Critics:
Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Shelley, Arnold
Sidney, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Shelley, Arnold
Sidney:
Three
traditions of critical thought mingle in Sidney
·
The Horatian-Aristotelian combination current in Italian poetics. Aristotle is
seen as a support to Horace, but on the whole he is not a major influence on
his own yet. The first English version of Horace's Art was published in
1567; later, Ben Jonson was to make his well-known verse rendering. Horace
reaches Sidney
·
The classical rhetorical tradition, whose main figure is Cicero Cicero England Sidney Sidney
·
The Platonic, or rather the neo-Platonic tradition as transmitted by Boethius
and Ficinus. These neo-Platonists admit that the beauty of objects is a way of
ascending towards the divine beauty.
We
may recognize in Sidney
Poetry: Its nature and aims
To
Sidney, a man with an acute political and religious sense, the highest sciences
are those which teach virtuous action in the political or the ethical sphere.
These are history and moral philosophy. Theology he refuses to consider
alongside human learning; it has for him a sphere of its own outside which it
cannot stand comparison. His comparison of poetry with history and with
philosophy is based on Scholastic psychology, which distinguishes three main
faculties in the human mind: imagination, reason, and memory. The different
kinds of learning are directed to one or another of these faculties:
enriching of memory (i.e. history),
enabling (or strengthening) of judgment (i.e. philosophy), and enlarging of
conceit (i.e. poetry).
Enlarging
of conceit: that is, expanding the human mind and improving ideas. In order to
present this concept in a lively way, Sidney
During
the Renaissance there was not much theorising on metaphysics, but there was an
acute interest in applied philosophy. "Much of Renaissance achievement lay
in diffusing over all human activities the intense, highly specialised
acquisitions of philosophy in medieval times" (Shepherd 31). Sidney
The
Humanists tend to establish comparisons between history and poetry. We saw that
Castelvetro defined poetry as an imitation of history; Lorenzo Valla sees in
history the source of both poetry and philosophy. Sometimes these opinions are
reversed, but all the disciplines are seen as closely related. History is
valued for its rhetorical power, apart from its factualness. It is seen as a
school of examples and morals. And of course there is an increasing political,
nationalistic interest in the writing of history.
One
main argument for Sidney
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any
such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in
effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth
forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the heroes,
demigods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like; so as he goeth hand in hand
with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts but freely
ranging within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in
so rich a tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers,
fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too
much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a
golden.
We
see that poetry presents a "golden world", that is, an ideal world
which brings out the potentialities of the real one. According to this
conception, poetry gives examples, but not merely in the way of allegory,
veiled theology or moral philosophy. "To Sidney Sidney Sidney Sidney Sidney Sidney
Many
of the scholastic accounts of poetry gave it a humble place among the sciences,
and often equated fiction with lies. For instance, Conrad of Hirsau praises
Virgil in the following terms:
There has never been a [greater] author in
terms of style and metre, and no one, when he ought to have told the truth,
nevertheless lied in a more polished and civil fashion.
One
of Sidney
The poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore
never lieth. For, as I take it, to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false
. . . . But the poet (as I said before) never affirmeth. The poet never maketh
any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he
writes . . . . And therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he
telleth them not for true, he lieth not.
In
fact, according to the main argument of Sidney Sidney
Sixteenth-century
interpretations of Aristotle and Horace lean towards didacticism; it is always
Horace's third possible aim for poetry (to please and teach) which is
quoted, repeated and emphasized (although there are some exceptions to this
view, like Castelvetro).
But
the main characteristic of poetry is its power to move. Moving has two senses:
stirring the emotions of the reader and inducing him to action. To move does
not mean to perturbate the hearer in any way, but rather to persuade him to do
something. Sidney
Moving
is a higher aim than teaching, because its effects are seen in actual action.
We may think here of this threefold aim of poetry (teach, delight and move)
similar those set by Cicero St. Augustine Sidney Ghent
The Poet
Sidney
dismisses (as Scaliger before him) Plato's condemnation of the poets in the Republic,
and commends instead what he believes to be the praise bestowed on the poet
in Ion, even though he points out that the claim of divine inspiration
is excessive. It is characteristic of Renaissance theorists that they tend to
present Plato as a defender of poetic inspiration; for them, Plato condemned
only the abuse of poetry. Sidney
There
is a tendency in neo-Platonism to draw a parallel between human and divine
creation: "What God creates in the world by His thought man conceives in
himself by intellectual act and expresses it in language, puts it into his
books and makes a copy of it using earthly materials" (Shepherd 62). How
is this to be effected? Ronsard, Tasso, Puttenham, Chapman, and many other
poets and critics in the Renaissance advocate the old inspirationalist theory
in Ion, which at the time is taken to be an exaltation of poetry, and
speak of the "divine fury" of the poet. "Possessed by this fury,
a poet's spirit was thought to rise to a direct awareness of the divine harmony
and acquire a supernatural wisdom." Willis notes that poetic fury is not
to be understood as pathological madness, but rather as a state of exaltation
induced by intense concentration. Others speak of direct divine inspiration.
For Spenser, poetry was no art, but a divine gift and heavenly
instinct, not to be gotten by labour and learning, but adorned with both, and
poured into the wit by a certain enthousiasmos and celestial
inspiration.
Giordano
Bruno wrote in England Sidney
I never drank of Aganippe well,
Nor ever did in shade of Tempe
And muses scorn with vulgar brains to
dwell;
Poor layman I, for sacred rites unfit
Some do I hear of poet's fury tell,
But (God wot) wot not what they mean by it.
. . .
(from Sonnet 74)
Poetry,
then, is a vocation, a rational activity, not a divine gift in any other sense
than the reason common to men is divine. But "orator fit, poeta
nascitur": poetry must lead, and not be led. It is an "unelected
vocation," and one which ought to be a demanding one, Sidney implies as he
exhorts his fellow-poets to more self-discipline. More work and less heroic
fury: this is Sidney
But
there are more romantic elements than this in Sidney Sidney Sidney
Persuasion
may be the end of love lyrics, but to persuade one must move, and one does not
move by mere imitation and study, without energy. Persuasion is therefore
linked to expression and to a renewal of the rhetorical tradition. Sidney
Loving in truth,
and faine in verse my love to show,
That the deare She
might take some pleasure of my paine:
Pleasure might
cause her reade, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might
pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine,
I sought fit words
to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions
fine, her wits to entertaine:
Oft turning others'
leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and
fruitfull showers upon my sunne-burn'd braine.
But words came
halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,
Invention, Nature's
child, fled step-dame Studie's blowes,
And others' feete
still seem'd but strangers in my way.
Thus great with
child to speake, and helplesse in my throwes,
Biting my trewand
pen, beating myself for spite,
"Foole,"
said my Muse to me, "looke in thy heart and write."
(I)
This
poem is written at the start of a tradition which favours original invention
over imitation of previous authors, a tradition which will not come to the
foreground of literary theory until the Romantic age. It is significant that we
find this statement in a poem, and not in Sidney Sidney
In
the Apology, the poet is dealt with only as an embodiment of his art. Sidney
The
poet is not committed to publication. The aristocrat Sidney favours the kind of
restricted and privileged audience he enjoyed during his lifetime; the Apology
itself was designed for restricted circulation in courtly circles. At the end
of the treatise, Sidney
Thus doing, your name shall flourish in the
printer's shops; thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface;
thus doing, you shall be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all, you shall
dwell upon superlatives.
The
Poem: Genres
Each
genre has its own end and its own merit: pastoral, for instance, is
interpreted by Sidney Sidney Arcadia
Comedy imitates the common errors of life.
Through it we get an experience of vice and learn the effects which are to be
expected from it. It shows evil characters and doings, but that does not mean
that it teaches evil; Sidney
Tragedy is interpreted by Sidney Sidney
Lyric is rated in the Apology rather more
highly than in other Renaissance treatises, maybe because Sidney himself was an
outstanding practitioner of the genre. Anyway, there is a general move in the
Renaissance to recognize the seriousness of lyric poetry. The aim of lyric is
for Sidney Sidney Sidney Sidney Sidney
Like
most Renaissance theorists, Sidney Sidney Sidney
The Poem: Prosody and Diction
It
results from Sidney
Imaginative
writings in prose can also be called poetry. Metre is appropriate because it
reflects the harmony of the Universe. It is also a good mnemonic resource and
helps poetry in teaching; besides, it favours the alliance of poetry with
"divine music." But in the last analysis it is only an ornament, not
a necessity. It is "feigning" together with teaching that makes a
poet, and not verse. A shortcoming of this way of putting it is that verse
seems something which is added to a pre-existing meaning, instead of helping to
constitute that meaning.
