The Goths in England : A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought

312 Pages·1972·6.958 MB·English

by  Samuel Kliger

THE GOTHS IN ENGLAND
THE GOTHS IN ENGLAND
A STUDY IN SEVENTEENTH AND
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT
SAMUEL KLIGER
1972
O C T A G O N B O O K S
New York
Originally published in 1952
Reprinted 1972
by special arrangement with Harvard University Press
OCTAGON BOOKS
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Printed in the. United States of America
To the memory of
my mother
םולשה הילע
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have already expressed my thanks to those who aided me
in this study, but I owe the greatest debts to Professor
Zechariah Chafee of the Harvard Law School and Professor
Arthur 0. Lovejoy, from whose advice I hope that I have
profited; to the American Philosophical Society for a grant
to study in England; to Deans T. Moody Campbell and Paul
Gross for research grants. 1 am grateful to the editors of
Modern Philology and the New England Quarterly for per-
mission to use material which first appeared in their journals.
Professors Moody E. Prior, Z. S. Fink, Howard Mumford
Jones, and Warner G. Rice also gave me useful advice.
S. K.
New York, December 15, 1951
CONTENTS
Introduction
A MOORING POST IN THE PAST.............................. 1
Mother of Parliaments—“Ex septentrione lux”—Whig
aesthetics
Chapter One
THE PROBLEM OF THE “GOTHS” ......................... 7
Gothic liberty—Gothic enlightenment—the “urbs aeter-
na”—the “urbs sacra”—the Danielic “translatio”—Char-
lemagne, the literal “translatio”—the Reformation in
Germany—Italy and the Renaissance—the “Goths” in
England—Note on the “Goths” in America
Chapter Two
GOTHIC PARLIAMENTS . . . . . 112
Chapter Three
GOTHIC ROMANCE...................................................... 210
The Oriental theory, “Ex oriente lux”—Gothic trial by
arms—Gothic feminism—Gothic romances
Appendix A. Climate and Liberty . . . 241
Appendix B. The Levellers: Climax and Crisis in
the Gothic Tradition.............................253
Appendix C. The Rabbinical Tradition: Japhet,
Gomer, Tuisco . . . . . . . 288
Index . . . 299
INTRODUCTION
A MOORING POST IN THE PAST
MOTHER OF PARLIAMENTS
It is common knowledge that throughout the eighteenth-
century discussion of aesthetic taste the term “Gothic” was
in prevailing usage a Modewort of very wide currency and
that as applied to literature and the fine arts the same term
was used with both eulogistic and disparaging connotations.
What is not common knowledge, however, is that the history
of the “Gothic” begins not in the eighteenth but in the seven-
teenth century, not 'in aesthetic but in political discussion;
stale platitudes drawn from the classic-romantic dichotomy
made familiar by the simpler sort of literary textbooks simply
do not suffice to explain the full phenomenon of the Gothic
vogue in England.
The term “Gothic” came into extensive use in the seven-
teenth century as an epithet employed by the Parliamentary
leaders to defend the prerogatives of Parliament against the
pretensions of the King to absolute right to govern England.
To this end the Parliamentarians searched the ancient records
of English civilization for precedent and authority against
the principle of monarchical absolutism. An antiquarian move-
ment flowered, and in the ancient records the Parliamen-
tarians discovered that the original forebears of the English
were the Germanic invaders of Rome whom they called not
Germans but Goths, substituting the name of only one of the
Germanic tribes to denote all the barbarians collectively; the
Goths, they thought, founded the institutions of public assem-
blies which, in its English parliamentary form, the Stuarts
were seeking to destroy. The antiquarian researches, conse­
2 GOTHS IN ENGLAND
quently, were directed to records more ancient than and
anterior to specific accounts of early English institutions, to
the histories composed by Tacitus, Saint Augustine, his dis-
ciple Salvian, Jordanes, and Paul the Deacon. The analysis
of Gothic character found in these early texts described the
Goths as a Teutonic folk to whom political liberty was dear.
Furthermore, the early texts offered a quasi-scientific ex-
planation of the Gothic propensity for liberty in a theory of
climatic influence on character. According to this theory of
environmental conditioning, the frigid temperature of the
Gothic habitat in the northern regions was the physiological
factor explaining Gothic vigor, hardiness, and zeal for liberty.
(Conversely, the southern and Latin people were thought to
be invertebrate and supine under the heels of despots as a
result of the hot, enervating, southern climate.) The English,
a branch of the Gothic-Teutonic folk, shared in these psych-
ological characteristics. In the barbarian adventus, tradition-
