Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment by Sarah Eron

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment by Sarah Eron Elizabeth Kraft Sarah Eron. Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment. Newark: Delaware, 2014. Pp. xiii + 250. $85. Ms. Eron challenges conventional wisdom regarding eighteenth-century enthusiasm, linking it to a new kind of inspiration created by Augustan writers in response to modernity: a "practice" characterized by secularization and self-authorization rather than "a historical event," she defines enthusiasm broadly as an "ethos." Concentrating on the literary trope of invoking the muses, Ms. Eron finds in the works of Shaftesbury, Pope, Fielding, and Barbauld evidence of "worlding" the texts by rhetorically locating them within the public sphere. These writers employed invocation in order to "appeal to the social other" in the creation of communities of judgment and social exchange. Enthusiasm, as Ms. Eron acknowledges, was the source of much anxiety for eighteenth-century cultural commentators, but she finds that such anxiety produced reformation rather than rejection: "What had hitherto been seen as a religious and metaphysical phenomenon was in the early eighteenth century appropriated by poets and novelists as a means of figuring poetic inspiration." Augustan writers treated enthusiasm as an aesthetic rather than a theological concern and thereby tempered, governed, and transformed disruptive energies in the creation of a vital public sphere. Ms. Eron pursues her argument in five chapters devoted to three Augustan writers (Shaftesbury, Pope, and Fielding) and one late-eighteenth-century / Romantic writer (Barbauld). The heart of Ms. Eron's study, and the strength of her work, resides in her fine readings of Shaftesbury and Pope. The three chapters devoted to these writers (one to Shaftesbury and two, appropriately, to Pope) firmly establish the process and point of the "worlding" of literary discourse. Shaftesbury's treatment of enthusiasm and sympathetic identification in The Moralists and A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm speaks to the general template of Augustan inspiration in that it highlights the "conversational aspects of the public sphere" in its reformulation of the classical invocation to the muse. While the works take opposing stances toward the addressing of the other (The Moralists featuring an interlocutor who tempers enthusiasm with judgment and A Letter relegating that role to the audience of the author's imagination), the emphasis in both is on the "social nature of inspiration" and the "redefinition of enthusiasm" as an aesthetic experience followed (and tempered) by judicious critical mediation. For Shaftesbury, this two-part process is the antidote to blind enthusiasm (which he associates with idolatry); the public sphere of dialogic examination thus becomes the site of "unveiling" in Shaftesbury's terms, or "worlding," to employ Ms. Eron's term. In Ms. Eron's discussion of Shaftesbury (which is also germane to Pope and Fielding) she emphasizes his notion that "[s]atire, or humor, . . . [is] a cure for enthusiastic [End Page 80] disorders." Shaftesbury's address to Lord Somers (his human muse) in A Letter asserts the force and power of imagination and creation while at the same time exhibiting awareness of audience and exchange. In the Letter itself, Shaftesbury imitates "the very thing . . . [he] satirically critiques." In this manner, the way of later Augustan writers, as well, Shaftesbury encourages skepticism, self-awareness, and judgment in his reader as well as himself, forming community by creating his own muse in "the best kind of critical audience." Ms. Eron's treatment of Pope's use of invocation spans two chapters, the first devoted to the muse of The Rape of the Lock and the second primarily to Essay on Criticism, Essay on Man, and The Dunciad. For her, the Rape is a satire on enthusiasm, which, especially in its mock-epic substitution of sylphs for gods, reveals that in the modern world "[d]ivine inspiration no longer serves." It is the poet himself who has the power to move through his "rhetoric and agency." He depends on the reader's ability to judge and critique—unlike Belinda whose enthusiastic excesses and solipsistic desires stand in satiric support of the need for a sociability based on "meaningful language and critical responsiveness." The muses of Essay on Criticism (Walsh), Essay on Man (Bolingbroke), and The Dunciad (Swift) are invoked by Ms. Eron to further her...