Before the Empire of English: Literature, Provinciality, and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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BEFORE THE EMPIRE OF ENGLISH

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BEFORE THE EMPIRE OF ENGLISH: LITERATURE, PROVINCIALITY, AND NATIONALISM IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Alok Yadav

BEFORE THE EMPIRE OF ENGLISH Copyright © Alok Yadav, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6496–3 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yadav, Alok Before the empire of English : literature, provinciality, and nationalism in eighteenth-century Britain / Alok Yadav. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 1–4039–6496–3 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 2. National characteristics, British, in literature. 3. Nationalism and literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. 4. Great Britain— Civilization—European influences. 5. Great Britain—Civilization— 18th century. 6. English literature—European influences. 7. Great Britain—Relations—Europe. 8. Europe—Relations— Great Britain. 9. Nationalism in literature. 10. Imperialism in literature. I. Title. PR448.N38Y33 2004 820.9'358'09033—dc22

2003067756

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2004 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Zofia


CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

(Dis)establishing the Empire of English

viii 1

1.

The Progress of English

21

2.

The Republic of Letters

55

3.

National Differences and National Autonomy

111

Notes

177

Index

215

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his book has been a long time in the making and owes much to the steady support of friends, family, and colleagues. I owe a lot to my fellow graduate students at Cornell University and to the faculty there, especially Laura Brown and Satya Mohanty. That experience of critical exchange and intellectual purposefulness has provided a crucial grounding ever since, and not only for my work on this book. I’m grateful for the financial support provided by a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities during my time in graduate school, and had the good fortune to spend two years on a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, where Kevin Gilmartin and Susan Ueki helped make the experience both intellectually productive and personally memorable.At the University of Chicago, I enjoyed the stimulation of the thinking and research going on around me, in the English department and with the Committee on South Asian Studies. Lisa Freeman, Joshua Scodel, Elaine Hadley, Laura Rigal, Loren Kruger, Chris Looby, Katie Trumpener, Jim Chandler, and J. Paul Hunter all helped to make my time in Chicago both productive and engaging. My latest debt, to my colleagues in the English department at George Mason University, and my longest-standing one, to my parents and siblings, are the most palpable. At George Mason, I owe most to Denise Albanese, Devon Hodges, Deborah Kaplan, and Kristin Samuelian in sustaining this work and bringing it to completion, and wish to acknowledge also the University’s support in time off from teaching through a Mathy Fellowship and through junior faculty leave.To my sister, brother, and my parents—and to their patience—I owe much of my critical bent. My final thanks, and what I am least able to express adequately, go to Zofia Burr, for her partnership through this work and her love around and beyond it, and to Leela, who little knows how much her little might is.

T

INTRODUCTION (DIS)ESTABLISHING THE EMPIRE OF ENGLISH

s it possible to approach the history of English literature without taking for granted its status as a great tradition? What issues and dynamics would become evident if we recognized the claim to metropolitan cultural standing as an ambition on the part of English-language writers throughout the early modern period, rather than as an achieved fact? How would our perspective on eighteenth-century English-language literary culture change if we took seriously Shaftesbury’s contention that the “British Muses” were “yet in their mere Infant-State”?1 J. P. Kenyon chastizes G. M. Trevelyan’s very popular English Social History (1942) for “its chauvinistic assumption that England had always been great,”2 and a similar though even more deeply rooted assumption has formed the bedrock of most work on English literature: namely, the assumption that it has formed a great tradition since the days of Shakespeare. But if we are interested in gaining a truly postimperial perspective on modern English-language literary culture, we will need to rethink this tendency to begin with the metropolitan status of English-language literary culture as a given, and will need to analyze instead the process through which this status was achieved. In contrast to modern assumptions, throughout the early modern period English-language writers evidence a self-conscious awareness that they are part of a traditionally marginal literary culture in the European world, far behind the Italians, the Spanish, and the French in international recognition and renown. What I explore in this book are the nationalistic cultural negotiations prompted by this recognition on the part of Englishlanguage writers during the Restoration and eighteenth century. My contention is that a modified understanding of eighteenth-century Englishlanguage literary culture emerges if we take seriously the provincial anxieties that beset this culture—and, as a result, we gain a new perspective on the development of English into the global language and literary culture that it now is, a perspective that allows us to see the real resonances between the literary politics of cultural nationalist self-assertion in the early

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modern period and those of our own era, especially in the postcolonial world. By beginning with an exploration of the provincial anxieties of this culture rather than with an assumption of its imperial centrality, this book carries out a twofold revisionist agenda: first, it challenges long-dominant accounts of English-language literary culture that have discounted the importance of nationalistic investments in the literary culture of the period. Such accounts have been modified by more recent attention to issues of nationalism but the underlying literary historical framework constructed by these accounts remains largely intact. In my discussion of a range of topics (the republic of letters, the “progress of English” topos, the purchase of nationalistic investments in “Augustan” literary criticism), I seek to rewrite basic features of this literary historical framework that have been largely unaffected by the recent work on nationalism, but that carry important consequences for our evaluation of the dynamics of nationalism and provinciality in English-language literary culture. Second, this book also challenges some of the assumptions and approaches adopted in recent scholarly attention to issues of nationalism and imperialism.This new scholarship has sometimes reinforced problematic assumptions about the metropolitan hegemony of English culture even as it has sought to subject older accounts to critical scrutiny. In particular, such scholarship has tended to misconstrue imperial ambitions in eighteenthcentury British literary culture as an assurance of metropolitan centrality, rather than recognizing these ambitions as marks of an effort to overcome provincial secondariness in the world of European culture. As a whole, this book seeks to provide a broad revision of our understanding of the interplay of culture, nationalism, provinciality, and empire in the eighteenth-century British context, and, in doing so, to offer ways to rethink the burden of the imperial past in the postcolonial present.

Reframing Early Modern British Cultural History Let me illustrate some of the re-visioning enjoined in this book by commenting briefly on the kind of difficulties that beset our understanding of cultural nationalism during the eighteenth century, in particular with respect to the issue of English insularity and xenophobia. In their important work on English and British nationalism, Gerald Newman and Linda Colley have placed great stress on the anti-French, anti-Catholic, and xenophobic attitudes prevalent in English culture during the eighteenth century.3 In doing so, they reinforce a long-standing view, to be found, for example, in Basil Williams’s remark that in the eighteenth century, “the

I N T RO D U C T I O N

3

Englishman of every class is famous for his insular self-satisfaction and his contempt for the foreigner,” and echoed in Daniel Baugh’s reference to “the chauvinism and isolationism of the British populace.”4 There is, no doubt, a good measure of truth in such observations shared by so many historians. But if they are taken as the whole story, they also obscure from view the very real anxieties registered by Englishmen (and Britons more generally) during the eighteenth century on how they were perceived by outsiders, especially by those at the established centers of European literary culture. An exclusive emphasis on English xenophobia elides, in other words, the very real concern with provinciality in eighteenth-century English-language culture. Not only had England only just emerged as a contender for great power status (around the turn of the eighteenth century, a status not consolidated until the Seven Years’ War), but its claims to being a metropolitan literary culture were felt to be rather more precarious. The chapters that follow provide evidence for this claim, and trace the consequences of and responses to this situation; for the moment, I want simply to note how radically recognition of this anxiety about provinciality alters our sense of the dynamics of cultural nationalism in Britain during this period. Something like the “colonial cringe” and the assertive defensiveness that are familiar characteristics of “provincial” cultures within the later British Empire are also evident features of “metropolitan” English-language literary culture during the eighteenth century.5 This uncertainty about being provincial underlies the raucous nationalistic boasting that historians and literary scholars have been more ready to identify as a basic feature of the culture of the period. In eighteenthcentury British writings, the figure of a bluff, manly, coarse John Bull may indeed be contrasted with the foppish refinements of the French, the morose gravity of the Spanish, the corrupt and devious insinuations of the Italians, but John Bull is also a figure that condenses cultural anxieties, underwriting assertions of English superiority but also acknowledging a certain cultural lack, a deficit of urbanity. Dryden, for example, in his Epilogue to Aureng-Zebe (1675), mocks what he perceives as the vulgar and chauvinistic English contempt for all things French, and in the process he attests to his own belief in the superiority of “French civility” over English barbarism as he contemplates the likely reception of his play: No song! no dance! no show! he [the author] fears you’ll say; You love all naked beauties but a play. He much mistakes your methods to delight, And like the French, abhors our target-fight; But those damned dogs can never be i’th’right. True English hate your Monsieur’s paltry arts,

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For you are all silk weavers in your hearts. Bold Britons at a brave bear-garden fray Are roused, and clatt’ring sticks, cry, “Play, play, play!” Meantime, your filthy foreigner will stare And mutter to himself, “Ha! Gens barbare!” And gad, ’tis well he mutters—well for him; Our butchers else would tear him limb from limb. ’Tis true, the time may come your sons may be Infected with this French civility, But this in after ages will be done; Our poet writes a hundred years too soon.6

Dryden rightly identifies the century following his own time as the period in which the “barbaric” English will acquire “civility”: a hundred years later, by the 1770s, the British will come to embody (in their own eyes, and sometimes in the eyes of others as well) the epitome of cultured civility. But in Dryden’s own time, and for decades to come, Britons often appear brutish in the eyes of their own polite culture, to say nothing of how they appear to foreigners. For example, nearly forty years after Dryden’s remarks, Jonathan Swift, in his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue (1712), writes,“I am afraid, My LORD, that with all the real good Qualities of our Country, we are naturally not very Polite,” and he acknowledges that the British display “a tendency to lapse into the Barbarity of those Northern Nations from whom we are descended.” In his Essay on Criticism (1711), Pope refers to “Those half-learn’d Witlings, num’rous in our Isle, / As half-form’d Insects on the Banks of Nile,” and Thomas Tickell, in his poem On the Prospect of Peace (1712), imagines a future reformation of the British stage, as the country realizes the benefits of the arts of peace:“In happy chains our daring language bound, / Shall sport no more in arbitrary sound, / But buskin’d bards henceforth shall wisely rage, / And Grecian plains reform Britannia’s stage.” Even in 1740 Colley Cibber is complaining about the popular audiences at English theaters as “savages” in contrast to “the better-bred Audience, in Paris.”7 Regardless of whether the standard of metropolitan urbanity is located among the ancients or in modern France, English-language literary culture appears as a rude wilderness still in need of proper cultivation. John Bull’s claim to cultured politeness would remain a vulnerable point through most of the eighteenth century, and the comments of Dryden, Shaftesbury, Swift, Pope,Tickell, and Cibber suggest the limitations of the view that English insularity and xenophobia served to render the issue inconsequential. By focusing exclusively on those contexts (within the British Isles and in the extra-European world) in which anglophone culture could view itself as decidedly superior, recent scholars have mistakenly reinforced the


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impression that English-language culture was unproblematically positioned as a metropolitan culture in the early modern era. Such scholarship certainly widens the perspective beyond the insular, anglocentric concerns of traditional literary scholarship,8 but it does little to alter the complacent self-assessment that forms the basis of older scholarship. In this book, I seek to redress this problem by devoting significant attention to the European context alongside those of the British Isles and the wider imperial arena. This triple framework is essential for arriving at an adequate assessment of the situation of English-language literary culture in this period and for understanding its characteristic dynamics. Provinciality and cultural belatedness are not terms that we generally emphasize in analyzing the situation of English-language literary culture during the long eighteenth century, but they indicate something of the shift in perspective demanded by the analysis offered in this book. I trace, indeed, the process in which this provinciality and belatedness were transcended by the close of the eighteenth century, but I try to show how we misunderstand, or even miss altogether, the process of cultural transformation if we read the endpoint back into the earlier phases of the process. Before the Empire of English analyzes this transformation through a series of overlapping chapters, each of which focuses on one facet of the process. Chapter 1, “The Progress of English,” illustrates the provincial selfconsciousness of English-language literary culture at the start of our period by recovering and analyzing what I identify as a “progress of English” topos, prevalent in English poetry from the death of Cowley to the death of Pope, and its concern with claiming cultivated status for the Englishlanguage literary tradition.The chapter then proceeds to examine the transformation of this topos in the period since the mid-eighteenth century when it enters what I term a “triumphalist” phase, in which the topos emphasizes the global diffusion of the English tradition rather than its increasing refinement and emerging worthiness as in the earlier phase. In the final section, the chapter shows how directly the promotion of the Englishlanguage cultural sphere to metropolitan status came at the cost of demoting the other regional cultures of the British Isles to a merely provincial status—and how aware contemporaries were of this dynamic. Chapter 2, “The Republic of Letters,” examines how the terrain of literary culture was predominantly conceptualized during the long eighteenth century and the relatively marginal place the English-language tradition occupied on this terrain. I show the importance of a belletristic concept of the republic of letters for English-language writers in this period, and how different this eighteenth-century concept was from the scholarly, erudite republic of letters of the seventeenth century (which has provided the focus for most modern scholarship on the notion of the republic of

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letters). By emphasizing the transformation of the older, erudite republic of letters (based on the idea of a universal Latin-based culture) into the new belletristic republic of letters (based on the notion of cultural diversity) of the eighteenth century, I underline the neglected importance of issues of language, nation, and provinciality to this “cosmopolitan” literary formation in the eighteenth century, and show how clearly English-language writers understood themselves to occupy a secondary place in the contemporary world of letters. Focusing on the situation of English-language writers, I offer a novel exploration of the republic of letters from a provincial vantage point rather than from that of the francophone center (as most previous scholarship has done). I show the inadequacy of an insular perspective on English-language literary culture in this period, as well as the inadequacy of cosmopolitan and universalist idioms for getting at the issues of national cultural diversity and marginality posed by the eighteenth-century concept of the republic of letters. Chapter 3, “National Differences and National Autonomy,” reexamines literary critical discourses of the eighteenth century. In an extended examination of both French and English “neoclassical” criticism, I show how signally we have ignored the recognition of historical and cultural differences in the discourse of neoclassical critics, mistakenly construing it instead as a universalizing, ahistorical poetics. I focus attention on the idiom of the “laws” of poetry, showing how it functions to articulate a discourse of national cultural autonomy and how it underlines the anxious assertion of cultural independence by English-language writers in the period. In the final section of this chapter, I go on to show how we have misunderstood the shifts in outlook that take place in later eighteenth-century British literary culture as a result of our false understanding of the earlier period, and I propose an alternative narrative of changes in poetics across the eighteenth century to replace the “from classic to romantic” schema that has served, with various elaborations, as our basic account of eighteenthcentury British literary history for several generations now. Taken together, the chapters offer a new understanding of cultural nationalism within the context of the transformation of the status of English-language literary culture across the long eighteenth century. The critical approach adopted in this book shifts the focus away from an exclusive concern with nationalistic representations in literary texts to a focus on nationalistic investments in, and uses of, literary culture. My primary object of analysis consists not of the ideologemes in a given literary work or authorial oeuvre, but rather the situation of English-language literary culture and the way this conditions the outlook of writers in the period. At the same time, my analysis respects the specificity and relative autonomy of the literary terrain, and so does not subsume these literary developments


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into an undifferentiated account of geopolitical and socioeconomic developments, though, to be sure, it underlines the conditioning importance of such developments. In proceeding in this manner, I take heed of some of Theodor Adorno’s remarks addressed to Walter Benjamin in 1938, in response to the latter’s work on Baudelaire.With a slightly perverse phrasing, Adorno begins, “Let me express myself in as simple and Hegelian a manner as possible”: Unless I am very much mistaken, your dialectic lacks one thing: mediation. Throughout your text there is a tendency to relate the pragmatic contents of Baudelaire’s work directly to adjacent features in the social history of his time, preferably economic features. . . . I regard it as methodologically unfortunate to give conspicuous individual features from the realm of the superstructure a “materialistic” turn by relating them immediately and perhaps even casually to corresponding features of the infrastructure. Materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process.9

Adorno’s insistence that in the absence of a consideration of mediating structures and processes, Benjamin is reduced to an undue reliance on mere metonymy (linking together “adjacent features”), producing a rather “casual” and impressionistic kind of criticism, is an important stricture.The explanatory value of such “weak montage” (as Dominick LaCapra has described it, with reference to tendencies in New Historicist criticism) is limited, whatever its rhetorical appeal. In examining the intersections of literature and nationalism, it remains necessary, as he insists, to identify mediate institutions and discourses (between the individual text/artifact and the “total social process,” however ill-defined and problematic each of these terms might be) and to examine the constitutive antagonisms and conflicts that structure these mediate terrains, if we hope to avoid sophisticated but arbitrary interpretations that fail to come to terms with the historical efficacy of discourses and representations.This book offers a literary historical examination of specific determinations structuring the terrain of Englishlanguage literary practice across the long eighteenth century: its central focus is on examining how, in relation to a problematic of language, nation, and provinciality, the literary terrain was perceived and structured during the long eighteenth century, and the implications of this for our understanding of eighteenth-century English-language literary culture. By no means do I imagine that this book resolves the important questions that it engages, but I do hope that it presents a new framework for thinking about the interplay of language, nation, empire, and culture in the shaping of our modern world by disrupting what I think are misapprehensions regarding the character and consequences of nationalism in

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eighteenth-century British literary culture—beginning first of all and most centrally with the misapprehension that such issues only emerge as central concerns in the closing decades of the century. Nationalism in British History: The Place of the Eighteenth Century My emphasis on the pervasiveness of cultural nationalism throughout eighteenth-century British literary culture (especially during the so-called Augustan period) challenges a weighty historiographic consensus (from the work of Isaiah Berlin to that of Eric Hobsbawm and Anthony Pagden) that views the era of Herder and Ossian as the era in which cultural nationalism becomes an important phenomenon in European societies.10 But there is also an older historiographic tradition that sees the Renaissance and Reformation as initiating and defining the epoch of European cultural nationalisms.11 This latter perspective also finds expression in a range of recent work on English nationalism in the Elizabethan period and the seventeenth century.12 Despite the internal divergence between these two historiographic traditions (the one associating nationalism with the Renaissance and Reformation, the other with the French Revolution and romanticism), they both have the effect of marginalizing attention to the long eighteenth century as a locus for the development of modern nationalism. The substance of this book offers a sustained rejoinder to the view that nationalism does not figure centrally in English literary culture until the later eighteenth century, but let me comment briefly on the view that the emergence and consolidation of English nationalism should be located before the eighteenth century. I make no attempt in this book to claim that the eighteenth century witnesses the “origins” of English cultural nationalism. Indeed, the triple co-articulation and development of the Tudor state apparatus, the “empire” of England, and the Reformation politics of religion from the 1530s do seem to me to have an epochal significance in English history. But I do insist on the difference between the eighteenth-century situation of British nationalism and the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century setting of English nationalism. The differences between the earlier English Protestant nationalism and eighteenth-century British nationalism are most evident in the shift from a religious to an imperial grounding. Summarizing analyses of the earlier, religiously inflected variety of nationalism in Britain, Margot Finn writes: For Sir Lewis Namier, religion “is a sixteenth-century word for nationalism,” and to Christopher Hill,“the patriotic aspects of the Reformation must have


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struck contemporaries far more forcibly than any doctrinal change.” Early nationalist typology indeed, as Conor Cruise O’Brien has recently argued, was “a Protestant property, and a constant theme of Protestant discourse.”13

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English Protestant reform and English nationalism are inextricably intertwined. But by the middle of the eighteenth century the structure of religious discourse had been significantly modified, and with it the matrix through which nationalist discourse was articulated in the period.Thus, while England’s path of national grandeur was earlier viewed in terms of religious destiny and duty, in the eighteenth century, this manifest destiny was increasingly linked to the imperial standing of British dominion and the imperial ambitions of British culture.14 Gibbon comments that “we” may “compare the boats of osier and hides that floated along our coasts [in the days of the naked Briton] with the formidable navies which visit and command the remotest shores of the ocean,” and concludes: “Without indulging the fond prejudices of patriotic vanity, we may assume a conspicuous place among the inhabitants of the earth.”15 Britain’s destiny is being read here directly in terms of its imperial aggrandizement, and indeed imperial power and sociopolitical achievements increasingly serve as the foundational matrix from which nationalist discourses are articulated and interpreted. This shift in English/British national discourses from a religious to an imperial matrix is certainly evident by the time of Macaulay’s boast about the British: In the course of seven centuries [since the Norman Conquest] the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents . . . , have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage,Venice, and Genoa together, have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical, have produced a literature which may boast of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, have speculated with exquisite subtilty on the operations of the human mind, have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of political improvement.16

Like Gibbon and other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, Macaulay has not lost sight of the dramatic rise of the British nation from the

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condition of a “wretched and degraded race” (a race of naked savages, in Gibbon’s discourse) to its recent emergence as a powerful and eminent polity on the global stage. And, unlike the religious mission of God’s Englishmen, this essentially eighteenth-century imperial accomplishment had a worldhistorical impact that makes it difficult even for contemporary historians to gainsay, as is indicated by the parallel between Macaulay’s earlier-quoted catalogue of British achievements and Linda Colley’s similar summary: Britain’s “long” eighteenth century, which began with one aristocratic revolution in 1688 and ended with another in 1832, was a pageant of success. The nation’s art and architecture reached their elegant and original best. Its capital became the center of print culture, finance, fashion, and commercial creativity, the largest and most vibrant city in the Western world.The British constitution became a topic for eulogy, as much by the unenlightened and illiterate at home as by the Enlightenment litterati abroad.The armed forces, fiscal system, and bureaucracy of the British state grew in efficiency and range, bringing victory in all but one of a succession of major wars. Legitimized by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power, Britain’s landed elite kept at bay every domestic revolution except the industrial one, which only enriched it more. The American Revolution, of course, was not averted; but while this crisis embarrassed the British Empire, it did not destroy it. Even before 1776, the conquest of Canada had reduced the thirteen colonies’ strategic significance, just as their profitability to the mother country had been outstripped by its Indian possessions; their final loss was made up, and more than made up, with relentless and almost contemptuous speed. Between 1780 and 1820 some 150 million men and women in India,Africa, the West Indies, Java, and the China coast succumbed to British naval power and trading imperatives. Thus did eighteenth-century Britain, at the command of greed rather than of heaven, succeed in ruling the waves and much of the world.17

As my discussion in subsequent chapters shows, Colley reads too much of Macaulay’s confidence back into the less-than-certain process by which Britain achieved its imperial dominance, and she uncritically repeats cultural self-valorizations authorized (like Macaulay’s) by a consciousness of speaking as a member of a “great,” or a “global,” power. We, like Macaulay, know how things turned out (and having seen the disappearance of Britain’s imperial power, we know how things have turned out in a sense different from Macaulay’s), but early eighteenth-century Britons living in the shadow of Louis XIV’s France could have had no such assurance, even as they did indeed develop an enthusiasm for imperial aggrandizement as a remedy for their perceived past lowliness.


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Nor was such lack of national eminence a remote condition, confined to the distant past. Through much of the eighteenth century, and even in its last quarter—despite Britain’s great success in the Seven Years’War—the country’s situation seemed precarious to many observers: the MP William Burrell, in his speech of November 26, 1772 to the House of Commons, referring to the emerging crisis of the East India Company’s finances (not to mention the worsening relations with the mainland American colonies), declared: “Sir, let no gentlemen think this is a trivial question of ministry or opposition. No sir, it is [the] state of Empire; perhaps upon it depends whether Great Britain shall be the first country in the world, or ruined or undone.”18 As Bruce Lenman notes, Britain did not “rule the waves” during this period in anything like the manner suggested by Colley’s summary: Robert Clive had died in 1774, convinced that he lived in a disintegrating Empire. There was much to be said for this opinion by 1783. . . . With America largely lost; British India wasted by war, famine, and corruption; Ireland restive; and the British West Indies in economic difficulties, it looked in 1783 as if the British Empire faced an uncertain future.19

As Lenman suggests, the course of the War of American Independence seemed to confirm the worst fears of contemporaries: in 1781 and 1782, Horace Walpole was writing that he was “mortified at the fall of England”: “we shall be reduced to a miserable little island. . . . I see little or no prospect of its ever being a great nation again”;20 likewise, in July 1782, Lord Shelburne declared to the House of Lords that “the Sun of England’s glory was set for ever” and, around the same time, Lord George Germaine maintained in the House of Commons that “from the instant when American independence should be acknowledged the British Empire was ruined.”21 Contemporaries in Europe also shared this perception: “In early 1783 the Emperor Joseph II concluded that England’s power and wealth were no more, while his brother Leopold (then ruling as grand duke of Tuscany) frankly declared that Britain had been relegated to the second division of European states and now ranked alongside Denmark and Sweden,” and Frederick the Great commented on Britain’s “exhaustion and feebleness.” The importance of empire in sustaining any elevated sense of Britain’s place within the European concert of states was no less evident at home. George III himself conceded that defeat at the hands of the Americans must “annihilate the rank in which this British empire stands among the European states,”22 and Lord Sandwich lamented,“We shall never again figure as a leading Power in Europe, but think ourselves happy if we can drag on for some years a contemptible existence as a commercial State.”23 Castigating the decadence of city dwellers,William Cowper likewise concludes

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book 1 of The Task (1785) by remarking, “Folly such as your’s” has made “Our arch of empire, stedfast but for you, / A mutilated structure, soon to fall.”24 In all these comments, we see how crucial Britain’s recent imperial aggrandizement was to its transformation from “a miserable little island” to “a great nation”—and we discern eighteenth-century commentators’ anxious perception of Britain’s lowly position in the world of nations prior to its recent acquisition of greatness. Even such precarious “greatness” was, however, a geopolitical not a cultural fact. And whatever the claims to recognition of British medicine, science, technology, philosophy, and “political improvements,” British literary culture and the arts constituted relatively autonomous fields whose status was open to debate. Indeed, despite Colley’s “Whiggish” tone, significantly absent in her summary of eighteenth-century Britain’s “pageant of success” is any reference to its letters and literature—beyond London’s centrality for the commercialization of print. Colley does claim that British art and architecture flourished during the long eighteenth century, but this statement ignores the fact that the British art world experienced a conscious inferiority to that of the Continent throughout this period. One might contrast the assessment of eighteenth-century British culture and society offered by Macaulay and Colley with that offered by J. H. Plumb: The first four Georges ruled for a little over one hundred years [1714–1830], yet they witnessed far profounder changes in economic, social, and cultural life than any previous monarchs. During these times England ceased to be a small influential maritime state and became the leading empire of the world, responsible for the destinies of scores of millions of mankind. . . . The attitude of inferiority of the eighteenth century was transformed into the complacent arrogance of the nineteenth. . . . The confidence to which such a sense of superiority gave rise has led also to a distortion of the magnitude of English achievement in the Georgian age. It was formidable in technology, but in science and mathematics it could scarcely compare with European achievement, and in all the arts, save perhaps for the poetry of the romantic revival, it was very definitely inferior. Here and there—Gibbon and perhaps Hume—there is a writer of European stature, but the general level of achievement in philosophy, history, and literature is mediocre. Painting and music tell the same story.The decorative arts are equally jejune and provincial. . . . Rich enough to afford to imitate the best, eighteenth-century England lacked the confidence to create its own standards of taste and culture. Behind the braggart attitude there was an inner uncertainty, a sense of being provincial which ever-growing prosperity could not disguise. In many ways England in the eighteenth century in its attitude to things European was similar to that of Rome in the first century to Greece or America in the late nineteenth to Europe—too conscious both of its own riches and its own rawness.25


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Plumb astutely states the difficulty, for us who come in the wake of Britain’s imperial epoch, of addressing the terrain of culture in British history: there are, as he suggests, multiple, and multiply resistant, layerings of ideological “distortion” that have served to magnify and enforce the claims of British culture for several centuries now. Since World War II— during the era of European decolonization and in the postcolonial period, that is—it has become more possible (as the first publication of Plumb’s remarks in 1956 evidences) to contest the inherited narratives in which the greatness and beneficence of British culture (like that of European culture in general) have been and continue to be asserted. This task of producing more adequate accounts of the characteristics of British culture is further complicated with respect to the period from 1688 to 1815 since this was a period during which the effective claims of British culture were radically revised (ambitiously embellished and elaborated) in the course of Britain’s acquisition of imperial stature. In other words, there is not only the legacy of subsequent (retrospective, revisionist) distortions to deal with, but the eighteenth century is itself a period of large-scale reevaluation and conflict over the claims of British culture. The transformation of self-understandings and of institutional embodiments that this process involved does not take the form of a steady evolution—neither, as we have seen, does the consolidation of Britain’s empire and national power in the period. Rather, throughout the eighteenth century similar cultural claims keep being reasserted and renegotiated, though on diverse terrains and in changing circumstances. As I argue throughout this book, eighteenthcentury assessments of cultural standing constantly reference (rather than reflect) the geopolitical standing of the society whose culture is in question. In the case of Britain, its geopolitical standing, while by no means completely secure, was extraordinarily enhanced across the long eighteenth century, and this served as the major stimulus for radical reassessments of its cultural standing without in itself being able to produce simple confidence about the claims to cultural eminence. Given the uncertainties of imperial competition, occasions of victory became national celebrations.And across the eighteenth century, the heroes of British patriotism are no longer the religious martyrs glorified by Foxe, but the military leaders who symbolized the redefinition of Britain’s place in the world: for example, the Duke of Marlborough, General Amherst, General Wolfe, Admiral Boscawen, Admiral Hawke, Lord Clive, Admiral Vernon, Warren Hastings, Lord Cornwallis,Viscount Lord Nelson. Opinions about the East India Company might be mixed, and official inquiries might express qualified disapproval in the late eighteenth century—as later with the Governor Eyre controversy (1865) or General Dyer and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre (1919)—but popular sentiment is more

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accurately captured in the celebrity enjoyed by these figures, a celebrity echoed at a dinner party at Lady Mary Coke’s on May 25, 1773 attended by Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, and others including James Beattie, who recorded: “Every body seems pleased, at Lord Clive’s having been so honourably acquitted by the house of Commons yesterday.”26 Philip Ayres has noted that British military heroes acquired agnomines in imitation of their Roman predecessors—“Wolfe of Quebec, Clive of India, Montgomery of Alamein, Mountbatten of Burma are the English equivalents of Scipio Africanus”27—and like their Roman models, these celebrated Britons were essentially heroes of imperialist expansion. Eighteenth-century British nationalism, thus, develops most significantly through an imperial project that increasingly displaces a religious understanding of collective identity and manifest destiny. A second defining feature of nationalism in eighteenth-century Britain is the powerful dynamic of incorporation and anglicization that governs the relationship between England and the other regions of the British Isles. To be sure, this too is not a novel dynamic in the eighteenth century. But in earlier periods the outcome or full significance of the cultural contestation among the various regions of the British Isles remained uncertain despite the evident predominance of England; in the eighteenth century, however, English hegemony is effectively consolidated and the outlines of a long-term uprooting and provincialization of regional cultures on a large scale become visible. The modalities for the anglicization of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—which eventually result in the present precarious position of Irish in Ireland, of Welsh in Wales, and of Gaelic in Scotland— become effective with the increasingly direct incorporation of regions into the market economy, the increasingly decisive displacement of oral culture by print culture, and the increasing formalization of schooling as an element of popular socialization. This is a process that reaches its high point in the nineteenth century; in the eighteenth century itself, the more manifest result is the relegation of regional cultures to a provincial and “archaic” status in contrast to the claim of urbane modernity and metropolitan standing for the English-language sphere.What is important to note for our purposes is how the provincialization of other regional cultures within the British Isles works in tandem with the developing imperial extension of the English-language sphere to facilitate the new claim to metropolitan self-understanding on the part of English-language writers in this period. The specificity of nationalism in eighteenth-century Britain consists, then, not in its absolute novelty, but in its articulation with a nexus of imperial and British Isles developments, which issued in a radical transition from provincial to metropolitan self-conceptions in the cultural


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realm—and this is what makes it so consequential an era for understanding the place of English-language culture in the modern world. Literature and Nationalism Having sketched, however briefly, the context of eighteenth-century British nationalism, we need to situate the role of literature and literary culture in this context. Putting the matter somewhat crudely, let me note that the forms of intercultural encounter, the scenes of cross-cultural “contact,” in the eighteenth century are structured through a dynamic of commercial and military conflict, and that such intercultural encounters become unavoidable given the expansionist impulses that constitute this dynamic: as Colley notes, “Between 1780 and 1820 . . . [much of ] India, Africa, the West Indies, Java, and the China coast succumbed to British naval power and trading imperatives.”Whether by willing participation, progressive encroachment, or direct confrontation, various regions of the world are consequently brought into an exchange with the metropolitan centers of this military–commercial expansionism. For there to be an exchange-relationship, however, that is not simply one of domination or plunder, the metropolitan region must possess some commodity that the other regions want, in the sense both of something lacking and something desired. Milton’s Satan asserts that he “who overcomes / By force, hath overcome but half his foe,”28 and contemporaries were quite conscious that the exercise of hegemony required something more than just preponderant force. In the earliest period of English colonial enterprise (reformed) Christianity functioned as the pearl of inestimable value that could be used to justify any and all encroachments on the lands and commodities of the New World natives, as is illustrated by the following remarks of Sir George Peckham in his A True Report of the Late Discoveries (1583): the Savages shall hereby have just cause to blesse the houre when this enterprize was undertaken. First and chiefly, in respect of the most happy and gladsome tidings of the most glorious Gospel of our Saviour Jesus Christ, whereby they may be brought from falsehood to trueth, from darknesse to light. . . . And if in respect of all the commodities they can yeelde us (were they many more) that they should but receive this onely benefit of Christianity, they were more than fully recompenced. . . . we may say with S. Paul, If wee have sowen unto you heavenly things, doe you thinke it much that we should reape your carnall things?29

The crudity of this rationalization of plunder and dispossession is astonishing, but in light of the fact that the English (unlike the Spanish Franciscans

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and the French Jesuits) actually made very little effort to convert the natives and spread the gospel of Christianity it soon became useless even for purposes of self-delusion.Thus, Dryden, speaking as a Catholic dissident in The Hind and the Panther (1687), critiques the subordination of religious faith to the demands of mercantile opportunism by the Dutch who, in order to “run full sail to their Japponian Mart,” “Sell all of Christian to the very name,”30 and, likewise, he laments of the English themselves: Here let my sorrow give my satyr place, To raise new blushes on my British race; Our sayling ships like common shoars we use, And through our distant colonies diffuse The draughts of Dungeons, and the stench of stews. Whom, when their home-bred honesty is lost, We disembogue on some far Indian coast: Theives, Pandars, Palliards, sins of ev’ry sort, Those are the manufactures we export; And these the Missionaires our zeal has made: For, with my countrey’s pardon be it said, Religion is the least of all our trade. (pt. 2, lines 556–67)

Given the thinness of a purely missionary pretext, a new “benefit” had to be devised as the inexhaustible fund of legitimation for colonial and imperial expansion. In the eighteenth century, a new conception of “culture”— whether in the form of British political institutions, British scientific advances, British religious enlightenment, or, increasingly, British polite culture and arts—comes to play a key role in this economy of exchange, functioning as the quality wanting in other regions, and serving to legitimate their incorporation, willing or unwilling, into the economy of exchange. The “riches” of British culture become the inexhaustible resource that fuels the expansion of the British structuring and regulating of exchanges in the British Isles and more broadly around the globe. Before such a circuit of exchange can be consolidated, however, an elaborate process of building up the claims of British culture, and, conversely, of asserting the deficiencies of other cultures, must occur—and this doubleedged process, with regard to the literary terrain, is a chief focus of this book. As I have suggested, the successful assertion of the richness or wealth of British literary culture was not easy and, to the extent that it was realized, it was an eighteenth-century innovation. It depended on the “rise to greatness” of the British state but this assertion of cultural richness was never fully assured and remained open to challenge or disregard in a way not equally true of Britain’s military and economic power. In the century before the successes of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), the British had


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repeatedly asserted their claim to cultural recognition but they had not yet consolidated the assumption of cultural centrality that marks the modern history of the empire of English. Thus, for example, Thomas Sprat’s Observations on Mons. de Sorbiere’s Voyage into England (1665) seeks to turn the Frenchman’s criticisms into testimonials of English virtue, but the argument remains on the defensive: The Temper of the English is Free, Modest, Kind, hard to be provok’d. If they are not so Talkative as others, yet they are more Careful of what they Speak. If they are thought by Some of their Neighbours to be a little defective in the Gentleness and Pliableness of their Humour, yet that Want is abundantly supplied by their firm and their masculine virtues: And perhaps the same Observation may be found true in Men which is in Metals, and that the Noblest Substance are hardest to be polished.31

This emphasis on the “masculine virtues” of the English is reiterated by Sprat in his 1667 History of the Royal Society, but again the defensive note is evident in his contrast between the achieved dissemination of “Neighbouring Languages” and the future possibilities of English:“As the Feminine Arts of Pleasure, and Gallantry have spread some of our Neighbouring Languages [e.g., French] to such a vast extent: so the English Tongue may also in time be more enlarg’d, by being the Instrument of conveying to the World, the Masculine Arts of Knowledge.”32 The recourse to a gendered discourse here, the attempt to shore up the “masculine” self-confidence of English culture, betrays an insecurity about the claims of English-language culture that is only too palpable. Sprat is forced to project the “enlarg’d” standing of English into an indefinite future era when,“in time,” his hopes “may” be realized. Due to both its novelty and its vulnerability, Britain’s claim to cultural leadership would remain a “sore spot” through much of the eighteenth century, in need of continual reassertion and buttressing—and for this very reason, it would also remain a critical terrain for the articulation of Britain’s imperial nationalism. In the early eighteenth century, Matthew Prior writes A Letter to Monsieur Boileau Despreaux; Occasion’d by the Victory at Blenheim, 1704 (1704), the last in a series of poems he wrote responding to Boileau as panegyrist of Louis XIV. The occasion for this last poem marks an explicit triumph for British arms, but regarding analogous claims for British literary culture, the poet merely characterizes himself as one who will be: Bless’d, if I may some younger Muse excite, Point out the Game, and animate the Flight. That from Marseilles to Calais France may know, As We have Conquerors We have Poets too,

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And either Laurel does in Britain grow. ............................... We can with universal Zeal Advance, To curb the faithless Arrogance of France. Nor ever shall Britannia’s Sons refuse To answer to thy Master, or thy Muse.33

“Britannia’s Sons” may respond to both the arts and arms of France, but Prior leaves the triumphs of British poetry to the future achievements of “some younger Muse” who may be inspired by his evocation of British military victories. Prior envisions the joint rise of British arts and arms, an important topos in the imperial culture of the long eighteenth century, but all he can attest to is the present success of British arms. The culturally defensive note we observed in Sprat’s response to Sorbière has not entirely disappeared fifty years later—although one can see in Prior’s stance clear indications of a more assertive cultural self-conception emerging with the changed geopolitical standing of Britain in the European (and extraEuropean) world over this same period. The importance of the cultural terrain as a site for national legitimation remains unchanged, however, from Sprat to Prior and beyond. The acquisition of empire may not have depended on culture, but imperial stature could not be sanctioned—lacking both legitimacy and a triumph—without cultural preeminence. It is the argument of this book that efforts to construct such claims to cultural preeminence on behalf of British literary culture were more doubtful and anxious across the eighteenth century than scholars have typically realized. And, indeed, “letters and literature” were, during the long eighteenth century, a crucial issue in making claims about cultural achievement—as Edward Ward implies in his comment that Dryden is “The chiefest Glory of his Native Land”; as John Dennis suggests in his account of the critical vocation (“For what does the good critic design? He designs the advancement of a noble art, and by it the interest and glory of his native country, which depend in no small measure upon the flourishing of the arts”); and as Samuel Johnson restates in the preface to his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), “The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.”34 A writer in the Quarterly Review contends in 1809 that works of literature constitute “those efforts of genius which all civilized nations consider as their proudest boast, and their only permanent glory,” and Thomas Carlyle writes in his unfinished history of German literature that literature “is not only the noblest achievement of the nation, but also the most characteristic; the truest emblem of the national spirit and manner of existence.”35 The Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1770s informs us that the advances of eighteenth-century British


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inventors “diffuse a glory over this country unattainable by conquest or domination,” and as late as 1842, Thomas Wyse (M.P. and Irish reformer) states in a speech, “Rich we may be, strong we may be; but without our share in the literary and artistic as well as scientific progress of the age, our civilization is incomplete.”36 The imperial and international context of cultural competition that underlies these remarks is, as this book shows, absolutely fundamental to the cultural dynamics of English-language literary culture in the long eighteenth century. And attending to the vulnerability of British claims to literary eminence in the early modern period allows us to see a historical space outside the modern global hegemony of English-language culture and to articulate a critical vision of its modern pretensions, creating a space for other histories than that of an everexpanding empire of English ever since the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain.


CHAPTER 1 THE PROGRESS OF ENGLISH

ne of my main contentions in this book is that issues of cultural provinciality played a central role in eighteenth-century British literary culture.Writers of the period understood that literature was not just a matter of artistic achievement but of cultural power. Individual achievements, in their view, took place within the space defined by the broader question of the standing of the cultural tradition of which they were a part—and cultural prestige, they knew, was in turn linked to the geopolitical power of the polity whose culture was in question.These connections have been brought under renewed scrutiny through the lense of postcolonial cultural criticism, but they involve an old recognition of the interplay of cultural and geopolitical power in the shaping of cultural status.What is harder for us to recognize is that across the Restoration and the eighteenth century, English-language writers saw themselves as in need of establishing the value of the cultural tradition in which they operated—certainly for the audience constituted by the wider world, but, consequently, to a certain extent for their own eyes as well. In this chapter, I delineate the historic transformation in the status of English-language literary culture across the early modern period, by excavating beneath the acquired metropolitan standing of English-language literary culture layer by layer. I begin with the early nineteenth-century moment, by which time the English tradition had secured a metropolitan status, in order to show the significance accorded to such questions of cultural standing in the literary culture of the period.Then I move back to the crucial hundred years or so from the death of Cowley to the death of Pope during which English-language writers made a concerted effort of self-promotion, envisioning and asserting a metropolitan bearing for their cultural tradition. I identify and examine what I call the “progress of English” topos in the poetry of this period, a topos that is absolutely central to understanding the self-conception of English-language writers at the time and that shows us how broad a swathe of the cultural dynamics of the

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period we miss when we fail to recognize the provincial anxieties that beset the literary culture. I trace the development of this topos, and the shift it undergoes from the end of the eighteenth century and on through the nineteenth century and beyond with the changing status of the Englishlanguage literary tradition. Finally, I dig one layer deeper still, to examine briefly the dynamic involved in the process through which the English language acquired its national status as a language of culture in contrast to the other regional vernaculars of the British Isles. The scope of the discussion in this chapter suggests some of the ways in which developments in each of the three contexts I emphasize in this book—that of the British Isles, of the European world, and of the wider, extra-European terrain—bear on one another, producing a complex nexus of value and status through which the standing of the English-language literary tradition is negotiated and defined.

“Who is Bilderdijk?”: Major and Minor Languages In order to make manifest the importance of issues of cultural provinciality in eighteenth-century British literary culture, let me begin slightly to one side, with an acknowledged instance of cultural marginality presented by Southey in the early nineteenth century. Willem Bilderdijk (1756– 1831), an important Dutch poet, is an unfamiliar name for most anglophone readers in the present day, as he was in his own age. For his part, however, Bilderdijk served as a conduit of English-language literary culture into the Netherlands. He was a political exile in London from 1795 to 1797, during which time “he gave lectures in French on the writing of poetry.”1 Subsequently, he translated some of the Ossianic poems as well as various of the works of Alexander Pope into Dutch; his wife, Katharina Wilhelmina Bilderdijk-Schweickhardt (1776–1830), likewise translated Southey’s Roderick. Southey came to know the Bilderdijks personally and was a great admirer of Willem. Having revisited the couple in Leiden in June 1826, Southey incorporated a tribute to Bilderdijk into his poetic “Epistle to Allan Cunningham” (1829) (I quote from the revised version of the poem published in 1838): Would I could give The life and spirit of his vigrous Dutch, As his dear consort hath transfused my strains Into her native speech; and made them known On Rhine and Yssel, and rich Amstel’s banks; And wheresoe’er the voice of Vondel still Is heard.2

T H E P RO G R E S S O F E N G L I S H

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There follows a compressed translation into “English rhyme” (line 155) of part of one of Bilderdijk’s poems (the use of rhyme sets this passage apart from the rest of Southey’s poem). This tribute to Bilderdijk leads to these lines: “And who is Bilderdijk?” methinks thou sayest, A ready question; yet which, trust me, Allan, Would not be ask’d, had not the curse that came From Babel, clipt the wings of Poetry. Napoleon ask’d him once with cold fix’d look, “Art thou then in the world of letters known?” “I have deserved to be,” the Hollander Replied, meeting that proud imperial look With calm and proper confidence. (lines 189–97)

Bilderdijk’s more or less anonymous, or even uncouth, status in Englishspeaking mouths leads Southey to invoke the curse of Babel, which has divided up “the world of letters” into mutually incomprehensible compartments. And yet, this fall into incomprehension is not uniform, nor does it affect everyone alike: Bilderdijk and the Dutch know of important English-language writers, even if most English-speakers cannot be expected to be similarly familiar with Dutch writers. This discrepancy suggests that the curse of Babel means not only that the world is divided into various distinct language-spheres, but also that it is divided into major and minor languages. In some language spheres, because of their minor status, “the wings of Poetry” have been “clipt” more fully than in others, and this is particularly the case for Bilderdijk: The language of a State Inferior in illustrious deeds to none, But circumscribed by narrow bounds, and now Sinking in irrecoverable decline, Hath pent within its sphere a name wherewith Europe should else have rung from side to side. (lines 220–25)

Bilderdijk’s anonymity stems, then, on Southey’s account, not from any lack of achievement, nor even from the mere fact that Europe is divided into numerous language spheres, but from the more consequential fact that he writes in a minor language.The Bilderdijks’s hometown of Leiden, with its renowned university, may have been a leading center of the European world of letters in the seventeenth century, but by the early nineteenth century, the literary and cultural scene of Leiden, like that of the Dutch world more generally, has been reduced to the status of a provincial enclave.3

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The significance of such cultural marginality is made clear by John Adams’s remarks of 1780: The Dutch Language is understood by nobody but themselves: the Consequence of which has been, that this Nation is not known.With as profound Learning and Ingenuity, as any People in Europe possess, they have been over looked, because they were Situated among others more numerous and powerfull than they. I hope that Congress will profit by their Example, by doing . . . every Thing in their Power to make the Language they Speak [i.e., English] respectable, throughout the World.4

Adams is still concerned about the international status of English, but by the time of Southey’s poem the English language, and with it English literary culture, have consolidated their newfound importance on the international scene—although this fact is presented only implicitly in Southey’s verses. The contrast Southey does focus on (in lines 189–97) is that between the Dutch poet Bilderdijk and the French military and political leader Napoleon. The latter, with his “proud imperial look,” embodies the consciousness of power, while the Dutch poet, with his “calm and proper confidence,” embodies the self-assured dignity and independence of the world of letters. Overtly, the English-speaking world does not figure at all in this scene.The scene does not present us, however, with a simple opposition between (military–political) power and a world of letters that stands completely apart from such worldly entanglements, for embedded in Bilderdijk’s response (“I have deserved to be” known in the literary world) is a consciousness of differentials of cultural power, a consciousness underlined by Southey’s subsequent commentary in the poem about the “narrow bounds” of the Dutch language. Napoleon’s presumptuous manner with respect to this Dutch poet, while clearly that of a world-historical figure, is also that of a Frenchman (i.e., the manner of a representative of a metropolitan tradition) when facing a representative of a nonmetropolitan tradition. In this regard, Southey himself speaks from a position closer to that of Napoleon than to that of Bilderdijk. Southey sets out to “do justice” to Bilderdijk in this poem, that is, he sets out to give him a name in the world of letters and cultural power.5 Southey can imagine doing so because he writes in English, and English-language literary culture has acquired the status of a “great tradition” by his time. By translating the sentiments of Bilderdijk and Napoleon into his own English idiom, and staging their encounter in an English-language work, Southey, the Poet Laureate of Great Britain since 1813, hopes to effect a righting of the relatively neglected and marginal standing of Bilderdijk in


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the world of letters. By virtue of his own standing in a metropolitan tradition, Southey acquires the status of an arbiter in the world of letters and the capacity to confer a kind of “honorary citizenship” on individuals who would otherwise remain on the outskirts of the realm.The scene between Bilderdijk and Napoleon that Southey stages in his “Epistle to Allan Cunningham,” a scene in which Southey himself and the English-speaking world seem at first glance to play a quite limited role, turns out to be one that could only have been presented in a metropolitan tongue such as English. The implied dynamic of translation and cultural centrality that structures this scene (construed as an occasion for rendering poetic justice to Bilderdijk) makes it a privileged display for major languages, and underlines the importance of issues of cultural power in the world of letters.6 The question that remains with us from Southey’s poem—after we have answered “who is Bilderdijk?”—is when and how did the English-language literary tradition acquire its metropolitan standing? A century before Southey stages Napoleon’s metropolitan condescension to Bilderdijk,Addison reports similar condescension (and contempt) directed at the English: the French, he complains in The Freeholder of April 2, 1716, treat the English “like a Race of Hottentots.”7 Despite our commonplace tendency to assume otherwise,“English literature” has not always been a great tradition in a major language throughout its modern history. In 1578, John Florio remarked that English is “a language that wyl do you good in England, but passe Douer, it is woorth nothing,”8 and, indeed, up through most of the seventeenth century, English (no less than Dutch in the nineteenth century) might be described as “[t]he language of a State / Inferior in illustrious deeds to none, / But circumscribed by narrow bounds.” Milton, in his Reason of Church Government (1642), had put the case emphatically in speaking of his country and his own ambition “to be an interpreter and relater of the best and sagest things among mine own citizens throughout this island in the mother dialect”: not caring to be once named abroad, though perhaps I could attain to that, but content with these British islands as my world; whose fortune hath hitherto been, that if the Athenians, as some say, made their small deeds great and renowned by their eloquent writers, England hath had her noble achievements made small by the unskilful handling of monks and mechanics.9

By choosing to write in English (“the mother dialect”), Milton relegates himself to the narrow confines of “these British islands.” And some twenty years later, in the pamphlet The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, Lately Stiled the German Princess,Truely Stated (1663), the English language is still referred

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to as “the lockt repository of so many Excellencies”10—a phrasing in which “lockt” can only refer to the very limited dissemination of the English language in Europe beyond the British Isles. In his 1674 “Preface to Rapin,” Thomas Rymer, in the wake of the third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74), celebrates the successes of English arms but acknowledges the limited standing of the English language: Wit and Valor have alwayes gone together, and Poetry been the companion of Camps.The Heroe and Poet were inspired with the same Enthusiasm, acted with the same heat, and both were crown’d with the same laurel. Had our Tongue been as generally known, and those who felt our blows, understood our Language; they would confess that our Poets had likewise done their part, and that our Pens had been as successful as our Swords.11

Just as Sprat and Prior envision some future moment in which the claims of English-language culture will be more widely recognized (especially by the French), while conceding that at present the culture lacks such recognition (see introduction), so, too, Rymer asserts the claims of “our Poets” against the Dutch, while conceding that “our Tongue” is not so “generally known” in fact. As these various remarks suggest, the acquisition of metropolitan status—both for the English language and for the literary tradition it carries— is a post-Restoration, and basically eighteenth-century, achievement.12 This belated rise to metropolitan standing becomes evident if we recollect that Voltaire’s Essay on the Epic Poetry of the European Nations (1728) and his Letters Concerning the English Nation (1733) were among the earliest significant acknowledgments of English-language literary culture on the Continent. Writing to Horace Walpole on July 15, 1768,Voltaire reminds his correspondent of his role in introducing English literature to the French public:“Je suis le premier qui ait fait connaître Shakespear aux Français. J’en ai traduit des passages il y a quarante ans, ainsi que de Milton, de Waller, de Rochester, de Driden et de Pope. Je peux vous assurer qu’avant moi presque personne en France ne connaissait la poésie anglaise; à peine avaiton même entendu parler de Loke.”13 Indeed, ca. 1700, it would be hard to name even a few vernacular British literary figures whose writings were at all well known on the Continent.Writers like Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes did indeed have a European reputation, but for their Latin writings.14 Since very few people on the Continent were literate in English, vernacular writings could only acquire a readership through translations, and these were rare for “literary works” (in the modern sense) until the vogues for Addison’s periodical essays, Pope’s poetry, and Richardson’s novels, and the publication of French translations of English drama in the mideighteenth century. Shakespeare and Milton might have been familiar to


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some by reputation, but were scarcely known through their English writings. In her Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786), Hester Lynch Piozzi notes, “Shakespeare himself has, till lately, been worshipped only at home,” and it is indicative that when Pope Benedict XIV added Pamela to the Index Expurgatorius, it was the French translation rather than the English original that was cited.15 Bernhard Fabian refers to the German “discovery” of English culture as a “terra incognita” in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and has noted the continuing reliance during this period on Latin editions of English works; other scholars have remarked on the practice in Germany, throughout the first half of the eighteenth century, of “translating from French or Dutch versions of English works rather than from the originals.”16 Difficult as it may be for us to imagine, given the persistent celebration since the eighteenth century of the unrivaled richness of the British literary tradition, English literature would not automatically have been considered one of the “great” traditions at the start of the eighteenth century and contemporary English-language writers were very aware of this fact. For English speakers in the twenty-first century, it requires a strenuous effort of the historical imagination to picture an early modern world in which the English-language literary and cultural sphere occupy only a relatively minor place, but without such an effort we will have a distorted picture of the early modern world and will fail to notice the singular achievement and radical transformation embodied by the rise to metropolitan standing of the English-language literary tradition across the long eighteenth century. The Progress of English, First Phase: Refinement of the Tongue In the Restoration and eighteenth century, English-language writers repeatedly celebrate the recent achievement of a metropolitan cultural standing that we tend to take for granted. By 1810, George Crabbe could refer to “the vast collection of English poetry,” while Trollope in 1857 refers to “the imperishable list of English poets,”17 and we, after the close of the twentieth century, can speak of a literary tradition stretching for a millennium “from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf ” and beyond; but, English-language writers in the Restoration and early eighteenth century typically view themselves as the inheritors of a century or less of literary achievement (from Spenser’s or Shakespeare’s or, more typically, Denham and Waller’s time to their own). In that perspective, and by comparison with the older vernacular traditions of continental Europe, the English-language literary tradition could look distinctly jejune. The recentness of the claim to

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metropolitan standing meant that English-language writers were highly conscious of the issue of their place in the wider world of culture, and it led them to enshrine the culture heroes who had brought them to their present glory. The frontispiece to The Universal Visiter (1756) presents us with a typical instance of this kind of gesture: it consists of an engraving of the “Templum Apollinis Anglicani” (see figure 1.1).We see five busts on pedestals (Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Waller, and Dryden), behind which are shelves lined with folio volumes, below, and with numerous smaller volumes, above.The verses that the frontispiece carries appears as a caption of figure 1.1. To CHAUCER! who the English Tongue design’d: To SPENSER! who improv’d it, and refin’d:— To Muse-fir’d SHAKESPEAR! who increas’d its Praise, Rich in bold Compounds, & strong-painted Phrase, To WALLER! Sweet’ner of its manly Sound:— To DRYDEN! who its full Perfection found.—

While these couplets invoke Chaucer and the other authors, the subject they celebrate is “the English Tongue” and its refinement to “full Perfection”— a progression that is presented as only being consummated in Dryden’s age. The verses and the image certainly celebrate the achievement of English authors, but the substance of that achievement centers on their improving the English language, and raising it to its present status in the world of letters.18 While the engraving depicts the English corner in the Temple of Apollo, it is clear that this is but one part of a larger structure. The Latin inscription naming the edifice reminds us that there is a classical portion to this Temple, and presumably there are niches where the celebrated writers of postclassical Italy, France, and Spain are also housed.The Temple of Apollo, as it is pictured here, is a commodious structure. It is cosmopolitan in scope, but organized into distinct national literary traditions (much like the eighteenth-century republic of letters). Within this national space, the authors are organized in a roughly chronological sequence, with divisions among the shelves that seem to indicate something like (very rough) historical “periods” or “ages.” Thus, behind the five busts, we find the following arrangement of large volumes: Gower, Hubert | Sydney, Drayton, Fairfax, Surry, Beaumont | Johnson, Bathurst, Bacon, Fletcher, Ralegh | Milton, Butler, Wycherly, Congreve | Temple, Addison, Pope, Gay,Tillotson.

