the whig interpretation of literary history

American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies (ASECS)

The "Whig Interpretation" of Literary HistoryAuthor(s): Henry Knight MillerSource: Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Autumn, 1972), pp. 60-84Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Sponsor: American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies (ASECS).Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3031562Accessed: 06/07/2010 00:47

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The "4Whig Interpretation" of Literary History HENRY KNIGHT MILLER

LITERARY HISTORY iS inevitably the child of literary history-not necessarily in the sense of a naked raid upon earlier materials, but in that any scholar who approaches the formidable task of composing a literary history cannot really escape drawing, for schemata and evaluations, upon his own learned experience, his own past. And that will include the literary histories to which he had been exposed in his own youth. There will of course be changes, but there is a continuity, too, as with other phenomena in the stream of time. And it is the continuity that is my present concern. For numerous assumptions proper to the literary history written in the nineteenth century linger on, not only in our histories but in the scholarship that will feed tomorrow's synthesis.

Thus it may be useful to review briefly some of the assumptions that belong to an older (and, some may think, closed) chapter in the study of our literary past; for that older writing can often still be read beneath the codex rescriptus of modern literary history-as when a distinguished (and sympathetic) modern historian tells us that Pope's Pastorals "made little attempt to bring to Londoners the sweets and freshness of the countryside." The curious reader who seeks to discover the beginnings of such irrelevant judgments-irrelevant to Pope's Pastorals, for instance-will find, of course, that they appear in the eighteenth century itself. But there they form part of a vigorous argument, an ongoing dialectic: the question is, how did such judgments come to assume the shape of ultimate and self-evident truths that no person of sensibility and taste could doubt? And this is the historical matter to which I here address myself, that of the codifica- tion of a set of literary absolutes-which (unfortunately) were in many respects expressly calculated to denigrate the qualities and achievements of eighteenth-century English literature.

60

[HE "WHIG INTERPRETATION" 61

In the year 1887, a distinguished Victorian man of letters, Augus- tine Birrell, declared confidently that "we have left off beating the eighteenth century."' His kindly estimate was somewhat premature. Again, in 1916, George Saintsbury asserted that the "extreme deni- gration" of the eighteenth century "has indeed ceased."2 His estimate, too, was somewhat premature. For the nineteenth-century vision of its literary past dominated the writing of literary history well into our own times; and an essential element in that nineteenth- century vision was the polarization between itself and the eighteenth century (which was, except for its "anticipations" of Romanticism, usually referred to as a single entity, rather much the same throughout). Without that polarization, half the drama, half the meaning, of the Victorian self-image was gone. "Our excellent and indispensable eighteenth century," as Matthew Arnold patronizingly called it, was indeed indispensable to nineteenth-century literary historiography. And, as I have suggested, literary histories oriented in Vic- torian terms are very nearly all that we have had (until most recently) in the twentieth century.

Useful studies have been made of the rise of a "historical point of view" over several centuries before the nineteenth;3 and Professor Wellek has provided a valuable account of the "rise" of literary history, leading to Thomas Warton.4 But the formal history of Enqlish

I Augustine Birrell, "Pope," in The Collected Essays & Addresses (London, 1922), I, 42-43.

2 George Saintsbury, The Peace of the Augustans (London, 1916), p. vi. 3 For example, George M. Miller, The Historical Point of View in English Literary

Criticism from 1570 to 1770 (Heidelberg, 1913). 4 Rene Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill, 1941). There

is much of relevance to this topic also in Wellek's History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950 (New Haven, 1955- ). The interesting and eccentric Sketches of a History of Literature (1794), by Robert Alves, reproduced by Scholars' Facsimiles (Gainesville, 1967), ambitiously sought to comment upon all the major literatures of the world in fewer than three hundred pages. Joseph Spence wrote (but did not publish) a brief literary history in French as early as ca. 1732 (see James M. Os- born, "The First History of English Poetry," in Pope and His Contemporaries: Essays Presented to George Sherburn, ed. James L.'Clifford and Louis A. Landa [Oxford, 1949], pp. 230-50). I must here express my gratitude to Dr. Osborn, who first suggested that I undertake this little survey, and to Professor Wellek, who kindly read (and soundly criticized) an early draft of the paper. Neither is, of course, to be held responsible for my conclusions or approach.

62 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES

literature is, nevertheless, essentially a nineteenth-century achievement, one in which it could take justifiable pride. Now, this achievement happened to coincide with the then most recent manifestation of a normal phenomenon-the inevitable change in taste exhibited by a new era as it seeks to exorcize the ghost of the immediate and influential past. We are familiar with the shift from a Spenserian decorum to that of the Metaphysicals and extravagant ironists, and with the shift from the late Metaphysicals to the decorum of the Augustans, and with the transition to the phenomenon of "sensibility," followed by the complex forms of Romanticism, and then, after the Victorian artistic ambivalences, the shift to a fresh voice in Pound and Eliot and Auden and their congeners in our own era, perhaps already displaced by a counterrevolution. This, in other words, is the normal history of changing taste, in everything from literary emphases to the subtle modulations of design.' But one particular instance of this inevitable process, namely the shift from the variety of eighteenth-century tastes to those that we lump to- gether (for want of a better general term) as "Romantic," happened to coincide with, or be immediately followed by, the first widespread attempts to construct a history of English literature; and it is perhaps not surprising that, therefore, this one local and present instance of a general phenomenon was elevated into the very archetype and model of all changes in literary taste. A normal (and, in fact, gradual) change was elevated into an apocalyptic revolution: the Ro- mantic "Rebellion," the Romantic "Triumph," the Romantic "Re- jection." And if this was to be the dramatic type of the supersession of one mode by another, then the local instance of a superseded mode, that of eighteenth-century values, had to become the very type of everything that was to be rejected in one's literary past.

r) See, for instance, John Gloag, Georgian Grace: A Social History of Design from 1660 to 1830 (London, 1956), and John Steegman, Consort of Taste, 1830-70 (London, 1950). One need scarcely point out that something is always conserved in these changes and that they are seldom as pure and as dramatic as our pedagogi- cal techniques would make them. Moreover, in any given period, there is inevitably a strong "Conservative" wing, wedded to the values of the immediate past. We sometimes forget just how monumentally the Eighteenth Century weighed upon its successor; and we tend to read the first half of the Nineteenth Century through its great Romantics and fail to realize that in their own time they were as islands in a sea whose major body was still of the century past-with assumptions and dictates by then vulgarized and codified into a stifling orthodoxy. Just so, the literary histories that are my subject largely represent nineteenth-century opinion vulgarized and codified into a stifling orthodoxy.

THE "WHIG INTERPRETATION" 63

There are many particular implications that follow from this general model, and I cannot pursue them here. But the major implica- tion is clear: the eighteenth century was indispensable; it was the necessary negative type, or antithesis. Without it, the governing theme of nineteenth-century literary historiography-an inevitable progress through the ages toward the culmination of all values in its own age-was incomplete, made no dramatic sense. For, if the major event in English literary history was to be celebrated as the triumph of Romanticism and "the Folk," the idea of Progress required a stage that had been superseded-and, perhaps even more important, the idea of Drama additionally demanded an aristocratic enemy, who had been vanquished.6 And there is no literary history in the nineteenth century, or, indeed, in the Victorian survivals inco the twentieth century, that does not swear implicit allegiance to this scenario of the Ultimate Revolution and achievement of the Ultimate Grail. It has since been called "the fallacy of premature teleology."7

When George Saintsbury's The Peace of the Augustans (1916) was enshrined among the pleasant volumes of the World's Classics series in 1946, Sir Herbert Grierson wrote a brief introduction, ex- pressing the disquiet that he had felt on hearing of the original pub- lication:

But was there to be a revaluation of Pope as a poet, implying [my italics] some devaluation of the Romantics, such as has been attempted once or twice since Saintsbury wrote . . .? I need not have been afraid. When one has considered all the deductions which Saintsbury admits in Pope's work, monotony of versification, want of all originality in the thought, what remains? "The phrasing is triumphant." But has any judicious reader of poetry ever doubted that? . . . No; Saintsbury does full justice to Pope, but it is when the Romantics, the Fugitives, come in sight that the lights begin to go up.