The
rhythm of modern verse, he says, is based on "number, with some regard of
the accent," and on rhyme. Sidney Sidney
In
spite of his defense of classical poetry, Sidney
There
were two general attitudes to style current in Sidney
·
That good style consists in an elaborate, difficult and ornamented language,
different from the simplicity of everyday speech.
·
That the best style is simple and direct, that ornaments only serves to hinder
the clarity of truth.
In
rhetoric as well as in poetry, Sidney Italy France Spain Sidney Arcadia
English Poetry
In
the Apology we find one of the earliest surveys of English literature.
Apart from the usual complaints that poetry has fallen from an earlier state of
preeminence and that contemporary poets are cold and rhetorical, Sidney
presents us with the "great tradition" of English poetry up to his
time: among medieval poets he values Chaucer (though he mentions Troilus and
Criseyde rather than The Canterbury Tales), and he shows an
appreciation for medieval romances and ballads uncommon in a Humanist. Among
his contemporaries he praises the Earl of Surrey ,
and Spenser, though he does not approve of the archaic diction of the latter.
As
concerns drama, he complains that English tragedies and comedies, even the
great Gorboduc , are faulty as to the classical rules of space and time:
the English stage is fond of dramatizing many episodes which should instead be
narrated in a messenger speech, or suppressed altogether by plunging in
medias res. He calls for a strict verisimilitude of the action represented
on the stage, and for less reliance on the fancy of the spectator. Besides, he
says, Englishmen are too fond of farce, and spoil their tragedies by turning
them into tragicomedies. The aim of the stage (even in the case of comedy) for Sidney
delight we scarcely do but in things that
have a convenience to ourselves or to the general nature; laughter almost ever
cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature.
Comedy
is more polished and intellectual than farce. It makes us laugh by exposing
human foibles, not through mere clowning; laughter should come from its satiric
aspect. As to tragicomedy, it is not rejected outright; only the sudden
breaches of tone which spoil the tragic effect. The test is the emotional
effect, the quality of the dramatic illusion produced, not a blind submission
to the rules.
Dryden:
Dryden
was the major literary figure in both literature and criticism of during the
Restoration and later 17th century, and the most influential critic of the
whole century. Criticism during the Jacobean age and the Commonwealth will fail
to justly appraise or even recognize the great works of the age. It is an
undeveloped genre, and the information about literature often consists of a
"roll-call" of authors, a bare list of names and works with some
laudatory comment appended to them. There is not even a single detailed study
or commentary of a literary work. Dryden will do much to change this situation;
his success is also the success of criticism in English letters.
Being
a writer as well as a critic, Dryden always wrote criticism to some practical
end concerning his own works. Much of his critical work is to be found in
prefaces to his own works. Besides, he was a professional writer. He was not a
nobleman writing for his pleasure: he had to live from his work and in the age
he wrote in this meant that he had to find some patron or other to take him
under his protection. He had to flatter, and this explains not only the nature
of his writing, but also sometimes that of his criticism. Sometimes his
reasoning is flawed by this need to flatter. As in the critics we have studied
up to now, we find in Dryden an interest in the general issues of criticism
rather than in a close reading of particular texts (although he will provide
one of the first of such readings, that of Jonson's The Silent Woman).
He wants to rely on both authority and common sense, and often seems at a loss
when the two seem to go against each other. We call Dryden a
neoclassical critic, just as Boileau, although in fact there are wide
differences between them. Dryden meditates on the neoclassical rules, which he
feels to be right in the main, but then he also wants to find a critical
justification for the great tradition of English poetry, which lay beyond those
rules. It is to his credit that he thought over the principles of French
neo-Classicism and did not apply them mechanically to the English letters.
According to T.S. Eliot, Dryden's great work consists not so much in the
originality of his principles as in having realized the need to affirm the
native tradition, as opposed to the overwhelming French influence. His
best-known work, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, partly reflects this
tension in Dryden's commitments. Its dialogue form has often been criticized as
inconclusive, but actually, as in most dialogues, there is a spokesman more
weighty than the others. Dryden carries about his task with efficiency, stating
his own ideas but leaving some leeway for difference of opinion. Neander's
overall statement on the rules is that they can add to the perfection of a
work, but that they will not improve a work which does not already contain some
degree of perfection or genius in it. And we may find writers like Shakespeare,
Dryden believes, who did not follow the rules but are nevertheless obviously
superior to any "regular" writer. Shakespeare disconcerts Dryden, who
recognizes his superiority but is more at ease with Ben Jonson. In Dryden,
then, we find a "liberal" neoclassicist, although he is most coherent
when he is dealing with that which can be understood and reduced to rule. His
relaxation is to a great extent both a refusal to believe in the universal
application in the neoclassic principles and an inability to provide new and
more comprehensive principles. Because his most cogent statement on the rules
(following Rapin) is that
1. [i]f the rules be well considered, we shall find them
to be made only to reduce nature into method . . . they are founded upon good
sense and sound reason, rather than on authority.
Dryden
is not a great analyst of texts or an important literary historian, but some of
his works are significant steps in the development of both directions in
criticism. Dryden's importance as a critic comes from his place in history at
the start of the long neoclassical era, whose principles he helped determine;
he contributed a great deal to raise the standards of criticism and to define
the role of the discipline. As he says himself,
2. they wholly mistake the nature of criticism who think
its business is principally to find fault. Criticism, as it was first
instituted by Aristotle, was meant a standard of judging well; the chief part
of which is to observe those excellences which should delight a reasonable
reader.
And
of course his ideas also give us insights into his own work.
The
way the work is "moulded to shape" is through "fancy
moving the sleeping images of things towards the light, there to be
distinguished and then either chosen or rejected by the judgement." In
Dryden, and indeed in all the 18th-century critics after him, fancy is
sometimes synonymous with imagination and sometimes identified as a special
kind of imagination. "Wit" is also used to refer to this faculty.
Fancy and imagination will become different concepts in Coleridge. So we have
two opposite principles at work in the writer's mind: fancy and judgement (cf.
the different accounts of the creative process in Sidney, Bacon, and Hobbes).
We may note that fancy is subordinate to judgement, although it seems to be
assigned a more relevant role than in Hobbes' theory. Fancy is synthetic, while
judgement is analytic, as Hobbes had said and Locke will reaffirm.
Of
course, Dryden has to give fancy its due in the composition of a work. But it
is something he mistrusts. It is too lawless, and there is a danger that it may
get out of hand. Strictures placed during the process of composition, such as
the rules or the use of rhyme, are a good means to restrict the impulse of
fancy and allow judgement to become dominant. While writing, "fancy,
memory and judgement are then extended in the rack" (Orrery 2).
Writing is a painstaking activity, one which demands the utmost of the writer's
capabilities.
In
the preface to his poem Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden gave an account
of the phases of the creative process, which we can profitably compare with the
inventio , dispositio and elocutio of classical rhetoric.
To compose an epic poem, he says, a poet needs wit. "Wit" in the
eighteenth century did not suggest the gift of the quick repartee or the bon
mot, as it does today; rather, it stood for the creative faculty of the
human mind, above all the aspect defined by Hobbes as "fancy," the
ability to see the resemblances between different objects. Dryden defines wit
as imagination, as the ability to find the right memory or the right metaphor
we are looking for:
3. But to proceed from wit in the general notion of it to
the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem, I judge it chiefly to consist
in the delightful imaging of persons, actions, passions, or things . . . it is
some lively and apt description, dressed in such a colours of speech, that it
sets before your eyes the absent object, as perfectly and more delightfully
than nature. So then, the first happiness of the poet's imagination is properly
invention or finding the thought; the second is fancy, or the variation,
deriving or molding of that thought, as the judgement represents it proper to
the subject; the third is elocution, or the art of clothing and adorning that
thought so found and varied, in apt, significant and sounding words: the
quickness of the imagination is seen in the invention, the fertility in the
fancy, and the accuracy in the expression.
Writers
in dramatic style, such as Ovid and all playwrights, must excel in invention
and fancy; those speaking in his own voice, like Virgil, must cultivate their
expression. So, there are different creative faculties in the human mind, and
each kind of work may demand a special development of one or other. Dryden
feels at times the need to specialize: he wrote works in practically all genres
except the novel, but he seems to think that each writer excels in a particular
kind of writing. He complains that the Ancients were either tragedians or
comedians, and that it is easier to attain perfection in this way, writing only
the kind of thing one does best. This natural gift has to be controlled by
technique. The good writer must be a born genius (here Dryden refers us to
Longinus), and he must know the emotions he is depicting. But he must not be
carried away by them because probably the audience would not follow him. Dryden
believes that poetry is an art for witty men, and not for madmen. Passion would
blur the differences between characters, and it is judgement which keeps them
separate. We can compare this analytical labor of the judgement to Hobbes once
again. Dryden's interest in the successful objectification of the poet's
emotions is an interesting pre-figuration of later aesthetic theories (e.g.