The numerous smaller volumes (without names on their spines) filling out the rest of this alcove are presented as necessary, perhaps, to the achievement


Figure 1.1

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of the major authors, but they remain individually anonymous and indistinct. The principles of order here involve the demarcation of three things: a national space, a chronological sequence, and a hierarchical division between major and minor authors (with five transcendent or hypercanonical figures singled out for special mention). Both poets and prose-writers are included, as are writers of both imaginative and historical or didactic genres. There are, of course, peculiarities in this selection of representative figures: in particular, the choice of Waller over Milton, among the busts, testifies, in part, to the way in which Milton the republican remained a vexed figure for the upholders of tradition long after the Restoration, but this choice underlines also the emphasis in the frontispiece on refinement of the English language and English versification as the criterion for praise. Milton’s literary achievement may have been greater than Waller’s (and may have been recognized as such at the time this frontispiece was produced), but the sense that he had distorted the English idiom under the influence of his Latinity, rather than contributed to its improvement, would tend to exclude him from the select few represented in busts. Along with its exclusively male cast (which echoes the ostensibly masculine virtues of the English tongue—its boldness, its strength, its fire, its manly sound), what is most striking about this representation of the national tradition is its emphatically “English” inflection (in two senses): the neo-Latin strand of the English tradition has virtually disappeared, and likewise the national space has been defined as “English” rather than “British” in scope. Indeed, in place of a multiple or multistranded tradition, we have here a single, linear tradition. Despite the commonplace perception, throughout the eighteenth century, of English as a hybrid or mixed language, the literary tradition it carries is presented here in purified form: purged of any dynamic of interaction with other cultural traditions, whether near or far, it is presented as autonomous and self-contained—and only as such is it placed in relation to other equally autonomous and selfcontained national literary traditions in the Temple of Apollo. The Universal Visiter frontispiece is only one example of a popular genre (generally of poems) tracing the emergent perfection of the English language and the achievements of English culture, a genre that dates back to the Restoration and that flourished through the first half of the eighteenth century. For instance, when Dryden’s translation of Virgil was published in 1697, Lady Mary Chudleigh wrote a poem “To Mr. Dryden, on his excellent Translation of Virgil,” which appeared in her Poems on Several Occasions in 1703.19 In this poem, Chudleigh anticipates the Universal Visiter in presenting Dryden as one who has brought the English language to its full perfection, but she is more explicit about the former barbarism of the native tongue. She traces the progress of English poetry from darkness


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(“Dark melancholy Night” [line 20]) to “the Triumphs of refulgent Day” (line 38): from Chaucer to Spenser to Waller to Milton and Cowley to Dryden (as the culmination of the whole series). For Chudleigh, “our first Dawn of Light” (line 31) only begins with Waller (Chaucer’s is a “delusive Light” [line 23] and Spenser gives us only “Lunar Beams” [line 25]), and even with Milton and Cowley, “there [remain] some Footsteps of the Night” (line 35). Chudleigh, who lived from 1656 to 1710, thus writes of the refinement of the English tongue as a contemporary process. She praises Dryden particularly for cleansing “th’Augean Stable” of “Our Language,” for “all those Toils, whose kind Effects we share” (line 67): Our Language like th’Augean Stable lay, Rude and uncleans’d, till thou by Glory mov’d, Th’Herculean Task didst undertake, And hast with Floods of Wit th’offensive Heaps remov’d. (lines 68–71)

She further praises Dryden for ridding the literary language of “That ancient Rubbish of the Gothick Times, / When manly Sense was lost in trifling Rhimes” (lines 72–73).20 Thus, on her account, Dryden is responsible for raising “our language” to a newfound “manly” dignity, after long ages when it appeared besmeared with gothic barbarities. As with the Universal Visiter, Dryden’s major achievement is presented here as his contribution to the fashioning of the English language as an instrument and artifact of culture. Similar essays in genealogical reconstruction and celebration might be examined in Denham’s “On Mr. Abraham Cowley, his Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets” (1668), Oldham’s “Bion. A Pastoral, in Imitation of the Greek of Moschus, Bewailing the Death of the Earl of Rochester” (1684), Knightly Chetwood’s “To the Earl of Roscommon on his Excellent Poem” and Dryden’s “To the Earl of Roscommon, on his Excellent Essay on Translated Verse” (both 1684), Dryden’s “To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve” (1694), Addison’s “Account of the Greatest English Poets” (1694), Samuel Cobb’s Poetae Britannici (1700), Samuel Wesley’s An Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700), Jabez Hughes’s “Verses Occasion’d by Reading Mr. Dryden’s Fables” (wr. 1706; pub. 1720, 1737), Elijah Fenton’s “An Epistle to Mr. Southerne” (1711), George Sewell’s “To Mr. Pope, on his Poems and Translations” (1720), Leonard Welsted’s “Epistle to the Duke of Chandos” (1720), John Dart’s Westminster Abbey, a Poem (1721), Judith Madan’s “The Progress of Poetry” (wr. ca. 1721; pub. 1731), William Mason’s “Musaeus, a Monody to the Memory of Mr. Pope” (1747), or Thomas Gray’s “The Progress of Poesy” (1754).21 From the death of Cowley to the death of Pope, the progress of (English) poetry is an important topos in the self-understanding of English-language literary

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culture: a writer in the Critical Review of January 1764 expresses this notion in these words: “[Chaucer] was (as a certain biographer terms him) the morning-star of this art; for as we descend to later times we can trace the progress of English poetry from this great original to its full blaze and perfect consummation in Dryden and Pope.” Each of the poems I have mentioned offers its own variation on the notion of literary genealogy, but the topos I am concerned with is to be distinguished from the simple homage paid to the talents and achievement of an individual writer, however great, in that it involves a reference beyond his or her particular accomplishments to the consequences of this achievement for the literary language and the literary tradition as a developing whole.22 The gesture draws on the historical vision of the writers of Augustan Rome, who spoke of the gradual refinement and perfection of their own tongue, especially as it engrafted Greek literary culture onto its own rude stock. But in the hands of English authors, the topos is increasingly characterized by a reluctance to acknowledge any dependence on foreign cultures, and is used to assert instead a native (even a nativist) genealogy that supports or implies a claim for autonomous and autotelic development. This topos participates in the cultural work that R.F. Jones has examined in his classic study of The Triumph of the English Language (1953). Jones discusses various efforts to enrich the English language in the early modern period, to make it a fit linguistic instrument for culture, and the assertive proclamation, by the Restoration, of its adequacy for such tasks.What is most important for my argument here is Jones’s recognition that,“The refinement and adornment of the mother tongue were themselves considered the goal of literature. In other words, literature was considered instrumental to language, not language to literature.”23 Early modern writers were concerned most directly with negotiating and altering the reigning apparatus of languages within Britain and in the European world and its distribution of prestige,24 and only secondarily thought of being praised for their individual achievement in the language as something independent of the former task. It was only once the prestige and legitimacy of one’s tradition could be taken for granted that individual achievement became the essential criterion of evaluation. And such concern with the status of the English tradition continued for a hundred years after Jones’s conclusion of his study with the Restoration. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, English-language writers continue to express doubts about the status and adequacy of the language they work in. In 1650, Hobbes comments to Davenant regarding the latter’s epic poem, Gondibert: I never yet saw Poem that had so much shape of Art, health of Morality, and vigour and beauty of Expression as this of yours.And . . . I should say further


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that it would last as long as either the Aeneid or Iliad, but for one Disadvantage; and the Disadvantage is this: The languages of the Greeks and Romans, by their Colonies and Conquests, have put off flesh and blood, and are become immutable, which none of the modern tongues are like to be.25

The “mutability” of English was an important concern of English-language writers during the hundred years after 1650: it prompted Swift’s proposal of 1712 for establishing an English academy (Swift comments to the Earl of Oxford, “It is Your Lordship’s Observation, that if it were not for the Bible and Common Prayer Book in the vulgar Tongue, we should hardly be able to understand any Thing that was written among us an hundred Years ago:Which is certainly true”; he laments that modern English writers “will be read with Pleasure but a very few Years, and in an Age or two shall hardly be understood without an interpreter”) and is still evident in Johnson’s proposals for a dictionary of the English language at mid-century and in his remarks in 1765 on Chaucer and Shakespeare ( Johnson contrasts English with “grammatical and settled languages” such as ancient Latin and Greek—as a result of which,“Homer has fewer passages unintelligible than Chaucer”—and laments that Shakespeare’s language has “become obsolete” and “his sentiments obscure”).26 Edmund Waller’s “Of English Verse” provides perhaps the best-known instance of this concern: But who can hope his lines should long Last in a daily changing tongue? ............................ Poets that lasting marble seek Must carve in Latin or in Greek: We write in sand, our language grows And like the tide our work o’erflows.27

This poem satirizes hyperbolic claims to poetic immortality and measures the span of “all an English pen can hope” (line 26) in terms of the impermanence of “fading beauty” and “present love” (lines 31–32). In contrast to “palace[s]” in Latin and Greek, English verse,Waller writes, is like a “flame” (i.e., desire) (line 12) that burns and is consumed all too quickly. Waller’s sense of the impermanence of English as a medium for poetic composition is echoed in Sir William Temple’s “Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning” (1690):“If our Wit and Eloquence, our knowledge or Inventions would deserve [to last longer than the works of the ancients have done], yet our Languages would not; there is no hope of their lasting long, nor of any thing in them; they change every Hundred Years so as to be hardly known for the same. . . . so as they can no more last like the Ancients, than excellent Carvings in Wood like those in Marble or Brass.”28

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In the early eighteenth century, Pope too strikes the same note when he writes in his Essay on Criticism (1711), “Our Sons their Fathers’ failing Language see, / And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be,” as does Addison in the Spectator of June 28, 1712:“if [Milton’s] Paradise Lost falls short of the Aeneid or Iliad . . . , it proceeds rather from the Fault of the Language in which it is written, than from any Defect of Genius in the Author. So Divine a Poem in English, is like a stately Palace built of Brick, where one may see Architecture in as great a Perfection as in one of Marble, tho’ the Materials are of a coarser Nature.”29 Addison is no longer apprehensive about the future viability of Milton’s English, but he still takes for granted the inferior “Nature” of English as compared to the classical languages.Thomas Tickell, even as he is celebrating the lasting fame of British military heroes in his poem On the Prospect of Peace (1712), acknowledges a need to cast their praise in medals rather than in the impermanent medium of the English language that poets like himself rely upon: “faithful coins” will “teach the times to come,” he writes,“O’er distant times such records shall prevail, / When English numbers, antiquated, fail.”30 Thomas Sheridan echoes this concern in 1756 when he pleads for greater public attention to English language use in British Education: “Suffer not our Shakespear, and our Milton, to become two or three centuries hence what Chaucer is at present, the study only of a few poring antiquarians.”31 This concern about the limitations of English as a literary medium provides the context for the progress of English topos that I have been discussing; it is this context, and its implications about the standing of English-language literary culture vis-à-vis other European traditions that gives urgency to the topos. A particularly interesting case to examine, in this regard, is the influential translation-cum-adaptation of Boileau’s L’Art poétique (1674) undertaken by Sir William Soame, revised by John Dryden, and published anonymously in 1683 as The Art of Poetry (repr. 1708, 1710, 1712, 1715, 1717). Jacob Tonson states of this work: This translation . . . was made in the year 1680 by Sir William Soame of Suffolk, Baronet; who being very intimately acquainted with Mr. Dryden, desired his revisal of it. [Tonson] saw the manuscript lie in Mr. Dryden’s hands for above six months, who made very considerable alterations in it, particularly the beginning of the Fourth Canto; and it being his opinion that it would be better to apply the poem to English writers than to keep to the French names, as it was first translated, Sir William desired he would take the pains to make that alteration; and accordingly that was entirely done by Mr. Dryden.32

It is precisely this substitution of English writers and English literary history for the French writers and literary history in Boileau’s work that interests me here.


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The Soame–Dryden version makes English literary history observe the same line of development as that adduced by Boileau for French literary history, but despite this parallelism a certain distance between the two works becomes apparent. The crucial passage in this regard occurs in canto 1, and, despite its length, I quote it in full from the English version: Our ancient verse, as homely as the times, Was rude, unmeasured, only tagged with rhymes: Number and cadence, that have since been shown, To those unpolished writers were unknown. Fairfax was he who in that darker age By his just rules restrained poetic rage; Spenser did next in pastorals excel, And taught the noble art of writing well, To stricter rules the stanza did restrain, And found for poetry a richer vein. Then Davenant came, who with a new-found art Changed all, spoiled all, and had his way apart; His haughty muse all others did despise, And thought in triumph to bear off the prize, Till the sharp-sighted critics of the times In their Mock-Gondibert exposed his rhymes, The laurels he pretended did refuse, And dashed the hopes of his aspiring muse. This headstrong writer, falling from on high, Made following authors take less liberty. Waller came last, but was the first whose art Just weight and measure did to verse impart, That of a well-placed word could teach the force, And showed for poetry a nobler course. His happy genius did our tongue refine, And easy words with pleasing numbers join; His verses to good method did apply, And changed harsh discord to soft harmony. All owned his laws, which, long approved and tried, To present authors now may be a guide. (lines 111–40)

We note here the familiar narrative of progress from the “rude,” “unpolished” writers of a “darker age,” through various intermediate steps, to the eventual emergence of a “happy genius” who “did our tongue refine.” This delineation of literary history, the shape and features of the development, are all traced from the pattern provided by the French work.Where the Soame–Dryden version speaks of Edward Fairfax (ca. 1575–1635), Edmund Spenser (1552/53–99), Sir William Davenant (1606–68),“following

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authors,” and Edmund Waller (1606–87), Boileau’s work refers to François de Villon (1431–65?), Clément Marot (1496?–1544), Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), Philippe Desportes (1546–1606), Jean Bertaut (1552–1611), and François de Malherbe (1555–1628). Since Boileau’s work appeared in 1674 and the Soame–Dryden version in 1683, the temporal vantage point from which the two works reflect on their respective national literary histories is roughly contemporary, but one is immediately struck by the fact that Boileau traces a development that begins a full century earlier, and, moreover, a development that has already reached its completion (with Malherbe) some fifty years before Boileau published his Art poétique. The English development, by contrast, begins roughly as the French one reaches its completion, and very quickly it moves onto figures who were personally known to Dryden’s generation. Indeed, Dryden collaborated with Davenant on a ballad opera version of The Tempest in 1667, and a substantial part of Waller’s oeuvre would not be published until after the appearance of the Soame–Dryden Art of Poetry ( Waller’s Divine Poems appeared in 1685 and The Second Part of Mr. Waller’s Poems was published posthumously in 1690). Thus, when we reach the conclusion of the passage quoted earlier (“All owned his laws, which, long approved and tried, / To present authors now may be a guide”), the relationship between Waller as time-tested model and “present authors” as his disciples has a very different complexion than the corresponding French situation, since Waller was then still a living author. (Indeed, at the close of canto 4, the English work can wish that Waller would “his age renew, and offerings bring” in praise of Charles II [line 197].) The effort to adapt the French work to English circumstances thus produces a noticeable strain in the argument of the poem, a strain that carries the mark of England’s belated arrival on the scene of culture in the European world.The difference in poise between the two works here comes in part from the fact that Boileau is speaking with greater historical distance on the events he is describing, but it stems also from the different situations of the two countries and cultures involved in this adaptation. This factor becomes most evident in canto 2, where, in a discussion of the ode, Boileau and his adaptors write as follows: Aux athlètes dans Pise elle [l’ode] ouvre la barrière, Chante un vainqueur poudreux au bout de la carrière, Mène Achille sanglant au bord du Simois, Ou fait fléchir l’Escaut sous le joug de Louis. (lines 61–64) Of Pisa’s wrestlers [the ode] tells the sinewy force, And sings the dusty conqueror’s glorious course; To Simois’ streams does fierce Achilles bring, And makes the Ganges bow to Britain’s king. (lines 61–64)


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The wars of Louis XIV may well have led him to dominate the Escaut river (and to capture Mastricht, Dôle, Salins, and Besançon, as Boileau celebrates in canto 4), but how does one adapt that image to the situation of the British monarch? The Soame–Dryden version resorts to a bit of poetic license, and choosing a setting far enough away to preclude objection, constructs a fantasy of “the Ganges bow[ing] to Britain’s king.”What is crucial here is the way in which an ambition to parallel or exceed the French model, catapults the English authors into a fantasy of imperial conquest. This fantasy, however, needs to be read by us not in light of future events (which eventually would transform it into a reality), but in light of its contemporary circumstances.33 In that context, the projected conquest of the Ganges is clearly a compensatory fantasy: something like it is demanded by the literary context provided by Boileau’s model, and yet the English authors can find nothing actual to fulfill the demand.34 Their predicament, though papered over in the text, nonetheless serves to undermine the authority and ease with which the speaker of the poem can assume a metropolitan demeanor while reviewing the development of his literary tradition. For decades to come, as we have observed, English-language authors will continue to feel the need to rehearse the progress of English and to vindicate their claim to having arrived at a metropolitan standing in the world of letters. The Progress of English, Second Phase: Diffusion of the Tongue The English language is travelling fast towards the fulfilment of its destiny.Through the influence of the dreadful Republic [i.e., the United States] . . . and through the English colonies— African, Canadian, Indian, Australian—the English language (and, therefore, the English literature) is running forward towards its ultimate mission of eating up, like Aaron’s rod, all other languages. —Thomas de Quincey, “William Wordsworth” (1839)

The uneasy attempt to combine a celebration of the refinement of the English tongue with a celebration of expanding imperial power in this poetic adaptation by Soame and Dryden points us toward an important supplement to or variation of the progress of English topos, a supplement that comes to be articulated most fully from the mid-eighteenth century. The emphasis in the earlier discourse of the progress of English falls on the increasing “refinement” and “perfection” of the English language as such: it

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is an idiom focused on the gradually refining intrinsic merits of the English-language poetic tradition, what Johnson refers to as “the reputation of our tongue.”35 From the early eighteenth century through to our own time a different kind of celebration of the English language and its literature also comes to be sounded—a celebration of its widespread geographical scope, its emergence as a world language, in stark contrast to its earlier provincial insularity.This is the era in which an imperial vision in English literary culture comes to be articulated more fully with a general imperial self-understanding in the society as a whole. Where the earlier discourse celebrated the emergence of English as the equal of other (older, betterestablished) metropolitan traditions in the European world through the polished achievements of English-language poets, this newer discourse celebrates the expanding geographical scope of the English-language cultural sphere and its concomitant change in status and function as it begins to acquire an imperial role and eventually a position of cultural hegemony on the global stage.36 This notion of the expanding scope of the English tongue emerges out of a comparison of the English with the achievements of other cultural traditions ( just as an assertion of imperial grandeur for the state is asserted in the Soame–Dryden Art of Poetry out of an implicit comparison with the France of Louis XIV). Thus, for example, Samuel Cobb in his revision of Poetae Britannici (1700) as “Of Poetry” (1710) moves to conclude his poem by turning back to reflect on the volumes of the various English poets he has been praising: These gainful to the Stationer, shall stand At Paul’s or Cornhill, Fleetstreet or the Strand. Shall wander far and near, and cross the Seas, An Ornament to Foreign Libraries. Hail; Glorious Titles! who have been my Theme! O could I write so well as I esteem! From her low Nest my humble Soul shou’d rise As a young Phoenix out of Ashes flies. Above what France or Italy can shew, The Celebrated Tasso, or Boileau.37

This sense that English poets will serve to ornament “Foreign Libraries,” that their fame shall not be confined to England or Britain but shall be spread “far and near,” reiterates a vision that had haunted English literary culture since the Elizabethan age (as seen, e.g., in Samuel Daniel’s Musophilus), and is clearly based on an ambition to rival the extensive recognition of Latin or French or Italian in the world of European culture. Dryden had proclaimed the extensiveness of English fame in his poem “To My Honoured Friend,


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Dr Charleton” (1663), though he was not referring specifically to literary writers in his comment that, “Among th’Assertors of free Reason’s claim, / Th’ English are not the least in Worth, or Fame.”38 Instead, Dryden refers to learned men like Francis Bacon, William Gilbert, Robert Boyle, William Harvey, and Walter Charleton himself,“Whose Fame, not circumscrib’d with English ground, / Flies like the nimble journeys of the Light” (lines 34–35). Whatever the merits of Dryden’s celebration of the fame of English “science,” English literary culture would remain in the shadows into the eighteenth century. In Cobb’s revised poem of 1710, the actual realization of the vision of English literary fame is cast into the future, as it will continue to be throughout the eighteenth century, while the recognition accorded the achievements of Italy, France, and Spain is already a well-established feature of the literary world. Similarly, when Leonard Welsted calls on the Duke of Chandos to “take the Muses to thy care,” he predicts as one happy consequence of such support an expansive future for the language: If you vouchsafe to lend the timely aid, Nor Greece nor Rome shall Britain’s sons upbraid; The sunny climes, that boast a kindlier soil, With hills of wine enrich’d, and groves of oil, To us in Arts shall yield, to us in Song, And distant nations prize the British tongue.39

Neither poet is ready yet to claim that “the British tongue” has already come to be prized by “distant nations” (in Europe and beyond), but once such ambitions begin to switch into the present tense we have entered a new phase in the making of English as a metropolitan tradition. This present-tense celebration of the expansive scope and recognition of the English tongue (and of the literary tradition it carries) inaugurates what we might call the “triumphalist” phase of the “progress of English” topos and of the social history of the English language, but this does not really arrive until well into the nineteenth century, though we see inklings of it earlier. At first, there is a defensive cast to assertions of the widening domain of English. In its opening number, the Universal Visiter (1756), for example, responds to the objection that “our tongue wants universality”: “But this objection,” the writer comments, “is vanishing daily; for I have been assured, by several ingenious foreigners, that in many places abroad, Italy in particular, it is become the fashion to study the English tongue.” In remarks that clearly anticipate those just quoted, the London journal The Present State of the Republick of Letters reported in 1728 that it has learned “from undoubted hands” that “for the sake of reading our Authors, the English language is now in greater request, and studied more than ever, in all foreign parts, where-ever learning flourishes, and particularly in Italy.”40

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A more positive sense of English-language literature’s new and increasingly extensive dissemination is evident in the 1741 remark by Edward Cave, publisher of The Gentleman’s Magazine (est. 1731), that his periodical “is read as far as the English language extends, and . . . [is] reprinted from several presses in Great Britain, Ireland and the Plantations.”41 James Macpherson, in the dedication of the 1765 edition of Fingal, states that “the Works of Ossian . . . have been received with applause by men of taste throughout Europe,” and in the “Dissertation” prefixed to that edition argues that “the compositions of Ossian would have still remained in the obscurity of a lost language” had they not been translated into English. “All the polite nations of Europe,” he adds in the preface of 1773,“have transferred [these poems] into their respective languages.”42 By this point, then, English far from being a “lockt repository” has become, in the eyes of Englishlanguage authors, a key to the dissemination of a work throughout Europe—although we should keep in mind that, in fact, Ossian circulated through Europe primarily in French translations, rather than in English. Macpherson credits the English language with a cultural efficacy that really belongs even so late in the eighteenth century to the French, as we will see more emphatically when discussing the republic of letters in chapter 2.The situation that obtained through most of the eighteenth century is well characterized in Thomas Sheridan’s exhortation to the audience of his 1759 lecture on the English language: “The Italians, the French, and the Spaniards, are far before you.Their languages and authors are well known through Europe, whilst yours have got admission only into the closets of a few.You have but to rouze yourself from your lethargy, and to exert your native vigour, soon to outstrip them all.”43 Sheridan may feel assured about the eventual advance of the English language and its authors, but the present situation he confronts in 1759 is their laggard and relatively marginal place in European culture. We have already repeatedly encountered this kind of expectant, anticipatory, assertive investment in the idea of metropolitan standing for the English language and the literary tradition it carries, but we need to be careful not to mistake such gestures for actual evidence of metropolitan status. They exemplify, instead, anxieties about metropolitan status even as they envision a future in which such anxieties have been triumphantly canceled out. The basis for such hopes regarding the future prospects of Englishlanguage literary culture was made explicit by various eighteenth-century writers. In rehearsing the history of “global” languages in a memorial to the U.S. Congress in September 1780, John Adams underlines the increasing geopolitical importance of the Anglo-American world: In the last Century, Latin was the universal Language of Europe. Correspondences among the learned, and indeed among Merchants and Men of


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Business and the Conversation of Strangers and Travellers, was generally carried on in that dead Language. In the present Century, Latin has been generally laid aside, and French has been substituted in its place; but has not yet become universally established, and according to present Appearances, it is not probable that it will. English is destined to be in the next and succeeding Centuries, more generally the Language of the World, than Latin was in the last, or French is in the present Age. The Reason of this is obvious, because the increasing Population in America, and their universal Connection and Correspondence with all Nations will, aided by the Influence of England in the World, . . . force their Language into general Use, in spight of all the Obstacles that may be thrown in their Way.44

Adams’s comment is still cast as a future expectation regarding “the next and succeeding Centuries,” but now the expectation is not simply that English will be recognized in foreign lands as a major language, but that it will be recognized as “the language of the world”—and this in a more emphatic sense than any previous language in human history. Adams’s concern is not simply with English achieving metropolitan standing (as one among several metropolitan traditions), but with its achieving hegemonic standing as the leading metropolitan tradition on the world stage, as he reiterates in a letter to Edmund Jenings later in September 1780: “I have undertaken to prophecy that English will be the most respectable Language in the World, and the most universally read and Spoken in the next Century, if not before the Close of this.”45 Adams, we should note, is not simply concerned with the empirical spread of English (which he, like De Quincey, imagines as a violent process) but more particularly with the “respect” the language will gain through this dissemination. Adams’s emphasis on the imperial destiny of English underlines the basic theme of the expansive version of the “progress of English” topos: the connection between the diffusion of the language and its consequent cultural status.The spread of Latin under the Roman Empire stands as the exemplary case of linguistic diffusion for early modern writers, and the imperial (geopolitical) foundations of cultural power are part of the common sense of the age. In 1767, Hume writes to Gibbon that French would soon be eclipsed by English as the dominant language of European culture, and seeks to dissuade him from the intention of writing his proposed History of the Swiss Revolution in French: I have perused [your manuscript] with great pleasure and satisfaction. I have only one objection, derived from the language in which it is written. Why do you compose in French, and carry faggots into the wood, as Horace says with regard to the Romans who wrote in Greek? I grant that you have a like motive to those Romans, and adopt a language much more generally diffused than your native tongue: but have you not remarked the fate of those

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two ancient languages in following ages? The Latin, though then less celebrated, and confined to more narrow limits, has in some measure outlived the Greek, and is now more generally understood by men of letters. Let the French, therefore, triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid and increasing establishments in America, where we need less dread the inundation of Barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English language.46

Like Macaulay after him, Hume invokes the imperial dimension to liken the status and fate of English to that of Latin. Cultural prestige, Hume implies, rests not on cultural achievements alone (the main emphasis in the earlier version of the “progress of English” topos), but rather on achievement mediated through the perspective of a nation’s position in the worldsystem. Despite his claims for English, Hume acknowledges the present “triumph” of French, which is so extensive that Gibbon’s history will be a mere “faggot” amongst an extensive “wood.”This interweaving of domestic, European, and global considerations in Hume’s argument is typical of the emergent discourse about the status of English during an era of British imperial ambition. Gibbon himself, it is worth noting, expresses a rather similar sentiment in the concluding section of the third volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, titled “General Observations on the Decline of the Empire in the West” and published in 1781, during the War of American Independence:“America now contains about six millions of European blood and descent; and their numbers, at least in the North, are continually increasing. Whatever may be the changes of their political situation, they must preserve the manners of Europe; and we may reflect with some pleasure, that the English language will probably be diffused over an immense and populous continent.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge echoes Hume even more closely, in a notebook comment of 1808, when he writes that the works of Milton and Shakespeare are secured from such contingencies as destruction by accident, time, and war: “they and their compeers, and the great, tho’ inferior, peerage of undying intellect, are secured! secured even from a second irruption of Goths and Vandals . . . by the vast empire of English language, laws, and religion founded in America thro’ the overflow of the power and virtue of my country.”47 We catch a glimpse of the situation Gibbon, Hume, Adams, and other eighteenth-century writers were pointing toward in Francis Turner Palgrave’s reference in 1861 to English as “the dominant language of the world,” or again, and more interestingly, in James Weldon Johnson’s discussion in 1921 of the prospects for black poetry in the Americas: referring to the different social conditions for blacks in Latin America and the United States, Johnson concludes, “So I think it probable that the first worldacknowledged Aframerican poet will come out of Latin America. Over


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against this probability, of course, is the great advantage possessed by the colored poet in the United States of writing in the world-conquering English language.”48 We are a long way, by this point, from the sense of English as having only recently emerged from a rude and barbarous past. “The world-conquering English language” now can command “worldacknowledg[ment]” for its writers and literary culture with an assurance that is, as Adams anticipates, perhaps unexampled in the history of the world. As Sara Suleri notes, in our age English has become “history’s language.”49 I have called this expansive view of the spread of English the “triumphalist” version of the “progress of English” topos, and we can see what is meant by such a label in various remarks about English since the nineteenth century. Edwin Guest, in his A History of English Rhythms (1838), strikes this note quite emphatically: the importance of cultivating English arises, he argues, from its position in the world at large, irrespective of its being “our living tongue.” English, he writes, is rapidly becoming the great medium of civilization, the language of law and literature of the Hindoo, of commerce of the African, of religion to the scattered islands of the Pacific.The range of its influence, even at the present day, is greater than ever was that of the Greek, the Latin, or the Arabic; and the circle widens yearly.Though it were not our living tongue, it would still, of all living languages, be the one most worthy of our study and our cultivation, as bearing most directly on the happiness of mankind.50

The gesture of “objectivity” here is, no doubt, unconvincing, but the continuing power of English in many countries throughout the postcolonial world today—even where governments have been ideologically committed to the replacement of English by a “national” language, as in Malaysia, India, and Nigeria—attests to the logic of the global situation invoked by Guest (as well as to various local complexities of linguistic pluralism in these nations).The consequences of this (emergent or achieved) hegemony of English—celebrated as a cultural triumph by the Anglo-American world since the eighteenth century—are spelled out no less bluntly by Rev. James George in The Mission of Great Britain to the World, or Some of the Lessons which She is Now Teaching, published at Toronto in 1867 (the year of the Canadian Confederation): other languages will remain, but will remain only as the obscure Patois of the world, while English will become the grand medium for all the business of government, for commerce, for law, for science, for literature, for philosophy, and divinity.Thus it will really be a universal language for the great material and spiritual interests of mankind.51

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Rev. George projects onto a global stage the very process of differentiation between a language of culture and mere “patois” that occurred within the British Isles hand in hand with the imperial elevation of English, a process I discuss in the next section. He envisions a situation in which English, far from being in need of cultural transactions with the ancient and modern languages of culture, becomes itself the metropolitan source and fount of such cultural richness for various “provincial” cultures. As these various remarks illustrate, the hegemony of English implies not simply a “quantitative” domination of English over other languages in terms of language-use around the world; it also, and more importantly, implies a “qualitative” domination of English resulting in or reinforcing the impoverishment of other languages, their provincialization, their reduction to the functional status of “kitchen languages” or “patois,” unusable for the great majority of the public-sphere activities of the modern world. This then is the flip side of the triumph of English, the dark underbelly that has provoked (and continues to provoke) much resentment in many parts of the world, even as it has been celebrated by English-language writers as a wonderful and intoxicating reversal of the historic provinciality of the tongue. In the modern era, this triumphalist view of English has come to seem so natural that even in a “postcolonial” world it has become difficult to see English as anything other than inherently a world language, a language peculiarly able to incorporate and assimilate “loans” and appropriations from the other languages of the world that it has come to dominate—a language that by virtue of this quality seems peculiarly adapted for global expansion. But the writers of the long eighteenth century saw the English language instead as a newly fashioned artifact, newly perfected and gleaming with possibilities. For them, its major work was to purge itself of the dross of the past (a rude and provincial past), and in so doing make itself an instrument for the elevation of the national literary and cultural tradition to a fit eminence.This transformation and elevation was one of the central cultural facts of their age, but one that has been so taken for granted in the imperial aftermath of the English language that we have frequently failed even to notice it, let alone take full measure of its significance.

Imperial English and Provincial Tongues The Third World was not the only place where English tried to grow on the graveyard of other people’s languages. Even in Britain I have heard similar complaints from regions whose original languages had been swallowed up by English or in regions where they are putting up a last ditch struggle to prevent their languages from being killed and buried forever. —Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1988)


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So far, I have been tracing the transformation of the status of the English language and the English-language literary tradition in relation to the larger European world of letters and in relation to the global stage. But side by side with these processes there was a related transformation of its status and function within the British Isles that was equally important for the progress of English: across the early modern period, English went from being one of several regional languages within the British Isles to being the national language, “the British tongue” as Welsted calls it, and as such distinguishable from various “provincial” languages still in use in the British Isles.This elevation of English above the other British regional vernaculars gave it a much more secure footing on which to claim the status of a language of culture than did English’s standing vis-à-vis the recognized European languages of culture, and this “national” elevation of English was one of the most palpable and far-reaching domestic consequences of empire.Yet such multilingual cultural dynamics have regularly been neglected in the study of English literature, almost as though the British Isles or the United States were monolingual terrains.While such erasure of “local” or “regional” cultural diversity clearly betrays an anglocentric bias, recovering this diversity is important not simply as a remedy for anglocentrism, but also to enable us to see one of the modalities of anglocentrism. For linguistic and cultural anglocentrism in the early modern period within the British Isles operated not simply—or even primarily—in the way implied by Ngugi in the epigraph to this section (“swallowing up” and destroying other languages), but rather through a politics of cultural status, the object of which was not to anglicize other cultural spheres but to provincialize them—and, by the same token, to elevate English to a metropolitan status. Our discussion of the “triumphalist” expansion of English in the previous section can be only too easily misconstrued as implying that cultural assimilation was the main vector of eighteenthcentury cultural imperialism. But as I show in this section and in following chapters, the negotiation of metropolitan and provincial standing within a context of cultural diversity was as important a modality of imperial culture as any project of hegemony and cultural assimilation. In the eighteenth-century world of composite monarchies, recognition (rather than erasure) of linguistic and cultural diversity, precisely as “provincial” diversity, was central to the elevation of English as a “metropolitan” language. Modern English monolingual ideology construes English as “the natural Mother Tongue” of Great Britain (in the words of the 1536 Act of Union of England and Wales),52 and conceives diversity of language as a social and cultural “problem.” But such an outlook forgets more traditional conceptions of the British Isles as an inherently multilingual domain—generally construed as consisting of five regional languages and cultures—and the anglocentric cultural politics that makes use of such

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diversity as a resource. Although the movement toward anglicization and enforced cultural homogeneity is inaugurated with the Henrician Reformation of 1534 and increasing Tudor assertion that cultural diversity is in itself politically pernicious, linguistic diversity was still recognized in the eighteenth century as a characteristic of large states.This linguistic diversity took two forms: one was the cultivation and use of prestige languages, the other was the presence of various “provincial” languages and cultures that helped to set off the “metropolitan” or “national” language (and helped to give it the status of a prestige language, at least within the confines of the state). The modern monolingual outlook, by disregarding the fact of local linguistic diversity, also forgets important aspects of the struggle through which English achieved prestige status, through which it secured elevation in the apparatus of languages that obtained in early modern Britain. I discuss the place of English in the European republic of letters in chapter 2; here, I only want to note in summary fashion the relatively low status of English vis-à-vis the prestige languages (both ancient and modern) and the increased pressure this put on advancing English by consolidating its “metropolitan” status vis-à-vis the other regional languages of the British Isles. In 1690, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, John Locke lamented the degraded position of English relative to the learned languages, and in the middle of the eighteenth century Thomas Sheridan still thought it pertinent to reiterate the complaint by quoting him: To mind what English his pupil speaks or writes, is below the dignity of one bred up amongst Greek and Latin, though he have but little of them himself. These are the learned languages, fit only for learned men to meddle with, and teach; English is the language of the illiterate and vulgar.53

In order to raise the status of English, to dissociate it from “the illiterate and vulgar” and associate it with culture and social prestige, there was a more or less continuous effort in the early modern period to praise English at the expense of the other provincial languages of the British Isles (Manx, Cornish,Welsh, Scots, Scots Gaelic, Norn, Irish).Thus, for instance, in 1681, an English satirist, “W. R.,” writes in his Wallography: The Native Gibberish is usually prattled throughout the whole Taphydome, except in their Market Towns, whose Inhabitants being a little rais’d, and (as it were) pufft up into Bubbles, above the ordinary Scum, do begin to despise it. . . . ’Tis usually cashier’d out of Gentlemen’s Houses. . . . the Lingua will be English’d out of Wales.54

English is poised, as it were, between the European languages of culture (the prestige languages) and the provincial vernaculars (the patois): it approaches the condition of the former by asserting its distance from the latter.


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The insistent subordination to English of other regional languages within Britain found an important motive in this emulation of European languages of culture. In the 1759 work cited previously, Sheridan declares, “Had Demosthenes written his orations in such a language as High Dutch, or Virgil his poems in such a one as Irish or Welsh, their names would not long have outlived themselves” (27–28). Linking together Irish and Welsh with other “minor” languages like “High Dutch” (i.e., German) provides the groundwork for a differential linking of English with “major” European languages: the two moves are mutually reinforcing.What is at work in the denigration of provincial languages is not simply a monolingually nationalistic effort to anglicize these domains, but equally an effort to elevate English by subordination of these cultural domains: the effort is not entirely to replace Welsh or Gaelic or other regional tongues with English, but to construct the metropolitan stature of English by relegating these other languages and their cultural spheres to a merely provincial status. Satirists like “W. R.” may look forward to the day when Welsh will have been “English’d out of Wales,” but for the time being they are quite content to load the Welsh language with contempt, to treat it as a “Native Gibberish” unfit for gentlemen, and despised even by those inhabitants who are “a little rais’d . . . above the Scum.” This dynamic is perhaps most evident in the familiar case of Scots speech in the eighteenth century (which has, however, generally been interpreted solely in terms of a process of anglicization). Samuel Johnson is explicit (and explicitly patronizing) about this intertwined process of anglicization and provincialization in his account of his journey to the Hebrides in 1773: The conversation of the Scots grows every day less unpleasing to the English; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves.The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the English phrase, and the English pronunciation, and in splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except now and then from an old lady.55

While Johnson speaks here of the “wearing away” of Scots peculiarities, he is not really contemplating the utter disappearance of the tongue; rather, as he states, he envisions the language becoming “provincial and rustick” even in the eyes of the Scots themselves and thus confined to the uses proper to a “kitchen language.” As is apparent in such comments, within a specific class context, Scots increasingly acquired the status of a relic.Thus, although nineteenth-century writers like Galt, Scott, Hogg, and Mrs. Johnstone tried to reinstate Scots as a language fit for dignified literary uses, in social discourse and in most writing it continued to carry a “clownish air,” as

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Matthew Bramble asserts in Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker (1771). Spoken Scots has not so much disappeared as it has been decisively relegated to the status of a provincial dialect. The complicated interplay of provincializing and anglicizing aims in Johnson’s outlook comes out even more clearly in his discussion of Irish. In a letter of April 9, 1757 to Charles O’Conor, Johnson urges the Catholic Irish antiquary and historian to continue the “account of Ireland” he had begun in his Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland (1753), commenting: I have long wished that the Irish Literature were cultivated. . . .What relation there is between the Welch, and Irish languages, or between the language of Ireland, and that of Biscay, deserves enquiry. Of these provincial, and unextended tongues, it seldom happens that more than one, are understood by any one man; and therefore, it seldom happens that a fair comparison can be made. I hope you will continue to cultivate this kind of learning, which has lain too long neglected, and which if it is suffered to remain in oblivion for another century, may perhaps never be retrieved.56

In the preface to the revised edition of the Dissertations (1766), O’Conor acknowledges Johnson’s encouragement of his work:“Far from joining in the current Prejudice against the present Subject, or oppressing the writer who undertook it, with Censure . . . he approved of an Endeavor to revive . . . the antient Language and Literature of a Sister Isle.”57 O’Conor’s praise of Johnson suggests how the latter was willing to endorse the “revival” of Irish for scholarly purposes, how far he was from seeking the complete extinction of the other languages of the British Isles, but also how completely Johnson views them as “provincial, and unextended tongues.” Johnson’s comments on Irish illustrate the limitations of an account of eighteenth-century cultural politics simply in terms of anglicization, and the need for us to recognize the importance of provincializing dynamics in the cultural contestations of the period. In A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), Johnson exemplifies the licensed ignorance of metropolitan cultural authority when he writes, “Of the Earse language, as I understand nothing, I cannot say more than I have been told. It is the rude speech of a barbarous people, who had few thoughts to express, and were content, as they conceived grossly, to be grossly understood” (116). Such complacent dismissal of cultures of which one “understand[s] nothing” illustrates the typical outlook of metropolitan self-conceit when confronting a “provincial” culture, as we saw in Napoleon’s confrontation with Bilderdijk. Contempt for the other culture, not an imperative to assimilate it, is the keynote of such an attitude (though, of course, such contempt may very often issue in proposals to replace the “rude speech of a barbarous people” with the inestimable gift of the English language).