And Grierson concluded, "Rest and refreshment are excellent things,

6 There also had to be a "heritage," however: and the entire literary history of England was (both consciously and unconsciously) reshaped to exhibit its inher- ently "romantic" qualities, its fascination with physical nature, its psychological "realism," and its abiding concern with "higher and finer" evangelical emotional values. Hence the frequency of insistence upon a "Return" to Nature or some other element. The critique of this version of literary history may be said to constitute one of the major tasks of modern scholarship in all periods of English literature (including the Nineteenth Century itself); but even this late in the twentieth century the effort has thus far been largly piecemeal.

7 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 17.


as are good meat and vegetables, and eighteenth-century verse and prose will supply both in abundance-but, after all, there is wine and there is poetry."8

It is among the wry ironies of literary history that the devaluation of the Romantics which did, indeed, inevitably occur was exhibited not so much in the revaluations of Pope as in the rise to new prom- inence of the Metaphysicals, heralded by the superb edition of John Donne that had been issued in 1912 by Herbert J. C. Grierson.

But Grierson's fear was symptomatic: in his bones he could feel that the entire version of literary history that he had grown up with (and therefore, for him, all literary judgment) depended upon the continuing opposition of "Classic" and "Romantic," of Pope and Wordsworth (or Shelley), as the central and ultimate struggle of English literary history. If that were to be "revalued," then all of the accepted version produced by nineteenth-century literary historiography would have to be revalued. And of course he was right. It would be.

Herbert Butterfield has spoken, in a now famous phrase, of "the Whig Interpretation of History." And his book of that title (in 1931) was, in effect, a critique of the assumptions of nineteenth-century historiography, a critique of the attempt "to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."9 Butter- field's rejection of the Historian as Avenger, full of moral indigna- tion, and of History as the over-dramatization of origins and analo- gies that could be seen as leading to the "Modern," is familiar. (It is a hardy man who now permits himself to speak of Magna Carta as

8 H. J. C. Grierson, "Introduction" to The Peace of the A ugustans by George Saintsbury (London, 1946), pp. xi-xii. The Critical History of English Poetry (Lon- don, 1950), by Grierson and J. C. Smith, declares in its "Prefatory Note" that "we are well aware that critics like us, whose taste in poetry was formed in Victorian days, may fail to do justice to the poetry and the criticism of the present generation, between which and the Victorian Age a 'shift of sensibility' has occurred com- parable to that which took place between the Age of Pope and the Age of Words- worth." This honest avowal makes equally clear that no justice will be done to the Age of Pope.

9 The Wliig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), preface. Sir Herbert came to feel, however, during the patriotic years of the War, that the Whig bias had on the whole been fortunate for the English in its very stress on "liberty"; see The Englishman and His History (London, 1944).


a great blow in the democratic struggle for Liberty.) But we cannot afford to overlook the enormous appeal of such modes of history. They do provide a stirringly concocted drama that eventuates in ourselves and in our victory; they do "ratify and glorify the present." The implicit teleology of "the Whig Interpretation of History" makes it possible to believe that one has arrived at an ultimate peak, a permanent resting place, and that the past may be surveyed as a grand story with a built-in, an immanent, purposiveness leading to us. It is permissible to speculate that this in itself offers one explana- tion for the fact that literary history as a "species" took its modern form in this era-which did indeed witness the effective triumph of the "middling classes," not only as the wielders of economic and political power, but (the real triumph) as the value-givers for a culture. Never perhaps has the study of history itself been so broadly honored as in the nineteenth century, when its lessons provided such a reas- suring image of final "synthesis" for the established society. More- over, if one is enabled to search earlier times for anticipations and precursors of a final entelechy, then a major ordering principle for the significant organization of history is provided-an ordering principle that, in fact, we still find it difficult to do without.

But there is no doubt that, whatever its uses and joys, this organiz- ing principle is not only always relative to a particular telos, or goal, but that it also provides a distorting lens through which to view any earlier period. It must distort, because it seeks out in preceding eras only those things that pointed to the millennium (or that perversely failed to recognize it) and ignores the actual interests and concerns of the past. It is inescapably relative, because if one's view of the millennial point changes-as to most scholars not personally committed to the nineteenth-century point of view, the so-called Roman- tic Triumph no longer appears as that exalted and ultimate telos of English literary history-then all that one is left with in earlier histories is a mass of insignificant trivialities (such as the documenta- tion of a feeling for "nature" from Chaucer to Cowper), that distorts or ignores the really central concerns of this stretch of literature and history.

I would insist again, however, that this "Whig Interpretation of History" is enormously appealing. It cannot fail to be, for it enables the "modern" historian to feel superior to his materials (since past ages can necessarily have seen only a part of the full light, and did


not realize whither they were tending-or culpably failing to tend); and this feeling of superiority is, though seldom mentioned, a great spur to historical composition. It further enables a man or an age to project upon other eras those qualities which it finds most offensive in itself 7 and to identify with a richer (or more elemental) existence than its own. In nineteenth-century England and America, a ruling society of practical middle-class Christians, wedded to the virtues of the evangelical and the utilitarian, reveled in a splendid literature and a very satisfying criticism that offered identification with more heroic (even pagan) attitudes, and that fobbed off its own quiet good sense upon the regnant society of the previous age that it was seeking to reduce in scale. It is scarcely surprising that such a personally fulfilling version of literary history should have had a long life-or should, indeed, continue to enjoy sparks of life in what is still essentially a democratic, utilitarian, middle-class society.

We may call this version of the literary past "the Whig Interpreta- tion of Literary History," for it is influenced by and is part of that whole tradition of the nineteenth-century "Liberal" Movement which is the period's glory, and which many now are as violentiy seeking to exorcise as ever that era sought to exorcise its own immediate past. We usually call this complex of ideas "Victorianism," and we are likely to be quite as intolerant toward it as it was toward the excellent and indispensable eighteenth century. But in its own day, the "Whig Interpretation" had strong community support- more than any given historical view can be said to command today -and this confident sense of community validation appears in all the literary histories of the period, quite as vigorously as it appears in Sir Charles Wyndham's letter in the 1890s protesting Henry Arthur Jones's projected play, The Case of Rebellious Susan: "I am not speaking as a moralist, I am simply voicing the public instinct." '1

The "public instinct" gave a finality to the judgments of literary historians, and enabled them to luxuriate in a "privileged language"

10 In a valuable essay on nineteenth-century misconceptions of Locke (many of which are still regnant), Hans Aarsleff points out that however perverted their vision of Locke as "sensationalist" and "utilitarian," etc., may have been, "it also shows that Locke was still very mLIch alive; if he had not been, the nineteenth century would not have fought its own battles by projecting them into the reading of Locke" ("Locke's Reputation in Nineteenth-Century England," The Monist, 55 [1971], 392-422; cit. p. 422).

