reached in 1688: “Almost none.”
Main change: from a society based on hierarchy, uniformity and personal loyalty, to one of diversity and mutual toleration, which did not need to be so tightly controlled, whether by the court or the church, but also (esp. in the upper layers) from a society dominated by the principle of honour to one controlled by (economic) interest.
Economy: - 17th c.: great colonial expansion: exodus of Puritans during the Carolinian Age, and of
Catholics (esp. Irish) during the Interregnum => highly profitable commerce + decongestion of labour market and population excess in England + power position in
1 A dynasty marked by constant conflicts with Parliament.
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negotiating political issues with other European countries.- Late 18th c.: Industrial Revolution: migration of labour from the countryside to the
industrial towns to work in the new textile mills etc. => overcrowding of towns, unsanitary living conditions, but also a certain degree of prosperity, which allows more and more people of the middle and lower classes to become literate => increasing demand for periodicals and unpretentious prose + decline of interest in poetry, which is less marketable than the novel, for instance (=> poetry and drama become elite genres; poetry will be revived during the Romantic Age).
ii.Aesthetic ages :The Elizabethan Age / Renaissance2 characterised by Humanism + Classicism The Jacobean Age / Baroque characterised by Humanism + Classicism (more
refined) The Interregnum – aesthetic and philosophical vacuum (more or less),
dominated by religionThe Restoration + The Augustan Age / The Enlightenment3 / The Age of
Reason / Neo-Classicism The late 18th century / The Age of Sentimentality / Preromanticism
Classic = 1. “A book everybody talks about but nobody reads” (Mark Twain). – an artist or artistic production belonging to the canon; serving as a standard. 2. belonging to the ancient Greek or Roman cultures.Classical = pertaining to the Greek and Roman antiquity, characterised by order, harmony, rationality, simplicity – e.g. classical beauty – but also artificial, contrived, stylised, essentialised. Classicism = idealisation and recuperation of the antiquity, characterised by order, harmony, rationality, simplicity, discipline, equilibrium.Neoclassicism = a new revival of the interest for classical order and the Greek and Roman antiquities during the Enlightenment.Canon = originally, referring to the sanctioned books of the Bible; now, a set of artists / writers / artistic productions whose aesthetic value is universally acknowledged. – e.g. the canon of English romantics, the canon of world literature, the canon of modernist novelists etc. Paradigm = a coherent set of cultural phenomena whose relevance transcends the confines of a chronological period. – e.g. the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Victorianism, Modernism, Postmodernism etc. – e.g. the Enlightenment = recuperation of classical art and philosophy + technological progress + industrial revolution + rationality and the belief in the power of human reason over the world etc. The Enlightenment project continues even nowadays. Humanism = an intellectual and philosophical trend centred around the preoccupation with the improvement of the human lot, especially through education the Humanists are also
2 In italics here are the names of paradigms. 3 Next paradigm after this is the Romantic one (early 19th c.).
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known as the Educationists – e.g. John Colet, Sir Roger Ascham, Sir Thomas Elyot, Sir John Cheke, Thomas Wilson...
TS Eliot’s theory of the “dissociation of sensibility”: after the late Elizabethan Age, the mind and heart never worked together in perfect concord, but took turns: age of reason + age of sensibility + age of reason (Victorian) + age of exacerbated sensibility (modernist) etc. (he sought to recover that early undissociated sensibility of the Metaphysical poets in his own work).
iii. Literary genres
Age Prose Drama VerseI. Renaissance
(-1603)
Educational essays: Roger
Ascham’s The Scholemaster
(1570);
Stephen Gosson’s School of
Abuse (1579);
Sidney’s Defense of Poesie
(1595), Arcadia (1590) (1 st long
prose fiction).
Shakespeare, Marlowe and
the University Wits
(the most popular cultural
manifestation).
Shakespeare, Sidney,
Spenser.
Most prestigious
genre: the epic poem;
Most popular: the
sonnet.
II. The Jacobean Age
(1603-1642)
Philosophical essays: Francis
Bacon’s Essays (1625).
Comedy of humours: Ben
Jonson’s Volpone (1606),
Every Man in His Humour,
Every Man out of His
Humour; Fletcher and
Beaumont;
Blood and thunder tragedy:
John Webster’s Duchess of
Malfi, The White Devil etc.
John Donne’s Poems
(1633); the
Metaphysical poets;
John Milton’s Lycidas
(1637), Poems (1645).
III. The Interregnum
(1649-1660)
Political essays: Thomas
Hobbes’ Leviathan (1654);
Religious tracts, sermons.
IV. The Restoration
(early
Enlightenment)
(1660-1689)
John Dryden’s An Essay of
Dramatic Poesy (1668);
John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s
Progress (1678); John Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Letter
Concerning Toleration, and Two
Treatises of Government (all
1690).
Tragedies adapted to the
classical rules: Dryden’s
All for Love (1678),
Troilus and Cressida
(1679), The Conquest of
Granada, etc.
Dryden’s Absalom and
Achitophel,
McFlecnoe;
John Milton’s
Paradise Lost (1667),
Paradise Regained,
Samson Agonistes etc.
V. The
Enlightenment/ Age
of Reason
(1689-1760)
1702-onwards – the 1 st
periodicals.
Fiction: D. Defoe’s Robinson
Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders;
J. Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704),
Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
David Hume’s Enquiry
Concerning Principles of
Morals (1751) (philosophy).
Comedies of manners:
William Congreve’s Love
for Love (1695), The Way
of the World (1700).
Alexander Pope’s
Essay on Criticism
(1711), Essay on Man,
The Rape of the Lock,
The Dunciad, etc.
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Dr. S. Johnson’s Dictionary
(1755).
VI. The Age of
Sentimentality /
Preromanticism /
Late Enlightenment
(roughly, the 2nd half
of the 18th century)
The Novel: S. Richardson’s
Pamela (1740), Clarissa, Sir
Charles Grandison;
H. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews,
Tom Jones (1749), Amelia;
L. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
(1760-7);
H. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
(1765);
O. Goldsmith’s Vicar of
Wakefield (1766).
History: Gibbon’s Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire (1776
– 1st part), Adam Smith’s The
Wealth of Nations (1776).
Education: Mary
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication
of the Rights of Women (1792).
Richard Brinsley
Sheridan’s School for
Scandal, The Rivals (1775)
etc.
Percy’s Reliques of
English Poetry (1765
– anthology);
James Macpherson’s
Poems of Ossian
(1763);
Thomas Gray’s Poems
(1768);
Robert Burns’ Poems
(1786);
William Blake’s Songs
of Innocence (1789).
iv. Innovation and tradition The recuperation of classical art and philosophy initiated during the Renaissance continues and is intensified during the next two centuries. There is an increasing emphasis on simplicity of style, a reaction against the adorned style and empty decorative language of the Renaissance, both from Puritan quarters and from some of the philosophers, such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Following the example of the French Racine and Corneille, literary theoreticians and writers of the 17th c. theorise the appropriateness of adopting certain literary genres and/or adapting them to the needs of the English artistic temperament. – e.g. Ben Jonson’s and John Dryden’s theoretical essays, following in the footsteps of Sidney et co.
Certain literary genres died out and others became mainstream as a result of cultural and economic developments. e.g.:
- The epic poem has one last great avatar in Milton’s Paradise Lost, then dies out; so does the allegory, in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; in the late 17th and the 18th c., they will be revived in parodic modes: the mock-heroic poem (Dryden, Pope), the novel.
- Pindaric odes are resuscitated by Ben Jonson and Abraham Cowley, then peter away until Grey and Wordsworth’s time.
- The sonnet, once all the rage in erotic poetry, became one of the main forms of religious expression with Donne and esp. Milton, then died out, to be resuscitated once more by the Romantics.
- The religious strife breeds religious poems, tracts, and sermons. - The political tensions make it fashionable to write political pamphlets. - The emphasis on reason makes it imperative to write philosophical essays about the
working of the mind, the nature of morality, the social order. - Economic progress in the 18th century makes it possible for people of all social walks
and both genders to pursue an education and demand reading material commensurate
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with their level of education – i.e., readers’ digests, light prose, news, stories about similar experiences.
- The increasing importance of education and emphasis on morality and propriety make it imperative to have tracts on education.
- The great impetus of new literary forms requires the development of prescriptive literary criticism and theory, both for the benefit of readers and of writers.
Greatest philosophers of the century: John Locke, pupil of Thomas Hobbes, pupil of Sir Francis Bacon.
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Lecture 2: Literary Criticism
Today’s Agenda: I. Renaissance criticism: the Educationists: Sir Roger Ascham, Sir Thomas Elyot, etc.; the
Puritans: Stephen Gosson; the Courtiers: Sir Philip Sidney. II. The disciplinisation of criticism: the Classicists: Sir Francis Bacon and Ben Jonson; the
Neoclassicists: John Dryden and John Milton.
I. The 16th was the 1st century of the printed book, and the Elizabethan Age was a comparatively prolific one in writing and publishing, most of which was religious or educative in purport, written either in Latin or in English. Many of these books were the production of prestigious professors teaching at Oxford, Cambridge and the so-called Inns of Court (institutions of both the law and education) in London. Influenced both by the humanist exaltation of classical languages and by the Renaissance desire for eternal fame, many Renaissance scholars (Ascham, Thomas Morus, etc.) were suspicious of literary productions written in the unstable vernaculars. At the same time, the religious Reformation pleaded for a wider accessibility of the written word that contaminated the profane as well as the sacred text. The controversies bred by these opposing tendencies were highly seminal, as can be seen by comparing Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1670) with Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (written 1679, publ. 1695 in two eds.), or the latter text with its Puritan counterpart, Stephen Gosson’s School of Abuse (1679), or even the various Educationists. Sir Thomas Elyot, for instance, considered that all literature, even the bawdiest, can serve as a lesson in morality by educating the reader to make moral choices. Roger Ascham, on the contrary, insists that only the finest of ancient writing be used as an object of imitation both in terms of rhetoric and morals.
Yet as more was composed in the English language, metatexts increasingly deal with the principles of poetic composition. Such are the treatises of George Gascoigne (c.1534-77) (“Certayne Words of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English,” 1575), King James VI of Scotland (“Ane Short Treatise Conteining Some Reulis and Cautelis to be Observit and Eschewit in Scotts Poesie,” 1584), the massive book The Arte of English Poesie (1589) attributed to Richard Puttenham (c.1529-91), and the less pertinent Discourse of English Poetry (1586) by William Webbe (1568-91). Puttenham especially is open to the innovations and merits of English poetry, and he praises Wyatt and Surrey for adapting the Italian form of the sonnet and polishing the English language, Chaucer for the “grave and stately” metre in Troilus and Criseyde (although he does not appreciate The Canterbury Tales), alongside Ralegh, Dyer, and Queen Elizabeth I (!).
Throughout the Renaissance, despite the copious development of a wide variety of literary genres, literature was regarded as an adjunct activity, a part of the education process – witness Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528, transl. by Holy in 1560) and Ascham’s Scholemaster. Moreover, education itself was reserved only for the higher classes, and especially for their male membership. Hence, there were comparatively few readers and
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publishers of books by our standards, and no professional men or women of letters. Elizabethan writers of rank, like Sidney, thought of themselves as courtiers, statesmen, and landowners; they considered poetry a social grace and a courtly pastime. Consequently, the primary aim of the careful study of the classics was the appropriation of their resounding rhetoric and graceful language. Paradoxically, nevertheless, Renaissance writers were not slavish imitators of the ancients. Rather, they looked to classical and Continental works as models to learn from, emulate, transform, and if possible surpass. The level of their expertise in a variety of fields was simply astounding, and they valued the intricacy of design and elaborateness of pattern in rhetoric.
The first truly pertinent and sophisticated treatise on literature in English is Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie/An Apologie for Poetrie (1595) and it marks a return to the issue of the nature of poetry and its role in society. Its writing was prompted by a pamphlet entitled The School of Abuse (1579) by Stephen Gosson (1554-1624), who had the bad taste and poor judgement to dedicate his Puritan diatribe against poetry to Sir Philip Sidney, one of the best poets of the time. The latter was not the only writer to retaliate: Thomas Lodge (1558-1625) was the first to reply in his own Defence of Poetry (1579), and Edmund Spenser (c.1552-99) attacked it in a letter to a friend. Yet, as Blamires notes, “To turn to Sidney’s work from the works previously dealt with in this chapter is to enter a different world” (55).
The first English Renaissance poet of note, Philip Sidney (1554-1586) was widely regarded in his own day as an ideal Renaissance gentleman. Born into a noble family in Kent, he studied at Cambridge, became intimate with Sir Fulke Greville and Camden and became a member of the Areopagus (a club formed chiefly for the purpose of naturalising the classical metres in English verse, which included Spenser, Fulke Greville, Harvey, Dyer etc.). His death in the Spanish War sparked general morning in England and evoked elegies by Spenser, James VI, Michael Drayton and others. To his admiring contemporaries, Sidney was the English model of the universal Renaissance man: a gentleman of humanist education committed to both the active life of virtue and the artistic and patriotic ideal of creating a literature to stand beside the great vernaculars of Europe. He defended English literature against the attacks of the Puritans who, in addition to considering it dangerous to Christian morality, opposed Sunday performances and the enactment of feminine roles by male actors. Sidney also defended literature against Platonic attacks on its nature as a pernicious and useless imitation of an imitation. As Daiches points out, Sidney himself was both a Puritan and a neo-Platonist (a humanist), as well as a poet, and therefore “[h]is defence of poetry was a noble attempt to combine all these positions” (70).
Sidney’s Defence of Poesy is the only major work of literary criticism in 16th-century England, a period during which Italy and France produced large numbers of critical treatises, heavily influenced by Aristotle’s Poetics. Sidney’s engaging tract is highly eclectic, drawing together precepts from several traditions and underscoring those that are of primary importance to the Elizabethans: ideal imitation, moral teaching, and decorum. Looking back to Aristotle, Sidney defines poetry as an imitation of nature, but links that imitation to his view of the poet as maker, whose activity reflects that of the Divine Creator. The poet imitates not the real, fallen nature we see, but “lifted up with the vigour of his own invention,” he imitates an ideal nature. Sidney also makes large claims for the didactic role of poetry; he
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invokes Horace’s formula that poetry teaches by delighting, but emphasizes its rhetorical power to move us to be virtuous. He also highlights the importance of suiting subject to genre and style – the idea of decorum so dear to the classicists. In Sidney’s Defence we identify some of the main aesthetic principles of the Renaissance: the delight in the abundance of words, poetic figures and ornaments; the close relation of poetry and rhetoric; the concern with levels of style (high, middle and low); and the continuing importance of allegory as a means to teach moral truths as well as to suggest the mysterious analogies and symbolic relationships that permeate and order God’s universe.
For Sidney, poetry was not a pastime or an exercise of wit; it was a very serious form of art meant to instruct, delight, and move. His point of view is clearly expressed in An Apologie for Poetrie, which is remarkable for the clarity of argument, range of scholarship and imaginative vision. “Ideas flow from his pen. Apt illustrations, imaginative turns of thought and neat dialectical thrusts crowd his pages. And the prose, largely free of arid modish turgidities and superfluous contrivances, carries the reader eagerly forward” (Blamires 55). His arguments for a new type of poetry are fashioned around the persuasive formulae of the seven-part classical oration, and many of them are in line with the classical Latin rhetorical tradition (the emphasis on decorum, on the inadvisability of mixing the genres, especially tragedy and comedy; the Horatian misce utile dulci etc.). Although Aristotle’s Poetics could have served as an effective model for this defence of poetry, its influence is rather nominal, mostly due to a very restrictive understanding of that classical text that had to do with its rediscovery, translation and editing by the Italian humanists in the 16th century.
In Sidney’s essay, the poet is the first purveyor of knowledge, a prophet (vates in Latin) and maker (poietes in Greek), and Sidney shows how he is superior to mere analysts of fallen nature like the moral philosopher and the historian, since the poet’s mind alone can glimpse the eternal types of “virtues, vices or what else” that underlie the world of appearance. These visions of the ideal the poet then shapes in verse, so that erring men may be delighted and improved by them, even if they cannot fully attain to such excellence themselves. In other words, by fashioning exemplary figures, the poet invents a “golden” world for our profit and delight. His work is a faithful copy of the eternal verities rather than of incidental actualities, of what should be, from a moral point of view (rather than the Aristotelian “should” of probability).
This is the process Sidney outlines in his ‘proposition’ – the core of his argument – when he defines the subject thus: “Poesie therefore is an arte of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word Mimesis – that is to say, a representing, counterfetting, or figuring foorth – to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture: with this end, to teach and delight.” The emphasis, as this definition suggests through the tautological translation of mimesis, is on the contrived and invented nature of the copy, which, therefore, makes no claims to truth, and cannot, consequently, in good faith, be accused of lying or deceiving. Sidney does not seem to be aware here that he is addressing Plato’s main objection to poetry (its second-hand imitation condition), and rather than insist, in Platonic terms, on the Ideas or verities behind the imitation, he emphasises the fact that literature offers an alternative to reality, and a superior one, at that. He also suggests that by delighting the audience with his images of perfection and poetic justice, the poet stimulates them to imitate literature, rather than consider literature an imitation of reality. The word Sidney employs is the Horatian “move,” though used here more
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ambiguously so as to suggest not only the arousing of emotion (to which Plato had objected so strenuously), but especially persuasion, enlisting passion on the side of virtue. The poet does that by employing a lively and passionate style, well exemplified by Sidney himself in his essay. Thus, in addition to fighting poetry’s detractors on their own ground – that of moral teaching – his Defence of Poesie also has the authority of having been written in full awareness of the condition of the poet from the inside, as it were.
II. The Classicists The Late Renaissance
There was much discussion during the Elizabethan Age of matters concerning the function, the proper province (discourse), and the proper form (decorum) of poetry. Many important poets became involved – among them, Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Campion and many others. Much of this debate fruitlessly pivoted around the controversy of classical metres in English (Sidney himself felt compelled to address that issue in his Defence). Far more interesting are the essays appended by translators to their English versions of classical and modern masterpieces, such as for instance Sir John Harington’s rendering of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591), Thomas Drant’s translations from Horace, or George Chapman’s version of Homer’s Iliad (1578).
Yet poets were not the only ones concerned with literary matters. The philosopher Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), in the second book of his ambitious work The Advancement of Learning (1603 and 1605), “argues that the three parts of man’s understanding are memory, imagination, and reason,” and that none of these suffices alone.