Schopenhauer's).
Of
course we have the classical models to guide us. To copy their ways is not a
fault, rather a virtue. In the Essay of Dramatic Poesy we find this
phrase as a commendation of Ben Jonson: "He was not only a professed
imitator of Horace, but a learned plagiary of all the others".
But
true imitation must be original and improve the models. Dryden believes that
poetry has a historical development, and he wishes "that poetry may not go
backward, when all other arts and sciences are advancing." We may profit
from the models and the experience of the ancients and try to go beyond them.
All great writers have borrowed from others, without their being less original
for it. He traces the Homeric influence in Virgil, for instance. The
neoclassical era is not particularly sensitive to originality and invention,
but nevertheless Dryden believes that other things being equal, originality is
to be preferred to good imitation, and is a greater proof of genius.
One
word on the subject of progress in literature: Dryden, as many other critics of
his time, seems to believe in a cyclical alternation of barbarian ages with
ages of refinement and progress. They believe themselves to be in the
equivalent of the Roman Empire . Shakespeare is
Dryden's Homer, and Jonson is his Virgil. He does not seem to believe that the heights
of the classical age can be reached again; even the language is too unstable
for great works and inferior to Greek. Like Pope, Dryden believed that writing
in English is like writing on sand, compared to the writing on marble of the
Ancients.
Rhyme
is for Dryden something more than a mere ornament. It is a way of consciously
controlling the process of composition: because of the superior attention it
requires, rhyme demands a greater consciousness on the part of the poet, and
less abandonment to the inspiration of his fancy. Rhyme
4. bounds and circumscribes the fancy. . . . the fancy
then gives leisure to the judgement to come in, which, seeing so heavy a tax
imposed, is ready to cut off all unnecessary expenses" (Dryden, Orrery
6).
Rhyme,
then, is not a mere "embroidery of sense," it is a means of
clarifying the thought.
We
shall see that Dryden initially favoured the use of rhyme in plays when the
appropriateness of this convention coming from France
Maybe
the neoclassical preference for the heroic couplet is the reason for this
change: couplets of alexandrines, the staple of French classical drama, are all
right for the French language, but the English heroic couplet does not lend
itself so easily to the portrayal of conversation. It is best fit to long
series of meditative or essayistic verses, and it is here where it will
triumph; English drama reverts to blank verse and then to prose.
Dryden
also writes a miniature history of modern prosody. Although he is a bit
patronizing on Chaucer, he is readier than most people in his age to recognize
his genius. However, at the time Chaucer's language was still unknown (Dryden
laughs at the first news of a reconstruction of Chaucer's regular metrics in
the preface to his translation), so Dryden does not recognize his merits as a
versifier, and considers Waller and Denham (who are minor poets from our point
of view) to be the first great versifiers of the English language. Waller is
the inventor of the couplet: he "first showed us to conclude the sense
most commonly in distychs" (Orrery 5). Dryden will
insist on the connection between form and sense: in this way form will impose
itself directly on sense. Couplets and quatrains must contain a unit of sense.
On the other hand, he opposes the strict equality of syllables in all lines, a
reasonable thing to do, since stressing certain weak syllables and making them
count for measure is unnatural to English.
Dryden
opposes Aristotle in believing that the soul of a play is not to be found in
its plot, but rather in its author's language, in diction and thought. Dryden
wants a literature written in a pure language, one which is free from neologism
and pedantry alike. However, he accepts coinages from Latin. Like Swift whose
complaints will be much the same, he longs for an academy with an authority to
decide on linguistic matters.
We
find in the age of Dryden a growing reaction against the Ramist conception of
rhetoric. If rhetoric is just an addition of ornamental words, it is better to
do away with it. The Cartesian and the empiricist ideas coincide here. Fancy
will seen as something which plays with words, while judgement defines the real
relationships between things. One of the most notable phenomena of the age is
the definition of the language of science in opposition to rhetoric. The Royal
Society inspires the works of John Wilkins (Essay towards a Real Character
and a Philosophical Language, 1668) and Thomas Sprat, who advocates a
"mathematical plainness" in style: one word, one thing. These ideas
will be satirized in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, where the wise men in
Laputa carry with them all the objects they want to speak about and merely
point to them. For Locke, the most influential philosopher during the
eighteenth century, eloquence misleads judgement, instead of directing it. All
these writers mistrust literature, poetry, rhetoric, which they consider empty
words. There is a growing emphasis on reason which will be felt in literary
theory as well.
Dryden
discusses character and plot as technical difficulties faced by the writer,
sometimes working one against the other. This conception is very characteristic
of British criticism. We can compare it with E. M. Forster's account in Aspects
of the Novel (1927), which describes how the plot seems to lead the writer
in one direction and the characters in a different one. For both Forster and
Dryden, it is the poet's art to respect both the decorum of the characters and
the causally necessary, natural solution to the plot. The writer, Dryden says,
is like a god to his characters, having prescience and power of determination.
But it is difficult to use them in a way altogether convincing, working as a
whole.
We
may note that decorum and rule are for Dryden a means of giving formal
integrity to the work: that is, they are not only content, but form as well;
their aim is not to depict the world as it is, but to give unity to the work.
Dryden, like many later critics, is conscious of two different tendencies
present in a work: although he does not use these terms, we might call them the
mimetic tendency (the relationship between an element in the work and reality)
and the structural tendency (the coherence of the work imposing its own
conventions, the concern for formal integrity).
He
opposes the strongly conventionalized characters and plots of Roman comedies,
asking for a wider imitation of nature, although he also appreciates the
advantages of patterning and of structural simplicity in current French plays,
and he believes some of Shakespeare's plays to be "ridiculously
cramped" with incident. But the interest of the plot and the
characters is also to be found in variety and not simply in a well-defined
structure. In variety we recognize real life, and this is one of the advantages
of the English approach to dramatic art.
The
story itself is the least important part of a poet's work, the one which lends
it most easily to imitation. It is a material which must be worked on, finding
suitable characters and style. Aristotle, Dryden points out, placed plot first
of all elements in a play as the basis on which the others are built, and not
as the most important one to determine the quality of a play. For Dryden, it is
the characters' language which is the most important element in a play.
Dryden
repeats Aristotle's theory on the unity of action, but understanding it in a
wider sense than many neoclassical critics. There can be unity in a play with
two lines of action, if they are causally linked. Dryden introduces in English
criticism the criterion of unity used by Corneille, the contrast between the
suspense of the partial actions and the final repose of the mind of the
audience when the whole of the action is completed. He demands that beginning,
middle and end follow each other in a necessary way:
5. a fable ought to have a beginning, middle, and an end,
all just and natural, so that that part which is the middle, could not
naturally be the beginning or end, and so of the rest: all are depending on one
another, like the links of a curious chain.
This
does not happen, he says, in Spanish plots;
6. as in perspective, so in tragedy there must be a point
of sight in which all the lines terminate; otherwise the eye wanders, and the
work is false ("Grounds" 167).
It
is the moral that directs the whole action of the play to one centre.
Dryden
also repeats Aristotle's doctrine on characters. Manners must be apparent
(shown in action and discourse), suitable, resemblance, and constant.
Characters derive from manners, but they must be a suitable composite of
manners, and not be grounded on a single trait. We may compare this conception,
once again, to E. M. Forster's well-known opposition between flat and round
characters (Aspects of the Novel).
In
1663, a Frenchman called Sorbière published a book on England England
In
any case, Dryden expounds in a fair enough way the reasons for and against the
dramatic practice of both countries, as well as of that of the Ancients, and
re-states the classical doctrine on drama. Dryden retains an openness to
contrary argument which almost approaches scepticism, although it would be more
accurate to define his views as probabilistic rather than sceptic (Wimsatt and
Brooks 193). Dryden was accused of inconclusiveness, and he retorted with the Defence
of an Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668), and there he alludes to the
Aristotelian difference between demonstrative and probabilistic arguments: the
latter Aristotle had said to be proper to rhetoric. It is up to the talent of
each fictional speaker to convince us of the rightness of his opinions. They
are Crites, Eugenius, Lisidius, and Neander. Although Neander is generally
recognised as Dryden's spokesman and as the more cogent speaker of all, all are
allowed to have their say, and the dialogue is not brought to a conclusion
through the victory of Neander's argument: we leave the four friends still
debating the issues. And in the Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy,
Dryden says that his argument is not demonstrative but probabilistic: it is up
to the reader to decide which of the speakers he will side with. Crites defends
and extreme Classicist position, although he is not blind to the merits of
modern versification. Lisideius and Eugenius accept the same Classical premises
as Crites, but say that modern poets have profited from the experience and
imitation of the Classics and follow rules more exactly. Lisideius adds that
the rules have been best followed by French drama, which is to be regarded as
the model. Neander ("new man") insists on the need of
liveliness-which he feels is lacking in Classical and French plays-rather than
plain verisimilitude. He approves as well of Corneille's phrase, "il est
facile aux speculatifs d'estre severes," and he is concerned with the
excessive rigidity that critical principles, divorced of actual dramatic practice,
tend to impose on drama.