I1 Cited in Doris Arthur Jones, Taking the Curtain Call: The Life and Letters of Henry Arthur Jones (New York, 1930), p. 136.


that must have made such history a pleasure to write. But it also made possible a failure in historical integrity that is not always a pleasure to read. An anthology of English literature published as late as 1942 (the anthology that I studied from, in fact) introduced American students to eighteenth-century literature by presenting the familiar nineteenth-century myth in toto and by confidently declaring, after the usual citation of Imlac's dictum in Rasselas about not numbering the streaks of the tulip, "A twentieth-century critic feels compelled to say that almost every statement in this passage, written by the most influential literary critic of the eighteenth century, is completely and viciously wrong." Moreover, the introduction demonstrated the general "dwindling" of culture in the whole era after this fashion:

In Dr. Samuel Johnson, one of the more favorable examples of what the eighteenth century could do in the development of personality, no one can fail to see the results of this dwindling. Painting, sculpture, architecture, dancing, and acting he cared little for. Music he defined as the least unpleasant form of noise. About most of what we refer to by the word "nature" he knew little and cared less. To that health, beauty, strength, and skill of the body which the wiser ancients had thought to be almost the highest good he did not even aspire. He was gross in appearance and in physical habits. He was often boorish in manners. . . . He did his best literary work in the field of criticism, and even there his judgments were often shaped not by true literary standards but by a dogmatic morality. 12

The logic of this argument is easily followed: if this is the best that the eighteenth century can offer, what indeed must have been the condition of the rest? Thus were American students introduced to the literature of the eighteenth century in the year 1942.

12 The College Survey of English Literalture, ed. B. J. Whiting, Fred B. Millett, Alexander M. Witherspoon, Odell Shepard, Arthur Palmer Hudson, Edward Wagen- knecht, and Louis Untermeyer, 2 vols. (New York, 1942), I, 781, 779. This kind of thing is, perhaps, water under the bridge now; but doubtless many students educated in that era accepted such travesties as gospel, and some may still depend upon their undergraduate notes for their opinions. A recent study of linguistic history provides at one point this brief summation: "As a symbol of rneoclassicism in literature, Pope typified the aristocratic attributes of the poetry written in that time. . . . Believing that what man knew was more important than what he could imagine, the rational singers of the first half of the eighteenth century remained content to copy the ancients rather than nature" (John Nist, A Structural History of English [New York, 1966]5 p. 289). As one of his exercises for students, Nist suggested: "From everything you have learned about Authoritarian English, now write a critique of the following literary judgment: the neoclassicism of eighteenth- century England is really pseudoclassicism" (p. 300).


Such naive dishonesty is not personal: it is communal. A general agreement in preconceptions makes circular argument invisible; and an obsessive need to maintain a myth justifies any mode of argument. When a myth satisfies certain felt needs-particularly when it dis- guises one's own inadequacies or enables one to have the cake and munch it too-not only will that myth be warmly clasped and celebrated as the only viable truth, but all questionings of the myth will be felt as treasonable (we have seen Sir Herbert's fears that Saints- bury might be about to commit treason). If self-indulgence and self- congratulation can be disguised by the myth as a noble stand for liberty and the Love of the Highest, combined with a dignified contempt for their enemies, then the power of the myth is quite unre- sponsive to argument or evidence. It is self-validating; and nothing that contributes to it can be felt as dishonest or illogical.13 Evidence that runs counter to it will be resolutely belittled, ignored-or not even seen.14

The literary histories that helped to create this powerful myth, still regnant in 1942 (and later), took shape in various forms. As in the eighteenth century itself, much of the local ruling tradition is

13 Moreover, once Alexander Pope (or Jonathan Swift) had been set up as the official monster, it became an easy matter to flourish one's own unquestionable credentials of sincere virtue and good-heartedness: one merely damned Pope (with an authorized spite, poison, and malice) as spiteful, poisonous, and malicious. Such eidola of evil are fatally self-gratifying and self-serving; and the lesson once learned is difficult to forget-as we see in even recent journalistic biographies of Pope.

14 The case of Sprat's History of the Royal Society is instructive. It is endlessly cited (as, typically, in Basil Willey's The Seventeenth Century Background [London, 1949], pp. 206 if.) to illustrate the "war upon poetry" in the age. But no one of the critics who quote for this purpose the passage on "a close, naked, natural way of speaking . , . preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars" is even able to see that, if one is to accept a dichotomy of the "neo-classic" and the "Romantic," this is the true "pre-Romantic" voice, "anticipating" by more than a century Wordsworth's dictum that poetry should employ the language of common life, of rural folk ("purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust" and selected so as to "separate the composition from the vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life"), because "poems somewhat less naked and simple are capable of affording pleasure at the present day" (Lyrical Ballads, ed. R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones [London, 1963], pp. 239, 257; my italics). The true heir of Sprat's supposed "war upon poetry" must patently be William Wordsworth, not the Augus- tans, who scorned the Royal Society.


expressed through the work of individual critics dealing with particular topics, and unquestionably the voices of Hazlitt and Macaulay, of Carlyle and Arnold, were highly influential in providing phrases and points of view for the horde of minor historians. Again, journalistic reviews and public lectures increasingly helped to form and to consolidate literary taste, through a process that our modern engi- neers would call "positive feedback"-which eventually became a highly effective control mechanism. An influential lecturer such as Thackeray, for instance, offers very nakedly an image of the social obsession with class that provided a major pole of discourse, as the nineteenth century looked back upon the eighteenth. As a prelude to praise of "dear old Johnson," Thackeray presented some quotations from Lord Carlisle's letters, and declared:

If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must make allowances for the rich men's failings, and recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we not motive for work, a mortal's natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptations of a large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a great fortune, do but be splendid and idle? . . . Better for him had he been a lawyer at his desk, or a clerk in his office;-a thousand times better chance for happiness, education, employment, security from temptation.

It is to the middle class we must look for the safety of England: the working educated men, away from Lord North's bribery in the senate; the good clergy not corrupted into parasites by hopes of preferment; the tradesmen rising into manly opulence; the painters pursuing their gentle calling; the men of letters in their quiet studies: these are the men whom we love and like to read of in the last age.15)

English literature was not a subject formally taught in the two major English universities until very late in the century;16 but it was read in the grammar schools and academies and at some other English and Scottish universities, as well as in America; and the early histories tend to take the form of helpful manuals and dictionaries, such as Robert Chambers' famous Cyclopaedia of English Literature, 2 vols.

15 The Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, 26 vols. (London, 1901), XXIII, 70-71.

1 6Sqe D. J. Palmer, The Rise of Englislh Studies: An Account of the Study of English Language and Literature from Its Origins to the Making of the Ovford Englislh School (London, 1965); and, on the growth of English studies at Cam- bridge, E. M. W. Tillyard, T'he Muse Unchained (London, 1958).