History relates to his memory, poetry to his imagination, and philosophy to his reason. … Since the imagination is not ‘tied to the laws of matter,’ poetry has such licence that it may ‘at pleasure join that which Nature hath severed, and sever that which Nature hath joined.’ In respect to style, Poetry is a technical matter belonging to ‘arts of speech.’ In respect to substance, poetry is ‘FEIGNED HISTORY’ [i.e., hypomnesis, false memory], which can be presented either in prose or in verse. … Poetry feigns acts and events that are ‘greater and more heroical’ than history can supply, and distributes reward and retribution to virtue and vice more justly than life itself, and more in accordance with divine Providence [poetic justice]. Poetry is judged to have ‘some participation of divineness’ because of the way it exalts and fulfils the aspirations of the mind, while ‘reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.’ (Blamires 63)
Bacon’s methodical, almost pedantic considerations and classifications of poetry may make it sound more like a craft than an art. Although having a direct stake in, and a more passionate response to, literature, Ben Johnson’s (1572-1637) scattered theorising is almost as severely organised. In his various prologues, prefaces, and dedicatory epistles, he pleads for a drama that strictly observes the classical unities of time, place and plot, and, especially in tragedy, “truth of Argument, dignity of Persons, gravity and height of Elocution, fullness and frequency of Sentence” (Preface to Sejanus) (i.e., decorum). His main preoccupation is with the moralising function of literature, and insists that only restraint, truthfulness to nature (i.e., realism) and a systematic arrangement of the material can fulfil it. As Blamires puts it, “[h]e was a neo-classicist soaked in the literary traditions of the past, yet so alive to the contemporary world that in his comedies the portrayal of Elizabethan life, vulgar, boisterous
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and sourly satirical, throbs with vitality” (63). His commonplace book Timber, or Discoveries (written between 1620 and 1635), although heavily influenced by classics and classicists, evinces a very powerful personal stamp. “The voice is that of abounding confidence, of perspicuity and commonsense” (ibid. 64). At the same time, the book is filled with thoughtful considerations of his contemporaries (Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne are among the ones he praises), as well as defences of his own plays.
Although less original and influential than Sidney, Jonson introduced many of the recurrent features of future criticism. The tone of self-righteousness and the erudition of the literary dictator are also recognisable in John Dryden and Samuel Johnson; his moderation and commonsense set a worthy example for future generations of neo-classicists. And his superlative praise of Shakespeare’s grace and ease with language, as well as of his thorough understanding of human nature, alongside the acknowledgement of his wilful ignorance of classical order and poetic justice were to become leitmotivs of Shakespearean criticism in the next three centuries.
The Restoration In the two decades that followed after Ben Jonson’s death, religious strife and civil
tension, as well as the domination of the Puritanic ethos, were not conducive to much pertinent literary debate. After the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, literary productiveness returned, but the French fashion was leading the way, in criticism as much as in the arts and entertainments of the reinstated court and aristocracy. Nonetheless, the moral and theological struggle between the Puritans and the Anglicans continued in the realm of literature and in commentary upon it. Here is how Blamires describes the age:
Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711) was an exponent of a classicism which set the highest value on the role of reason in poetry, and his book L’art poetique (1674) won him a European reputation in the “Age of Reason.”
In the course of the 17th century, the concerns of those who passed judgement on literature varied enormously. In the early decades, as theological controversy gathered force in public life, we naturally find anxiety to justify poetry by its educative usefulness. We hear claims for the poet as philosopher and sage which seem to anticipate Shelley. An exalted notion of the Christian poet is expounded by [Henry] Reynolds and [John] Milton, and touched on less persuasively by [Sir William] Davenant and [Abraham] Cowley. Then the respective roles of fancy and of reason are disputed. The respective authority of the ancients, of the French, and of the Elizabethans is brought into question. So is the respective value of stylistic plainness or of ornament, of rhyme or of blank verse, of the couplet or of the ode. Should there be rules or no rules? Should comedy be mixed with tragedy? Is the poet’s duty to instruct or to delight?
Most of the significant issues received their fullest treatment at the hands of Dryden. (Blamires 69-70)
Indeed the age was rich in controversy, much of which was sparked either by the relationship of poetry to Christianity or to ancient antecedents, and was initiated on French soil. It was seldom that the discussion was disentangled from the intellectual, moral and spiritual function of literature, and few were as deeply aware of the fundamental autonomy of the aesthetic as Dryden was.
John Dryden (1631-1700) was not only one of the most highly appreciated critics of
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his time, but also one of the most intensely involved in the debates concerning the nature and function of literature, and especially of dramatic poetry, as can be seen from his numerous written dialogues with contemporary critics. His much celebrated Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) is only one such instance, and it was followed in the same year by the publication of A Defence of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy. These, as well as a plethora of prologues, prefatory essays and apologies mark the evolution not only of his personal preferences, convictions and principles, but of those of the age. According to Dryden, poetry is “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” In other words, poetry reveals character by realistically presenting it in action, and thus instructs mankind in psychology as much as in morals. A century after Sidney, the emphasis is no longer on literature’s function to explicate moral philosophy as much as on conveying empirical knowledge about the real world (see Daiches 74-75). In this, Dryden is a man of his neoclassical age.
Through much of his career he pleads that rhyme is the appropriate medium for the dignified matter of tragedy, that to delight is poetry’s prime function, and that the classical rules and unities are the proper reins on imaginative extravagance. He defends English drama in the various battles of the ancients vs. the moderns and the French vs. the English, claiming that it is possessed of a unique quality of vigour and spontaneity that makes up for its unpolished surfaces. He looks up to Ben Jonson’s Timber for neoclassical principles that are adaptable to the English temperament and taste.
By the time he re-wrote Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra into All for Love (1678), he had come to prefer blank verse to rhyme and to regard French drama as supremely artificial and boring. The next year, in the preface to his revised version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1679), he makes clear his preference for the refinements of his age in terms of language and character, and rehearses the need to observe the principles set forth by Aristotle, Horace and Longinus. He next turns his attention to translation, but his concern with what is both appropriate and appealing to the English public is never forgotten.
The full range of Dryden’s critical acumen and the odd streak of critical insensitivity come together finally in his Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern, Translated into Verse from Homer, Virgil, Boccace, and Chaucer (1700). … Dryden challenges [Thomas] Hobbes’s view that “the first beauty of an epic poem consists in diction; that is, in the choice of words, and harmony of numbers [i.e., rhythm].” Words may indeed be the first thing to strike the reader, but it is “the design, the disposition, the manners, and the thoughts” which have prior importance. However, it is in judging Chaucer that Dryden’s vast qualities and odd limitations most forcefully emerge. (Blamires 101)
It is in this context that he proclaims “here is God’s plenty,” that is, in Chaucer’s vast and apt gallery of characters and manners. On the other hand, he says, “Chaucer is a rough diamond,” as his verse and language lack harmony and polish, and does not hesitate to suggest adaptation.
Dryden is also the first to recognise the evolution of literature from one age to another, as well as its social over-determination, thus also launching the discipline of literary history. As Blamires concludes, “Dryden is the man who seems almost singly to have launched English literary criticism on its way. Before him the genre scarcely exists. After him it has bulk and substance” (102). It is therefore with good reason that Samuel Johnson dubbed him
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“the father of English criticism,” just as about Dryden’s contribution to poetry he said that “he found it brick, and he left it marble.”
Dryden’s abilities as both poet and playwright brought him to the attention of the King, who in 1668 made him poet laureate. Two years later the post of royal historiographer was added to the laureateship at a combined stipend of £200, enough money to live on. He was a literary dictator who ruled by the power of personal example, and set a model of common sense and good taste for a literature that was to be intensely English. In his age, the
new discipline of criticism enlisted famous personalities of the literary and philosophical scene such as Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), Abraham Cowley (1618-67), Sir Robert Howard (1626-98), Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon (c.1633-85), Thomas Rymer (1641-1713), Samuel Butler (1613-80), Sir William Temple (1628-99), William Wotton (1666-1726), Jeremy Collier (1650-1726), John Dennis (1657-1734).
John Milton (1608-74), alongside Dryden, helped to create a new age in the development of English literature, an age dominated by reason and order, in keeping with the new tendencies in France and throughout Europe: the Enlightenment. Their work looks back on Humanism and on the Greek and Latin Ancients, but their attitudes differ: while Dryden pleads for change, for evolution, for the acceptance of what came to be regarded as Neoclassicism, an innovative re-assessment of the ancient values in literature, Milton’s work is the culmination of Renaissance art. Milton is in fact an astounding instance of the opposing forces colliding during the Restoration Age: though a fervent Puritan, he reacted against institutionalised religion, preferring instead his own personal interpretation of “the ways of God to men” and publicly argued that divorce should be granted on grounds of incompatibility; on the other hand, he could never adapt to the fashionable liberalism of the Restoration people and defended the Puritan regime to the very last moment. Though very much a man of his age, deeply involved in the political and social affairs of his country, as a writer he represents the epitome of the Renaissance. Milton’s retrograde / backwards-looking propensity is so strong, that critics have gone as far as to regard – and often ridicule – him as the only representative of the Ancients in a still on-going battle against the Moderns. This is of course an exaggeration, as the Ancients still represented the norm well into the 18th century; nonetheless, by 1700 Milton had entered the canon of English literature in spite – or indeed perhaps because – of his uniqueness.
Areopagitica (1644), Milton’s best-known pamphlet, was occasioned by an Ordinance for Printing that had been issued one and a half years earlier, and which attempted to control the publication of unlicensed material. The Stuart police being what it was, it was not the effects of the Ordinance that inflamed Milton, but the principle itself. The pamphlet is highly modern in its defence of the freedom of expression and thought. As God had given man the freedom to choose among the many foods of the physical world, urging only temperance, so He had also left him free to pick and choose for himself among ideas. Man’s choice, Milton argues, should not be limited for the sake of petty mercantile and ideological privilege. In its florid, oratorical tone, as well as in conception, however, the text is classicist: it implies a parallel between the ancient Greek supreme tribunal and the English Parliament, with Milton himself as the wise Isocrates, whose title and rhetorical style he borrows. As with his pamphlets on divorce (1643-5) and Of Education (1644), in spite of the conventional rhetoric,
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the ideas upheld are quite radical for that time. They question, with biblical or classical arguments, some of the most deeply engrained social conventions as well as political decisions, at a time when larger political issues pre-empted the social reform in whose name they had been undertaken.
In essays such as The Reason of Church Government Urg’d Against Prelaty (1641) and Apology for Smectymnuus (1642), Milton treats of his own vocation as a poet. Keenly aware of the high calling of the poet and his own potential for becoming a bard of his nation, he insists on the importance of personal moral integrity and heroism to the one who will be a poet, and thus not only a celebrator of great deeds and ideals but also a personal example. This lofty concept of the poet’s role is clearly relevant to the production of his great epic Paradise Lost, where it is reinforced by the use of blank verse and a subtle system of keywords and echoes, whose role and importance are defended in the Preface to that work (1668).
Viewed against the background of prose propaganda that Milton was writing almost to the exclusion of all other genres during the Civil War and Commonwealth period, these pamphlets reveal the writer to be not only self-righteous but also opinionated and critical. After the Restoration, as his opinions become both potentially dangerous to himself and less likely to find a large audience, Milton returns to the far more refined medium of poetry for the expression of his positions on religion, politics, society, and literature.
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Lecture III: The English Drama after Shakespeare
Today’s Agenda: - the Jacobean “blood and thunder” tradition; - Ben Jonson’s “comedy of humours”; - Restoration drama (Dryden, Congreve, Sheridan).
I. If the 16th century was the 1st century of the printed book, the 17th was the 1st century of the professional writer and literary critic. The Jacobean Age, however, remained one in which the printed text was addressed mainly to a select courtly readership and assumed a classical education in its readers. In drama, this was a century that lived and breathed in the shadow of Shakespeare. While theatre-going was still the most popular form of entertainment for the Jacobeans, the plays acquired a twofold seriousness: on the one hand, the fin de siècle, apocalyptic mood of the late 16th century that had prompted Shakespeare to write his major tragedies continued to produce “blood and thunder tragedies” throughout the next decades. On the other, the increasing self-awareness and professionalism of the writers imposed the Neo-classical models and rules prescribed by Aristotle but never before seriously regarded as applicable.
Questions: 1. Define “blood and thunder tragedy” and give e.g. 2. What do you think was their main appeal? 3. Who did they appeal to? 4. What kind of effect did their sensationalism and horror have on the audience?
In any other age than Shakespeare’s a group of writers that included not only Ben Jonson but John Ford, John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, Francis Beaumont, John Marston, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton would have been the climactic glory of the English stage. John Webster (1580?-1625?) “stands out as second only to Jonson – not as a contriver of well-articulated stage actions, but for the dark poetry of his tragic imagination.” Practically nothing is known with any degree of certainty about Webster’s life (apparently he was an undistinguished lawyer). He collaborated with other playwrights and came into his style only gradually. There is evidence that he drew heavily on his readings, and modern scholarship has been able to trace almost every phrase and concept in his plays to their source. Yet the result is one of great originality: “His art is one of brilliant highlights and black shadows, of furtive and dangerous intrigue carried out in the flickering light of hellfire; it serves to illuminate one clear character who accepts without faltering or cringing the ultimate test.” Though he is not skilled at articulating persuasive plots, Webster is capable of tremendous poetic flashes. His scenes of brooding, stagnant terror give new depth and meaning to that favourite Jacobean word melancholy. Their darkness is lit by frequent imaginative lightnings.” His best plays
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include The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. The latter especially, although a conventional Jacobean demonisation of Catholic Italy, is remarkable for the delineation of the female protagonist, one of the freest and most positive women in all English drama (Norton Anthology 1281).
II. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) was the 1st writer to live solely by the earnings brought in by his writing, as well as the 1st literary dictator in English literature. In his various prologues, prefaces, and dedicatory epistles, he pleads for a drama that strictly observes the classical unities of time, place and plot, and, especially in tragedy, “truth of Argument, dignity of Persons, gravity and height of Elocution, fullness and frequency of Sentence” (Preface to Sejanus). His main preoccupation is with the moralising function of literature, and insists that only restraint, truthfulness to nature (i.e., realism) and a systematic arrangement of the material can fulfil it. As Blamires puts it, “[h]e was a neo-classicist soaked in the literary traditions of the past, yet so alive to the contemporary world that in his comedies the portrayal of Elizabethan life, vulgar, boisterous and sourly satirical, throbs with vitality” (63). His commonplace book Timber, or Discoveries (written between 1620 and 1635), although heavily influenced by classics and classicists, evinces a very powerful personal stamp and is filled with thoughtful considerations of his contemporaries (Shakespeare, Sidney, Donne are among the ones he praises), as well as defences of his own plays. His superlative praise of Shakespeare’s grace and ease with language, as well as of his thorough understanding of human nature, alongside the acknowledgement of his wilful ignorance of classical order and poetic justice were to become leitmotivs of Shakespearean criticism in the next three centuries.
The 1st of Jonson’s major plays was Every Man In His Humour (1598) (also the 1st he published), in whose stage performance Shakespeare acted a leading role. It was also the 1st of the so-called comedies of humours, in which the prevailing eccentricities and ruling passions of men (i.e., their “humours”) were exposed to satire. It was followed by Every Man Out of His Humour. Jonson’s classical tragedy Sejanus (1603) has not been much liked (it is gloomy in mood, static in action, and weighty with antiquarian lore). Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610), on the other hand, are two supreme satiric comedies of the English stage. Both have been repeatedly “adapted” and “modernised,” although even now the original texts seem very lively and vital. The former especially is a brilliant mixture of classical satire and Italian comedia dell’arte, akin to the fable and the Renaissance tradition of voluminous comic exaggeration (see Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel). The central topic – sordid greed deluded by ruthless guile – dictated the tone of the play, which is cruelly funny. Yet Jonson protested the inhumanity not just of greedy people but of greedy laws that protected their acquisitions. At the same time, his play is replete with an invincible spirit of mischief and fun and a delight in the con game for its own sake that provide the real dynamic of the play and make it highly original and enjoyable.
Meanwhile, Jonson began in 1605 to write a series of masques for the court. These were elaborate semi-theatrical displays involving spectacle, ballet, allegory, and compliment to the king or queen. He thus became involved with the life of the court, a connection that was formalised in 1616, when he was appointed poet laureate, with a substantial pension. In the same year he published in a splendid volume his collected Works (1st writer to publish his
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complete works), a body of plays and poetry to which he kept adding in the years before his death. Though his later plays were not very successful, he turned out many occasional poems, verse letters, translations, complimentary verse before other poets’ volumes. In writing all these he found a grave, incisive pattern of formal speech through which the reverberations of his immense classical learning make themselves heard (see Norton Anthology 1127).
III. In addition to being the 1st century of professional authorship, the 17th was also the 1st century in which the autonomy of the aesthetic was declared, as well as one of remarkable developments in the dramatic medium. Thus, after the Restoration of monarchy (1660), although the informative and educational functions of literature remain crucial, poetry is no longer defined as any text written for the intellectual and moral benefit of a readership. Instead, it is an imaginative imitation of nature, written or performed for aesthetic enjoyment. The moving and entertaining functions of poetry come centre-stage and an increasing emphasis is laid on artistry and decorum. Hence, the mannerism of style and implausibility of characters and actions – altogether, the highly artificial quality of the Restoration drama and poetry – but also their elegant diction and balanced form.
It is also from this century that women’s 1st attempts to join the literary world date. With the reopening of the playhouses in 1660, a new fashion was brought to the English stage from France: women were for the 1st time allowed to play feminine roles on stage. Moreover, one of the best playwrights of the day was Aphra Behn (ca. 1640-1689). Women’s presence on stage helped create a new style and type of performance which aimed to attract the court and its adherents and did nothing to conciliate Puritan sensibilities, although that had been the ostensible reason for their presence there. It is also at this time that women make the first timid attempts to insert themselves in the literary talk of the recently-opened coffeehouses. However, they will not be recognised as serious competition on the creative and critical scene until the mid-18th century, when the unconventionally-dressed Bluestockings establish clubs and salons of their own under the leadership of the wealthy Elizabeth Montague, where gradually men will begin to join them for literary conversation.
Although the 1642 ordinance against stage plays made it illegal to perform on stage, and effectively discouraged playwrights from producing original dramas, there is documentary indication that plays went on being performed in private and public theatres and that on festive occasions Cromwell’s court organised masques and pageants. During the last years of the Protectorate, Sir William Davenant had a massive contribution to the revival and innovation of the theatre. As a result, after the Restoration, he was, alongside Thomas Killigrew, one of the two people to have a royal patent from the Lord Chamberlain for theatrical performances by his company. Granting them this kind of monopoly was a way of controlling what could be represented on stage, but it also encouraged professional craftsmanship in the field. There were however several other illicit theatrical companies during the Restoration which ensured a healthy competitiveness. The relationship with the Court was very close, in terms of status for the actors as royal servants, financially, through gifts in money and clothing, and more generally in terms of the need for noble patrons, as well as politically, through censorship. On the other hand, the relationship to the audience is considerably changed: instead of the massive cross-section of the Elizabethan society, performances are now attended mostly by the lower- and upper-middle class, and selectively
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but efficiently patronised by the upper class, in an atmosphere of coterie that favours socialising as much as critical appreciation. They usually run for six evenings or more if they are successful, and much less if they are not, and are known to be interrupted by repartees and comments from the pit (now the most fashionable seats in the house). Much is changed in as far as the sets are concerned, moveable and changeable scenery, dance and music are introduced, and the performance takes place in enclosed houses, to artificial light. In addition, the aristocrats could choose to attend a concert or opera, while for the commoners occasional civic pageants were organised in London (thrice a year, at the Lord Mayor’s ceremonials, and the London Bartholomew and Southwark Fairs), along with the entertainments afforded by drolls (short, often farcical plays) and puppet shows.
