Addison and the Birth of Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics

Abstract

In an essay of several years ago' I tried to show that there is more continuity than has usually been thought between criticism of poetry written in England during late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and that written in latter half of seventeenth century. This continuity, I argued, was established by central assumption, shared by earlier and later critics, that poetry's main job was to function as a moral teacher and that best way it could do this was by furnishing sharp, sensuously vivid examples (or images or pictures). Such examples, it was thought, could influence our conduct more directly and efficiently than either bare precepts of moral philosopher or examples provided by historian, which, unlike poet's imagined or feigned examples, are tied to messy (because fallen) world of fact and can thus not manifest their full moral implications as clearly as can poet's examples. Nineteenth-century histories of English literature, as perpetuated in course offerings of university English departments, have taught us to think of earlier of these two periods (the Renaissance) as radically separate in virtually all ways from later (the Restoration); moreover, they have taught us to lump later one together with eighteenth century. There is, of course, much to be said in favor of this traditional grouping. But anyone who comes to eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetics aware of tedious frequency with which terms precept and (or image) occur in Restoration as well as in Renaissance criticism, and of enormous importance, to Restoration as well as to Renaissance critics, of point that they were used to make, is astonished that in eighteenth century terms, and explanation of poetry's superiority as a moral teacher that they were used to provide, have quite suddenly vanished. is true that throughout eighteenth century (and even after) terms still tended to crop up in informal talk about literature and morals. Pope, in a famous letter that he published in 1737 and claimed (perhaps fraudulently) to have written to Arbuthnot three years earlier, remarks that the best Precepts, as well as best Laws, would prove of small use, if there were no Examples to inforce them. Pope then continues: General propositions are obscure, misty, and uncertain, compar'd with plain, full, and home examples: Precepts only apply to our Reason, which in most men is but weak: Examples are pictures, and strike Senses, nay raise Passions, and call in those (the strongest and most general of all motives) to aid of reformation.'2 But all other uses of terms that I can recall encountering after about 1700 are more casual not only than their Restoration uses but also than use Pope is making of them here. In Miscellaneous Reflections, Shaftesbury says of poets even of wanton sort: Their example is best of precepts, since they conceal nothing, are sincere, and speak their passion out aloud.'3 Fielding opens first chapter of Joseph Andrews by remarking: It is a