The
three unities, Dryden observes, ought to be followed in all regular plays. But
he is tolerant enough with plays which are moderately irregular.
In
the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Crites repeats the account of the unities
given by Corneille (without his qualifications on the difficulty of the
enterprise). The unities aim at verisimilitude; the space and time of
representation must be as close as possible to those of the feigned action. Any
distortion must be supposed to fall between the acts, plots have to begin
"in medias res", narration must be restricted to events simultaneous
with the action if possible, etc.
In
time we find that the coincidence of times works all right in dealing with the
precipitate events at the conclusion of a play, but makes the complication seem
artificial or else rely too much on narrative.
Dryden
follows Corneille in showing how the unities of space and time are mutually
related, and regularity in one favours regularity in the other. This may be
helped through the "liaison des scènes." Place (and time, too)
remains the same inside each act,
7. and that you may know it to be the same, the stage is
so supplied with persons that it is never empty all the time. (Dramatic
Poesy 28).
But
the view of the question give by Crites is much qualified in the debate by the
advocates of the moderns. The disadvantages of regularity are pointed out:
there is a danger of narrowness and monotony. The "liaison des
scènes" is only possible in French plays because their plots contain
little action and their scenes are very long. This also demands an excessive
use of monologue, which is unnatural. One main end of theatre, delight, is not
sufficiently attended to in Greek or French plays.
Dryden
held an interesting debate with his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, on the
property of rhyme in plays and its relationship to verisimilitude. Howard
opposed the use of rhyme, which he believed to break the illusion of reality
which any play ought to produce. Dryden defended the use of rhyme. He believes
that the end of a play is not so much to give a faithful imitation of human
life as to give a heightened image of reality. Rhyme works in that way:
it guides the attention and gives greater tightness to speeches. Besides,
Dryden says, blank verse (which was proposed by Howard as a substitute for
rhyme) is not "natural," either. Howard based his attack on rhyme on
the principle that if a play is to trick our minds into a fictive reality, then
the use of rhyme worked against that, because men do not speak in rhyme; we
will not believe that it is the character who is actually speaking. Dryden's
answer is categorical: we are never tricked in a play into believing that we
are facing a real scene; and it is the author, not the characters, whom we
consider to be speaking in the last analysis. In the Essay of Dramatic
Poesy, even Crites acknowledges that dramatic verisimilitude deceives us
because we desire to be deceived, and that we know all the time that we are
being deceived. We will have to keep this in mind when we discuss the
definition of the audience's role as a "willing suspension of
disbelief" in nineteenth-century criticism.
Howard
was also against following of the three unities, also for the sake of
verisimilitude: he believed that too much use must be made of coincidence to
concentrate an action in so restricted a space and time. Paradoxically, Dryden
holds the opposite: the unities produce an effect of verisimilitude.
Actually,
Dryden's position is not incoherent; only, verisimilitude as such is not the
only thing at stake here. Howard, we may note, is for a relaxation of the
formalities of theatre: no rhyme, no rules, whereas Dryden appreciates the
value which they have in the making of a work of art, because of the tightness
they impose on experience, the concentration, the dramatic intensity, the
heightened attention of the audience. Dryden sees that the essence of art is
more than just imitation of real life. Drama is not trompe-l'il, that
extreme of mimetic trickery. Verisimilitude is all right, it is relevant to the
question, but we need something more than just verisimilitude, something which
rhyme and a concentrated action help to shape. A tragedy is always natural as a
tragedy:
8. The plot, the characters, the wit, the descriptions,
are all exalted above the level of common converse, as high as the imagination
of the poet can carry them with proportion to verisimility. (Dramatic
Poesy 71)
Verse,
then, is natural to tragedy, even if it is not natural to life:
9. Verse, 'tis true, is not the effect of sudden thought;
but this hinders not that sudden thought may be represented in verse. (72)
In
his definition of a play in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden says it
is
10. a just and lively image of human nature,
representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it
is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind. (25)
So,
once again we meet a version of the Horatian ""productive
delight." Elsewhere Dryden writes:
11. these two ends may be thus distinguished.
The chief end of the poet is to please, for his immediate reputation depends on
it. The great end of the poet is to instruct, which is performed by making pleasure
the vehicle of that instruction; for poetry is an art, and all arts are made to
profit. (Answer to Rhymer 148)
But
in later pronouncements, Dryden asserts that
12. delight is the chief, if not the only end
of poesy; instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poesy only
instructs as it delights,
or
that instruction is the end of tragedy,
13. but in comedy it is not so; for the chief
end of it is divertisement and delight, and that so much, that it is disputed .
. . whether instruction be any part of its employment.
Dryden
does not believe comedy to be grounded on any serious principle such as moral
instruction. Here Dryden sides with Heinsius in declaring that comedy has
amusement and delight as its only aim, far from the serious concerns of
tragedy. Comedy works not on the best impulses of the audience, but on the
worst, making them laugh. The pleasure coming from comedy is a "malicious
pleasure"; comedy may instruct, but it is a secondary purpose: its main
duty is to please. But he often changed opinions on this subject, alternately
stressing or playing down the responsibilities and moral requirements of drama.
In this sense he is not the typical neoclassical critic. The general attitude
towards comedy is that it ought to provide moral instruction. Sidney and Jonson
had even defended comedy without laughter. Others defend, of course, laughter,
such as Molière and Pope. Dryden affirms that Ben Jonson did not require
creative wit, being satisfied with humour. He believes that as far as wit is concerned,
modern playwrights are superior to Jonson. His characters are funny, but not
witty. They do not make us laugh willingly: we laugh at them. They are at once
more realistic, and more approximate to real conversation. Dryden distinguishes
between a comedy of wit and a comedy of humours, and he prefers a mixture of
the two.
In
A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, written in
his old age (1693), Dryden asserts that pleasure is only a secondary end to
poetry. It is only a means to the real end, which is instruction. Conversely,
the aim of the poet is to please, but not everything that pleases is good.
Dryden believes that the quality of a work is inherent to it, that it comes
from its having certain qualities; he mistrusts to some extent the judgement of
the audience. The dramatist must not be a slave to the taste of the audience.
So
we find in Dryden all the gamut of combinations between the poles of delight
and instruction. Instruction comes unconsciously from the admiration produced
by the events in the plot. The soul of the spectator is wound insensibly into
the pratice of that which it admires.
In
the late 1670s, Dryden receives strong influence from the French critics
Boileau, Rapin and Le Bossu, and also from the extreme classicism of another
Englishman, Rymer. In his Tragedies of the Last Age, Thomas Rymer had
introduced the term "poetic justice" and had insisted that it had to
be respected in all plays. Many were ready to agree with him for a long time,
such as Dennis, and Addison, who still exaggerate the concept. Rymer launched
some silly attacks on Shakespeare, criticizing him for his moral faults and his
ignorance of the unities. Dryden had a respect for Rymer which we cannot
understand today: but then we must not forget that Dryden himself was a great
rewriter and "improver" of Shakespearean plays (All for Love, The
Tempest, Troilus and Cressida, etc.). But Dryden, while accepting poetic
justice, is not an extreme advocate of it. And he makes some interesting
observations on the conflicts it arises in tragedy, when it runs against
sympathy. The aim of tragedy is to instruct by example. Dryden proposes love as
the most suitable theme to move the pity of the audience, a subject which
"was almost unknown to the Ancients." The poet must labour to arouse
pity for the criminal, and not for the victim, and terror must come from the
punishment of the criminal we pity: this idea introduces some complexity beyond
the simplicity of poetic justice.
We
may note that the favourite theatrical emotions of the Neoclassic age, when a
new ethics of benevolence is developing, are poetic justice, pity, melodrama,
the pleasure of compassion of injured innocence. All are in direct opposition
to Aristotle's catharsis and his basic requirements for tragedy. Now a
sentimentalized version of catharsis is fashionable : it is understood to be
the abating of pride and anger through fear and pity. The stage is ready for
the development of sentimental drama and bourgeois tragedy or melodrama (George
Lillo, The London Merchant, 1731; Richard Steele, The Conscious
Lovers, 1722).
Dryden
wrote a long essay on satire: A Discourse Concerning the Original and
Progress of Satire (1693). He follows Horace and the French critic Dacier,
who had undertaken a similar enterprise before.