The favourite themes after the Restoration of monarchy are also the politically correct ones: the Puritans are the comic butts of comedy and the villains of tragedy, while the libertinism of the King and Court make room for a considerable amount of licentiousness on stage, especially in the treatment of love and marriage. In (1) heroic drama, the discourse is that of heirs that are lost and found or fight for their divine right; usurpation and exile are the most frequent themes. In the 1670s, there is a far more sober concern with lineage that stems from the absence of a legitimate heir to the throne of England and the threat posed by the ascendance of the manifestly Catholic James II. In the same decade, the alternative playhouses reintroduce the blood-and-thunder tragedy, whose sensationalism and horror appeal once more to a large segment of the audience. The mainstream historical drama and tragedy presented implausible heroes who could single-handedly conquer whole armies, becoming entangled in insolvable conflicts between the private and the public, between love and honour, emerging in the end with their honour intact and their marital happiness ensured. Written in bombastic heroic couplets, these are generally perceived as fundamentally idealistic and escapist, whereas the (2) comedies were realistic and cynical. Nonetheless, in offering a sentimental alternative to the mercantile ethos of the time by encouraging the pursuit of love at the expense of arranged marriages and ridiculing strict fathers as blocking devices, the comedies of manners and morals contain an element of idealism. At the same time, they are never quite free of conventionalism or misogyny: women may be witty and fashionable, but their liberties seldom extend beyond the right to love the hero. And although they seek to select their own partners, these partners are always within their status group and find the means to reinsert their wives within the socially-prescribed gender role patterns, while the institution of marriage is seldom challenged. Marriage across social boundaries is the punishment reserved for fools who find themselves wedded to other men’s whores.
Whether they are comedies or heroic dramas, these plays articulate what has been called “fictions of authority.” Honour, as Richard Braverman argues, “defines the relationship of sovereign and subject and lends political resonance to the play insofar as it mediates the moral economy that binds them. The sine qua non of honour, service, is expressed in the language of debt.” Love, loyalty, submission is an expression of that debt owed by the subject to the sovereign and, figured as wedlock, also establishes the legitimacy and naturalness of political relationships in power and domination. “Love and honour, in fact, are not really conflictual elements in many of these plays, but parts of a whole that has been disrupted through usurpation and exile” (Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650-1740 93-4). In this, both Restoration comedies and tragedies are essentially a reflection of the concerns
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of the age, and increasingly the realities they portray are connected with political corruption and moral decay, that even the Restoration love of spectacle cannot conceal. Indeed, by 1680, drama breaks its allegiance to the Crown, gradually becoming both politically independent and more concerned with the private and the domestic. As a consequence, it also becomes more aware of the need for a reformation of stage morals. Unfortunately, it also renders its professional practitioners all but insolvent due to the withdrawal of patronage, and some of the most talented playwrights, including Nathaniel Lee, Aphra Behn and Thomas Otway, died in poverty in the late 1680s and early ‘90s. In the early 18th century this niche is filled by an influx of female professional playwrights (Susannah Centlivres, Mary Pix, Catherine Trotter, Jane Wiseman, Delarivier Manley) producing works that are female-oriented in terms of characters and plots. By then, the old guard was dead (even Congreve stopped writing in 1700), and a new tradition of dramatic entertainment was emerging, dominated by opera in the Italian fashion (which replaces English operatic drama), ballet (the offspring of the dance episodes of the 1670s and the ballet entr’actes of the ‘80s), and domestic and sentimental drama.
According to John Dryden (1631-1700), poetry reveals character by realistically presenting it in action, and thus instructs mankind in psychology as much as in morals. A century after Sidney, the emphasis is no longer on literature’s function to explicate moral philosophy as much as on conveying empirical knowledge about the real world (see Daiches 75). In this, Dryden is a man of his neoclassical age. Through much of his career he pleads that rhyme is the appropriate medium for the dignified matter of tragedy, that to delight is poetry’s prime function, and that the classical rules and unities are the proper reins on imaginative extravagance. He defends English drama in the various battles of the ancients vs. the moderns and the French vs. the English, claiming that it is possessed of a unique quality of vigour and spontaneity that makes up for its unpolished surfaces. He looks up to Ben Jonson’s Timber for neoclassical principles that are adaptable to the English temperament and taste.
By the time he re-wrote Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra into All for Love (1678), he had come to prefer blank verse to rhyme and to regard French drama as supremely artificial and boring. His own production is written in blank verse and strenuously observes the classical unities of time, place and action to create a neatly symmetrical plot which comprises the last hours of the tragic lovers. Not only did his play help revive interest in Shakespeare, but it set in motion an entire industry that undertook the re-fashioning of the Elizabethan’s historical plays during the years of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis (1679-82 – see plays by John Crowne, or Nahum Tate, now famous for giving King Lear a happy ending).
In the preface to his revised version of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (1679), Dryden makes clear his preference for the refinements of his age in terms of language and character, and rehearses the need to observe the principles set forth by Aristotle, Horace and Longinus. His urbane intelligence and classical education take advantage of the fact that his audience was mostly comprised of people of fashion, and he creates rhymed heroic plays whose impossibly noble and heroic protagonists face incredibly difficult choices between love and honour. These he defined as “a heroic poem in little” – i.e., the commensurate expression of the conception of heroism held by his age. He also wrote comedies, in which male and
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female rakes engage in complex intrigue and bright repartee; and later, libretti for the newly introduced dramatic form, the opera.
His abilities as both poet and playwright brought him to the attention of the King, who in 1668 made him poet laureate. Two years later the post of royal historiographer was added to the laureateship at a combined stipend of £200, enough money to live on. He was a literary dictator who ruled by the power of personal example, and set a model of common sense and good taste for a literature that was to be intensely English (see NAEL 1787).
The two other eminent tragic poets of the period were Nathaniel Lee (ca. 1649-1692), known for violent plots, the wild emotions of his characters, and the extravagance of his rhetoric, and Thomas Otway (1652-1685), who excelled in pathos and moralising. Not one enduring tragedy was produced during the 18th century. Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713) is a museum piece, illustrating the frigidity of “correct” and rule-bound tragedy. George Lillo’s didactic London Merchant (1731), dealing with commonplace characters in mercantile life, took a feeble step in the direction of the sort of realistic middle-class drama with which we are familiar today.
The real distinction of Restoration drama was comedy. The best plays of Sir George Etherege (ca. 1635-1691), William Wycherley (ca. 1640-1716), Aphra Behn (ca. 1640-1689), William Congreve (1670-1729), and the less accomplished but witty Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) and George Farquhar (ca. 1677-1707) still hold the stage today. These writers excelled in representing – and critically evaluating – the social behaviour of the fashionable upper classes of the town. This sort of comedy – brilliantly witty, cynical in its views of human nature, which it shows to be sensual, egoistic, and predatory – is known as “the comedy of manners,” because its concern is to bring the moral and social behaviour of its characters to the test of comic laughter. The male hero lives not for military glory but for pleasure and the conquest that he can achieve in his amorous campaigns. The object of his very practical game of sexual intrigue is a beautiful, witty, pleasure-loving and emancipated lady, every bit his equal in the strategies of love. The two are distinguished not for virtue but for the true wit and the well-bred grace with which they conduct the often complicated intrigues that make up the plot. The best examples of the comedy of manners are Etherege’s The Man of Mode (produced 1676), Wycherley’s The Country Wife (ca. 1672-74), and Congreve’s The Old Bachelor (1693), Love for Love (1695) and especially The Way of the World (1700) (see NAEL 1778-9).
William Congreve’s The Way of the World is one of the wittiest plays ever written, a play to read slowly and savour. Like an expert jeweller, Congreve polished the Restoration comedy of manners to its ultimate sparkle and gloss. The dialogue is epigrammatic and brilliant, the plot is an intricate puzzle, and the characters shine with surprisingly complex facets. The comedy of situation is complicated with love triangles, confusions and quid pro quos, and simplified by the use of suggestive names (Millamant, Mirabell, Lady Wishfort, Fainall, Petulant or Foible), idiosyncratic speech and transparent sarcasm. Yet the play is not all dazzling surface; it also has depths. In a world of unscrupulous materialism, the only feat of prowess available to the hero is the conquest of an heiress. And if the “way of the world” is cynical self-interest, it is also the worldly prudence that sees through the ruses of power and turns them to better ends. In this world generosity and affection win the day and true love
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conquers all – with the help of some clever plotting (see The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. I, p. 1911). Along with his Love for Love, this play remains Congreve’s most frequently revived work. At the time it was first produced, however, it did not enjoy much popular success and caused the author to give up writing plays in favour of a political career. His one attempt at tragedy, The Mourning Bride (1697), though little appreciated now, enjoyed great popular esteem.
Richard Braverman explains:
18th-century drama is generally regarded as a decline from that of the late 17th century insofar as it expresses bourgeois values of comfort rather than glory, and esteems trade rather than war. The emergent dramatic mode has been characterised as “genteel” with “sentimental” comedies, and “pathetic” domestic tragedies. …
Seemly and exemplary dramas with improving moral agendas were not the only new dramatic fare. Anti-government satirical ballad operas such as John Gray’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and Henry Fielding’s The Grub-Street Opera (1731) [were played to great success]. (Cambridge Companion 99)
Congreve’s heirs in the 18th century were Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) and Oliver Goldsmith (ca. 1730-74), whose best work was produced in the 1770s: The Good-Natured Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773), two comedies of humours by the latter, and The Rivals (1775), St Patrick’s Day (1775), The School for Scandal (1777), and The Critic (1779), by the former. It is remarkable how the wit and cynicism of the Restoration comedy has by now modulated, through extended and sober taste, into moral didacticism and anti-hypocrisy satire. In a century which sincerely relished a good performance and produced an impressive array of famous actors, these two playwrights used their plays to satirise that other popular literary genre, the sentimental novel, along with the shallow ethos it was giving rise to.
By 1737, when the Licensing Act reduced London theatres again to the two licensed companies and submitted that all plays must be first approved by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, “England’s fictions of wealth, sexuality, and authority would, as Henry Fielding found when he lost his job, be equally or more effectively expressed in the novel” (ibid. 100).
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Lecture IV: Seventeenth-century Poetry
The two early 17th-century poets who had the greatest impact on later poetry were Ben Jonson and John Donne. As R.G. Cox notes in The New Pelican Guide to E.Lit., “It is not so much that…there was a ‘school of Donne’ and a ‘school of Jonson’; rather that almost any 17th-c poet will show signs of having learnt from both, though the proportions and the nature of the blend may differ widely” (vol.3 p. 59).
BEN JONSON (1572-1637)
Life: 1572 – born as the foster son of a bricklayer; 1598 – Every Man In His Humour, in which Shakespeare acted a leading role, followed by Every Man Out of His Humour; 1603 – Sejanus (classical tragedy);1605 – starts writing masques for the court;1606 – Volpone;1610 – The Alchemist. Along with Volpone, this is his supreme satiric comedy;1616 – is awarded the title of Poet Laureate; publishes his collected Works, being the first writer to do so; 1620-35 – writes Timber, or Discoveries;
Work: Although his non-dramatic poetry does not show an obvious originality and a decisive breach with contemporary fashions, it does however modify the Elizabethan manner. “Even his songs have a greater neatness and point; they are more economical in method, and the best of them achieve a striking sureness of movement, a kind of controlled élan, which is different from the limpid Elizabethan flow” (ibid. 59-60).
Apart from lyrics, including numerous songs from his plays and masques, Jonson wrote chiefly occasional verse-epigrams, epitaphs, odes and epistles. He rejected equally the Petrarchan convention, the Spenserian fluency and ‘sweetness long-drawn out,’ and with rare exceptions the sonnet form. For his models, he turned from the French and Italian to the Latin lyric poets and epigrammatists, especially Catullus, Horace, and Martial; from these he learned a detached coolness of style which can unite with genuine feeling to give it restraint, stability, and permanence…
Jonson’s classicism was in no sense an escape from the contemporary world; in reaching after an ideal civilisation he did not lose touch with the interests of the life around him and a vigorous native idiom. (ibid. 60)
The effect is one of urbane elegance which always suggests an underlying strength. He “contrives within the smooth regularity of his verse a directness and energy of statement clearly related to speech. His detachment and epigrammatic conciseness combine to produce
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an effect of wit” – though different from the wit of the metaphysical poets. The “kind of strength he sought for was not to be achieved through obscurity or metaphorical complexity,” but rather through a “tough reasonableness” (T.S. Eliot qtd. 61).
The bulk of Jonson’s poetry falls into 5 groups, based mostly on stylistic qualities: 1.poems of festive ceremony – celebrating those qualities of ordered richness and
dignified delight that represent his image of good life. e.g. To Penshurst, Inviting a Friend to Supper etc.
2.elegies and epitaphs – brief, full, simple poems, such as one could imagine being carved on a marble slab – direct, impersonal, inevitable.
3.compliments and tributes – prefixed to books or dedicated to friends, warm yet judicious. E.g. “To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare…”
4.songs – beautifully melodic.5.epigrams – sometimes lewd, sometimes nasty, occasionally funny. We have lost the
taste for this genre, but in those days they were highly appreciated.
JOHN DONNE (1572-1631)
Life:1572 – born in an old Roman Catholic family at a time when the Catholics were badly treated at the hands of the Elizabethan secret police. His faith barred him from education (he attended both Oxford and Cambridge universities, as well as Lincoln’s Inn, but did not get a degree) and social position, but his temperament and lively intelligence helped him attain favour at court, especially with the ladies, but also, later, with King James I. 1598 – appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, one of the highest officials in the queen’s court, he fell in love with and secretly married Lady Egerton’s niece Ann More (1601), causing the ruin of all his hopes for social success: he was dismissed and imprisoned. Sick, poor and desperate, Donne wrote a treatise on the legitimacy of suicide, Biathanatos, which he did not dare publish. Nevertheless, the marriage turned out happily, and he still had some friends willing to offer him patronage.1590’s – quietly abandoned Catholicism; he publicly acknowledged his renunciation when in 1610 and 1611 he published two anti-Catholic polemics (Pseudo-Martyr and Ignatius his Conclave). 1615 – after much hesitation, Donne overcame his scruples and took religious orders, becoming an Anglican priest, but also one of the best preachers in an age of great preachers. 160 of his sermons have survived and serve as models for modern clergymen. In due course, he was appointed Reader in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn.1621 – appointed Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral.1623 – wrote and published his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions as a result of severe illness.1631 – a few weeks before his death, he preached what he called his own funeral sermon and arranged for a final portrait of himself to be made, dressed in his shroud.1633 – first publication of Poems.
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1635 – second publication of Poems.1912 – edition edited by Sir H.J.C. Grierson.
Work:When speaking of himself, Donne once observed that there is a clear distinction
between Jack Donne, the adventurous young rake about the city, who wrote bawdy and cynical verses dedicated to an assortment of mistresses, and the dignified and eloquent Dean of St. Paul’s, the author of famed sermons and sacred poems. What is true about his observation is the fact that Donne did his best to keep his two faces, the public and the private, apart, especially after becoming dean. That is the reason for his never having published his poems – although they were circulated in hand-written copies and widely known and influential in the literary circles of the time – as well as for the fact that an exact chronology of his works is now impossible to reconstruct.
Some order, however, can be set in his works, as it seems that after 1610 he was increasingly concerned with the idea of death; also, a certain Calvinistic orientation is visible in his sense of the depravity of mankind and of the irresistible and saving power of God’s grace or predestined fate, which cannot be earned or merited. Consequently, the evolution of his art took a more serious turn, and the prevailing literary genres of this part of his career are the religious sonnets and the sermons. According to literary historians, in the seventeenth century, among court circles and lawyers, “preaching was at once a form of spiritual devotion, an intellectual exercise, and a dramatic entertainment” (Norton Anthology, 1081). Donne’s sermons and Devotions were characterised by a metaphorical style, bold erudition, and dramatic wit, and therefore highly appreciated by the sophisticated congregation of St. Paul’s.
His work, however, is much more comprehensive than his remark might suggest, just as his personality was much more complex. His opus contains, besides his love Songs and Sonnets and his Divine Poems, clusters of epigrams, love elegies, epithalamia (wedding songs), satires, verse letters, funeral elegies, and a long poem entitled The Progress of the Soul, as the second, 1635, edition of his works, groups them. What characterises all these works is their vivid, compelling, troubling quality, the poet’s scorn for platitudes and smooth phrases, and his restless intellectual energy. “Donne’s poetry demands imaginative effort of the reader, whom it absorbs in a tense, complex experience” (Norton Anthology, 1080), which frustrates any attempt at generalisation or at a final assessment.
Donne, influenced by the Continental tendency of “freshening” the Petrarchan tradition by “developing a more intellectual form of conceit, created highly concentrated images that involve a major element of dramatic contrast or of intellectual strain” (Norton Anthology, 1081), and did away with the conventions and clichés of earlier love poetry. His poems are written in a colloquial and conversational language (often shockingly so), characterised by oratorical devices and syntactical concentration, which often leads to roughness, sudden transitions, elliptical expression, but which also confers a special dynamism to the discourse. They are also highly dramatic, not only by the use of a persona by the author, but also in the unfolding of the argument, which is often conceived either as a monologue or as part of a dialogue. There is always an element of persuasion and a minute analysis of the working of the mind and of motives. The poem is a gesture, i.e., it not only says something, but it does something, as in “The Flea.” Consequently, the metaphors and conceits are conceptual, not
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pictorial; they are functional, not decorative, drawn from the “unpoetic” world of everyday reality, philosophy, science, geographical discovery, major social and political events, etc. (e.g. “A Valediction: Of Weeping”); there is a marked absence of pastoralism and mythology as they had been employed by Donne’s predecessors.
In his choice of metaphors as well as in his attitude, Donne is essentially masculine, but his style is not the only level at which this quality is manifested. It has been stated that “one of Donne’s most important contributions to love poetry is…his celebration of mutual, reciprocal love” (The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell, 135), his audacity in taking the woman off the pedestal on which the cavaliers of courtly love lyrics had set her in the Middle Ages, and in making her a partner in the game of love. Yet, in most of his poems the man is presented as superior to the woman in the art of love-making and loving, as well as in intelligence and sensibility (see “The Flea”). Some of Donne’s most important “profane love” poems are: “The Good Morrow,” “The Flea,” “Song” (“Go and catch a falling Star”), “The Indifferent,” “Air and Angels,” “A Valediction: Of Weeping,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “Love’s Alchemy,” “The Ecstasy,” Elegies 16 and 19, “The Anniversaries” (First and Second), etc.
Donne’s major religious poems share the same major characteristics. Moreover, divine love is always dealt with in the same terms profane love is dealt with and with the same vividness and gusto. More often than not religious terms are replaced by metaphors of carnal love, and many of these poems are based on the ambiguous biblical notion that Christ is the bridegroom and the soul the bride, and that the soul must seek and pray for the union with God. Achsah Guibbory, in his essay on John Donne comprised in The Cambridge Companion, states that
In alternately adopting the conventionally “feminine” passive role of bride and the aggressive “masculine” role of suitor, Donne’s religious poems exhibit contrary impulses that are curiously similar to those in his love poetry. For he both attempts to control God (thus preserving his individual separateness and autonomy) and seeks an intimate union with God that would erase his separate identity … Repeatedly invoking analogies between human and divine love, Donne’s Divine Poems suggest that erotic love is our only means, experientially, for apprehending our relation with God.
But if Donne draws an analogy between sexual and religious love, it is not without a sense of tension, for some poems suggest conflict or competition between human or “profane loves” and love for God. (141-142) (see Sonnet 14)
The best known titles of religious poems by Donne are probably the nineteen Holy Sonnets and “Hymn to God My God, in My Sickness.”
