BRITISH
CRITICISM DURING THE 18th CENTURY
–Blamiers
M. Phil English, Bharathiar
University--Blamiers—
Approaches--Unit II
Summary by Dr. S. Sreekumar
The Eighteenth Century
I: The Age of Addison and Pope
Introduction
·
The 18th
century was a period of calm and prosperity in England. Industry and commerce
were rapidly expanding. Agriculture and sheep farming also showed much progress
in this century.
·
The
reign of Queen Anne was also a period of political controversy created by the
question of succession. Though 17 children were born to her, Queen Anne was
childless and without a successor as all her children died one after another.
·
The
Tories wanted James, the son of James II by his second marriage to succeed
Anne, but the Whigs who had the majority in the Parliament passed the Act of
Settlement through which the succession question was finally settled. The Act
of Succession ensured that the protestant king George I, son of James I’s
granddaughter became the next ruler.
·
The
reign of Queen Anne was also the age of military victories in Europe.
·
In the
field of literature there was all-round development in periodical journalism.
The Tatler was launched in 1709 and
the Spectator in 1711. At the same
time clubs and coffee houses provided ample opportunities for talk and
sociability.
·
The age
was known as ‘Augustan Age’ as it was compared to the age of the Roman Emperor
Augustus in which great writers like Virgil, Horace and Ovid lived.
In this
century the genre of literary criticism developed fully. The literary critic
became a figure on his own right. He became free from the surrounding crowd of
poets and dramatists jostling to defend themselves and attack their rivals.
1. Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
Addison was never a professional critic like Dryden.
He was a man who pursued a political career and writing was only a part-time
occupation for him. Nevertheless his tragedy, Cato, was considered the most celebrated drama of 17th
century.
Addison’s
critical output consists of articles published in Spectator from 1711 to 1714. About fifty articles can be classified
as literary criticism
a. Papers on separate critical issues,
b. Papers on Paradise Lost.
C. Papers on the Pleasures of Imagination.
a. Papers on separate Critical issues
Here he
wrote a series of papers on English tragedy, wit and ballads.
1. English tragedy
Addison
writes about ‘poetic justice’ in Spectator 40. He condemns the notion that
there must be a just distribution of rewards and punishments in tragedy. He
comments, ‘Life is not like that. Good and evil happen to all men’.
Addison
condemns tragicomedy as a ‘monstrous invention’.
He
points out that ‘just and natural thought, spoken without vehemence can be far
more moving to an audience than ranting extravagance’.
2. Wit
Addison
says a lot about various forms of ‘false wit’. He amends the definition given
by Locke for wit. Lock said that wit lies in the ‘assemblage of ideas, and
putting those together with quickness and variety wherein can be found any
resemblance or congruity’. Addison modifies this definition by stating that the
likeness brought to light by wit must not be obvious. It must ‘delight and surprise
the reader’.
Thus
when a poet tells us the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow; there is no
wit in the comparison. But when he adds, with a sigh, that it is as cold too,
it grows into wit.
3. Ballad
Addison
praises the ‘majestic simplicity of the ballad’, the ‘greatness of the
thought’, the dignity and beauty of the poetry, all of which justify direct
comparison with Homer and Virgil.
b. Papers on Paradise Lost.
Addison
brought out 18 papers on Paradise Lost.
Addison
broke new ground in subjecting a great literary master piece to systematic and
appreciative critical scrutiny. There are six papers
on general things and twelve papers on twelve
books of Paradise Lost.
·
The
first paper considers how well Paradise
Lost stands up by the classical rules of Epic poetry, and whether it
matches up to the Iliad and the Aeneid in this respect. Addison stats
that the fable of the Epic is unified, complete and great.
·
The
second paper examines the characters. Addison has high praise for the sheer
variety of characterization.
·
The
third paper considers the sentiments of Paradise
Lost. Milton’s chief merit is in the sublimity of his thought.
·
The
fourth paper comments on the verbal devices in Paradise Lost. Addison says that Milton has carried ‘our language
to a greater height than any of the English poets have ever done before or
after him’.
·
In the
fifth paper, Addison speaks about the qualifications of a critic, who must be well-read.