(Edinburgh, 1843-44), Thomas Budd Shaw's Outlines of Eng- lish Literature (London, 1849), or Samuel Allibone's Critical Dic- tionary of English Literature, 3 vols. (Philadelphia and London, 1858-71). Austin Dobson's Civil Service Handbook of English Lit- erature (London, 1874) reminds us that, after 1855, the Civil Service examination created a ready market for such elementary texts. The conception of literary history remained centrally biographical, as we may see in such a work as William F. Collier's His- tory of English Literature in a Series of Biographical Sketches (Edinburgh and New York, 1865); but with Hippolyte Taine's His- toire de la litte'rature anglaise (Paris, 1863-64; translated, Edin- burgh, 1871), the possibility of rather more sophisticated and "scientific" principles for the organization of literary history was offered. And Taine's history, with the German histories by the great Hettner and the lesser Engel and K6rting, also testifies to the in- creasing interest exhibited by the Continent in the historiography of English literature-the latter volumes may be seen as emblematic of the influence throughout the century of German literary scholarship (which was normally, of course, highly "Romantic" as well as highly philological).17 It is not until the 1880s, however, that one begins to see a real flow of literary histories of particular periods; and this is still largely the work of resolute amateurs rather than of pro- fessional scholars-such productions as Mrs. Margaret Oliphant's Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Be-

17 Henry Beers complained, as late as 1899, that English literary history did not properly set off a Romantic school, as German and French literary history had done (A History of Englisih Romanticism in the Eighlteenthl Century [London, 1899], p. iii). On the whole, for English scholars of the time, France was still vaguely the enemy and Germany a natural friend: the French were "neo-classical," the Germans "romantic." Of the European comments upon the English eighteenth century in this period, only Le Public et les hlommes de lettres en Angleterre au dix-hiuitieme sieele (Paris, 1881; trans. E. 0. Lorimer, London, 1948), by Alex- andre Beljame, is still useful. The same cannot be said of the Histoire de la littira- ture anglaise (Paris, 1924; trans. 1926-27, and revised, London, 1957), by Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, which (despite M. Cazamian's "modern" psychologiz- ing) merely echoes the official Victorian judgments. The most important history in German was doubtless that of Hermann J. T. Hettner, Literatiurgescliiclite des aclhtzelinteni Jalirhiuinderts (Braunschweig, 1856-70); Eduard Engel, Gescliiclite der englisclien Literatiur (Leipzig, 1883), and Gustav Korting, Grundriss der Gescliiclitc der englischleu Litterailur (Miinster, 1887), offered popular manuals. A useful set of essays by Rene Wellek is collected in Conifronitations: Studies in the Intellectiial and Literary Relations between Germany, England, and the United States during the Ninieteenthl Century (Princeton, 1965).


ginning of the Nineteenth Century, 3 vols. (London, 1882), or Thomas Sergeant Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Cen- tury (New York, 1883),18 and Sir Edmund Gosse's History of Eigh- teenth Century Literature (London, 1889).19

With the 1890s, the era of academic professionalism in the study of English literature may be said to begin. It was still, however, strongly colored by dilettantism-as Donald Greene has pointed out, many of the holders of early academic chairs in English litera-

18 Perry, who was an instructor at Harvard for a time, but was best known as a public lecturer, made some effort to be historically sympathetic to the eighteenth century (unlike the more self-righteous academic historians who followed); but only Addison and Steele and the novelists were really to his taste (Addison "reconciled literature and life," p. 129). Of Pope's Dunciad: "There breathes through the poem not merely Swift's coarseness, but the brutal spirit which darkens the middle of the last century-the same thing which stained the comedy of the Restoration, faded away under Addison's influence, and appeared again here, and in some of the novels of the period that was opening" (p. 268). Gulliver's Travels, incidentally, receives no mention whatever in this history of eighteenth-century literature. Field- ing is the familiar "beer and tobacco" figure (who still haunts the imagination of some critics); Gray is referred to the accepted authority: "As Mr. Arnold has shown, Gray was a victim to the age in which he lived" (p. 394); and Dr. Johnson, as a literary man, was merely a heavy follower of the Spectator: "No greater tribute could be paid to Addison and Steele than the fact that Dr. Johnson, in order to reach the public, had to follow, heavily shod as he was with all the learning and conservative prejudice of the eighteenth century, in their light footsteps" (pp. 409-10). And finally, of the poets after, Pope: "We will examine them simply to discover such traces as there may be of what afterwards developed into genuine poetry" (p. 370).

19 Gosse's earlier Clark lectures, published as From Shakespere to Pope: An In- quiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England (Cambridge, 1885), drew a violent denunciation of "the Dilettanti School" from John Churton Collins, in the Quarterly Review (see Palmer, Rise of English Studies, pp. 87-89); but the work was applauded, despite its inaccuracy and amateurishness, by Tennyson and Swinburne, as well as the general public. Other studies from this early phase, somewhat at the same level, include: Allen Cunningham, Biographical and Critical History of the British Literature of the Lasi Fifty Years (Paris, 1834); George Lillie Craik, Sketches of the History of Literature and Learning in Eng- land (London, 1844-45), which was part of a series entitled "Knight's Monthly Volume," and which was ultimately abridged, as A Manual of English Literature (1862), and included in the famous Everyman's Library series (1909); William Spalding, The History of English Literature (Edinburgh, 1853), by the Professor of Logic at St. Andrews; Thomas Arnold, A Manual of English Literature (London, 1862); William Rushton, "The Classical and Romantic Schools of Eng- lish Literature. As Represented by Spenser, Dryden, Pope, Scott, and Wordsworth," published in a series, The Afternoon Lectures on English Literature, Delivered inl the Theatre of the Museum of Industry . . . Dublin (London, 1868); Charles Duke Young, Three Centuries of English Literature (London and New York, 1872); Henry Coppee, English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History (Philadelphia, 1873); and the very popular work by Henry Morley, A First Sketch o0 English Literature (London, 1873).


ture reached this eminence via careers in genteel journalism20-and there was not to be, for a good long age, the kind of period-specializa- tion that we now take for granted as both the curse and the necessity of literary study. (This is important for our topic, because at this time there would be few scholars with a "vested interest" in the Eigh- teenth Century, to come to its defense, as Romantic scholars later vigorously did, when Wordsworth and Shelley were downgraded by the New Critics.)2' By the 1 890s, the "Whig Interpretation of Liter- ary History" was soundly established in all its essentials, and it remained only for the academic historians to set it forth in organized fashion and to establish a canon of chosen works that would most effectively demonstrate its conclusions. And this they cheerfully proceeded to do, seldom varying in one iota from the Received Version. The studies by such individuals as William Lyon Phelps, The Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement: A Study in Eighteenth Century Literature (Boston, 1893), John Dennis, The Age of Pope (London, 1894), William Minto, The Literature of the Georgian Era (Edinburgh, 1894), Richard Gamett, The Age of Dryden (London, 1895), and Henry A. Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1899), echo

20 Review of a facsimile reprint (Port Washington, N.Y., 1970) of William Minto's Literature of the Georgian Era (ed. William Knight, 1894), in The Scribler- ian, 3 (1971), 45-46.

21 If such a collective body of eighteenth-century specialists had been in existence in 1850 (as a collective body of Victorian specialists was in 1950 to throw its weight against the natural tendency of the son to break away from the father, there would have been articles in PMLA and letters in TLS-I mean, of course, their equivalents -and volumes of Reconsiderations, to point out that the image presented of the eighteenth century was sheer caricature. But there was no such body of informed (or committed) scholars, and the Victorian reading of the "Romantic Revolt" went quite unchallenged, except for a few hardy souls such as Austin Dobson (Leslie Stephen's literary judgments are entirely conventional). The curious defense of eighteenth-century "conservatism," as opposed to nineteenth-century "liberalism," by W. J. Courthope, in The Liberal Movement in English Literature (London, 1885), could find little more to say than that the period had managed to preserve essentially unscathed the values of the English past: "Critics of the present day are apt to talk in a superior and patronising tone of the eighteenth century. They say it is 'unpoetical,' unromantic, sceptical, utilitarian. But surely the wonder is that, after the Revolution through which it had passed, English society was able to construct an ideal life of any kind. The best answer to those who disparage the eighteenth century is the question, 'What should we have done without it?'" (pp. 115- 16). Courthope's modest dissent anticipates a use that was occasionally found for the eighteenth century, as an old beef-eater's stick to beat "modernism"- "our present mixture of self-conceit, contempt of the lessons of history, fads, crazes. affectations, and worst of all, 'rotting'" (Saintsbury, Peace of the Augustanls, p. 191). This, of course, was not calculated to increase enthusiasm for the eighteenth century among the youthful.