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Actual large-scale cultural transformation of the regions of Britain was, in fact, an uneven, extended process, affecting some areas early and rather fully (e.g., Cornwall) while in other areas significant changes across a broad range of social levels only come to be registered in the eighteenth century (e.g., in the Scottish Lowlands), and in still other areas wholesale transformations occur only in the nineteenth century (e.g., in Wales). But preceding and overlaid atop such sociocultural transformation was the construction of an ideology of cultural stratification, cultural hierarchy.Thomas Watts, in a paper read to the Philological Society in 1850, echoes this sense of a determining cultural hierarchy that underpins any more specific cultural evaluation: he suggests that after German, two Scandinavian languages, Russian, and Polish, “Hungarian makes the sixth language which, during the last century, has risen to the dignity of a language of books and literature.” He proceeds to note that the last hundred years have been particularly rich in such transvaluations of cultural traditions—social and cultural “mobility,” in other words, do not apply solely to individuals and, even at a level of greater generality, such transformation of status is characteristic of the modern period: Within the century before it [i.e., 1650–1750] there was not one [language] that had changed its footing in this respect in a striking degree.There are still in different corners of Europe a few languages which remain in the same position that they then occupied, or in very nearly the same; and of these there is a remarkable number in the British islands.The progress of each of these six languages has been greeted as a sign and harbinger of the progress of cultivation, but should we be prepared to hail with similar gratulation a similar advance on the part of the Gaelic, the Irish, or the Welsh?58

This is a remarkably candid admission that what was involved in the denigration of Scots Gaelic, Irish, and Welsh cultural traditions as illiterate and meager was no humanist valuation of letters and learning, but the assertion of a cultural hierarchy structured to reinforce English superiority. The desire was not to see the “advancement” (to use Bacon’s term) of these other cultural traditions, but to see them subsumed under a structure of English cultural domination.Watts then proceeds to sketch out a history of the progress of English, concluding with a fantasy of English worldhegemony (a hegemony of the English-speaking peoples), and in doing so he suggests how much the superior “dignity” of English (relative to the various “provincial” languages of the British Isles) derives from its imperial cachet: Two centuries ago the proud position that [English] now occupies was beyond the reach of anticipation. We all smile at the well-known boast of

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Waller in his lines on the death of Cromwell, but it was the loftiest that at the time the poet found it in his power to make:— “Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath received our yoke.”59 . . . A French jesuit Garnier, in 1678, laying down rules for the arrangement of a library, thought it superfluous to say anything of English books, because, as he observed, “libri Anglica scripti lingua vix mare transmittunt” [books written in the English language are hardly ever sent across the sea]. . . . [But] the dominions of England now stretch from the Ganges to the Indus, [and] the whole space of India is dotted with the regimental libraries of its European conquerors. . . . What will be the state of Christendom at the time that this vast preponderance of one language [i.e., English] will be brought to bear on all its relations, —at the time when a leading nation in Europe [Britain] and a gigantic nation in America [the United States] make use of the same idiom, —when in Africa and Australasia the same language is in use by rising and influential communities, and the world is circled by the accents of Shakespeare and Milton? (211–12)

Watts makes very clear that the glory of empire is an essential part of the cultural confidence that Britain has been able to consolidate since the eighteenth century: he is able to present Dryden’s fantasy of the Ganges bowing to Britain’s king as an imperial reality. Writing in the wake of Macaulay’s notorious Minute on Indian Education (1835), with its claim that “[w]hat the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India,”60 Watts understands that this altered sociopolitical position has led to far-ranging readjustments in the global cultural–linguistic apparatus. Once again, the idea that metropolitan and provincial cultural statuses are directly dependent on geopolitical power is made manifest for us. In a similar vein, John Hughes, a leading Welsh Wesleyan and a defender of the virtues and rights of Welsh, nonetheless writes in 1822:“At the same time, while we feel we are Welshmen, we forget not that we are members of the British Empire at large; and we are sensible of the excellency of the language, which is not only that of the British Isles, but promises to be the grand medium of communication, both in the Western and Eastern world.”61 Hughes legitimates the status of English as the language of all the British Isles by invoking its imperial relations across the wider globe; he uses this imperial dimension to mitigate the subordination of the other regional languages of Britain to English. That is, by virtue of being an imperial language, English ceases to be a regional language like any other in the British Isles. The invocation of imperial range becomes a crucial aspect of the reconstruction of Britain from a realm of numerous diverse cultures into a tendentially homogeneous realm that properly is English, and in which various subaltern, regional cultures are tolerated. As a result


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of the shifting relations of the apparatus of languages within the British Isles, the “provinces” were increasingly transformed into “locked repositories” of regional culture, while the English-language sphere became, by contrast, a metropolitan domain of cultural production and dissemination. This change in status, as much as the various internal linguistic features commented on by traditional scholarship on the development of English literary language, is what distinguishes Shakespeare’s English from that of the writers of the era of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bardolatry. Waller’s boast that “Under the tropics is our language spoke” marks a significant turn from Milton’s patriotic acceptance of the limited sphere of English speech: it signifies the beginnings of a complete revolution in the self-conception of writers operating in the English-language cultural sphere. This revolution in self-conceptions produced an immense distance likewise between the English-language sphere and all other cultural spheres within the British Isles.This, too, was a new fact or feature of the terrain of culture in the British Isles, although we commonly tend to treat the resulting situation as immemorial by conflating the simple historical predominance of the English-language cultural sphere within the British Isles with its rather later assumption of metropolitan distinction within this context. As a result of the new elevation of English, even if there was a Welsh literary revival in the eighteenth century,Welsh was no longer a “literary” language; the metropolitan tradition of Welsh court poets was dead and in its place there arose a regional tradition, in conscious subordination to or at least distinction from the metropolitan English-language tradition.62 By that time, it had become increasingly difficult for writers in Welsh (or Scots or Scots Gaelic) to produce “literature”: by virtue of its medium, their writings were relegated to the category of “dialect” or “folk” or “regional” literature.Thus, as Roland Mathias writes, discussion of Anglo-Welsh and Welsh poets from the seventeenth century onwards, is vitally affected by the issue of confidence and a viable tradition. . . . [T]he tradition in which Anglo-Welsh writing began—with the Tudor glory, and behind it the line of Welsh princes going back to Brutus the Trojan, with the seniority of centuries that that implied [vis-à-vis the English]—had all but disintegrated. Progressively from the middle of the seventeenth century versifiers in English, themselves not men of outstanding parts, were writing from a Wales that was unconfident, poor, provincial and second-rate: they partook of the enfeebled spirit, the servility of the times to which they belonged.The malaise affected the whole nation. . . .A sense of inferiority became deeply ingrained in the great majority of the Welsh-speaking population.63

Mathias’s comments here echo those of John Hughes in the early nineteenth century. Discussing the difficult approach toward a linguistic

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“general standard” (i.e., uniformity) in early nineteenth-century Welsh, John Hughes writes: “In a national language the difficulty is less, but it is different with respect to a people, whose language is not now used, nor in the court, nor in the senate; and whatever it was at one time, is now no more than a provincial tongue” (25–26).Welsh is not a “national” language because it is not integrated with national political institutions; it is merely “provincial” because it has little in the way of diverse institutional or infrastructural consolidation. In contrast, English, “the general language of the Empire,” is “the great vehicle of the national Literature, of Law, of the Senate, and the Court, as well as the first commercial transactions” (51). Given this structured hierarchy of linguistic domains and communicative practices,Welsh culture—irrespective of individual achievements—will be, in Hughes’s phrase, “subordinate to” English-language culture (51). If language-spheres like those of Welsh and Scots were relegated to provincial status across the long eighteenth century, this happened even more emphatically to the smaller languages of the British Isles (Cornish, Manx, Shetland Norn and Channel Islands French). In 1785 there was an “ode” in the Universal Magazine by Peter Pindar ( John Wolcot) on, among others, Dolly Pentreath, (assumed to be) the last speaker of Cornish, who had died in December 1777: the mock ode’s tone of metropolitan, sexist “wit” can be gauged from these lines: “Hail Mousehole! birth place of old Doll Pentreath / The last who gabber’d Cornish . . .” A note in the collected volume from which I am quoting identifies Pentreath and recounts in mocking fashion, as a tale of romance, Daines Barrington’s “discovery” of “this wrinkled, yet delicious morceau”: The honourable Antiquarian, Daines Barrington, Esq; journied, some years since from London to the Land’s-end, to converse with this wrinkled, yet delicious morceau. He entered Mousehole in a kind of triumph, and peeping into her hut, exclaimed, with all the fire of an enraptured Lover, in the language of the famous Greek Philosopher—“EUREKA!”The couple kissed— Doll soon after gabbled—Daines listened with admiration—committed her speeches to paper, not venturing to trust his memory with so much treasure. The transaction was announced to the [Philological] Society—the Journals [e.g., Archaeologia] were enriched with their dialogues—the old Lady’s picture was ordered to be taken by the most eminent Artist, and the honourable Member to be publicly thanked for the DISCOVERY!64

Much of the amusement here is supposed to reside in the ludicrousness of casting a grave antiquary and an antique woman in the role of romantic lovers. The text emphasizes the cultural poverty of the whole affair by underlining words like “treasure” and “enriched,” and by deliberately invoking the aura of prestigious cultural spheres, whether French (“morceau”),


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Greek (“EUREKA”), or Roman (“He entered Mousehole in a kind of triumph . . .”). The anecdote constructs value and indicates valorization through metropolitan cultural practices, whether this be publication, having a portrait painted, or holding a public vote of thanks.The conventions of romance function as parody here particularly in association with the larger intersection of prestigious versus provincial cultures; the poem and the note dramatize the evaluative judgments that structure the relations of the cultural–linguistic apparatus. The dialectical process that, across the eighteenth century, elevates English-language literary culture to metropolitan status, on par with other prestige languages of the European world, also demotes other cultural spheres of the British Isles to provincial status. The existence of such a dynamic suggests the importance of paying attention to regional cultural diversity if we wish to understand the character and implications of nationalism in English-language literary culture. The context of any cultural nationalism is multilingual and multicultural and it is in the structuring of this heterogeneous terrain that one finds the work of nationalism. But equally importantly, as this chapter has shown, we cannot limit our attention to the “domestic” British scene if we wish to understand the situation of English-language literary culture in this period.65 The interplay of the cultural pressures and opportunities offered by the local British, the European, and the wider imperial contexts is crucial to any full account of the changing self-understanding of English-language writers in our period. The mechanisms of cultural prestige and authority are to be found in the interpellation of a given “national” culture into a specific set of relations within the wider cultural–linguistic apparatus, and not in splendid isolation “within” the culture in question. Many of the central dynamics at work in the literary culture are obscured if, in the manner of much literary scholarship, we adopt an insular perspective on the London-focused literary world of eighteenth-century Britain or if we simply look for and examine nationalistic representations in literary texts. We need, instead or in addition, to understand the situation of the literary culture and the cultural dynamics that govern the production and reception of work by Englishlanguage writers.This chapter has shown the importance of issues regarding the status of one’s own cultural tradition vis-à-vis other literary traditions in the cultural politics of the early modern world; chapter 2 examines the concept of the republic of letters in order to provide a more structured account of the situation of the English-language literary tradition within the world of European culture, underlining how much we miss about the real situation of English-language literary culture when we credit writers like Addison and Pope with an unproblematic metropolitan urbanity.


CHAPTER 2 THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

he “republic of letters” represents one of the central ways of cognitively mapping the terrain of European culture during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If we want to understand the situation of Englishlanguage literary culture in the early modern period and how this situation impinged on the self-understanding of English-language writers, we need to examine this discursive institution. Unlike the progress of English topos, the republic of letters has been the subject of extensive study. But most of this work assumes that the erudite, scholarly vision of the republic of letters that was dominant through the early seventeenth century is the essential and definitive expression of this concept.As a result, as I show in this chapter, we have signally misconstrued or ignored the eighteenth-century vision of the republic of letters. This vision was based, not on the ideal of an equal, universal, learned, Latin-based culture, but rather on a belletristic conception of heterogeneous national literary traditions interacting with one another and negotiating issues of linguistic diversity and cultural marginality/centrality. This chapter brings this more modern version of the republic of letters into focus and shows how it conditioned the self-understanding of Englishlanguage writers, posing for them issues of secondariness and cultural marginality, and giving a nationalistic inflection to their conception of literary practice.The neglect of this modern conception of the republic of letters has contributed to the construction of an image of “Augustan” literary culture as invested in a universalist poetics and a neoclassical orientation, an image that fails to register how fully the literary culture of the period engages with a problematic of cultural diversity and national status. The phrase Respublica literaria itself,“unknown to Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” has been traced back to the early fifteenth century (it occurs in a Latin letter of 1417 written by Francesco Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini). Marc Fumaroli argues that it is an adaptation of “the much more ancient formula Respublica christiana”: “Respublica literaria stands out against the background of Respublica christiana, not in opposition to it but in imitation

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of it, so to speak, on a literary level. . . . It was not until the Republic of Letters spread to northern Europe, encompassing Gallicans and Protestants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and Masons in the eighteenth, that the original relationship of this literary aristocracy to the Roman church was dissipated, but without the disappearance of the idea of scholars united in a mystical body and working together toward a common good whose significance was universal.”1 Paul Dibon also argues for the dependence of the notion of the European republic of letters on an earlier notion of European Christian community: the republic of letters, he argues, testifies to “la conviction, que nourrissait une élite, de l’unité intellectuelle et spirituelle de la civilisation occidentale.”2 The notion of the republic of letters was popularized by publishers and scholars such as Aldo Manuzio and Erasmus, but the notion did not acquire a wide currency until the seventeenth century. During that century, the notion was naturalized in much of Europe and was taken to refer primarily to “the learned world,” that is, to the international world of savants and érudits, their learned correspondences and personal networks (what the Germans refer to as a Gelehrtenrepublik).3 The phrase was not naturalized into English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, but by then the notion had already begun to undergo a significant transformation. It no longer referred exclusively or even primarily to the world of scholars and erudition, but to a larger world of polite letters, and came, increasingly, to work in tandem with a broad notion of “the public” (rather than an exclusive fellowship of scholars). Already by the mid-seventeenth century, Guez de Balzac speaks of the “République des belles lettres”; similarly, Sir Richard Blackmore in 1705 refers to the “Polite Republick” of the “Men of Letters.”4 The history of the phrase in English, thus, takes place in an era after the republic of letters, both as a concept and as a cultural formation, has already expanded beyond the library or study of the scholar to incorporate the whole imaginative realm of Parnassus. Disregarding this transformation, modern writers often treat the “true” republic of letters, even in the eighteenth century, as the world of scholars and scholarship (the world of erudition), and on occasion eighteenth-century writers also use the phrase in this narrower sense. But the phrase is hardly restricted to such uses in this period; instead, the “man of letters” (and, crucially, the woman of letters) join, and in good measure succeed, the “scholar” as the protagonists of the republic of letters in the eighteenth century. My sense of a transformation, by the later seventeenth century, of the erudite commonwealth of learning into a polite republic of letters is close to the view of Elizabeth Eisenstein, who notes that, as part of this shift, “the language of the inhabitants of the literary Republic has shifted in the course of the seventeenth century from Latin to French.”5 But she also emphasizes

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the persistence of Latin-based erudition at the close of the seventeenth century, and thus suggests that for the last part of the seventeenth century “it may be desirable to distinguish between a learned cosmopolitan Latinreading ‘Commonwealth of Learning’ and the more ‘worldly’ cosmopolitan French-reading ‘Republic of Letters’ ” (138, n. 289, emphasis added). Rather than speak of two distinct cultural formations—a “Commonwealth of Learning” that is unchanged from the seventeenth century and a new “Republic of Letters”—that exist side by side, I think it preferable to conceive of this distinction as pertaining to an internal segmentation within the European republic of letters and to emphasize the conceptual transformation of the notion of the republic of letters as it shifts from a dominantly erudite to a dominantly polite mode.The notion of a “Commonwealth of Learning” can serve as a synonym for the erudite republic of letters, but this version of the republic of letters does not simply continue unchanged while a second, “worldly” republic of letters arises alongside it; rather, the character of the republic of letters shifts from being marked by erudition to being marked by politeness, and a specifically erudite domain now figures as a particular sector within the larger realm of the polite republic of letters—and erudition itself comes to be subjected to the demands of politeness, as we will see in the discussion of Addison’s Dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals, later. Other students of the early modern republic of letters have described its changing social basis (as it shifts from a network of educated male scholars, many of them ecclesiastics, to include both writers and readers, men as well as women, and sites such as the salons, coffee houses, and reading societies); its increasing institutionalization (as it shifts from reliance on personal correspondences to consolidation through the media of academies, learned societies, circulating libraries, periodicals, and book-reviews); and the increasing importance of commercial logics in its operation as it becomes more intimately intertwined with print capitalism (through the publishing and dissemination of books and journals for a wider readership). In this chapter, I take much of this sociological transformation of the character of the eighteenth-century republic of letters for granted, and focus on delineating the place of a problematic of language and nation, metropole and province, within this cultural formation. Against the tendency to construe the republic of letters as always implying a homogeneous cultural arena (as it did from the Renaissance into the seventeenth century)—with shared values, a shared language, and commitment to the supposed intellectual and spiritual unity of occidental civilization—I argue that across the long eighteenth century the notion of a republic of polite letters consistently serves to focus attention on a multiplicity of languages and cultures in relation to one another. In the eighteenth century, the republic of letters serves, not as

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a trope of European unity and identity, but as a figure for the problem of cultural difference and its negotiation, a negotiation that constantly highlights issues of the relative standing of a given cultural tradition or milieu vis-à-vis other comparable traditions or milieus.The notion of the republic of letters may imply a search for commonalities across constitutive heterogeneities, but it does so in conscious recognition of the diversity of cultural and social identities that structure interactions in a transnational arena. Likewise, where many scholars treat the republic of letters as implying the abstract equality of all its members, or a purposeful disregard of inequalities of positioning within the realm, I argue that the concept serves precisely to emphasize the consequentiality of issues of urbanity and provinciality and the inequalities of sociocultural location that these terms suggest. And, finally, I show that attention to the notion of the republic of letters alerts us to how the concept of the literary public sphere diverges from that of the political public sphere in this period—an issue neglected by much work on cultural history inspired by Habermas’s account of the “bourgeois” or “civic” (bürgerliche) public sphere. My aim in this chapter is to show that across the Restoration and eighteenth century in Britain, the national literary culture is consistently placed in the context of a wider, European literary field, and hence the inadequacy of purely national frames of reference in reading eighteenth-century British literature, a parochial tendency of much literary scholarship that inevitably elides the issues of provinciality posed by the wider context. Visions of the Republic of Polite Letters Despite the ease with which authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invoke the republic of letters, the notion itself has always been hard to pin down. During its heyday, relatively few contemporaries felt obliged to elaborate on the notion at any length, a characteristic that attests to its general currency but that also makes it more difficult to reconstruct historically. Being widely diffused in the culture, the notion also becomes at times somewhat diffuse in articulation and meaning. Early modern Englishlanguage writers employ a variety of phrases more or less closely synonymous with the “republic of letters,” beginning with such variations as the “Latine Republick,” the “Polite Republick,” or the “Republic of Parnassus,” and extending through such phrases as: “wit’s commonwealth” or the “muses’ commonwealth”; “learning’s commonwealth” or the “commonwealth of learning”; the “commonwealth of letters,” the “commonwealth of literature,” or the “literary commonwealth”; the “world of letters” or the “lettered world.”6 It is clear enough that the phrases the “commonwealth of letters” or the “republic of letters” are translations of the notion of a respublica


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literaria, but it is not equally clear that eighteenth-century writers using the phrase the “world of letters” have this particular notion in mind. Our tendency, I think, is to interpret this latter phrase as invoking an undefined but generally fairly local literary scene (e.g., the London literary world) and, no doubt, the phrase the “world of letters” is frequently used in such a sense. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the phrase often functions in the eighteenth century as a loose translation and adaptation of the respublica literaria, so that writers speak indifferently of the “republic,” the “commonwealth,” or the “world” of letters. When Southey has Napoleon ask Bilderdijk, “Art thou then in the world of letters known?” he and his readers understand “the world of letters” to be a synonym for the transnational republic of letters. In 1770, when Thomas Chatterton refers to Samuel Johnson as “Long in the literary world unknown,” the phrase “the literary world” may seem quite distant from a notion of the republic of letters; yet, in 1800 when Sir Joseph Banks uses the same phrase in writing to a French colleague, the translators render it as “la République des lettres.” Elizabeth Hamilton, in Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), writes that “The thirst of conquest and the desire of gain, which first drew the attention of the most powerful and enlightened nations of Europe toward the fruitful regions of Hindoostan, have been the means of opening sources of knowledge and information to the learned, and the curious, and have added to the stock of the literary world,” a wording in which “the . . . nations of Europe” and “the literary world” are equally phrases of transnational scope.7 Over the course of this chapter, we shall encounter plenty of evidence to support the view that the notion of a republic of letters had a general currency in eighteenth-century English-language literary culture, but even if we accept this claim, we still need to ask what contemporaries understood the republic of letters to mean.We cannot expect, of course, a single or uniform answer to this question, but there are certain features that recur repeatedly despite the other variations in different depictions of the republic of letters, and it is through these common features that we can begin to understand what the notion of the republic of letters made available to those involved with the realm of letters across the long eighteenth century. While visiting Chatsworth in June 1750, David Garrick received a gift from William Cavendish, third Duke of Devonshire, and wrote to his close friend, Somerset Draper, about it: “[The Duke] has given me, since I have been here, a Book I much wanted, it is called Melanges d’Histoire & de Litterature, in three volumes.”8 This work, written by Bonaventure d’Argonne under the pseudonym of M. de Vigneul-Marville, was published originally in 1699 and republished at various points throughout the eighteenth century. Garrick’s interest in the work anticipates that of modern students of the republic of letters, as one of the passages in Vigneul-Marville’s

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collection of miscellaneous literary anecdotes and observations is an account of the republic of letters: La république des lettres est très-ancienne. . . . Jamais république n’a été ni plus grande, ni plus peuplée, ni plus libre, ni plus glorieuse. Elle s’étend par toute la terre, & est composée de gens de toute nations, de toute condition, de tout âge, de tout sexe, les femmes non plus que les enfans n’en étant pas exclus: on y parle toute sorte de langues vivantes & mortes; les arts y sont joints aux lettres, & les mécaniques y tiennent leur rang: mais la religion n’y est pas uniforme, & les moeurs, comme dans toutes les autres républiques, y sont mêlangées de bien & de mal; on y trouve de la piété & du libertinage. La politique de cet état consiste plus en paroles, en maximes & réflexions vagues, qu’en actions & en effets. Le peuple y tire toute sa force de l’éloquence & du raisonnement. Son trafic est tout spirituel, & ses richesses sont trèsmédiocres. On y tend à la gloire & à l’immortalité sur toutes choses. La pompe des habits n’y est pas grande, & l’on y fait peu de cas des gens qui ne travaillent que par avarice & pour avoir du pain. Les sectes y sont en grand nombre, & il s’en forme tous les jours de nouvelles.Tout l’état est divisé entre les philosophes, les médecins, les théologiens, les juriconsultes, les historiens, les mathématiciens, les orateurs, les grammairiens & les poëtes, qui ont chacun leurs loix particulières. La justice y est administrée par les critiques souvent avec plus de sévérité que de jugement. . . . La honte est le plus grand supplice des coupables, & perdre sa réputation en ce pays là, c’est y perdre la vie. Il y a pourtant des effrontés & des chevaliers d’industrie, qui ne laissent pas d’y subsister aux dépens d’autrui; & des écornifleurs qui emportent les bons morceaux, & arrachent le pain de la main aux personnes de mérite. Le public y distribue la gloire, mais souvent avec beaucoup d’aveuglement & trop de précipitation; ce qui cause de grandes plaintes, & excite de fâcheux murmures dans la république.9

Vigneul-Marville’s account of the republic of letters is clearly not an empirical report on this realm as a contemporary cultural formation; instead, it gives us a somewhat mixed description both of what this republic should be and what it fails to be.The division into sects, the blindness of the public in its judgments on writers and writings, the libertinism of some of the republic’s members, the judgmental arrogance of critics—all of these are palpable failings within the realm. According to Vigneul-Marville’s account, the republic of letters is anything but a well-ordered realm, and it remains full of complaints and angry murmurings.What he gives us is not, then, simply an idealized portrait of the republic of letters. Nonetheless, much of what he writes can only be understood as an expression of the value-ideals of the republic of letters as a concept. This applies in particular to his sense of the universal scope of the republic


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of letters. In contrast to modern scholarship, Vigneul-Marville (like other early modern writers) characterizes the republic of letters as having subsisted since antiquity. For him, the republic of letters is, as it were, a “natural” feature of literate civilization: it may be flourishing at the end of the seventeenth century as never before, but it is not a novel departure in the history of European culture. This universalization of the temporal scope of the republic of letters is matched by Vigneul-Marville’s even more emphatic insistence on its geographical, cultural, and social universality. By no means is it restricted to the world of erudition (including as it does orators and poets), nor, even, is it restricted to an adult male fraternity (including women and children also); and, in line with the projects of Bacon, Leibniz, and the Encyclopédie, the republic of letters is here already seen to comprise a union of lettered learning and mechanical arts (each in their proper place, to be sure), and thus it extends to a wider social world than simply that of the aristocracy, the landed gentry, or the traditional professions. As a positive concept, the republic of letters is clearly linked to an ideal of universality—an ideal that finds partial fulfillment through various institutional nodes.The Royal Society of London is one such node, as one can see from the correspondence of its secretary, Henry Oldenburg. Oldenburg represents the Royal Society as seeking to help coordinate an international enterprise based on a shared commitment to “truth and human welfare” (see letter to Johannes Hevelius, February 18, 1662/63). But while the Royal Society may be interested in joining forces with “men from all parts of the world who are famous for their learning,” the use of the masculine gender here is not incidental.10 The “world of learning” remains a cosmopolitan but male preserve within the larger republic of polite letters as envisaged by Vigneul-Marville. A closer approximation to the full ideal of universality might be provided by the academy of the Arcadians at Rome. The Monthly Review (March 1758) describes the academy in these terms: The academy of the Arcadians was erected towards the latter end of the last century, at Rome, by those learned persons chiefly who were about Queen Christina of Sweden.This academy admits all sciences, all arts, all nations, all ranks, and both sexes. The number of its members is not determined; they are said to be at present upwards of two thousand.11

This academy, with its interest in “all sciences [and] all arts” and its openness to persons of “all nations, all ranks, and both sexes,” embodies a miniature version of the republic of letters. Like Vigneul-Marville’s description, these remarks about the academy of Arcadians suggest that the form of sociability conceptualized and valorized through the notion of the republic of letters is

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distinguished importantly from ordinary forms of social life in its ability to construct relations across differences of nationality, rank, and gender. Despite the investment in reaching across (or “transcending”) these and other differences, Vigneul-Marville conceives of the republic of letters as anything but uniform or homogeneous. This republic includes members from all nationalities, social ranks, ages, and genders—but not on the model of a melting pot or through insistence on a common language and culture. Just as the different genres of writing (history, philosophy, etc.) each have their own province within the realm with their own laws, so, too, the realm is divisible into the various languages and nationalities that compose it. (Vigneul-Marville’s republic of letters, in this respect, bears comparison with the “Temple of Apollo” depicted in the frontispiece to the Universal Visiter, with its separate niche for each national literary tradition, as discussed in chapter 1.) The inhabitants of this republic of letters importantly are groups of people with diverse social and cultural identities, rather than abstract individuals divested of their social personalities. What remains unclear in Vigneul-Marville’s account is how the intellectual commerce among these diverse groups of people takes place and how they shape themselves into a single, if indefinite, “public.” The problem of communication entailed by the multiplicity of languages within the republic of letters is only rendered more intractable in light of comments Vigneul-Marville makes elsewhere in his miscellaneous literary collection.“Chaque langue,” he writes,“a son génie, son caractere, ses usages, ses privileges, ses immunitez, & ses graces particulieres. Chacune demeure, pour ainsi dire, sur son quant-à-moi; & elles ne s’entrecommuniquent point leurs singularitez.”12 This insistence on the characteristic singularities of each language anticipates in many respects the outlook of a writer like Wilhelm von Humboldt, although Humboldt places more emphasis on the differences among language families (and hence on a typology of languages), than on differences among languages in their singular uniqueness. Nonetheless, it is important for us to keep in mind that writers in the period we are concerned with were acutely aware of cultural and linguistic differences (even if some of them also believed in the possibility of a rational and universal grammar), and that their investment in a notion of the republic of letters was neither built on a blindness to such differences, nor did it require that they disregard them. In Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante (rev. ed., 1786), even the future is envisaged as marked by linguistic multiplicity and the diverse character or “genius” of each language. This diversity is made the basis for functional specialization, as Mercier’s spokesman from the year 2440 explains: “l’allemand est aujourd’hui la langue des chymistes et naturalistes; l’anglois, la langue des poètes et des


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historiens; l’italien, la langue des opéras; l’espagnol, celle des hymes et des odes; le françois, la langue éternelle des romans, et celle de la politique.”13 The republic of letters, past, present, and future, is thus continually understood, across the long eighteenth century, to be a multilingual and culturally differentiated domain. Vigneul-Marville’s account of the republic of letters certainly depicts it as an extensive, internally heterogeneous domain; it does not, however, offer us any hints on how to chart the center and the peripheries of this realm. To get a sense of this aspect of the republic of letters it is useful to turn to another work popular in its own day, but which has been completely disregarded in most of the twentieth-century scholarship on this subject. I refer to Republica literaria by Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (1584–1648).This work was originally published in Spain in 1655 and 1670, then reprinted in the Netherlands in 1677 and 1678 and from there translated into English (in 1705, 1727, and 1728), German (1748), Italian (1767), and French (1770), as well as being reprinted in Spanish across the eighteenth century (1730, 1735, 1788, and 1790).14 The work may originate in the early seventeenth century, but its period of greatest currency within Spain and throughout Europe was in the eighteenth century: it may thus be taken as influential for and resonant with eighteenth-century conceptions of the republic of letters. Saavedra’s work takes the form of a dream-vision, which begins with the following words: I was running over in my Mind the prodigious Number, and continual Increase of Books, thro’ the Liberty of the Press, and the Presumption of Writers, who make a downright Trade of it; when, falling asleep, a Veil was drawn over those Images which my Thoughts, while awake, had been employ’d about; and I found myself in Sight of a City, whose Capitals of Silver and radiant, [sic] Gold dazzled me with their Lustre, and that carried their aspiring Tops even above the Clouds. . . . [He chances upon “an elderly Man” whom he recognizes to be Marcus Varro “that universal Scholar.”] Upon Enquiry what City that was, he . . . told me it was the Republick of Letters, and offer’d his Company to conduct me to a Sight of what was most curious therein; which I readily accepted, and placed myself under his Direction.15

Much like Dante’s Virgil in the Inferno and Purgatorio,Varro here serves as a guide and leads Saavedra through the city of “the Republick of Letters.”16 Although writing fifty years earlier, Saavedra, like Vigneul-Marville, presents the republic of letters as a realm containing a full range of writers, both scholarly and belletristic. But unlike Vigneul-Marville, he presents the republic as a “closed” realm: it is walled and surrounded by a moat

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(of ink), and in order to gain admittance, works sent from the rest of the world must first pass through the hands of censors/critics who either approve the work or condemn it to be used as waste paper (or to be burnt, in extreme cases). Rather than being spread across every region of the globe, Saavedra’s republic of letters is, thus, a self-contained city that exists apart from the rest of the world. Nonetheless, he finds the whole world within this single polis, in miniature as it were, as for instance when he comes upon a street lined on both sides with “the most celebrated Libraries, both antient and modern.As that of Ptolomy Philadelphus, adorned with 600000 Volumes; the Vatican; that of St. Ambrose at Milan of 40000 Books; and several others” (73). He also finds any number of useless citizens within the realm, who contribute little to the advancement of the arts or sciences, but who have taken up the trade of writer in one fashion or another.Thus despite the topographical differences in their descriptions of the republic of letters, Saavedra’s city is more like Vigneul-Marville’s realm of letters than one might expect. Since Saavedra, in his dream, actually travels through this republic of letters and meets its inhabitants, his account allows us to examine the borders of the republic and the exclusions and hierarchies it manifests more readily than Vigneul-Marville’s abstract account. Saavedra places “Men busied in those Arts that are but the Habits of the Body; merely Handicraft, in which the Understanding bears little or no Part” in the “Suburbs” of the city, within the city walls but separated by a river from those who belong more properly to the republic of letters (8–9).After these merely “Mechanical Arts” and artists, he and his guide come upon the practitioners of “those Arts wherein the Understanding takes Place, and the Hands serve but as Instruments to it”—for example, architecture, painting, sculpture, tapestry-making, engraving (9). Finally, they come to the city gates proper, inside which reside the professors of the seven “Liberal Sciences,” the practitioners of which deal only with “Words and Quantities,” untouched by crude matter (9, 26). As with Vigneul-Marville, Saavedra’s republic of letters comprehends both artificers and writers, although in this latter case the tripartite hierarchy of mechanical, fine, and liberal arts, like the central role assigned to censors, emphasizes the selectivity rather than the breadth and inclusiveness of the republic of letters. Nonetheless, the republic Saavedra encounters remains a peculiar mixture of indiscriminate inclusions and curious exclusions.The citizens of the republic all must be thoroughly proficient in Latin, Saavedra finds, and when he inquires why this expenditure of time and energy is required, Varro explains: as to the Sciences, it would be altogether improper to expose and make them common in the Mother-Tongue; besides, . . . it was necessary to preserve


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[the Latin tongue], not only upon account of the many learn’d Books writ in it, but also that different Nations might enjoy the Benefit of one another’s Studies, and Improvements, they being made publick in one common and general Language; which could not otherwise be brought about but by the endless Fatigue of Translations; which disfigure and greatly impair the Strength of their Originals. (61–62)

This understanding of the republic of letters as a Latin republic is symptomatic of the relatively early date at which Saavedra’s work was composed, but the emphasis on Latinity is undermined by the very fact that his work is itself written in Spanish. Moreover, once we move through the republic we come upon all sorts of writers for whom Latin is not the exclusive language of literary culture. Thus, for instance, Saavedra includes an extended review of the major Italian and Spanish poets (48–58); he also discusses the presence of a variety of writers engaged in “Philosophical Enquiries”: Gymnosophists, Druids, and “the Magi of Persia, the Chaldeans, the Turdetans of Spain, the Indian Bracmans, the Rabbinists, Cabbalists, Sadducees, and others” (75–76)—the presence of all these figures suggests that his republic of letters, no less than that of Vigneul-Marville, is a multilingual and immemorial realm, stretching across various historical cultures and regions of the globe (or at least epitomizing them within its own bounds). Saavedra is unusually inclusive in the attention he gives to occult traditions of alchemy, sorcery, and divination (beginning with “Hermes the Egyptian, Zoroaster and Buda the Chaldean [sic]” [95], and continuing with a variety of necromancers, pyromancers, hydromancers, aeromancers, sycomancers, geomancers, chiromancers, soothsayers, diviners, and oracles [95–98]). So, too, the republic turns out to be full of a variety of nameless writers in miscellaneous genres: thus, in addition to historians, philosophers, poets, grammarians, and critics, we find also physicians, opticians, astrologers, lawyers, miscellany-writers, and catalogue-writers (105–07). Despite the initial emphasis on the extremely selective process of admission to the city, then, the question we find ourselves asking by this point is who isn’t included in this catch-all republic? The most obvious exclusion in Saavedra’s vision of the republic of letters is that of women. For, despite the presence of a few “nymphs” here and there, the only woman writer encountered during his tour is Sappho—and she only serves as an occasion to expiate on the proper role of women.17 Saavedra finds the poet running from her father, and the old man complains to him: she minded nothing but to make Verses, without the least Thoughts of the Business and Concerns of the House, as to sew and spin; which, said he, are the fittest and most becoming for a Woman: ’Tis not for them to study and

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fling away their Time upon Books, which distract their Thoughts, and are apt to make them vain of the little they know, to enter into Disputes, and to keep Company with Men; to the no small Prejudice of their Characters, as it makes them grow remiss and neglectful of the Reservedness and Decency of their Sex. (172–73)

Sappho’s father expresses here the censure of ill-repute that, unless carefully guarded against, circled around female writers as public women throughout the period I am concerned with (from Aphra Behn to Mary Wollstonecraft) and that constantly evoked a discourse about “the fittest and most becoming” “Business and Concerns” of women.Whatever success and acceptance women writers may have won across the long eighteenth century (and this was, in particular times and places, considerable), they never completely escaped the murmurings of a sentiment that their “place” was really elsewhere. This conjunction of an atopic or utopic discourse about the scope of the republic of letters with an insistently localizing discourse about the proper place of women produces one of the most characteristic and central tensions in the notion of the republic of letters as it was conceived in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Fifty years after Saavedra, Vigneul-Marville may state categorically that women are included in the republic of letters, but his phrasing (suggesting that even women and children are not excluded) indicates the dominant perception by which they were relegated to a second-class citizenship within the realm. In the 1740s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu argues that women have a contribution to make to the republic of letters, but her argument remains in a conditional or optative mood: Si les Hommes vouloient seulment nous regarder comme un parti dans l’état (cas je me soumets a l’inferiorité quoyque je pû dire mille qui a écrit comme vous sçavez, pour prouvez l’egalite des sexes) ils doivent tacher de mettre a profit tous les Talents. Nôtre delicatesse ne nous permet pas de servir a la Guerre, mais cette mesme delicatesse nous fournit un grand loisir pour l’étude. Celles qui reüssiront pourront ajouter a la Republique des Lettres, et celles qui ne reussiront pas éviteront au moins l’oisiveté avec toute sa suitte.18

Similarly, Hume, in his 1742 “Of Essay-Writing,” recognizes the benefits that might be achieved from the full admission of women into the republic of letters (indeed, from their becoming the “sovereigns” of this domain), but he also recognizes that most male savants (at least in Britain) will resist any such “Union . . . betwixt the learned and conversible Worlds.”19


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Speaking of “the Fair Sex, who are the Sovereigns of the Empire of Conversation” (535), Hume writes: I approach them with Reverence; and were not my Countrymen, the Learned, a stubborn independent Race of Mortals, extremely jealous of their Liberty, and unaccustom’d to Subjection, I shou’d resign into their fair Hands the sovereign Authority over the Republic of Letters.As the Case stands, my Commission extends no farther, than to desire a League, offensive and defensive, against our common Enemies, against the Enemies of Reason and Beauty, People of dull Heads and cold Hearts. (535–36)

Hume acknowledges that in France “the Ladies are, in a Manner, the Sovereigns of the learned World, as well as of the conversible” (536), but he underlines the continuing division in Britain between the provinces of men and women (Reason and Beauty, the head and the heart). Hume’s endorsement of the existing division of social life (despite his “gallant” attempt to avoid giving offense to “the Fair Sex”) echoes the less compromising outlook of the third earl of Shaftesbury earlier in the century: “For Shaftesbury, politeness was very definitely the consequence of conversation among learned gentlemen rather than between men and women. Indeed, Shaftesbury believed women’s company to be not only unnecessary but detrimental to the process of male refinement, replacing masculine sense with what he considered the ‘Gothic’ horrors of triviality and gallantry.”20 The opprobrium cast on women’s active participation in the republic of letters underwrites the apologetic tone of Sarah Fielding’s preface to David Simple (1744), which is typical of much of women’s published writing during the early part of this period:“Perhaps the best Excuse that can be made for a Woman’s venturing to write at all, is that which really produced this Book; Distress in her Circumstances: which she could not so well remove by any other Means in her Power.”21 Robert Halsband states that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s writing career,“with its span over the mid-century, bridges the gap between, on the one side, women writers as tawdry Sapphos or stately ladies, and, on the other side, women writers as professional and respectable members of the republic of letters.”22 And it is true that a 1763 review of Catherine Macaulay’s History of England in the Monthly Review refers to “the great number of the Fair Sex, who have figured in the republic of letters,” and that Henry Mackenzie, in a letter of January 26, 1771 to his cousin Elizabeth Rose, remarks, “Your Sex is certainly very high in the Republic of Letters at this very Aera. Mrs. McAulay in History, Mrs. Montague in Criticism, Mrs. [Frances] Brooke in Novel . . . are inferior to few.”23 By the time of

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Richard Samuel’s painting of 1779, The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, which depicts the realm of arts and letters led by nine British women— Elizabeth Carter, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Elizabeth Anne Sheridan (née Lindley), Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox, Angelica Kaufmann, Catharine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, and Elizabeth Griffith—we have certainly come a long way from Saavedra’s republic with its all-male citizenry. But Samuel’s painting still testifies to a desire to record for posterity the extraordinary constellation of nine such women in one country at one time, more than it illustrates the acknowledged and unremarkable presence of women in the republic of letters, and the review of Macaulay in the Monthly spends its energy arguing that “the soft and delicate texture of a female frame” makes it “dangerous for the fair” to undertake “severe study.” The precarious standing of women in the republic of letters is illustrated vividly by the remarks of the Critical Review on Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): “Women we have often placed near the throne of literature: if they seize it, forgetful of our fondness, we can hurl them from it.”24 Saavedra’s exclusion of women from his vision of the republic of letters is no longer the norm in eighteenth-century conceptions of this republic, but a continuing marginalization of women remained typical. A second major exclusion is the virtual absence of the northern European world from Saavedra’s republic of letters. He mentions druids, it is true, but Erasmus is the sole writer from northern Europe named in his work. Saavedra discusses, as we have seen, “ancients” from various parts of Eurasia, and among the “moderns” mentions writers of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. But he does not venture beyond these “southern” cultures, and it goes without saying, in light of the provinciality of English literary culture prior to the eighteenth century, that he never has occasion to mention a British writer, let alone one whose works are written in the English language.This feature of Saavedra’s work leads “J. E.,” the translator of the work into English in 1727, to modify Saavedra’s discussion of the epic poets. Saavedra and his guide, we read, come upon: a Hill with two towering Tops in Form of a Mitre, beset all over with Mirtles and Laurels: And at the Bottom of it there flow’d a clear and pleasant Stream. . . . Upon the Banks of this Silver Stream were seated at their Ease Homer, Virgil, Tasso, Camues [sic, for Camoens], and Milton, with Laurel Crowns upon their Heads, and sounding the Alarm to Heroick Poetry with Silver Trumpets. (99–100)

At this Parnassian moment in Saavedra’s journey through the republic of letters, the English translator feels compelled to assert the claims of the English-language literary tradition by inserting Milton into the list of supreme epic poets, each of whom represents a different literary tradition.


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The 1705 English translation of Saavedra’s work does not make such an addition, so this represents a new departure; but as the sole reference to an English writer in the whole work, the addition only serves to underline the general absence of the English-language world from this vision of the republic of letters. Since Saavedra’s republic of letters includes a host of minor and disreputable writers, the exclusion of English-language writers is not the result of a low opinion of their individual achievements; rather, Saavedra does not mention them (nor other writers from northern Europe) because in his eyes they do not belong to a “major” literary tradition, a literary culture whose presence in the republic of letters could not go unmentioned. In this perspective, the ancient cultures of Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, and India still retain an eminence that northern European cultures have yet to acquire. For “J. E.” in 1727 Saavedra’s complete neglect of the English-language literary tradition is insupportable, and he is forced to “update” the work. Nonetheless, if by the early eighteenth century the English-language tradition figures in the republic of letters, it is not at all clear that it occupies anything other than a relatively marginal place—at least among the “literary” (in the modern sense) writers. As I noted in chapter 1,Voltaire could claim to be “discovering” literary England for the Continent as late as 1733, but even within Britain itself, this sense of the relatively marginal place of English-language literary culture within the republic of letters is not uncharacteristic. Pope’s own dream-vision, The Temple of Fame (wr. 1711; pub. 1715), bears comparison with Saavedra’s work: Pope is even more systematically inclusive than Saavedra in enumerating cultures from East and West, North and South, depicted on the four faces of his temple structure, but while he includes figures from Egypt to Scythia, from China to Rome, the center of this temple is still dedicated to six ancient worthies from the Mediterranean world (Homer,Virgil, Pindar, Horace,Aristotle, and Cicero). Inside the temple, Pope finds Fame beckoning her devotees: And all the Nations, summon’d at the Call, From diff ’rent Quarters fill the crowded Hall: Of various Tongues the mingled Sounds were heard; In various Garbs promiscuous Throngs appeared; ..................................... Millions of suppliant Crowds the Shrine attend, And all Degrees before the Goddess bend; The Poor, the Rich, the Valiant, and the Sage, And boasting Youth, and Narrative old Age.25

This scene of almost babel-like confusion underlines the open-ended scope of the realm of fame; the goddess herself bears “A Thousand busy

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Tongues . . . / And Thousand open Eyes, and Thousand list’ning Ears” (lines 268–69)—and we need to imagine these thousand tongues speaking unnumbered different languages.Within such a vast and multiform scheme, in which antiquity claims a privileged position, the modern traditions in general, and with them Pope’s own literary milieu, retain only a precarious position, variously engraved and erased from the lower walls of the temple of fame (lines 31–44). Pope delivers a similar judgment in the Essay on Criticism (1711) on the place of modern traditions (and in particular the English-language tradition) within the realm of fame: No longer now that Golden Age appears, When Patriarch-Wits surviv’d a thousand Years; Now Length of Fame (our second Life) is lost, And bare Threescore is all ev’n That can boast: Our Sons their Fathers’ failing Language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.26

Many of Pope’s contemporaries did not agree with him on this question of the lasting value of the English tongue (and Pope himself offers a different estimation at other moments), but what is important here is simply that there was still a debate going on in Britain over such issues, as discussed in chapter 1. A secure and permanent place in the international republic of letters was not something that English-language literary culture could take for granted: certainly not in the eyes of foreign writers, as Thomas Sheridan notes as late as 1762, when he laments that “the English are still classed by the people of those [southern European] countries, amongst the more rude and scarce civilized nations of the North.They affix the term of barbarism to this country, in the same manner as the Greeks did to the rest of the world.”27 And, in consequence, as we have seen here and in previous chapters, an ambition to assert or prophecize Britain’s rightful place in this world of letters becomes an important preoccupation of English-language writers in this period. One final work that bears consideration here is Oliver Goldsmith’s An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759; 2d ed. 1774). This work received mixed reviews, being criticized as “consisting . . . of little else than the trite commonplace remarks and observations, that have been, for some years past, repeatedly echoed from Writer to Writer, throughout every country where Letters, or the Sciences, have been cultivated.”28 But this triteness makes the work all the more valuable for present purposes, since it suggests the pervasive familiarity, throughout the republic of letters, of the opinions expressed therein. Goldsmith, in unanimity with the other writers we have considered, speaks of a “commonwealth of literature” in ancient times as well as modern (259–69), and under this head


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he considers equally the historian, the poet, the philosopher, and the critic—although only the first two genuinely embody “polite learning” (the philosopher pursues “science” and critics are parasites who feed on the works of others) (269). Goldsmith’s work confines itself to a review of polite learning in Europe, so it is not perplexed with the question of the borders of the republic of letters, but built into this very delimitation is an assumption that the center of this republic is to be found in Europe. His incidental remark that, “as in the land of Benin a man may pass for a prodigy of parts who can read, so in an age of barbarity a small degree of excellence ensures success” (274), exemplifies the tendency to exile into the wilderness of barbarity, outside the republic of letters, all cultures perceived to be nonliterate, but even within Europe, Goldsmith relegates all the countries beyond Italy, France, England, Germany, Holland, and, perhaps, Sweden, to the verge of barbarity. Goldsmith, like Saavedra, Vigneul-Marville, and Pope, regards printing not as the central institutional mechanism for the expansion and flourishing of the republic of letters, but as something that is at best inconsequential and at worst positively detrimental to the republic of letters. Referring to the scholarly industry of the Middle Ages, Goldsmith observes: the number of publications alone will never secure any age whatsoever from oblivion. Nor can printing, contrary to what Mr. Baumelle has remarked, prevent literary decline for the future, since it only encreases the number of books, without advancing their intrinsic merit. (272)

This view that it is the “intrinsic merit” of works, rather than any institutional apparatus to support their production, dissemination, and reception that subtends the flourishing of the republic of letters is central to the selfunderstanding of this realm as a kind of meritocracy. Goldsmith adverts to the plethora of literary journals published in France and England each month, but he views them as a nuisance (“with which even idleness is cloyed at present” [259]), rather than as the support of the republic of letters (289). What Goldsmith does see as necessary for the flourishing of letters within any particular region of the republic of letters is political freedom (understood in its liberal, rather than democratic, sense—i.e., as freedom to keep and do with one’s property what one wishes, secure from governmental depredations, rather than any notion of political equality or of having a voice in the governing of one’s own society).29 Arts and learning, he argues, “are the offspring of security, opulence, and ease” (261): they require a “soil and climate” that provide “the necessaries of life” (263), the existence of a state “of long continuance” to provide permanence, and of a state that is “free” (262)—“for in a nation of slaves, as in the despotic

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governments of the east, to labour after fame is to be a candidate for danger” (263). Thus, although Goldsmith champions in this work an outlook “beyond the bounds of national prejudice” in which people consider themselves “citizens of the world” (291), he also acknowledges a close connection between writers and the state or polity they inhabit in their shared commitment to “national improvement” (333). For Goldsmith, there is a mutual dependence between writer and society: the writer benefits from a free society, and the society benefits from the flourishing of its writers. In this perspective, there is a link between civic patriotism and citizenship in the republic of letters: serving the polity and serving the world of letters go hand in hand.This is a common enough view in the seventeenthand eighteenth-century republic of letters, but one that has been downplayed by scholars of this republic who concentrate on the French case, where (under conditions of political absolutism) it was more common for writers to insist on the absolute autonomy of the republic of letters. In general, however, writers may insist on freedom from externally imposed values, but their own chosen values often include national loyalties. Thus, for instance, Hugo Grotius, whom Paul Dibon identifies as an archetypal citizen of the republic of letters, believed that the writer’s role was to function as a patriot and serve the cause of his polis and his religion.30 Similarly, Addison writes to Pope in 1713 regarding the latter’s work on the Iliad: “I question not but your Translation will enrich our Tongue and do Honour to our Country,” thus asserting that literary achievements operate simultaneously in the realm of letters and in the world of nations.31 Sir Joseph Banks, in a letter to Déodat de Dolomieu in 1801, imagines an even more intimate link between the lettered world and the world of politics: We English, tho’ much attached to Science, have not, as your Chief Consul did, sent learned men with our Army [i.e., as Napoléon did on his expedition into Egypt]; our successes therefore, if Heaven should favour us with success, will be productive of political advantages only, while Science, unthought of by Rulers, must look to France alone for having blended Learning with her Arms and gathered knowledge beneficial to the whole race of men with those Laurels which to our Commanders will be the fruitless ornament of successful valour.32

This celebration of the “blending” of learning and arms stands in stark contrast to the sentiment that the republic of letters was seen as standing aloof from the state and its activities. Rather, as the examples I have quickly mentioned suggest, the republic was not infrequently seen as distinctly benefiting from the power of the state and, in its own turn, contributing to the advancement and honor of the polity. Indeed, this sense of an alliance between the realm of letters and the civic polity (adumbrated in the topos of the joint rise