He must be a clear and logical thinker, and a master of his native tongue.
·
In the
sixth paper, Addison speaks about the defects of Paradise Lost. The first defect he finds is that the ‘Event is
unhappy’. The hero of the poem is ‘unsuccessful, and by no means a match for
his enemies’. This gave rise to Dryden’s comment that the devil was in reality
Milton’s hero. Addison disagrees with this. He does not realize that looking
for an epic hero in Paradise Lost is
looking for something which Milton never intended. Addison feels that Milton’s
digressions on his blindness, etc. are defects. But at the same time he does
not want to remove them as they are very beautiful. Unsuitable allusions to
fables, excessive display of learning and labored use of stylistic devices are
the other defects mentioned by Addison.
·
In the
next 12 papers Addison explores the 12 books of Paradise Lost. They are largely pedestrian in content and employ a
vocabulary of generalized praise.
C. Papers on the Pleasures of Imagination.
Addison
deals with the pleasures of imagination in numbers 411 to 421 of the Spectator. These papers constitute what
is now called ‘aesthetic’.
·
Addison
proclaims the superiority of sight over all other senses and it is from sight
that the pleasures of imagination arise.
· The
primary pleasure arises from direct observation.
·
The
secondary pleasure arises from recollection of objects no longer actually
present.
·
He says
that ‘the pleasures of imagination are not as refined as those of
understanding, but they are more moving, more clear, and less strenuous’.
In the
last six papers he writes about literature. He makes it clear that ‘our power
of recollection does not depend upon what we have seen or what is described in
words’. ‘The poet improves on nature, giving a landscape more vitality and
beauty. Addison tells us:
Homer makes a special impact on the imagination with what is great,
Virgil with what is beautiful, and Ovid with what is strange. And if we were
asked to name a poet who is ‘perfect master in all these arts of working on the
imagination’, then Milton is the man.
Now
Addison takes up a controversial topic. He accepts that even unpleasant sights
give us happiness when received by the imagination. Literature is not always
about pleasant things. Descriptions of corpses, torments and bloodshed can give
us happiness when received by imagination. But in actual life we turn away from
such things with horror.
From
literature’s concern with the unpleasant, Addison moves on to its concern with
what is unreal, such as fairies, witches, demons, and departed spirits. He
states that the representation of spirits and the like need not be considered
as impossible. Poetry has ‘new worlds of its own’ as its province.
Writing
on imagination in his last paper, Addison says that it is ‘the very life and
highest perfection of poetry’.
Whatever
beauties a work may have, it will be ‘dry and insipid’ if it lacks this
quality... It makes additions to nature and gives greater variety to God’s
works’.
Conclusion
‘Addison
might have lacked profundity and analytical precision when judged by the
standards of later criticism, but he sought to understand why’. In pursuing his
quest he could admit his esteem for Aristotle and Longinus, Horace and
Quintilian. Addison insists ‘that there are deviations from artistic rules in
the works of the greatest masters who are ignorant of the rules of art than in
those of a little genius who knows and observes them’.
Our
inimitable Shakespeare is a stumbling block to the whole tribe of these rigid
critics. Who would not rather read one of his plays where there is not a single
rule of the stage observed than any production of a modern critic where there
is not one of them violated?
II. The Battle of the Books
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Swift
brought a controversy between the Ancients and the Moderns to a climax with his
The Battle of the Books.
Swift’s
sympathies were with his former patron Sir William Temple who supported the
Ancients in the controversy.
Criticism
is painted as a ‘malignant deity’ in the satire. She sits in her den devouring
volumes.
At her
right hand sat Ignorance, her father and
husband, blind with age; at her left Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the
scraps of paper herself had torn...About her played her children, Noise and
Impudence, Dullness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-manners.
Criticism
is described thus. She encourages her son Wotton to fight against the Ancients.
Among the otdhe encounters is one between Virgil and Dryden. Virgil is mounted
on a grey steed and Dryden on a massive, lumbering, worn-out cart-horse, his
head buried in a helmet nine times too big. Dryden proposes an exchange of
armor and horses, but is too terrified to try to mount the steed.