one another's judgment.22 And the studies that followed them in the twentieth century,23 leading up to the collaborative Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge, 1907-16), a great summation of Victorian scholarship,24 reproduce the same judgments so

22 Minto's volume is by far the most intelligent and informed of these, but, although it corrects a number of vulgar prejudices, it can scarcely be said to rise above contemporary canons of taste (see the review by Donald Greene cited above). The study by Henry Beers may serve for representative opinions: attacking the "pseudo-classic period," he observes (what is doubtless true), "Evidently the Queen Anne writers took hold of the antique by a different side from our own nineteenth- century poets" (p. 35); moreover, "the times were artificial in poetry as in dress" (p. 36), and very much under the influence of the French; the period was "classical, or at least unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect sense of beauty" (p. 43); "Literature was a polished mirror in which the gay world saw its own grinning face. It threw back a most brilliant picture of the surface of society, showed manners but not the elementary passions of human nature. As a whole, it leaves an impression of hard- ness, shallowness, and levity" (p. 46); Addison's essays on Milton are faulted: "Not a word as to Milton's puritanism, or his Weltanschauung, or the relation of his work to its environment. Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method-that en- deavor to put the reader at the poet's point of view-by which modern critics from Lessing to Sainte-Beuve have revolutionized their art" (pp. 55-56). (Also, of course, nothing of all that in Beers-for the eighteenth century.) And so on, to the conclusion, in which the period is assigned its only permissible role of significance, that of John the Baptist: "It was left for the nineteenth century to perform the work of which the eighteenth century only prophesied" (p. 424).

23 One may cite such once-standard authors as Oliver Elton, The Augustan Ages (Edinburgh, 1899); Thomas Seccombe, The Age of Johlnson (1748-1798) (London, 1900); John H. Millar, The Mid-Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1902); Sir William Nicoll and Thomas Seccombe, History of English Literature, 2 vols. (Lon- don, 1906). Oliver Elton's later Survey of English Literature 1730-1780, 2 vols. (London, 1928), following the Survey . . . 1780-1830, 2 vols. (London, 1912), exhibits the gradual transition to a more appreciative historical point of view.

24 The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. Sir A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, 14 vols. (Cambridge, 1907-16; index, 1927), is still occasionally useful for its comments on minor writers and for the attention given to philosophy, history, and other intellectual prose; but, despite its variety of contributors, it presents an unsurprising unanimity in its acceptance of the ruling nineteenth-century myth. There is an understandable note of pride in its "Whig" bias, which celebrates Addi- son and Steele as representative of the coming Victorian triumph: "The middle class had broken away from [aristocratic] leadership and had pressed forward to the front rank of national progress" (IX, 27). But we are presented with such hoary untruths as that Milton was "then an unfashionable author" (IX,28). And, although the treatment of Pope is notably restrained, in comparison with most preceding histories, the judgments of value have not changed: there are "touches" in Pope's Eloisa "which anticipate the romantic feeling for natural scenery and architecture," but "it may be doubted whether, in Pope's fervid tones, we are listening to the voice of nature and passion . . ." (i.e., the diction of the Romantics) (IX,71). On Book Four of Gulliver's Travels: "It is only a cynic or a misanthrope who will find anything convincing in Swift's views" (IX, 106); and "Swift's poetry has the merits of his prose, but not many other merits" (IX, 119). John Dyer's Grongar Hill "showed a spontaneous attitude to nature which was too exceptional to capture the public


completely that their pages become sprinkled with apologetic phrases: "it is a hackneyed truth that . . .", "it is now generally agreed that . . .", "no one doubts that . . . and so on. It was indeed "generally agreed that . . ."; and no literary historian was going to have his academic credentials called in question by ventur- ing to suppose that it might be other than the Victorian authorities had decided for all time.

Even so astute an observer and omnivorous a reader as George Saintsbury, who really liked most of the literature of the eighteenth century (and Dryden, as his appreciative study shows), dared not defy the Received Version-in fact, could not find a critical language in all his heritage to express the reasons for his liking (when he wants to praise Swift's Journal to Stella he can only think to call it "a spontaneous overflow of nature"), and had to fall back upon the tepid phrase, "rest and refreshment," because the only virtues permitted to the eighteenth century were tepid ones. It is rather de- pressing to compare Saintsbury's pleasant and leisurely little volume, The Peace of the Augustans, with such a thing as a manual for American schools produced by one William J. Long in 1909, because both will be found to agree in all essentials, despite the fact that Saintsbury set out to praise the period,2' and Mr. Long was concerned to demonstrate the false and undemocratic principles upon which its literature was constructed: "The poetry of the first half of the century [says Long], as typified in the work of Pope, is polished and witty enough, but artificial; it lacks fire, fine feeling, enthusiasm, the glow of the Elizabethan Age and the moral earnest- ness of Puritanism. In a word, it interests us as a study of life, rather than delights or inspires us by its appeal to the imagination." Pope himself, Long goes on, "was deformed and sickly, dwarfish in soul and body. He was lacking, apparently, in noble feeling, and instinc- tively chose a lie when the truth had manifestly more advantages." Swift's Gulliver's Travels "was not written from any literary motive, but rather as an outlet for the author's own bitterness against fate and human society"; and "he often used his verse to shock the new- born modesty [of the period] by pointing out some native ugliness

taste at once: the age preferred the conventional and generalised descriptions in which poets not preoccupied with nature were accustomed to indulge . . ." (X,97). And so on.

25 Like all of Saintsbury's writings, this volume offers many incidental pleasures: such as assuring us that the Italian name for Johnson's Rambler was II Vagabondo.


which his diseased mind discovered under every beautiful exterior." Swift's work, moreover, "emphasizes the faults and failings of hu- manity; and so runs counter to the general course of our literature, which from Cynewulf to Tennyson follows the Ideal, as Merlin followed the Gleam, and is not satisfied till the hidden beauty of man's soul and the divine purpose of his struggle are manifest."26 And so on. As a volume intended to set the minds of children-the minds of the next generation of literary historians-upon a proper track, this merely distills and expresses more blatantly the views and sentiments that Saintsbury and every other literary historian in the Victorian mode accepted as unquestionable fact, almost indeed as revealed truth. The "divine purpose" of man's struggle, few of them could really doubt, was to produce the liberal bourgeois society exempli- fied by Victorian England (and America) and the literature (and conventions) that imaged forth its high and practical ideals. And since this society and this literature were, with obsessive frequency, defined negatively in terms of their opposition to all eighteenth- century values and modes, the myth set forth in the "Whig Interpre- tation of Literary History" had to be presented as an absolute, if the superior virtues of the modern middle-class world were to gleam in all their splendor.

The myth itself is familiar-assuredly familiar to anyone who received his education before 1945, because (with quite rare excep- tions) that is about all he could have been taught. I do sometimes wonder how any of us from those generations could have chosen to deal professionally with a period so despicable: perhaps we were the new "Romantic rebels"-against Romantic orthodoxy. The Eigh- teenth Century (in the myth) was aristocratic, which was very clearly bad; but it was also middle class, which was also bad because its middle class must have possessed only the worst features that Vic- torian men of letters were able to see about them in their own ruling class (this, of course, is the psychological phenomenon known as

26 William J. Long, English Literature: Its History and Significance for the Life of the English-Speaking World: A Text-Book for Schools (Boston, etc., 1909), pp. 260, 264, 275, 277, and 278. Wittier and more elegantly phrased parallels to these arguments may be found in Saintsbury, passim.


