The Artist as Hero in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

'Damn him! How various he is!', said Gainsborough of Reynolds, and we might well show the same grudging admiration for the eighteenth-century hero although, on the face of it, eighteenth-century heroes do not appear to be a very promising lot. We immediately think of the mock-heroic of Pope and Swift, the anti-heroic in Johnson's portrait of Charles XII, the stiff Neo-classicism of Addison's Cato. Eighteenth-century heroes are more apt to be Yorick than Hamlet, Tristram Shandy than Sir Tristram. And once we have brought Sterne, or perhaps Cleland with his red-headed champions and battering rams, into the discussion, heroism may be thought more honoured in the breach than the observance. Yet 'variety' was a keyword of the time, and in nothing is the age so true to form as in the variety of its heroes. In the artist, to take a striking example, it saw the development of a heroic figure of great originality and continuing importance.1 I can best mark the shift which came about by observing that in the Renaissance Tasso wrote Gerusalemme Liberata and Milton wrote Paradise Lost; but in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, Goethe wrote Torquato Tasso and Blake wrote Milton. An artist-hero was not in itself new. The mythic figures of Orpheus, Apollo, Daedalus and Icarus, Prometheus, Pygmalion, and others have always provided subjects for poets and painters, and certain genres have been particularly hospitable to the artist: obvious examples are the elegy, which from the time of Bion and Moschus has had a special place for the poet's lament for his fellow poet, the ode, about while I will speak later, and the sonnet, in which the narrator usually promises to immortalize his lady's white face with his black ink. Yet to find such a hero in the acknowledged major genres, tragedy and epic, is