Swift
gives us a fable-within-the fable, with the encounter of a spider, representing
the Moderns, with a bee, representing the Ancients.
Spider
is a creature feeding on the insects and vermin of the age. The bee gets what it can be by ‘infinite
labour and search, and ranging through every corner of nature’. The one
creature accumulates ‘dirt and poison’, the other honey and wax which furnish
mankind ‘with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness
and light’.
Swift
never had the coolness necessary for a literary critic. ‘When he had a point to
make, he wielded the sledge-hammer’. However, his concern for literary
standards can be seen in some of his writings. In an article entitled ‘On the
Corruption of the English Tongue’ [Tatler,
230], Swift condemned the vulgarization of English through careless elisions
and abbreviations. He ridiculed expressions like ‘can’t’, ‘do’t’, and ‘tho’t’.
Innovations like ‘banter’, and ‘bamboozle’ also came in for criticism. Though
we may not agree with Swift’s views on English vocabulary, there is no doubt
that he played a significant role in simplifying the language.
George Farquhar (1678-1707)
He was
an Irish dramatist and critic impatient with the arid arguments of
theoreticians. In ‘A Discourse upon Comedy in Reference to the English Stage’
he condemned the attitude of theoreticians. He argues that in divinity, law, or
mathematics everyone defers to the specialists.
-
Only in
poetry does everyone claim to be an expert fit to judge the practitioners.
Everyone thinks he can set himself up as a dramatic critic. The poor dramatist
has to adjust his work so as to please his audience; then the scholar comes
down on him like a ton of bricks, quoting Aristotle or Scaliger, Horace or
Rapin.
Hence,
Farquhar argues that plays have to be modeled on the system proposed by
critics. But unfortunately such plays prove lifeless in the theatre.
Our age
is not an age of decadence. Why should we drag about with us the fetters of the
discredited thinking of the past? What
have the rules designed for Aristotle’s Athens got to do with Drury Lane,
London? Why is poetry ...regarded so cheaply that any Tom, Dick and Harry can
prescribe for poets? Poets are rare birds. Greece and Rome could supply
hundreds of philosophers, but only one Homer and one Virgil.
Seeking
the origin and purpose of comedy, Farquhar defines comedy as ‘a well-framed
tale handsomely told as an agreeable vehicle for counsel of reproof’.
·
The aim
of comedy is to give profit and pleasure, instruction and delight
·
The
people to be instructed are neither French nor Spanish, neither ancient Greeks
nor Romans.
·
An
English play is for the use and instruction of an English audience’ possessed
of all the follies and weaknesses peculiar to them.
·
The
English represent a medley of temperaments and dispositions, oddities and
humors, only a rich variegated story can divert them.
·
It is no
good turning up a rule book or history if we want to succeed as playwrights for
such an audience. Far better to concentrate on how Shakespeare and Fletcher
amused them in violation of classical rules.
Farquhar
ends by repeating the standard arguments against the ‘unities’. ‘The world of
drama is a world of pretence. The theatre is only a theatre, the actors only
actors. Arbitrary limitations on movement of place or time are nonsensical’.
But it
must be so because Aristotle said it. ‘Now I say it must be otherwise because
Shakespeare said it, and I am sure that Shakespeare was the better poet of the
two.
III Poetry: sacred vocation and
disciplined art.
Isaac Watts (1675-1748)
He was a
poet of evangelical piety. As a hymn-writer, he has a continuous influence on
church worship. Hymns like ‘O God our help in ages past’ and ‘When I survey the
wondrous cross’ testify to the continuous popularity of his skill and sensitivity
in a form of verse in which it is none too easy to reconcile simplicity and
vitality.
Watts
was no puritan. He saw the allurements of poetry as a gift from God. The ‘sweet
and restless forces of metaphor, wit, sound, and number’ were not to seduce
man’s heart from God.
Watts
laments that the profanation and debasement of poetry should have prompted
pious Christians to conclude that poetry and vice are naturally akin. He
undertakes a forceful analysis of the imagery of the Old Testament. He
concludes that the ‘naked beauties of Christian poetry far outclass and
outshine the falsities of heathen poetry’.