"projection"). The period was one of Prose and Reason ("Dryden and Pope . . . are classics of our prose," in Arnold's phrase, illus- trating the Fallacy of Exclusive Premises: what is not our kind of "poetry" is not poetry-ergo, it must be prose). The period was "Classic" as opposed to "Romantic," which was also clearly bad; but, since only the nineteenth century truly understood the classics (this is known, in the technical parlance of logic, as having it both ways at once), the eighteenth century was necessarily a pseudo-classic, or perhaps less pejoratively, a neo-classic era. As Gilbert Highet, in whose Classical Tradition this view, is enshrined, could assure us: "They called Homer vulgar; they called Aeschylus mad."27 (Oddly enough, although the "Romantics" were provided with a supposed heritage of their own, in the literature of "Romance," no one seems ever to have thought to speak of their movement as "neo-Romantic" or "pseudo-Romantic," which would appear to have been equally logical.) Further: the eighteenth century wrote by Rules-that is, it looked to norms- rather than letting true poetry ooze out of its soul; and it despised the "Imagination." (One instance among many, in which semantic change occurred in a mere word, and the new meaning was hypostatized as a thing-the creative principle. Thus, if an attack could be found upon the word, in its older sense, this was happily translated to mean that the creative principle itself was despised.)"8 The period lived by convention: if an undoubted admiration for the Renaissance was found to exist in the time, it had to be, as we are always told, "a conventional admiration," because obviously the myth required that only the nineteenth century should have a genuine (unconventional?) admiration for the Renaissance. Again, eighteenth-century poetry was written in a conventional Diction. This once favorite topic has, of course, evaporated since we have witnessed the later revolt against Romantic diction-"the hillside woods of solemn pines and murmur of the distant main, here in the cool sequestered vale of life," etc.-and have come to recognize that

27 Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition (London, 1949), p. 357. Presumably taking parody as evidence of contempt (since very little other evidence is offered: see pp. 272, 281), Mr. Highet goes on to generalize: "We have seen how Homer was disliked and misunderstood in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries . . ." (p. 383).

28 We must confront the reality that many other semantic "kidnapings" of this sort have been legitimized and now form part of a "privileged language" for talking about art that all of us have inherited.


every vital, commanding poetic voice in every age ultimately degen- erates into a "diction" that every warbler has by heart. The Vic- torians, however, were as certain as earlier ages had been that the verbal cues which evoked immediate emotional responses in themn constituted the eternal language of passion, truth, and beauty.29 But the eighteenth century's literature was surely "artificial" (which the Augustans would have accepted, with thanks) and lacked "sincerity." The test for sincerity was quite simple: if language did not evoke this automatic mechanism of emotional response (tested on the pulses), it was not sincere. (One thinks of the old Norwegian lady re- settled in Minnesota, who was heard to remark as she emerged from church, shaking her head, "I don't know: even the Bible seems to lose its power when it's translated out of the original Norwegian.") One feels intense in the presence of a diction in whose presence one has learned to feel "intense"; and since the eighteenth century had no access to the major source of that sincere emotional response, namely, an established Romantic diction-as Saintsbury says, "It knew not 'The Sublime' "-very little sincerity could be found in its work. Moreover, its matter all too seldom constituted a celebration of those evangelical, "Liberal," middle-class virtues that were the ultimate test of genuine sincerity in content.

The nineteenth-century literary historians very properly recognized that the eighteenth had been lacking in an adequate "historical sense"; and they did not fail to censure the period's comparative failure to place itself in a historical perspective with regard to earlier eras. The righteous contempt that they display for the (past, after all) historical era of the eighteenth century, as they attack it for its failure, is of a piece with the dogmatism with which they condemn its dogmatic critics, the conventionality with which they deplore its con-

2') The argument about "diction" was usually conducted in terms of a supposed general separation in the eighteenth century between the world of poetry and the world of prose; but the argument (paradoxically) goes hand in hand with a logi- cally opposed argument that the eighteenth century also failed to discriminate between "poetic" subjects, such as nature and private feeling, and "unpoetic" subjects that should have been treated only in prose. Such a blatant confusion rests upon (and is disguised by) community consensus on the restricted realm of the "poetic": if real poetry (and "real" is the obsessively iterated qualifier of the Victorian literary histories- "real passion," "the real picaresque," etc.) must deal subjectively with external nature and "the human heart," then only a few passages of nature- description in Virgil's Georgics justify calling that work "poetry." This, of course, is genuine "slavery to the rules."


ventionality.30 As I have noted, once the myth became established, no technique of argument could be recognized as dishonest, so tong as it reached the desired truth-for, as we say, any stigma will do to beat a dogma. Thus the infelicities of minor writers could be cited as "typical" of the age; on the other hand, undoubted felicities in major writers could be called '"untypical." Having firmly marked off the dichotomy of "neo-classical" and "romantic," with all that is dry or dull or insincere adhering to the former, all that is imaginative or dynamic to the latter, the separation of the typical from the untypical becomes a simple matter. Farquhar writes with great vitality: how can that be, if we have already defined the eighteenth century as a neo-classical period without vitality? Answer: he represents a "return" to the "romantic" Elizabethans. And so on.

This is the major factor that enters into the familiar old concept of "Pre-Romanticism." Latter-day objections to this term do not deny, of course, that every age necessarily draws upon its adjacent literary heritage and modifies it;3' the objection is simply to the teleological bias that is encapsulated in the term (the sole importance and interest of "pre-romantic" writers must be that they herald the predefined dawn and point to the telos of "the Romantic Rebellion"). But, be- sides this Fallacy of Premature Teleology, the term exhibits the dis- junctive fallacy previously mentioned, that anything which has been associated with the "romantic" by the received myth-anything from love of variety to a streak of melancholy-must represent a submerged "romantic" tendency in an earlier period. Hence we were told in an article on "The Romantic Side of Dr. Johnson," in 1944, that although Johnson clearly preferred London to the world of nature, "There is, however, something romantic about his enthusias-

30 Unfortunately, the fact would seem to be that whatever feels most "spontaneous" and unmediated is inevitably that which is most conventional-since the things that are "natural" and "spontaneous" are precisely those familiar values and modes internalized in childhood. Only a considerable degree of learning and a considerable degree of personal effort can take one beyond the ordinary cliches and knee-jerk reactions by which most of us measure "spontaneity." Likewise, the familiar literary phrase, "intensity of feeling," more often than not signifies a stock-response to a familiar diction. If we have learned to feel "intense" or "serious" in the presence of one particular kind of diction, we are not likely to be able (without further education) to feel any "intensity" or "seriousness" outside that frame. The limited notion of the "serious" found in some modern critics may offer a case in point.

31 The study of literary indebtedness in other periods has not normally required the use of such terms as "pre-Metaphysical" or "pre-Augustan" to demonstrate its valid conclusions.


tic, his almost passionate love of London."32 For obviously, the "classic" mind, as predefined by the myth, could not have a passionate love of anything: that lhad been predefined as in its very nature "romantic."33 There was no study of the so-called "Pre-Romantic" that did not indulge itself in this kind of circular argument and fallacious logic. But the term honorably served its non-historical mythical purpose and has been quietly and peacefully allowed to die. Requiescat in pace.