ally dated in Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 449, the
barbarians implanted on English soil their tribal assembly,
the seed of English parliaments. As the defenders of Par-
liament saw it, the Parliament had a continuous existence in
England dating from the Saxon witenagemot despite the sub-
sequent Danish and Norman conquests and the occasional
efforts of power-hungry kings to uproot it, even William the
Conqueror failing in this dastardly ambition. It was in this
way that the Gothic Volkerwanderungen of antiquity sup-
plied the basis of discussion out of which emerged the ideas
which were destined to play a governing role in the seven-
teenth century in the bitter contest between the Stuart kings
and Parliament.
“EX SEPTENTRIONE LUX״
The arguments spread in abundance by the Parliamentary
circle of writers, based on implications drawn from traditional
INTRODUCTION 3
political inheritances, were not the only factor aiding in the
creation of the Gothic vogue in England. A powerful thought-
current set in motion by the Reformation, known as the “trans-
latio imperii ad Teutonicos,” emphasizing this time traditional
racial characteristics, brought about an association of the
Goths with a tradition of enlightenment. The result was that
the epithet “Gothic” became not only a polar term in political
discussion, a trope for the “free,” but also in religious dis-
cussion a trope for all those spiritual, moral, and cultural values
contained for the eighteenth century in the single word “en-
lightenment”. The picture drawn from Tacitus showed the
triumph of Gothic humanity, honor, and simplicity over inver-
tebrate Roman urbanism, effeminacy, and luxury. The Gothi-
cists pictured, that is, a world rejuvenation or rebirth due to
the triumph of Gothic energy and moral purity over Roman
torpor and depravity.
The seventeenth and eighteenth-century understanding of
the Goths has very little to do with the actual facts of Gothic
history; but all that is necessary in the history of ideas is to
determine the process of intellectual cross-fertilization which
created the Gothic edifice into a living symbol of England’s
democratic past. Consequently, if the Gothic idea is to be
understood it must be gathered up into its total: political,
semantic, and aesthetic. Only less important than the “Gothic”
inheritance itself was the fact that the Englishman’s view of
his Gothic past was affected by what he saw in his present.
WHIG AESTHETICS
An anonymous essayist of 1739 not only admires the Gothic
style of architecture but claims that a special taste, “A Consti-
tutional sort of Reverence,” is required to appreciate it. The
Whigs of the period represented the party that made much
of constitutions ptotecting popular liberties. Although it ap-
pears impossible now to identify the anonymous writer as
4 GOTHS IN ENGLAND
either Tory or Whig, we do know, on the other hand, that
William Whitehead, the Tory, unmistakably detects a parallel
between the Whig clamor for increased popular representa-
tion and the debased Gothic taste.
It cannot be shown, as a matter of fact, that a fixed or
general connection existed between Whiggism in politics and
admiration of the Gothic style. Addison, a Whig, disapproved
of Gothic architecture and spoke his disapproval of the
strained metaphors of metaphysical poetry as an example of
"Gothic” poetry. Walpole shifted from admiration to depre-
ciation of the Gothic style yet he remained a Whig throughout.
Instances can be multiplied. In fact, as Professor Lovejoy
has pointed out, the use of the term “Gothic” as a word of
abuse can be illustrated by the Whig practice of hurling the
word at the Tories to designate the latter’s hostility to Whig
reforms. In addition, we must scrupulously avoid drawing the
inference that the favorable connotation which the term
“Gothic” had in Parliamentary circles either statistically out-
weighed the predominating use of the term unfavorably or
that the favorable connotation was the main or even important
cause of the actual building of Gothic structures. Nevertheless,
even if actual party affiliation did not mean very much, the
conception of Gothic freedom and energy depicted, so the
century thought, in the inexhaustible imagination displayed in
such “Gothic” poetry as Spenser’s Faerie Queene, illustrates
the way in which the Gothic tradition of the previous century
brought about a cross-fertilization of aesthetic and politico-
religious ideas. In other words, an association had been formed
in some eighteenth-century minds between Whig prin-
ciples of popular government and the freedom from neo-
classical restraints displayed in the Gothic building; per con-
tra, from the opposing Tory point of view, the symmetry and
balance of the Grecian building apotheosized the Tory aim
of maintaining national stability through a vested aristocratic
interest and a strong monarchy.