Earl of Shaftesbury (1671-1713)
Shaftesbury
published a series of speculative books and gathered them together as Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times. The book has neither clarity nor cogency. It is not systematic or
lucid. His references impinge on literary criticism from time to time. He
contrasts the way in which Ancients hid from sight with the way in which
Moderns project themselves in whatever they write. ‘The whole machinery of
prefaces, dedicatory epistles and the like is designed to focus attention on
the writer himself’.
Shaftesbury
says that modem poets are ‘an insipid race’. The true poet is ‘a second maker, a just Prometheus under Jove’.
As for Shakespeare
and Fletcher, Jonson and Milton, they represent poetry in an infant state. They
‘lisp as in their cradles’ and stammer out puns and quibbles...they have
provided us with the richest ore.
Shaftesbury
regrets the fashionable attack on critics. He asserts that they are not the
enemies of the commonwealth of wit and letters but ‘the
pops and pillars of the building’.
Joseph Trapp (1679-1747)
Trapp
was the first Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He delivered Lectures on Poetry which were published in Latin and later
translated into English in 1742.
Trapp
engaged himself in rehashing some of the staple neoclassical formulations in
criticism. His definition of ‘wit’ is somewhat interesting. He insisted that
there must be ingenious thought which must be well-founded on truth, nature,
and reason.
Trapp quotes
Boileau’s definition of wit: ‘Wit is not wit but as it says something everybody
thought of, and that in a lively, delicate, and new manner’. He gives the
example given by Boileau.
When it
was suggested to Louis XII that he might punish some people who had opposed him
before he came to the throne, he replied, ‘A King of France revenges not the
injuries done to a Duke of Orleans’.
John Hughes (1677-1720)
Hughes
praises Spenser’s rich vein of ‘fabulous invention’ and the ‘poetical magic’ of
his imaginative fecundity. He praises Spenser for the sublimity of his thought,
and for his freedom from the ‘mixture of little conceits and that low
affectation of wit’ which has infected English verse and prose since his day.
IV. Alexander Pope and his victims
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
As a poet he ‘threw himself into the
controversies of the day and into lively commentary upon the social and
literary scene in such a way that the fruits of a critical mind are scattered
over his output’.
An
Essay on Criticism
This is a poem in the tradition of Horace’s Ars Poetica. Scattered here and there in
the text are paraphrases of lines from Virgil, Cicero and Quintilian.
The book is not systematic in its approach or
analysis. ‘The sheer polish of Pope’s couplets is such that the whole has an
air of authoritative guidance from a master who is vastly superior to his
subject and exudes commonsense’
Pope believes that only poets are fit to be
critics, and after some fairly rough treatment of the fools and failed writers
who turn critic, he sets out the qualifications of the true critic.
·
He must know his own limitations, and he must
‘follow nature’.
·
A thorough knowledge of the Ancients is a
pre-condition for criticism.
·
There must not be any slavish imitation of
the ancient rules and models. In poetry there are ‘nameless graces which no
methods teach’.
Various
impediments to true critical judgment
·
Pride,
·
inadequate knowledge and
·
piecemeal judgment instead of a survey of the
whole
Rules
for the good critic
He must be frank and truthful,
Hold his piece when he is not sure of himself
Speak diffidently even when he is confident
Must not be niggardly with his advice
Preface
to the Translations of the Iliad
The book is a lucid and persuasive analysis.
To read it is to ‘realize how closely clarity of thought and clarity of style
are related’.
For Pope, Homer is pre-eminent because he
excels in the most fundamental respect—‘invention’. Invention is the source of
all the materials on which art operates. ‘It is the sheer abundance and power
of Homer’s creativity which stokes up the fire and rapture energizing his
work’. Pope praises the fecundity and comprehensiveness of Homer’s genius, ‘the
variety and vitality of his characterization, the grandeur of his sentiments,
the rich profusion of his imagery, the vividness of his style, and the
flexibility of his versification’.