Platonism: Donne is considered the best Platonist among Elizabethan poets. In most of his Songs and Sonnets Donne asserts the superiority of the soul, the body being merely a vehicle in love (typical Platonic attitude). “The Ecstasy” is more ambiguous, making room for equality and interdependence between body and soul. Thus, “he is arguing for a more than usually prominent role for the body and his purpose is to dignify the erotic rather than to eclipse and abjure it. The poem’s erotic statement neither parodies Neoplatonism…nor does it end by submitting to its orthodoxy” (Platonism and the English Imagination, 116). For this reason it has been stated that “Donne is, in ‘The Ecstasy,’ the most original and adventurous
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of Elizabethan poetic thinkers to engage with the Platonic mode” (id.). What is characteristic of Donne is that he does not only refuse to abjure the body, but
also his independence of thought. Platonism and Platonic tropes are mere vehicles for the expression of his complex ideas, but never the object of his poetic meditation and mediation. “The Good Morrow” is a typical instance of the way in which Donne made use of Platonic imagery and ideas. This is an aubade, a poem in which physical love is celebrated in terms that remind rather of the Platonic ascendance of the spirit to perfection through love. Perfection itself is represented in the poem by the repeated Platonic metaphor of the sphere (“Let us possess one world,” the eye, the two perfect hemispheres). Thus the poem turns upon itself and deconstructs its own apparent intention, refusing to remain at the surface of things in at the moment of ecstasy.
Another Platonic trait of Donne’s poetry is his recourse to induction, to logical argument; yet, as Achsah Guiborry notices, “logic and the use of reason are often revealed to be arbitrary, imperfect, implicated in the speaker’s motives” (127), serving the rhetorical function of persuasion in the poem, rather than that of demonstration (e.g. “The Flea”).
Donne’s main aim seems to have been to capture thought in the process of its making and to reveal it in poems which could gratify both heart and mind, and that he did.
Metaphysical poetry: Donne’s poetry was perceived by his contemporaries as a break from the tradition of decorative, harmonious, flowery Elizabethan poetry, and many of them, like Ben Jonson, considered that “Donne, for not keeping of accent [i.e., metrical uniformity], deserved hanging,” though he also acknowledged Donne as “the first poet in the world in some things.” Other, younger poets (George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Carew, Andrew Marvell, Abraham Cowley) were very much influenced by Donne’s style, and they came to be known as the Metaphysical poets. This term, coined by John Dryden and then used by Samuel Johnson, is a misnomer on two grounds: first, these poets were not organised as a group, and in fact had little in common inasmuch as their poetic preoccupations were concerned; secondly, most of them had no “metaphysical” tendencies, but were quite earth-bound in their poems. What Dryden and Dr. Johnson referred to was in fact the tendency common to these poets of displaying a huge amount of learning and a penetrating wit, which are set above any interest in “poeticity.” The attitude of these two great critics signals the increasingly important Neoclassicist influences operating after 1660 in England, which swept away the fashion Donne had begun, not to be recovered until the beginning of the twentieth century.
The famous poet and critic of the twentieth century T.S. Eliot, on the contrary, considered that the poetry written by the Metaphysical poets was in a direct line with that of the Elizabethan Age, and that the break occurred sometime during the seventeenth century, around the Civil War. Eliot was among those who reacted with great enthusiasm at the rediscovery of the poetry of the so-called Metaphysical poets and not only wrote on them on several occasions, but took these poets to be his masters in poetry writing. His most famous essay is the one entitled “The Metaphysical Poets,” in which he explicates the sources of the beauty and intellectual challenges that characterise this poetry, as well as the circumstances which contributed to its development and then to its disappearance. He compared the Metaphysical poets with the Victorian ones, pointing out that for the former every new
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experience modified their whole sensibility, always creating and recreating new wholes, new ties between sensorial perception, feelings and ideas, between the present moment, memories from the past and projections of desire into the future. All these continually coexisted in the mind of the poet in a complex, yet perfectly organized unity, which enabled him to “yoke together” ideas which outside the context of a particular poem had nothing to do with each other; it was only the mind of the poet that compelled them into unity in spite of their apparent disparity.
This wonderful capacity of the poetic mind to create new, surprising wholes of experience, was, according to T.S. Eliot, lost when “In the 17th century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” He considered it to be his task to recover in his poetry that unified sensibility, in which the body and the soul, the heart and the mind, worked together in a perpetual celebration of the complexity of life.
The artistic device apt to convey such complexity was the conceit (>It. concetto), a highly sophisticated, elaborately sustained metaphor, an attempt at defamiliarizing and renaming everyday experience by sifting it through the filter of philosophy, science, myth, legend, sensorial perception, etc. Another device Donne was particularly fond of was the paradox, the assertion that mutually contradictory statements are simultaneously true (e.g. “Air and Angels”). The poets’ preference for these devices confirms Eliot’s remark according to which they were engaged in the strenuous “task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling,” rather than meditating poetically on philosophical theories, as the Augustans thought.
ANDREW MARVELL (1621-1678)
1638 – graduated AB from Cambridge1650 – tutor to the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, lord general of the parliamentary forces – a delightful tutor, with a great method1657 – assistant to the blind Latin secretary for the Commonwealth, John Milton, whom after the Restoration he saved from an extended jail sentence and pending execution1659 – MP for his native town of Hull – up to his death; had less and less time for poetry1681 – Miscellaneous Poems.
When he died, he was known as the author of a few rough-and-ready satires in prose and verse that had been printed during the Restoration. His ‘serious’ verse was published after his death by a woman whose relation to him remains ambiguous. “Playful, casual, and witty in tone, always light on its metrical feet and exact in its diction, Marvell’s verse displays depth and intellectual hardness in unexpected places; its texture is extraordinarily rich” (Norton Anthology 1415). Allusive, erudite, occasionally humorous and mocking, his work was rediscovered by T.S. Eliot at the beginning of the 20th century and has preserved its freshness and reputation. e.g. the 4 Mower poems in which the mower Damon is insidiously assimilated with Old Father Time and the Grim Reaper; “To His Coy Mistress” – best known of his work, due to Eliot.
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His special blend of wit includes the imaginative surprise of Donne and the civilised grace of Jonson, the gallantry of Carew and the grave delicacy of Herbert. His temperament has both Puritan sobriety and a classical sophistication more flexible than Milton’s. In no poet are levity and seriousness more subtly mingled…. The lightest pastoral may take on the resonances of religious allegory without losing its quality of delicate artifice (Clorinda and Damon); a playful love song will contain a quiet reminder of human transience, as in The Mower to the Glow-worms…and a fancifully elaborated comparison of garden flowers to soldiers on parade, in Upon Appleton House, can lead without the slightest incongruity to serious reflections on the Civil War. (New Pelican 70-1)
“The classical quality in Marvell appears in his smooth polished verse, his precision and economy of phrase, and his balanced sense of human limitations” – see his Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland (71-2).
JOHN MILTON (1608-1674)
In his essay “The Metaphysical Poets” T.S. Eliot blamed especially writers like Dryden and Milton for the dissociation of poetic sensibility which occurred in the 17th century and from which we have not yet completely recovered. Milton and Dryden in fact created a new age in the development of English literature, an age dominated by reason and order, in keeping with the new tendencies in France and throughout Europe, the age of the Enlightenment. Their work looks back on Humanism and on the Greek and Latin Ancients, but their attitudes differ, in that while Dryden pleads for change, for evolution, for the acceptance of what came to be regarded as Neoclassicism, an innovative re-assessment of the ancient values in literature, Milton’s work is the culmination of Renaissance art. Milton’s retrograde/backwards-looking propensity is so strong, that critics have gone as far as to regard – and often ridicule – him as the only representative of the Ancients in a still on-going battle against the Moderns. This is of course an exaggeration, as the Ancients still represented the norm well into the 18th century and by 1700 Milton had entered the canon of English literature in spite – or indeed perhaps because – of his uniqueness.
The fact is that Milton had began his literary career at a time (the Jacobean Age) when the imitation of the Ancients, not yet accompanied by the “anxiety of influence” (Harold Bloom, 1973), represented the mainstream in English letters. His education had also been dominated by the learning of the classical values, alongside the Puritan ideology, and these two major influences stayed with him in spite of changes in the literary fashions of the England of his day and were strengthened by the Puritan regime following the Civil War.
The Restoration Age, when Milton wrote his major epic poems, was an age when the English nation was divided against itself, in spite of the relatively general satisfaction at King Charles II’s return to the throne. A new fashion was brought from France in terms of manners, morals, social, political and religious attitudes, while at the same time the Puritan stance still survived and manifested itself in the underground – Milton’s religious poetry bears witness to that. Milton himself is an astounding instance of the opposing forces colliding during this age: though a fervent Puritan, he reacted against institutionalised
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religion, preferring instead his own personal interpretation of “the ways of God to men”; on the other hand, he could never adapt to the fashionable liberalism of the Restoration people. Though very much a man of his age, deeply involved in the political and social affairs of his country, as a writer he represents the epitome of the Renaissance.
Milton’s life conveniently falls into three divisions, covering years of important changes in the history of England (the Civil War, the Puritan Interregnum, the Restoration): I. Youth and apprenticeship (1608-1639):1608 – born as the son of a well-off notary; went to St. Paul’s School, where he learned several modern languages, as well as Latin, Greek, Hebrew; had the Bible by heart; his father initiated him in the mysteries of music by teaching him how to play the organ, which endowed him with a very keen sense of harmony and a good ear for sounds and the significance that can be attached to them.1629 – graduated AB from Christ’s College, Cambridge. At Christmas he wrote “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.”1631 – wrote L’Allegro and Il Penseroso.1632 – AM from the same College. Then he refused to take orders and went to London and then to his father’s countryside house, where he continued to read voraciously and to write verse occasionally. 1634 – Comus, a masque written at the invitation of a noble family in Shropshire.1637 – Lycidas, an elegy written on the death of a fellow student from Cambridge and included in a commemorative volume.1638-1639 – travelled on the Continent, putting “the finishing touches on an already splendid education” (Norton Anthology, 1434); visited famous literary figures of the day, as well as sites of famous events.
II. Political and social prose and controversy (1640-1660) – three phases:1. 1642 – married Mary Powell, daughter of a royalist country squire, 17 of age; within a few weeks she left him and returned to her parents’ house.2. 1643-1645 – pamphlets pleading for divorce on grounds of incompatibility, much ridiculed and criticised as a scandalous attempt to disrupt all social order.1644 – Of Education, a short essay; Areopagitica, a defence of a free press; antiprelatical tracts.1645 – an edition of his poems was published; Mary returned to her husband and they had three daughters; she died in 1652. 3. 1649-1660 – political pamphlets in support of Cromwell’s politics.1651 – Milton went blind.1656 – married Katherine Woodcock, who died in childbirth in 1658.1660 – after the Restoration of Charles II Milton was imprisoned and in danger of his life, but escaped with a fine and the loss of most of his property.
III. Literary masterpieces (1660-1674):1663 – married Elizabeth Minshull.1667 – Paradise Lost published in 10 books.
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1671 – Paradise Regained (epic poem in four books) and Samson Agonistes (“closet” tragedy) were published.1674 – died of complications arising from gout.
Work:It has been said about Milton that he probably wrote his verses in Latin and then
translated them into English, so strong was the influence of the Latin language and syntax on his writing. Milton in fact wrote lyrics in Latin and in Italian (being proficient in those as well as several other languages, both classical and modern), but the important impact of Latin on his work was also due to his thorough knowledge of the structure and functioning of that language in poetry, and that is the reason for remarks like Wimsatt’s, according to whom “Milton through Paradise Lost, give[s] us varied anthologies in the torment of the English language [and, we might add, metre] into curiously Latinate patterns” (Literary Criticism: Idea and Act, 465-6). The poet was very well acquainted with the literary masterpieces of the classical writers and of his English predecessors and contemporaries, and was fascinated with the idea of creating literature of equal value. From this ambition arose Paradise Lost, a poem intended to supply the English literature with the great epic it lacked. From this ambition arose also what Harold Bloom termed “the anxiety of influence,” a fear of not being up to the models that was to plague almost all the subsequent writers. But before he could be ready for such a superb undertaking Milton had to try his hand at all the other, lesser literary genres the Ancients had devised.
The 1645 volume of his works opened with “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” a well-known ode in which the naïveté of the traditional carol mingles with that of a youthful poet in celebrating the end of the reign of the pagan gods and the beginning of a benevolent, unproblematising Christianity. The rise of Christianity is presented as a type of the later resurrection, which the young poet felt it his duty to prophesy. By the time he included it in his volume, however, Milton had become aware of its immaturity, and added to the title the words “Compos’d 1629,” signalling the fact that it belonged to his past. This was in keeping with the mood of the whole volume, in which the poet meant to convey, as Louis L. Martz notices, “a sense of the predestined bard’s rising powers” (Literary Criticism: Idea and Act, 408), as well as “to create a tribute to a youthful era now past – not only the poet’s own youth, but a state of mind, a point of view, ways of writing, ways of living, an old culture and outlook now shattered by the pressures of maturity and by the actions of political man” (id., 404).
The volume also contains elegies written in the tradition of Virgil’s eclogues (of which some in Latin), and sonnets of the good old Petrarchan kind (of which five in Italian), as well as famous poems like Lycidas, the twin poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, and some of his early masques (Comus, Arcades), and it closes up with the Epitaphium Damonis, which under the guise of lamenting the death of a friend lament the end of an era.
Special mention should be made of the companion poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, the unsurpassed masterpieces of the volume. Louis Martz warns against the dangers of reading them in parallel as if they were the “two sides of an academic debate,” and points out the fact that they “develop a linear, sequential effect, moving from youthful hedonism toward the philosophic, contemplative mind” (id., 411). Michael Wilding neglects the
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warning and identifies the theme of these two poems as “the poetic itself,” regarding the two moods, joy and melancholy, as “the contrasting moods of inspiration, the sources of creativity” (The Cambridge Companion to English Literature: Donne to Marvell, 233), and insisting more on the outreaching tendency of the poems, which propose an ideal way of life, idyllic, rural, free of the cares of both frivolous love and political turmoil. Wilding assigns Milton’s attempt at self-knowledge and austerity of his ideals to the poet’s Puritanism, while Martz is inclined to see in them the influence of Platonism.
For the next 20 years or so after the publication of this volume, Milton’s primary interest seemed to be in politics and the mores of his society and his writing was in prose, represented mainly by pamphlets. He also lost his sight in 1651 and had to dictate his works to assistants. This slowed him down considerably, but it also made him refine his thoughts more thoroughly before entrusting them to paper. Some critics consider that it was because of his blindness that Milton was capable of ordering the ideas and imagery of his later poems so carefully, but this excessive patterning of things also creates a sense of artificiality, of “unnaturalness,” which is not always for the best. Yet this penchant for organising and ordering was also in keeping with the Classicist ideal of the world dominated by reason.
Milton’s attempt to recreate the world from memories and through the sheer power of his imagination also enhanced his already extraordinary mythopoeic power, which was already at work in as early a poem as “The Morning of Christ’s Nativity.” And it was this fantastic power that made possible the creation of England’s greatest epic, and of one of the greatest Christian poems of all time.
The writing of Paradise Lost probably began in the early fifties, after his going blind and the death of his first wife, yet the poem was first published only in 1667 and it bears obvious marks of the influence of the Restoration. The first edition was made up of ten books, which were later reworked into twelve, at the beginning of which, at the suggestion of the publishers, the author added Arguments in which he summarised and explained the action.
The first paragraph of the first book is an invocation of the Muse in the tradition of the classical epic poem, although the muse invoked here is not the pagan one of the Ancients, but the Christian Holy Spirit, the bearer of divine Word and of the Light of divine Inspiration. Critics have noticed that references to the muse, to poetry and the poet are very frequent in Milton’s works. This is not only an instance of Milton’s self-awareness as a poet, but also of his permanent search for the proper subject and the appropriate form.
At the end of the same paragraph Milton also states his alleged intention in writing this poem, “To justify the ways of God to men.” Critics however have detected some other aims in the poem, although their interpretations were often determined by their own reactions to that age, to the Christian faith, and to the poem itself. According to some, especially Romantic, critics, Satan and the fallen Angels stand for Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans rebelling against a tyrannical monarch, and William Blake went as far as to say that Milton himself was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” This view is supported by the opening books of the poem, in which Satan is presented as brilliantly intelligent, compelling and dynamic, so that for a moment the reader forgets that all this energy is in the service of a bad cause. When Christ is introduced at the beginning of Book III the
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balance is set right again, and Satan is reduced to a dull, obsessive pursuer of evil, in accordance with the traditional view of the “arch-fiend.” What the portrait of Satan needed for a correct interpretation was the contrast of the characters who stand for Christian virtues and hope, and this strategy points out the redeeming power of religion.
The strategy of the contrast and that of the parallelism are fundamental in ordering and developing the whole epic. Milton juggles with a plethora of names, situations, scholarly and biblical references, and as the authors of the Norton Anthology say, “it is one of the supreme rewards of literary study to be able to follow him with equivalent security” (1475). But he also succeeds in giving coherence and cohesion to the poem, precisely due to his capacity for devising such organising principles. The poet also attempts to organise the universe according to quasi-Ptolemaic principles: the earth is at the centre of what Milton calls “the world” and which is in fact the physical universe, and it is connected to Heaven by a ladder. The universe in its turn is in the middle of the “limitless” chaos which is paradoxically limited by Heaven at its superior margin and by Hell at its lowest end, in a typically classicist hierarchy. The Garden of Paradise is on the Earth, and it has only one gate to the east, through which fallen man will depart at the end of the poem. The care with which these five locations of the plot are designed is paralleled by the chronology of the events, which range over 33 days from the building of the City of Heaven to the Fall of Man. Yet neither is the plot told in a chronological order nor is there a continuous ascending or descending movement from one setting to another. Milton prefers to resort to the unifying power of the meaning.
Milton’s theodicy, his attempt to make religion understandable to his readers, his rejection of the simplistic, superstitious acceptance of the clergy’s interpretations of the Old Testament, are in the good tradition of the Protestant Reformation. The Calvinist doctrines of Divine Providence, of predestination and grace, of the burden of original sin pressing on all our shoulders, of resignation and of the felix culpa (p. 1606) which implies hope in redemption, are central to the poem. Yet the ideas of good and of evil are rather Neoplatonic, as Anna Baldwin noticed. Goodness is not identified with “spirit (wholly incorporeal), but with being (including both corporeal and incorporeal being). Only God truly exists, and so all things must emanate from and out of God, and will eventually return to Him again. This conception of creatio ex deo … implies that the material world is good in its nature” (Platonism and the English Imagination, 153). This fundamentally optimistic view of the world “prepared the way for his analysis of the freedom of not only man, but of the whole creation” (155), and introduced the anti-Puritan notion of free will, which confers matter power and the capacity to use it to return to God (p. 1574). By contrast, evil is defined as
a deprivation of being, the absence of existence, as well as the absence of good…a falling away from Authentic Existence (God), towards formlessness, lifelessness, and darkness… Milton is allegorising the development of evil as a series of self-reflective images, each looking back to itself rather than looking forward to the true ascent of being toward God. (id. 160-1)
This allegory as well as the whole chronological and spatial scaffolding are however merely the frame of the real drama, which takes place “inwardly, at the core of the human
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consciousness” (Norton Anthology, 1435), and whose beauty resides in its essential humanity rather than in active heroism in the tradition of the epic poem. Milton however did take pains to observe the conventions of the epic poem, and he gave us love, war, supernatural powers intervening in the action, a descent into hell, a catalogue of warriors, the establishment of a new order. The style too is the high style of epics, Paradise Lost being written in blank verse and in a highly sophisticated metaphoric language, replete with erudition and literary references. The magnificence of the undertaking was matched by the magnificence of the achievement. The poem may frustrate the attempt to define it as an epic, but through it Milton gave world literature one of the most complex monuments of Renaissance Christian Humanism.