Dryden's
definition of satire, following Daniel Heinsius, has a strong Aristotelian
flavour:
14. Satire is a kind of poetry, without a
series of action, invented for the purging of our minds; in which human vices ,
ignorance and error, and all things besides, which are produced from them, in
every man, are severely reprehended; partly dramatically, partly simply; but
for the most time figuratively and occultly. . . . It ought only to treat of
one subject; to be confined to a particular theme, or, at least, to one
principally (Satire 268- 269).
Satire
is not libel or slander: it is concerned with the castigation of universal vice
through its manifestation in individuals (cf. A's comedy vs. lampoon or poetry
vs. history). Nevertheless, satires will still be concerned with attack to
particular persons on concrete occasions (f.i., Dryden's Absalom and
Achitophel ).
Dryden
traces the independent development of satire in Greece Rome Burton
The
other main styles in satire were developed by Persius, who writes invective and
insults against vice rather than satire, and above all by Horace and Juvenal.
Horace is more profitable, and Juvenal more delightful. Also, they castigate
different things: Horace folly, Juvenal vice. Horace's instructions are more
general:
15. [Horace] had found out the skill of Virgil,
to hide his sentences to give you the virtue of them without showing them in
their full extent, which is the ostentation of a poet, and not his art"
(Satire 256).
However,
Dryden finds that Horace's wit is insipid, and that Juvenal is sharper. Horace specializes
in fine mockery, Juvenal is more direct and pungent. Dryden's conclusion is
that although Horatian satire is the best kind of satire, both in tone and in
objects, Horace has carried it to less perfection than Juvenal, who writes more
successfully an inferior kind of satire.
Dryden's
creative work shades off into his imitations and his translations. He was not
only an important translator in his age, but also a theoriser of translation,
above all in his later years. He translated from Boileau to Chaucer an
Boccaccio (Fables ).
In
the preface to his translation of Ovid's Epistles (1680), he
distinguishes three kinds of translation (a distinction similar to that made by
Ascham in his Schoolmaster ):
·
metaphrase is "turning an author word by word and line by line from
one language into the other." This is not always possible, and
moreover the sense is often obscured.
·
paraphrase is "translation with latitude," which nonetheless
preserves the original sense.
·
We have imitation when the author abandons both the words and the sense
of the original whenever he thinks it fit. There are some authors who cannot be
translated, only imitated. Indeed, it is impossible, he says, to translate
poetry literally. We must keep to the most faithful translation whenever we
can, but this is not always possible. So, the translator of poetry must be a
poet as well as an accomplished speaker of both languages.
16. A translator is to make his author appear
as charming as possibly he can provided he maintains his character, and makes
him not unlike himself. (195).
It
is a difficult enterprise, and the good translator has a previous experience
both as critic and creator.
Pope:
The
age Pope writes in already accepts wholeheartedly the neoclassical principles
which Dryden was still at pains to diffuse. Pope's Essay on Criticism
(1711) is the English equivalent of Boileau's Art poétique in France Windsor Forest
Pope's
essay is modelled after the verse epistle of Horace and Boileau's Art
poétique : it also follows a long line of imitations of these in Britain Rochester Adams
277) according to which poetry is to be judged; so, he will also focus on
poetry. And, as a matter of fact, he thinks that only writers qualify for the
role of critics:
1.
Let
such teach others who themselves excel
And
censure freely, who have written well.
He
defines the intellectual and moral characteristics of the good critic. For
instance, the critic must not pay excessive attention to small faults; he must
appreciate what is good, irrespective of its being old or new , foreign or
national. He must control his obsessions and not sacrifice his judgement
"to one loved folly "; he will seek to appreciate, rather than to find
fault; he will avoid the extremities of novelty and tradition, etc.
"Certainly what Pope recommends to the critic is superior to the varieties
of critical narrowness that he draws up for censure" (Adams 237).
In
the third part of the essay, Pope points out the moral virtues required in the
critic. Knowledge is not sufficient: honesty is needed, too, and humility in
putting forward his judgement, taking care not to offend: "Without good
breeding truth is disapproved." A good critic must have a sense of proportion,
and know when to forbear criticising a great writer, while foolish critics will
assail him with importunities:
2.
Nay,
fly to the altars, there they'll talk you dead
For
fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Earlier
on in the essay, the main advice given to the critic is not to set his pride
against the author; to try to understand first the author's spirit and then
judge accordingly. We must know a poet's culture, religion, etc. before we
attempt to judge him. The Augustan age was scarcely a historically conscious
period. It was given to the admiration of neoclassical models as eternal
standards, instead of seeing aesthetic conventions as historically relative.
Pope's observations in the Essay on Criticism and in his "Preface
to Shakespeare", although they do not amount to a historicist perspective,
show some degree of historical consciousness.
Finally,
to understand an author we need to understand his intentions. Few would
disagree with that now, but in Pope this hides a further assumption: that the
author cannot accomplish more than he intends. That is, that art is conscious
and wilful; all must "stoop to what they understand." This is again
the old Horatian idea that writing well comes from thinking well, and that
writers must measure their strength before attempting certain subjects. But
Hobbes's empiricist principle that "only that must be written which is
perfectly understood" is not far away. And with this we can no longer
agree in this age of Marxist, Structuralist and Freudian thought, where much of
our behavior, even in writing literature, is accounted for by means of
unconscious ideologies and hidden drives.
Like
Hobbes and Dryden, Pope mistrusts imagination: it misleads understanding, and
only understanding, judgement, can make a successful work of art for him.
Judgement makes a writer follow nature, which is always the same for Pope.
Following nature means understanding the rules and writing according to them.
This is because Pope sees the rules as a product of Nature; they are a self-imposed
restraint:
3.
Those
rules of old discovered, not devised,
Are
nature still, but nature methodized:
Nature,
like liberty, is but restrained
By
the same laws which first herself ordained.
And,
as the Ancients were the ones who followed the rules best, "To copy nature
is to copy them." For Pope, there is no possible difference between
experience and imitation; here he is thoroughly neoclassical in the narrowest
sense. He sees culture (the rules) as a part of nature, while the pre-Romantic
writers of the XVIIIth century have a primitivistic tendency; they see nature
as something which man has alienated himself from through culture. Nature and
rule, nature and culture, nature and manners, become then opposite terms. For
Pope, nature and manners are nearly synonymous.
However,
Pope is not only inspired by Horace, but by Longinus as well, the "critic
with a poet's fire," the most romantic of classical critics. He recognises
that there are beauties which cannot be reduced to rule:
4.
Some
beauties yet no precept can declare
For
there is a happiness as well as care
5.
Music
resembles poetry; in each
Are
nameless graces which no methods teach.
Sometimes,
"license is a rule." And it is true that Pope comes close at times to
the Longinian admiration of sublimity which can jump over the rules guided by
genius alone. The rules must be respected, but they can be occasionnally
broken:
6.
Great
wits sometimes may gloriously offend
And
rise to faults true critics dare not mend.
But
this is a risky thing to attempt, and Pope seems to be trying to justify the
ancients everywhere while keeping the moderns withing the boundary of rule.
Another
piece of advice is to learn to judge the work as a whole, and not its isolated
parts; to appreciate the true merits of a work, and not the superficial
ornaments like good sound or a good style with no content. The harmony between
sound and sense finds in Pope's view its most finished instance in the figure
of imitative harmony :
7.
'Tis
not enough no harshness gives offense;
The
sound must seem an echo to the sense .
Soft
is the strain when zephyr gently blows,
And
the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But
when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The
hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar:
Whe
Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The
line too labours, and the words move slow.
Not
so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies
o'er th' unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Here
Pope takes care to exemplify in his own poem the effects or defects he wants to
point out, in bad poets, with examples of imitative verse on monosyllabic
lines, hiatus or bad rhyme:
8.
These
equal syllables alone require,
Though
oft' the ear the open vowels tire;
While
expletives their feeble aid do join
And
ten low words oft' creep in one dull line:
While
they ring round the same unvaried chimes,
With
sure returns of still expected lines
Where'er
you find "the cooling western breeze"
In
the next line, it "whispers through the trees"
If
crystal streams "with pleasing murmurs creep"
The
reader's threatened (not in vain) with "sleep"
These
lines seem to imply that poetry must avoid clichés and that one of the worst
enemies of poetry is bad poetry, or even predictable poetry. Poetry should
surprise with its wit and its innovative use of words and images.
Pope
tries to practice what he preaches. Every principle and commonplace of
criticism is given a witty and catchy formulation, and we may feel that Pope's
own Essay on Criticism follows his requirement for "true wit":
9.
True
wit is nature to advantage dressed
What
oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
.
. . something. . . .