Comparing Homer with Virgil, Pope makes his
assessment thus:
Homer was the greater genius, Virgil the
better artist. In the one we most admire the man, in the other the work. Homer
hurries and transports us with a commanding impetuosity. Virgil leads us with
attractive majesty. Homer scatters with a generous profusion; Virgil bestows
with a careful magnificence.
Preface
to the Works of Shakespeare
In this preface Pope does justice to some of
the beauties in Shakespeare. He asserts that Shakespeare was more original than
Homer.
The poetry of Shakespeare was inspiration
indeed: he is not so much as imitator as an instrument of nature, and it is not
so just to say that he speaks from her, as that she speaks through him.
·
Shakespeare not only gives ‘variety and
vitality to his characters, but he preserves each individuality throughout each
play’
·
‘Without any strain or evident effort
Shakespeare produces the situation where the ‘heart swells and tears burst out
just at the proper places’.
·
‘The penetration and felicity displayed by
him is perfectly amazing from a man of no education or experience of public
life’.
·
‘He seems to have known the world by
intuition, to have looked through human nature at one glance’.
Then Pope goes into some of the prejudices
against Shakespeare. Shakespeare had to write for a living and please the
box-office. The audience composed of meaner sort of people. Shakespeare had to
appeal to them. Hence there is bombast in the tragedies and buffoonery and ribaldry
in the comedies.
Taking up the charge that Shakespeare lacked
learning, Pope points to evidence of considerable reading.
Comparing Shakespearean drama with ‘more
finished’ plays is like ‘an ancient majestic piece of Gothic architecture
compared with a neat modern building. We have greater reverence for the former
fabric, even though ‘many of the parts are childish, ill-placed, and unequal to
its grandeur’.
Lewis Theobald (1688-1744)
The animosity between Pope and Theobald
started with the latter’s edition of Shakespeare. In this edition, Theobald
brought out the defects in Pope’s edition. Pope had determined his text by an
arbitrary reading of the folios and quartos. Some quite celebrated lines were
left out from the text; others were tastelessly altered or simply
misunderstood.
Whatever be his capacity as a poet, Theobald
was a good editor and critic. As early as 1715 he was writing on Shakespeare
with sensitivity which gave the requisite momentum for Shakespeare studies to
move forward. He studied what Shakespeare did with his sources. Taking King Lear, he praises the exquisite
poetic mastery revealed at high points in Lear’s agony. He also shows
remarkable psychological consistency and insight in the development of the
character of Lear.
Theobald takes up the degree of culpability
permissible in a tragic hero. Against the view of Corneille that Oedipus was
not guilty of any fault because of his ignorance, Theobald argues that rashness
and impetuous temper are his faults for which he pays dearly. Taking up the
case of Othello, Theobald states that though the moor is brave, open, generous
and a loving person, ‘jealousy and rage native to him and which cannot be
controlled’ undid him. Thus Theobald’s writings are full of sympathetic insight
into Shakespeare.
We are indebted to Theobald for the numerous
emendations he suggested to improve the text left by Shakespeare. Where
passages were unintelligible he consulted known sources of usages elsewhere in
Shakespeare or other Elizabethan literature which might help in elucidation.
V. Henry Fielding (1707-54)
He
brought a blast of fresh air into the world of criticism. Fielding came
representing a new type of literature which finally transformed the arena of
critical studies. Fielding’s Joseph
Andrews and Tom Jones were
published in 1740 and he brought with him all the trappings of neo-classical
criticism. Yet he knew that he was an innovator:
‘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.
In the
Preface to Joseph Andrews Fielding
had appealed 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.
The genre has a light and ridiculous fable
and persons of inferior rank and manners instead of superior ones. In
sentiments and diction it substituted the ‘ludicrous’ for the ‘sublime’.
For Fielding
the inspiration came from Homer. It is noteworthy that in the long history of
the English novel, the two most innovative writers—Fielding and James
Joyce—found the basis for their innovation in Homer.
Lord
Byron called Fielding ‘the prose Homer’ and Coleridge was to class him with
Sophocles and Ben Jonson.
What a
master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots
ever planned.
Study materials for the guidance of M.Phil scholars and teachers
Dr. S. Sreekumar
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