Paradise Lost has influenced many writers, of whom most noteworthy William Blake, the next mythopoeic mind of English literature. Others, nevertheless, regard it as a failure because of Milton’s distortions of the English syntax and diction (e.g. Pound and Eliot).
A whole array of poets marked the gradual change from the poetry of the Renaissance to that of the Augustan age; among them, Edmund Waller, Sir John Denham, John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, Samuel Butler, etc. Especially the latter two are remembered as brilliant authors of satires in the classical style.
JOHN DRYDEN (1631-1700)
The most impersonal of English poets, Dryden wrote mostly time-serving occasional poems, initially fluctuating from one side of the political spectrum to the other, to affix himself after the Restoration on the side of Charles II and then James II. There is no major socio-political event taking place during his writing career that did not receive fair treatment in his verse. e.g. Astraea Redux (1660) – the return of the King; Annus Mirabilis (1667) – to celebrate the English naval victory over the Dutch and the fortitude of the people of London and the king during the Great Fire of 1666 etc.
Between 1678-81 he discovered his great gift for writing formal verse satire – e.g. Mac Flecknoe (written 1678/9, publ. 1682) – satirising a fellow playwright of some talent; Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682) about the Popish Plot (1678), etc. Twenty years’ experience as poet and playwright had prepared him technically for the triumph of Absalom and Achitophel. He had mastered the heroic couplet, having fashioned it into an instrument suitable in his hands for every sort of discourse from the thrust and parry of quick logical argument, to lyric feeling, rapid narrative, or forensic declamation.
The consideration of religious and political questions that the events of 1678-81 forced on Dryden brought a new seriousness to his mind and work. In 1682, he published Religio Laici, a poem in which he examined the grounds of his religious faith and defended the middle way of the Anglican church against the nationalism of Deism on the one hand, and the authoritarianism of Rome on the other. In 1686, however, he and his two sons converted to Catholicism, to which he was to be faithful to the end. From his new position as a Roman Catholic, Dryden wrote in 1687 The Hind and the Panther, in which a milk-white Hind (the
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Roman Catholic church) and a spotted Panther (the Anglican Church) eloquently debate theology. The Hind has the better of the argument, although Dryden already knew that James’ policies were failing, and with them the Catholic cause in England. As a result of this conversion, after James’s abdication Dryden lost his appointments and had to turn to translations, playwriting and hack writing to make a living. His versions of Juvenal, Persius, Vergil, Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer are remarkable; published in Fables Ancient and Modern two months before his death, they are prefaced by one of his finest critical essays.
In addition to creating a prose style that we still regard as modern, Dryden’s achievement in the field of poetry is nothing short of revolutionary. His satire, still vital today, exerted a fruitful influence on the most brilliant satirist of the next century, Alexander Pope. The vigour and variety of his metrics made inevitable the long-enduring vogue of the heroic couplet among his successors. At the same time, he created a poetic language that remained the basic language of poetry until the early 19th century and that even the romantic movement did not wholly destroy. His poems represent the superbly civilised language of the Augustan style at its best: dignified, unaffected, precise, and always musical – a noble instrument of public speech. Dr. Johnson’s final estimate remains valid: he found English poetry brick, and left it marble.
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Lecture V: The 18th-century Essay
The 18th century began under the sign of Reason and ended under that of Sentiment. As Harry Blamires points out,
The early decades of the 18th century represent a period of calm and prosperity after the dissensions and turmoils of the previous century. … It was an age when industry and commerce were expanding, when agriculture, sheep-farming and woollen manufacture prospered. ‘Puritanism’ was taking on a different guise. Energies which had gone into religious controversy were being devoted to trade and industry. (127)
In this context, the arts and philosophy quickly flourished.
In the literary field the development of periodical journalism gave a new outlet for writers and soon provided a platform for literary criticism. The Tatler was launched in 1709 and the Spectator in 1711. At the same time, clubs and coffee-houses increasingly provided centres of talk and sociability for those interested in politics or literature. The use of the term ‘Augustan Age’ to identify the period implies that in English literary history it has the kind of distinction which Virgil, Horace and Ovid gave to the reign of the Emperor Augustus. (128-9)
Indeed, the name of the age may have been coined by the poet Leonard Welsted (1688-1747), but the fame of the age depended on a triumvirate of writers – Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope – similar in strength, influence and preferences to the Roman one. The English Augustan Age was so great that Voltaire (1694-1778), after his visit to England in 1726-9, was moved to attack the ancien règime at home in his Lettres Philosophiques (1734).
One of the most important additions to the Augustan world of letters was the periodical essay. Its appearance can be dated with precision: it was invented by Richard Steele in The Tatler, in April 1709. Although originally political news made the object of periodicals, England’s relatively peaceful international relations and domestic censure made it more profitable, as well as safer, within six months of The Tatler’s initial appearance, to be almost entirely devoid of political news and comment. It soon became common form to disparage the appetite for news. Instead, periodicals proposed closer attention to the individual, to manners and morals, and generally to self-development. It was thus the case that by the time The Spectator started to appear in 1711 the chief object of the periodical essayists was the great common question of how to live. In order to render as varied a response to the issues and cultural events of the day, Steele invented the so-called Spectator Club, an imaginary set of persons of different humours and characters, acting on some imaginary occasions and giving their informed opinions. The invention of the characters of Sir Roger de Coverley, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew Freeport, and the rest was at once a rhetorical or literary device, a symbol for the English people as it struggled to coalesce, and a flattering portrait of the reading public that the writers had as their aim. The two greatest advantages of the periodical essay were its brevity and conversational style. In the case of contributors like
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Addison and Steele, a third advantage was the lightness and reasonableness of their advice, which, although in keeping with many precepts upheld by their contemporary (Puritan) Reformers of Manners, gained a peculiar attractiveness from their taking the middle way.
One of the most interesting developments brought about by the development of the periodical essay and facilitated by the accession to the throne of a woman (Queen Anne4) was the changing attitude towards the female reading public and women generally. It became an important part of the Tatler and Spectator ‘platform’ to stress that the authors were writing for women as well as men, and to emphasize that women must play a large role in the process of civilisation which they were striving to promote. As the largest number of readers of these periodical were women, it was essential to cater to the improvement of their status and education. Generally speaking, one of the principal reasons for the success of Addison and Steele was the fact that they kept the tastes and requirement of their readers, male and female, constantly in mind.
Joseph Addison (1672-1719), a Whig politician with decided religious opinions, forged for himself a distinguished journalistic career in the field of the letters by publishing insightful articles in the Spectator between 1711 and 1714. His output can be divided into three categories: articles on criticism generally, on Paradise Lost, and on “The Pleasures of Imagination.” The first category comprises definitions of such complex concepts as wit and taste. His emphasis is always on simplicity (as opposed to the emerging taste for “Gothic” and “Romanticism”), commonsense and reason (correspondence of ideas rather than forms in metaphors define “true wit”), but he adds a new element that brings him close to Longinus: the intuitive capacity to “enter into the very spirit and soul of fine writing” and elucidate what it has to offer (“Taste” in Spectator no. 409). His criticism of Milton’s masterpiece evinces a stance “from which so much of the best literary criticism has sprung; the stance of the reader so entranced with what he has read that he must willy-nilly share his delight with others” (Blamires 134). As to the pleasures of imagination, they arise especially from recognition and recollection of objects that we need not ever have seen in the same way, but which are summoned up by the work of art that is characterised by the great, the new, and the beautiful. “The philosophical basis, however, of human delight in the great, the new, and the beautiful, lies in the fact that God ‘has so formed the soul of man that nothing but Himself can be its last, adequate, and proper happiness’” (135). Imagination is that faculty which “makes additions to nature and gives greater variety to God’s works.” God “can so exquisitely ravish or torture the soul through this single faculty as might suffice to make up the whole heaven or hell of any finite being” (“On the Pleasures of the Imagination” in the Spectator no. 421). Addison’s enthusiasm and commonsense, as well as his open-mindedness about what it is that makes a work great, have ensured an important place for him in the pantheon of English criticism, in spite of his lack of profundity and analytical precision.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a much more spirited neoclassicist, whose Battle of the Books (1704) does not spare even the best of his contemporaries (Dryden, for instance, is one of his victims). His social critique covers vast areas, from economy to politics, and from religion to philosophy and the sciences. His style is generally thought to be characterised by 4 Who, incidentally, had a copy of the Spectator taken in with her breakfast.
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simplicity, although an equally obvious feature is the swiftness of tone variation. Simplicity of style suggests plain statement and a straightforward approach, but the author usually has a special ironic motive for cultivating the matter-of-fact style of contemporary books of travel or science. Very often his simplicity in syntax and diction is liable to be a camouflage for insidious intentions. It is a rhetorical device not entirely different from the witty misapplication of learned ideas in support of an audacious proposition, which he had learned from the Metaphysical poets. In his brilliant play with the old modes of learned speculation, his imaginative fertility in developing concretely an absurd pseudo-scientific conception, his dialectical resourcefulness and effrontery, the admirable art of ‘arguing through images,’ Swift is of the world of Rabelais, Donne, and Ben Jonson. The English masters of ratiocinative wit, the art of developing a plausible yet outrageous argument are Donne, Dryden and Swift, and they spring from a long-standing tradition of teaching dialectic thinking in school.
His basic strategy in a number of works is to write in the character of someone from whose standpoint the facts he is satirising can be stated with disconcerting freedom. The freedom depends on the ignoring of certain considerations, while the imaginary reader who is the victim of the manoeuvre is so placed that protest only leads to further embarrassment. E.g. A Tale of a Tub (1704), The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit (1704), The Abolishing of Christianity (1708), A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1710 – a parody), The Drapier’s Letters (1724), A Modest Proposal (1729), etc. The latter especially is perhaps the most tremendous pamphlet ever written. Swift suavely proposes that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food for the rich. The horror of the proposal is roughly commensurate with the horror of starvation and poverty permitted by the target audience. The shock is all the more effective in that it is introduced casually as part of the evidence for, or in illustration of, his project. The effects of his manoeuvrings, of the general strategy of his pamphlets, depends very largely on certain uses of language. Swift’s habit of writing in the character of a fictitious person allows him freedom in the choice of idiom from which he is always ready to profit – e.g. The Drapier’s Letters, written in the voice of a plain-spoken citizen, who expresses his indignation in round terms, and illustrates his point with common-sense arithmetic. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is only the best known of his satires, while its last part is also the bitterest – some would say, misanthropic. In having Gulliver explain to the Houyhnhnms (the reasoning horses, unacquainted with the practices of mankind) the uses to which reason is put by humans, Swift rearranges and distorts the details in an ominous way, to secure heightening and emphasis of the humans’ wickedness and lack of a strong sense of moral rectitude.
George Farquhar (1678-1707), Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713) and John Hughes (1677-1730) (who contributed to restoring Spenser and allegory to their former fame), for instance, plead that English literature and criticism have much to offer when properly approached. For all these, the writing of periodical essays proved an essential lesson in style: a writer who had undergone the discipline of that short form was less likely to have recourse to unnecessary pomposity or meaningless jargon in other writing. The influence of the periodical essay made for clarity, simplicity, and literary good manners. The essayists and writers served their apprenticeship in periodicals such as: The Guardian, The Adventurer, The World, The Connoisseur, The Citizen of the World (run
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by Oliver Goldsmith), The Champion (to which Henry Fielding contributed), the short-lived Edinburgh Mirror and Lounger, etc.
The other major critic of the time who had “the status of an Addison or a Dryden” (Blamires 146) was Alexander Pope (1688-1744). His verse Essay on Criticism (1711) rehearses in Horatian form most of the fundamental tenets of neoclassical criticism and insists that a thorough knowledge of the ancients is a prerequisite of criticism. Yet he “distances himself from those who recommend a slavish adherence to the ancient rules and models. In poetry there are ‘nameless graces which no methods teach’” (148), and genius is manifested precisely when the infringement of the rules produces results that far surpass those yielded by their observance. The good critic is characterised as unbiased, learned, well-bred, sincere, ‘modestly bold and humanly severe,’ but amongst the Britons, the only ones worthy of the name, according to Pope are minor ones such as Roscommon and Walsh. As to English poets, even his discussion of Shakespeare (in the Preface to his imperfect edition of the latter’s works, 1725) exhibits all the prejudices of his age and his own personal envy.
As a member of the Scriblerus Club (which also included Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gray, a group determined to mock “all the false tastes in learning”), Pope contributed a treatise to a volume of Miscellanies (1728) under the pseudonym Martin Scriblerus. In that treatise, entitled “Peri Bathos, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry,” he modelled his criticism on Longinus, ironically twisting the word bathos (‘profundity’) to mean “a ludicrous descent to the commonplace,” a meaning which has stuck. With poker-faced ‘seriousness,’ he surveys the cheap poeticisms of the time and “constitutes sober instruction in how not to write” (156). The essay is a brilliant instance of Pope’s vitriolic ridicule, and among his victims were Leonard Welsted and Lewis Theobald (1688-1744) (who among other things edited a much better edition of Shakespeare Restored, 1726).
In spite of such blatant pettiness and narrow-sightedness, Pope remains one of the most relevant voices of his time. His essays are usually written in verse. In a style that has the clarity of crystal and the memorable quality of a proverb, as well as the capacity to meet the highest artistic standards of the age, he deals with every event, convention and mentality that can be assigned to the Augustan era. “The rigorousness of his artistic training is evident in everything he published: one is conscious of standards meditated first and then kept continually in mind. In this way it may be said that the stringency of contemporary criticism contributed somewhat to that exquisite poise of judgement which is the mark of all Pope’s work” (Norman Callan, in The New Pelican…, vol. 4, p. 237). E.g. The Rape of the Lock (1712-4), Epistle to Arbuthnot (1734), The Dunciad (1728-43), Essay on Man (1732-4), these are only a few instances of his satirical genius and qualitatively the equal of Swift’s prose satires. Indeed, the full measure of his ambition is given by his translation of the Iliad (1715) and Odyssey (1725-26).
Yet Harry Blamires points out:
It is, however, the bulky figure of Dr [Samuel] Johnson [1709-84] who represents for many readers the archetype of the 18th-century spirit, and his literary productivity belongs especially to the 1750s, 1760s and 1770s. Though, strictly speaking, the “classical” label attaches less
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fittingly to Johnson than to his Augustan predecessors, if faithful attachment to ancient classical formulations is the criterion, yet the label belongs supremely to him in connoting the central fount of literary influence in the century of stability and the age of reason. (171)
The commentator goes on: “Many of his utterances are crammed with illumination and entertainment.… The most relevant output is largely contained in three branches of Johnson’s work: periodical essays in the Rambler and the Idler; the edition of Shakespeare; and the Lives of the Poets” (173). Furthermore, in his prose fable Rasselas (1759), he has an old philosopher, Imlac, who delivers a description of the “business of the poet” that echoes Fielding and anticipates the Romantics Wordsworth and Shelley. According to this description, the poet must observe what is universally valid in human nature and “write as the interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations” (qtd. 173-4). The poet has the genius for making the familiar things of every day life seem new.
Especially in The Rambler, but also in The Idler, Dr Johnson published some of his best literary and cultural criticism. Although in the former he appears to have virtually no sense of humour and is generally very critical, the volume form was published to great acclaim and commercial success. This demonstrates that by the 1760s knowledge of a few great writers was not a matter for professional scholars only, but a part of general culture, almost of good manners. The same is true of concerns with the English language: he urges that aspects of style concern anyone who tries to speak or write correctly; moreover, a critical interest in the spoken language is a mark of literary maturity. Jane H. Jack comments:
On the whole, however, the merits of The Rambler and The Idler are less those proper to the periodical essay as a form than those characteristic of all Johnson’s writing. …he…grapples with [his subject] with all his strength, bringing to bear all his experience of human life. The Rambler and The Idler form a storehouse of mature reflection on human life and perceptive literary judgement. (New Pelican… vol. 4, p. 192-3)
In many of his articles Dr Johnson warns that literature is not reducible to a systematisable list of rules and regulations, and neither is criticism, and advises against undue reliance on critics. His Preface to Shakespeare is a brilliant illustration of his empirical method of analysing theories and testing them against experience. He rehearses the main points developed by Shakespeare criticism since Dryden (Shakespeare as the poet of nature, not learning, as the creator of memorable characters, as the poet who supremely evokes and expresses passion), but attacks and dismisses the long-standing reverence for the unities of time and place. He demonstrates that, thanks to the imagination of the spectator, the playwright need not contain the action within the period of twenty-four hours or restrict it to one place throughout the drama. In this as well as in the Lives of the Poets, Johnson is the great champion of common sense and the common reader. Without denying the right of the poet to flights of imagination, he also insists that poems must make sense, please readers, and help us not only to understand the world, but to cope with it. Johnson holds poems to the truth, as he sees it: the principles of nature, logic, religion, and morality. Not even Shakespeare can be forgiven when he “sacrifices virtue to convenience” and “seems to write without any moral purpose,” or when he takes off on the mad pursuit of a pun and forgets the matter in hand.
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Yet Johnson is no worshiper of authority or mere ‘correctness’: his determination is to judge literature by its truth to life, not by abstract rules. Hence his fascination with the art of biography as revelatory of human nature as well as of the creative processes of the mind of genius. Although the poets he presents in his masterpiece are not always of his choice (the selection was made by booksellers according to current fashion and covers the period from Abraham Cowley to Thomas Gray), his astute criticism, though not infallible, has established the tone and criteria for the next centuries of criticism. (e.g., TS Eliot hugely appreciated his erudition, insight, irony and detachment.)
In terms of the development of the English language, his genuine concern with it materialised in the shape of his prodigious Dictionary (1755), the first professional, most comprehensive dictionary of the English language to date (although not the 1st dictionary ever: in fact the 18th century was one of multiple good dictionaries). Above all, he sought to fix the meaning or meanings of words, and to this end he added illustrative quotations ranging from Sidney forward. For each word, where possible, he gave etymologies, and even though some of his etymologies sound ridiculous in view of modern philological studies, he made good use of the growing work of Anglo-Saxon scholars. Further, one of his primary aims was to unify spelling – a project to which the development of journalism had a major contribution – and accentuation through rudimentary phonetic transcription.
Dr Johnson’s influence materialised in a gradual rejection of neoclassicism. The most important critics at the end of the 18th century: Edward Young (1683-1765 – pre-Romantic poet), James Warton (1722-1800), Thomas Warton (1728-90 – brother of the former, Professor of Poetry at Oxford and eventually Poet Laureate), Richard Hurd (1720-1808). Also the philosophers David Hume (1711-76), Edmund Burke (1729-97), and Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696-1762), and the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), attempt to outline a theory of aesthetic experience. Moreover, the practitioners of literature themselves become more outspoken. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74), Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831), Richard Cumberland (1732-1811) are some of the most important novelists who wrote on their craft.