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of arts and arms) might even be taken as the dominant view at the time— rather than any proclivity to claim a posture of autonomy from the state and polity, from which to conduct a critical review of their policies, values, practices (as Habermas suggests in his notion of an early modern public sphere). This link between the realm of letters and the civic polity serves to exacerbate issues of provincial and metropolitan status within the republic of letters, and suggests the extent to which writers in the period perceived a fairly direct and pervasive connection between a society’s cultural power in the realm of letters and its geopolitical power in the world of nations. For all the writers we have considered thus far, the republic of letters stretches across generations and across cultures, with no easily definable outer boundaries, but for many of them the center of this republic is nonetheless readily definable. Whether they locate this center in the world of classical antiquity or within some identifiable location in the contemporary world, the notion of a governing center of value does not seem to be undermined or problematized by the unbounded extent of the republic of letters and its multicultural complexity. When writers discuss the republic of letters, they tend to do so from an assumed identification with this central position, and modern scholars have followed their lead, but a question with more urgency and ramifications for most cultures has to do with what it means to occupy a provincial rather than a metropolitan location within the republic of letters. I have been suggesting that until the late seventeenth century, Englishlanguage literary culture had a marginal status within the European republic of letters: the cultural self-understanding that accompanied such a positioning did not change overnight, even as the culture began to acquire a more metropolitan positionality. Pope’s discourse, as discussed earlier, gives us a glimpse, perhaps, into the neglected question of what a provincial location looks like from the inside (the uncertainties it produces about the value of one’s work), but in order to understand better what it means to be part of the republic of letters but not at its very center, we need to examine more closely the negotiation of provinciality in certain English-language works from the era leading up to Pope. The “Exorbitant” Address of English-Language Polite Literature In his address “To the Reader” in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Sir Thomas Browne states that, at first,“considering the common interest of Truth,” he had “resolved to propose [the work] unto the Latine republike and equall judges of Europe”: but owing in the first place this service unto our Country, and therein especially unto its ingenuous Gentry, we have declared our selfe in a language

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best conceived. Although I confesse, the quality of the Subject will sometimes carry us into expressions beyond meere English apprehensions; and indeed, if elegancie still proceedeth, and English Pennes maintaine that stream wee have of late observed to flow from many, wee shall within few yeares bee faine to learne Latine to understand English, and a work will prove of equall facility in either. Nor have wee addressed our penne or stile unto the people, (whom Bookes doe not redresse, and are this way incapable of reduction) but unto the knowing and leading part of Learning.33

Browne, construing his work in Baconian fashion as a contribution to the general “advancement of Learning” (4), at first understands his natural audience to be the “equall judges of Europe.” This sense is reinforced by his own subsequent reference to previous works on “vulgar errors” published in French, Italian, and Latin, thus evoking a European commonwealth of learning to which he belongs.34 Browne’s reference to the “common interest of Truth” suggests, indeed, that the notional audience for his work is the learned world at large (not just in Europe). Nonetheless, he chooses to publish his work in English. Works in languages such as French, Italian, and Latin may have been accessible to a broad cross-section of the learned community of seventeenth-century Europe, but Browne cannot assume the same for a work written in English. He justifies his decision to write in English by arguing that his “service” is owed “in the first place” to his own “Country.”35 At the same time, however, he acknowledges that the work will be beyond the capacity of “meere English apprehensions” and thus will require some facility with Latin on the part of the reader. By this double gesture, Browne defines for himself a quite distinct audience, consisting essentially of learned or semi-learned English readers, including both scholars and gentry.36 Already in Browne’s address to his readers we see indications of both a narrowing and a widening of audience and address: instead of a European, Browne restricts himself, by writing in English, to an English audience, but, by writing in English, instead of an audience confined to scholars, Browne seeks to include also the “ingenuous Gentry.” The refashioning of audience and address suggested by Browne’s remarks points us in the direction of the long-term process of the vernacularization of European literary culture and the transformation of a cosmopolitan commonwealth of learning into mutually independent national literary public spheres. But these two strands (vernacularization and the consolidation of discrete national literary spheres), while they are certainly intertwined, are not synonymous with each other. There is an intermediate phase, between the starting point and end point indicated here (and extending through the Restoration and eighteenth-century period in


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Britain), during which vernacular literary cultures operate in relation to a wider European republic of letters, rather than in self-sufficient isolation as autonomous wholes in their own right. In the later nineteenth century, the structure I am describing breaks down to a fair extent and the notion of a republic of letters loses much of its resonance, but through the eighteenth century and even into the early part of the next century there is a combined and mutually implicated development of national and transnational perspectives on literary culture. Sir Thomas Browne evokes “the equall judges of Europe” even though he chooses not to address them directly. He recognizes that they and he are participants in the same arena, the world of learning, and whether or not he looks for their cooperation or their evaluation of his work, they are entitled to their opinions about it. Browne’s direct address to the English gentry does not specifically exclude or delegitimate the opinions and views of the learned of Europe, unlike those of “the people, (whom Books doe not redresse, and [who] are this way incapable of reduction).” The illiterate vulgar may have opinions of their own, but these are irrelevant to the universe of discourse in which Browne operates. The “judges of Europe,” by contrast, may be placed on the sidelines, but they remain players in the same universe of “elegancie” in which Browne performs. Browne’s address is thus both exclusive and nonexclusive in intention: his direct address to the English gentry and learned operates to the exclusion of the English common people, but not to the exclusion of the learned of Europe. I dwell on this structure of address because it prefigures a central mode of articulation in the eighteenth-century republic of letters, a mode that is not infrequently present when authors have opted, like Browne, to produce a vernacular discourse. I refer to the structure of address that I have just delineated as an “exorbitant” address to one’s compatriots, to distinguish it from an “exclusive” address to them. The “exorbitancy” can take two distinct forms: with respect to compatriot readers, it refers to the inadequacy of “meere English apprehensions” to take the measure of the discourse being offered to them; with respect to extraterritorial or extra-provincial readers, it refers to a (sometimes implicit) acknowledgment of their status as peers in the universe of polite letters. Thus, even though an “exorbitant” address to one’s compatriots oftentimes looks superficially like an “exclusive” address to them, the two modes of address need to be carefully distinguished.The difference here (as we have seen with Browne and as I indicate later) can be discerned in the rhetoric of a particular work, but its full resonance becomes more apparent when placed in relation to the larger cultural context. Given the traditionally quite restricted geographic contours of their tongue’s domain, English-language writers of polite literature during the

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Restoration and eighteenth century certainly understand their (direct) audience to consist of compatriots, but the echoes of their works are understood to extend into an “auditorium” that is also filled with the murmurings caused by works of other (foreign) polite writers and their readers. This larger auditorium or arena is the eighteenth-century republic of letters. It does not necessarily figure as the direct addressee or audience of English-language writers, but as a kind of virtual audience that becomes relevant insofar as a given work is addressed to a “polite” audience. That a supranational audience figures as a monitory presence for Englishlanguage writers of polite literature is rendered palpable by the insistence with which English-language writers, even when seeking only to persuade their own compatriots of the merits of English literature, proceed by drawing comparisons with the achievements of other European (especially French) writers, and the sedulousness with which they retort to every French characterization of English culture even while vociferously expressing disdain for French viewpoints and opinions.37 Genuine disregard of extraterritorial opinion (whether due to insularity or contempt) might be compatible with retorts to assertions of French superiority by other English writers, but it hardly squares with a felt need to respond to every French writer’s comment about English culture and society. In an essay of 1756, Adam Smith refers to the English and the French as “those two great rivals in learning, trade, government and war” and he characterizes the cultural aspect of this rivalry as explicitly conducted in relation to the wider European “auditorium”: “tho’ learning is cultivated in some degree in almost every part of Europe,” Smith writes,“it is in France and England only that it is cultivated with such success or reputation as to excite the attention of foreign nations.” Smith’s comment clearly suggests that he takes as a primary criterion of “reputation in the learned world” the question whether or not “the works of any particular man are inquired for out of his own country.”38 He assumes, in other words, that what I am calling an “exorbitant” address, an address that reaches beyond an audience of one’s compatriots is the implicit posture of all writers of reputation. Adam Ferguson arguing in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) that “the rivalship of nations” is fundamental for the formation of political society even makes such “emulation . . . excited from abroad” a basic plank of his social theory, claiming that:“Could we at once, in the case of any nation, extinguish the emulation which is excited from abroad, we should probably break or weaken the bands of society at home, and close the busiest scenes of national occupations and virtues.”39 Such competitive “emulation . . . excited from abroad” is quite a different thing from the insularity and xenophobia emphasized by modern scholars, though it no less emphatically renders necessary an assertive English cultural nationalism in the quest to gain satisfactory recognition for the English-language literary sphere within the multilingual and multinational republic of letters.40


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We need to keep in mind this larger context of cultural combativeness between the English and (especially) the French and the way in which it reinforces the sense that there is an “exorbitant” address in many English works of the period, but for now I want to proceed with a more local and textually particular examination, in order to flesh out my argument that one can see the presence of the eighteenth-century republic of letters as a “virtual” audience in the texture of individual works. Addison’s Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (wr. 1702; pub. 1721), and the prefatory poem written for it by Pope, can serve to illustrate my claim about the distinction between an “exclusive” and an “exorbitant” address to a seemingly national audience. By way of its discussion of ancient medals and classical poetry, Addison’s work constructs a kind of “parallel” or comparison between ancient culture and that of modern England. In its engagement with the ongoing dialogue between the ancients and the moderns, and in its translation of the Latin poetic tradition into a contemporary context, the work clearly belongs to the “neoclassical” phase of the long-term vernacularization of European cultures. Alexander Pope’s prefatory poem,“Verses occasion’d by Mr. Addison’s Treatise on Medals,” highlights and focuses on this exchange between the ancients and modern Britain.41 But side by side with this primary engagement in Addison’s text, emphasized by Pope, involving only contemporary English literary culture and the ancients, there is another orientation evident—an orientation toward the eighteenth-century European republic of letters that speaks through this English-language work, set in “a country village, that lies upon the Thames.”42 The tension, as well as the partial consonance, between Pope’s prefatory poem and Addison’s dialogue allow us to gauge some of the differences between a more or less “exclusive” and an “exorbitant” address to one’s compatriots in early eighteenth-century English-language literature. Pope’s prefatory “Verses” survey the “ruins” and “wild waste” into which the ancient world has fallen; in an elegiac tone, he evokes “How Rome her own sad sepulchre appears” (337). The sense of futility suggested by this picture of greatness fallen into decay is compounded by the activity of “the learn’d,” who engage in “fierce disputes” seeking to decipher a halfpreserved name, “And give to Titus old Vespasian’s due” (337). Pope continues his satire on numismatic learning by describing “pale antiquaries” consumed with “learned spleen” (337–38). At last, he comes to Addison, who, in contrast to the pedants, knows how to handle this kind of learning properly: Theirs is the vanity, the learning thine. Touch’d by thy hand, again Rome’s glories shine: Her gods, and godlike heroes rise to view, And all her faded garments bloom anew. (338)

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This revival and resurrection of ancient glories sets up Pope’s final turn: a poem that had started out like a warning about the vanity of human ambitions and the inevitable decay of earthly grandeur, closes by seeking to instill in the author’s contemporaries and compatriots an ambition to excel the achievements of the ancients: Oh when shall Britain, conscious of her claim, Stand emulous of Greek and Roman fame? In living medals see her wars enroll’d, And vanquish’d realms supply recording gold? Here, rising bold, the patriot’s honest face; There warriors frowning in historic brass. Then future ages with delight shall see, How Plato’s, Bacon’s, Newton’s looks agree: Or in fair series laurel’d bards be shown, A Virgil there, and here an Addison. (338)

Rome, far from being a warning, now functions as a model for Britain to emulate.43 In these lines, Pope constructs a strict parallel between classical antiquity and modern Britain; he envisions Britain as the successor to “Greek and Roman fame.” As yet, this is once again a (futuristic) vision, as is the satisfying notion of “vanquish’d realms” supplying gold in tribute, since Britain seems strangely behindhand in asserting “her claim.” Nonetheless, that Britain already equals ancient Greece and Rome is asserted by Pope’s ability to list off equivalents: Bacon and Newton for Plato,Addison for Virgil (and, in lines that follow those I have cited, James Craggs for Pollio, the patron of Virgil). In philosophers, poets, and statesmen, modern Britain is already the peer of the ancients, and Pope can draw a direct line between the two societies without needing to invoke any intermediaries or foreign interlocutors.The poem is addressed to Addison, but to him in his capacity as an exemplary Briton, thus allowing Pope to speak in a public rather than a private and personal voice. Addison’s “treatise on medals” provides for Pope an “occasion” for national exhortation and for assertion of national self-regard. In introducing Addison’s work, Pope’s poem narrows our focus so that nothing else of the world remains beyond the borders of Britain and its dialogue with the ancients—except “vanquish’d realms,” nameless and unnumbered, that echo the “nations spoil’d” conquered by ancient Rome, and “future ages” for whom contemporary Britain will function as a kind of glorious antiquity. This last named feature of the poem (“future ages”) potentially moves it beyond a purely “exclusive” address, hinting at a future multinational audience for Britain’s glories; nonetheless, Pope’s nationalistic paean to the new Romans embodies a relatively “exclusive” address to his


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compatriots and ignores much in Addison’s text that is “exorbitant” in relation to such an engagement. Addison’s Dialogues seems to engage in the same kind of “neoclassical” cultural work as Pope’s poem, but it is repeatedly complicated by an implicit appeal to a virtual audience of European contemporaries.The dialogues are conducted between three characters, Cynthio, Eugenius, and Philander, the last of whom undertakes to elucidate for the others (and for Addison’s readers) the “usefulness of ancient medals.”The work has a semidramatic form, consisting, for the most part, of dialogue among the three characters. But each dialogue is framed at the start by an anonymous narrating voice that quickly and unobtrusively effaces itself, reemerging only at the end to close the dialogue. Despite this respect for the integrity of the dialogues, however, the narrator presents the dialogue form itself as a deliberate literary device, remarking at the opening of the second dialogue that, “Some of the finest treatises of the most polite Latin and Greek writers are in dialogue, as many very valuable pieces of French, Italian, and English, appear in the same dress” (359). If one took one’s cue from Pope’s prefatory poem, it would have been sufficient to have mentioned the classical models and the English precursors that Addison is following in this work; but in invoking the “polite” world of “fin[e]” and “valuable” literature, Addison feels compelled to indicate the presence also of parallel works in French and Italian, much as Thomas Browne invokes his French, Italian, and Latin predecessors. Indeed, he emphasizes at the start of the first dialogue that his three characters, although retired “from the town [i.e., London] to a country village” for the summer,“were all three very well versed in the politer parts of learning, and had travelled into the most refined nations of Europe” (339). Here again we see the curious linking together of references to the classical world and to the polite world of modern Europe, as though an Englishman could not stake a claim to familiarity with the former except by way of a detour through the latter.44 As the dialogues proceed and Addison melds together his knowledge of numismatics and classical poetry, he refers occasionally by name to various scholars and their studies (Guy Patin, Carlo Sigonio, Joseph Scaliger,André Dacier, Jean-Foi Vaillant, and G. J.Vossius), thus evoking the European commonwealth of scholarship on which he draws (and it is noteworthy that no native British scholar is mentioned by Addison). Cynthio is always ready to mock the petty disputes and trivial learning of antiquarian scholars (as Pope, too, in his prefatory poem, is willing to mock “pale antiquaries” in order to praise Addison by contrast), but Philander offers a carefully measured defense and justification of their minute scholarship. “[A] cabinet of medals is a body of history,” he argues:“It was a kind of printing, before the art was invented. It is by this means that Monsieur Vaillant has disembroiled

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a history that was lost to the world before his time, and out of a short collection of medals has given us a chronicle of the kings of Syria” (348). This by no means allays Cynthio’s suspicions about the doubtful value of such learning; a little later in the dialogue, Cynthio comments: considering the subjects on which your chronologers are generally employed, I see but little use that rises from it. For example, what signifies it to the world whether such an elephant appeared in the amphitheatre in the second or the third year of Domitian? Or what am I the wiser for knowing that Trajan was in the fifth year of his tribuneship when he entertained the people with such a horse-race or bull-baiting? Yet it is the fixing of these great periods that gives a man the first rank in the republic of letters, and recommends him to the world for a person of various reading and profound erudition. (349)

The “republic of letters” (a phrase Cynthio has already used in a similar tone previously [347]) figures here as a world of false values, a world of pedantry. Nonetheless, the whole movement of the dialogue is to reconcile Cynthio (and Eugenio), as representative “men of wit” (447), to the view that the knowledge of ancient medals is indeed fruitful, that it does indeed contribute to one’s appreciation of “the politer parts of learning” (339). It is worth noting that even in dismissing the erudite “republic of letters,” Cynthio himself is speaking from the perspective of one “very well versed” in the world of polite letters, so that the tension embodied in his remarks is that between two conceptions of the republic of letters (erudite and polite), rather than between an appreciation of the republic of letters and a dismissal of it.The stance of Addison’s Dialogues, in other words, is scarcely that of a parochial rejection of the wider world of the European republic of letters. The effort of the dialogues as a whole is to reconcile the erudite and the polite sectors of the republic of letters, but the dialogues can make this their agenda only because there is already a perceived tension between these two dimensions of the republic of letters.45 Not only Cynthio, but the Dialogues as a whole are at one remove from the seventeenth-century all-male world of numismatic scholarship, as evoked in an engraving of ca.1691 by Antony van Zijlvelt that presents an imaginary group-portrait of the most celebrated numismatists of the previous centuries.46 While van Zijlvelt’s engraving is rather formal and austere in manner, Addison (or his protagonist, Philander) takes care to open his detailed examination of particular medals by focusing on depictions of women, their features, their dress, their ornaments. Thus, Addison’s discourse, while still conducted within the bounds of male friendship, opens out by implication onto a world of


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heterosexual gallantry and social graces more generally. Addison’s Dialogues may well work to reconcile the older, inherited conception of the republic of letters as a commonwealth of learning with the more modern conception of the republic as a cosmopolitan world of polite letters, but it does so on the terms of the latter.The relative value of these two aspects of the republic of letters, for Addison, is clearly evident in his justification of numismatic erudition on the basis of its serviceability for the elucidation of ancient poetry.47 This last point sounds a note familiar from Pope’s prefatory “Verses,” but we can also see that, far from the two writers speaking in the same voice, there is a kind of dialogue and negotiation taking place between the discourse of Pope and that of Addison. If, so far, I have emphasized the “exorbitancy” of Addison’s text, the extent to which it works with a horizon that, in its contemporary European orientation, exceeds that of Pope’s prefatory poem, it is important also to underline the extent of their convergence. Pope pictures a “fair series” of medals of “laurel’d bards” in which the ancient poets are paired with their modern British equals, and Addison’s work gives us very nearly the same construct but in the form of paired quotations rather than paired medals. Addison’s work offers us more than two hundred and fifty illustrative quotations in Latin from the ancient poets, and where these are of any length, he generally accompanies them with an English verse translation (by himself or by other English poets). Thus, we get various pairings repeated over the course of the work: Dryden and Virgil, Creech and Horace, Rowe and Lucan, Addison and Seneca. Such parallels between English and Latin verse constitute the single largest element of the Dialogues, in terms of space on the page, and in this respect Pope’s prefatory “Verses” speak in the same accents as Addison’s own words. Addison’s work seems to set up a kind of currency exchange for Latin verses, where they can be turned in, in order to be paid out an equivalent in English verse. But even as it performs this kind of conversion, where the Latins provide the “gold” with which to mint English medals and thus figure as one of the “vanquish’d realms” evoked by Pope, Addison’s text refuses to slip into a simply nationalistic address. For, if Pope’s poem celebrates the British as the new Romans, Addison’s work contrasts the grandeur of Roman self-conceptions with the pettiness of those of modern England: the Romans were careful to preserve their fame for future ages, even those a thousand years hence:“But where statesmen are ruled by a spirit of faction and interest, they can have no passion for the glory of their country, nor any concern for the figure it will make among posterity. A man that talks of his nation’s honour a thousand years hence, is in very great danger of being laughed at” (439). Philander goes on, somewhat later in the third dialogue, to comment on the “majesty and force,” the “brevity

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and comprehensiveness” of the inscriptions on the ancient Roman medals compared to the “diffuseness” and “dulness” of modern inscriptions (444–45): “If you look into the ancient inscriptions, you see an air of simplicity in the words, but a great magnificence in the thought; on the contrary, in your modern medals you have generally a trifling thought wrapt up in the beginning or end of an heroic verse” (446). Having pointed to the ridiculous misfit between the triviality of the thought and the grandeur of the verse in which it is clothed in modern medals, and the inversion this represents of the Roman practice, Addison moves on to consider the effect of direct attempts to imitate the Roman style in modern medals—attempts that only betray the distance separating Roman majesty from modern parody: the Romans always appear in the proper dress of their country, insomuch that you see the little variations of the mode in the drapery of the medal.They would have thought it ridiculous to have drawn an emperor of Rome in a Grecian cloak or a Phrygian mitre. On the contrary, our modern medals are full of togas and tunics, trabeas, and paludamentums, with a multitude of the like antiquated garments, that have not been in fashion these thousand years.You see very often a king of England or France dressed up like a Julius Caesar. One would think they had a mind to pass themselves upon posterity for Roman emperors. (448–49)

Thus, while Pope presents the British as the new Romans (if only they were willing to assert themselves) upon whom “future ages” will look back “with delight,” Addison presents them as counterfeit Romans, as frauds in Roman attire thinking to dupe “posterity.” Both authors present the ancient Romans as worthy models, but they have different conceptions of whether the modern English/British are ready to fill those shoes.48 Addison’s address remains, as I have been arguing,“exorbitant” to purely nationalistic cultural assumptions. Like Sir Thomas Browne’s, Addison’s work exceeds at various points “meere English apprehensions” and Addison is careful to introduce early on in the dialogues the sentiment that his characters feel free “upon occasion to speak a Latin sentence without fearing the imputation of pedantry or ill-breeding” (340). Moreover, in place of Pope’s climactic paean to contemporary Britain, Addison leaves a deliberate blank. Toward the close of the second dialogue, Philander reviews a series of medals in which we see “so many cities, nations, and provinces, that present themselves to you under the shape of women” (415). He discusses the conventional iconography associated with the figures of “Africa,” “Egypt,” “Mauritania,” “Spain,” “France,” and “Italy,” before moving on to discuss “Achaia.” Here, Cynthio interjects, “I was in hopes you would have shown


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us our own nation, when you were so near us as France” (424). Philander is forced to discuss “one of Augustus’s Britannias” and notes the flattering representation of the “military genius” of the British thereon, but he proceeds to acknowledge the general tenor of the ancient Roman view of Britain: This [military genius] is, I think, the only commendable quality that the old poets have touched upon in the description of our country. I had once made a collection of all the passages in the Latin poets, that give any account of us, but I find them so very malicious, that it would look like a libel on the nation to repeat them to you.We seldom meet with our forefathers, but they are coupled with some epithet or another to blacken them. Barbarous, cruel, and inhospitable, are the best terms they can afford us, which it would be a kind of injustice to publish, since their posterity are become so polite, goodnatured, and kind to strangers. (424–25)

Addison may claim that his contemporaries, the “posterity” of the ancient Britons, “are become . . . polite,” but he nonetheless feels insecure enough about this claim to feel it necessary to suppress the details of the ancient Roman depiction of the Britons as “barbarous, cruel, and inhospitable.”There, instead of a panegyric, we come upon “a libel on the nation.” Philander’s “collection” of passages from the Latin poets—a collection amassed out of patriotic investments, it seems clear—remains unpublished. Instead, he cites a few lines from the poets that underline Britain’s marginality vis-à-vis the Roman world, including Virgil’s famous line from the first eclogue: Et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. VIRG. Ecl. 1. The rest among the Britons be confin’d; A race of men from all the world disjoin’d. Mr. DRYDEN. (425)

Philander acknowledges also that in Roman representations the figure of Britannia typically “confess[es] herself a conquered province”—although she represents “a new world, separate from that which the Romans had before conquered, by the interposition of the sea” (425).49 By Addison’s time, Britain has conquered her own “new world” across the seas, and no longer figures as a conquered province. Modern scholars have focused on this newfound geopolitical eminence, while ignoring the burden of Britain’s cultural past.What Addison’s Dialogues shows us is that in many respects Britain still remains marginal to the European world of culture and the republic of letters as it exists at the start of the eighteenth century. Some of the animus of Cynthio’s disdain for a certain aspect of the republic of letters, while expressed as a disdain for pedantry, might be read

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nonetheless as a not uncharacteristic attitude of someone speaking from the margins of a cultural formation that they not only cannot entirely dismiss, but in which they wish to make a name for themselves.Addison’s Dialogues stages for us quite explicitly some of the anxieties besetting a society seeking to assert its claims in the world of culture, while burdened with an inherited conception—however outdated or unfair to begin with—that it is a realm of barbarity and savage ferocity. Philander still finds it necessary to live down the past. An indirect acknowledgment of the claims of the wider republic of letters—that is, an acknowledgment mediated through an “exorbitant” address to one’s compatriots—is one way of negotiating the conflicting pressures placed on a writer who belongs to a club in which he and his kind have traditionally been held in contempt. Later in the eighteenth century, references to the republic of letters in the writings of British authors are no longer so defensive; instead, they begin to display an automatic, somewhat complacent, character, while still underlining the importance of a virtual European audience for Englishlanguage writers. In 1774, informing William Mason of the death of Oliver Goldsmith, Horace Walpole writes: “The republic of Parnassus has lost a member; Dr Goldsmith is dead of a purple fever,” thus casually invoking the Parnassian republic of letters as the context in which to consider such a writer. Likewise, Frances Burney opens her preface to Evelina (1778) by stating that “In the republic of letters, there is no member of such inferior rank, or who is so much disdained by his brethren of the quill, as the humble Novelist,” and invokes the names of “Rousseau, Johnson, Marivaux, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett” as some of her predecessors who have saved this genre of writing from utter “contempt.”50 In this international republic of letters of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Englishlanguage writers have a secure place and Burney feels no need to engage in an elaborate assessment of its characteristics and complications. In his Essai sur l’étude de la littérature (1761), Edward Gibbon writes that there are two sorts of writers: the one is content with the praises of his contemporaries (his compatriots), the other seeks the praises of the remotest posterity and takes pleasure in the thought that “mille ans après sa mort, l’Indien des bords du Gange, et le Laponois au milieu de ses glaces, liront ses ouvrages, et porteront envie au pays et au siècle qui l’ont vû naître.” Likewise, Swift writes to the Abbé des Fontaines (the French translator of Gulliver’s Travels) in July 1727 that,“l’auteur qui n’ecrit que pour une ville, une province, un Royaume, ou meme un siecle, merite si peu d’etre traduit qu’il ne merite pas d’etre lu.”51 Pope’s address to “Bards Triumphant” in An Essay on Criticism (1711) evokes a similar horizon of extensive fame: Hail Bards Triumphant! Born in happier Days; Immortal Heirs of Universal Praise!


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Whose Honours with Increase of Ages grow, As streams roll down, enlarging as they flow! Nations unborn your mighty Names shall sound, And Worlds applaud that must not yet be found! Oh may some Spark of your Coelestial Fire The last, the meanest of your Sons inspire. (lines 189–96)

Pope’s sense that a poet’s stature is measured by the number of “Ages” and “Nations” that “sound” his name, by the extensiveness of his fame, is very much of a piece with Gibbon’s conception of true fame. No matter how highly esteemed a writer is by any one nation or by any one age, if his or her reputation is confined to such parochial esteem it falls far short of the “Universal Praise” that serves as a standard for Pope and for polite letters across the long eighteenth century. The prefatory material to Richardson’s Pamela (1740; 2d ed. 1741) likewise underlines this orientation toward extensive fame. The letter to the “Editor” of Pamela by “J.B.D.F.” ( Jean Baptiste de Freval) concludes by addressing the work itself: Little Book, charming PAMELA! face the World, and never doubt of finding Friends and Admirers, not only in thine own Country, but far from Home; where thou mayst give an Example of Purity to the Writers of a neighbouring Nation; which now shall have an Opportunity to receive English Bullion in Exchange for its own Dross, which has so long passed current among us in Pieces abounding with all the Levities of its volatile Inhabitants.52

The prospect of reversing the flow of literary works from France into Britain is thus envisioned as part of the effect of Pamela as it “face[s] the World” at large. Even more dramatically, Aaron Hill writes in his letter to the “Editor” of Pamela that the work “will live on, through Posterity, with such unbounded Extent of Good Consequences, that Twenty Ages to come may be the Better and Wiser, for its Influence”; it will influence “Millions of MINDS” in the generations to come (11). Gibbon may imagine a writer’s influence extending a thousand years forward into the future, but Hill credits Richardson’s novel with an afterlife of at least two millennia.The parameters of fame, thus, even for a “trifle” like Pamela are understood by its audience to extend “far from Home” and down “through Posterity.” This image of Richardson’s extensive fame is picked up in Anna Williams’s “Verses addressed to Mr. Richardson, on his History of Sir Charles Grandison”: she suggests that (British) posterity will continue to profit from Clarissa long after Fielding’s Tom Jones and Amelia Booth have fallen into obscurity:“In distant times, when Jones and Booth are lost, / Britannia her Clarissa’s name shall boast.” But Williams also underlines Richardson’s

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international stature:“Even now, not rocks or waves thy fame can bound, / The Rhine’s rude banks Clarissa’s worth resound; / And Tuscan bards her mournful tale relate, / In groves where Virgil sung of Dido’s fate.”53 The polite writers of the long eighteenth century all dream of this more extensive kind of fame, a dream that is inseparable from a vision of British influence spread throughout the globe—a vision which, by the close of the eighteenth century, no longer seems visionary, and allows these writers to see in the geographic scope of English letters, from the Ganges to the Atlantic colonies, a token of its claims on the furthest posterity. This conception of extensive fame provides the context and the complement to the progress of English topos I discussed in chapter 1, and it underlines the changing self-conception of English-language literary culture across the long eighteenth century. Far from being content with a domestic reputation, in smug disregard of foreign opinion, English-language writers of polite letters in the eighteenth century habitually conceive of the literary terrain in terms of the republic of letters and are ambitious for an extensive fame that reaches beyond the confined circle of their own compatriots. The late eighteenth-century situation of confident claims by British writers to a significant place in the republic of letters is a long way from that of Addison’s time; early eighteenth-century Britain may have begun to assemble an empire of her own, but the contemporary European republic of letters was clearly structured predominantly as a French-language sphere, and it is toward the Continent that we must turn to examine it more fully, and to understand more clearly the differences between metropolitan and marginal cultural locations. Peripheries and Centers in the Republic of Letters In his “Essay on the Georgics,” forming part of the prefatory matter in Dryden’s translation of Virgil (1697), Addison contrasts “the Address of a Poet” to “the simplicity of a Plow-Man,” a contrast by which English poets, like those of other nations, are honored above rustic simpletons.54 But Addison also maintains, as we have seen, that Horace and Boileau, unlike our English satirists, know “how to stab with address” (see n. 44): within the wider world of European letters, the English-language tradition was still stigmatized as lacking polished “address” (in the sense of skill, dexterity, or adroitness). But in order to assess these issues of centrality and marginality within the republic of letters more adequately, we need to turn from a discussion of individual texts to examine more broadly the structure and character of the European republic of letters. In doing so, we will see how central the issue of language was to the functioning of this realm from the later seventeenth century onward and how clearly the francophone domain


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constituted the metropolitan domain within this realm, while the Englishlanguage sphere constituted one of several provincial borderlands. In the seventeenth-century erudite republic of letters, Latin figured relatively simply as, so to speak, the official language; with the shift by the end of the century to a polite republic of letters, Latin was rendered not superfluous, but increasingly marginal, and the problematic of language acquired a new significance. Marc Fumaroli states that, “The question of language became immediately, and was to remain, one of the moving forces of the Republic of Letters, and in the eighteenth century, it was to lead to the conversion, itself controversial, to academic French as the ‘Latin of the moderns.’ ”55 This analogizing of French with Latin, though frequently adopted both by contemporaries and by modern scholars, obscures (as we shall see) the radical differences between the erudite and the polite versions of the republic of letters: in the polite republic of letters the French language may have come to supply the place of Latin, but the substitution could never be complete nor wholly adequate due to this republic’s essentially multicultural and multilingual character. Nonetheless, across the eighteenth century, French played an extraprovincial role on the Continent unlike that of any other European vernacular, and its sway extended into domains where Latin had only exercised a limited role. Bruce, a “Gentleman of wit and sense” in Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso (1676), may speak contemptuously of French as “that mighty Universal Language” (in contrast to Latin as a genuine universal language), but his comment nevertheless acknowledges the assumption by French of a new social role in European culture.56 Similarly, in 1688 Aphra Behn writes, rather grudgingly,“I confess the French Arms, Money and Intrigues have made their Language very universal of late.”57 More predictably, the Parisian Mercure galant emphasized in October 1694 that the effective domain of the French language and culture extended far beyond the borders of the French kingdom: L’étendue de la langue française passe les limites du Royaume. Elle ne se borne ni par les Pyrénées et les Alpes, ni par le fleuve du Rhin. On entend le français dans toute l’Europe. . . . [La langue française] est connue dans toutes les Cours: les princes et les Grands la parlent, les ambassadeurs l’écrivent, et le beau monde en fait une mode.58

The culture of European elites—the courtly and the lettered—was largely francophone and French oriented. The vast majority of the population of each country, which fell below the level of “les gens bien élevés,” remained of course outside this cultural sphere. Nonetheless, within these limits and because of these limits, the emergence of a relatively coherent elite European

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culture was made possible, a culture under the hegemony, as Henry Fielding has one of his characters put it, of “all-conquering France.”59 It is only by considering French domination of the polite republic of letters that we can properly understand the dynamics of centrality and provinciality in contemporary European culture. It is in light of this structured cultural hierarchy that the marginality of English-language literary culture at the start of the eighteenth century becomes fully apparent. Perhaps the best indication of the extraterritorial importance of French in the eighteenth-century cultural terrain is the plenitude of journals and newspapers published in various parts of Europe in the French language. During the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, Frenchlanguage periodicals were published in over two score European cities outside France, including: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Copenhagen, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, The Hague, Hamburg, Köln, Leiden, Leipzig, London, Maestricht, Mannheim, Metz, Moscow, Prague, Rotterdam, St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Turin, Utrecht, Venice, Vienna, Warsaw, Zurich.60 The existence of French-language periodicals, for varying periods of time, in these and other cities attests to the emergence of French as indeed a “lingua franca” for the world of culture in much of eighteenth-century Europe. But it is worth noting that Italy and Spain, with their long-standing claims to cultural leadership in Europe, were not so completely swept up in the trend toward French—nor was Britain. In a letter of August 1767, Voltaire writes: “notre langue se parle à Vienne, à Berlin, à Stokolm, à Copenhague, à Moscou. Elle est la langue de l’Europe”61—but the omissions in this charting of “Europe” are as important as the sites that are named. What one can say is that French was unique among the modern European languages in the eighteenth-century world in having a substantial extra-provincial role beyond the borders of French political control. This was a relatively novel situation, having developed only since the seventeenth century, but it gave to French literary culture at the turn of the century a privileged position unparalleled by that of other modern European literary traditions—certainly not by that of English-language literature. As Elizabeth Eisenstein writes, “In no other eighteenth-century region would the hope of obtaining an independent eminence and international prestige be similarly encouraged by aid forthcoming from foreign workshops”62—that is, from anything comparable to the extraterritorial French-language book-trade and publishing industry (and its readerships). If the seventeenth century was still an age of Latin so far as the republic of letters was concerned, the eighteenth century was the age of French. The Jesuits may have pursued their teaching in Latin, but their review journal, the Mémoires de Trévoux (1701–67), was conducted in French; going one step further, in the 1750s the Parisian Journal des Savants ceased to review


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works written in Latin. As Elizabeth L. Eisenstein notes, “the works of such seventeenth-century Latin-writing savants as Pufendorf, Grotius, and Leibniz penetrated eighteenth-century Europe in French translations. In the 1630s Dutch publishers served cosmopolitan readers by publishing roughly 85 per cent of their output in Latin and only 10 to 15 per cent in French; by the 1730s these proportions had been reversed.”63 Writing in 1759, Goldsmith offers a similar assessment of the relationship between English works of genius and French translations: “If we have produc’d reasoners who have refin’d mankind, it is by means of French translations and abstracts that they are generally known in Europe.Their language has prevailed, and our philosophy.”64 And, as early as 1673, Bathsua Makin could write, regarding the study of “Tongues” by Englishwomen,“Was all Learning in English, as it is now in French, I think those dead Languages would be of little use, only in reference to the Scriptures.”65 Thus, one can indeed speak of a French-dominated republic of letters in eighteenth-century Europe, a realm in which all sorts of literary works circulated through the medium of the French language. The polite republic of letters may have been conceived of as a multilingual domain, but its francophone sector occupied a position of undoubted centrality—a fact that English-language writers understood as clearly as everyone else and that inevitably colored their perception of their own linguistic medium and their ambitions for it. Such a situation of widespread familiarity with French as a language of culture in eighteenth-century Europe led very easily, as I have suggested, to exaggerated claims about the “universality” of the French language, and to claims about it as the linguistic basis for a homogeneous,“cosmopolitan” republic of letters during the period.The functional, and more so the normative, role of the French language as the “universal” language of culture in eighteenth-century Europe was well recognized; it was maintained and promoted by the practices of courts, academies, salons, periodicals, and individual writers and readers inside and outside of France, who chose to produce and consume works in French. Nonetheless, it is profoundly misleading to analogize French superiority in the eighteenth century with the “universality” of Latin in the seventeenth-century republic of letters. Doing so is only possible if we ignore the conceptual transformation involved in the eighteenth-century view of the republic of letters as a multicultural and multilingual domain. Despite the generally celebratory account of French predominance in the modern republic of letters offered by his compatriots, d’Alembert, in the “Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia” (1751), articulates a much more mixed view of the outcome of the adoption of French in place of Latin as the language of the Encyclopédie and of other scholarship more generally. It is by following his lead that we can produce a more adequate

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account of the problematic of language in the eighteenth-century republic of letters: “Since our language,” d’Alembert writes, was spread throughout all Europe, we decided that it was time to substitute it for Latin, which had been the language of our scholars since the renaissance of letters. . . . However, an inconvenience that we certainly ought to have forseen results from [this practice]. The scholars of other nations for whom we have set the example have rightly thought that they would write still better in their own language than in ours.Thus England has imitated us. Latin, which seemed to have taken refuge in Germany, is gradually losing ground there. I have no doubt that Germany will soon be followed by the Swedes, the Danes, and the Russians.Thus, before the end of the eighteenth century, a philosopher who would like to educate himself thoroughly concerning the discoveries of his predecessors will be required to burden his memory with seven or eight different languages. . . . The use of the Latin language, which we have shown to be ridiculous in matters of taste, is of the greatest service in works of philosophy . . . which urgently require a universal and conventional language. It is therefore to be hoped that this usage will be re-established, yet we have no grounds to hope for it.66

D’Alembert’s sense of the dilemma posed by the vernacularization of the republic of letters—an issue broached by Saavedra and implicit in VigneulMarville’s description—is articulated temporally in relation to a recent past when the French language “was spread throughout all Europe” and thus could substitute for Latin, and a near future when the curse of Babel will be revisited on scholarly Europe. His proposed solution is to reestablish the use of Latin for scholarship, unlike others who were content to advocate a return to the proximate past (or the still lingering present), in which French could claim a kind of (idealized) universality. D’Alembert’s prognostications about the intensified fracturing of the republic of letters were not far from the mark, and they reiterate for us the importance of a problematic of linguistic multiplicity in the French-dominated republic of letters of the eighteenth century. Even the earlier period that d’Alembert views with a kind of nostalgic serenity as the age of the universality of French never, of course, existed as such.The anonymous writer of “A Character of Saint-Evremond” prefixed to a translation of his Miscellaneous Essays published in 1692 puts the situation very well, recognizing both the preeminence and the limits of French in the republic of letters: it is not with the Wits of our Times, how Eminent so ever, as with those who lived under Augustus when the Empire and Language were in some Sence Universal; they properly wrote to the World: the Moderns, even the French


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Authors themselves, write at most but to a Province of the Roman Empire; and if they are known beyond their own Country, and become a Common Benefit to Mankind, it is, in a great measure, owing to their Translators.67

The disappearance of the imperial “universality” of Latinity (which had preserved a kind of afterlife in the erudite republic of letters of the earlier seventeenth century) means that the problematic of language in the polite republic of letters of the eighteenth century involves not the relatively stable contrast between the language of learning and the vernaculars, but a more dynamic rivalry amongst various vernaculars for metropolitan status, a dynamic contest to determine status differentials between “major” and “minor” languages.The older concept of linguistic universality did not disappear overnight, of course: for example, Bayle writes in his Nouvelles de la République des Lettres of November 1685 that “la Langue Françoise est désormais le point de communication de tous les Peuples de l’Europe, & une Langue que l’on pourroit appeller transcendentelle,”68 suggesting that by virtue of its “transcendental” universality and prevalence everywhere the French language has produced a kind of uniform playing field on which “all the peoples of Europe” can interact equally. But a closer examination of this journal and its situation (which I undertake in this and the next section of this chapter) suggests a very different view of the structure and functioning of the European “republic of letters” in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—and hence the need for modern scholars to recognize the radical departure of the eighteenth-century republic of letters from the earlier model of a homogeneous, universal, Latin-based cultural domain. The Nouvelles does foreground the supposed displacement of Latin by French in the republic of letters toward the close of the seventeenth century, but it allows us at the same time to witness the centrality not only of issues of linguistic multiplicity but also of other issues of provinciality and cultural division within the modern republic of letters, especially as these are overdetermined by the geopolitical realities of the European system of states. In the preface to the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, Bayle begins by referring to the prototype of such reviews: On a trouvé si commode & si agréable le dessein de faire sçavoir au Public, par une espece de Journal, ce qui se passe de curieux dans la République des Lettres, qu’aussi-tôt que M. Sallo, Conseiller au Parlement de Paris, eût fait paroître les premiers essais de ce Projet au commencement de l’année 1665, plusieurs Nations en temoignerent leur joye, soit en traduisant le Journal qu’il faisoit imprimer tous les huits jours, soit en publiant quelque chose de semblable. Cette émulation s’est augmentée de plus en plus depuis ce temps-là, de sorte qu’elle s’est étenduë . . . d’une Nation à une autre. (1; original in italics)

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Denis de Sallo’s weekly Journal des Savants ran for only three months ( January to March 1665), until it was suspended by order of the government under Colbert. It was then resumed in January 1666, under new editorship and transformed into an official organ, continuing in existence until 1792 (indeed, after its revival in 1816, down to the present).69 Likewise, Bayle’s own journal was prohibited from sale in France from the start of 1685, though he emphasizes in the preface that “Messieurs de l’Eglise Romaine” need not be alarmed by his journal, and indeed that it can help the censors to decide which books should be prohibited: Nous agirons avec tant de circonspection, qu’apparement ces Nouvelles ne seront pas défenduës, & nous esperons cela d’autant plus, qu’elles serviront à faire connoître si un Livre doit être suspect. De sorte que Messieurs de la Congrégation de l’Indice, soit à Paris, soit ailleurs, n’auront pas besoin de lire beaucoup pour connoître les Livres de contre-bande. (2; italics reversed)

Bayle’s ironic politesse here serves, perhaps, to taunt the censoring authorities, but it also acknowledges the indulgence necessary for the circulation of such a work as his.That is, the phantasmatic republic of letters, existing only as a shadow or a double of the states that made up the European system, was necessarily shaped by the institutional structures of these states. No matter how “circumspect” a publication might be—and Bayle went to considerable lengths in this work to couch his views in ironic or otherwise evasive guise wherever they might seem to impinge on powerful institutions—it always ran the risk of being censored or prosecuted throughout the long eighteenth century in every European state, often more for the educative impact of such a suppression on others than for any threat that the publication in question itself embodied. I suggested earlier that eighteenthcentury writers perceived a close connection between the realm of letters and the world of nations, and the issue of regulatory control of the republic of letters is an important aspect of this connection. The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century ideal image of the republic of letters sometimes depicts an autonomous or an elevated realm that transcends the political terrain of Europe. For instance, in his preface to the letters of Bayle (Amsterdam, 1729), Pierre Desmaizeaux writes that the republic of letters is present as “un État répandu dans tous les États, une République où chaque membre, dans une parfaite indépendance, ne reconnoît d’autres loix que celles qu’il se prescrit à lui-même.”70 This rejection of heteronomy, and anticipation of the Kantian notion that freedom (or independence) consists in obedience to the laws one gives oneself (rather than in simple lawlessness or caprice), expresses a value-ideal but it hardly corresponds to any actually existing state of affairs. Bayle’s acknowledgment that the freedoms to be found in Holland, where he himself found refuge, were


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almost unique testifies to the prevailing conditions of regulation, surveillance, and prosecution under which the republic of letters operated in fact: la République de Hollande. . . . [a] un avantage qui ne se trouve en aucun autre pais; c’est qu’on y accorde aux Imprimeurs une liberté d’une assez grande étenduë, pour faire qu’on s’adresse à eux de tous les endroits de l’Europe, quand on se voit rebuté par les difficultez d’obtenir un Privilege. Assurément si Milton eût vécu dans ces Provinces, il ne se fût pas avisé de faire un Livre de Typographia liberanda; car il n’eût point senti que les choses y fussent dans la servitude à cet égard. . . . Cette honnête liberté de l’Imprimerie est sans doute un avantage très-favorable au dessein de faire un Journal des Sçavans . . . (1; italics reversed)

From this point of view, Holland is the capital of the republic of letters, and perhaps even its only real home, a land of “liberty” where others are realms of “servitude.” At a minimum, one can say that the terrain of the republic of letters is very unevenly developed across Europe, with what Bayle calls “les pais d’Inquisition” representing the opposite extreme to Holland’s relative tolerance (as least of works published in French or Latin rather than Dutch, and hence designed largely for an elite, transnational audience, rather than a local one). The echo here of a religious division between Catholic and Protestant Europe is made explicit by Bayle in his elaboration of these remarks: Nos Presses [dans ces Provinces] sont le refuge des Catholiques aussi-bien que des Réformez, & on craint si peu les Argumens de Messieurs de la Communion de Rome, qu’on laisse vendre publiquement tous leurs Livres, bien loin de faire comme dans les pais d’Inquisition, où . . . on ne souffre pas même que les Controversistes Catholiques soient exposez en vente, tant on a peur des objections qui paroissent dans leurs Ouvrages. (1; original in italics)

The free circulation of works of erudition and serious discussion thus is presented by Bayle as preeminently a “Reformed” virtue, and he drives home his critique of the “Messieurs de l’Eglise Romaine” by suggesting, as an explanation of their reluctance to see works circulate freely: “Il faut qu’ils ayent, ou moins de confiance dans les lumieres du Lecteur que nous, ou plus de défiance de leur cause, que nous la nôtre, ou enfin meilleure opinion de nos Livres, que nous n’en avons de leurs” (2; original in italics). This division of the republic of letters into “us” and “them” betrays a state of affairs quite at variance with idealized assumptions about the norms and functioning of this realm, and suggests a sober recognition of the inextricable involvement of the realm of letters with the sociopolitical terrain and the cultural divisions of the contemporary world.71

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But even if one ignores the irony of Bayle’s invocation of Denis de Sallo as a precursor—and the issues of censorship and sectarian division that revolve around it (undermining any overidealization of the transcendental independence of the republic of letters)—his characterization of the republic of letters in the passage that opens the preface still remains curiously complicated.Thus, even the use of the French language as the medium of the journal serves to mark a boundary as much as it serves to facilitate communication: for most of the actual works reviewed in the journal are written not in French but in Latin. As Henri Basnage de Beauval writes in his Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans for November 1687, the conflict between the Ancients and the Moderns—embodied in the competing claims of the two languages, Latin and French—itself constitutes “une espèce de schisme” in the republic of letters.72 Sallo’s and Bayle’s promotion of erudite journals in the vernacular may have opened up the world of scholarship to a wider audience, but this larger audience was internally fractured between those possessing different kinds of literacy (monolingual and multilingual), those living in metropolitan locations and those residing in the provinces, and those who could chart a free course through the republic and those for whom special accommodations had to be made if they were to be admitted at all within its precincts. All of which served to reinforce the function of the republic of letters as a hierarchical mapping of cultural locations in relation to each other, rather than as some sort of uniform, equal, homogeneous cultural space. The signs of this internal sociolinguistic fracture are evident throughout Bayle’s Nouvelles even though Bayle himself presents Latin as being on its last legs as a language of scholarship, on the verge of being displaced by French. Bayle more than once calls attention to the discrepancy between the language of his journal and the language in which many of the works of erudition he reviews are written: in the issue of August 1685, discussing a Latin dissertation on whether or not the Amazons existed, and in particular the motivations that induce men, in the present day, to insure that male and female children do not receive the same education, Bayle comments: “Je n’aurois pas tiré ces remarques de son Latin, si je n’avois considéré qu’il est important au beau sexe, qu’il sçache ce que l’on publie contre luy” (341). Women, in other words, remain only marginal members of the republic of letters, for whom special accommodations need to be made, since they lacked, barring a few exceptions, any extended education in Latin.The system of culture might well have been shifting toward a vernacular-dominated structure, but much of the past—including such elusive realms as the “République des Amazones”—comprised an insulated “Latine republike” (as Sir Thomas Browne terms it), which remained accessible only to those who were fully franchised members of the republic of letters.73


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Similarly, in the issue of September 1685, at the end of an article on a Traité de l’Excellence du Mariage . . . Où l’on fait l’Apologie des femmes contre les calomnies des hommes (Paris, 1685), Bayle inserts this notice for his readers: Quelques personnes ayant fait connoître que ceux qui ne savent pas le Latin, sont fâchez de ne pas entendre le titre de tous les Livres dont nous parlons, parce que cela les engage souvent à passer plusieurs articles qu’ils liroient peut-être, s’ils voyoient d’abord de quoi il s’agit, nous mettrons desormais à la fin des titres Latins, une explication qui les fera connoître suffisamment. (366; original in italics)