That
gives us back the image of our mind.
Wit,
then, is the crown of nature, and not something alien to it. This definition of
wit, with its peculiar setting of familiarity against novelty, can be traced to
a Horatian source, but it was criticized by Samuel Johnson, who believed that
Pope has reduced "wit" from strength of thought to happiness of
language. But this is not Pope's doing: the term was already evolving from its
original meaning towards a lighter and more frivolous one.
Nevertheless,
Pope's neoclassical concepts are too limited to allow a real analysis of poetic
effect. Form is not important in itself, Pope says, but only with respect to
subject matter: "Expression is the dress of thought" and so it
must be suitable, not uniformly bright,
10.
For
diff'rent styles with diff'rent subjects sort
As
several garbs with country, town, and court.
Pope's
sartorial metaphors have often been criticized, because they betray him into
denying what he is trying to assert: that there is an organic relationship
between style and content. Defining style as a dress, as something which exists
apart from the thing it covers, is not the best way to do it, but we must note
that Pope is very careful in not using too much the word "ornamental"
(cf. Dryden, Sprat and the decay of rhetoric), and he takes care in his poetry
not to be too much "ornamental." Anyway, the definition of language
as a kind of dress for thought is not Pope's own: it is commonplace until the
Romantic age, when it will be severely criticised.
Just as Horace and Boileau had written a
short history of literature, Pope ends his Essay with a short history of
criticism, and he ends his essay with the hope that "wit's fundamental
laws" will take root in England
Johnson:
Johnson
was a poet, biographer, lexicographer, and an essayist on criticism and morals
(The Rambler , The Idler ); he was the most influential literary figure
of his lifetime in England
Johnson
is the last important critic of the neoclassicism, in an age where pre-Romantic
ideas are more widely accepted than neoclassicism. Johnson is usually less
dogmatic and more eclectic than Pope in his assertion of the neoclassical
values. Moreover, sometimes Johnson's claims are contradictory: for instance,
he wants at once realism and poetic justice on stage. He is not a consistent
theorist, but rather a practical critic of penetrating insights, honesty and
common sense. In Johnson we can witness both the dead weight of a tradition and
the signs that a new conception of literature is emerging. Johnson had a
strongly classical mind, and a great desire for order and coherence. But he had
very little patience with whatever he perceived to be false, useless or
pretentious, and he made short work of many neoclassical prejudices. He has
become an emblematic character among literary critics, as a personification of
English common sense and distrust of vague abstractions or fantastic
theoretical systems. One anecdote told by Boswell exemplifies this hard-core
common sense, with both its advantages and its limitations. The following
anecdote from Boswell exemplifies this hard-headed no-nonsense theory, which
has its limitations as well as its virtues:
1. After we came out of the church, we stood talking for
some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the
non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal.
I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is
impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson
answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he
rebounded from it, "I refute it thus." (Boswell 162)
A
large part of Johnson's criticism consists in rejecting what he sees as logical
absurdities either in criticism or in literature. His common sense leads him
some times into narrowness, because he tends to interpret poetical or critical
conventions too literally; no doubt he also does away with a lot of nonsense
and rubbish.
One
main critical statement is the preface to his edition of Shakespeare's works.
His judgement on Shakespeare is similar to Dryden's. He recognizes his
greatness in spite of being unable to reduce him to his principles, and in
spite of his admiration is often narrow in judging him: he complains that
Shakespeare is not moral enough, that he cares so much to please and to portray
life that he seems at times to be writing without moral purpose. He also
complains that Shakespeare has no sense of geography or history, and too often
puts high-sounding speeches in situations where they are out of tune. And he has
a pernicious love for puns which makes him spoil his best effects. Shakespeare
is ready to abandon all artistic purpose for the sake of wordplay. Besides, he
adds, Shakespeare's plays are incorrectly designed and he does not submit to
decorum. But Shakespeare remains the greatest: with all his defects, he is a
force of nature which no careful writer can hope to surpass.
However,
Johnson was the one who rejected once and for all the doctrine of the unities;
Shakespeare, he says, was right in paying no attention to them. Johnson rejects
classical dramatic doctrine in the name of common sense, the same common sense
that was said by Dryden and Pope to have established it. He maintains the unity
of action, but sacrifices the unities of time and place to the higher pleasures
of variety and instruction, which are best attained without them. He also
accepts tragicomedy, as being more pleasurable than both tragedy and comedy,
and having the same didactic potential. "I am almost frightened at my own
temerity," Johnson says.
His
main work in practical criticism is found in The Lives of the Poets
(1777), dealing with Savage, Cowley, Milton, Gray, Dryden and Pope, among many
others. There is a balance of biography and criticism in this work, as Johnson
is interested not merely in the poet, but in the man as a whole. This is
already revealing of a new attitude towards poetic creation. We may note that
he is sound enough while writing on neoclassical poets, seeing their defects as
well as their merits, but that his prejudices as a Royalist make him undervalue
Gray, who was a democrat and a pre-Romantic, and Milton
Didacticism
is still important for Johnson. Fiction he defines as "truth invested with
falsehood." Witness also his definition of poetry:
2. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by
calling imagination to the help of reason.
In
an essay on fiction Johnson grounds critical judgement on morality. Realism can
be dangerous if it is not moral. Not everything in nature is fit for representation:
art must imitate only those parts of nature which are fit for imitation. The
artist must polish real life and offer us an ideal image. Vice, if it is shown,
must inspire disgust.
In
his novel Rasselas , Johnson further develops his ideas on imitation:
3. The business of a poet . . . is to examine, not the
individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large
appearances: he does not number the streaks of the tulip, or describe the
different shades in the verdure of the forest. He is to exhibit in his
portraits of nature such prominent and striking features, as recall the
original to every mind.
The
poet must not only have a wide knowledge, but also magnify his attention to
have an increased perception of similarities in nature; they must be free of
prejudice and must be able to rise to eternal and transcendent truths.
4. He must write as the interpreter of nature, and the
legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and
manners of future generations; as a being superior to time and place.
In
his Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson asserts that
5. Nothing can please many, or please long, but just
representations of general nature.
Shakespeare
is a "faithful mirror of manners and of life," but what he shows are
not particular manners: he depicts not the individual, but the species. This
idea has of course a long Aristotelian and neo-Platonic ancestry; it is being
strongly emphasized at the time by Reynolds in his discourses on the theory of
painting (Discourses on Art, 1770-86). Poets or painters should concern
themselves with the representation of "general nature", rather than
particular experience; oddities or personal whims (Tristram Shandy is
one of Johnson's examples) will not do. Particulars are that which is limited
to a given age or place (Johnson : the Puritans in Butler
6. Wit, abstracted from its effects upon the hearer, may
be more rigorously and philosophically considered as a kind of discordia
concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult
resemblances in things apparently unlike. Of wit, thus defined, [the
metaphysical poets] have more than enough. The most heterogeneous ideas are
yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations,
comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs, and their subtlety
surprises; but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and,
though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased. (Life of Cowley).
Sublimity
or greatness in poetry is for Johnson dependent on essentials, and not to
details (cf. Longinus against picturesque detail as detracting from sublimity).
This is opposed to the ideals of the Romantic critics that will follow
immediately after him. The Romantics would rather insist on dwelling on
particular experience and on minute detail as its proof. But in fact the
opposition is less acute than it looks at first sight: the neoclassical
standard of universality, of "general nature," is never well defined;
it subsumes many different concepts (ideality, actual frequency,
intelligibility, essence, etc.). Johnson's "species" or generality
which must be examined by the poet is not a Platonic universal, but rather a
generalization from the average sense experiences. This we must associate to
his demand that the poet have an encyclopedical knowledge, and write free from
the prejudice of his age and nation. While for the neo-Platonics the knowledge
of general ideas is achieved through some kind of direct inspiration, through
their inborn presence in the mind of the poet, Johnson insists on the need of
long experience in the world before being able to deal with general truths.
This is in the spirit of empiricism. His reaction against the rules, too, is in
the spirit of empiricism: here he appreciates "nature" over
"convention", and opposes those critics who can't distinguish between
the two.
Johnson
is remarkably sensitive to the feelings of the public. His discussions of drama
are usually grounded on the feelings or effects of the audience: he says that
the difference between a tragedy or a comedy depends on their effect, not their
structure. Johnson thinks that the common public is usually right on issues
which have been long debated. Even his own definition of wit, the one he
prefers over metaphysical wit, is dependent on general consensus and common
experience:
7. If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be
considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not
obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that
which he that never found it wonders how he missed, to wit of this kind the
metaphysical poets have seldom risen.