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Lecture VI: The Novel
DEFINITIONIn J.A. Cuddon’s Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, the term “novel” has the longest definition in the book (over 40 pages! – it also contains an abridged history of the genre in world literature). Cuddon says, selectively: “Derived from Italian novella ‘tale, piece of news,’ and now applied to a wide variety of writings whose only common attribute is that they are extended pieces of prose fiction. …in contemporary practice, a novel will be between 60 or 70,000 words and, say, 200,000.” Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, the term ‘novel’ “denoted a prose narrative about characters and their actions in what was recognizably everyday life and usually in the present, with the emphasis on things being ‘new’ or a ‘novelty’. And it was used in contradistinction to ‘romance’. In the 19th century the concept of ‘novel’ was enlarged.” Very broadly, it is “a form of story or prose narrative containing characters, action and incident, and, perhaps, a plot. … The subject matter of the novel eludes classification…. No other literary form has proved so pliable and adaptable to a seemingly endless variety of topics and themes.” Also, “[a]part from dramatic comedy no other form has been so susceptible to change and development,” and I suggest you go to Cuddon’s Dictionary for a complete taxonomy (classification). By general agreement, the novel must observe certain conventions that have to do with the psychological complexity and evolution of the protagonist and with the credibility of his/her progress within the world circumscribed by the book.
A BRIEF HISTORY, OR THE CONTROVERSY OVER ITS ORIGINSTraditionally, the beginning of the novel is placed in mid-18th century. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the English Novel (1957), links the invention of the novels with the secularisation and individualisation of the mercantile middle class. Steven Connor explains: “as the ‘new’ story, which follows the unprecedented, unpredictable shape of the individual life, the novel embodies the new philosophical preference for the strenuously self-creating individual subject over inherited systems of value and belief” (6). Watt proclaims Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1840) the first English novel in the modern sense of that term, assigning previous long prose fictions to the realms of satire and romance. Many other critics, however, challenge such neat demarcations and broaden the definition of the novel so as to accommodate sub-genres such as novellas, romances, “lives”/ “histories,” picaresques, tales of adventures, prose allegories and satires (e.g. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Bunnyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Swift’s Tale of the Tub and Gulliver’s Travels, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe etc.). According to Margaret Anne Doody, a feminist critic, “the true story of the novel” actually begins in the antiquity, especially Greek, Egyptian and Roman, and the genre should be defined in terms of the key tropes that recur in and to a large extent shape the plot and character delineation. Nonetheless, for the practical purposes of the present discussion, it is much more useful to locate the beginnings of the English novel in the 18th century and examine the history of this genre in terms of the defining characteristics of the age in which it came into its own as the widest
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spread and most popular kind of literature. If the 17th century had been tormented by religious problems, the 18th seemed to be
dominated by a polite, gentlemanly belief in the power of reason to solve all misunderstandings and to find solutions for improving human existence. Philosophy, philosophical detachment, the development of the sciences, the economic increase, and especially, paradoxically enough, the Protestant insistence on personal interpretation of the scripture, created the conditions for an optimistic relative independence from religion. This was the century in which people believed in the science of chronology, which established that the Creation began on 23 October 4004 BC, that the Flood started on 7 December 2349 BC, and that the passage through the Red Sea was opened on 11 May 1491 BC, which was a Monday. Yet, as Melvyn New states, “the most widely read and often discussed collection of narratives in eighteenth-century England was scripture,” both in the form of the Bible itself, and in the form of literary comment on it (“Modes of Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” in Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism, 1991: 506). The critic states that almost all the fiction written during that century was in fact a combination of a number of literary modes which had already had quite a long tradition in English literature: history, romance, apologue/apology, biography, autobiography, and satire. The novel is defined as the natural outcome of the tendency for combining these genres under the influence of a changing attitude towards scripture.
This changing attitude consisted mainly in the transition from the innocent, optimistic belief that the holy writ is true on its own terms and that it is not to be inquired into from an anachronistic standpoint, to the equally optimistic trust that the mind could attempt to reach a deeper understanding of scripture from the perspective of the more advanced, ‘enlightened’ intelligence of the Augustan man. Melvyn New explains the fallacy that led to the invention of the novel: it was basically the loss of belief in miracles and the beginning of questioning the motives behind them.
Certain questions do not exist in scripture because reality precludes them; when, in the course of commentary, curiosity, imagination, or simply the art of elaboration and adornment leads to such questions, the Word is put in jeopardy and the world begins to define itself anew.… The term ‘novel’ arises amidst enormous generic confusions during the century…it is a splendid appellation, for what it does indeed label is the revision of commentary in the face of a new order. That is to say, the parallel to the novel is not the romance or any other narrative mode, but the source of narrative modes, scripture in the case of much Western fiction. The novel is not an individual story or even a way of telling a story, but the collective force of stories told under the influence of a different way of looking at the world. (ibid. 515, my emphasis)
This definition of the novel also explains the variety of species listed under that heading. What they had in common in the 18th century was the fact that they were all “stories that commented partially upon scripture, partially upon a world in which miracles had ceased, and [that] the creating and sustaining power of the Word had less sway than previously over the minds of authors and readers alike” (ibid. 515-6).
In this context, the stories also have the function of compensating for what is missing. On the one hand, the need for truth, for authenticity and authentication, for the eye-witness account that confirms the facts to the incredulous leads to an increasing emphasis on the documentary evidence, the corroboration of multiple testimony, the factual data of place,
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time, quantity (of people, money, goods etc.); hence the factual realism of ‘histories’, ‘lives’, memoirs, and autobiographies – fictional or not. At the opposite pole, the need for the miraculous is met by romances, in which the emphasis is on the assertion of the power of imagination (the Word) to create and sustain a world whose people and events are real as long as the Author maintains his dominion. Instead of detailed evidence, essential to this genre is the assertion of moral intention which reinforces the truths of divine retribution and justice. Romances therefore include elements of the allegory, moral fable, apologue, biography etc.
Another critic, John Dwyer, explains the emergence of the “sentimental ethic” in the 18th century from a social point of view, emphasising the fact that it was not, as is generally believed, merely a result of the rise of the bourgeoisie, although it was soon and rapidly assimilated by that class, but the reaction of the refined intellect of the classically trained moralist “when confronted with an increasingly commercial empire which made selfishness and the pursuit of luxury ruling principles of social behaviour. Sentimental authors believed that economic improvement needed to be balanced not only by an abstract humanity, but by a well-cultivated appreciation of the communal bond” (“The Sentimental Ethic,” ibid. 1040). As Dwyer puts it, “[t]he sentimental genre was, first and foremost, a characteristic literary product of the European Enlightenment” (ibid. 1030).
As such, it had an obvious moralising aim, which became even more effective than that of Calvinistic preaching. This was the aim of all the literary species enumerated by New, and it did not focus on morals exclusively, but also on attitude, behaviour, and even dress. The efficiency and widely-spread influence of this didactic tendency was primarily due to the fact that the “latent fellow-feeling” was aroused by recourse to “a concept which had a long cultural history in Britain,” namely melancholy, the so-called British ‘disease’ (ibid. 1036). The tradition of melancholy in English literature included Milton’s “Il Penseroso,” where detached contemplation of the world was preferred to the dynamic enjoyment of its pleasures.
Thus, in the century which is commonly called the Age of Reason the heart was becoming, especially after 1740, an increasingly important issue. Sentimentality was not a unitary, programmatic movement, and it certainly did not have any literary dictators as the previous age had in Pope and Dr. Johnson. It began as a rebellion against the restrictive norms of Neoclassicism and in fact against any form of authority, that of the church included, and it was mainly defined by empathy with nature and with the fellow human beings. Neoclassicism is regarded as an exaggerated and stifling cult of the intellect to the detriment of feelings, while at the other extreme Sentimentalism came to be characterised as an over-indulgence of sentiment. As a result, culture at the turn of the century is dominated by an ethos of escapism that manifests itself either in the form of bleak gothic of variable quality, or in a reassessment of the distant and exotic past, especially the Middle Ages – i.e., a return both to its ethos and the tradition of chivalry, and to the artistic forms that expressed them: the romance, the ballad, the epic.
This return to artistic forms of the past was paralleled in architecture by the revival of the ornate Gothic style by Horace Walpole. The love for the mysterious, for the undefined and unordered, is yet another symptom of the rebellion against the optimistic belief of the Enlightenment in the ordering and clarifying power of reason. Fog, swamps, marshes, madmen, monsters, demons and witches abound in the poetry and prose of the late 18th century, just as winding passages, narrow stairwells and gargoyles ornament neo-gothic
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buildings, the Houses of Parliament included. They all contribute to the mysterious, Nordic atmosphere of what was to be the Gothic novel of H. Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Clara Reeve, and later Mary Shelley, or E.A. Poe across the ocean. In the gothic thus the sentimental and the epic meet in a unique and complex manner that combines the over-indulgence of sentiment with the wish-fulfilment of agency in the allegorical struggle between good and evil. The typical gothic tropes include: enclosure, claustrophobia, and escape; anger and social and existential rebellion; pilgrimage to maturity; inner conflicts between feelings and social dictates; doubles and mirror images; escape through/into madness, etc.
A web page offers a list of keywords connected with the literature of sensibility, which includes terms as wide apart as: benevolence, virtue, physiognomy, physiology, landscape, animals, heart, understanding, sense, sympathy, honour / reputation, delicacy / modesty, sublime, fear / horror / terror, imagination, spirit / enthusiasm / transport, character, compassion / pity, wit / humour / invention, communication, community, education, melancholy / madness, taste, empathy. In his book The Feminine Tradition in English Fiction, Philippe Sejourne enumerates some of the stereotypical situations in the early novels: the orphaned girl, the dictatorial, narrow-minded guardian, isolation of the girl from society, separation of the two lovers or friends, the villain/ogre (in gothic novels), rebellion against social conventions, refuge in a convent, passivity of the heroine who waits for the hero to rescue her, happy ending or tragic ending, moralising message.
These two enumerations effectively suggest that the range of issues dealt with in novels covers the aspects of life that were traditionally ascribed to women, that is, the home, child rearing, marriage, fantasy, and a vast palette of negative feelings stemming from isolation and deprivation of personal and civic freedom. As the expression of such feelings and the product of unchecked flights of imagination, as well as by foregrounding women, the novel posed the “danger” of stimulating women to think more highly of themselves, consequently demanding more from society in terms of personal rights and respect. In other words, the novel represented a threat to the established social order by suggesting that change was possible at the level of social organisation as well as technology, of mentalities as well as manners.
Early on, Henry Fielding had remarked on the fact that, to the exclusion of almost all other subject matters, the point of interest common especially to all women, but to many of the men of the late 18th century was love, and the portrayal of woman in love. Women writers’ conception of what would make the hero more sympathetic was describing him as sharing the qualities which belonged to women (sensibility, delicacy of feeling, interest in the minor arts etc.). The critic Margaret Anne Doody similarly notes that, with the rise of the novel, we also witness a “feminisation” of fiction,5 which had been essentially oriented towards the ideals of masculine behaviour and Christian morals since the Middle Ages. The most important disruption it effects is separation of the private from the public sphere, redefining civic life in terms of the domestic in addition to the traditional male ethos that had dominated social and political life. Consequently, the reading public also starts to develop a phobia towards novels, which are regarded as softening and detrimental to men’s character. The critic emphasises, however, that this new tendency meant primarily a reorientation towards feelings, and
5 Isobel Armstrong speaks about the “feminisation of literature” in the 19th century, as a result of the romantic “invention of depths in the self” (i.e., the renewed interest in introspection, psychological analysis, empathy).
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especially love in all its aspects, and towards domestic life, without excluding moral ideals and economic politics. Moreover, precisely in order to preclude such a sceptical attitude towards the potentially pernicious effect of novels, writers and supporters alike insisted on the educational and moral role it was meant to play in the lives of the young, ignorant and idle. However, it was not before it acquired a rigid prescriptive realism that the novel became fully acceptable in polite English society (The True Story of the Novel, 1994).
Prescriptive realism is meant to control not only the modes of expression that were available to the novel, but also what could be expressed by it, and thus turn it into an instrument of moral education. It does so by urging a revaluation of the Aristotelian demands for “probability” and “verisimilitude” and it results in a clear resistance to the idea that literature has an impact on the creation of ‘reality.’ By limiting the exemplary nature of the novel strictly in terms of personal virtue, the educational function of literature was in its turn severely restricted. Moreover, this cult of the ‘normal’ and the ‘real’ limited certain kinds of psychic and social questioning. Yet, while tying the novel down to the domestic province, these prescriptions also made the plight of women more immediately visible and credible. At the stylistic/discursive level, the tension is between (1) the masculine discourse of rationality and authority (illustrative of the centripetal force of language: orderly, coherent) and (2) the feminine discourse of sentimentality and madness (disruptive, centrifugal force of language: incoherent, fluid, resisting).
Prose fiction is mainly represented by two sub-genres, the picaresque (the modern avatar of romance and epic) and the sentimental novel. Both were centred on the motif of quest and reached, though by widely different means, similar revelatory and didactic endings, but while the latter is serious and moralising, the former is fundamentally a good opportunity for social critique and even satire. At this polar level, they are best represented by Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson, respectively.
In the early times the novel was defined in terms that recalled the classical epic and drama. Henry Fielding (1707-54) in fact enters the literary world dragging all the paraphernalia of neoclassicism behind him in his trajectory through drama to the novel. Yet for all that indebtedness, he knows how much of an innovator he is. “For as I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein” (Tom Jones (1749), Bk. II, ch. 1). In Joseph Andrews (1742), the author sets out to parody Richardson’s Pamela, but the need for originality is so much stronger that the book eventually moves away from the object of its parody and attempts to generate a new literary genre altogether. In the Preface to Joseph Andrews he appeals to Homer and Aristotle as authorities for his own “species of poetry”: “Now a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose: differing from comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy: its action being more extended and comprehensive; containing a much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a greater variety of characters.” This genre has a “light and ridiculous” fable instead of a “grave and solemn” one, persons of inferior rank and manners instead of superior ones, and in its sentiments and diction it substitutes the “ludicrous” for the “sublime” (Blamires 167-8); that is to say, they are not subject to the high standards of the tragic. It is from the classics that he derives his postulation of the large array of characters accommodated by the novel.
Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa were
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all published in the 1740s. It may be doubted how far Richardson’s novels (or for that matter, Defoe’s) arose from any sense of that tradition emanating from the ancients to which almost the whole of the criticism was either deeply attached or paid lip-service. According to Fielding, the most valuable history of human nature has been supplied by Homer and Milton rather than the historians.
He also wrote: Jonathan Wild (1743) and Amelia (1751) – main novels – + plays etc. The non-heroic protagonists of sentimental and realistic novels must fulfil the difficult
task of both imitating and prescribing current manners and morals, while at the same time entertaining an ever-wider spectrum of readers. In fact the most interesting feature of the novel is that under the guise of refurbished classical and more recent (e.g. medieval) genres it managed to promote an ethos that was typical of the emerging bourgeois capitalism. Consequently, the hero of the sentimental novel was the ‘gentleman,’ characterised as “[f]ar from being an egotistic individual” and combining “a spartan courage with condescending manners towards inferiors; he is a quixotic knight-errant of sentiment; and he abhors the bustle of city life, preferring the company of friends in the more virtuous countryside” (Dwyer 1041). He marks the demise of the earlier prototype of “military prowess, manly independence and the idealisation of man as citizen”:
In place of the paradigm of aggressive political purpose, [the sentimental mode] substituted a world view in which private friendship, the domestic hearth and specifically feminine feeling not only had a respected place but became essential characteristics of the moral community. Never again would it be possible to define a man solely by his political or professional position; never again would it be possible to ignore the place of women in the ethical equation. (ibid. 1030)
The greatest achievement of the sentimental novel was “the emotional and intellectual foundation for recognisably modern social relationships.” These relationships “could no longer realistically be based upon patriarchal hegemony or traditional communal sanctions”; what was required was “a social system founded upon the acquisitive individual ego – a veritable market-place of desires and values. The ethic of sensibility bridged [this] paradigmatic gap by advocating more flexible, humane, and polite kinds of human interaction,” in which the heart was allowed “a greater share in the governance of behaviour” (ibid. 1030) by enforcing the necessary group harmony and stability.
The language of commerce and interest is most appropriately used by Dwyer, as it characterised the language of most human transactions at that time. The society of the 18th century was an increasingly specialised one, “made up of cunning and mercenary role-players” and defined by artificiality. Yet, it was economic improvement and trade that “brought in their train many of the same values that sentimental authors were wont to champion – tolerance, civility, humanity and an increasingly international community” (ibid. 1031). The sentimental movement was born to counteract the negative effects and to further the positive ones.
Fielding’s improvident heroes generally take an ironic position vis-à-vis their role as models, but that is a rather rare privilege. In Daniel Defoe’s (1660-1731) much earlier Robinson Crusoe (1719), the protagonist, though a merchant, is the typical early 18th-century
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English gentleman, whose greatness lies in the ease with which he adapts to his new environment, as well as in his representativity of the English imperial ethos. Loneliness, the fundamental theme of the novel, is a metaphor for a new type of human consciousness: the individual is robbed of the ties with his community; his individuality emerges in isolation, yet it exemplifies the best in the society he comes from. Crusoe is a character somewhat detached from his own condition, and his loneliness is a pretext to ask fundamental questions about one’s attitude to life and to the Enlightenment. The book brings forth the authority of personal experience (for purposes of credibility), and it does so through the simplicity of the narrative manner that increases the sense of verisimilitude, as well as through its detailed factual realism.
But the autobiographical mode is also consistent with another central theme: colonisation. The pattern of colonisation in English literature is represented by the Prospero-Caliban-Ariel triangle. The novel is a replication of the ideology of colonial expansion: the basic paradigm is that of the colonised as the “other,” savage, brute, vs. the white man as redeemer, educator, illuminator. The trope of the desert island is replete with significance. The word may be read as a derivation of the “I”: I’s land, i.e., an illustration of the emerging idea of private property. Crusoe leaves his home island (England) only to be abandoned on another island where he will probe his civic spirit in solitude. Thus the “I” becomes an extension of England, of the Empire, in a desert land where the idea of possession, conquest, and submission can be articulated with renewed emphasis. It is therefore significant that before the arrival of Friday, Crusoe refers to his dog, cat and parrot as “servants,” and the first words he teaches Friday are “yes” and “master” (i.e., the language of submission).
The critic Ian Watt comments: “Robinson Crusoe is one of the great myths of modern civilisation; the story celebrates Western civilisation’s material triumphs and the strength of its rational will to conquer the environment: and it also prefigures the spiritual loneliness and the social alienation which have accompanied its progress” (The New Pelican Guide 158). Yet the same critic insists that the book is not a novel: it is too little concerned with personal relationships and too restricted in emotional scope. Moreover, there is no intrinsic unity in the development of the plot, and no unifying theme and controlling intention except for the (pseudo) Puritan didactic intention. The insistence on the allegorical value of the story also diminishes the book’s chances of being included in the new literary genre. Defoe’s other books, Moll Flanders (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), The Fortunate Mistress, or Roxana (1724) come closer to being novels in the modern sense. Captain Singleton (1720) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), on the other hand, come closer to the historical mode of Robinson.
