"An Ambition to Excell": The Aesthetics of Emulation in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

Literature is, by definition, a made and therefore learned thing. The varied arts of teaching from the renaissance through the eighteenth century thus bore the burdens of inculcation and, implicitly, cultural change. The teaching of imitation was an essential device of pedagogy and literary transmission; it marks a divide between the earlier and later seventeenth century, and predicts consequent developments in eighteenth-century aesthetics. In general, such imitation of texts could take any of three forms. One form was imitation as education, and was especially relevant for translation from Latin into English, the better to plant classical fruit in English soil. Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster (1570) well explains the preferred mode of double translation. A young student turns a passage from Cicero into English; after a while he turns the English back into Latin and allows his master to compare this effort with the original. Where the child does well, commend his good choice, & right placing of wordes which show that he is learning how to be Ciceronian and, by implication, looking toward Latin for the highest standards of excellence.' In a second form, a more advanced adult poet imitates to enhance his own learning and talent, and to use the material imitated in his own way. By so doing, the modern may either something new out of the various older materials, or virtually become his one great model. Ben Jonson advises each path. The poet, he says in Timber (1641), should make choise of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him, till he grow very Hee: or, so like him, as the Copie may be mistaken for the Principall. He should not, however, swallow the ancient nourishment whole-that is, not imitate servilely-but concoct, divide, and turne all into nourishment. Observe how the best writers like Virgil or Horace have imitated, and follow them, whom the modern should ever account his masters, and reverence.2