In saying this, Bayle was in fact adverting to a practice that he had followed generally, if not entirely regularly, from the start of the Nouvelles. Nonetheless, the remark alerts us to the radical division of his readership into two groups—the “mere” French readers, on the one hand, and the lettered, bilingual or multilingual, readers on the other hand, a division that is crucial throughout the eighteenth century inasmuch as it marks the boundaries of a “national” reading-formation distinct from a properly European realm of letters, and of a second-rank readership from that which has acquired full citizenship in any version of the realm of letters.Thus, while the vernacularization of the republic of letters marks a certain broadening of participation in it, this does not take the form of an equable “democratization” of the realm but the construction of a new hierarchy of differential literacies. Despite its geographical diffusion among European elites in the eighteenth century, French could never function as the “Latin of the moderns” because it remained inscribed within an apparatus of languages in which elite literacy required literacy in both French and Latin. Linguistic multiplicity and multilingual literacy (in the leading modern vernaculars and Latin, as well as in one’s own mother tongue) now became defining features of the domain of literature and learning, in contrast to an earlier (neo-Latin) era in which such literature and learning was ostensibly sustained in a single,“universal” tongue. Language, education, religion, gender, censorship all serve to fracture the supposed unity of the republic of letters, articulating it instead as a hierarchical structure of cultural locations in which English-language writers, like their European peers, are embedded. The fact that English-language writers of polite letters take the republic of letters as their proper arena of participation thus confronts them with multiple issues of centrality and marginality within this realm, and this multiplicity only underlines the issues of provinciality posed by the manifest secondariness of their own linguistic sphere in this context. Given the importance of issues of provinciality within the eighteenthcentury republic of letters, it is important that we examine more closely its

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normative ideal of unboundedness and inclusivity, and ask ourselves what the significance of this ideal is: is it best understood as a mystificatory idealization? as a utopian critique of existing sociocultural formations and their erection of fixed boundaries? What kind of historical “reality” can one ascribe to value-ideals such as the one at issue? and what does it mean to confront such an ideal with historical “realities” (such as the exclusions and marginalizations I have been discussing in this section)? To attempt to answer these questions fully would take us too far afield; I raise them here only to serve as a caution against assuming that we know all too well how to handle the question of “idealism” in the field of cultural history. In what follows, I narrow the issue of the boundaries of the republic of letters by posing it in relation to the question of its Europeanness, in order to bring out one final issue that has been implicit in much of the discussion in this chapter: the link between the eighteenth-century concepts of “the republic of letters” and of “the public,” and the implications this raises (like the “exorbitant” address of English-language writers and the problematic of provinciality) for our tendency to think of early modern literary culture in insularly national terms. The Republic of Letters and (National) Public Spheres In speaking of a “European” republic of letters I have been using the term descriptively, but one might question what the status of this “Europeanness” is in normative terms. This is an issue that presses in two directions: on the one hand, what is the status of a “European” republic of letters visà-vis distinct national arenas; on the other hand, what is its status vis-à-vis an extra-European horizon? I argue that as a normative construct, the Enlightenment republic of letters is conceived of as necessarily transnational in form and singular in number, articulating a cosmopolitan universality open to all peoples (men and women alike) within and beyond Europe. This republic of letters is, as we have seen, internally stratified in terms of various kinds of provinciality and marginality; but what is essential to the idea of the republic of letters is its multilingual, multicultural extension, not any particular internal hierarchization. For Enlightenment thinkers, whether Bayle at one end of the century or Kant at the other, the exercise of reason in public discourse and debate always takes as its normative horizon a cosmopolitan realm of discussion and interchange, and indeed ideally a global or universal realm. Already in 1690, in his essay “Of Heroic Virtue,” Sir William Temple was drawing attention to the narrow conception of human history and humanity enforced by traditional learning, with its focus on the “four great monarchies” of the ancient world (Egypt, Greece, Persia, and Rome):“if we


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consider the map of the world, as it lies at present before us, since the discoveries made by the navigations of these three last centuries, we shall easily find what vast regions there are which have been left out of that ancient scene on all sides.”74 Temple complains that writers on politics and ethics have deduced “the very common laws of nature and of nations” (322) from the evidence provided by these “four great empires” (316)— “Yet the stage of all these empires . . . is but a limited compass of earth, that leaves out many vast regions of the world, the which, though accounted barbarous, and little taken notice of in story [i.e., history], or by any celebrated authors, yet have a right to come in for their voice, in agreeing upon the laws of nature and nations (for aught I know) as well as the rest, that have arrogated it wholly to themselves” (322).The concept of the “law of nature and nations,” like that of the republic of letters, entails, as Temple recognizes, that all the peoples of the earth “have a right to come in for their voice,” however much the proponents of these concepts may have failed to honor this demand. Nor was Temple singular in his emphasis on a wider conception of humanity than one based narrowly on Europe or Christendom. In his Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature, as we have seen earlier in this chapter, Vigneul-Marville writes that the republic of letters “extends over the whole world and is composed of people of all nations, of all statuses, of all ages, and of each sex. . . . every sort of language, ancient and modern, is spoken there.” In his Discourse on Method (1637; Latin translation 1644), Descartes begins by asserting the equal rationality of all humans (“what is called Good sense or Reason, is by nature equal in all men. . . . the diversity of our opinions does not proceed from some men being more rational than others, but solely from the fact that our thoughts pass through diverse channels and the same objects are not considered by all”) and goes on to assert that he felt obliged to make public his views on the principles of physics: “I believed that I could not keep them concealed without greatly sinning against the law which obliges us to procure, as much as in us lies, the general good of all mankind.”75 Leibniz, in his preface to the Novissima Sinica (1697), ignores the western hemisphere but nonetheless presents what is clearly meant to be an image of universal progress in enlightenment: I consider it a singular plan of the fates that human cultivation and refinement should today be concentrated, as it were, in the two extremes of our continent, in Europe and in Tschina (as they call it) [i.e., China], which adorns the Orient as Europe does the opposite edge of the earth. Perhaps Supreme Providence has ordained such an arrangement, so that as the most cultivated and distant peoples stretch out their arms to each other, those in between may gradually be brought to a better way of life.76

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The early Enlightenment, the era of the “crisis of European conscience” (as Paul Hazard has termed it), involved, then, a move beyond not only national, but also European, parochialism.This globalizing intellectual horizon is fundamental to the normative conception of the republic of letters in the eighteenth century, however much authors may treat this formation historically and empirically as European in scope: when they reflect on the issue they are conscious, like Sir William Temple, of the gap between the universality demanded by the concept and the Eurocentrism evident in the practice. At the other end of the period we are concerned with we see a continuing emphasis on a transnational, and tendentially global, horizon. James Beattie, in his Elements of Moral Science (1790), underlines the reach across different times and places made possible by the written (and printed) circulation that undergirds the republic of letters: “By means of writing, human thoughts may be made more durable than any other work of man; may be circulated in all nations; and may be so corrected, compared, and compounded, as to exhibit . . . the accumulated wisdom of many ages.”77 John Gilchrist emphasizes this global scope when he invokes “the republic of letters at large” and “the literati of all countries” in The Oriental Linguist (1798).78 Kant’s explicit formulations of this cosmopolitan principle occur in several places: for instance, in his writings on education, in which he states that “children ought to be educated not for the present, but for a possibly improved condition of man in the future; that is, in a manner which is adapted to the idea of humanity and the whole destiny of man.This principle is of great importance. . . . the basis of a scheme of education must be cosmopolitan”;79 in his writings on politics, in which he argues that “The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is subordinate to the problem of a law-governed external relationship with other states, and cannot be solved unless the latter is also solved”;80 and in his writings on Enlightenment, in which he argues that “a congregation, however large it is, is never any more than a domestic gathering,” contrasting it with the situation of “a scholar addressing the real public (i.e. the world at large) through his writings.”81 In all these cases we are right, I think, to take the authors at their word and to understand the republic of letters as normatively global in scope. It is intimately linked, in other words, with the notion of what Samuel Johnson calls, in 1750 in one of the Rambler essays, “the great republick of humanity,” what Mary Wollstonecraft refers to as “the common relationship that binds the whole family on earth together,” and what Thomas Jefferson names, in a letter of 1809, “a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth.”82 And this conception of the global scope of the republic of letters stands behind the language of William Wordsworth when he declares, in the preface (1802) to the Lyrical Ballads, that, “In spite of difference of soil and


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climate, or language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things silently gone out of mind and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.”83 What is most important for our purposes is that the modern notion of “the public” develops in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in relation to and under the shadow of this transnational notion of a republic of letters. The two notions are not fully synonymous, of course, but neither are they completely separable from each other. When Adam Smith, in his essay of 1756, speaks of the “improvements and observations” which “the academies in the different parts of Europe” have “communicated to the public,”84 it is clear that this “public” is transnational in scope. An indication of the relationship between the notions of the “the public” and “the republic of letters” is even more directly apparent in one of the notes to William Julius Mickle’s 1776 translation of Camoens’s The Lusiads, in which Mickle writes: The writers who have treated of the mission of [St. Francis] Xavier, relate, that there is extant in India the writings of a Malabar poet, who wrote nine hundred epigrams, each consisting of eight verses, in ridicule of the worship of the Brahmins, whom he treats with great asperity and contempt. Would any of our diligent enquirers after oriental learning favour the Public with an authentic account of the works of this poet of Malabar, he would undoubtedly confer a singular favour on the republic of letters.85

For Mickle,“the Public” and “the republic of letters” are clearly coordinate notions, and if the republic of letters is a transnational formation so is the public. Similarly, when George Douglas titles a work in 1810, An appeal to the republic of letters, in behalf of injured science, from the opinions and proceedings of some modern authors of elements of geometry, he might equally have addressed it as “An appeal to the public . . .”: in this instance, the two notions are not only coordinate, but almost synonymous. A similar suggestion of synonymy is evident in various translations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Paul Dibon notes that Descartes uses the French term le public thirteen times in the Discours de la Méthode; to render this term, the Latin translator generally uses the neuter noun publicum or the adjective publicus, Dibon tells us, but he twice uses the phrase Respublica litteraria and once the term respublica,86 indicating the way in which the notions of “the public” and the “republic of letters” were mutually implicated.We can see the same process of mutual conceptual interference taking place in the mid-eighteenth century. Edward Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) was translated by Pierre Le Tourneur in Oeuvres Diverses

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du Docteur Young (1770).87 Young’s English text uses the phrase “the republic of letters” only once (“Originals are, and ought to be, great favorites, for they are great benefactors; they extend the republic of letters, and add a new province to its dominion” [45]), but employs as near synonyms the phrases “the learned world” (47), “the lettered world” (51, 54), and “the intellectual world” (61); likewise,Young on occasion thinks of works as presented to “the public” (53, 72), but more generally he prefers to think of them as presented to “the world” (which operates, in this context, sometimes as an abbreviated form of “the learned world” or “the intellectual world” and sometimes simply as a reference to the world at large) (63, 70). Le Tourneur sets up his own range of synonyms: he uses “la république des lettres” (240, 242, 248) to translate both “the republic of letters” and “the learned world,” as well as using “le monde littéraire” (265, 279),“le monde lettré” (268), and “le monde intellectuel” (315) as near synonyms. He translates both “the public” and “the world” as “le public” (275, 288, 290, 345, 356) tending to equate it, as does Young, with the supranational audience of the republic of letters.This implication is clearest toward the end of the work where Young celebrates Addison the Christian (whose deathbed scene Young has just disclosed) as even more glorious than Addison the man of letters.Young writes: If powers were not wanting, a monument more durable than those of marble should proudly rise in this ambitious page, to the new and far nobler Addison than that which you and the public have so long and so much admired. Nor this nation only; for it is Europe’s Addison, as well as ours; though Europe knows not half his title to her esteem; being as yet unconscious that the dying Addison far outshines her Addison immortal. (72)

Le Tourneur translates this climactic passage as follows: Ah! si mes forces ne m’avoient pas abandonné, j’éleverais ici un monument plus durable que le marbre à ce nouvel Adisson bien plus grand, que l’Adisson qu’ont admiré jusqu’ici l’Angleterre & les Nations étrangéres [sic]; car Adisson appartient autant à l’Europe qu’à sa Patrie. L’Europe chrétienne ne connoissoit pas tous les droits qu’il avoit à son estime; elle ne savoit pas combien Adisson mourant, est supérieur à l’Adisson qu’elle a nommé l’immortel. (358–59)

Where Young speaks of the Addison that “you [i.e., Samuel Richardson, to whom the Conjectures are addressed] and the public” have admired, Le Tourneur speaks of the “Adisson” who has been admired by “l’Angleterre & les Nations étrangéres,” thus underlining the extent to which in the era of the republic of letters, the “public” for literature is understood not exclusively in national terms but as a European ensemble.Young’s clarification


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that “the public” that has admired Addison consists not of “this nation only” but rather constitutes a European public nicely exposes the distortion that enters into our mapping of the literary sphere if we too readily assimilate “the (international) public” as it figures in relation to the realm of letters with “the (national) public” as it figures in relation to the domestic political arena. Yet, in contrast to the transnational or cosmopolitan concept of the republic of letters, the notion of the “public sphere” as elaborated by Jürgen Habermas (and as deployed by numerous other contemporary cultural critics) is situated within the framework of a given “state and civil society”— by definition, an individual, particularized state-and-civil-society nexus, thus serving to “nationalize” the notion of a public sphere of letters.88 Habermas speaks of the “political public sphere” as emerging out of the “literary public sphere” as though these two formations operated with an essentially comparable notion of “the public,” whereas, as we have seen, the scope (and hence the character) of the public as understood in the realm of letters is quite different from the national public sphere in the realm of politics. No doubt, the two notions of the public produce a kind of “interference,” each for the other, and, over time, the political delimitation of the public may come to dominate any relatively autonomous literary determination of a public, but this still involves a certain distortion of the notion of the public as it had been (and to some extent continued to be) conceived in the literary culture of the period. The notion of the public sphere that Habermas holds up as a kind of regulative ideal figures for Enlightenment thinkers in general (not only for litterateurs) as the degeneration of a cosmopolitan ideal into a series of very uneven and somewhat disjointed national developments across the face of Europe, frequently also deployed in antagonistic and competitive relations with each other. Having himself abandoned the normative universality of the public sphere, Habermas can speak of various kinds of public spheres and publics in relation to his fourfold sociological division of society into (i) the Intimsphäre of the family, (ii) the “private sphere” of civil society, (iii) the “public sphere” of communicative rationality, and (iv) the “public sphere” of the state. This model allows for a certain fluidity in its recognition of different kinds of “publicness” (of the family sphere vis-à-vis the “novel privacy” of individuals; of civil society vis-à-vis the sphere of the family; of the “public sphere” vis-àvis civil society; of the state vis-à-vis the “public sphere”), although it constantly risks (both in Habermas’s own discussion and in its reception by others) being reduced to a binary distinction between a “public” and a “private” sphere, or at best a tripartite distinction between civil society, the “public sphere,” and the state. In any case, with regard to the early modern period, Habermas manages to speak descriptively of a liberal public sphere

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and a plebeian public sphere (xviii); a literary public sphere and a political public sphere (29); as well as a variety of “publics”—a reading public, a theater-going public, a concert-going public, a fine arts public (38–39), each of these presumably being a particular public within a given society. But this historical-descriptive account sits oddly with Habermas’s simultaneous desire to focus attention on the normative and conceptual implications of the notion of the public and the public sphere. Habermas does, in fact, devote one chapter to “Kant’s elaboration of the principle of publicity” (102) and acknowledges Kant’s emphasis on a global horizon.Yet Habermas never directly addresses the dissonance between his own elaboration of the regulative ideal associated with the public sphere and Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal. One might argue that Habermas is interested ultimately in what he calls the “political public sphere,” as distinguished from the “literary public sphere,” and that it is only the literary formation that corresponds closely to Kant’s cosmopolitan emphasis. But such an argument ignores the fact that a cosmopolitan horizon is crucial for Kant precisely because he wishes to articulate a notion of “world citizenship” as a political category. For our purposes, what is most important about Habermas’s way of reframing the notion of the public is that it eliminates, or at least obscures, the politics of language and the issues of provinciality that are central to the conception and the historical development of the European republic of letters. Thus, unlike many recent critics of Habermas, my complaint is not that he overidealizes the civic public sphere, but instead that he does not take the normative universality of the public seriously enough, and is content to inscribe it within the domestic boundaries of existing polities, thus radically simplifying the problematic of cultural difference that the notion engages. This feature of Habermas’s analysis has also been criticized recently by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein: “Jürgen Habermas, who first drew attention to the emergence of a neutral space dedicated to rational criticism, seems to have envisaged the new arena as being contained within each separate dynastic state. But the emergent public sphere also had extraterritorial aspects which need to be explored.”89 The historical considerations that Eisenstein raises are certainly important, but even more crucial, in my view, for Habermas’s argument, and any other constructed along similar lines, is the normative conceptualization of the public sphere within a global horizon—a posited conceptual horizon that far exceeds, as we have seen in our discussion of the French-dominated republic of letters, the actual historical development of the “extraterritorial aspects” of the emergent public sphere. A global or universal horizon is designed to bring critical scrutiny to bear on the selfauthorizing complacency of publics.The Enlightenment concept of the public sphere not only subjects the state to public scrutiny and accountability,


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but furthermore subjects this (national) public itself to scrutiny and critique from the point of view of humanity at large. Habermas interprets the public sphere as part of a liberal problematic focused on the relations between the state and civil society; in my view, the Enlightenment ideal exceeds such a designation, and contains resources for a critique of liberal publics as well as authoritarian states.90 This normative investment of the notion of a realm of letters in a global horizon makes unavoidable the problematic of linguistic multiplicity and the partial imbrication of linguistic–cultural spheres: it makes unavoidable the issue of the relationships among the various language and cultural spheres and, consequently, it renders inescapable issues of relative standing, of metropolitan and provincial status. Eisenstein herself speaks of two distinct literary republics in the world of eighteenth-century Europe: a continental francophone republic of letters and a transatlantic anglophone republic of letters. But this suggests too categorical a demarcation. First, French-language journals circulated not only on the continent but also made their way into the “New World”;91 moreover, in the eighteenth century, French-language journals also originated and were being published in places like Boston, Cap-Français (SaintDomingue), Guadeloupe, Montréal, New Orleans, Newport (Rhode Island), Philadelphia, Québec, Saint-Pierre (Martinique), so that the francophone republic of letters is not merely “European” as distinct from “transatlantic.” Second, in many respects Britain and her colonies (which seem to comprise Eisenstein’s transatlantic republic) form what one might call an “imperial public sphere” rather than a cosmopolitan “republic of letters” (which necessarily constructs a form of “citizenship” quite distinct from, though not necessarily antagonistic to, the civic-patriotic citizenship entailed by the system of states). If these regions form an anglophone republic of letters, it is a literary republic that bears a very different relation to existing political structures than does the francophone republic of letters. But, most importantly, there are normative reasons, as I have suggested previously, why the republic of letters needs to be conceived of as singular in number (and universal in scope); a purely “descriptive” usage of the term to refer to a multiplicity of literary republics transforms the concept radically and divests it of the critical normativity that it otherwise expresses and that is its essential trait. Instead of speaking of multiple republics of letters in the European (or Atlantic) world, I think it is more accurate to inscribe the problematic of language within the singular concept of the republic of letters, and to attend to the external boundaries and internal hierarchies of this republic. The European republic of letters undergoes a process of transformation across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not a process of multiplication. It remains singular in number, but it is no longer monolingual in

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form; rather, it is articulated through a multilingual apparatus of languages, an apparatus in which the French language occupies the dominant position. Using the idiom elaborated by Raymond Williams, one might speak of residual, dominant, and emergent dimensions of the republic of letters as a way of describing the interrelationships between Latin, French, and English respectively in this apparatus of languages. What is essential to remember is (as we saw at the start of this chapter) that in the long eighteenth century the republic of letters is not conceived of as a domain with a single, common, homogeneous culture, but rather as a domain encompassing multiple cultures, languages, peoples.What the notion of the republic of letters proposes is not the simple victory of one standard of civility, but an ideal of intercommunication across cultural differences—an intercommunication that takes place in a world of constant (if generally slow and subtle) realignments of cultural centrality. We can catch a glimpse of this flux in the status of cultural spheres within the republic of letters in the history of the Journal des savants (est. 1665), a periodical conducted in French that begins to review Englishlanguage works from about 1702 and that ceases (as was previously noted) to review works written in Latin in the 1750s.Throughout the period we are concerned with, the European republic of letters remains dominantly francophone, but there are constant adjustments of cultural positionality taking place through the internal articulation of its apparatus of languages, and through the reconfiguration of its constituencies.This means that there is a complex politics of culture produced in and through the republic of letters: not merely an “opposition” between the realm of letters and the structure of European politics, but a cultural politics inextricable from the discrepancies between the normative ideal of the cosmopolitan republic of letters and the fractured literary public spheres that delimit the terrain of cultural production in eighteenth-century Europe. Issues of cultural power structure the realm of letters just as issues of geopolitical power structure that of polities, as we saw in the discussion of Bilderdijk in chapter 1. As an ideal, the republic of letters both acknowledges the existence of a multiplicity of languages and their attendant cultural spheres, and insists on the inadequacy of any one of them as a self-sufficient whole. It forces upon us, in other words, a consciousness of the positionality of any one cultural sphere, its place and standing within a larger cultural ensemble. Such a consciousness, I have been arguing, is very marked in the eighteenth-century literary world, and in the English-language sphere it entails a consciousness of (and active desire to negate) cultural provinciality. On the one hand, there are clearly nodes of dissemination (such as Paris or the cities of the United Provinces) that extend their influence across national boundaries, and, on the other hand, locations (geographical and social) where it is


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incommodious for potential readers (e.g., women or “provincials”) to gain access to certain books, or more fundamentally, to the educational training and social standing that would allow them to be full participants in the republic of letters. One aspect of this discrepancy between a metropolitan and a provincial location and “identity” is discussed by Bayle in the Nouvelles for June 1685 in a review of a volume on the “patavinitas” of Livy, that is, on the question of provincialisms in the language of this writer who is a native not of Rome itself but of Patavium (Padua). Bayle rehearses the author’s discussion of various conjectures regarding “ce que c’étoit que cette Patavinité, qu’Asinius Pollio trouvoit dans l’Histoire de Tite-Live” (304), until he comes to Rapin’s view that “Asinius Pollio ne blâmoit dans Tite-Live, qu’une mauvaise prononciation qui choquoit les Courtisans élevez à la délicatesse de la Cour d’Auguste, & sentoit un peu la Province” (305).92 Bayle treats this as a perfectly commonplace attitude, with nothing particularly malicious about it, by reference to the contemporary attitudes of Parisians: il est vrai qu’il se trouve des Parisiens fort habiles & fort équitables, qui trouvent presque dans tous les Auteurs Provinciaux je ne sai quel tour de phrase, & comme une espece de goût de terroir qui ne les accommode pas. Ils avouëront qu’à tout prendre ces Provinciaux écrivent bien, & plus éloquemment quelquefois que ceux qui ont été toûjours dans la Capitale; mais enfin ce je ne sai quoi qui est un reste de la Province revient toûjours. (305)93

This allusion to Parisian attitudes should remind us that while French may have been the language of culture through much of Europe in the eighteenth century, many regions of France itself continued to speak “des patois” and were not fully subordinated to the dialect of the capital until well after the era of the program to impose Parisian French on all the regions of the country undertaken in the wake of the French Revolution. Bayle, himself a provincial from the south of France and now an exile whose own writing in French is, apparently, sometimes marked by “gasconnismes,”94 remarks toward the end of this review on the role of provincial authors in the refinement of languages: l’Auteur remarque fort judicieusement, que les Romains étoient coupables d’une espece d’ingratitude lors qu’ils parloient des Provinciaux avec mépris, car de tant d’habiles Ecrivains qui nous restent, & qui ont tant contribué à perfectionner la Langue Latine, à peine s’en trouve-t-il trois qui soient nez à Rome; Lucrece,Varron, & Cesar.Tous les autres sont venus ou d’Espagne, ou de quelque Province d’Italie, & il est certain que plusieurs d’entr’eux ont le stile incomparablement plus beau que Varron & que Lucrece. Un Auteur François avoit déja fait cette remarque l’an 1678. & y avoit ajoûté qu’à cet

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égard Paris est bien plus heureux, & bien plus glorieux que Rome. Cela n’empêche point que Malherbe & M. de Balzac, deux Provinciaux, ne soient ceux qui ont heureusement commencé à bien polir la Langue Françoise. M. de Vaugelas autre Provincial y a eu sa bonne part. (306)

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the role of provincial authors in the corruption or refinement of a given language, it is clear that a distinction between “ce qu’on appelloit urbanité dans le langage” and “le stile étranger & Provincial” (306) was a major part of early modern perceptions of the literary field (and of language-use more generally), and that the “mépris” of the metropolitan speech-community for provincialisms was a significant aspect of the hierarchical structuring of the republic of letters.95 We catch a further glimpse of how the notion of “provinciality” condenses social and linguistic–cultural hierarchies, bringing the republic of letters into a kind of alignment with the sociopolitical world, in David Garrick’s response to Henry Jones (1721–70), the Irish bricklayer and poet patronized by Lord Chesterfield. Writing in 1755 to the Marquis of Hartington, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Garrick comments:“Mr Jones ye Famous Irish Bricklayer & Poet sent me an Ode from Dublin to present to yr Excellency. there was such an Irishism in the proposal, that I have desir’d to be Excus’d, & I don’t doubt but by this Time You have seen & felt the Trowel & Mortar.”96 In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Ben Jonson may have been able to live down his own humble beginnings as a bricklayer and soldier, but by the mid-eighteenth century the category of “uneducated poet” was well established, and compounded by Jones’s Irishness, there was no escaping his provinciality in the eyes of someone like Garrick, firmly ensconced in the London literary world and the larger republic of letters. Far from being a relatively uniform and “open” field of participation for all, then, the republic of letters was informed by a set of value-norms and institutions that established a structured hierarchy of “metropoles” and “peripheries,” not to mention the vast wild and barbaric tracts that lay beyond the borders of this republic. Earlier in this chapter, we saw that the republic of letters is in fact marked by a hierarchical ordering of centers and peripheries; here, we can say further that by virtue of its investment in a value-ideal of “urbanity” the republic of letters is also in idea invested in a cultural hierarchy of metropolitan and provincial standing. The issue of provinciality acquires an undeniable importance in the workings of the republic of letters precisely because of the republic’s unbounded scope. By contrast, in more parochially defined cultural spaces, it is possible to imagine (at least) a kind of abstract equality. Thus, for instance, following Habermas, Terry Eagleton has argued that the literary public sphere


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established an ideal sociality, one in which the hierarchical distinctions of the actual society were temporarily “suspended”: The sphere of cultural discourse and the realm of social power are closely related but not homologous: the former cuts across the latter and suspends the distinctions of the latter, deconstructing and reconstituting it in a new form, temporarily transposing its “vertical” gradations onto a “horizontal” plane.97

Eagleton’s sense that the distinctions that serve to produce the hierarchical structure of the social order are not immediately operative in “the sphere of cultural discourse” is unobjectionable; however, the realm of letters operates with its own structured hierarchy of value and recognition, and with its own barriers to full accessibility for various social groups. As such, the realm of letters does not “deconstruct” or “suspend” the hierarchical distinctions of the social world; rather, it complicates them.98 This allows for the emergence of novel solidarities, novel groupings (based, e.g., on affinities of taste, connoisseurship, learning) that do not entirely reproduce the ordering of groups in the social hierarchy, but that nonetheless are not entirely independent of features of the social identities and the social world of the persons concerned. For example, when Bayle died in 1706, his will ought to have been invalid in France since he was a Huguenot emigrant, but the French authorities, by decree of the parliament of Toulouse, chose to honor it nonetheless on the basis of his standing in the republic of letters: Le parlement de Toulouse lui a fait un honneur unique, en déclarant valide son testament, qui, suivant la rigueur de la loi, devait être annulé, comme fait par un réfugié. Les héritiers ab intestat réclamaient en leur faveur les édits contre les réformés; mais la grande chambre crut devoir céder à l’avis de Senaux, l’un des juges, qui représenta “que les savans étaient de tous les pays; qu’il ne fallait pas regarder comme fugitif celui que l’amour des lettres avait appelé en d’autres contrées; qu’il était indigne de traiter d’étranger celui que la France se glorifiat d’avoir produit.”99

Following this same logic and citing this precedent,Voltaire, in his Siècle de Louis XIV, includes Bayle, although a refugee in Holland, amongst the writers who bring honor to the age of Louis le Grand.We see here that the republic of letters generates its own hierarchy of value, but it is very clearly a hierarchy, and it is effective in the system of states only because it is not entirely divorced from the social realities of that system. If, to take another instance, a division between the leisured and the laboring classes is fundamental to the terrain of early modern social life, there is a reinscription (and partial transformation) of this division in the distinction between mental

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and physical labor—a distinction embodied in the status of literary work (which Isaac D’Israeli refers to as “the labor absqae labore,‘the labour devoid of labour,’ ” quoting “the inscription on the library of Florence . . . describ[ing] the researches of literature”),100 and in the distinction Dr. Johnson invokes in his characterization of his native town of Lichfield as “a city of philosophers: we work with our heads, and make the boobies of Birmingham work for us with their hands.”101 There are, then, two kinds of value-norms associated with the eighteenthcentury republic of letters: one is a norm of universality, the other a norm of “urbanity” (non-provinciality).The first norm, by invoking an ideal audience that always exceeds any given audience, contests the nationalist and majoritarian complacencies of actual, historical publics. The second norm reinflects, and in some respects exacerbates, social divisions by “refracting” them on the cultural terrain. Neither norm can be simply equated with the actual historical-empirical operation of the eighteenth-century republic of letters, but by the same token they both need to be recognized as part of the historical reality of that cultural formation (i.e., the normative force of the republic of letters is as much a part of its historical reality as are its more exclusively empirical features). With regard to the eighteenth-century republic of letters, I have emphasized a number of themes that have not received the attention they deserve: the centrality of a problematic of language and nation in this cultural formation emerging from its conceptualization as a domain encompassing multiple languages and cultures; the fundamentally secondary place of the English-language literary world in this republic of letters across the long eighteenth century and the negotiation of this fact in the works of Englishlanguage writers; the centrality of issues of provinciality in the ordering of the realm of letters; and the critical leverage of the concept of the republic of letters (implying as it does an unbounded and normatively global sphere of cultural interchange) vis-à-vis the parochialisms and complacencies of individual cultures and societies. In all these respects, the notion of the republic of letters does not stand opposed to the notion of distinctive national or regional cultures, nor does it simply require the abandonment of a commitment to one’s local culture.The notion of the republic of letters implies a kind of multicultural awareness, but not a cosmopolitanism (if one understands this to mean an outlook that transcends national divisions and specificities). Indeed, “nationality” is a third value-norm operating in the field of culture in the long eighteenth century, a norm that is especially marked in the English-language literary sphere. Thus, although students of the republic of letters—like critics of Habermas—have focused almost exclusively on the conflict between the “ideal” and the “reality” of the republic of letters, there seem to me to be a plurality of value-norms


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operating in the field of culture in the eighteenth century, a plurality that creates its own complications and tensions that have not been adequately explored.When an author expresses a special obligation to his or her own compatriots, for instance, it is not simply a case of failure to live up to a cosmopolitan ideal; rather, it is evidence of a competing ideal of literature(s) and taste(s) as national in form. Such national inflections are not seen only or even primarily as deformations of the cultural terrain but as positive values in their own right, as I show in chapter 3. Even within the conceptuality of the republic of letters and “neoclassical” poetics, as we shall see, the recognition of national cultural differences and the assertion of national identity function as positive values in English-language literary culture across the long eighteenth century. While the notion of the republic of letters hardly cancels out nationally specific and nationalistic literary investments, it does contextualize each national literary culture in a wider transnational field that is structured in terms of a hierarchy of metropolitan urbanity versus provincial rusticity. Eighteenth-century English-language writers are everywhere conscious of such a hierarchy, as much prior scholarship on “polite,”“refined,”“enlightened,” “neoclassical” British culture has shown. But because such scholarship has tended to localize the distinctions at issue here within the domestic context of Britain, as played out in such works as Pope’s Dunciad, it has failed to appreciate the pressure this cultural hierarchy exerted on the selfunderstanding of all English-language writers as products of a cultural sphere traditionally perceived as marginal, provincial, even barbaric. The intensity with which “polite” writers assert their cultural distinction from Grubstreet hacks within the domestic arena has much to do with the insecurities of their ambition to claim metropolitan status within the wider republic of letters. English-language writers of the long eighteenth century understood their inherited status as a minor tradition, but in response to this situation they articulate an assertively nationalistic literary ethos and latched onto the possibility of metropolitan cultural aggrandizement opened up by the rising geopolitical standing of the British polity. The desire for cultural distinction—the forceful effort to overcome the marginality of the past—fed both a nativist (insularly nationalist) and an imperialist current in eighteenth-century English-language literary culture. The complex intersections that result from these two outlooks provide the matrix within which the notion of an English-language literary tradition acquires its modern shape, and help explain why this tradition, while national in form, remains crucially invested in its extraterritorial and imperial dimensions since these are the tokens by which it lays claim to a non-provincial standing within the republic of letters.


CHAPTER 3 NATIONAL DIFFERENCES AND NATIONAL AUTONOMY

n The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon distinguishes between the structure of the Roman Empire—forming “one great nation, united by language, manners, and civil institutions”— and the structure of the modern “republic” of Europe, as he styles it, which emerged from the European Christendom of the Middle Ages.1 The strength of this modern European formation was based, in Gibbon’s view, not on unity and homogeneity of “language, manners, and . . . institutions,” but on national diversity and competition: he comments that, “On the revival of letters, . . . national emulation, a new religion, new languages, and a new world, called forth the genius of Europe” (1:84). Gibbon’s understanding of the modern European republic of states, and the republic of letters that forms its cultural double, is consonant with the views of other writers discussed in chapter 2. As we saw in that chapter, the notion of the republic of letters, as part of its transnational orientation, constantly calls attention to the diversity of multiple national literary traditions and to the related dynamic of “national emulation.” For Gibbon, “the genius of Europe” emerges out of the competition of nations, religions, languages; and, likewise, the eighteenth-century republic of letters gains its coherence not from a shared culture but from a dynamic of national competition. As Gibbon’s comments suggest, notions of national cultural particularity are not only embedded in the broad concept of the republic of letters, but are also far more pervasive in eighteenth-century European culture and are seen to apply to many particular fields of cultural practice. In his fragmentary “Relation de l’état présent de la République des Lettres” (1675?), Leibniz writes, “Ie remarqve qve chaqve pais a une certaine maniere d’erudition qvi ne sera pas estimée autre part,”2 thus suggesting that cultural particularities and national differences apply in the ostensibly “objective” field of erudition and scholarship, and lead to diverse criteria of

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value in each country. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, moreover, national differences and national investments fissure even the terrain of modern science, that most “universalist” of cognitive paradigms, especially in the debate between French (Cartesian) and English (Newtonian) science. In his Letters concerning the English Nation (1733), Voltaire writes: A Frenchman, who arrives in London, will find philosophy like every thing else very much changed there. He had left the world a plenum, and he now finds it a vacuum. At Paris the universe is seen composed of vortices of subtile matter; but nothing like it is seen in London. . . . The very essence of things is totally changed.You neither are agreed upon the definition of the soul, nor on that of matter. . . . How furiously contradictory are these opinions! Non nostrum inter vos tantas componere lites. Virg. Eclog. 3. ’Tis not for us to end such great disputes.3

Later, in this same chapter of the Letters concerning the English Nation,Voltaire notes the outrage caused in England by Fontenelle’s Eulogy of Newton: “M. de Fontenelle presides as judge over philosophers; and the English expected his decision, as a solemn declaration of the superiority of the English philosophy over that of the French. But when it was found that this gentleman had compared Des Cartes to Sir Isaac, the whole Royal society in London rose up in arms” (85), and likewise,Voltaire’s own championing of Newton’s science would raise heated opposition in France.This conflict between “English natural science” and its “French” competitor recalls, in some respects, the politicized conflict in the 1930s between “Soviet” and “Western” science, and the parallel should alert us to how extensive and intense the field of cultural contestation was in the eighteenth century. An echo of a similar debate between partisans of Newton and Leibniz can be heard as late as 1774: as Lorraine Daston notes, Klopstock, in Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774), suggests that a monument to Leibniz should adorn “the entrance to his imagined society of German scholars,” with an inscription reading: Stand silent, Researcher, be you German or Briton. Leibniz plowed the furrow and sowed the seeds, just as Newton did. But he alone built upon that furrow and seed, beyond Newton.You hesitate in vain, Briton, to concede him to be the better man. For all Europe names him so.4

Here the issue is not so much a contest between two distinct systems of physics (as it was in the conflict between Cartesian and Newtonian

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physics); rather, it is a conflict between competing claims to national eminence within a unified scientific paradigm. Likewise, in his Preliminary Discourse (1751) to the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert may have praised Maupertuis (“the first among us who dared declare himself openly Newtonian”) for evidencing that one could be a “good citizen without blindly adopting the physics of his country,” but d’Alembert’s own Preliminary Discourse is full of anxiety about French indebtedness to the English (Bacon and Chambers) regarding the encyclopedic venture, an indebtedness he is careful to argue away.5 D’Alembert’s anxiety may not lead to blind adherence to a peculiarly national system of science, but it is hard to read his Discourse without discerning a strong element of national partisanship, of national jockeying for a position of leadership in the international advancement of learning. Much the same set of concerns about national priority and eminence has beset the evaluation of the relative contributions of the Physiocrats and of Adam Smith to the development of modern political economy since the initial publication of the Wealth of Nations in 1776.6 Pascal’s well-known comment that “what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other” underscores this nationally inflected diversity of cultural assumptions in religion, the arts and sciences, and manners and mores.7 With respect to literary culture, the competition among the various national literary traditions structured through the eighteenth-century republic of letters involves not only rival claims to eminence in belles lettres, but extends indeed to the acknowledgment of a diversity of nationally inflected poetics. Cultural competition is supplemented and deepened by an emphasis on cultural difference.Throughout the long eighteenth century the emulation of rival national literary traditions is conceived of in terms that resemble more the conflict between Cartesian and Newtonian physics, than the competition for preeminence between Newton and Leibniz.8 This is true not only in the later eighteenth century and the romantic period, but already, as I show in this chapter, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The frequency and wide distribution of nationally inflected debates in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—occupying such terrains as those of politics, scholarship, science, belles lettres, music, painting, and landscape gardening—should lead us to examine more closely the character and meaning of national differences in relation to the anglophone literary culture of the long eighteenth century. My own discussion, in chapter 2, of the universal normativity built into the notion of the republic of letters was designed to suggest that a certain universalism remained a powerful force throughout the long eighteenth century (from Bayle to Kant and beyond), but that this universalism did not extinguish or preclude

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attention to national differences. But how exactly “national differences” were interpreted in relation to literary culture remains to be worked out. In this chapter, I discuss two neglected facets of the significance of national cultural differences in the long eighteenth century, before considering in the final section the implications of this issue for our understanding of literary historical developments across the eighteenth century. I argue, first, that not only were national cultural differences recognized in some broad sense, they also entered directly into the reflections on literature, into the poetics and literary criticism of the period. Second, not only were national cultural differences widely acknowledged in this period, but the particularities of “one’s own” culture were readily valorized as a kind of cultural individuality from the earliest part of this period even during the period of “neoclassical” cultural dominance—well before the age of Ossian and Herder from the 1760s, or the “Patriot” poets of the 1730s and 1740s.9 These features of the literary culture have largely been neglected in studies of the poetics and criticism of the period, at least with respect to the Restoration and early eighteenth century. Instead, a model of “neoclassicism” has been constructed with reference to such categories as Nature, Reason, and Universality, leaving little scope for acknowledgment of—let alone engagement with—national cultural particularity.Thus, P.W. K. Stone, for example, argues that the “recognition of a uniformity of taste” is a fundamental feature of “eighteenth-century aesthetics”; he illustrates the tendency of this “ ‘uniformitarian’ doctrine” in Hugh Blair’s comment that, “His Taste must be esteemed just and true, which coincides with the general sentiments of men.”10 Hand in hand with this interpretation of the poetics of the earlier part of our period, the dominant tendency in literary historical scholarship has been to divide the literary developments of the long eighteenth century into a tripartite pattern consisting of neoclassicism, the age of sensibility, and full-blown romanticism (adhering, respectively, to a mimetic and rationalist poetics; a discourse of taste and sympathy; and an expressivist and subjectivist poetics of imaginative power). While this scheme does get at genuine shifts in the dominant idioms for discussing and theorizing aesthetic issues, it also leads us to neglect certain continuities of concern across the long eighteenth century, and chief among these is the concern with nationally inflected cultural differences and specificities. Once we acknowledge such continuities, however, we need to rethink our received models of literary historical development across the long eighteenth century. In the final section of this chapter, I suggest that the traditional tripartite literary historical scheme leads us to misunderstand the character of the “shifts” in literary culture across this period, and I propose a different way of understanding both the genuine shifts and the real continuities in the literary culture of the period.


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In this chapter I focus, then, on the place of issues of national particularity in the era of “neoclassical” poetics, taking this to be a crucial step for reconceptualizing the place and significance of nationalism in the anglophone literary culture of the long eighteenth century as a whole. In the first two sections of this chapter, discussing influential French writers (such as Boileau, Baillet, Le Bossu, Bouhours, and Saint-Evremond) and Englishlanguage authors from John Dryden to Henry Fielding, I show how such issues were perceived and evaluated by writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, I underline how widespread the recognition of issues of national cultural difference was among “neoclassical” authors (intertwined as it was with notions of climatological and ethnic difference)—in contrast to many of our common perceptions about “neoclassical” literary outlooks. And I show how one of the central idioms of the criticism of this period—the notion of the “rules” or “laws” of poetry—has been flattened by twentieth-century scholars into a monological idiom of universality, when it was actually used in quite a different fashion by many English-language writers of the period, used in fact to underwrite a notion of national cultural difference. In the third section of this chapter I show more particularly how motives of cultural nationalism function as an embedded, and acknowledged, part of the poetics of the period by examining closely two critical texts by Dryden and Addison. My aim in these sections is to overhaul our conception of the “neoclassical” era of English literary history: instead of focusing on the interplay between ancients and moderns (whether through translation, imitation, or parody), I focus on the issues of national specificity and nationalistic investment in one’s own literary culture, giving rise to both a “nativist” and a “patriotic” emphasis in the literary culture of the period. I show that there is a widespread concern in Britain in this era for giving an authentically national inflection to literary discourses and that this concern to assert the national culture betrays much the same concern with cultural imposition from abroad as that found in many postcolonial societies. By recognizing the role of nationalist outlooks in “neoclassical” English-language literary culture, we appreciate more fully the provincial anxieties that beset this culture. In the concluding section of this chapter, I glance briefly at the more traditionally acknowledged development of cultural nationalism in the era of the Wartons, Percy, Macpherson, Hurd, and others (continuing up through the romantic period), and the “shift” in literary attitudes that this development is supposed to signal. Having shown how much of this critical idiom has already been anticipated in the earlier periods, I argue that revising our inherited understanding of the development and significance of literary–cultural nationalism in the early eighteenth century leads us to revise more generally our understanding of the character and manner of

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the transformation of literary culture across the long eighteenth century. Reexamining the problematic of national cultural difference in early eighteenth-century poetics not only revises our understanding of that particular period; it also pushes us to try to reconceptualize how change in the literary system took place over the longer term. French Critics and National Traits The French literary critics of the seventeenth century who were most influential in Britain have generally been identified with the codification of a neoclassical aesthetic and an insistence on the universal validity of “the rules” of poetry as formalized by Aristotle and Horace. They might, perhaps with more justice, be identified as the fashioners of a perspective on and engagement with literary history as a process of cultural development and transformation. Earl Miner has written that “it is to Dryden that England owes its very concept of a literary period and of literary succession,”11 but Dryden and the other English-language writers and critics of his era drew their conceptions and much of their knowledge of literary history from French writers. Indeed, John Oldmixon in his Essay on Criticism (1728) insinuates that the influence of French critics exists even—or especially—where they remain unmentioned by classicizing English authors: The French Academy set an Example to other learned and ingenious Men, to make themselves Masters of their own Language, and the Encouragement they met with from Lewis XIV produced an Age of Poets, Orators, and Criticks. The latter have done more towards explaining the Classicks than had been done before from the Augustan Age to their own.They threw Pedantry and Jargon out of their Writings, and render’d them as polite as judicious. Such are the Criticisms of Rapin, Bossu, Segrais, Boileau, Bouhours, and Dacier, who are all read with like Profit and Pleasure; and this is the Reason of the frequent Use of them, and not an Affectation of foreign Phrases, and technical Cant, as is insinuated by such as never read, or never understood them, and by such too as have not only both read and understood them, but have learnt of them all the Reading they have, and yet make use of no other Names than Quintillian, Longinus, Donatus, Eustathius, and the Ancients.12

These French critics, and their peers, also elaborated an understanding of the national particularity of cultural traditions that was picked up and amplified by English-language writers.The particular aesthetic identified as “neoclassical” might have waned in popularity after the first four decades of the eighteenth century, but the focus on historical and national differences articulated by these earlier writers established a problematic that has not been entirely superseded even now.