The primary emphasis of the "Whig Interpretation of Literary History" was upon lyric poetry and (to a lesser extent) upon prose fiction; for there could be no doubt that the subjective lyric and the "realistic" novel of low and middling life were the most impressive literary achievements of a middle class in its newly won status of value-givers; and these were therefore to be taken as the prototypical literary forms. One must not underestimate the major shift in literary perspective, at all levels and in all genres, that is involved in setting up lyric poetry as the norm of artistic expression, in place of the Renaissance-Augustan assumption that the epic was the crown and norm of art: this is a significant shift indeed, and no historian

32 Thomas Pyles, "The Romantic Side of Dr. Johnson," ELH, 11 (1944), 199- 212; p. 206. Cf. W. D. MacClintock, Some Paradoxes of the English Romantic Moveiment of the Eigliteentli Century (Chicago, 1903); R. D. Havens, "Romantic Aspects of the Age of Pope," PMLA, 27 (1912), 297-324 ("It is obvious, as soon as one considers the matter, that there must have been many persons at this time who were not malignantly classical," p. 298); J. G. Robertson, Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighlteentlh Century (Cambridge, 1923); Harko de Maar, A History of Modernz English Romanticism, Volume I (all published; London, 1924); Samuel W. Stevenson, Romantic Tendencies in thle Works of Dryden, Addi- son, and Pope (Baltimore, 1934). All such studies of "pre-romanticism," including the work of Ernest Bernbaum and Paul Van Tieghem (of course often valuable in scholarly particulars), represent mere exercises in historical distortion to serve a local dogma.

33 Thus, for instance, any support of the unities in drama was ipso facto "classical" and typical of the eighteenth century; any denial of the unities was "romantic" and untypical. So Bonamy Dobr6e, discussing the unities in his book on Restoration Tragedy (Oxford, 1929), quite automatically declares, when Neander in Dryden's Essay argues against their tyranny: "There the romantic jumps out of the classical cage" (p. 36). The volume by J. W. H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: 17th and 18th Cenzturies (London, 1951), is a treasury of such circular argument, some of which was documented by R. S. Crane in his review-article, "On Writing the History of English Criticism, 1650-1800," UTQ, 22 (1953), 376-91. Crane's reviews in Phlilological Qua)rterly, from 1926, were of inestimable value in exposing the illogicalities of the "Whig Interpretation" of literary history, and in contributing to a revised estimate of its dogmas.


can afford to forget it when he is engaged upon the study of any literary periods before the nineteenth century.34

So, too, the hegemony of the "realistic" novel (that brilliant crea- tion of the high Victorian age) implicitly reshaped the critical history of all narrative fiction-as, for the most part, it continues to do today, despite a few gentle reminders that a narrative tradition of two millennia had quite other goals and is therefore not responsive to the rubrics of "realism."35 Of the drama little need be said, since before Shaw the nineteenth century added few plays to the permanent repertory; and most nineteenth-century criticism in this area contents itself with judging previous drama in terms of the piece bien faite,

34 The substitution of the Lyric for the Epic as the implicit norm of Literature leads to many other judgments of value that remain today among our unquestioned critical assumptions. Hence any student of periods before the nineteenth century must find it prudent to be alert to this "built-in" bias in his own critical thinking. It appears very nakedly of course in such Victorian works as W. J. Courthope's History of English Poetry, 6 vols. (London, 1895-1910); C. M. Gayley and C. C. Young, The Principles and Progress of English Poetry (New York, 1904); and E. B. Reed, English Lyrical Poetry from Its Origins to the Present Time (New Haven, 1912). In such a context, even the later sympathetic study by James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Centutry Poetry (London, 1948), was required to adopt a largely apologetic tone toward its subject. And, of course, this major shift in refer- ence now poses almost insuperable barriers to a genuinely sympathetic reading of such forms as "heroic tragedy," because we automatically read "epic" speeches as though they were trying somehow to be "lyric" and not succeeding very well.

35 In this regard, it must be said that Victorian histories of prose-fiction, while sharing today's (or, at least, yesterday's) emphasis upon "realistic" criteria, were considerably more generous to the Romance tradition than most twentieth-century histories have been. There is no modern survey, not even Ernest A. Baker's enormous set of volumes, that can compare in scope with John C. Dunlop's History of [Prose] Fiction, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1814; various later editions) or even Frederick M. Warren's A History of the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1895). Though not a history, as such, The Nature of Narrative, by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg (London, 1966), offers a valuable corrective to modern "novel-centered" histories of fiction-as, of course, does Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957). But the "romance" as a literary form has also been badly misunderstood because of the assumption that, since it is clearly not "realistic," it must therefore be "romantic." This careless use of "romantic"-an adjective by now solidly associated with the early nineteenth century-confuses and conflates two utterly disparate, almost antithetical, realms. One, that of the medieval-Renais- sance romance, is normally aristocratic, hierarchical, epic-oriented, "public" and never expressive of the artist's "personality" as a literary end; the other, that of nineteenth-century Romantic literature, is normally middle-class, non-hierarchical, lyric-oriented, "private" and most frequently an expression of "personality." One might, rather desperately, recommend as a mode of obviating this total confusion the use of the adjective "romance," in place of "romantic," when speaking of early prose-fiction or drama in this mode, for "romantic" in the later sense it assuredly is not.


with condemning the aristocratic immorality and "superficiality" of the Restoration stage, and with scorning the eighteenth century for having failed to idolize Shakespeare in the "privileged language" of the Romantic mode.36 Finally, popular literary criticism (as distinguished from a Coleridge or even an Arnold) had given over close examination of texts for a belletristic subjective impressionism (the soul's adventures among masterpieces) that was normally celebrated as genuine "Aesthetics" and contrasted with the mere mechanical "Criticism" of the early eighteenth century before the triumph of The Sublime. The modern "rebellion" of the New Critics has represented perhaps the most thoroughgoing inversion of Victorian values to be found in the major literary modes.

What the study of the foundations of English literary historiography really comes down to, in the end, then, is a study of the ever- fascinating mind of Victorian England (and America).37 We can today take only a limited pleasure in pointing out the logical flaws of its scholarship-the genetic fallacy, the circular arguments, the familiar psychological factor of "projection," the selected instances

36 On the other hand, some eighteenth-century plays, such as Home's Douglas, enjoyed an esteem in the nineteenth century that has not subsequently been accorded them. The standard Victorian history of earlier drama was Sir Adolphus William Ward's History of Englishl Dramatic Literature to the Death of Queen Anne, 2 vols. (London, 1875). The history of eighteenth-century drama had to await the volumes of Allardyce Nicoll.

37 Not to presume to offer here a bibliography, I can say only that valuable in- sights into some of the myriad complexities of the period are offered by such studies as Walter E. Houghton's The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1957), and Raymond Chapman's The Victorian Debate: English Literature and Society 1832-1901 (London, 1968); and there is an interesting collection of BBC addresses, published as Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians: Anl Historic Revaluation of thle Victorian Age (London, 1949), with a Foreword by Harman Grisewood. Jerome H. Buckley's The Victorian Temper (Cambridge, Mass., 1951) sanely as- sessed the ambiguous and contradictory modern uses of the epithet "Victorian." In our present context, one may remark the interesting paradox that, in an age usually taken to have been suffused with evangelical piety, literary scholars resisted (as some have continued to resist) most strenuously and bitterly all attempts to suggest a Christian purpose in such "happy pagans" as the author of Beowulf, Boccaccio and Chaucer, Rabelais and Shakespeare. It does not require too much psychological penetration to see that these authors served as "escape valves" from a stifling ,'official" piety that was normally proclaimed by the scholars themselves.


to prove general cases, the "fallacy of premature teleology," the fallacy of disjunction and exclusive definition, the technique of damn- ing with faint praise, the endless failures in historical objectivity or even simple honesty. Only a limited pleasure-because these Vic- torian scholars and their epigoni were not all lightweights by any means; they were, in a great many respects, better informed on historical details of their subject than many scholars of today would claim to be; and their normal conception of "Literature" as encom- passing all the modes of humanistic expression, from history to personal letters, a genuine litterae humaniores, may even be seen as a richer vision than some of the more restricted definitions of "literature" that succeeded and displaced it. The flaws of our learned predecessors are not peculiar to the age of Victoria: most of them would appear to be endemic to the human mind.