Johnson
may have endorsed the principles of Neoclassicism, but in reality he is a
transitional critic, and he is not alien to the influence that empiricist
philosophy has on critical thought in this age. And his personal taste often
reveals a sensitivity towards detail, the picturesque and the individual (for
example, biography and personal morality, as opposed to philosophy) which
appears obscured in his theories. There is often a gap between Johnson's
theoretical concepts and his actual critical judgements: his judgements seem to
be independent of the theories he is supposed to be applying. For instance, he
repeats the traditional Neoclassic view of style as ornament. He defends the
ideas of different levels of style, of specifically poetic diction. But in
practice he also holds a different, more modern conception of style. In Johnson's
practical criticism, style is seen as a way of perceiving the world. This can
be seen above all in his rejections of poetic clichés and worn-out, trite
expressions which derive from previous literature and not from personal
experience.
This
is in the line of the general shift form a conceptual, taxonomic view of style
(that best exemplified by Ramism) to the perceptual, experiential view of
literature which is foreshadowed in the concern of the late 17th century for a
more intelligible and persuasive oratorical style, a view which is developed by
the aestheticians of the 18th century and surfaces in the Romantic movement.
Poetry makes familiar things new and new things familiar (Cf. Horace, but
Wordsworth and Shklovski too) by creating an image of a mind in action. Johnson
says that art is imitation, and that we can imitate either the object perceived
or the process of perception. His criticism of the metaphysical poets is that
their works imitate neither the object nor its impression. This "mimetic
principle" is often used by Johnson as a criterion of unity, when he is
opposing the intrusion of mannered styles.
So,
Johnson is superficially a neoclassical critic, above all in his explicit
theoretical statements. But in his personal taste and his practical criticism,
we can see that he is in fact a transitional critic, just like many others
which will be dealt with now. "His stylistic criticism, and probably in
some degree his personal taste, reveal the strain of a contradiction which he
did not perceive." This is to a certain extent the contradiction of his
age; we will see now the emergence of this new literary standard in the
esthetic though of many other writers apart from Johnson.
Shelley:
Shelley
is the most accomplished instance of the second generation of Romantic poets,
leading a scandalous life and adhering to any suspicious doctrine he found,
from atheism to political revolution or vegetarianism. He wrote A Defense of
Poetry
On
the model of Sidney Adams
490). In this work, "strains of 18th-century primitivism mingle throughout
with a Germanically-colored romantic excitement about the immediately spiritual
and morally plastic power of the poet" (Wimsatt and Brooks 419).
"Beginning
with the familiar Romantic distinction between imagination (synthesis) and
reason (analysis), Shelley proceeds to attribute to the products of imagination
immense spiritual and cultural powers" (Adams
490). To start with, reason is merely contemplative, while imagination is
creative: "Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitude
of things. Reason is to the imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the
body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance". Poetry he
defines as "the expression of the imagination" ; it was born
when man was born. Man has in him this creative principle, or rather, this
ability to tune up with the universe, but it is present in the poet in a
greater degree (cf. Coleridge, Sidney
Poetry
immortalizes the best of man. "Poetry redeems from decay the visitation of
the divinity in man" .
It
is to be noted that the poet experiences his vision in some degree, but he is
also instrumental to it: poetry goes far beyond the poet, as we can gather from
the enthusiastic eulogy of the poet which concludes the Defense , and which is
in the best "divine madman" tradition :
Poets
are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the
gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express
what they understand not; the trumpets which ring to battle, and feel not what
they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.
So,
the poet is something like the unconscious voice of nature; a poetical
formulation of this doctrine can be found in Shelley's Ode to the West Wind,
which is a kind of "romantic Ars poetica " (Wimsatt and Brooks).
The
poet also sows the seeds of social revolution. In ancient times he was a
legislator and a prophet; and even now, the poet sees the future in the present
and understands the the spirit of events, sees more profoundly than his
contemporaries. At times, Shelley seems to believe seriously that all original
thought has to be expressed in metre; and for him, Shakespeare or Milton Sidney
The
functions of the poetical faculty are twofold; by one it creates new materials
of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a
desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order
which may be called the beautiful and the good.
The
creative activity of the poet is manifested in his work on language. The poet
is the maker of language: "he helps remake the world by reconstructing the
form through which we see it." The life of language springs from the
perception of relationships between things, from metaphor. Shelley combines
remarkably Vico's and Sidney's views when he says that "in the infancy of
society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is
poetry" . But metaphors die after a certain time, the relationship
ceases to be perceived and language becomes disorganized, "and then , if
no poets should arise to create afresh the associations which have been thus
disorganized, language will be dead to all the nobler purposes of human
intercourse" . Poetry makes us perceive the world anew by making us
feel what we perceive; it removes "the film of familiarity from
experience; "It recreates the universe, after it has been annihilated in
out minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration."
Shelley
offers a number of other definitions of poetry and poetic creation that are
vague and romantically all-inclusive . . . . Almost anyone who expresses a
profound thought is classifiable as a poet under one or another of his
definitions. It would seem that poetry is an activity of which a poem is but
one of many possible products. (Adams 490)
He
is not sure whether he wants to give to all artists the name of poets, or to
claim that poets invented all the other arts; this is plausible, he says,
because language, the material of poetry, is nearer to us than the materials of
other arts; language is a kind of arbitrary outpouring of human imagination. Indeed,
he sees poetry as the source of all invention, a kind of all-inclusive
knowledge, the closest human analogue to real creation. Here we find the
essential difference between Shelley's defense and that of
Sidney
Sidney
in all his talking about the teaching and persuading power of poetry would
never dream that poetry was teaching or persuading any doctrine which it did
not discover in some legislative competent authority outside itself, either
Scriptural revelation or ethical philosophy. With Shelley just the opposite is
true. (Wimsatt and Brooks 422-423)
Admittedly,
he pushes this argument too far. Shelley is at his best on his remarks on
poetry as a language-creating activity which makes us see the world anew.
Shelley's Defense is remarkable by its enthusiastic synthesis of many Romantic
positions; on the whole it is both extreme and not radically original, but its
faith and its imagery make it a forceful statement of the Romantic view of
poetry.
Matthew Arnold
Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the Victorian poet and critic, was 'the first modern critic' ,
and could be called 'the critic's critic', being a champion not only of great
poetry, but of literary criticism itself. The purpose of literary criticism,
in his view, was 'to know the best that is known and thought in the world,
and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh
ideas', and he has influenced a whole school of critics including new critics
such as T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and Allen Tate. He was the founder of the
sociological school of criticism, and through his touchstone method
introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing
comparison and analysis as the two primary tools of criticism.
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T. S. Eliot praised The social role of poetry and criticism To Arnold a critic is a social benefactor. In his view the creative artist, no matter how much of a genius, would cut a sorry figure without the critic to come to his aid. Before Cultural and critical values seem to be synonymous for To Arnold poetry itself was the criticism of life: 'The criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty', and in his seminal essay The Study of Poetry' 1888) he says that poetry alone can be our sustenance and stay in an era where religious beliefs are fast losing their hold. He claims that poetry is superior to philosophy, science, and religion. Religion attaches its emotion to supposed facts, and the supposed facts are failing it, but poetry attaches its emotion to ideas and ideas are infallible. And science, in his view is incomplete without poetry. He endorses Wordsworth's view that 'poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science', adding 'What is a countenance without its expression?' and calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of knowledge'. A moralist As a critic Arnold is essentially a moralist, and has very definite ideas about what poetry should and should not be. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas, he says, is a poetry of revolt against life, and a poetry of indifference to moral ideas is a poetry of indifference to life. Aristotle says that poetry is superior to History since it bears the stamp of high seriousness and truth. If truth and seriousness are wanting in the subject matter of a poem, so will the true poetic stamp of diction and movement be found wanting in its style and manner. Hence the two, the nobility of subject matter, and the superiority of style and manner, are proportional and cannot occur independently. Arnold took up Aristotle's view, asserting that true greatness in poetry is given by the truth and seriousness of its subject matter, and by the high diction and movement in its style and manner, and although indebted to Joshua Reynolds for the expression 'grand style', Arnold gave it a new meaning when he used it in his lecture On Translating Homer (1861):
I think it will be found that that the grand
style arises in poetry when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with
simplicity or with a severity a serious subject.
According to
Even Chaucer, in
Return to Classical values
He urged modern poets to look to the ancients and their great characters and
themes for guidance and inspiration. Classical literature, in his view,
possess pathos, moral profundity and noble simplicity, while modern themes,
arising from an age of spiritual weakness, are suitable for only comic and
lighter kinds of poetry, and don't possess the loftiness to support epic or
heroic poetry.