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In order to get a proper perspective on English aesthetic assumptions during the neoclassical period (and indeed our own understandings of cultural and historical difference), it is useful to begin by examining afresh some of the influential French critical writers of the late seventeenth century. I discuss these French authors not as “foreign” writers in relation to the British context, but as authors whose works circulated widely in and figured significantly in the English-language literary discussions of the period. In examining these writers, we see just how pervasive a concern with the topics of national traits and national tastes was in this period, how insistently the poetics of the neoclassical period involved a comparative cultural poetics, and how far the literary criticism of the period operated in conscious awareness of the multinational horizon of the republic of letters. Such concerns provide the framework within which the cultural nationalism and provincial anxieties of eighteenth-century English-language literary culture took shape. Adrien Baillet’s Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs (9 vols., 1685–86; repr. 7 vols., 1722) is a massive compilation of the critical estimates offered through the centuries on the writings of authors famous in “the republic of letters.”13 In his first volume, Baillet devotes three hundred pages to discussing the qualities of a good critic, focusing especially on the various “prejudices” that influence and sometimes distort critical evaluation of literary works. These prejudices are of various types: for example, those based on characteristics of the author (his social rank, educational qualifications, religious affiliation, antiquity/modernity, etc.) and those based on characteristics of the book itself (its title-page, its anonymity [or lack thereof ], its rarity, its popularity, etc.). Among other prejudices, Baillet discusses—and argues against—that based on the nationality of the author. But, as we shall see, his critique of this prejudice is qualified in various ways, beginning with his acknowledgment that the prejudice obtains almost universally throughout the republic of letters. Despite his own qualified dissent, then, Baillet’s discussion provides striking testimony to the pervasiveness of a consciousness of literary nationality during this period: as he suggests, nearly all of his contemporaries understood the nationality of the author of a given work to be an informative fact about the likely character of the work in question. Baillet himself allows that “Les siécles differens ont leur génie & leur goût particuliers” (15), but he is more skeptical of alleged national characteristics and differences. He quotes from Boileau’s Art poétique, but disagrees with the sentiment expressed there: Souvent sans y penser un Ecrivain qui s’aime Forme tous ces Heros semblables à soi-même Tout a l’humeur Gascone en un Auteur Gascon. (119; quoting chant 3, lines 127–29)

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Baillet, himself a provincial from Picardy, comments:“on voit des humeurs Gascones & des caractéres de rhodomonts dans des Auteurs de toutes sortes de pays, de toutes sortes d’états & de conditions” (119). He grants that different societies have each their own corporate characters, but insists that one can push such distinctions too far, and that individual (personal) differences and traits are more consequential than those derived from corporate identity. He argues, “qu’il y ait une espéce d’injustice à rejetter sur un climat, sur un territoire, ou sur une Province les vices & les vertus qu’on remarque dans les Auteurs” (122). Like Bayle in his comments on the alleged “patavinity” of Livy, Baillet is aware that the discourse of cultural difference is frequently deployed by metropolitan cultures to castigate or stigmatize provincial cultures, to characterize them as marked by various forms of cultural deficiency or inferiority—and as such, he disputes, it seems, the validity of the whole notion of national traits. Despite his own stance, however, he is forced to acknowledge that almost all critics, from the days of antiquity to the present, have ascribed some significance to differences of nationality and climate, and he is willing to allow, with Boileau, that “Les climats font souvent les diverses humeurs” (Art Poëtique, canto 3, line 114). As Baillet continues his discussion, the distance separating him from the prevailing attitudes toward the question of national differences becomes less and less significant. As we shall see, two points emerge with clarity: first, that his objection to the traditional typology of national differences derives from his sense that it praises Greeks and Asians at the expense of “Europeans” (i.e., inhabitants of the occidental and septentrional nations). In combating this prejudice, he in fact comes close to simply reversing the evaluation and accepting the validity of the notion of national differences so long as it serves to enforce the cultural superiority of (Western) Europe over its rivals. Second, it becomes clear that Baillet objects not so much to the notion of national differences per se, as to their deduction from climatological rather than sociocultural factors. This revision of the theory of national differences renders it capable of enforcing judgments in favor of (western and northern) Europe, and thus salvages it from the critique that Baillet had seemed prepared to launch. As Baillet’s criticisms suggest, the climatological account of national differences, prevalent in Europe since the days of Graeco-Roman antiquity, and notably revived since the Renaissance, was entering a period of revision and challenge with the continued shift to the west and the north of the center of gravity of the European world. The theory of climates, dividing the world into three climactic zones—the frigid, the torrid, and between these two extremes, the temperate—and associating with each a characteristic bodily, political, and cultural “constitution” or “complexion,” was used to argue for and explain the preeminence of the peoples of the temperate zone


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over all others (which meant, for the ancient Greeks, their preeminence over the rest of the world).Already in the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin had reinterpreted the scope of the privileged “temperate” zone to include northern France as well as the Mediterranean world of Greece and Rome, and toward the end of the seventeenth century Sir John Chardin completes this appropriation of the climatological theory to serve the interests of the “septentrional” nations. In his Voyages en Perse (first part published London, 1670; complete work published in 3 vols., Amsterdam, 1711), Chardin offers this assessment of the cultural effects of excessive heat: la température des climats chauds énerve l’esprit comme le corps, dissipe ce feu d’imagination nécessaire pour l’invention ou pour la perfection dans les arts. On n’est pas capables, en ces climats-là de longues veilles, et de cette forte application qui enfante les beaux ouvrages des arts libéraux et des arts mécaniques; de là vient aussi que les connoissances des peuples de l’Asie sont si limitées, et qu’elles ne consistent guère qu’à retenir et qu’à répéter ce qui se trouve dans les livres des anciens, et que leur industrie est brute et mal défrichée, pour ainsi dire; c’est seulement dans le septentrion qu’il faut chercher les sciences et les métiers dans la plus haute perfection.14

English writers, adjusting the climatological discourse in a similar fashion to their own advantage, would define southern England as occupying a temperate zone quite different from the barren northern climates of Lapland, Scandinavia, and Scotland, on the one hand, and from the torrid zone to the south, on the other hand. This climatological theory of national difference, variously adapted from its classical European and Arabic sources, would retain its adherents in the long eighteenth century (as is evident, e.g., in the writings of Milton, Sir William Temple, Sir Richard Blackmore, Joseph Addison, Abbé Du Bos, Montesquieu,Vico, James Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith,William Robertson, Thomas Hutchinson,William Falconer, and Kant), but it would also be supplemented by newer accounts of national difference.15 Baillet’s emphasis on sociocultural, rather than climatological, factors as the basis of national differences was one such supplementary emphasis; in the later eighteenth century, a racial-ethnic typology of national differences also becomes increasingly important as a supplement to the climatological typology.The sociological and racial-ethnic models accepted, for the most part, quite traditional characterizations of national differences, but simply sought to account for them on a new basis. They served, thus, as “modernizations” of the theory of national differences rather than as radical challenges to the worldview supported by the theory of climates. To a large extent, the newer explanatory models would merely elaborate and rework strands already present in the theory as it had been developed by classical and early

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modern writers, linking these with the idioms of racial difference codified by Enlightenment ethnological writings, and with the sociocultural style of explanation privileged by Baillet and elaborated by the writers of the Scottish Enlightenment, among others. Racial-ethnic thinking thus draws on sources with deep roots in Western culture and is hardly a modern development of the age of Enlightenment as it has sometimes been represented. To return to Baillet, however, let me cite his rejection of the inherited typology of national–climatological differences: Aristote estimoit que les Peuples qui naissent dans les Pays froids & généralement dans toute l’Europe sont naturellement courageux & robustes, mais qu’ils ne sont point propres aux exercices de l’esprit, qu’ils ne sont point capables de méditation, & qu’ils n’ont point d’industrie pour les Arts. Il jugeoit au contraire que les Peuples de l’Asie ont beaucoup de talent pour les exercices de l’esprit, qu’ils sont ingénieux, spirituels, propres à la méditation & au raisonnement, & adroits à trouver & à perfectionner les Arts. Mais si l’on vouloit se départir du respect dû à l’antiquité & au mérite de ce Philosophe, on pouroit demander à ses Sectateurs où est la solidité de cette pensée. Car sans entrer en discussion de ce qu’il dit des Asiatiques, qui ne sait que Regiomontanus ou Muler de Konisberg, que Copernic, que Tyco-Brahé, que Kepler & plusieurs autres Mathématiciens, Astronomes & Philosophes sont sortis des Pays les plus froids? Et qui sont les Asiatiques plus capables de méditation & de contemplation que ces Septentrionaux? Où a-t-on trouvé les Arts de l’Imprimerie & de l’Artillerie si ce n’est dans les Pays froids, & où a-t-on perfectionné les autres Arts les plus beaux & les plus utiles à la vie si ce n’est en Europe? Et qui est-ce qui voudroit soutenir aujourd’hui que les Européens ne sont point propres aux exercices de l’esprit, eux qui sans contredit ont passé généralement tous les Peuples des autres parties du monde en ce point. (122–23)

One can see here how Baillet engages in a version of the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, and it is clear that one way of understanding this quarrel is as a competition between the claims of modern Europe and those of the ancient cultures of the East. Most commentators on the Battle of the Books have tended to ignore this aspect of the debate, seeing it instead as a “domestic” European debate pitting a European past against a European present (a debate in which temporal, not geographical, location is the central line of division). This is an issue I cannot pursue here, but in fact the debate regularly extends beyond the respective claims of different historical epochs and calls for a recentering of the republic of letters on western and northern Europe and away from the cultures of the south and east. For Baillet, the modern cultural achievements of Europe undermine the ancient national discriminations and prejudices advanced by Aristotle. Baillet accepts (in agreement with Hippocrates, Plato,Aristotle, Seneca, and


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“les autres”) that “la temperature de l’air & la bonté du climat contribuë quelque chose à la disposition naturelle des esprits” (187); but he insists that “nous ne pouvons consentir à ce que quelques-uns d’entre eux ont avancé que les Peuples de l’Occident & du Septentrion n’ont ni génie ni disposition pour les Arts & les Sciences” (187). Baillet’s objections are easy enough for us to accept, but he immediately qualifies their force by allowing that “le Préjugé que l’on a de cer[t]ains pays, n’est pas toujours faux”—although, he insists, the validity of these prejudices is due not to climatological factors but to the shared customs and mutual interaction of persons belonging to the same community (188). With this admission, Baillet limits himself to critiquing the traditional (negative) characterizations of western and northern European cultures, while accepting the general viability of national characterizations. Baillet no longer insists that qualities (whether negative or positive) apply only to individuals, and thus are personal, not corporate, in character;16 he simply argues that such corporate characteristics are the result of sociocultural rather than climatological factors. We see how little difference this reinterpretation of the theory of national characteristics can make when Baillet himself comes to survey the national characteristics of the writings of various peoples. In this survey, he repeats the familiar stereotypes about grave Spaniards, heavy Germans, vain Italians, industrious Dutchmen, solid and philosophic Englishmen, and spirited (or in some people’s eyes, frivolous) Frenchmen. As we might expect, his acceptance of cultural stereotypes is most evident in his discussion of “des Orientaux” (Egyptians, Jews, Syrians, Arabs, Persians, and Indians). These peoples are addicted to fables and allegories; they have a propensity for feigning and lying agreeably that is evident in their earliest extant writings and that is still with them (125–28). Where Europe is the land of science (knowledge), the Orient is the land of romance and fable: Ainsi nous ne pouvons presque conclure autre chose en faveur des Nations Orientales, que de dire que comme leurs Ecrivains n’ont point travaillé pour notre usage, ils ne sont bons & utiles la plupart que pour leur Pays; que le goût des Occidentaux est un peu different du leur; que le génie des uns est peut-être plus éloigné de celui des autres, que n’est la distance des lieux qui les sépare. Et rien n’empêche que nous ne prenions toutes leurs fictions, leurs allégories, & leurs autres maniéres d’écrire que nous avons remarquées pour des puérilités, des bassesses, des badineries, & des fadaises; comme il leur est permis de faire passer chés eux le sérieux, la gravité, la sincérité, & la solidité des Ecrivains d’Occident pour des grossiéretés, des simplicités, & tout ce qu’il leur plaira. (128)

In other words, East is East and West is West, and the two can share nothing but mutual contempt and incomprehension. The vehemence of Baillet’s

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dismissal of the literary culture of the East is clearly a response to the provocation occasioned by so many dismissive remarks about the cultural capacities of the peoples of western and northern Europe.17 Yet it is clear that in the end, Baillet does not so much seek to deconstruct the (GraecoRoman) discursive structure that authorizes such dismissive remarks as to appropriate and redirect that discourse against the cultures of the East. Baillet’s discussion of national prejudices is important not only as among the most extensive treatments of the subject in the early modern period, but also as characteristic of the qualified manner in which such prejudices were opposed throughout the long eighteenth century. Like Baillet, Samuel Johnson and David Hume might oppose the climatological theory of national differences, but they too supported a “modernized” (sociocultural, and in Hume’s case, racial) theory of national characteristics that was readily deployed in the service of dominant cultural stereotypes.18 Moreover, Baillet’s discussion suggests not only the familiar typology of national characters prevalent throughout the European world in the early modern period, but also focuses our attention on how national prejudices enter into the reception and evaluation of literary works. In dismissing the literary culture of the East, Baillet acknowledges the diversity of national cultural modes and engagements: their literature has nothing to say to “us” because the literary “taste” and “genius” of Oriental and Occidental peoples are so far apart. Through Baillet’s discussion, we have seen in passing that Boileau accepts and adapts Horace’s notion of the differences of climes and humors among the different countries of the world. A more extended elaboration of this outlook is found in Dominique Bouhours’s very popular Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène (1671), a work from which Baillet quotes in his discussion of the national character of Germans and other northern peoples. Bouhours (1628–1702) was a Jesuit man of letters and the author of several works of criticism that had a significant impact in England. His Manière de bien penser dans les ouvrages d’esprit (1687) was translated into English in 1705, and more freely adapted by John Oldmixon in 1728, having already served as the inspiration for George Granville, Lord Lansdowne’s Essay upon Unnatural Flights in Poetry (1701). Addison summarized the main thrust of this work of Bouhours in the Spectator, no. 62 (May 11, 1711): Bouhours, whom I look upon to be the most penetrating of all the French Criticks, has taken Pains to shew,That it is impossible for any Thought to be beautiful which is not just, and has not its Foundation in the Nature of things: That the Basis of all Wit is Truth; and that no Thought can be valuable, of which good Sense is not the Ground-work.19

Bouhours’s insistence on the superiority of poetic delights founded on truth and good sense, over those that are mere creatures of fancy, is certainly


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an important aspect of his critical legacy (and one that resonates with Europe’s sense of its difference from “Oriental” literary culture). But for present purposes, more important is his articulation of a language-centered cultural nationalism. At one point in La manière de bien penser, which is presented in the form of four dialogues between Eudoxe (the author’s surrogate) and Philanthe, Bouhours might seem to insist on the universality of his criteria of truth and good sense, articulating a critical outlook that leaves little scope for the distorting effects of translation, let alone for more fundamental national differences of taste and literary valuation. Thus, in the following exchange, concerning some verses by Achillini on St. Francis Xavier, we are told by Eudoxus that good sense is the same in all languages and in all countries. Philanthus begins the exchange by defending Achillini (I quote from the anonymous English translation of 1705): The Thought perhaps is not so good in French, replies Philanthus; but say what you will, it is excellent in Italian. Every Nation has its own peculiar relish in Wit, as well as in Beauty, in Clothes, and in every thing else. As if justness of Sence [sic] were not the same in all Languages, replies Eudoxus: and that what is bad in it self ought to pass for good in any Country with Men of Sense.20

“Men of Sense,” it would seem, will be like-minded whichever country and culture they happen to inhabit.The literary criteria of good sense, reason, and truth, Bouhours’s touchstones, hardly seem to allow for cultural particularities and national differences, just as our inherited conceptions of “neoclassicism” maintain. But later in this their first dialogue Philanthus comments, without dissent from Eudoxus, that “what pleases one Man of good Sence [sic], does not infallibly please another” (36). Bouhours’s touchstones for critical evaluation do not, then, fully homogenize the heterogeneous terrain of literary tastes. Indeed, Eudoxus himself, in the third dialogue, comments regarding an Italian poet’s praise of Louis XIV: I am pleas’d to find Foreign Wits, when our Monarch is the Subject[,] speak of him a little upon the Excess, it is a Proof of that noble Idea which they have of him. . . . I say these Thoughts are pardonable in a Man, on t’other side the Mountains; but I don’t know, if they would be excusable in a Frenchman, for our Wit is of another mixture than the Italian, and we Relish now, nothing but a just Grandeur. (24–25; the pagination begins anew with the third dialogue)

Eudoxe’s statement here is scarcely distinguishable from that of Philanthe in the first dialogue, cited earlier. By this point, it becomes clear that the

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requirement of “justness,” far from being a universal aspect of good poetry, is a characteristic mark of modern French taste. Other rules apply to “Foreign Wits,” and the two discussants will go on to describe the characteristic excesses of Spanish and Italian poets, in contrast to the just mean observed by the French. Bouhours clearly has no doubt that modern French taste is superior to that of all other cultural communities, but he does seem to accept that national literatures have (and will continue to have) distinctive characteristics. If we are still at some remove here from a cultural relativist outlook regarding cultural tastes, it is not for lack of recognizing national differences in literary taste. Similarly, Bouhours may not espouse an outlook of historical relativism, but he does recognize something of the historical embeddedness of literary works. Discussing, in the fourth dialogue, the issue of obscurity, Eudoxus, despite his penchant for the ancients, dispenses with the notion of a “timeless” classic: The Antients whom you esteem so much, said Philanthus, are often Obscure enough, and few understand them without the help of Interpreters[.] [I]f the Obscurity proceeds from the Thought itself, answered Eudoxus, I condemn the Antient as well as the Moderns; but if it relates to certain Historical Circumstances, we have nothing to reproach them with, they writ for the Age they lived in, not ours.They allude to things of which we have lost the Memory, and they are unknown; which is not their faults, if we don’t understand them.The Commentators guess sometimes the matter, but commonly they oblige an Author to say what they please, and they put him to the Torture like a Criminal, to make him speak against his Will. I doubt whether the comparison be altogether just: but I know part of what we write now, will meet with the same fate, as the works of Antiquity. (80)

This acknowledgment that all works, modern as well as ancient, will require commentary for their elucidation with the passage of time indicates that Bouhours recognizes that audiences (as well as works) are historically specific, inhabiting particular cultural worlds with their unspoken assumptions and interwoven strands of common knowledges and practices.21 Similarly, Bouhours allows his spokesman to assert that the ancients wrote for their own time, not ours (much as Baillet says of Oriental writers that they write for their culture not ours): he is very far from a sense that “classic” authors wrote for posterity, for all time, rather than for their own time and place. Thus, while Bouhours’s stance in La manière de bien penser may well be characterized as espousing a “universalist” poetic, we need to be careful to understand the extent to which it is explicitly compatible with an acknowledgment of national and historical cultural particularities. In his Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, Bouhours goes beyond a recognition of cultural particularities to a more emphatic valorization of some of the


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national specificities of French literary culture. Indeed, some of his remarks in this work are characterized by a vulgar cultural chauvinism, arguing (through Ariste) that, “de toutes les prononciations la nôtre est la plus naturelle et la plus unie” and (through Eugène) that,“la langue française est peut-être la seule qui suive exactement l’ordre naturel, et qui exprime les pensées en la manière qu’elles naissent dans l’esprit.”22 Despite the limitations of this cultural outlook, it is worth noticing that Bouhours is well aware of the diversity of languages. In his view, there is in fact an intimate connection between the particular “genius” of a language and the specific “character” of a nation. Eugène remarks that the French language is particularly apt for combining brevity with clarity, and adds:“Il n’y a peut-être rien qui soit moins à son goût que le style asiatique. . . . Et cela est fondé en quelque façon sur notre humeur: car le langage suit d’ordinaire la disposition des esprits; et chaque nation a toujours parlé selon son génie” (59–60). Each language, for Bouhours, is a reflection of a national culture, and a single terminology of “humor,” “disposition,” “genius,” and “temperament” can be used to discuss either linguistic or national–cultural specificities. Thus, for instance, Eugène argues that, “Les Allemands ont une langue rude et grossière; les Italiens en ont une molle et efféminée, selon le tempérament et les moeurs de leur pays” (60); and likewise that,“[la langue française] tient de notre humeur franche et sincère, qui ne peut souffrir la fausseté et le mensonge” (49). The national characterizations with which Bouhours operates are all rather stereotyped, except of course for the relatively extended and laudatory characterization of the French. It is clear that for him all modern languages other than French are essentially defective. “Comme les talents des peintres sont divers,” Eugène remarks,“les génies des langues les sont aussi”: il y en a quelques-unes qui ne sont pas heureuses à peindre les pensées au naturel. Telle est entre autres la langue espagnole. . . . elle aime passionnément l’hyperbole et la porte jusqu’à l’excès. . . . La langue italienne. . . . songe plus à faire de belles peintures que de bons portraits; et, pourvu que ses tableaux plaisent, elle ne se soucie pas trop qu’ils ressemblent. . . . Il y a d’autres langues qui représentent naivement tout ce qui se passe dans l’esprit; et entre celles qui ont ce talent, il me semble que la langue française tient le premier rang, sans en excepter la grecque et la latine. Il n’y a qu’elle, à mon gré, qui sache bien peindre d’après nature et qui exprime les choses précisément comme elles sont. (46–48)

The kind of privilege that the Judaeo-Christian tradition ascribed to Hebrew as the “original” language, Bouhours appropriates, in a modernized and secularized form, for French. He remarks that “les génies [divers] des langues” are much like the diverse talents of individual painters. But while this initial analogy might seem to point toward a cultural relativist

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conclusion, Bouhours moves instead toward a hierarchical ordering of the epistemological adequacy of different languages. Every language might function as “la langue naturelle” for its native speakers, but French has a unique capacity to represent things as they really are, “au naturel.” Bouhours has much more to say about the particular character of the French language and its historical development (“Les langues,” he argues, “ont leur naissance, leur progrès, leur perfection et même leur décadence, comme les empires” [104]), but what we have considered is enough to show how central the notion of national characteristics was to his conception of language and literary culture. Bouhours may have retained his sense of the privileged position of French, but he would have agreed with the recognition of diversity, and to some extent even with the cultural relativism, of Richard Simon’s remarks in his Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678). Simon, “one of the founders of modern biblical criticism,” “discarded the hypothesis of the divine origin of Hebrew. . . . Language, he wrote, was a human invention; since human reason differs in different peoples, so languages must differ as well. God willed that different peoples speak different languages in order that ‘each might explain themselves in their own way.’ ”23 Bouhours and Simon clearly inhabit the same cultural climate, one in which a notion of national cultures and their great diversity is the starting point for reflection.This recognition of cultural diversity, at least as much as any reference to universal principles of art, constitutes the foundation for the elaboration of poetics and literary criticism in the “neoclassical” period. The reception of Bouhours’s work in Britain also reinforces the pertinence of this outlook, and indeed of Adrien Baillet’s emphasis on national prejudices in the evaluation of an author’s work. John Oldmixon translated and adapted Bouhours’s La manière de bien penser in 1728 as The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick, and the work is one long object lesson in the diverse, even opposed, national commitments of English and French writers during this era of Anglo-French military conflict—though what is worth remarking from our perspective is the extent to which these writers, English and French alike, hold comparably nationalistic cultural investments. Oldmixon diagnoses an inherent national bias in Bouhours’s work, commenting:“The learned Jesuit cannot give an Example or two out of the antient or modern Authors, which are not French; but we must have many out of the Writings of his Countrymen, and always to the Credit of his Country, or the King of it.”24 But Oldmixon is also capable of recognizing a tendency to scorn French self-descriptions on the part of English readers due to their own national prejudices. Citing phrases from French panegyrics, he offers this commentary: “If Frenchmen were capable of Fear, behave your selves like French, and such like Phrases are ridiculous to us Englishmen; in which perhaps we


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are a little too national, and nothing but the Vanity of our Neighbours, and their Overvaluing themselves, should hinder us from allowing them to be a brave and gallant People” (174). For Oldmixon, who is himself nothing if not a nationalistic Englishman, Bouhours’s work is full of national chauvinisms, and the English response to it and other French works is likewise marked by national prejudices. From our review of Bouhours’s own works and of Oldmixon’s adaptation of one of them, it is clear that the European republic of letters across this period was structured as a great hall of mirrors in which national investments and prejudices about one’s own culture and that of other peoples were continually being reflected and multiplied in such a fashion that it would be impossible to arrive at a vantage point on a given literary work that was not already in some fashion framed by the need to consider its national particularity.The fact of national partisanship in literary discussions and in broader cultural discussions is casually accepted by the London Journal in a May 1732 review of Voltaire’s Histoire de Charles XII, when it states: “It is no wonder that a Frenchman should be partial in his Characters of the English Nation . . .,” and by Horace Walpole, who explains why he declined to argue with Voltaire over Shakespeare, by stating (ca. 1768): “all France would be on his side, and all England on mine,” treating as a foregone conclusion how the lines of combat will be drawn.25 This situation of national competition and partisanship hardly seems surprising, given the conception of the republic of letters elaborated in chapter 2; what is surprising is the extent to which this engagement with national particularity in the literary criticism of the period has been ignored or minimized in many twentieth-century studies. Saint-Evremond (1614–1703) is another French critic who repeatedly thematized the issue of national cultural differences, and he was, in addition, the French critic most directly involved in the development of Englishlanguage literary culture in the period, having lived as a political exile in London for a period of almost forty years, from 1661 until his death in 1703, except for a period from 1665 to 1670 when he was in Holland. Bouhours praises Saint-Evremond in his La manière de bien penser as a fine writer and critic and the false attribution of works to Saint-Evremond, not unlike similar attributions to the Earl of Rochester, testifies to the reputation of Saint-Evremond: indeed, over seventy editions of Saint-Evremond’s works appeared between 1650 and 1753, including a dozen in English from 1672 to 1728.The continuing eminence of Saint-Evremond in the anglophone world during the eighteenth century is also attested to by the citation of his name on various title-pages, in a clear bid to enhance the sale of these works.Thus, for instance, Charles Gildon’s Life of Mr.Thomas Betterton, the late Eminent Tragedian (London, 1710), is described as containing “The Judgment

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of the late Ingenious Monsieur de St. Evremond, upon the Italian and French Music and Opera’s.”26 Similarly, a translation of Petronius’s Satyricon published in 1736 advertises on its title-page that it contains “a Character of his Writings by Monsieur St. Evremont.”27 Even as late as 1769, a collection of Letters Supposed to have passed between M. De St. Evremond and Mr.Waller. Now first Collected and Published (actually authored by John Langhorne) was published.28 Despite the twentieth-century neglect of Saint-Evremond’s influence on anglophone culture during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, then, there is every reason to believe that his writings were well known, widely circulated, and influential. Saint-Evremond’s “Discourse upon the Grand Alexander” (1665)— which Dryden praises as “an admirable piece of Criticism”29—is an important essay for our purposes. In this essay, Saint-Evremond commends Racine in general, but complains about his depiction of Alexander the Great and the Indian king Porus in his play Alexandre le Grand (1665), arguing that rather than observing the distinctive genius of each of these characters (belonging to a very different age and nation), Racine has made them into contemporary Frenchmen. This fault is most egregious in the depiction of Porus: “I imagined to find in Porus,” Saint-Evremond writes: a Greatness of Soul, which wou’d be somewhat more surprising to us; an Indian Heroe should have a different Character from one of ours. Another Heaven, if I may so speak, another Sun, and another Climate, produce other Animals, and other Fruits: The Men seem to be of another make, by the difference of their Faces, and still more, if I durst say so, by a distinction of Reason: Both their Morals, and a Wisdom peculiar to their Religion, seem there to guide another sort of Men, in another World. Porus however . . . is here purely French. Instead of transporting us to the Indies, he [Racine] carries him into France, where he is so well acquainted with our Humour, that he seems to have been born, or at least to have passed the greatest part of his Life among us.30

Anticipating Baillet and Bouhours, Saint-Evremond expresses here his sense that there is an unbridgeable cultural dichotomy between East and West, that a culture vastly different from our own will exhibit strikingly different characters, different morals, even a different rationality—in effect, it will constitue “another sort of Men.”This is about as extreme a statement of cultural particularity and cultural difference as one can imagine. For Saint-Evremond, it is not merely the manners and customs of peoples that differ (while their fundamental “human nature” remains essentially the same in all ages and cultures); his demand is not for “local coloring” but for an understanding of the fundamental differences that characterize and particularize each age and nation, distinguishing them from all others.


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Although Saint-Evremond thus advocates a strongly relativist position, arguing that “alien” characters should appear strange and somewhat incomprehensible to “us” when we encounter them in literary works, he nonetheless remains trapped within the stereotypes of cultural difference prevalent in his age—a failing that besets us at the start of the twenty-first century no less than it did the writers of the early modern period. For him, Roman liberty and Roman tyranny alike differ from Oriental despotism: They that undertake to represent some Heroe of ancient Times, should examine the Genius of the Nation to which he belonged, [of ] the Time in which he lived, and particularly his own. A Writer ought to describe a King of Asia otherwise than a Roman Consul; one should speak like an absolute Monarch, who disposes of his Subjects as his Slaves; the other, like a Magistrate who only puts the Laws in execution, and makes their Authority respected by a free People.An old Roman should be described furious for the Publick Good, and moved by a wild Notion of Liberty, different from the Flatterer of Tiberius’s time, who knew nothing but Interest, and abandoned himself to the Slavery of the Age. (1:191–92)

Saint-Evremond insists on “the Genius of the Nation,” but this notion is clearly overdetermined by a more general conception of the dichotomy between Europe and Asia. Louis XIV as an European monarch, however absolute, is categorically different from a lawless Asian despot. Despite his emphasis on the characteristic quality of “the Genius of the Nation,” it is clear that Saint-Evremond also recognizes that this national “Genius” is historically malleable.The “old Romans” are nothing like those “of Tiberius’s time.” The historical malleability—and hence the historical constructedness—of a nation’s “genius” is most evident in SaintEvremond’s long essay, “Reflections upon the Different Genius of the Roman People, At different Times of the Republick” (wr. 1663–64).31 Here, Saint-Evremond argues that, initially,“[t]he Genius of this People was as rustical as it was wild” (1:11); “afterwards this Humour turned into Austerity, and became a rigid Vertue, far remote from Politeness or Agreeableness, and hating the very least appearance of Corruption” (1:24–25); still later, coming into contact with the wealth and luxuries of other cultures, the Romans lusted after them and secured them through conquest: “An Universal Curiosity was now excited in the Citizens, even their Hearts began to feel with emotion, what their Eyes had begun to see with pleasure. . . . They began to have a Curiosity for Shews, and an Affection for Pleasures” (1:34, 36). An ambition for glory succeeded briefly, before giving way to an age in which “every one basely pursued his own private Interest”: “the Genius of Interest, which succeeded to that of Honour, acted differently amongst the Romans, according to the diversity of

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Tempers. Those that possessed a true Greatness of Mind, strove to acquire Power; inferiour Souls contented themselves by heaping up Riches all manner of ways” (1:67–68). By the time of Augustus, the Romans had lost all their former “greatness or force of Soul,” all their former “Vertue” and love of liberty; they were now amenable to “a gentle and agreeable Government” (1:90). From this, it was a quick slide to complete abjection: “the Romans more disposed to serve, than Tiberius to command, gave themselves up to Slavery, when he hardly durst hope for their Subjection. This was the Genius of the Roman People at that time” (1:91). In response to the tyrannical rulers they now suffered under, the Romans themselves became nothing better than a furious mob, and an involved history of “Massacres, and Civil Wars” and political confusion followed (1:100). In this rapid survey of the changing character of the Roman people across the ages, it is clear that for Saint-Evremond, the notion of “national character” or the “genius” of a people is a historical notion, subject to alteration, and indeed virtually complete transformation, across time. However, for Saint-Evremond, historical investigation does not undermine or deconstruct the notion of national character by showing its changeability, its difference from itself; rather, history itself becomes nothing other than a narrative of the successive transformations of national characteristics. SaintEvremond comes to different conclusions about the validity and usefulness of the notion of “national character” as a result of his historical investigations than we might, but this difference in conclusions should not lead us to assume that he is blind to the notion of historical development and transformation. Saint-Evremond’s discussion of the changing “genius” of the Romans is not specifically concerned with the intersection of literature and national character (unlike his remarks on Racine’s play). He returns to a more directly literary discussion of national character in a series of essays on the drama. Here, through a number of cross-cultural comparative discussions, Saint-Evremond considers various issues regarding tragedies and comedies, ancient and modern, in France, Italy, Spain, and England. Saint-Evremond’s discussion in these essays is full of references to national characteristics and their literary implications. He repeats, for instance, the common French criticism of English tragedies as bloody, cruel, and shapeless: There are four or five English Tragedies, which in Truth ought to have several things retrench’d in them, and with that Reformation might be made admirable Plays. In all the rest you see nothing but a shapeless and indigested Mass, a Crowd of confused Adventures, without Consideration of time and place, and without any regard to Decency, where Eyes that delight in cruel Sights, may be fed with Murders, and Bodies weltering in Blood. Should the


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Poets palliate the Horrour of them by Relations, as it is the Custom in France, they wou’d deprive the Spectators of that Sight which pleases them most. The Men of better Breeding among them condemn this Custom, through a sense of Humanity perhaps; but an ancient Habit, or the Humour of the Nation in general, prevails over the Delicacy of a few Persons.32

For Saint-Evremond,“ancient Habit” and “the Humour of the Nation” are almost synonymous terms, since (as we have seen) he considers the “humour” or “genius” of a nation to be nothing other than the historically formed product of its habits, customs, and way of life. The impact of national characteristics on comedy is even greater than on tragedies, since comedy “ought to be the Representation of the Actions of common life.” Saint-Evremond complains, however, of French comedy: “we have in Imitation of the Spaniards, made it run altogether upon Gallantry, not considering . . . that the Spaniards following their own genius have onely painted out the Manners of Madrid in their Intrigues and Adventures” (1:505). SaintEvremond continues: “It is no wonder that Regularity and Probability are less to be found among the Spaniards than the French; for since all the Gallantry of the Spaniards is derived from the Moors, it retains still a certain Tincture of Afric, that is uncouth to other Nations, and too extraordinary to be accommodated to the Exactness of Rules” (1:507). In the wake of the Reconquest of the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century, the Spaniards may have made a fetish of “purity of blood,” Saint-Evremond seems to imply, but their culture nevertheless remains hybridized and will not be able to get rid of “a certain Tincture of Afric” without a radical transformation of its modes and manners. In criticizing an episode in La Calprenède’s romance of Cleopatra, Saint-Evremond invokes a climatological conception of national character:“Calprenede, though a Frenchman, ought to have remembered that Lovers born in a hotter Climate than that of France, need but few words on such occasions” (i.e., when once a lover and his mistress find themselves together) (1:506–07). We see that Saint-Evremond’s views on national character, like those of other commentators, become more sophisticated and flexible the nearer he draws to home, and more reductive and stereotyped the further away he looks. Nonetheless, national particularity always remains a major consideration for him: indeed, he articulates an “Augustan” notion of nationally specific aesthetics, rather than some universal norm. Comparing French and English comedies, Saint-Evremond emphasizes that where English audiences and writers prize “Variety” in their comedies, the French value “Regularity.”33 Following him, Dryden similarly states that the English value “Energy” above all else, while the French value “Correctness,” and Colley Cibber adds his opinion that, “to’ I allow them [the French] many

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other Beauties, of which we are too negligent; yet our Variety of Humour has Excellencies that all their valuable Observance of Rules have never yet attain’d to.”34 Saint-Evremond (and Dryden and Cibber) thus recognize that there will be nationally specific aesthetic criteria used to evaluate literary works; that works from diverse cultures cannot be evaluated by a single standard of aesthetic achievement. In the early eighteenth century, Voltaire reemphasizes this point when he states that the popularity of Paradise Lost among the English proves that there is such a thing as nationally specific literary tastes. He comments that,“If the Difference of Genius between Nation and Nation, ever appear’d in its full Light, ’tis in Milton’s Paradise lost,”35 a comment that is usefully glossed by his earlier contention that, “It is as easy to distinguish a Spanish, an Italian, or an English Author, by their Stile, as to know by their Gait, their Speech, and their Features, in what Country they were born. . . . From their different Characters flows that dislike which every Nation shows for the Taste of its Neighbours” (40–42). Saint-Evremond’s conception of nationally specific aesthetic criteria was, in fact, a commonplace of the “Augustan” period, despite its neglect by modern scholars. In his comments on the diversity of French and English dramatic tastes, Saint-Evremond touches on an issue that was also raised by Bouhours in his discussion of “good sense” in La manière de bien penser (see earlier). SaintEvremond’s handling of this issue is, as we shall see in the next section of this chapter, much more resonant for the approach adopted by British writers when they come to handle this issue. In his essay “Upon Comedies,” Saint-Evremond writes: I confess that good Judgment, which ought to be of all Countries of the World, has established some Rules, which are nowhere to be dispensed with, but it is hard not to make some Allowances to custom, since Aristotle himself in his Art of Poetry, places sometimes Perfection in that which was best liked at Athens, and not in that which is really most perfect. Comedy cannot pretend to greater Privileges than the Laws, which though they ought to be founded on Justice, are nevertheless different, according to the different Genius of the People who make them.36

The rules of poetry, says Saint-Evremond, are like the laws of nations: they all ought to be founded on reason ( judgment, justice), which is “of all Countries of the World,” but they will nonetheless differ “according to the different Genius of the People who make them.”Aristotle’s own poetics, after all, reflect not some universal standard, but what “was best liked at Athens.” The issue of the “universality” of Aristotle’s rules for poetry is also addressed by René Le Bossu in his Traité du poëme épique (1675), a French


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critical work that helped define the very meaning of neoclassicism in both France and England. Le Bossu confronts the issue directly right at the start of his work, in a passage that is important enough for us to quote at length: Aristotle and Horace left behind them such Rules, as make them by all Men of Learning, to be look’d upon as perfect Masters of the Art of Poetry: And the Poems of Homer and Virgil are, by the Grant of all Ages, the most perfect Models of this way of Writing, the World ever saw. So that if ever a Just and Supreme Authority had the Power to prescribe Laws and Rules to any Art, one cannot question but these four Persons had all Authority on their side, with respect to the Epick Poem. And this is the only kind we shall treat of at present. ’Tis true, the Men of our Times may have as much Spirit as the Ancients had; and in those things which depend upon Choice and Invention, they may likewise have as just and as lucky Fancies: But then it would be a Piece of Injustice to pretend that our new Rules destroy those of our first Masters; and that they must needs condemn all their Works, who could not forsee our Humours, nor adapt themselves to the Genius of such Persons as were to be born in after-Ages, under different Governments, and under a different Religion from theirs; and with Manners, Customs, and Languages, that have no kind of relation to them. Having no Design then by this Treatise to make Poets after the Model of our Age (with which I am not sufficiently acquainted) but only to furnish my self with some sort of Foundation in the Design I have of explaining the Aeneid of Virgil; I need not concern my self with every new Invention of these last Times. I am not of Opinion, that what our late Authors think is universal Reason, and such a common Notion as Nature must needs have put into the Head of Virgil. But leaving Posterity to determine whether these Novelties be well or ill devis’d, I shall only acquiesce in what I think may be prov’d from Homer,Aristotle, and Horace. I will interpret the one by the Other, and Virgil by all Three, as having the same Genius and Idea of the Epick Poesie.37

Le Bossu is often treated as a prime example of the pedantic critic who cannot see beyond the authority of Aristotle to the actual practice of poets, ancient and especially modern. But as this passage makes clear, Le Bossu’s opening gesture is to draw a distinction between the “Laws and Rules” authorized by Aristotle, Horace, Homer, and Virgil, and the “new Rules” established by the innovations of the moderns. For Le Bossu, “the Model of our Age” for epic poetry will naturally differ from that of the ancients, even if the Greeks and the Romans shared “the same Genius and Idea” of epic poetry. This difference between ancients and moderns need not be total, and some aspects of what Aristotle and Horace had to say may still apply in the modern world. But modern writers, “born in after-Ages, under different Governments, and under a different Religion . . . and with

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Manners, Customs, and Languages, that have no kind of relation” to those of the ancients, will naturally need to find ways of writing that are compelling and relevant to their own age.As a result, Le Bossu makes clear that his treatise is intended as an aid to the reading and appreciation of Virgil, an aid that is necessary precisely because “universal Reason” and “Nature” do not guarantee that modern readers will share the cultural assumptions of Homer and Virgil, Aristotle and Horace. Le Bossu’s work, then, far from prescribing a timeless and universal set of rules for all poets, sets itself the task of recovering the culturally specific “Idea” of epic poetry held by the ancients. One may argue that he fails at this task, but this is a different kind of failure than that with which Le Bossu and his confreres are usually saddled. Le Bossu shares with Saint-Evremond, Bouhours, Boileau, and Baillet a sense of the differing “genius” of diverse ages and nations. He, like the others, understands the notion of cultural diversity in terms of a hierarchical schema, but he also recognizes that it is easy to misjudge the achievements of foreign cultures. He notes, for instance, that: The Relish which all Antiquity, both Sacred and Profane, Greek and Barbarian, had for Fables, Parables, and Allegories (which are one and the same in this place) gave the Ancient Poets a great deal more Liberty than the Moderns have; and make things in Homer pass for Beauties, which would look but ill in a Piece of Modern Poetry.This likewise exposes our Ancient Poet to such Censures, as bewray our Ignorance oftner than his faults. (50)

Cultural differences lead to misunderstandings and a failure to appreciate the aesthetic achievements of alien cultures, even of the “alien cultures” of one’s own past. Le Bossu’s point here, in defense of Homer, remains a basic proposition in historicist and cultural relativist arguments about specific works and about cultural traditions more generally. A version of the argument is used by Francis Douce in 1807 (in his Illustrations of Shakespeare) to defend Shakespeare against the strictures of Charlotte Lennox: regarding Imogen in Cymbeline, Douce writes: She [Lennox] degrades our heroine into a mere kitchen wench, and adverts to what she calls her oeconomical education. Now what is this but to expose her own ignorance of ancient manners? If she had missed the advantage of qualifying herself as a commentator on Shakespeare’s plots by a perusal of our old romances, she ought at least to have remembered, what every well informed woman of the present age is acquainted with, the education of the princesses in Homer’s Odyssey. It is idle to attempt to judge of ancient simplicity by a mere knowledge of modern manners; and such fastidious critics had better close the book of Shakespeare for ever.38


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We might be tempted to classify Douce, with his nationalistic defense of “the book of Shakespeare,” as a very different kind of critic from Le Bossu, but continuities such as the one I have just pointed out indicate the need for a more flexible conception of critical schools, eras, and modes. Le Bossu insists that Homer was “oblig’d to accommodate himself to the Manners, Customs, and Genius of the Greeks his Auditors” (19), and this principle allows him both to acknowledge and to resist what he takes to be the ideological thrust of ancient Greek literature: “The Grecians . . . were extremely pleas’d to see the Crimes and Misfortunes of Kings: And the Moral instruction, that was most in Vogue at that time, was such a one as did beget in Men an Aversion to Monarchy, and a love to Democracy, which they call’d liberty” (60). Le Bossu repeats this point (“in the Popular States of Greece, where Monarchy was Odious, nothing was heard with greater pleasure and Ardency than the Misfortunes of Kings” [105]), but his notion of cultural specificity and the relativity of values allows him, as a subject of the Sun King, to undermine any exemplary status such attitudes might hold for the present. Here, as throughout our discussion in this section, we see how central notions of cultural diversity and relativism are to the outlook of French seventeenth-century critics and their epigones—who show themselves to be more the descendants of the Montaigne who wrote that “it is the rule of rules, and the universal law of laws, that each man should observe those of the place he is in” than one might have thought.39 This elaboration of a space for negotiating national cultural specificity and national cultural selfassertion in the writings of “neoclassical” critics has been strangely neglected in modern scholarship and has underwritten a distorted perspective on the literary culture of the early modern period. As we will see in the next section, English critics took this recognition of national specificity and gave it an emphatically “nationalist,” even “nativist,” inflection as they sought to assert the cultural autonomy of English literature.

The Laws of Good Writing [M]y Purpose . . . is not to give Laws to others; but to shew by what Laws I govern myself. —Colley Cibber Italy, in the age of queen Elizabeth, gave laws to our island in all matters of taste, as France has done ever since. —Thomas Warton. In France, sir! what’s France to me? I’m an Englishman, sir, and know no right the fools of France have to be my examples. —Robert Dodsley40

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Both Saint-Evremond and Le Bossu suggest that the laws of poetry enunciated by Aristotle apply to the ancient Greeks but not necessarily to the practice of other ages and nations.This notion of the nationally specific spirit of the laws proved to be especially resonant for English writers, perhaps not surprisingly, given the extreme self-consciousness about the distinctive body of national laws in England (the common law tradition).41 We find English-language writers repeatedly interpreting the “laws” of poetry—what John Dennis calls “Poetical Statute[s]”42—in analogy with the “laws” of the land—that is, as confined to a particular place and time, rather than universal in their force.The laws of the land might be “provincial” in scope, but by the same token they are autonomous and independent of all “foreign” laws, as Sir William Blackstone declares in his Commentaries on the Laws of England: “the civil and canon laws, considered with respect to any intrinsic obligation, have no force or authority in this kingdom; they are no more binding in England than our laws are binding at Rome.”43 This trope of cultural autonomy is crucial to the Englishlanguage discourse of poetics from 1650 to 1750, but has been neglected by modern scholars, who have wrongly assumed that when the laws or rules of poetry are invoked in this period, a timeless and universal set of rules is invariably implied. Occasionally, it is true, a writer will analogize the laws of poetry with the (universal) laws of nature, rather than with civic laws (different in each state). For instance, Charles Gildon, in his Complete Art of Poetry (1718), comments on the rules of art: never any Laws had such Force and Authority. Humane Laws expire, or change very often after the Death of those, who enacted them, because Circumstances change, and the Interests of whom they are made to serve are different; but these still gain new Vigour, because they are the Laws of Nature, which always acts with Uniformity, renews them incessantly, and gives them a perpetuate Existence.44

Although a vocabulary of “the law of nature” was elaborated in the traditions of natural law theory and rationalist philosophy in relation to the moral universe (as, e.g., in the claim that innate ideas enable us to “spell out the Law of Nature”),45 it would seem that Gildon here invokes “the laws of Nature” in relation to the physical universe, that is, in relation to a Newtonian conception of the laws of nature.The older vocabulary of natural law is still very much alive in the period we are dealing with, but it is coming to be eclipsed in general usage by the newer scientific idiom (with its pluralized notion of the laws of nature). The spread of these notions of law(s) inherent in the very nature of reality, the very order of things, sharpened the contrast between such natural laws and the man-made laws used


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to order societies. In the passage just quoted, Gildon draws this contrast between “laws of Nature” and “human laws” rather pointedly, in order to align the rules of art with the former class of laws. But other writers, emphasizing the man-made quality of works of literature, view the rules of art as human conceptions, just like other human laws: even Johnson comments in the Rambler that,“The accidental prescriptions of authority, when time has procured them veneration, are often confounded with the laws of nature.”46 Gildon’s universalizing position has generally been seen as typical of that of French critics, but as we have seen in our discussion of Baillet, Boileau, Bouhours, Saint-Evremond, and Le Bossu, the idiom emphasizing judgment, sense, and reason as the basis of the critical evaluation of literary works hardly necessitated an insistence on a single, uniform literary standard for all the world. Gildon’s insistence on “uniformity” in the quoted passage is an extreme position for an English writer, but it would be an equally extreme position for a French writer.47 John Dennis anticipates Gildon when he writes in 1701: “But, as both Nature and Reason . . . owe their Greatness, their Beauty, their Majesty, to their perpetual Order. . . . so Poetry which is an Imitation of nature must do the same Thing. It can neither have Greatness or Real Beauty, if it swerves from the Laws which Reason severely prescribes it.”48 The “Laws” prescribed by Reason are explicitly analogized here to the “perpetual Order” of nature itself, and Dennis likewise comments in 1696 that “the Rules of Aristotle . . . are but Directions for the Observation of Nature, as the best of the written Laws, are but the pure Dictates of Reason and Repetitions of the Laws of Nature.”49 But Dennis had earlier critiqued Thomas Rymer’s strictures on English drama, arguing that they would lead to the ruin rather than the reformation of the English stage: For to set up the Grecian Method amongst us with success, it is absolutely necessary to restore not only their Religion and their Polity, but to transport us to the same Climate in which Sophocles and Euripides writ; or else by reason of those different Circumstances, several things which were graceful and decent with them, must seem ridiculous and absurd to us, as several things which would have appear’d highly extravagant to them, must look proper and becoming with us.50

Again, once we probe a little deeper we become aware that Nature may prescribe a “perpetual Order,” but Nature itself is not conceived as uniform across diverse ages and nations. For Dennis, the constitution (physical and political), the manners and mores, the “Climate and Customs” (1:12) of the Greeks and the English are sufficiently different for their aesthetic

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sensibilities to be significantly incompatible. Likewise, in his Remarks on . . . Prince Arthur (1696), Dennis questions “whether some Episodes, which do not in the least offend against Probability or Reason in Virgil, may not be reasonably suppos’d to be highly improbable, when they are copied in a modern Poem, by a Poet of our Age, by reason of the vastly different Circumstances of Times, Places, Persons, Customs, Religions, and common received Opinions” (1:60). Thus, for Dennis, “Probability and Reason” might be necessary criteria in evaluating a given literary work, but they are clearly not sufficient: one must also take into account the specific “Circumstances of Times, Places, Persons, Customs, Religions, and common received Opinions.” Each culture consequently, it is clear, must pursue its own proper dramatic mode. Twentieth-century scholars, it seems to me, have accepted too much at face value the polemical discourse of English writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who constantly differentiate themselves from French critics by foisting onto the latter a blindness to national differences. I think it more accurate to say that while most French writers of our period took for granted the fact of national particularities and differences of taste, English writers presented themselves as champions of (English) national distinctiveness, national particularity. In doing so, they were certainly responding to an imperialistic impulse in the French literary culture of the period, but such imperialism glorified the spread of French culture across Europe; it did not assume that all literary cultures were essentially homogeneous and reducible to a single standard (prior to their assimilation into the French cultural sphere). There is, thus, not so much a difference between the theoretical stance of French and English critics, as there is a fundamental opposition between two distinct projects of cultural domination or self-assertion. In any case, the analogy between the laws of the land and the laws of good writing is worth attending to more particularly, since it is fundamental to the literary conceptions of the period. Sir William Davenant, in the preface to Gondibert, An Heroick Poem (1650), defends himself by arguing: “If I be accus’d of Innovation, or to have transgressed against the method of the Ancients, I shall think my self secure in beleeving [sic] that a Poet, who hath wrought with his own instruments at a new design, is no more answerable for disobedience to Predecessors, then Law-makers are liable to those old Laws which themselves have repealed.”51 The poet who undertakes a poem on a new design is like a giver of laws, by whose actions the old laws are abrogated, at least within his domain. Davenant uses the analogy with the laws of a polity in order to assert the independence of himself as a modern against the example of the ancients, but his usage is not heavily overdetermined by nationalistic assumptions.