Samuel Richardson’s (1689-1761) Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa Harlowe (1747-8) illustrate and enforce the central values of 18th-century English society precisely by not being typical of it. At a time when women generally had no civil rights, and servants were treated as the personal possession of their master, Pamela’s headlong defence of her virtue and her sense that her soul values as much as that of a princess represented a radical departure from the standard social organisation. While serving the didactic purpose of teaching morals to middle- and lower-class women, the novel also posits women as representatives of those classes, both in terms of their subjected position and of their role as repositories of moral values. It thus teaches them that their intellectual and moral
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improvement may benefit society at large (e.g., Pamela brings Squire B. back to the righteous path of Christian virtue), and in that their position is a more central one than they are generally encouraged to believe. Consequently, Richardson’s epistolary novel, although ostensibly fulfilling the pedagogical requirements of the moral and educational dictators of his time, is much more revolutionary in its subdued, didactic way than the adventure books of Defoe, in which characters stand for the acknowledged masculine ethos of the Empire.
Sir Charles Grandison (1754) Literary language is stratified according to genre (as in oratorical, publicistic,
journalistic, etc., but also low and high – i.e. comedy vs. tragedy, etc.), and the profession and social class of the characters (R&R 33). Moreover, “there are not ‘neutral’ words and forms…. All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life, all words and forms are populated by intentions” (35). In other words, “[l]anguage is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others” (35). That is to say, language is a system of quotation, which carries into the speech of the individual the socio-ideological undertones that inform it (as we have seen in Robinson Crusoe). Comic novels are particularly adept at including a wide range of strata of literary language, which they also parody and stylize (Fielding’s novels are brilliant instances of that parodic stylization). In literary terms this stratification of language is known as heteroglossia, a term coined and decisively defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian theoretician of the twentieth century.
At the opposite end of the generic spectrum, Laurence Sterne (1713-17668) is content to parody and echo the whole of previous writing, literary, philosophical, scientific and religious in his Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767). Sterne is the best instance of sentimental literature in his unique novel, Tristram Shandy, as well as in A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy by Mr. Yorick (1768), which popularised the term ‘sentimental,’ in Letters from Yorick to Eliza, and in the four volumes of The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760-1775), whose publication was made possible by the success with which the novel had been received. Melancholic reflection is the mood especially of the second and the fourth books, in which Sterne prescribes the laws of sentimental behaviour. These are meditation on the affliction and misery of some of our fellow human beings and communion with nature, both in the form of trees and plants and especially of animals because of their uncanny resemblance to human beings. His approach was an invitation to unite with the “great SENSORIUM of the world” (A Sentimental Journey 278) in order to avoid the negative influence of selfish “spleen” and “miserable feelings.” His aim was formulated in the description he gives of his ‘sentimental’ voyage in France and Italy: “‘Tis a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE, and those affections which rise out of her, which make us love each other – and the world, better than we do” (ibid. 401). In the same book he also exclaims, “Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows!” If all this seems lachrymose, trite, commonplace and even boring, one should bear in mind that it influenced much of what we now call the English character and it meant the beginning of one of its main traits, humanitarianism, as well as of vegetarianism.
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The Parson Yorick of all these books is allegedly the successor of the jester from Shakespeare’s Elsinore. He is the benevolent clergyman who wishes to re-establish the balance of human passions in his parishioners, but is himself prey to them and often becomes bawdy and temperamental. He is in fact a parodic double, a persona for the author, himself a clergyman, a genial jester, a man of sensibility, and a philosopher of human nature. Like Sterne himself, he travels to the Continent for reasons of health and then imparts the wisdom learnt during his voyages. He preaches love and tolerance among people, and communion with nature.
This generous moral lesson is also accommodated by Tristram Shandy, a book which, according to the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, is the “most typical of all novels,” in that it employs freely – and indeed, more often than not, parodies – the most germane tropes of prose. Uncle Toby and Walter Shandy are two divergent instances of the Enlightenment sentimental, being concerned more or less with the practical matters of existence, uttering freely their feelings and opinions, asserting and forcefully, though obliquely, supporting the individual’s right to react to reality according to his own emotions and inclinations. Sterne’s understanding of sentimentality, however, is a rather special one, referring primarily to the individual’s right to react emotionally to any exterior stimulus and to be self-centred, rather than to the relation that needs to be established between man and society. His more anthropocentric concern made him a favourite with the Romantic writers, while his turning inwardly has helped to perpetuate his fame into the twenty-first century, thus accomplishing the author’s wish to become famous (“I write not to be fed, but to be famous”).
Nonetheless, the primary focus of this novel is not so much the manipulation of emotions in the reader, as the almost scientific observation of the working of the mind. The typically ‘enlightened’ tendency to inquire into the reasons and causes of facts and the growing interest in facts connected with the individual are mirrored here in the way Sterne sets the mind of his narrator at the centre of the whole novel, in an almost suicidal impulse to disregard the commonsensical conventions of fiction writing that were fashionable heretofore. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke, the first pertinent study in psychology, represented the incentive needed by Sterne to set out on a quest of his own, having as its main guideline the idea that everything, and intellectual processes more than anything else, is relative, uncontrollable, unaccountable. This is the reason behind Sterne’s use and abuse of digressions, allusions, graphics and all the paraphernalia that makes the book puzzling and forever open to interpretation. It is also the justification the writer puts forth for the often inordinate delight he takes in frustrating any expectation on the part of the reader, just as he seems to frustrate the expectations and plans of his narrator concerning plot, character, denouement, etc.
The most important modification he operates is the disruption of the traditional clock-and-calendar chronology – indeed, of any logical sequence of the events – and its replacement with an apparently random accumulation of events, theories, sermons, legal documents, descriptions, graphical devices (asterisks, crosses, dashes, diagrams, marble pages, black pages, blank pages, blank spaces, missing pages, etc.), in the most unlikely combinations. The narrator states his intention of making his book digressive and progressive at the same time. Digressive it certainly is, but if it is progressive in any chronological sense, it is so in a very sinuous way, ending long before the moment of its beginning. Yet progressive it is, in more
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senses than one: it opens up new, unexplored and as yet unexploitable, fields for fiction writing by replacing linear chronology with the chronology of the subconscious, in which past events and projections of desires and plans into the future constantly coexist in the present, constantly modifying the experience of the present moment as it becomes past. The mind keeps its own time, while physical time defies any attempt at keeping pace with it. The narrator is trapped between these two conflicting and demanding forces, unable to write about the past in a straightforward manner and at the same time pressed for time as every day brings something new to write about.
What is most charming is the narrator’s capacity to remain good-humoured throughout, in spite of the tricks the author plays on him. This acts as a covert invitation to the reader to preserve a similar mood to the end and to accept the challenge of participating in the game that is being organised by the writer. This invitation is also accompanied by overt ones addressed by the narrator himself to his imaginary reader, with whom he carries on a dialogue, directing his/her interpretation of the book, chiding him/her for making assumptions and for having any expectations in accordance with the conventions of fiction, advising him/ her to accept the book on its own terms.
This playfulness of both author and narrator stands for the underlying parodying intention. The book is a parody of the ‘ideal’ narrator who keeps the reins of the plot firmly in his hands; it is a parody of the ‘ideal’ reader, who is versatile in literature and can make educated guesses as to the outcome of events and the meanings to be read between the lines; it is a parody of reason as well, as it is denied any controlling or organising power; it is, first and foremost, a parody of novels, of all the devices and conventions they make use of to appeal to the reading public. This playfulness is the key to the understanding of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in fact the only key to an enjoyable reading of the book. It constantly reminds the reader that everything in fact happens in the mind, that the laws of the mind are unfathomable, and that reality itself is dependent on the way the mind processes it. This concept distinguishes a so-called ‘fantasia’ novel from a realistic one, the only reality here being that of the interchange between the mind of the narrator and that of the reader.
Subjective as time and reality may be, and although the narrator claims to tell the story mainly from first-hand experience, he seems to know much more than any common person can possibly know about things which happened long before he was even born. This is a means of parodying and abusing the convention of the omniscient author, whose authority and point of view were unchallenged in traditional fiction. On the other hand, the dependence of time and reality on the mind of the perceiving subject made Sterne a modernist novelist avant la léttre, in that the technique of relativity and digression that he employed was very similar to the “stream of consciousness” conceptualised by William James, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc. at the beginning of the twentieth century, and with the narrative techniques employed later on by the Postmodenists. If as a sentimentalist he was admired and appreciated by the Romantics, this gives us a notion as to his influence on an age which wished to have nothing to do with the pathetic and the sentimental, but which had everything to do with the innermost realities of the mind.
Enlightenment and the Novel
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The novel is not just a new way of telling stories, but a new way of seeing the world. The novel is when two or more of the older literary genres are combined (e.g.
biography, autobiography, romance, satire etc.), as long as the mixture remains domestic. As soon as a Sarasine or Arab is mentioned, what we deal with is ‘romance’. The novel is a xenophobic genre.
The novel is “that which emerges in the place of the truth of scripture” (Melvin New in The Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism 515). It emerged when questions about the old order started to be asked – questions about scripture.
“piety’s hostility to narrative” and the consequent insistence upon the “priority of the moral” (New 509).
The Bible reinforced the priority of the Word over the world. 18th century still overwhelmingly Christian in outlook. The novel “initiated the demise of the traditional public vocabulary with its stress
upon military prowess, manly independence and the idealization of man as citizen” (Joseph Dwyer in The Encyclopedia 1030).
It also made an effort to displace the vulgar vocabulary of commerce and interest. It attempted to introduce a more refined notion of morality, a domestic ethic, and ethic
of sensibility, in which women were allocated a stable position, and which aimed to establish an equilibrium between “personal emotion and social conscience which could reinforce group harmony and the stability of an increasingly complex and differentiated modern society” (Dwyer 1031).
Social and economic mobility artificiality becomes a way of life: everybody had an interest to appear what they were not.
“manipulating emotion in the cause of virtue” (Dwyer 1032): sympathy, empathy, fellow feeling.
The role of women becomes, especially in Victorian times, to “soften the harshness of an aggressive and insensitive world” (Dwyer 1041, citing Gorham 1982) – a contribution whose full psychological, ethical and sexual potential was exploited by the bourgeoisie.
Hegel: “the secularisation of spirituality” typical of the modern world begins in the late 18th century.
“widespread general interest in a relaxation of artistic restraints and an increased desire for imaginative freedom” (Robert D. Spector in The Encyclopedia 1044).
=> Sentimentality could be defined as an attempt to counteract the current tendency of reason to become enmeshed in technological and economic progress and turn into a mercantile instrument.
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Lecture VII: Preromanticism
Paradoxically enough, as we have seen, in the century which is commonly called the Age of Reason the heart was becoming, especially after 1740, a more important issue. In poetry the equivalent of Sentimentalism is now termed Preromanticism, i.e. the trend that came before Romanticism. At that time, however, it bore various names, according to the dominant concern of one or another group of poets: the poetry of sensibility, the graveyard school, the Scottish bards, etc. It was not a unitary, programmatic movement, and it certainly did not have any literary dictators as the previous age had in Pope and Dr. Johnson. It began as a rebellion against the restrictive norms of Neoclassicism and in fact against any form of authority, that of the church included, and it was, like Sentimentalism in prose, mainly defined by empathy with nature and with the fellow human beings.
Neoclassicism was regarded as an exaggerated and stifling cult of the intellect to the detriment of feelings, while at the other extreme Preromanticism came to be characterised as an over-indulgence of sentiments. Hence the frequency of laments, odes and elegies (e.g. James Thomson, “Ode: Rule, Britannia”; Thomas Gray, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat,” “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; Thomas Collins, “Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746,” “Ode on the Poetical Character,” “Ode on Evening,” “Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson”; Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village,” “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog”; Edward Young, “The Complaint, or Night Thoughts”; Robert Blair, “The Grave”; William Cowper, “The Task,” etc.). Most of this mournfully reflective poetry has been ascribed to the so-called graveyard school of poetry, which dealt with the theme of the brevity of life, death and the hope for immortality, and which became widely spread throughout Europe in the second half of the 18th century. This was a poetry that counted especially on melancholy, pity, pathos, precisely the attitudes that the age of reason did not allow for.
Another aspect of the rebellion against restrictions was that of the rejection of enclosed spaces and the preference for the landscape or seascape instead. The grandeur or the picturesque of nature, the wilderness as well as the delicate rose, became clichés of the Preromantic poetry. Moreover, the feelings of the people who lived in the middle of it and did not merely contemplate it passively, were often either caused by the beholding of the scape or projected onto nature, which thus became an active participant in the emotional life of people.
This is connected with another important orientation of the poetry of sensibility: primitivism. The term refers to the special interest that was invested in folklore, in the everyday life of common people, and it denominates the imitation of the rural voice unspoiled by education. This new interest contributed greatly to the success of writers like Robert Burns or James Macpherson, the two bards of Scotland, who revived and popularised the Scottish folklore and transformed it into the common property of European poetry readers. Macpherson in fact made his fame throughout Europe by publishing a volume a poetry whose author he claimed not to be, Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland and translated from the Gaelic or Erse, which was later to be joined by other
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pseudo-translations to constitute the Poems of Ossian (1763). Yet another contribution of the discovery of the potentialities of folklore is that to the form of poetry, which gains an unexpected musicality, freshness and vigour from its contamination with the songs and incantations of the folk festivals.
The rebellion against all institutionalised forms of authority gathered momentum towards the end of the 18th century when in France social upheavals turned into one of the bloodiest, most influential, and also in many ways most disappointing revolutions in Western history (the French Revolution 1789-94). As a result, culture at the turn of the century is dominated by an ethos of escapism that manifests itself either in the form of bleak gothic of variable quality, or in a reassessment of the distant and exotic past, especially the Middle Ages – i.e., a return both to its ethos and the tradition of chivalry, and to the artistic forms that expressed them: the romance, the ballad, the epic.
Thus, the rebellion against institutions and conventions did not prevent these poets from appreciating the great values of earlier English poetry. On the contrary, Milton, the Elizabethans, the old Celts and the Medieval poets were rediscovered and they played an essential part in the experimentation with old and new poetical devices and patterns which had become one of the major preoccupations of these poets. This led to a greater variety of metrical forms, which included blank verse and Metaphysical prosody alongside new, innovative meters, rhythms and rhymes. Burns again is a master in this field, being influenced by the long line of the Scottish Chaucerians as well as by folklore. Critics have gone as far as to say that no two poems by Burns employ exactly the same metrical patterns, and that his capacity for lexical inventiveness and double entendre is rivalled only be Shakespeare.
To sum up, the essential terms that characterise Preromanticism equally with Romanticism are, as listed by René Wellek, Imagination, Nature, and Symbol (or Myth), while the chief attitude is one of rejection of conventions, social order, the authority of formal religion and church, and of alleged empathy with the simple, the uneducated, superstitious, but pure, as well as with nature in all its wilderness and variety.
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Handouts
THE RENAISSANCE
= A change of cultural paradigm, from the Medieval to the modern one.= The rebirth of the classical/ancient Greek and Roman values in philosophy, art, literature and literary theory, ethics, but especially in the way man was regarded.
MAN becomes the centre of the Universe, and is regarded not only as a religious being, like in the Middle Ages, but as a very complex creature (religious AND moral, biological, aesthetic, intellectual, etc.).
HUMANISM = reassessment of the classics’ values; the intellectual, philosophical trend of the Renaissance.the belief in man’s fundamental capacity for improving himself, his
mind, his life, his world.==> Education was the main concern of the English humanists (also called educationists).
It was based on the medieval trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astrology, and music), with special emphasis on rhetoric and classical texts.
CLASSICAL MODELS in literary theory:
Aristotle: poetry is imitation (mimesis) of Naturethe aims of poetry: to instruct, to move, to delight
rules: the three unities: of action (one plot), of time (24 hours), of place (one city)language, style, prosody = discourse/ diction
decorum: using the appropriate diction to present specific types of characters and actions
==> classification of genresthe need to choose and adapt language, style, rhetorical figures to each genre
Horace: “misce utile dulci” (mix the useful with the entertaining)“ut pictura poesis” (as in painting so in poetry) = poetry ought to be a visual as well as a verbal art, so as to be seen with the mind’s eye as images.
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ROGER ASCHAM’s THE SCHOLEMASTER
BOOK ONE
[DOUBLE TRANSLATION]First, let him [the scholemaster] teach the childe, cherefullie and plainlie,
the cause, and matter of the letter: then, let him construe it into Englishe, so oft, as the childe may easilie carie awaie the vnderstanding of it: Lastlie, parse it ouer perfitlie. This done thus, let the childe, by and by, both construe and parse it ouer againe: so, that it may appeare, that the childe douteth in nothing, that his master taught him before. After this, the childe must take a paper booke, and sitting in some place, where no man shall prompe him, by him self, let him translate into Englishe his former lesson. Then shewing it to his master, let the master take from him his latin booke, and pausing an houre, at the least, than let the childe translate his owne Englishe into latin againe, in an other paper booke. When the childe bringeth it, turned into latin, the master must compare it with Tullies booke, and laie them both togither: and where the childe doth well, either in chosing, or true placing of Tullies wordes, let the master praise him, and saie here ye do well. For I assure you, there is no such whetstone, to sharpen a good witte and encourage a will to learninge, as is praise. But if the childe misse, either in forgetting a worde, or in chaunging a good with a worse, or misordering the sentence, I would not haue the master, either froune, or chide with him, if the childe haue done his diligence, and vsed no trewandship therein. For I know by good experience, that a childe shall take more profit of two fautes, ientlie warned of, then of foure thinges, rightly hitt. …
[THE SCHOOLMASTER’S ATTITUDE] If your scholer do misse sometimes, in marking rightlie these foresaid sixe thinges [Propria, Translata, Synonyma, Diuersa, Contraria, Phrases]6, chide not hastelie: for that shall, both dull his witte, and discorage his diligence: but monish him gentelie: which shall make him, both willing to amende, and glad to go forward in loue and hope of learning. I haue now wished, twise or thrise, this gentle nature, to be in a Scholemaster: And, that I haue done so, neither by chance, nor without some reason, I will now declare at large, why, in mine opinion, loue is fitter than feare, ientlenes better than beating, to bring vp a childe rightlie in learninge. …
I do gladlie agree with all good Scholemasters in these pointes: to haue children brought to good perfitnes in learning: to all honestie in maners: to haue all fautes rightlie amended: to haue euerie vice seuerelie corrected: but for the order and waie that leadeth rightlie to these pointes, we somewhat differ. For commonlie, many scholemasters, some, as I haue seen, moe, as I haue heard tell, be of so crooked a nature, as, when they meete with a hard witted scholer, they rather breake him, than bowe him, rather marre him, then mend him.
6 Categories into which Ascham divides words according to their meaning and which the student should be able to recognise after having done the double translation of a text.
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ROGER ASCHAM“Imitatio” (The Scholemaster) (1570)
Author famous for attempting to impose a new doctrine in the education of young aristocrats, based on imitation / double translation of the ancients and gentle methods.
The Scholemaster regards the trivium. In it the author expresses the pervading opinion that English poetry, under the influence of Italian poetry, has become a source of lies, deceits, and bad morals and manners, and that only the ancients’ literature is worth any attention.
Poesy = everything that is written for the reading public.
Aim of poetry: to teach.
Poetry = the art of conveying a message accurately.==> the author has a great responsibility towards those he might influence, therefore must be as mindful of his style as of his message.
