The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought PDF
Preview The Formation of English Neo-Classical Thought
THE FORMATION OF ENGLISH NEO-CLASSICAL THOUGHT THE FORMATION OF ENGLISH NEO CLASSICAL THOUGHT BY JAMES WILLIAM JOHNSON P R INC E TON, NEW J E R S E Y PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 11967 by Princeton University Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED L.C. Card: 66-21833 • Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press FOR NAN Preface Since its establishment in the eighteenth century as a signifi cant variety of literary activity, criticism in English has tended to employ certain basic approaches in a more or less sequential pattern. In the period between the Restoration of Charles and the Regency of Prince George, the space of about 160 years, critics developed most of the stances that have since become basic: the impressionist, the historical, the editorial, the con textual, the syncretistic, and so on. Moreover, the sequential development of criticism between 1660 and 1820 is an im perfect but workable paradigm of the manner in which a body of literature, accepted or rejected in its own day on the basis of its emotional validity or "truth" for its contemporaries, undergoes a series of reappraisals as time and change alter the circumstances which originally helped to produce it. Another period of 160 years has passed since the literature of English classicism became overbalanced by literature com posed in accordance with nonclassical assumptions and a crit ical rationale was developed to justify that literature even though critical modes remained the established ones. In that time, critics have been refining their equipment as they have been examining the works of Dry den, Swift, Pope, and John son—the great tetrad of classical literature—and making suc cessive syntheses to explain their comprehension of the nature of the literature and mentality they have come to call "clas sical," "Neo-Classical," or "Augustan." Today, it might super ficially appear that modern scholarship, somewhat like Brown ing's grammarian, has succeeded in settling Neo-Classicism's business. Certainly our own understanding of Restoration and eight eenth century literature is more comprehensive and accurate than that of our predecessors in the critical procession. We have largely succeeded in slipping off the narrow, pejorative impressions of the "romantic" critic. We have managed to Preface place the moral as well as the aesthetic reactions of the early Victorian critics into perspective. We have benefited from the efforts at historical and contextual criticism by such later Vic torians as Elton, Gosse, and Stephen. And we profit enor mously from contemporary financial and technological con ditions that enable several scholars to complete in a few years editorial chores that formerly would have occupied the life time of a solitary Bentley or Johnson. Today, the student of late seventeenth and eighteenth cen tury English literature may view with satisfaction the authori tative editions produced in the twentieth century: of Roches ter, Dennis, Prior, Swift, Pope, Gray, Johnson, and Gibbon. He confidently anticipates the completion of editions of Dry- den, Addison, Goldsmith, Walpole, Burke, and Boswell. The increasing number of reprint societies make easily available to him works also accessible in a number of excellent, special library collections. As far as primary materials are concerned, the modern scholar has far more numerous and accurate sources than his critical forebears did. Not surprisingly, the number of secondary critical works has increased in direct ratio to the availability of these primary materials, as a glance at annual bibliographies for igao and i960 shows. Critical projects have dealt with problems as specific as Swift's correspondence with his Irish printer or as general as the evolution of the "classical" outlook into the "romantic" one during the eighteenth century. Critical works of varying persuasions—the critical biography, the history of ideas, the investigation of sources and analogues, the meth odological, the interpretive—make accessible to the reader the dimensions of English classical thought in terms usually cogent and illuminating. As a result, the student can get a great deal of information about the literature of the English classicists by reading twen tieth century criticism. He can readily acquire a clear idea of the working hypotheses of their writing: a concern with "cor rectness," "rules," and "decorum"; the desire to imitate the Preface styles of Horace and Virgil; an admiration for the critical dicta of Longinus; enthusiasm for personification; distaste for elaborate conceits; a reliance on the concept of "nature," and so on. Moreover, twentieth century critics have carefully de lineated many of the preoccupations of the English classicists: their admiration for the literature of the Greco-Roman world; their implicitly Christian theological bias; their inclination to favor the aristocratic, the urban, and the institutional; their presuppositions about "taste" and moral responsibility; their insistence on applicability and practicality. These and other ideological boundaries of the classicists' frame of mind have been lucidly marked. Nevertheless, there are aspects of English classical literature that have been slighted, taken for granted, and totally ignored, just as there are writers and thinkers whose productions have not been edited and who are but sparingly treated in modern critical works. Swift and Pope have been edited, but what of Steele, Gay, and Bolingbroke? Can any examination of the "Augustan" mind afford to dismiss lightly the works of Arbuthnot or Shaftesbury, to mention the obvious? Defoe's London Review essays are now becoming available, but many of the works listed in Harry T. Moore's bibliography of Defoe continue to be unobtainable in an easy way. And what of the social and political pamphlets of Dennis and Mandeville, which certainly were an important part of the intellectual cur rency of the age of Swift and Pope? One is forced to question whether any modern, critical synthesis that discusses the "Augustan" state of mind or canon of literature can be very complete if it fails to take into account writers of the second and third magnitudes. There are, to be sure, formerly dark critical spaces that are slowly being illuminated—the work on Defoe by J. R. Sutherland and Maximillian Novak is a worthy instance—but far too much primary material remains unexamined in library stacks to permit us to feel we have mastered the study of English classicism. The modern scholar must perforce admit his finite comprehension of the purview
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