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Such assumptions come to the fore, however, in other uses of this analogy between the laws of poetry and the laws of the polity. Thus, Dryden, in his preface to All for Love (1678), writes: “I should not have troubled myself thus far with French poets, but that I find our Chedreux critics wholly form their judgments by them. But for my part, I desire to be tried by the laws of my own country; for it seems unjust to me that the French should prescribe here till they have conquered.”52 Samuel Butler, similarly, objects to the application of classical rules, “As if the Antique Laws of Tragedy / Did with our own Municipall agree”53 And Elkanah Settle, in his A Farther Defence of Dramatic Poetry (1698), complains that, “these Corneillean Rules, are as Dissonant to the English Constitution of the Stage, as the French Slavery to our English liberty.”54 Autonomy, independence, and self-determination in the political and cultural spheres are seen by each of these critics as mutually implicated. Their implicit assertion is that the literary value or achievement of English drama can only be rightly assessed after the assertion of cultural autonomy and self-determination; without this cultural independence, literary evaluation will be a mere charade.This assertion of the priority of cultural recognition over aesthetic evaluation makes the position of these English writers very similar to that of antiimperialist cultural critics of the twentieth century,55—and alerts us, once again, to the provincial standing of English-language literary culture in the European republic of letters. The emphasis on cultural self-respect and impatience with imposed evaluations comes out very strongly in George Farquhar’s “A Discourse upon Comedy, in Reference to the English Stage” (1702). Farquhar expresses his basic position sarcastically in the following passage: by what authority should Aristotle’s rules of poetry stand so fixed and immutable? Why, by the authority of two thousand years’ standing, because through this long revolution of time the world has still continued the same; by the authority of their being received at Athens, a city the very same with London in every particular: their habits the same, their humors alike, their public transactions and private societies à la mode France; in short, so very much the same in every circumstance that Aristotle’s criticisms may give rules to Drury Lane, the Areopagus give judgment upon a case in the King’s Bench, and old Solon shall give laws to the House of Commons.56

For Farquhar, the “fact” of cultural difference between modern England and ancient Greece is so very evident that the application of Aristotle’s rules to the English drama is in itself a kind of reductio ad absurdum. National differences, Farquhar argues, necessitate diversity of poetic means: “the forms of eloquence are divers, and ought to be suited to the different humor and capacities of an audience; . . . the fiery choleric humor of one

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nation must be entertained and moved by other means than the heavy phlegmatic complexion of another” (87). Farquhar’s statement here is more emphatic and categorical than some we have met with, but in substance it does not differ from the views expressed by the French critics discussed in the previous section. Indeed, Farquhar seems to paraphrase here a remark Saint-Evremond makes in a 1676 letter to the duchess of Mazarin: A vast number of Rules, made three thousand years ago, are set up to be the Standard of what’s writing now adays; without considering that neither the Subjects to be treated, nor the Genius to be regulated are the same. If we should make Love like Anacreon and Sappho, nothing would be more ridiculous; if like Terence, nothing more Plebeian, or Citizen-like; and if like Lucian, nothing more gross and lewd. All ages have a peculiar character proper to themselves: they have their Politicks, their Interests, their Affairs; and, in some measure, their Morals, having their particular Virtues and Vices. I own ‘tis all Humanity still: but Nature is various in men; and Art, which is nothing but an imitation of Nature, ought to vary as she does. Our impertinences are not the same which Horace ridicul’d; nor are our vices the same which Juvenal rebuk’d: we must therefore make use of other raillery and reproofs.57

The congruence of English and French criticism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and their common insistence on national particularity in aesthetics, could hardly be more clearly exemplified. “The rules of English comedy,” Farquhar continues, “do not lie in the compass of Aristotle or his followers, but in the pit, box, and galleries” (93–94). The authority of the audience could scarcely be ignored by a working playwright, even if he were (like Dryden in his prologues and epilogues) contemptuous of its judgments. Farquhar displays none of Dryden’s self-division on this score, and simply insists: We must consider then, in the first place, that our business lies not with a French or a Spanish audience, that our design is not to hold forth to ancient Greece, nor to moralize upon the vices and defaults of the Roman common wealth—no, no! An English play is intended for the use and instruction of an English audience, a people not only separated from the rest of the world by situation, but different also from other nations as well in the complexion and temperament of the natural body as in the constitution of our body politic. As we are a mixture of many nations, so we have the most unaccountable medley of humors among us of any people upon earth; these humors produce variety of follies, some of them unknown to former ages; these new distempers must have new remedies, which are nothing but new counsels and instructions. (92–93)

Farquhar protests that the English, insulated from “the rest of the world,” also have a nature different from that of other peoples: their humor,


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complexion, and temperament are uniquely their own. He qualifies this assertion of incommensurability between the English and the rest of the world when he argues that “some” of their follies were “unknown to former ages,” implying that they share the rest of their follies with other ages and nations. And by the end of his “Discourse,” Farquhar has articulated a position that, in principle, differs little from that of any of the critics he might be presumed to be chastising (such as Thomas Rymer): “let our old English authors alone,” Farquhar complains: If they have left vice unpunished, virtue unrewarded, folly unexposed, or prudence unsuccessful, the contrary of which is the utile of comedy, let them be lashed to some purpose; if any part of their plots have been independent of the rest, or any of their characters forced or unnatural, which destroys the dulce of plays, let them be hissed off the stage. But if by a true decorum in these material points they have writ successfully and answered the end of dramatic poetry in every respect, let them rest in peace. (99)

Farquhar’s defense of “our old English authors” is articulated here in the very language of the “neoclassical” criticism of the period: he emphatically ascribes a moral purpose to comedy (which Dryden, on occasion, was willing to waive); he focuses attention on coherence of plot and naturalness of character, rather than on any more secondary qualities of a drama; he speaks in the idiom of “decorum,” of utile et dulce, of the “end” or design of a given branch of poetry. Farquhar may disagree with Rymer in his substantive judgment of Shakespeare’s plays, but much of his “Discourse” is very much of a piece with that of the so-called neoclassical critics. But what concerns us most in this context is his use of the notion that the laws of good writing for English authors are based on local (i.e., national) precedents and not on Homer,Aristotle, and the classics:“To determine a suit at law,” he writes, we do not look into the archives of Greece or Rome, but inspect the reports of our own lawyers and the acts and statutes of our Parliaments; and by the same rule we have nothing to do with the models of Menander or Plautus, but must consult Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and others, who by methods much different from the ancients have supported the English stage and made themselves famous to posterity. (94)

Just as the acts and writs of Parliament are good throughout the polity, so the “models” of “Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and others” serve as sovereign precedents for English letters: they serve to establish the “empire” of English literature in the same sense in which the late Tudors asserted the “empire” of England. Reprinted at least seven times with his Works by 1775, Farquhar’s “Discourse” provides one of the most emphatic declarations of

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literary autonomy of any piece of criticism from the eighteenth century, though he leaves room for others to develop more fully an account of what the substantive content of this literature should be. One of the many echoes of Farquhar’s outlook occurs in the epilogue to Colley Cibber’s The Careless Husband (1704). The epilogue celebrates Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim over the French and their Bavarian allies, but the speaker also laments that the English stage still remains subject to “fears of slavery” and to “paying tribute to a foreign throne.”58 Referring to the popularity of French performers, Cibber complains that “song and dance” have usurped the place of drama, “And English actors [are] slaves to swell the Frenchman’s gains” (lines 8, 11). Cibber makes a nationalistic appeal to his audience of English men and women: “Oh, that your judgment, as your courage has / Your fame extended, would assert our cause, / That nothing English might submit to foreign laws” (lines 16–18). The English may have defeated the French on the battlefield (at least temporarily), but in the cultural sphere French domination remains unchallenged and Cibber urges his audience to champion the (neglected) cultural independence and self-regard of the English stage by invoking the analogy between “foreign laws” in politics and in art. The connection between the laws of good writing and those of the nation returns to view, albeit somewhat obliquely, in Addison’s discussion of the ballad of Chevy Chase in Spectator no. 70 (May 21, 1711). Addison begins his consideration of this poem, which concerns “the mutual Feuds which reigned in the Families of an English and Scotch Nobleman” (299), by outlining two critical “rules”: The greatest modern Criticks have laid it down as a Rule, That an heroick Poem should be founded upon some important Precept of Morality, adapted to the Constitution of the Country in which the Poet writes. . . . The next Point observed by the greatest Heroic Poets, hath been to celebrate Persons and Actions which do Honour to their Country. . . . The Poet before us, has not only found out an Hero in his own Country [i.e., England], but raises the Reputation of it by several beautiful Incidents. . . . At the same Time that our Poet shews a laudable Partiality to his Countrymen, he represents the Scots after a Manner not unbecoming so bold and brave a People. (298–301)

That heroic poetry should instruct as well as delight (it “should be founded upon some important Precept of Morality”) is, of course, a familiar maxim, but what makes Addison’s remark interesting for us is his specification that this moral precept should be “adapted to the Constitution of the Country in which the Poet writes.” Addison is here following Le Bossu’s Traité du


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poëme épique: Le Bossu distinguishes between the abstract moralizing of philosophers and divines, and the nationally specific precepts of the poet: “The School-men treat of Vertues and Vices in general.The Instructions they give are proper for all sorts of People, and for all Ages. But the Poet has a nearer Regard to his own Country, and the Necessities he sees his own Nation lie under.”59 The laws of good writing thus prescribe a focus on the “Constitution” of one’s own country, so that the epic poet, like the legislator, must suit his dictates to the peculiar circumstances and temperament of his nation. And in producing art, the poet should display “a laudable Partiality to his Country-men,” for heroic poetry is meant to support the national “Honour”; it is meant to enhance the nation’s glory. Patriotism, or national “Partiality,” is thus part of the poet’s duty and doctrine—a duty (as we shall see later in this chapter) already acknowledged by Dryden, similarly drawing on Le Bossu, in his discussion of Virgil in 1697. The emphasis here on the specificity of address of heroic poetry (and presumably of other poetry as well) tends to undermine Aristotle’s argument that poetry is more “philosophical” than history in the truths it teaches: here, poetry has come to be linked decisively with the historical, sociopolitical, and cultural development of the society from which it emerges.The nationalistic emphasis here (in Le Bossu and in Addison) is of a piece with the analogy between the laws of the land and the laws of good writing that we have been considering, and underlines a crucial difference between what is termed “neoclassical” poetics and the poetics of Aristotle. In keeping with its orientation toward a multicultural republic of letters, there is a comparative—a cross-cultural and historical—dimension to neoclassical poetics that is absent in Aristotle. Addison had previously articulated his sense of the importance of national cultural differences in Spectator no. 29 (April 3, 1711), in his discussion of the influence of Italian opera in England. In this paper Addison takes up the issue of the nationally specific address of a work of art not in terms of the moral it inculcates, but more directly in terms of its aesthetic qualities. He objects to the “use of Italian Recitativo with English Words” by underlining issues of cultural difference in language and music: the Tone, or (as the French call it) the Accent of every Nation in their ordinary Speech is altogether different from that of every other People, as we may see even in the Welsh and Scotch, who border so near upon us. By the Tone or Accent, I do not mean the Pronunciation of each particular Word, but the Sound of the whole Sentence. . . . For this Reason, the Recitative Musick in every Language should be as different as the Tone or Accent of each Language, for otherwise what may properly express a Passion in one Language, will not do it in anther. . . . I am therefore humbly of Opinion, that an English Composer should not follow the Italian Recitative too

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servilely, but make use of many gentle Deviations from it, in Compliance with his own Native Language. . . . he ought to accommodate himself to an English Audience, and by humouring the Tone of our Voices in ordinary Conversation, have the same Regard to the Accent of his own Language, as those Persons had to theirs whom he professes to imitate. (120–21)

Addison argues that the “music” of each language (and hence the music that should accompany the words of that language) has an individual character. As a result, each nation will have its own operatic style unsuited to the ears of foreigners.Addison goes on to extend his remarks on nationally specific tastes to music as such, even outside of an operatic context: A Composer should fit his Musick to the Genius of the People, and consider that the Delicacy of Hearing, and Taste of Harmony, has been formed upon those Sounds which every Country abounds with: In short, that Musick is of a Relative Nature, and what is Harmony to one Ear, may be Dissonance to another. (120–22)

Having underlined the necessary uniqueness of the “Taste of Harmony” in each country, the diversity of the “Ear” on a national basis, Addison concludes his discussion by generalizing his argument about the national diversity of tastes: I shall add no more to what I have here offer’d than that Musick,Architecture and Painting, as well as Poetry and Oratory, are to deduce their Laws and Rules from the general Sense and Taste of Mankind, and not from the Principles of those Arts themselves; or in other Words, the Taste is not to conform to the Art, but the Art to the Taste. (123)

Far from supposing that some intrinsic “Principles” of each art will dictate the universal “Laws and Rules” appropriate to their conduct, Addison argues that the “Laws and Rules” of each art must derive from the nationally differentiated “Sense and Taste of Mankind.” By linking the “Laws and Rules” of art with the national “Taste” and “Genius of the People,” Addison implicitly analogizes these aesthetic “Laws” with the civil laws peculiar to each polity. In asserting that “the Taste is not to conform to the Art, but the Art to the Taste,” he comes close to arguing that there should be a nationally specific “Art” peculiar to each country. In his Essay on Criticism (1711), Pope gently mocks the nationalistic analogy between civic laws and the laws of poetry when he writes about the spread of “Arts o’er all the Northern World”: But Critic Learning flourish’d most in France. The Rules, a Nation born to serve, obeys, And Boileau still in Right of Horace sways.


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But we, brave Britons, Foreign Laws despis’d, And kept unconquer’d, and unciviliz’d, Fierce for the Liberties of Wit, and bold, We still defy’d the Romans, as of old. Yet some there were, among the sounder Few Of those who less presum’d, and better knew, Who durst assert the juster Ancient Cause, And here restor’d Wit’s Fundamental Laws.60 (712–22)

Pope’s chief strategy in these lines is to counterpose allegedly “Foreign Laws” to lawless “Liberties”—in contrast to the procedure of the champions of native liberty, who identify this liberty not with lawlessness, but with the rule of indigenous laws rather than foreign ones. Through this shift in rhetoric, Pope is able to redescribe the ancient laws as “Fundamental” or universal (rather than “foreign”), and to paint opposition to them as “unciviliz’d.” He comments earlier on Aristotle’s civilizing mission: Poets, a Race long unconfin’d and free, Still fond and proud of Savage Liberty, Receiv’d his Laws, and stood convinc’d ‘twas fit Who conquer’d Nature, shou’d preside o’er Wit. (649–52)

“Savage Liberty,” on Pope’s view, is the only alternative to the “Laws” of Aristotle. But Pope’s own acknowledgment that issues of national (cultural) freedom and subjection are implicit in this debate echoes the terms of the discussion that we have been tracing, and it is far from clear that his rhetorical slight-of-hand is fully persuasive. Indeed, Pope’s own position in this poem is more ambivalent and compromised than many accounts would suggest.The lines I have quoted evoke a Tacitean image of rude, Germanic freedom only to subvert it with a clever turn immediately afterward. But many of Pope’s readers would have found the British identification with that image of freedom more powerful and compelling than anything Pope is able to offer in its place.And not only in this passage, but throughout the poem, Pope’s idiom carries within it an echo of a more nationally assertive cultural stance. He may deny the oppression of “Foreign Laws” in poetry, but he himself decries the “Licence of a Foreign Reign” (544) under William of Orange. He may have written: Those RULES of old discover’d, not devis’d, Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d; Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain’d By the same Laws which first herself ordain’d. ....................................

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When first young Maro in his boundless Mind A Work t’outlast Immortal Rome design’d, Perhaps he seem’d above the Critick’s Law, And but from Nature’s Fountains scorn’d to draw: But when t’examine ev’ry Part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same: Convinc’d, amaz’d, he checks the bold Design, And Rules as strict his labour’d Work confine, As if the Stagyrite o’erlook’d each Line. Learn hence for Ancient Rules a just Esteem; To copy Nature is to copy Them. (88–91, 130–40)

But in doing so he invokes the self-ordained laws so dear to the nationalistic critics (“Nature, like Liberty, is but restrain’d / By the same Laws which first herself ordain’d”). He also includes an injunction, paraphrasing Horace, that cuts against this seeming universalization of the “Nature” found in Homer: You then whose Judgment the right Course wou’d steer, Know well each ANCIENT’s proper Character, His Fable, Subject, Scope in ev’ry Page, Religion, Country, Genius of his Age: Without all these at once before your Eyes, Cavil you may, but never Criticize. (118–23)

If we combine these two statements of Pope’s we come out with a conclusion not unlike Saint-Evremond’s: the rules of poetry are founded on “Nature,” but the specificity of a given poet’s religion, country, and the genius of his age will modify the import and application of these rules. This need to reinflect “the Critick’s Law” in accordance with cultural diversities is even more evident if we recall the lines by Dryden that seem to stand behind Pope’s assertion that “Nature and Homer were . . . the same”: in the prologue to The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island (pub. 1670), Dryden writes: Shakespear, who (taught by none) did first impart To Fletcher Wit, to labouring Johnson Art. He Monarch-like gave those his subjects law, And is that Nature which they paint and draw.61

According to Dryden, Fletcher and Jonson found that “Nature” and Shakespeare were the same. And even Pope, when he discusses the power of “Great Wits” to “snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art” (155), allows that “the Ancients thus their Rules invade, / (As Kings dispense with Laws Themselves


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have made)” (161–62), thus echoing once again the nationalistic invocation of laws we ourselves have made. Dryden, for his part, recognizes the authority of each “founder” of a distinct kind of writing: in the preface to Albion and Albanius (1685), he puts forward “this fundamental proposition”: That the first Inventors of any Art or Science, provided they have brought it to perfection, are, in reason, to give Laws to it; and according to their Modell all after Undertakers are to build. Thus in Epique Poetry, no Man ought to dispute the Authority of Homer, who gave the first being to that Masterpiece of Art, and endued it with that form of Perfection in all its Parts, that nothing was wanting to its excellency. Virgil therefore, and those very few who have succeeded him, endeavour’d not to introduce or innovate any thing in a Design already perfected, but imitated the plan of the Inventor: and are only so far true Heroique Poets, as they have built on the Foundations of Homer. Thus Pindar, the Author of those Odes, (which are so admirably restor’d by Mr. Cowley in our Language,) ought for ever to be the Standard of them; and we are bound according to the practice of Horace and Mr. Cowley, to Copy him. Now, to apply this Axiom, to our present purpose, whosoever undertakes the writing of an Opera, (which is a modern Invention, though built indeed, on the foundations of Ethnique Worship,) is oblig’d to imitate the Design of the Italians, who have not only invented, but brought to perfection, this sort of Dramatique Musical Entertainment.62

Dryden’s position here certainly seems to undermine any claims to national specificity in the practice of writing in these genres, but the structure of his argument makes it very easy for someone else to assert that English epic or lyric or opera or drama is an independent “Invention” and thus need not conform to the ancient standard—as indeed Blackmore and Farquhar do soon after.63 In any case, Dryden’s argument evidently undermines any appeal to “nature” (e.g., in a critique of operas as “unnatural”), and it shows how the idiom of “laws” can come to be absorbed almost entirely within the folds of cultural history and culturally specific precedents, rather than reflecting a conception of nature, uniform and unchanging across diverse nations and ages as most modern commentators have assumed. Dryden’s notion of founding lawgivers is given a more liberal turn in Advertisements from Parnassus (1704) by “N. N. Esquire,” a free adaptation of Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612) that substitutes English figures for the Italian of the original. In advertisement 28 there is a critique of the Aristotelian critics in the form of a story about Otway. His plays have been debarred from the honor of being deposited in the Delphic Library in Parnassus, we are told, because the critics appointed to consider the case decided he had violated the rules of Aristotle. Otway appeals to Apollo who

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summons Aristotle to explain himself. Aristotle pleads that his rules have been misinterpreted by the critics: he had merely pointed out the methods that “the most accurate Writers before his time had follow’d; and withal confessed that he believed ‘twas possible a Poet, might at this Day, write so excellent a Poem, without following his Rules, as might serve to give Laws to future Ages.”64 Here, Aristotle himself is made to endorse the limited jurisdiction of his poetic rules, and to allow that a poet like Otway can establish a new precedent that will “serve to give Laws to future Ages.” Fielding will similarly reinvoke this prerogative as the founder of a new province of writing in Tom Jones (1749), carrying it forward with a comic elaborateness. He cautions the reader not to be surprised “if my History sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly” (77): For all which I shall not look on myself as accountable to any Court of Critical Jurisdiction whatever: For as I am, in reality, the Founder of a new Province of Writing, so I am at liberty to make what Laws I please therein. And these Laws, my Readers, whom I consider as my Subjects, are bound to believe in and to obey; with which that they may readily and chearfully comply, I do hereby assure them that I shall principally regard their Ease and Advantage in all such Institutions: For I do not, like a jure divino Tyrant, imagine that they are my Slaves or my Commodity. I am, indeed, set over them for their own Good only, and was created for their Use, and not they for mine. Nor do I doubt, while I make their Interest the great Rule of my Writings, they will unanimously concur in supporting my Dignity, and in rendering me all the Honour I shall deserve or desire.65

Fielding’s declaration of independence here echoes Davenant’s in his preface to Gondibert, and like Davenant’s, Fielding’s self-assertion does not carry any specifically national implication. He does not divide the “Jurisdiction” of various critical statutes and courts into nationally delimited spheres, but asserts rather the autonomy of the one work he is presently placing before the reader. It is a short step from Fielding’s position here to our modern tendency to conceive of each literary work (or at least each “great” work) as sui generis, requiring us to comprehend the unique laws of its constitution.Yet the legislative authority that Fielding assumes for himself necessarily bears an analogy with the legislative sovereignty of states, polities, nations, so that Fielding’s individualism ultimately is not entirely separable from the assertion of the independence of national cultures. Horace Walpole, in his preface to the second edition (1765) of The Castle of Otranto, would seem to have Fielding’s example in mind when he claims that,“I might have pleaded, that having created a new species of romance, I was at liberty to lay down what rules I thought fit for the conduct of it.”66 But instead, he reverts to an


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older formulation, echoing Dryden, when he argues that “My rule was nature” and more particularly that,“That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied” (8).Walpole, finding that Nature and Shakespeare were one, desists from any claim of originality and instead is content “to shelter my own daring under the cannon of the brightest genius this country, at least, has produced” (12), thus reverting to the emphatically nationalistic idiom bound up with the discourse of literary precedent and the laws of good writing. The connection between national cultural independence and the trope of legislative independence is reasserted also and more elaborately by Oliver Goldsmith in his Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759). Goldsmith, indeed, gives this connection the same kind of emphasis as Farquhar half a century earlier. He argues that there is “a particular standard of taste in every country” and on this basis reasons that: the critics of one country, will not be proper guides to the writers of another; Grecian or Roman rules will not be generally binding in France or England; but the laws designed to improve our taste, by this reasoning, must be adapted to the genius of every people, as much as those enacted to promote morality.67

Goldsmith constructs an analogy between the civic laws of a polity and the “laws designed to improve our taste,” and he argues emphatically that “English taste, like English liberty, should be restrained only by laws of its own promoting” (295). “In fact, nothing can be more absurd,” he argues, “than rules to direct the taste of one country drawn from the manners of another” (296). Arguing that “criticism must understand the nature of the climate and country, &c. before it gives rules to direct Taste,” Goldsmith continues forward to the logical conclusion:“In other words, every country should have a national system of criticism” (296). Goldsmith’s language here clearly gains some resonance from its affinities with Montesquieu’s discussion in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) of the diverse spirit, mores, and manners of nations, and the need to observe such differences in legislating for any nation. Just as Montesquieu argues that mores and manners are “institutions of the nation in general,”68 rather than something imposed by a legislator, Goldsmith posits national tastes as similarly determined by the nation at large and beyond the control of official decrees. When Montesquieu undertakes to describe the national character of England, or rather of a hypothetical nation just like England, he says that, “The character of the nation would appear above all in the works of the mind” (332), before proceeding to discuss their satirical writings, historians, and poets (333). Montesquieu is best known, perhaps, for his discussion of

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the effects of climate and terrain on the genius of a nation (a topic discussed throughout Part III of The Spirit of the Laws and exemplified in his well-known comment that, “The empire of climate is the first of all empires” [316]), and for his emphatic dichotomization of Europe and Asia on the basis of what he sees as the political, civil, and domestic liberty of the one and servitude of the other (he says of Asia, “in all the histories of this country it is not possible to find a single trait marking a free soul; one will never see there anything but the heroism of servitude” [284]). These ideas (the climatological theory; the dichotomy between East and West) are, as we have noted, important aspects of the conception of national traits and national tastes across the long eighteenth century. But the governing thesis of Montesquieu’s book—that the laws of each nation must be adapted to its national spirit—is even more germane to the particular idiom we have been examining in this section of the chapter. Montesquieu writes,“If it is true that the character [caractère] of the spirit and the passions of the heart are extremely different in the various climates, laws should be relative to the differences in these passions and to the differences in these characters” (231); and someone like Goldsmith merely elaborates the point with regard to the terrain of literature and literary criticism. Drawing on a trope and an argument that had been persistently reiterated by English-language writers through the previous one hundred years, Goldsmith thus makes emphatically clear how the idiom of rules and laws of good writing was used to insist on national–cultural differences and often to assert a nationalistic cultural stance. The insistence with which English-language writers in this period argue for their rightful cultural autonomy, the vehemence with which they decry submission to the aesthetic dictates of foreign cultures is a product of their perceived subordination to French and classical culture, French and classical cultural values. No less than writers in contemporary postcolonial societies, British writers from Dryden to Goldsmith are not simply expressing an insular, chauvinistic sentiment but are seeking to articulate and assert a right to national cultural self-determination.These British writers are engaged in a cultural politics of provincial self-assertion, but this whole dimension of their situation has been elided by modern scholars who equate the “neoclassical” period with a metropolitan bearing and thus turn a blind eye to the cultural dynamics I have been delineating in this section. This insistence on local, indigenous laws in the English-language critical tradition persisted throughout the eighteenth century, though it latterly lost some of its initial clarity of purpose.Thomas Warton, in his Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (1756; rev. ed. 1762), writes that, “it is absurd to think of judging either Ariosto or Spenser by precepts which they did not attend to. We who live in the days of writing by rule, are apt to try every


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composition by those laws which we have been taught to think the sole criterion of excellence.”69 Warton supposes that the “laws” by which we judge “every composition” constitute a single code of criticism, even as he argues that writers of the past did not “attend to” such rules. He is apt to assume that such older writers wrote by no rules at all, because they did not adhere to “our” rules (Spenser’s poetry, he writes, is not written according to a plan, but is “the careless exuberance of a warm imagination and a strong sensibility” [15]). Thus, though Warton retains the rejection of alien laws that characterizes the critical gesture we have been tracing, he does not envision the possibility of other codes of law that are indigenous to these older writers. A critic like the Rev. Henry Boyd, who published a translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia in 1802, redeploys the theme in his prefatory discussion of the claims of Dante’s nonclassical “epic.” Boyd suggests that “the old imperial code of criticism”—based on the edicts of Aristotle—is now just beginning to lose some of its authority, though Boyd’s language echoes what other writers had been asserting forcefully for over a century. “It is now grown familiar,” he writes, to appeal to the sentiments of nature from the dictates of ARISTOTLE, and Poets who were ignorant of his rules, or did not chuse to plan their works according to them, may at last expect a fair hearing; after having been long deemed criminals in the eyes of a law to which they were not amenable. . . . The venerable old Bard who is the subject of the present enquiry has been long neglected; perhaps for that reason, because the merit of his Poem could not be tried by the reigning laws of which the author was ignorant, or which he did not chuse to observe.70

Dante’s independence of laws whose jurisdiction did not reach him is of a piece with the cultural autonomy asserted by Restoration and eighteenthcentury English writers for themselves, but Boyd’s argument has striking affinities with that of Warton. Boyd’s formulation does not emphasize that Dante worked with other laws than those of Aristotle, and thus his formulation tends toward the romantic proclivity to oppose law to (antinomian) freedom, to understand freedom as necessarily lawless (as Pope anticipated). But the eighteenth-century critical tradition is closer to the Kantian perspective that defines freedom as obedience to laws that one has given oneself, a perspective that emphasizes autonomy (as against heteronomy), rather than lawlessness and lack of restrictions, as the basis of liberty. Boyd’s perspective, like Warton’s and like Pope’s parody, gives us a “negative” image of freedom as absence of constraint, but the critical idiom it draws on articulates a richer notion of positive freedom based on a self-defined cultural charter.

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The whole complex idiom of the laws or rules of poetry has been the focus of most commentary on the “neoclassical” critical idiom, and yet we can see that there are aspects of it that have been seriously occluded and as a result the general tenor of this idiom has been regularly misinterpreted in a one-sided fashion. By the end of the nineteenth century the misconstrual of this eighteenth-century idiom had reached its typical modern form, which has persisted since then. Thus, for instance, Leslie Stephen, in his 1903 Ford Lectures on English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904), comments that: Critics in an earlier day conceived their function to be judicial. They were administering a fixed code of laws applicable in all times and places.The true canons for dramatic or epic poetry, they held, had been laid down once for all by Aristotle or his commentators; and the duty of the critic was to consider whether the author had infringed or conformed to the established rules, and to pass sentence accordingly.71

The “modern critic,” by contrast, understands the claims of historical relativism, and recognizes that “The great empire of literature . . . has many provinces” (3): “There is a ‘law of nature’ deducible from universal principles of reason which is applicable throughout, and enforces what may be called the cardinal virtues common to all forms of human expression. But subordinate to this, there is also a municipal law, varying in each province and determining the particular systems which are applicable to the different state of things existing in each region” (3–4). Despite Stephen’s sense of innovation and modernity, his discourse here simply resurrects the eighteenth-century emphasis on “municipal law,” which is different in each “province” of the “great empire of literature.” Moreover, he is still willing to subordinate it to an overarching “law of nature” in a manner that is much less assertive of cultural autonomy and national independence than that of many a critic of the long eighteenth century.The modern failure to decipher this eighteenth-century idiom could hardly be better illustrated. All of this is to suggest that the inherited charts we use to navigate our way through the critical idioms of the long eighteenth century are in need of substantial revision, beginning with an admission that the continent of “neoclassicism” remains in certain respects a kind of terra incognita.What has been taken to be a universalist critical idiom emphasizing nature and reason as transcultural and transhistorical standards turns out to be, in the hands of English-language writers, a historically and culturally differentiating discourse of national–cultural autonomy and self-assertion. Such a serious misrecognition of the “Augustan” literary terrain constitutes a crucial aspect of our modern blindness to the provincial anxieties of early modern


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English-language literary culture, especially its obsessive concern to assert its own national cultural autonomy against “foreign” cultural standards imposed from abroad. Literary Nationalism in the Augustan Age What I have been tracing in the previous sections of this chapter is not the development of some “preromantic” currents in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but rather outlooks and investments that are central to the criticism of what we have been taught to name the “neoclassical” age of English literature. My aim has been to make clear how under-read and misunderstood aspects of the criticism of this era remain, despite the large volume of study devoted to this material by several generations of scholars. Once we attend to the nationalistic cultural politics of this body of literary criticism, however, we soon find cultural nationalism to be a more prominent and intrinsic ingredient than we might have been led to expect—and not only in the writings of a Farquhar, but also in those of such central figures of “neoclassical” criticism as Dryden and Addison, as I demonstrate further in this section. The early nineteenth-century national tale may have sought to show, as Katie Trumpener argues, how “a national art must be understood on its own terms, not forced into a prior aesthetic mold it can never fit,”72 but such an emphasis, far from embodying a “new” literary nationalism (as Trumpener argues) merely extends to the British peripheries the ideology of national cultural autonomy that had been dominant in England since the seventeenth century (or indeed since the Elizabethan period). Dryden’s “Dedication of the Aeneis” to the Earl of Mulgrave (1697) can serve as an exemplary instance of the complications of the late seventeenthcentury literary scene.73 Throughout this dedication, Dryden is deferential toward various French critics and poets who have preceded him (Le Bossu, Corneille, Dacier, Ruaeus [Charles de La Rue], Malherbe, Le Clerc, and especially Segrais, his predecessor as translator and critic of Virgil’s Aeneid ). Indeed, Dryden pays much more attention to French and Italian translators of the Aeneid who have preceded him than he does to his English predecessors, whom he clearly does not think worthy of much discussion. Likewise, Dryden employs in the dedication a language of literary achievement that employs the idiom of “Parnassus” (273, 327), which might seem to suggest a single standard of literary excellence, and no less than Mulgrave in his Essay on Poetry, Dryden employs the seemingly universal terms of classical poetics: exemplified, for instance, in his comment evoking the opening of Horace’s Ars poetica that “Nothing but Nature can give a sincere pleasure; where that is not imitated, ’tis Grotesque Painting, the fine

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Woman ends in a Fishes Tail” (272–73).This hardly appears to be a milieu in which one would find a clear acknowledgment of national particularities of taste and aesthetic value, and yet such it is. Parnassus, as we saw in chapter 2, has many different (national) colonies on its slopes, and “Nature” itself, as we have seen in this chapter, can serve to valorize national cultural differences. One might approach this less acknowledged aspect of Dryden’s critical idiom through his use of the language of “patriots” and patriotism (279), and his assertion that while a Frenchman like Montaigne may well have wished to have been born in Venice, he himself is “better pleas’d to have been born an English Man” (281). Dryden goes on to assert: “I shall . . . speak my Thoughts like a free-born Subject as I am; though such things, perhaps, as no Dutch Commentator cou’d, and I am sure no French-man durst” (283). But since this might seem to change the question by shifting it to the political terrain or to that of “national characters” ( bold Englishmen, dull Dutchmen, servile Frenchmen), and away from that of poetics per se, I will pause here only to underline the fact that the notion of identifiable humors and national characters is, as I have noted previously, omnipresent throughout the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so that there is nothing more stereotyped in the period than the notion of national particularities. Turning, then, to Dryden’s comments more specifically addressed to the task and achievement of the poet, what do we find? “To love our Native Country, and to study its Benefit and its Glory, to be interested in its Concerns, is Natural to all Men, and is indeed our common Duty. A Poet makes a farther step; for endeavouring to do honour to it, ‘tis allowable in him even to be partial in its Cause” (298). So proclaims Dryden, and he adds:“sure a Poet is as much privileg’d to lye, as an Ambassador, for the Honour and Interest of his Country” (299). Poets, on this conception, are ambassadors of their “Native Countr[ies]” and champions of a national cause. Homer, Virgil, and Tasso (the three greatest epic poets, on Dryden’s account) “are manifestly partial to their Heroes, in favour of their Country” (298). Poetic license acquires in this context a specifically nationalistic coloring, and the task of the poet is inseparable from furthering the glory of his “Country.” (Twenty years later, one might note, Matthew Prior in his preface to Solomon on the Vanity of the World [1718] reiterates this sentiment when he writes, “I need make no Apology for the short Digressive Panegyric upon GREAT BRITAIN, in the First Book: I am glad to have it observed, that there appears throughout all my Verses a Zeal for the Honor of my Country: and I had rather be thought a good English-man, than the best Poet, or greatest Scholar that ever wrote.”74 Dryden construes national partiality as an intrinsic part of being a good poet; Prior goes one step further, and suggests that even if his national partiality detracts from his poetic


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merits, he had rather be a good patriot (in verse) than a good maker of verses. Similarly, in his essay “On Lyric Poetry” [1728], Edward Young excuses the faults of his poem and expresses the hope that the poem “will meet indulgence for the sake of the design, which is the glory of my country and my king”75—that is, he hopes his patriotic intentions will compensate for any defects in poetic performance. In 1729, Bernard Mandeville comments, “There are some things, in which it is the Interest of Society that Men should be biass’d; and I don’t think it amiss, that Men should be inclined to love their own Language, from the same Principle, that they love their Country.The French call us Barbarous, and we say, they are Fawning: I won’t believe the first, let them believe what they please.”76 For Mandeville, not just writers, but all citizens should be “biass’d” in favor of the culture of their own nation, biased, in particular, in favor of their own national language. Similarly, George Lyttelton, in his Epistle to Mr. Pope [1730], has the shade of Virgil admonish Pope about the poet’s “task,” which is, above all, “to raise / A lasting column to thy Country’s praise”; by fulfilling this task, the poem concludes,“Approving Time shall consecrate thy lays, / And join the Patriot’s to the Poet’s praise.”77 James Thomson adopts this recommendation when he states his desire, in The Seasons [1730], to “mix the Patriot’s with the Poet’s Flame.”78 For all these writers, patriotic loyalty is a chief responsibility of the poet, and it is generally understood to harmonize with or reinforce his literary accomplishments as well.) Having made national partiality into not only a fact of nature, but also a moral duty, Dryden proceeds to distinguish between the differing aesthetic orientations and values of different literary traditions. “The French,” he argues,“have set up Purity for the Standard of their Language [and compositions in it],” while “a Masculine Vigour” is the proclaimed standard of English (322). “Purity” and “Vigour” are clearly two distinct aesthetic criteria or “characters”; they underwrite not only differences between the two languages (“Their Language is not strung with Sinews like our English. It has the nimbleness of a Greyhound, but not the bulk and body of a Mastiff ” [322]), but also between the “Genius” of their respective poets: “Like their Tongue is the Genius of their Poets, light and trifling in comparison of the English; more proper for Sonnets, Madrigals, and Elegies, than Heroick Poetry. The turn on Thoughts and Words is their chief Talent. . . . But Heroick Poetry is not of the growth of France, as it might be of England, if it were Cultivated” (323). Later in the dedication, Dryden returns to this distinction between French (and Italian) poetry and English poetry, and makes clear that these traditions not only valorize different kinds of poetic achievement, but that for Dryden the English outlook is more compelling: “Let the French and Italians value themselves on their Regularity: Strength and Elevation are our Standard. . . . the affected

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purity of the French, has unsinew’d their Heroick Verse. . . . they are so fearful of a Metaphor, that no Example of Virgil can encourage them to be bold with safety” (331). By this point, Dryden’s idiom is difficult to distinguish from that of the literary patriot or cultural nationalist. He believes that a distinctive (national) “genius” is attributable to the English-language literary tradition, and he believes that the virtues of this national genius are to be prized equally with, if not above, those of other national literary traditions. Moreover, he believes that the distinctive character of each national tradition is rooted in the particularities of the language in which it is composed, and that these linguistic particularities are reflective of the larger ethos of the society and its heritage. The French, as the dominant metropolitan literary tradition of the period, may identify their literary precepts with “classical” and “universal” aesthetic values (yet even this, we have seen, is not really the case), but English writers clearly label that outlook as a peculiarly French aesthetic of purity. From the perspective of English-language literary culture, a perspective constantly challenging its own stigmatization as provincial, there are various national aesthetics and any claim to universal validity is likely to be seen as a disguised attempt at cultural hegemony. The resonance between this perspective and that of many postcolonial literary cultures in their critique of Eurocentric aesthetics is not accidental, since both are responses (albeit from significantly different positions) to ascriptions of cultural barbarity, provinciality, underdevelopment. In English-language literary culture during this period there is a constant tension between emphasis on a norm of cultural pluralism and national diversity, on the one hand, and a desire to reposition their own cultural tradition as the standard and arbiter of all others, on the other hand.We catch a glimpse of this latter tendency in Dryden’s remark that,“What I have said, though it has the face of arrogance, yet is intended for the honour of my Country; and therefore I will boldly own, that this English Translation has more of Virgil’s Spirit in it, than either the French, or the Italian” (325).Through this claim of a preeminent correspondence between the spirit of Virgil’s epic and that of Dryden’s translation, Dryden repositions the national traits of English poetry as not just different from those of French and Italian poetry, nor simply preferred by himself, but as implicitly supported by the testimony of the classical tradition itself. Addison’s A Discourse on Ancient and Modern Learning (published posthumously in 1739) also articulates the cultural nationalism that inheres in so much criticism of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. We have already noted something of Addison’s emphasis on cultural nationalism in his Dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (in chapter 2), in


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his discussion of the ballad of Chevy Chase in Spectator no. 70, and his emphasis on nationally distinct cultural tastes in his discussion of national musical and operatic styles in Spectator no. 29. This last issue is taken up again in the Discourse on Ancient and Modern Learning,79 as are some of the issues raised in his discussion of Milton’s Paradise Lost in the Spectator (see nos. 273 and 285).The Discourse thus reprises and underlines themes central to Addison’s critical outlook.As with Dryden’s “Dedication of the Aeneis,” given the topic or occasion of Addison’s Discourse, here if anywhere we might expect to see the supposedly “universalist” poetics of “neoclassicism” articulated and defended. It turns out, however, that, far from proclaiming the timeless power of the classics and the need for modern writers to imitate them, Addison’s Discourse underlines instead the historicity of all writings, the effects (both damaging and enhancing) of temporal and cultural distance on our appreciation of ancient writings, and the issues of rhetorical effectiveness specific to the situation of writers vis-à-vis their contemporary and connational audiences. The import of Addison’s discussion in the Discourse is to recommend something like a nationalist poetics. Because Homer and Virgil constructed their poetical geographies out of their own countries, their readers (“if we consider ’em as the Poet’s Countrymen”) “liv’d as it were upon the Spot, and within the Verge of the Poem; their Habitations lay among the Scenes of the Aeneid; they cou’d find out their own Country in Homer” (455). For such readers, their familiarity with the settings and contexts of the poems made the poems themselves more readily intelligible and “gave ’em a greater Relish than we can have at present of several Parts” (455–56). But perhaps more importantly, such familiarity also gave these readers a different sense of their own lives and worlds, once they found them storied in the works of their poets: these readers “liv’d as it were on Fairy Ground, and convers’d in an enchanted Region, where every Thing they look’d upon appear’d Romantic, and gave a thousand pleasing Hints to their Imaginations” (455). Addison posits here a reciprocal relation between the national “content” (in terms of setting) of a given literature and the self-recognition of its connational readers. He had already touched on this theme in his Letter from Italy (1703)—where he celebrates the “Classic ground” of Italy (line 11) and rather hollowly asserts the exaltation of the Boyne from “a poor inglorious stream / That in Hibernian vales obscurely stray’d” to its newfound fame in the “immortal verse” of Charles Montagu, first Earl of Halifax, such that now “Its rising billows through the world resound” (lines 44–50)80— but in the Discourse, he elaborates the importance of nationally recognizable setting and content more explicitly. He argues, accordingly, that “it wou’d have pleas’d an Englishman, to have seen in [Blackmore’s] Prince Arthur any of the old Traditions of Guy [of Warwick] varied and beautified

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in an Episode, had the Chronology suffered the Author to have led his Hero into Warwickshire” (456). In this respect, Addison’s position is not unlike that of later writers who similarly champion the virtue of national setting and content. Thus, for instance, Joseph Warton, in his discussion of Pope’s Pastorals in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, vol. 1 (1756), comments: A Mixture of British and Grecian ideas may justly be deemed a blemish in the PASTORALS of Pope: and propriety is certainly violated, when he couples Pactolus with Thames, and Windsor with Hybla. Complaints of immoderate heat, and wishes to be conveyed to cooling caverns, when uttered by the inhabitants of Greece, have a decorum and consistency, which they totally lose in the character of a British shepherd. . . . We can never completely relish, or adequately understand, any author, especially any Ancient, except we constantly keep in our eye his climate, his country, and his age.81

Warton goes on to comment that Pope himself “was sensible of the importance of adapting images to the scene of action” (1:6), instancing his replacement of “laurels” in his Mediterranean originals with “willows” in his English pastorals. Warton goes on to express his desire for native subject-matter:“I cannot forbear wishing, that our writers would more frequently search for subjects in the annals of England. . . . We have been too long attached to Grecian and Roman stories” (1:272). Similarly, Royall Tyler in his prologue to The Contrast (1790) underlines for his American audience the patriotic setting of his play: Exult, each patriot heart!—this night is shewn A piece, which we may fairly call our own; ................................... Our Author pictures not from foreign climes The fashions, or the follies of the times; But has confin’d the subject of his work To the gay scenes—the circles of New-York. On native themes his Muse displays her pow’rs82

Tyler’s prologue translates Addison’s observation on the advantages of national content for a work’s connational readers into a doctrine of literary nationalism with respect to the setting and content of a work. The comments of Warton and Tyler define a position that is virtually identical to that of Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike in Toward the Decolonisation of African Literature (1980), who argue (for instance) that, “We have nothing against foreign imagery (‘seasons of an alien land’)


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as such. All we are saying is that when the context and setting is African and tropical, it is asinine to drag in spring, snow and other arctic paraphernalia.”83 We may seem to have traveled a long way from Addison to the “nativist” cultural nationalism of these postcolonial African critics—as indeed we have—but it is important to recognize the partial comparability of Addison’s cultural situation and that of postcolonial critics. In his Letter from Italy, Addison grants that he hails from a land that is relatively harsh in climate and uncelebrated in verse (or at least in verse that is known and acknowledged in other countries), but he has recourse to political “Liberty” as the saving grace and ultimate ground for British self-esteem. Postcolonial critics, writing in the aftermath of modern-day imperialism and under the continuing hegemony of a neocolonial world order, cannot make a similar move (“it is morning yet on creation day”) and remain committed to arguing the need for cultural autonomy and self-direction as an essential part of the continuing struggle for cultural “decolonization.” The resonances of Addison’s critical posture become clearer still if we recollect his argument that one “Circumstance that made Virgil and Homer more particularly charming to their own Country-men, than they can possibly appear to any of the Moderns” is the fact that they chose “their Heroes out of their own Nation” (456–57). For the connational reader of these poets, the whole Poem comes more home, and touches him more nearly than it would have done, had the Scene lain in another Country, and a Foreigner been the Subject of it. . . . I believe therefore, no Englishman reads Homer, or Virgil, with such an inward Triumph of Thought, and such a Passion of Glory, as those who saw in them the Exploits of their own Country-men or Ancestors. (457)

For Addison, reading national literature (especially epic literature) involves “an inward Triumph of Thought” and raises “a Passion of Glory.” This national link between readers and their reading produces a kind of pleasure that increases the power of the work in question, and that makes a connational audience in some sense the “natural” audience for works in heroic— and perhaps in other—genres.Addison recognizes an intimate link not only between literature and nationalism in general, but between certain kinds of literature and the imperialist passions of “Triumph” and “Glory” more specifically. He recognizes, in other words, the role of literature in supporting and furthering the ethos of imperialist nationalism. This emphasis on heroic nationalism is echoed by many subsequent English critics. For example, Joseph Warton, in An Essay on the Genius and

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Writings of Pope (1756), recommends (as we have seen) that dramatists abandon the legends of the Greeks and Romans and take up instead English historical subjects: We have been too long attached to Grecian and Roman stories. In truth, the DOMESTICA FACTA are more interesting, as well as more useful: more interesting, because we all think ourselves concerned in the actions and fates of our countrymen; more useful, because the characters and manners bid the fairest to be true and natural, when they are drawn from models with which we are exactly acquainted. . . . The historical plays of Shakespeare are always particularly grateful to the spectator, who loves to see and hear our own Harrys and Edwards, better than all the Achilleses or Caesars, that ever existed. (1:272–73)

Similarly, one mid-eighteenth-century reader in a nine-page letter for Gray (transmitted through Mason) writes that he prefers The Bard to The Progress of Poesy because of its national pertinence: “Can we in truth be equally interested, for the fabulous exploded Gods of other nations . . . as by the story of our own Edwards and Henrys.”84 Oliver Goldsmith likewise preferred The Bard to The Progress of Poesy, and he takes the nativist principle even further when he adds with regard to the former of these poems (in an unsigned review in The Monthly Review [September 1757]) that,“an English poet,—one whom the Muse has mark’d for her own,—could produce a more luxuriant bloom of flowers by cultivating such as are natives of the soil.”85 Elizabeth Montagu makes much the same point in her Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare (1769). Commenting on Shakespeare’s history plays as a new species of drama, she writes: “The common interests of humanity make us attentive to every story that has an air of reality, but we are more affected if we know it to be true; and the interest is still heightened if we have any relation to the persons concerned. Our noble countryman, Percy, engages us much more than Achilles, or any Grecian hero.”86 For each of these readers and writers, Addison’s “inward Triumph of Thought” is an essential part of the experience of reading national literature. Addison’s recognition of the importance of national subject-matter is important also for the way in which it can modify our perspective on literary works that might otherwise fail to register as nationalist to us, since we are so used to British literature centered on British subject-matter. But when, for instance, Nicholas Rowe introduces The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) by stating that tonight, “We’ll treat you with a downright English feast,” he means by this statement two things. First, that like Shakespeare (his professed model in this play “Written in Imitation of Shakespear’s


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Style”), he has “made it more his care / To rouse the passions than to charm the ear”: immortal Shakespeare wrote, By no quaint rules nor hampering critics taught; With rough, majestic force he moved the heart, And strength and nature made amends for art.87

Here, Rowe identifies Shakespeare with a national English aesthetic of “rough, majestic force” in preference to the “rules” and “art” of other literary cultures. But, in addition to this invocation of the national aesthetic governing his play, Rowe, by offering “a downright English feast,” also means to indicate that his play will deal with a story out of national history, in the manner made famous by Shakespeare’s history plays. Johnson, like many others, felt that Rowe’s play displayed little of the “rough, majestic force” of Shakespeare’s work, and remarked with some asperity: In what he [Rowe] thought himself an imitator of Shakespeare it is not easy to conceive.The numbers, the diction, the sentiments, and the conduct, every thing in which imitation can consist, are remote in the utmost degree from the manner of Shakespeare; whose dramas it resembles only as it is an English story, and as some of the persons have their names in history.88

Johnson may not have thought much of this fact here, but the choice of “an English story,” the use of national subject-matter, is an important gesture in Rowe’s play, and clearly modeled on Shakespeare’s own practice in his history plays. It is this choice that aligns the playwright with his character, Lord Hastings, and with the latter’s declaration of his patriotic faith: . . . my soul’s darling passion stands confessed. Beyond or love’s or friendship’s sacred band, Beyond myself I prize my native land. On this foundation would I build my fame, And emulate the Greek and Roman name; Think England’s peace bought cheaply with my blood, And die with pleasure for my country’s good. (3.1.241–47)

Outside of this episode in which the specter of civil war raises for Hastings an image of his “groaning country” bleeding “at every vein,” Rowe’s “shetragedy” does not focus on the theme of patriotism and self-sacrificing love for one’s “native land.” For the most part, it speaks instead in a more generalized idiom of virtue and tyranny, lawless passion and lawless power. Nonetheless, the initial invocation of Shakespeare’s example and the choice

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of English history as subject-matter establishes the fact that the generalized idiom of virtue rests on native ground. The underlying importance of national subject-matter in the critical thought of the early eighteenth century is brought out most emphatically perhaps in the widespread criticisms leveled at the popularity of Italian opera. To be sure, much of the criticism of this fashionable entertainment took the form of an Enlightenment advocacy of “rational entertainment” (e.g., serious plays in the English language) as preferable to the merely sensuous pleasures of Italian opera (for an English-speaking audience). Thus, for example, Swift comments in a letter of March 8, 1709 that “The Town is run mad after a new Opera [i.e., Pyrrhus and Demetrius]. Poetry and good Sense are dwindling like Eccho into Repetition and Voice”; the Tatler, referring to the same opera, comments that it is a “shallow Satisfaction of the Eyes and Ears only” and shows “the Degeneracy of our Understanding”; and Addison writes in the Spectator a couple of years later that the “only Design” of operas is “to gratify the Senses, and keep up an indolent Attention in the Audience”89: their attractions are scenic, musical, gestural, and theatrical—but not rational, since they make no appeal through language to the understanding of the English audience. At times this kind of “rationalistic” criticism of operas seems to be focused on the inherent absurdities of the form, irrespective of the language barrier that limits their address to an English audience (see, e.g., Spectator nos. 13 and 14 [March 15– 16, 1711])—and hence quite removed from any issues of cultural nationalism.And indeed much of the scholarly discussion of the English critique of Italian opera has focused on the general aesthetic principles at issue in the debate. But the underlying nationalist logic of the stance of critique of Italian operas comes out plainly in Addison’s discussion in Spectator no. 18 (March 21, 1711). “It is my Design in this Paper,” he states, to deliver down to Posterity a faithful Account of the Italian Opera, and of the gradual Progress which it has made upon the English Stage: For there is no Question but our great Grand-children will be very curious to know the Reason why their Forefathers used to sit together like an Audience of Foreigners in their own Country, and to hear whole Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they did not understand. (1:78–79)

Addison underlines what he takes to be a pusillanimous willingness on the part of the English gentry “to sit together like . . . Foreigners in their own Country,” attending “Plays acted before them in a Tongue which they did not understand.”Addison’s remarks emphasize not only the absurdity of the situation, but the disloyalty of the English audience in thus preferring Italian operas to English plays. He insists that,“If the Italians have a Genius


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for Musick above the English, the English have a Genius for other Performances of a much higher Nature, and capable of giving the Mind a much nobler Entertainment” (81).And the note of reproach for cultural disloyalty comes out clearly in his closing remarks that: At present, our Notions of Musick are so very uncertain, that we do not know what it is we like; only, in general, we are transported with any thing that is not English: So it be of a foreign Growth, let it be Italian, French, or High-Dutch, it is the same thing. In short, our English Musick is quite rooted out, and nothing yet planted in its stead. (82)

By this point in the discussion, Addison is no longer concerned with the merits or demerits of Italian opera in itself; rather, he is primarily concerned with the contest between “foreign” and native English arts. Addison’s remarks on Italian opera in the Spectator are of a piece with much of the voluminous criticism of opera published in the early eighteenth century.90 A particularly telling instance of this nationalistic critique of “foreign wit” is found in the epilogue to Richard Steele’s popular play, The Tender Husband (1705; 2d ed. 1711; 3d ed. 1717; 4th ed. 1723; 5th ed. 1731). Steele’s epilogue, in fact, is an important enough document of early eighteenth-century “English” cultural nationalism for us to quote it at length: Britons, who constant war with factious rage, For liberty against each other wage, From foreign insult save this English stage. No more th’Italian squalling tribe admit, In tongues unknown; ’tis Popery in wit. ................................ But is it not a serious ill to see Europe’s great arbiters so mean can be: Passive with an affected joy to sit, Suspend their native taste of manly wit, Neglect their comic humor, tragic rage, For known defects of nature and of age? Arise for shame, ye conquering Britons, rise; Such unadorned effeminacy despise; Admire (if you will dote on foreign wit) Not what Italians sing but Romans writ. So shall less works, such as tonight’s slight play, At your command with justice die away; Till then forgive your writers, that can’t bear You should such very tramontanes appear, The nations which contemn you, to revere.