Imitation = double translation, from Latin into English and then back into Latin, comparing the result with the original, in order to learn the Latin language, but also in order to learn the art of rhetoric, of addressing people.
Geni dicendi (styles) : tenue (low): comedies, lyrical poems(the classical division) mediocre: epic poems grande (high): tragediesAscham’s classification : Genus Poeticum: Comicum, Tragicum, Epicum, Melicum Genus Historicum: Diaria, Annales, Commentarios, Iustam, Historiam Genus Philosophicum: Sermonem, Contentionem Genus Oratorium: Humile, Mediocre, Sublime
Aspects to be always taken into consideration when assessing literature: matter utterance and words meter
Attitude towards versification: blank verse is preferred to the “barbaric” rhyme of the Italians.
All good poetry stems from Plato and Aristotle in Greek literature and Tully in Latin.Examples: Caesar, Varro, Salustus + contextualization of their work.
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SIR PHILIP SIDNEYThe Defence of Poesy / An Apology for Poetry (1595)
Author famous for the first long and original pastoral fiction in English (Arcadia, 1590, 1603), the best collection of Elizabethan sonnets (Astrophil and Stella, 1591), and the first important work of literary theory (The Defence of Poesy).
The Defence was written in response to Stephen Gosson’s book The School of Abuse (1579), dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, in which the author scorns poetry from a narrowly Puritan point of view.
Definition of poetry: “an arte of imitation, a representing, counterfetting, or figuring foorth: to speake metaphorically, a speaking picture“
Aims of poetry: “to teach and delight,” but also to move (to stir feelings in the reader in order to instruct).The Poet = Vates (Latin, prophet) Poietes (Greek, creator, maker)==> the divine origin of poetry.Poetry = the first and most complex means of recording the true values of humankind (courage, generosity, patriotism, etc.), combining the theoretical preoccupations of philosophy with the illustration of these precepts by history, and thus facilitating learning.
Kinds of Imitation: Imitation of God (divine poetry)Imitation of philosophy: moral, natural, astronomical, historicalImitation of “what may be, and what should be” (divine, like the first kind, but involving imagination): “Heroick, Lirick, Tragick, Comick, Satirick, Iambick, Elegiack, Pastorall,” Sonnet, etc.
+ examples
Poetry = imitation of Nature, but creating an idealised world, governed by order, harmony, measure, proportion, beauty.
Rhyme is an instance of disciplining the text, therefore is preferred to blank verse.
The contemporary English poets are defended against the Mysomousoi (poetry-haters): Poetry does not tell lies because it does not affirm anything, it only presents things, leaving it to the reader to construct his own truth.
Curse against those who do not love poetry.
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BEN JONSONTo The Memory Of My Beloved Master William Shakspeare,
And What He Hath Left Us
To draw no envy, SHAKSPEARE, on thy name, Am I thus ample to thy book and fame; While I confess thy writings to be such, As neither Man nor Muse can praise too much. ‘Tis true, and all men’s suffrage. But these ways Were not the paths I meant unto thy praise; For seeliest ignorance on these may light, Which, when it sounds at best, but echoes right; Or blind affection, which doth ne’er advance The truth, but gropes, and urgeth all by chance; Or crafty malice might pretend this praise, And think to ruin where it seemed to raise. These are, as some infamous bawd or whore Should praise a matron; what could hurt her more? But thou art proof against them, and, indeed, Above the ill fortune of them, or the need. I therefore will begin: Soul of the age! The applause! delight! the wonder of our stage! My SHAKSPEARE rise! I will not lodge thee by Chaucer, or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lie A little further, to make thee a room : Thou art a monument without a tomb, And art alive still while thy book doth live And we have wits to read, and praise to give. That I not mix thee so my brain excuses, I mean with great, but disproportioned Muses : For if I thought my judgment were of years, I should commit thee surely with thy peers, And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine, Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line. And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek, From thence to honour thee, I would not seek For names : but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles to us, Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead, To life again, to hear thy buskin tread And shake a stage : or when thy socks were on, Leave thee alone for the comparison Of all that insolent Greece or haughty Rome Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come. Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time! And all the Muses still were in their prime, When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm! Nature herself was proud of his designs, And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit. The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
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Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please; But antiquated and deserted lie, As they were not of Nature’s family. Yet must I not give Nature all; thy art, My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part. For though the poet’s matter nature be, His art doth give the fashion : and, that he Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the Muses’ anvil; turn the same, And himself with it, that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn; For a good poet’s made, as well as born. And such wert thou! Look how the father’s face Lives in his issue, even so the race Of Shakspeare’s mind and manners brightly shines In his well torned and true filed lines; In each of which he seems to shake a lance, As brandisht at the eyes of ignorance. Sweet Swan of Avon! what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear, And make those flights upon the banks of Thames, That so did take Eliza, and our James! But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere Advanced, and made a constellation there! Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage, Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourned like night, And despairs day, but for thy volume’s light.
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NEOCLASSICISM
= part of the Enlightenment in European culture: “Described most simply, it was a reaction against the intricacy and occasional obscurity, boldness, and extravagance of European literature of the late Renaissance, in favour of greater simplicity, clarity, restraint, regularity, and good sense” (The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 1993, vol. I, p. 1774).
= Augustan Age – strongly influenced by the writers (Virgil, Horace, Ovid) of the reign of the first Roman emperor Augustus Caesar, just before the beginning of the Christian era.
CLASSICAL MODELS: the same as for the Renaissance
KEYWORDS:Nature = aesthetic object (to be admired)
object of scientific inquiryobject of religious contemplationobject of imitation for art and especially for poetry, recreated by the poet (“poietes” –
Greek: maker) = eternal truth
universal laws of naturehuman nature (+ human experience)
later on: the sum of individuals and individualitiesthe world “out there,” wilderness
Wit = “fancy” or “imagination”“thoughts and words elegantly adapted to the subject”
(Dryden) – it had to be tamed by “judgment”
“decorum” (the appropriate)without suppressing passion, energy, or originality.
LANGUAGE– characterised by: personification
periphrasis (an elegant way of avoiding common words)stock and artificial phraseswords used in the original Latin meaningfondness of adjectives ending in y
(Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads) mannerism
VERSIFICATIONHeroic couplet = a pentameter couplet usually containing a complete statement
– characterised by parallelism, balance, antithesis, caesuraBlank verse = unrhymed iambic pentameter
mannerism and bombast
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JOHN DRYDEN’s “ESSAY ON DRAMATICK POESY” (written 1676-8, published 1682)
Fragments from an electronic text published by the University of Toronto (1996). Accessible at: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/criticism/of_dr_il.html
I know no other quarrel you can have to Verse, then that which Spurina had to his beauty, when he tore and mangled the features of his Face, onely because they pleas’d too well the lookers on.
… to lead out a new Colony of Writers from the Mother Nation…
Caesar… not so much his business to condemn Cato, as to praise Cicero.
… the drift of this ensuing Discourse was chiefly to vindicate the honour of our English Writers, from the centre of those who unjustly prefer the French before them.
Crites: … the public magistrate ought to send betimes to forbid them [bad poets] and that it concern’d the peace and quiet of all honest people, that ill poets should be as well silenc’d as seditious Preachers…
There are so few who write well in this Age… neither rise to the dignity of the last Age, nor to any of the Ancients… you have debauched the old Poetry so far, that Nature, which is the soul of it, is not in any of your Writings.
Eugenius: … there is no man more ready to adore those great Greeks and Romans than I am, but… I cannot talk so contemptibly of the age I live in, or so dishonourably of my own Countrey, as not to judge we equal to the Ancients in most kinds of Poesie, and in some surpass them…
Lisideius [a play is] a just and lively Image of Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and Instruction of Mankind.
Crites: [The Ancients are superior because they were able to write good poetry despite the fact that] … Asian Kings and Grecian Commonwealths scarce afforded them [the Ancients] a better subject [than the] unmanly luxuries of a debauch’d court, or the giddy intrigues of a Factious city.
Crites: Ben Jonson… That greatest man of the last age… a learned plagiary… you track him everywhere in their [the Ancients’] snow… I will produce Father Ben to you, dress’d in all the ornaments and colours of the Ancients. You will need no other guide to our party if you follow him.
Eugenius: We draw not.. after their [the Ancients’] lines, but those of Nature… When I condemn the Ancients, it is not altogether because they have not five Acts to every Play, but because they have not confin’d themselves to one certain number; ‘tis building an House without a
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Modell…
She [the “maid of virtue” in the Ancients’ comedies] hadst the breeding of the old Elizabeth way, for Maids to be seen and not heard; it is enough you know she is willing to be married, when the Fifth Act require it.
[The Ancient were] Imitative of Nature, but so narrow as if they had imitated onely an eye or an Hand, and did not dare to venture on the lines of a Face, or the Proportions of a Body.
Neander: … in most of the irregular Playes of Shakespeare or Fletcher (for Ben Jonson’s are for the most part regular) there is a more masculine fancy and greater spirit in all the writing, then there is in many of the French… Shakespeare, of all Modern and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning, give him the greater commendation: he was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of Books to read Nature; he looked inwards and found her there.
Shakespeare was the Homer, or Father of our Dramatick Poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare. To conclude of him, as he has given us most correct Plays, so in the precedents which he has laid down his Discoveries, we have as many and profitable Rules for perfecting the Stage as any wherewith the French can furnish us.
After this dialogue, the four speakers disembark and part ways, walking:
… through a crowd of French people who were merrily dancing in the open air, and nothing concern’d for the sound of Guns which had allarm’d the Town this afternoon.
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Enlightenment and the Novel
The novel id not just a new way of telling stories, but a new way of seeing the world. The novel is when two or more of the older literary genres are combined (e.g.
biography, autobiography, romance, satire etc.), as long as the mixture remains domestic. As soon as a Sarasine or Arab is mentioned, what we deal with is ‘romance’. The novel is a xenophobic genre.
The novel is “that which emerges in the place of the truth of scripture” (Melvin New in The Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism 515). It emerged when questions about the old order started to be asked – questions about scripture.
“piety’s hostility to narrative” and the consequent insistence upon the “priority of the moral” (New 509).
The Bible reinforced the priority of the Word over the world. 18th century still overwhelmingly Christian in outlook. The novel “initiated the demise of the traditional public vocabulary with its stress
upon military prowess, manly independence and the idealization of man as citizen” (Joseph Dwyer in The Encyclopedia 1030).
It also made an effort to displace the vulgar vocabulary of commerce and interest. It attempted to introduce a more refined notion of morality, a domestic ethic, and ethic
of sensibility, in which women were allocated a stable position, and which aimed to establish an equilibrium between “personal emotion and social conscience which could reinforce group harmony and the stability of an increasingly complex and differentiated modern society” (Dwyer 1031).
Social and economic mobility artificiality becomes a way of life: everybody had an interest to appear what they were not.
“manipulating emotion in the cause of virtue” (Dwyer 1032): sympathy, empathy, fellow feeling.
The role of women becomes, especially in Victorian times, to “soften the harshness of an aggressive and insensitive world” (Dwyer 1041, citing Gorham 1982) – a contribution whose full psychological, ethical and sexual potential was exploited by the bourgeoisie.
Hegel: “the secularisation of spirituality” typical of the modern world begins in the late 18th century.
“widespread general interest in a relaxation of artistic restraints and an increased desire for imaginative freedom” (Robert D. Spector in The Encyclopedia 1044).
=> Sentimentality could be defined as an attempt to counteract the current tendency of reason to become enmeshed in technological and economic progress and turn into a mercantile instrument.
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HENRY FIELDINGFrom The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and
His Friend Mr Abraham Adams
Author’s Preface
As it is possible the mere English reader may have a different idea of romance from the author of these little volumes, and may consequently expect a kind of entertainment not to be found, nor which was even intended, in the following pages, it may not be improper to premise a few words concerning this kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language.
The EPIC, as well as the DRAMA, is divided into tragedy and comedy. HOMER, who was the father of this species of poetry, gave us a pattern of both these, though that of the latter kind is entirely lost; which Aristotle tells us, bore the same relation to comedy which his Iliad bears to tragedy. And perhaps, that we have no more instances of it among the writers of antiquity, is owing to the loss of this great pattern, which, had it survived, would have found its imitators equally with the other poems of this great original.
And farther, as this poetry may be tragic or comic, I will not scruple to say it may be likewise either in verse or prose: for though it wants one particular, which the critic enumerates in the constituent parts of an epic poem, namely metre; yet, when any kind of writing contains all its other parts, such as fable, action, characters, sentiments, and diction, and is deficient in metre only, it seems, I think, reasonable to refer it to the epic; at least, as no critic hath thought proper to range it under any other head, or to assign it a particular name to itself.…
Now, a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose; differing from comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy: its action being more extended and comprehensive; containing a much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a greater variety of characters. It differs from the serious romance in its fable and action, in this; that as in the one these are grave and solemn, so in the other they are light and ridiculous: it differs in its characters by introducing persons of inferior rank, and consequently, of inferior manners, whereas the grave romance sets the highest before us: lastly, in its sentiments and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime. In the diction, I think, burlesque itself may be sometimes admitted; of which many instances will occur in this work, as in the description of the battles, and some other places, not necessary to be pointed out to the classical reader, for whose entertainment those parodies or burlesque imitations are chiefly calculated.
But though we have sometimes admitted this in our diction, we have carefully excluded it from our sentiments and characters; for there it is never properly introduced, unless in writings of the burlesque kind, which this is not intended to be. Indeed, no two species of writing can differ more widely than the comic and the burlesque; for as the latter is ever the exhibition of what is monstrous and unnatural, and where our delight, if we examine it, arises from the surprizing absurdity, as in appropriating the manners of the highest to the lowest, or e converso; so in the former we should ever confine ourselves strictly to nature, from the just imitation of which will flow all the pleasure we can this way convey to a sensible reader. And perhaps there is one reason why a comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable; but life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous.
I have hinted this little concerning burlesque, because I have often heard that name given to performances which have been truly of the comic kind, from
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the author’s having sometimes admitted it in his diction only; which, as it is the dress of poetry, doth, like the dress of men, establish characters (the one of the whole poem, and the other of the whole man), in vulgar opinion, beyond any of their greater excellences: but surely, a certain drollery in stile, where characters and sentiments are perfectly natural, no more constitutes the burlesque, than an empty pomp and dignity of words, where everything else is mean and low, can entitle any performance to the appellation of the true sublime.
And I apprehend my Lord Shaftesbury’s opinion of mere burlesque agrees with mine, when he asserts, There is no such thing to be found in the writings of the ancients. But perhaps I have less abhorrence than he professes for it; and that, not because I have had some little success on the stage this way, but rather as it contributes more to exquisite mirth and laughter than any other; and these are probably more wholesome physic for the mind, and conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy, and ill affections, than is generally imagined. Nay, I will appeal to common observation, whether the same companies are not found more full of good-humour and benevolence, after they have been sweetened for two or three hours with entertainments of this kind, than when soured by a tragedy or a grave lecture.
But to illustrate all this by another science, in which, perhaps, we shall see the distinction more clearly and plainly, let us examine the works of a comic history painter, with those performances which the Italians call Caricatura, where we shall find the true excellence of the former to consist in the exactest copying of nature; insomuch that a judicious eye instantly rejects anything _outre_, any liberty which the painter hath taken with the features of that _alma mater_; whereas in the Caricatura we allow all licence--its aim is to exhibit monsters, not men; and all distortions and exaggerations whatever are within its proper province.
Now, what Caricatura is in painting, Burlesque is in writing; and in the same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other. And here I shall observe, that, as in the former the painter seems to have the advantage; so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the writer; for the Monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the Ridiculous to describe than paint.
And though perhaps this latter species doth not in either science so strongly affect and agitate the muscles as the other; yet it will be owned, I believe, that a more rational and useful pleasure arises to us from it. He who should call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque painter, would, in my opinion, do him very little honour; for sure it is much easier, much less the subject of admiration, to paint a man with a nose, or any other feature, of a preposterous size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of men on canvas. It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe; but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause, that they appear to think.
But to return. The Ridiculous only, as I have before said, falls within my province in the present work. Nor will some explanation of this word be thought impertinent by the reader, if he considers how wonderfully it hath been mistaken, even by writers who have professed it: for to what but such a mistake can we attribute the many attempts to ridicule the blackest villanies, and, what is yet worse, the most dreadful calamities? What could exceed the absurdity of an author, who should write the comedy of Nero, with the merry incident of ripping up his mother’s belly? or what would give a greater shock to humanity than an attempt to expose the miseries of poverty and distress to ridicule? And yet the reader will not want much learning to suggest such instances to himself.
Besides, it may seem remarkable, that Aristotle, who is so fond and free of definitions, hath not thought proper to define the Ridiculous. Indeed, where he tells us it is proper to comedy, he hath remarked that villany is not its object: but he hath not, as I remember, positively asserted what is. Nor doth the Abbe
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Bellegarde, who hath written a treatise on this subject, though he shows us many species of it, once trace it to its fountain.
The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is affectation. But though it arises from one spring only, when we consider the infinite streams into which this one branches, we shall presently cease to admire at the copious field it affords to an observer. Now, affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy: for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues. And though these two causes are often confounded (for there is some difficulty in distinguishing them), yet, as they proceed from very different motives, so they are as clearly distinct in their operations: for indeed, the affectation which arises from vanity is nearer to truth than the other, as it hath not that violent repugnancy of nature to struggle with, which that of the hypocrite hath. It may be likewise noted, that affectation doth not imply an absolute negation of those qualities which are affected; and, therefore, though, when it proceeds from hypocrisy, it be nearly allied to deceit; yet when it comes from vanity only, it partakes of the nature of ostentation: for instance, the affectation of liberality in a vain man differs visibly from the same affectation in the avaricious; for though the vain man is not what he would appear, or hath not the virtue he affects, to the degree he would be thought to have it; yet it sits less awkwardly on him than on the avaricious man, who is the very reverse of what he would seem to be.
From the discovery of this affectation arises the Ridiculous, which always strikes the reader with surprize and pleasure; and that in a higher and stronger degree when the affectation arises from hypocrisy, than when from vanity; for to discover any one to be the exact reverse of what he affects, is more surprizing, and consequently more ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he desires the reputation of. I might observe that our Ben Jonson, who of all men understood the Ridiculous the best, hath chiefly used the hypocritical affectation.
Now, from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe any man living, who meets a dirty fellow riding through the streets in a cart, is struck with an idea of the Ridiculous from it; but if he should see the same figure descend from his coach and six, or bolt from his chair with his hat under his arm, he would then begin to laugh, and with justice. In the same manner, were we to enter a poor house and behold a wretched family shivering with cold and languishing with hunger, it would not incline us to laughter (at least we must have very diabolical natures if it would); but should we discover there a grate, instead of coals, adorned with flowers, empty plate or china dishes on the sideboard, or any other affectation of riches and finery, either on their persons or in their furniture, we might then indeed be excused for ridiculing so fantastical an appearance. Much less are natural imperfections the object of derision; but when ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or lameness endeavours to display agility, it is then that these unfortunate circumstances, which at first moved our compassion, tend only to raise our mirth.
The poet carries this very far:--
None are for being what they are in fault, But for not being what they would be thought.
Where if the metre would suffer the word Ridiculous to close the first line, the thought would be rather more proper. Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults, of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous.…
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