Preface to Poems of 1853
In the preface to his Poems (1853) Arnold asserts the
importance of architectonics; ('that power of execution, which creates,
forms, and constitutes') in poetry - the necessity of achieving unity by subordinating
the parts to the whole, and the expression of ideas to the depiction of human
action, and condemns poems which exist for the sake of single lines or
passages, stray metaphors, images, and fancy expressions. Scattered images
and happy turns of phrase, in his view, can only provide partial effects, and
not contribute to unity. He also, continuing his anti-Romantic theme, urges,
modern poets to shun allusiveness and not fall into the temptation of
subjectivity.
He says that even the imitation of Shakespeare is risky for a young writer,
who should imitate only his excellences, and avoid his attractive
accessories, tricks of style, such as quibble, conceit, circumlocution and
allusiveness, which will lead him astray.
Shakespeare's excellences are 1)The architectonic quality of his style; the
harmony between action and expression. 2) His reliance on the ancients for
his themes. 3) Accurate construction of action. 4) His strong conception of
action and accurate portrayal of his subject matter. 5) His intense feeling
for the subjects he dramatises.
His attractive accessories (or tricks of style) which a young writer should
handle carefully are 1) His fondness for quibble, fancy, conceit. 2) His
excessive use of imagery. 3) Circumlocution, even where the press of action
demands directness. 4) His lack of simplicity (according to Hallam and
Guizot). 5) His allusiveness.
As an example of the danger of imitating Shakespeare he gives Keats's
imitation of Shakespeare in his Isabella or the Pot of Basil. Keats
uses felicitous phrases and single happy turns of phrase, yet the action is
handled vaguely and so the poem does not have unity. By way of contrast, he
says the Italian writer Boccaccio handled the same theme successfully in his Decameron,
because he rightly subordinated expression to action. Hence Boccaccio's poem
is a poetic success where Keats's is a failure.
A modern writer might complain that ancient subjects pose problems with
regard to ancient culture, customs, manners, dress and so on which are not
familiar to contemporary readers. But
The Function of Criticism
It is in his The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864) that
The Study of Poetry
In The Study of Poetry, (1888) which opens his Essays
in Criticism: Second series, in support of his plea for nobility
in poetry,
For
In The Study of Poetry he also cautions the critic that in
forming a genuine and disinterested estimate of the poet under consideration
he should not be influenced by historical or personal judgements, historical
judgements being fallacious because we regard ancient poets with excessive
veneration, and personal judgements being fallacious when we are biased
towards a contemporary poet. If a poet is a 'dubious classic, let us sift
him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him. But if he is a real
classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best . . . enjoy his
work'.
As examples of erroneous judgements he says that the 17th century court
tragedies of the French were spoken of with exaggerated praise, until
Pellisson reproached them for want of the true poetic stamp, and another
critic, Charles d' Héricault, said that 17th century French poetry had
received undue and undeserving veneration.
He also condemns the French critic Vitet, who had eloquent words of praise
for the epic poem Chanson de Roland by Turoldus, (which
was sung by a jester, Taillefer, in William the Conqueror's army), saying
that it was superior to Homer's Iliad. Arnold's view is that this
poem can never be compared to Homer's work, and that we only have to compare
the description of dying Roland to Helen's words about her wounded brothers
Pollux and Castor and its inferiority will be clearly revealed.
The Study of Poetry: a shift in position - the touchstone method
Arnold's criticism of Vitet above illustrates his 'touchstone method'; his
theory that in order to judge a poet's work properly, a critic should compare
it to passages taken from works of great masters of poetry, and that these
passages should be applied as touchstones to other poetry. Even a single line
or selected quotation will serve the purpose.
From this we see that he has shifted his position from that expressed in the
preface to his Poems of 1853. In The
Study of Poetry he no longer uses the acid test of action and
architectonics. He became an advocate of 'touchstones'. 'Short passages even
single lines,' he said, 'will serve our turn quite sufficiently'.
Some of
From non-Classical writers he selects from Henry IV Part II (III, i), Henry's
expostulation with sleep - 'Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast . . . '.
From Hamlet (V, ii) 'Absent thee from felicity awhile . . . '.
From Milton's Paradise Lost Book 1, 'Care sat on his faded cheek . . .',
and 'What is else not to be overcome . . . '
The Study of Poetry: on Chaucer
The French Romance poetry of the 13th century langue d'oc and langue d'oil
was extremely popular in Europe and Italy, but soon lost its popularity and
now it is important only in terms of historical study. But Chaucer, who was
nourished by the romance poetry of the French, and influenced by the Italian
Royal rhyme stanza, still holds enduring fascination. There is an excellence
of style and subject in his poetry, which is the quality the French poetry
lacks. Dryden says of Chaucer's Prologue 'Here is God's plenty!' and
that 'he is a perpetual fountain of good sense'. There is largeness,
benignity, freedom and spontaneity in Chaucer's writings. 'He is the well of
English undefiled'. He has divine fluidity of movement, divine liquidness of
diction. He has created an epoch and founded a tradition.
Some say that the fluidity of Chaucer's verse is due to licence in the use of
the language, a liberty which Burns enjoyed much later. But
The Study of Poetry: on the age of Dryden and Pope
The age of Dryden is regarded as superior to that of the others for
'sweetness of poetry'.
Just as the laxity in religious matters during the Restoration period was a
direct outcome of the strict discipline of the Puritans, in the same way in
order to control the dangerous sway of imagination found in the poetry of the
Metaphysicals, to counteract 'the dangerous prevalence of imagination', the
poets of the 18th century introduced certain regulations. The restrictions
that were imposed on the poets were uniformity, regularity, precision, and
balance. These restrictions curbed the growth of poetry, and encouraged the
growth of prose.
Hence we can regard Dryden as the glorious founder, and Pope as the splendid
high priest, of the age of prose and reason, our indispensable 18th century.
Their poetry was that of the builders of an age of prose and reason.
As for poetry, he considers Gray to be the only classic of the 18th century.
Gray constantly studied and enjoyed Greek poetry and thus inherited their
poetic point of view and their application of poetry to life. But he is the
'scantiest, frailest classic' since his output was small.
The Study of Poetry: on Burns
Although Burns lived close to the 19th century his poetry breathes the spirit
of 18th Century life. Burns is most at home in his native language. His poems
deal with Scottish dress, Scottish manner, and Scottish religion. This Scottish
world is not a beautiful one, and it is an advantage if a poet deals with a
beautiful world. But Burns shines whenever he triumphs over his sordid,
repulsive and dull world with his poetry.
Perhaps we find the true Burns only in his bacchanalian poetry, though
occasionally his bacchanalian attitude was affected. For example in his Holy
Fair, the lines 'Leeze me on drink! it gies us mair/ Than either
school or college', may represent the bacchanalian attitude, but they are not
truly bacchanalian in spirit. There is something insincere about it, smacking
of bravado.
When Burns moralises in some of his poems it also sounds insincere, coming
from a man who disregarded morality in actual life. And sometimes his pathos
is intolerable, as in Auld Lang Syne.
We see the real Burns (wherein he is unsurpassable) in lines such as, 'To
make a happy fire-side clime/ to weans and wife/ That's the true pathos and
sublime/ Of human life' (Ae Fond Kiss). Here we see the genius
of Burns.
But, like Chaucer, Burns lacks high poetic seriousness, though his poems have
poetic truth in diction and movement. Sometimes his poems are profound and
heart-rending, such as in the lines, 'Had we never loved sae kindly/ had we
never loved sae blindly/ never met or never parted/ we had ne'er been
broken-hearted'.
Also like Chaucer, Burns possesses largeness, benignity, freedom and
spontaneity. But instead of Chaucer's fluidity, we find in Burns a springing
bounding energy. Chaucer's benignity deepens in Burns into a sense of
sympathy for both human as well as non-human things, but Chaucer's world is
richer and fairer than that of Burns.
Sometimes Burns's poetic genius is unmatched by anyone. He is even better
than Goethe at times and he is unrivalled by anyone except Shakespeare. He has
written excellent poems such as Tam O'Shanter, Whistle and I'll come to you my
Lad, and Auld Lang Syne.
When we compare Shelley's 'Pinnacled dim in the of intense inane' (Prometheus
Unbound III, iv) with Burns's, 'They flatter, she says, to
deceive me' (Tam Glen), the latter is salutary.
Praising Shakespeare,
In his sonnet On Shakespeare he says; 'Others abide our question. Thou
are free./ We ask and ask - Thou smilest and art still,/ Out-topping
knowledge'.
For all his championing of disinterestedness,
It was also unfair of
As we have seen, as a classicist
As we have seen, later critics praise
In spite of his faults,
Eliot is also indebted to
Although
In an age when cheap literature caters to the taste of the common man, one
might fear that the classics will fade into insignificance. But
In the present day with the literary tradition over-burdened with imagery,
myth, symbol and abstract jargon, it is refreshing to come back to
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