So that if the foregoing recital of unexamined assumptions and logical errors fills us today with a pleasant sense of superiority, it is unfortunately a weakly inspired afflatus. For we do not essentially differ, in our capacity for error, from our great predecessors. We all, to one degree or another, suffer from a psychic scotoma, wear critical spectacles with filters in them that enable us to see some things very clearly and others not at all.38 And we possess critical vocabular- ies that are capable of describing only some kinds of effect and not others. And we belong to some socio-religio-political frame that subtly influences both the range of art to which we can respond and the manner in which we do respond to that which comes within our purview. This was equally true of the Victorian critics-they were, on the whole, neither better nor worse than the average intelligent, objective, concerned scholar of today. Which is perhaps good enough reason for being very impatient with them.

There is a story that tells us of the outcry that greeted Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure in the 1890s, when it was condemned by the Bishop of Wakefield and declared by Mrs. Oliphant to be "given

38 That is, we are likely to begin with certain elementary critical schemata, and screen out what does not fit a particular desired schema, as "untypical," meanwhile permitting the inflow of only such evidence as that which supports the schema. This is quite human-indeed, it seems to be the manner in which we normally learn and form concepts. When supported by a set of basic common assumptions validated by the community, such schemata are almost impossibly difficult to assess critically from within. One of the major problems facing all students of English literary history today is that we have inherited (through education and through older studies) many of the Victorian schemata, which quite literally "falsified" the literary and historical records in their own interest; and we have not, even at this late date, really developed adequate or inclusive new schemes to replace them.


over to the exposition of the unclean": one Miss Jeannette L. Gilder wrote to the papers, agreeing, and added that "upon finishing the novel she opened the windows to let in the fresh air, turned to her bookshelves and said: 'Thank God for Kipling and Stevenson, Barrie and Mrs. Humphry Ward.'"3 Don't we say, when we hear this tale, "How typical of the Victorians!" Wouldn't we rather seize upon this as the "typical," and declare that Jude the Obscure itself obviously represents the "untypical"? Of course we would. And for precisely the same reasons that led Victorian scholars to seize upon Edward Bysshe as the "typical" voice of the eighteenth century.

As students of the eighteenth century (or other periods of literary history) and as responsible scholars, we therefore find ourselves in something of a schizoid position. For we must obviously reject the "Whig Interpretation of Literary History," we must expose the biases and reinterpret the evaluations of Victorian scholarship.40 But if we are not to fall into their own blind error of an automatic assumption of superiority to one's predecessors, we are also ultimately required to bring to the Victorian critics the same kind of sympathetic historical detachment that hopefully we exhibit when we consider eighteenth-century critics. We must object most strenuously to the Victorian bias as it is imported into modern literary history, and yet we must honor the Victorian bias as a historical phenomenon in the same way that we wish to have eighteenth- century biases and errors recognized and honored within the rele- vant context of their own historical frame.41

This is by no means an easy position to maintain. Indeed, the dis- illusionment that has arisen because of the very failure of nineteenth-

39 Cited by J. I. M. Stewart, "The Integrity of Hardy," English Studies (London, 1948), p. 4.

40 This exposure and reinterpretation may be said to have begun as "early" as the 1920s; but very few works of scholarship on the eighteenth century published before 1945 can really be said to escape the Victorian bias. A gradual increase in historical sympathy and understanding is, however, observable in the histories by Dyson and Butt (1940), McKillop (1948), Bredvold (1950), and in John Butt's The Augustan Age (London, 1950). George Sherburn's contribution to A Literary History of England, ed. A. C. Baugh (New York, 1948), despite inevitable flaws, has perhaps the best balance of any history of eighteenth-century literature that has yet appeared. The learned and graceful volumes by Sutherland and Dobree in the Oxford History of English Literature remain essentially in the "Victorian" tradition.

41 One could, of course, set oneself to write a "revisionist" literary history that inverted all the fundamental assumptions underlying nineteenth-century literary historiography: but this would simply be to repeat the basic failure in historical sympathy exhibited in their own caricature of the eighteenth century. Like some of the actual revisionist history of our day, it would merely substitute one lie for another. Ernst Cassirer has said that history "is anthropomorphic but it is not


century historians to live up to that high ideal of Leopold von Ranke -to describe the past as it really was42 -has resulted in a despairing conclusion that historical objectivity is altogether impossible and that the historical scholar might just as well go ahead and be an open and honest (not to say self-indulgent) propagandist for some view that has "modern" utility.43 That argument is still very much alive.44 If I venture to speak, myself, for an ideal of historical learning, sympathy, and objectivity, it is (I hope) with a full awareness of the human difficulties involved and of the small likelihood that the ideal will be completely realized in any one historian. But the whole complex debate is perhaps summed up in two marginal notations that I came across in a copy of Butterfield's Whig Interpretation in the Princeton library stacks. Opposite a passage in which he begins, "If we adopt the outlook of the sixteenth century upon itself . .

one reader, of the new school, has penciled shortly: "You can't." Beneath that, entered in a different hand, is written: "You can try!" And that, perhaps, is the best that we can do. We can try.

Princeton University

egocentric. . . . By making us cognizant of the polymorphism of human existence it frees us from the freaks and prejudices of a special and single moment" (An Essay on Man [New Haven, 1944; New York, Anchor Books], p. 242). This seems to me a worthy credo for the historical scholar.

42 On the history of historical writing in the nineteenth century, see John R. Hale, ed., The Evolution of British Historiography: Fronm Bacon to Namier (London. 1967), introduction; James W. Thompson and Bernard J. Holm, A History of His- torical Writing, 2 vols. (New York, 1942), Vol. II; Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing (Norman, Okla., 1937); Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge, 1955); Thomas P. Peardon, The Transition in English Historical Writing, 1760-1830 (New York, 1933); and Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952). On the influential German school, see Eduard Fueter, Geschichte der neueren Historiographie (Munich, 191 1 ).

43 One need not deny that the writing of history is a form of art (on this, see Russel B. Nye, "History and Literature: Branches of the Same Tree," in Essays on History and Literature, ed. Robert H. Bremner [Columbus, Ohio, 1966], pp. 123- 59), nor need one deny that subjective judgments of value are inescapable; but surely the historical art can be asked to observe the elementary canons of logic, to display some self-insight, and to be conscious of the biases of its chosen schemata.

44 A good anthology of the debate over "historicism" is The Philosophy of History in Our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (New York, Anchor Books, 1959). See also the essays in the older Philosophy and History: The Ernst Cassirer Festschrift (Oxford, 1936), and in the journal, History and Theory, from 1963. The recently founded journals, New Literary History and Genre, have of course provided a continuing forum for very vigorous debate upon many central questions and assumptions of the historical study of literature.

the whig interpretation of literary history

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