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Let Anna’s soil be known for all its charms, As famed for lib’ral sciences as arms; Let those derision meet who would advance Manners or speech from Italy or France; Let them learn you who would your favor find, And English be the language of mankind.91

Steele chastises the taste for Italian opera (and for French manners and modes) as “effeminacy,”92 as shameful submission to “foreign insult”: “The nations which contemn you, [you] revere.” He calls on the “Britons’ ” to admire manliness and conquering power—appealing to them to spurn the modern French and Italians, and to imitate instead the ancient Romans, who imposed their language and culture (Steele implies) on their conquered provinces instead of tamely allowing others to serve as cultural models for them. (The standing of Greek culture in ancient Rome is, of course, elided by Steele.) It is not for the “conquering Britons” to curry favor with the Italians and the French; rather, “Let them learn you who would your favor find, / And English be the language of mankind.” Steele’s cultural nationalism is not simply defensive (seeking to preserve the English stage against the encroachments of “foreign wit”); rather, emboldened by the recent military successes of “Britain,” he envisions the growing prestige of “British” arts as well as “British” arms (“Let Anna’s soil be . . . / As famed for lib’ral sciences as arms”).This explicit linking of geopolitical power with cultural recognition and authority, evoked by the ancient topos of the joint rise of arts and arms, is a theme we have encountered before, and one that recurs throughout the century. We might note that Steele’s appeal is not to the “English” but to “Britons”—this, despite the fact that the Anglo-Scottish union has not yet taken place. Steele’s nationalism is careful to evoke not simply the polity of England but “Anna’s soil,” that is, all the kingdoms and territories subject to her sovereignty. His nationalism, in other words, is cast in relation to an imperial monarchy and, by virtue of its focus on the geolinguistic politics of the English language, it positions Anna’s subjects as the Englishspeaking peoples.“Britons,” for Steele, is not so much a political term, as it is a term evoking a cultural community, and serving to articulate a specifically cultural nationalism that finds its chief goal and emblem in the envisioned global spread of the English language (and the literary culture that it carries). Steele’s stance in this epilogue weaves together many strands germane to the argument of this book. I have already noted the importance of the intersection of geopolitical and cultural power at various points; the evocation of a “British” and an imperial dimension for English-language culture is part of the transnational horizon of early modern literary culture that I have been emphasizing; and the theme of the global spread of the English


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language was elaborated in chapter 1. For present purposes, what is important is the testimony Steele’s epilogue provides regarding the emphatic sense of cultural secondariness and “foreign insult” that underpins the English / British investment in cultural nationalism in the early eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has been ready to recognize the imperialistic ambition in such cultural discourses, but it has tended to ignore the sense of neglect of the native culture that gives urgency to this ambition as a remedy for the present situation. As a result, modern writers often invert the eighteenth-century situation and interpret patriotic appeals to assert a neglected national culture as evidence of metropolitan self-assurance and complacency.What strikes Steele, by contrast, and raises his ire is the asymmetry of a situation in which Britons admire French and Italian arts while the cultivated classes of these countries only hold British arts in contempt. From Classic to Romantic? In this final section, I want to suggest that recognizing the important place of cultural nationalism in the literary criticism of this period forces us to reconsider the narratives of development from classicism to romanticism, from (cosmopolitan) Enlightenment to (romantic) nationalism, that have dominated literary historiographic scholarship on the long eighteenth century. In place of such ( linear) narratives of development, I propose a more dialectical account of how literary outlooks are transformed between the early and late parts of the long eighteenth century.This transformation involves the dissolution of what I call a posture of “critical pluralism” into a variety of competing “critical fundamentalisms” (of which “neoclassicism” and “romanticism” are two instances). Thus rather than witnessing a shift from neoclassicism to romanticism, the long eighteenth century witnesses instead a more complex transition from which both neoclassicism and romanticism result as consolidated, mutually incompatible, and coeval critical outlooks. The criticism of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries typically works with pairs of qualities that are not incompatible, but which produce a certain tension in relation to each other (e.g., imagination/ judgment; genius/reason).These paired qualities are approached via a logic of the mean as a way of negotiating the relations between them, so that while a common failing of a writer is to be deficient in one quality or another, an equally common failing consists in the excess of an otherwise desirable quality.93 In the mid- and later-eighteenth century, by contrast, the tendency is increasingly to enumerate single, positive qualities and to evaluate a writer in terms of the simple absence or presence (in varying degrees) of these qualities. Such a perspective retains the idea that a writer might be deficient in a given quality, but it eliminates the whole notion of

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excess and with it the idea of “balance” that is so central to the earlier criticism. Likewise, by thinking of qualities of writers and their works as simple positivities, rather than as in tension with some paired quality, the later criticism tends to replace the nuanced evaluations of the earlier criticism (e.g., “Homer has more fire, but Virgil more judgment”) with categorical derogation or approval of writers / works according to their affiliation or lack thereof with qualities esteemed by the critic (e.g., such and such is [or is not] genuine poetry; so and so is [or is not] a real poet). This transformation of the critical idiom across the long eighteenth century certainly means that issues of cultural difference and cultural nationalism come to be expressed with a different inflection in the later part of the period. But the fact of this transformation, and more importantly the way it has been construed in literary historical scholarship, have also tended to obscure the very real continuities in the engagement with such issues throughout the long eighteenth century, early and late. Recognizing the importance of cultural nationalism in the criticism of the early part of this period forces us to reconceptualize the changes in literary criticism across the long eighteenth century; and, at the same time, in order to be fully effective, local analyses of individual texts and passages of eighteenthcentury critical discourse, such as we have pursued so far in this chapter, need to be supplemented by a macrohistorical account of change in critical idioms across the long eighteenth century. This is what I attempt to sketch out in this final section of the chapter.94 Having exemplified the nationalistic investments of the critical outlook of the early part of the long eighteenth century by way of Dryden’s “Dedication of the Aeneis,” Addison’s Discourse on Ancient and Modern Learning, and Steele’s epilogue to The Tender Husband, we can ask how things have changed by the mid- and later-eighteenth century. Douglas Lane Patey speaks of a “mid-century nationalist movement of revisionist literary history,”95 but as far as poetics is concerned, we might ask in what sense have critical assumptions and outlooks been transformed across the century? I have suggested that the transformation that does take place has been misconstrued as a simple shift from universalist neoclassicism to nationalistic romanticism.William Collins is sometimes taken as a representative transitional figure in this shift, but so far as critical outlooks are concerned it is not hard to see the inadequacy of such claims. In the preface to his Persian Eclogues of 1742 (rev. 1757 as Oriental Eclogues), Collins champions the notion of nationally particular literary tastes, but there is little “new” in his discourse as a review of the material in this chapter makes abundantly clear. Collins writes: It is with the Writings of Mankind, in some Measure, as with their Complexions or their Dress, each Nation hath a Peculiarity in all these, to


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distinguish it from the rest of the World.The Gravity of the Spaniard, and the Levity of the Frenchman, are as evident in all their Productions as in their Persons themselves; and the Stile of my Countrymen is as naturally Strong and Nervous, as that of an Arabian or Persian is rich and figurative. There is an Elegancy and Wildness of Thought which recommends all their Compositions; and our Genius’s are as much too cold for the Entertainment of such Sentiments, as our Climate is for their Fruits and Spices. If any of these Beauties are to be found in the following Eclogues, I hope my Reader will consider them as an Argument of their being Original. . . . Whatever Defects, as, I doubt not, there will be many, fall under the Reader’s Observation, I hope his Candour will incline him to make the following Reflection:That the Works of Orientals contain many Peculiarities, and that thro’ Defect of Language few European Translators can do them Justice.96

Collins may be somewhat playful here in his assertion of the unbridgeable cultural differences between East and West, since he only pretends that he has translated genuine “Oriental” works into English. Nonetheless, his later dismissal of this early work on the grounds that it does not in fact capture anything of the manner of the eastern nations and might as well have been titled “Irish Eclogues,” only serves to confirm the sentiment of cultural difference expressed in his original preface.And the idiom of that discourse (the effect of climate; the notion of national characters; the cultural dichotomy between east and west) is, as we have seen, the common currency of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.97 Seen in this perspective, Collins’s preface hardly suggests a shift is taking place in critical idioms around mid-century; rather, it tends to support the view that critical idioms inherited from the earlier part of our period continued with unabated force through mid-century. I have already suggested that the transformation of critical idioms across the long eighteenth century did not take the form of a process of “evolution” or “development” from classicism to romanticism. Rather, the transformation might be better envisioned as the unraveling of a large fabric of loosely woven strands, and their regrouping into a number of distinct and tightly woven patches. The resulting transformation involves a fundamental shift from a posture of critical pluralism to one of a variety of (competing) critical fundamentalisms. Let me illustrate the kind of transformation I am referring to by considering two contrasting critical idioms of the 1760s, exemplified by Hugh Blair and Richard Hurd, in which we can see this transformation in process as it were. James Macpherson’s Ossianic works certainly figure as an important milestone in the history of European romanticism: initially published from 1760 to 1765 and republished throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they achieved a pan-European popularity second in

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their own time only to the cult of Shakespeare. From 1763, they were typically accompanied by Hugh Blair’s Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian (rev. 1765), which thus became one of the most important critical documents of the entire romantic period, either in its own voice or adapted, as it was, for instance, by Herder in his 1773 essay “Uber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker.”Though Blair’s standing as an influential cultural figure (through his teaching, and especially through his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres of 1783, which became a standard textbook for much of the next hundred years in Britain and the United States) has been frequently noted, his essay on the poems of Ossian has not received a great deal of attention; when we examine it, we are not surprised to find it valorizing a poetry of sublimity and pathos founded on imagination and the passions.98 Blair likewise valorizes the “force” and “energy” of a vigorous and primitive poetic idiom and poetic sensibility that have not been “emasculated” by overrefinement (381–82). He champions the “rude,” “wild,” and “passionate” eloquence of Ossian, a poet of “original genius” (378) as against the “modern poets” with their trivial banterings: His poetry, more perhaps than that of any other writer, deserves to be stiled, The Poetry of the Heart. It is a heart penetrated with noble sentiments, and with sublime and tender passions; a heart that glows, and kindles the fancy; a heart that is full, and pours itself forth. Ossian did not write, like modern poets, to please readers and critics. He sung from the love of poetry and song. (356)

Ossian’s poetry, that is to say, is the expression of his humanity, not the calculated product of a literary career, seeking either the reward of fame or monetary gain or both. Blair refers to him as a “true Poet” (378), influenced by “true poetic inspiration” (356),“who wrote from the immediate impulse of poetical enthusiasm, and without much preparation of study or labour” (384). Ossian’s forte, we are told, is “the true poetical sublime” (394): Accuracy and correctness; artfully connected narration; exact method and proportion of parts, we may look for in polished times. . . . But amidst the rude scenes of nature, amidst rocks and torrents and whirlwinds and battles, dwells the sublime. It is the thunder and the lightning of genius. It is the offspring of nature, not of art. (394–95)

This seems like a dismissal of the small arts of “polished times” in favor of nature and the Sturm und Drang, the storm and stress or “the thunder and lightning” of genius. Given all this, it is easy to see why both Macpherson’s work and, implicitly, Blair’s critical remarks have frequently been construed as heralds of the romantic movement.


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But this would be a very partial reading of Blair’s critical remarks. For side by side with the kind of remarks that I have just cited, we find another set of concerns in Blair’s Dissertation. This other aspect of Blair’s work emerges in his evaluation of the Ossianic Fingal and Temora as epic poems. The whole concern to legitimate the title of these poems to the honorific label of “heroic poem” or “epic” already attests to an investment in a notion of generic hierarchy that carries over from the “neoclassical” period. He also invokes the “rules” and remarks of Longinus, Horace, Quintilian, and Lord Kames regarding good writing, and more especially those of Aristotle concerning the qualities of an epic in particular. He may reject the claims of Le Bossu regarding the proper composition of an epic (“Never did a more frigid, pedantic notion, enter into the mind of a critic” [359]), but he nonetheless addresses Le Bossu’s requirement that an epic poem “illustrate some moral truth” (359). Moreover, his dismissal of Le Bossu only serves to allow him to embrace Aristotle’s requirements more fully, namely,“That the action which is the ground work of the poem, should be one, compleat, and great; that it should be feigned, not merely historical; that it should be enlivened with characters and manners; and heightened by the marvellous” (358–59). Blair’s validation of the Aristotelian requirements deserves quotation, even though it constitutes a somewhat lengthy passage: Examined even according to Aristotle’s rules, it [Fingal ] will be found to have all the essential requisites of a true and regular epic; and to have several of them in so high a degree, as at first view to raise our astonishment on finding Ossian’s composition so agreeable to rules of which he was entirely ignorant. But our astonishment will cease, when we consider from what source Aristotle drew those rules. Homer knew no more of the laws of criticism than Ossian. But guided by nature, he composed in verse a regular story, founded on heroic actions, which all posterity admired. Aristotle, with great sagacity and penetration, traced the causes of this general admiration. He observed what it was in Homer’s composition, and in the conduct of his story, which gave it such power to please; from this observation he deduced the rules which poets ought to follow, who would write and please like Homer; and to a composition formed according to such rules, he gave the name of an epic poem. Hence his whole system arose.Aristotle studied nature in Homer. Homer and Ossian both wrote from nature. No wonder that among all the three, there should be such agreement and conformity. (358)

Here we see the same reconciliation of “Nature” and “Homer” (and Aristotle) as that effected by Pope in the Essay on Criticism. Indeed, in its elaborate discussion of the fables, the composition, the description, imagery, and sentiments of the Ossianic poems (treating in turn the several figures of simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification, apostrophe), Blair’s

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Critical Dissertation can look like a very complete piece of “neoclassical” critical evaluation. He is pleased to find very little “border[ing] on an Italian conceit” in these poems (381), and says that some of their similes “would do honour to any of the most celebrated classics” (390), thus continuing to hold the classics as a kind of universal standard for judging poetic achievement and claiming the title of “classic” for Ossian. (Note also Blair’s comment that,“In one remarkable passage, Ossian describes himself as living in a sort of classical age” [352].) Blair thus praises Ossian both for his “enthusiastick warmth” (390), which sometimes carries him “beyond the cautious strain of modern poetry” (392), and for his “judgment and art” in the composition of his works (374), the “correct[ness]” and “propriety of sentiment and behaviour” in his characterizations (394). His criteria of evaluation reiterate the coupled demands for fancy and judgment, poetic fire and refined discernment that characterize “neoclassical” criticism from Hobbes forward.99 Blair’s presentation of Ossian as “a sort of classic” thus differs essentially from Richard Hurd’s strategy in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762), where Hurd seeks to rehabilitate “Gothic” art by distinguishing it as its own autonomous aesthetic paradigm, one that cannot be evaluated by the terms of “Grecian rules”: When an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian rules, he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture has it’s [sic] own rules, by which when it comes to be examined, it is seen to have it’s [sic] merit, as well as the Grecian. The question is not, which of the two is conducted in the simplest or truest taste: but, whether there be not sense and design in both, when scrutinized by the laws on which each is projected.100

Hurd’s dichotomization of “Grecian” and “Gothic” rules of art may seem like a more radical defense of nonclassical art than Blair’s, but it is worth noting that ultimately he ends up valorizing “sense and design” as the proper criteria of judgment. He insists, indeed, that the application of these criteria must take into account the different “projects” undertaken by the two kinds of art, but he universalizes “sense and design” as the defining characteristics of all art. Other critics who adopt this dichotomizing or polarizing strategy, such as Joseph Warton or Henry Headley, will champion fancy and the imagination above all else, but like Hurd they too reduce the criteria of evaluation to a single quality that they identify with the “essence” of poetry. Blair’s argument recognizes, instead, a multiplicity of criteria in terms of which art can be evaluated. Sense and design, correctness and accuracy, strictness of connection and propriety of diction and sentiment are all valid


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criteria—but so too are forcefulness, energy, and vigor; the ability to move the passions and stir the imagination; directness and simplicity. Blair’s discourse recognizes that literary art is a multifaceted practice that can appeal to its audiences in a variety of ways. His aesthetic outlook is characterized by what I call “critical pluralism”: an outlook that can operate in both a flexible and an intransigent manner, since it allows for an open and responsive relation to diverse cultural artifacts, but equally it makes possible an opportunistic and constantly shifting resistance to anything the critic chooses to oppose. In any case, this outlook remains quite distinct from the “critical fundamentalism” of Hurd—an outlook that tends to perceive systematic and mutually incompatible aesthetic stances between which the observer must choose, cleaving to one and rejecting the other as wholly alien. Thus, in discussing Spenser’s Faerie Queene Hurd maintains that the work has a genuine Gothic unity of design and overlaid atop it a specious attempt at classical unity of design, which “the violence of classic prejudices forced the poet to affect . . . tho’ in contradiction to his gothic system” (70). The expedients to which Spenser resorted in this attempt were “injudicious,” in Hurd’s view:“Their purpose was to ally two things, in nature incompatible, the Gothic, and the classic unity” (71). Even though Hurd has been at pains in the earlier portion of his Letters on Chivalry and Romance to demonstrate the compatibility of classical heroic and Gothic manners, accounting thus “for the constant mixture, which the modern critic esteems so monstrous, of pagan fable with the fairy tales of Romance” (39), he himself now adopts the idiom of “the modern critic” who insists on the systematic incompatibility of classical and Gothic notions of unity. Whatever the shifts in Hurd’s own outlook over the course of this work, it is indeed a mark of the “modern” critic (i.e., of the critical fundamentalism that began to dominate literary discussion by the late eighteenth century) to insist on the essential uniqueness and incompatibility of the classical world, the Biblical world, the medieval European world, the world of the Renaissance, and that of modern Europe, and of the literary art produced in each of these “worlds.” The history of literary criticism and practice across the long eighteenth century has generally been written from the point of view of some such “critical fundamentalism.”That is, whether a given scholar felt most affinity for “neoclassical” or for “romantic” aesthetics, the shared assumption was that the history of the period could be narrated in terms of a shift from one systematic poetics to another (the two being mutually incompatible), a shift from a given aesthetic outlook to a “new” (perhaps even revolutionary) aesthetic outlook: a “transition from ‘Augustan to Romantic,’ from ‘reason’ to ‘imagination,’ from ‘order and decorum’ to the ‘wilderness of sensations.’ ”101 The problem with this construction of cultural history is that once scholars

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start to investigate the genealogy of the new romantic aesthetics, they find themselves tracing these genealogical strands back through the whole of the eighteenth century. Thus, whether the focus is on an affective aesthetics (rather than a mimetic one), on an aesthetics of the sublime (rather than an aesthetics of the beautiful), on an aesthetics of originality (rather than one of imitation), or on an aesthetics of cultural particularity (rather than an universalist aesthetics), each and every one of these emphases can be found as a strand in the aesthetic outlook of the earlier part of this period.The newness of the “new” aesthetic outlook thus dissolves into a long string of precursors and anticipations.102 Most of these genealogical investigations of critical idioms were carried out by scholars deeply sympathetic to a romantic aesthetics. But scholars who claimed that such teleological investigations distorted and deprecated the literary practice of the earlier part of this period have offered their own version of the same shift from a neoclassical to a romantic aesthetic. They have sought to understand and often to champion a neoclassical aesthetic “in its own terms,” but they too have assumed that it has a systematic incompatibility with romantic aesthetics and that the early and late portions of the eighteenth century are marked by distinctive aesthetic outlooks, operating with quite distinct sets of assumptions.103 The literary history of the eighteenth century remains the story of a linear shift from one set of literary assumptions to another, though the outcome of this shift is perhaps seen, from this perspective, as a fall into romantic mystifications rather than the emergence of a new and vital recognition of the truth of the imagination. Neither of these accounts, however, is well equipped to address the apparent coexistence of what are constructed as two mutually incompatible sets of aesthetic assumptions and allegiances in a work such as Blair’s Critical Dissertation—or, for that matter, in the critical writings of most any other eighteenth-century literary figure. There is, no doubt, a marked change in the outlooks of anglophone literary culture across the eighteenth century, but my own sense is that this history is misunderstood if it is seen primarily as a simple transition from one aesthetic system to another. Such a view, in its strictest formulations, leads to the implication that certain kinds of aesthetic perceptions and critical problems could not be enunciated in the one era or the other, that certain thoughts only became thinkable within the new paradigm—an implication that is difficult to square with the long history of “anticipations” of supposedly novel romantic perceptions. I want to argue for a different understanding of the literary history of the eighteenth century.The transformation that does take place over this period can be better understood as a shift from what I have called “critical pluralism” to “critical fundamentalism.” On this account, it is not so much that new


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aesthetic assumptions, criteria, or concepts are introduced at some point during the course of the century. Rather, there is a kind of progressive distillation of the diverse coexisting and variously interacting strands in the aesthetic outlook of the early part of the century into what come to be seen as distinct and mutually incompatible aesthetic postures, to which we generally give the labels “neoclassical” and “romantic.” Thus, it is not so much that new, unprecedented assumptions and criteria are introduced (hence the futility of attempts to trace the origin and development of these “new” aesthetic assumptions); rather, already existing assumptions and criteria are reorganized so as to form newly consolidated aesthetic “stances” that now come to be defined in terms of (and through) polemical oppositions.The late eighteenthcentury tendency to pose fancy and judgment as incompatible qualities of the poetic temperament—so that a given poet belongs either to the school of fancy or the school of judgment—dismantles what had previously been construed as the twin and intertwined gifts of all great poets. On this account, then, both “neoclassicism” and “romanticism” are products of the later part of the eighteenth century: they are the coexisting products of a shift to a “fundamentalist” aesthetic outlook on the part of most participants in the literary field, whichever literary “school” they may feel themselves allied with.104 The retrospective construction of neoclassicism is evident in “Sleep and Poetry,” in which Keats posits neoclassicism as “a schism” in English poetry.105 But in doing so, Keats transforms into a radical departure what the Augustans viewed as a continuous refining of the single tradition of English poetry. In his book on Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (1941), Earl Wasserman long ago sought to clarify the continuity of the English poetic tradition, as well as the process by which “Elizabethan” and “Augustan” English poetry came to be seen as polar opposites, embodying mutually exclusive poetics. Wasserman shows that “a rather large body of Renaissance literature was very much alive in the eighteenth century, and the Augustans not only read and, after their own fashion, appreciated it, but often found in it the substance for their own literary productions”;106 he repeatedly emphasizes that the Augustans did not reject earlier English poetry, in order to construct a “new” kind of poetry (as Keats implies), but rather sought to blend Elizabethan poetic “fire,” “strength,” or “spirit” with their own greater “correctness” and refinements in versification (48–49).“[T]he division of poets into the school of Spenser and the school of Pope,” Wasserman writes, “is a dichotomy that was not often perceived before Hurd and the Wartons” (93). Nonetheless, it is clear that Wasserman thinks that the Augustans failed to perceive the incompatibility between their own poetics and the poetry of the Elizabethan age, so that his critical outlook is fundamentally the same as that of Hurd, the Wartons, and Keats in this regard.

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This sense of a “dichotomy” between different kinds of poetry is a cultural construction of the later eighteenth century, and it underlines the fact that a real transformation of critical assumptions and outlooks does take place over the eighteenth century. But this transformation occurs through a much more dialectical process than a simple transition from one aesthetic system to another: it involves, rather, the emergence of a fundamentally new way of conceptualizing both the nature of poetic schools or modes and the relationship between different poetic eras. As a result, there is both a greater measure of continuity and a more radical disjuncture than has generally been recognized between the critical outlooks of the early and late portions of the long eighteenth century: virtually every strand in the outlooks of the later period is to be found earlier in the century, but the underlying paradigm has been transformed from critical pluralism to critical fundamentalism. By the end of the eighteenth century, there was a tendency to define any given literary milieu in terms of the distinctive aesthetic assumptions and tenets in terms of which it was said to operate.This systematization and differentiation of distinct aesthetic “worlds”—not in terms of mere stylistic trends, but in terms of fundamental aesthetic outlooks—gives to the period since the late eighteenth century a cast very different from that which prevailed in earlier eras. For while critical differences have always been apparent, these had tended to be seen as differences of emphasis—to some extent chosen and wilful differences (or, by contrast, inescapable differences, of temperament, character, education), to some extent differences of emphasis adapted to different occasions, circumstances, purposes, and audiences. Despite such differences, however, all writers were seen to be operating on the same terrain, in the same aesthetic “universe” as it were.107 The result was not so much “ahistoricism” as eclecticism and often a kind of superficiality of argument since critical differences were rarely seen to involve fundamental assumptions and values. By the end of the century, this situation had been replaced by one that emphasized the mutual incompatibility of distinct sets of critical assumptions and values, and that gave a certain polemical clarity and consequentiality to critical argument since this was now seen to involve rival aesthetic worldviews as it were. (Of course, the more limited kinds of critical differences were also much in evidence, but these were now seen as relatively trivial disagreements, mere differences of emphasis within a given critical posture.) Seeing the literary history of the eighteenth century in terms of the crystallization of critical positions (rather than the emergence of novel critical outlooks) allows us to understand better why the literary terrain looks so different, so novel by the end of the century without our being able clearly and effectively to identify the deployment of categorically new


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assumptions, criteria, values on this terrain. This perspective helps us to understand better both what changes and what doesn’t change across the eighteenth century, or better, it helps us understand how change in literary outlooks takes place over this period. It allows us to see that the simple linear narratives that have governed our conceptualization of eighteenthcentury literary history (and of literary history more generally) need to be reinflected to allow for more complex logics of development and displacement. And this change in perspective allows us to see, finally, that cultural nationalist engagements are both much more central and much more continuous throughout the literary culture of the long eighteenth century in Britain than has otherwise been evident. The effort to redeem the neglected and lowly status of the national culture provides in fact one of the main engagements of the literary culture of the period, one that energizes the expansive visions and hopes for the metropolitan standing of English-language literary culture in the near future. My argument about the need to revise our inherited narratives of literary development across the long eighteenth century issues from the other fundamental revisionings of the English-language literary culture of this period enjoined in this book, by way of its efforts to underline the traditionally marginal status of English-language literary culture in the European world; to isolate the progress of English topos and its development from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries; to assert the importance of the republic of letters as a fundamental mode of conceptualizing the literary terrain and the way this concept foregrounded issues of provinciality, cultural difference, and national cultural status for eighteenth-century readers and writers; and to show how fundamentally “neoclassical” English critics were concerned with a nationalistic assertion of cultural autonomy and the redemption of their native culture from the dominating impact of more influential European cultures. However adequate my own narrative of a dialectical shift from critical pluralist outlooks to various kinds of critical fundamentalism may be in helping us to understand the character of the changes and continuities in the critical discourses of the period, this book has sought to demonstrate the need for us to discard our inherited preconceptions about the status, character, and engagements of English-language literary culture in the long eighteenth century by bringing into the foreground the interplay of imperial ambitions, provincial anxieties, and national self-assertion that structures this field of cultural production in this era.


NOTES

Short titles have been used for some internet sources cited in the notes, as follows: LION Literature Online. ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 1996–2003.Version 96.1 (December 1996) to version 03.4 (May 2003).

Introduction (Dis)establishing the Empire of English 1. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury,“Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author” (1710), in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 1:115. 2. John Kenyon, The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984), 234. 3. See Gerald Newman, “Anti-French Propaganda and Liberal Nationalism in the Early Nineteenth Century: Suggestions Toward a General Interpretation,” Victorian Studies 18 (1975): 385–418; Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); Linda Colley,“The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation 1760–1820,” Past and Present 102 (1984): 94–129; Colley, “Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750–1830,” Past and Present 113 (1986): 97–117; Colley,“Radical Patriotism in EighteenthCentury England,” in Patriotism:The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel, 3 vols. (London: Routledge, 1989), 1:169–87; Colley,“Britishness and Otherness:An Argument,” Journal of British Studies 31 (1992): 309–29; Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). See also Walter R. Johnson, “A Historiographical Sketch of English Nationalism 1789–1837,” Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism 19 (1992): 1–8. 4. Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714–1760 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 1; Daniel A. Baugh, “Great Britain’s Blue Water Policy, 1689–1815,” International History Review 10 (1988): 47. 5. In his recent book, Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests that “the region of the world we call ‘Europe’. . . . has already been provincialized by history itself. . . . [T]he so-called ‘European age’ in modern history began to yield place to other regional and global configurations toward the middle of the twentieth century,” and turns his attention instead to interrogating the intellectual inescapability of Eurocentric conceptions of modernity throughout the

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contemporary world (Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000], 3). Chakrabarty’s notion of “provincializing” Europe’s cultural centrality is an important inspiration for my own examination of the emergence of metropolitan status for the English-language cultural sphere within the European world and, by extension, of the anglophone cultural sphere within the wider world. As Chakrabarty argues, “provincializing Europe is not a project of rejecting or discarding European thought,” but of reconceptualizing it from a postcolonial perspective (16–17). John Dryden, Aureng-Zebe, ed. Frederick M. Link (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 119–20. Jonathan Swift, A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Language (1712; repr., Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1969), 25–26; Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), lines 40–41; Thomas Tickell, On the Prospect of Peace (1712), lines 464–67, in LION; Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. B. R. S. Fone (1968; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2000), 129, 138, 174. There is now an important body of such work that has expanded our sense of the engagements of eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Much of this work is devoted to particular authors or works, but for some of the more wide-ranging work, see, e.g.: Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Laura Brown, Ends of Empire:Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Mita Choudhury, Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theater, 1660–1800: Identity, Performance, Empire (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000); Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992); Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse of the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Rajani Sudan, Fair Exotics: Xenophobic Subjects in English Literature 1720–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980), 128–29. See, e.g., Isaiah Berlin,“The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism,” in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Human Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: John Murray, 1990); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);Anthony Pagden,“The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism

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13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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and the Origins of Nationalism in Diderot and Herder,” in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Developments, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). See, regarding the case of England, E. C.W. Stratford, The History of English Patriotism, 2 vols. (London: John Lane, 1913); Hans Kohn,“The Genesis and Character of English Nationalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940): 69–94; Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1953); and Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Puritanism and Revolution (1958; repr., Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1968), 58–125. See, e.g., Liah Greenfeld, “Science and National Greatness in SeventeenthCentury England,” Minerva 25 (1987): 107–22, and the same author’s Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth (Phoenix Mill, England: Sutton, 1998). Margot Finn,“An Elect Nation? Nation, State and Class in Modern British History,” Journal of British Studies 28 (1989): 184. In viewing nationalism in terms of investments in national greatness (“national grandeur”) rather than simply in national identity, I depart from Colley’s and Newman’s emphasis on religious dimensions of eighteenthcentury cultural nationalism in Britain. The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, ed. Lord Sheffield, 5 vols. (London: John Murray, 1814), 3:560. Thomas B. Macaulay, “Sir James Mackintosh” (1835), in Critical and Historical Essays, 6 vols. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 3:308. Linda Colley, “The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986): 359. British Library, Egerton MSS 242, p. 22, quoted in H.V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 132. Bruce P. Lenman, “Colonial Wars and Imperial Instability, 1688–1793,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 165–67. C. A. Bayly offers a similar assessment of the situation of imperial Britain in the 1780s: “the 1770s and 1780s were a British recessional.The American empire was lost; the infant empire in Asia racked by warfare and mismanagement [including the defeat of the British in western India by the Marathas in 1779 and in Madras by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1780]. In the eastern Mediterranean, French trade greatly outstripped English trade

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which had been dominant at the end of the previous century. . . . The profitability of the lucrative Caribbean islands was declining relative to the French West Indies. . . . Even the dependence of Ireland, the oldest colony, was in doubt. Whatever the underlying strength of the commercial economy, many Britons felt that their great days were over” (Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World 1780–1830 [London: Longman, 1989], 2). Horace Walpole, The Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 35:310. Quoted in Gerald S. Graham, British Policy and Canada 1774–1791:A Study in Eighteenth-Century Trade Policy (1930; repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 52. H. M. Scott,“Britain as a European Great Power in the Age of the American Revolution,” in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H. T. Dickinson (London: Longman, 1998), 180; John Cannon, “The Loss of America,” in ibid., 235 (Frederick the Great), 234 (George III). John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, The Private Papers of John, Earl of Sandwich, vol. 4, 1781–1782, ed. G. R. Barnes and J. H. Owen. Publications of the Navy Records Society 78 (London, 1938), 26. William Cowper,“The Task,” in The Task and Selected Other Poems, ed. James Sambrook (London: Longman, 1994), lines 770, 773–74. J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (1956; repr., Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co., 1966), 34–36. Ralph S.Walker, ed., James Beattie’s London Diary 1773 (Aberdeen:Aberdeen University Press, 1946), 39. Philip Ayres, Classical Culture and the Idea of Rome in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15. John Milton,“Paradise Lost,” in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), book 1, lines 648–49. Sir George Peckham, A True Report of the Late Discoveries (London, 1583), quoted in Klaus E. Knorr, British Colonial Theories 1570–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1944), 30.The notion is repeated in the Virginia Company’s True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia (1610), which states that we “doe buy of them [the natives] the pearles of the earth, and sell to them the pearls of heaven” (quoted in Paul Stevens,“Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,” Milton Studies 34 [1996]: 8). John Dryden, “The Hind and the Panther,” part 2, lines 572, 574, in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), vol. 2. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text. Thomas Sprat, Observations on Mons. De Sorbiere’s Voyage into England (London, 1665), quoted in Greenfeld, Nationalism, 84 (see n. 12). Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society of London (London, 1667), 129, quoted in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 138. Matthew Prior, The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1:226.

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34. Edward Ward, “To the Pious Memory of the Most Sublime and Accurate Mr. John Dryden,” in The London-Spy (1703), 422; John Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), 2:213; Samuel Johnson, “Preface to the Dictionary,” in Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Brady and W. K.Wimsatt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 296. 35. [Robert Southey?], Quarterly Review (1809), repr. in Richard Ruland, ed., The Native Muse: Theories of American Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Dutton, 1976), 71; Carlyle’s Unfinished History of German Literature, ed. Hill Shine (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1951), 6. 36. Encyclopedia Britannica quoted in Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory:A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 37;Thomas Wyse quoted in Carol Duncan, “Putting the ‘Nation’ in London’s National Gallery,” in The Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology, ed. Gwendolyn Wright (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 107.

Chapter 1

The Progress of English

1. Cornelius W. Schoneveld, “Bilderdijk between Pope and Byron: The Paradoxes of His Translation of An Essay on Man into Dutch,” in Centennial Hauntings: Pope, Byron and Eliot in the Year 88, ed. C. C. Barfoot and Theo D’Haen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 219. 2. Robert Southey, “Epistle to Allan Cunningham,” in The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, Collected by Himself, 10 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1838), 3:305–18, lines 141–47. Line numbers for subsequent references to this poem are supplied in the text. 3. See Paul Dibon, “L’Université de Leyde et la République des Lettres au XVIIe siècle,” Quaerendo 5 (1975): 4–38; Mordecai Feingold, “Reversal of Fortunes: The Displacement of Cultural Hegemony from the Netherlands to England in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” in The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89, ed. Dale Hoak and Mordecai Feingold (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 234–61, 316–22 (notes); E. H. Kossmann, “The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 19–31;Wijnand W. Mijnhardt,“The Dutch Enlightenment: Humanism, Nationalism, and Decline,” in ibid., 197–223; Mijnhardt, “Dutch Culture in the Age of William and Mary: Cosmopolitan or Provincial?” in The World of William and Mary, ed. Hoak and Feingold, 219–33, 311–16 (notes). 4. John Adams, Papers of John Adams, vol. 10, June 1780–December 1780, ed. Gregg L. Lint et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 174. 5. In a letter of December 6, 1828, to William Wordsworth, Southey writes that he has been preparing various essays for the periodicals: “—these and an ‘Epistle to Allan Cunningham’ for his Anniversary, describing some of my portraits, make the main part of what I have done since my return from London. The plan of thus exhibiting myself is borrowed from a poem of

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Bilderdijk’s, part of which I have translated and introduced, and taken that opportunity of doing what justice I can to one of the most admirable men in all respects whom it has been my good fortune to know” (New Letters of Robert Southey, ed. Kenneth Curry, 2 vols. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1965], 2:329). In 1830, Southey had successfully recommended that Bilderdijk be elected an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature (Cornelius De Deugd, “Friendship and Romanticism: Robert Southey and Willem Bilderdijk,” in Europa Provincia Mundi: Essays in Comparative Literature and European Studies Offered to Hugo Dyserinck on the Occasion of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday, ed. Joep Leerssen and Karl Ulrich Syndram [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992], 379). Cf. the comments of Gunnar Brandell (“Weltliteratur and Literary Nationalism,” in Problems of International Literary Understanding: Proceedings of the Sixth Nobel Symposium Stockholm, September 1967, ed. Karl Ragnar Gierow [Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1968], 109–15) regarding the position of Kierkegaard (Denmark), Ibsen (Norway), and Strindberg (Sweden) in the wider world of European literature: “The fame of all three of them spread through Germany, where the language barrier was easy to overcome, and where reigned at that moment, around 1900, a particular receptiveness for impulses from the North. It is an open question if any of them had held the position they do to-day without the German assistance.And I should think this is not unique: by being important in France or Britain a writer becomes almost automatically part of the international literary scene, whereas a writer from a small country, if he is lucky, may be adopted in one of the great countries and afterwards, with this backing, eventually accepted by others” (113). Brandell also comments, “From around 1500 our world literature is heavily biased in favour of the politically dominating European powers. . . . The idea of an exchange between different literatures is, as a corollary, from now on undefinable without thinking in terms of big and small nations” (113). Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, ed. James Leheny (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 162. John Florio, His Firste Fruites (1578; repr., New York: Da Capo, 1969), 50. Milton, Complete Poetry and Major Prose, 668 (see intro., n. 28). “The Case of Mary Carleton,” in Counterfeit Ladies: The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse and The Case of Mary Carleton, ed. Janet Todd and Elizabeth Spearing (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 87. Thomas Rymer, The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1956; repr.,Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1971), 9–10. Much the same is true of England’s geopolitical standing in the European world. Under Charles I, J. R. Jones writes,“Powerlessness, combined with a busy diplomacy and grandiose pretensions, made England contemptible” in the eyes of Continental powers; a similar situation arises in the reign of Charles II. “English historians have described with some satisfaction the speed with which Charles detached himself from the French alliance and

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the Third Dutch War in 1674, and the way in which the French ambassador was taken by surprise: in reality the lack of French reaction, the absence of a determined attempt to preserve the English alliance, was a true but unflattering estimate of how much it was worth. In terms of French diplomatic activity and expenditure, England mattered far less than Brandenburg or Sweden, and when Louis did later respond to Charles’s appeals for money the amounts which were paid put him on the same level as a minor French pensioner like the Elector of Trier. In 1688 Louis, by his decision to proceed with his aggression in the Rhineland, judged England to be less important than Cologne or the Palatinate” (“English Attitudes to Europe in the Seventeenth Century,” Britain and the Netherlands 3 [1968], 39). TheYale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, 41:152 (see intro., n. 20). John Hale comments: “It was Latin that enabled the English, through the writings of such men as Bacon, Camden, the anatomist William Harvey and the physician—and metaphysician—Robert Fludd, to re-enter as intellectuals a continent which had rejected them—with the loss of Calais in 1558—as a political power” (The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994], 152). Hester Lynch Piozzi, Ancedotes of Samuel Johnson, ed. S. C. Roberts (1925; repr., New York: Books for Libraries, 1980), 180; Bernard Kreissman, Pamela-Shamela:A Study of the Criticisms, Burlesques, Parodies, and Adaptations of Richardson’s “Pamela” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 83, n. 8. Bernhard Fabian, “English Books and their Eighteenth-Century German Readers,” in The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), 172; William Jervis Jones, “ ‘Spuma Linguarum’: On the Status of English in German-Speaking Countries before 1700,” in Images of Language: German Attitudes to European Languages from 1500 to 1800 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1999), 171. George Crabbe, Selected Poems, ed. Gavin Edwards (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 463; Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, ed. Robin Gilmour (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 168. Brief discussions of the frontispiece to The Universal Visiter are found in Trevor Ross, The Making of the English Literary Canon: From the Middle Ages to the Late Eighteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 3–4, and in Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 58–59. Lady Mary Chudleigh, “To Mr. Dryden, on his Excellent Translation of Virgil,” in Poems on Several Occasions.Together with the Song of the Three Children Paraphras’d (London: Bernard Lintot, 1703), 25–28. References to this poem will be given by line number in the body of the text. Ironically, though, Chudleigh’s own poem, like many such critiques of rhymed verse, is itself written in rhyme. For a broad survey of the debate over rhyme in English poetry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Arthur Melville Clark, “Milton and the Renaissance Revolt against Rhyme,” in Studies in Literary Modes (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1946),

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105–41; and Morris Freedman, “Milton and Dryden on Rhyme,” Huntington Library Quarterly 24 (1960–61): 337–44.The debate is of interest here because it is construed by its participants as an issue not simply of literary style or aesthetics, but of English cultural independence and cultural identity—much like the debate over the popularity of Italian opera in Britain, which I discuss in chapter 3. Sir John Denham,“On Mr.Abraham Cowley, his Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets,” in Poems and Translations (London: H. Herringman, 1668), 89–94; John Oldham,“Bion.A Pastoral, in Imitation of the Greek of Moschus, Bewailing the Death of the Earl of Rochester,” in The Works of Mr. John Oldham (London: Jo. Hindmarsh, 1684), 73–87; Knightly Chetwood, “To the Earl of Roscommon on his Excellent Poem,” and John Dryden, “To the Earl of Roscommon, on his Excellent Essay on Translated Verse,” both prefixed to An Essay on Translated Verse. By the Earl of Roscommon (London: Jacob Tonson, 1684), unpaginated; John Dryden, “To My Dear Friend, Mr. Congreve” (1694), in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 4, Poems 1693–1696, ed.A. B. Chambers and William Frost (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 432–34; Joseph Addison, “An Account of the Greatest English Poets,” The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq., 4 vols. (London: Jacob Tonson, 1721), 1:36–41;“Samuel Cobb, Poetae Britannici (London: A. Roper and R. Basset, 1700); Samuel Wesley, An Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (London: Charles Harper, 1700); Jabez Hughes,“Verses Occasion’d by Reading Mr. Dryden’s Fables,” in Dryden:The Critical Heritage, ed. James Kinsley and Helen Kinsley (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 248–53; Elijah Fenton, “An Epistle to Mr. Southerne,” in Poems on Several Occasions (London: Bernard Lintot, 1717), 67–83; George Sewell, “To Mr. Pope, on his Poems and Translations,” in A New Collection of Original Poems, Never Printed in any Miscellany (London: J. Pemberton and J. Peele, 1720), 58–62; Leonard Welsted, “Epistle to His Grace the Duke of Chandos,” in The Works, In Verse and Prose, of Leonard Welsted (London: Printed for the Editor, 1787), 73–75; John Dart, WestminsterAbbey. A Poem (London: J. Batley, 1721); Judith Cowper Madan, “The Progress of Poesy,” in The Poetical Calendar, ed. Francis Fawkes and William Woty, 12 vols. (London: J. Coote, 1763–64), 3:17–28;William Mason,“Musaeus, a Monody to the Memory of Mr. Pope,” in The Works of William Mason, 4 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), 1:1–15; Thomas Gray, “The Progress of Poesy” (1757), in Thomas Gray and William Collins, Poetical Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 46–51. Cf. the chapter on “the progress-of-poesy poem” in Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781, 35–62, esp. 49–57 (see n. 18). Jones, The Triumph of the English Language, 183 (see intro., n. 11). I draw the concept of the “apparatus of languages” from the work of Renée Balibar: see her L’Institution du français: essai sur le colinguisme des Carolingiens à la République (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1985). Thomas Hobbes, “Answer to Davenant,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Joel E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (1908–09; repr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 2:65.

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26. Swift, A Proposal for Correcting . . . the English Language, 32 (see intro., n. 7); Johnson, Selected Poetry and Prose, 334, 336 (see intro., n. 34). 27. Edmund Waller,“Of English Verse,” in Silver Poets of the Seventeenth Century, ed. G. A. E. Parfitt (London: Dent, 1974), lines 5–6, 13–16. Subsequent references to this poem are given by line number in the text. 28. Sir William Temple,“An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Spingarn, 3:63 (see n. 25). 29. Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” lines 482–83 (see intro., n. 7); Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 3:566. 30. Tickell, On the Prospect of Peace, lines 249, 251, 265–66 (see intro., n. 7). 31. Thomas Sheridan, British Education: or, The Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (1756; repr., Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1971), xvii. 32. I cite Boileau’s original (“L’Art poétique”) and the Soame–Dryden translation (“The Art of Poetry”) from the parallel printing of the English and French works in The Continental Model: Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, in English Translation, ed. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970). References to these works will be given by line number in the body of the text. (The quotation from Jacob Tonson is from The Continental Model, 386.) 33. A few years later, in 1686, the East India Company, under Sir Josiah Child, did send troops to India and declared war on the Mughal Empire. Despite military and naval support from James II, they were driven out of Surat, imperiled in Bombay, and defeated in Bengal. In September 1687, the Company was able to sue for peace, by agreeing to pay “a large sum in reparations.” Only in 1690 was the Company allowed back into Bengal,“after a grovelling apology from it as well as a fine of 150,000 rupees (about £15,000 sterling)” (Bruce P. Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars 1550–1688 [London: Longman, 2001], 209–11). 34. It is noteworthy that the American colonies do not seem appropriate to these authors to invoke at this juncture. The imperial fantasies of British literary culture were oriented toward the Old World of the East, even though the so-called first British Empire was constructed in the “New World” of the West, with the gap between these two orders creating a space of imperial anticipation and design that accompanies and shapes British expansion in the East. 35. Samuel Johnson, The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (London: J. and P. Knapton et al., 1747), 10. 36. Richard Bailey has gathered much material that bears on this topic in the chapter on “World English,” in his Images of English:A Cultural History of the Language (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), 93–121. 37. Samuel Cobb,“Of Poetry,” in Poems on Several Occasions . . . To which is Prefix’d A Discourse on Criticism and the Liberty of Writing, 3d ed. (London: James Woodward, 1710), lines 672–81. 38. John Dryden, “To My Honor’d Friend, Dr. Charleton,” lines 21–22, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 1, Poems 1649–1680, ed. E. N. Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956). Subsequent references to this poem will be supplied in the text.

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39. Welsted, “Epistle to . . . Chandos,” lines 11, 17–22 (see n. 21). 40. “Some Thoughts on the English Language,” The Universal Visiter ( January 1756): 6 (the author of this essay was probably Christopher Smart); The Present State of the Republick of Letters (November 1728): 399. 41. C. Lennart Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of the Gentleman’s Magazine (Providence, RI: Brown University, 1938), 81. 42. James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), 41, 51, 409. Macpherson’s comment about the “metropolitan” function of the English language as a medium for international cultural exchange reiterates a claim made some years earlier, in 1756, by the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), which sought “to introduce among the Highlanders a knowledge of the English language, to fit them for understanding and being understood by the rest of the world” (Present State of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge [Edinburgh, 1756?], 40, quoted in Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-Century British Writing, 40 [see intro., n. 8]).We see in these remarks the interdependence between claims about English’s international standing and claims about its metropolitan function within the British Isles. 43. Thomas Sheridan, A Discourse. Being Introductory to His Course of Lectures on Elocution and the English Language (1759; repr., Augustan Reprint Society, no. 136, Los Angeles:William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969), 12. 44. Adams, Papers of John Adams, 10:128. 45. Ibid., 170. 46. David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J.Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:170–71. 47. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. David Womersley, 3 vols. (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1994), 2:514, n. 8; Samuel T. Coleridge, Coleridge’s Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), 1:254–55. 48. Francis Turner Palgrave, The Golden Treasury, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1991), 8; James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922; repr., New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 40. 49. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 112. 50. Edwin Guest, A History of English Rhythms, ed. W. W. Skeat (1838; London: George Bell and Sons, 1882), 703, quoted in Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (London: Longman, 1994), 99. 51. Rev. James George, The Mission of Great Britain to the World, or Some of the Lessons Which She Is Now Teaching (Toronto: Dudley and Burns, 1867), 6, quoted in ibid. 52. United Kingdom, Committee on the Legal Status of the Welsh Language, Report, 1965, 9.

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53. Sheridan, A Discourse, 39–40 (see n. 43). 54. “W. R.,” Wallography (1681), quoted in Prys Morgan, The Eighteenth-Century Renaissance (Llandybie,Wales: Christopher Davies, 1981), 20. See also, in this context,Thomas Rymer’s comment in 1692 on Taliessin and Merlin as early Welsh poets: “had they not written in Welch, [they] might yet deserve an esteem among us” (quoted in Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781, 134 [see n. 18]). 55. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Peter Levi (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1984), 151. Subsequent references to this work are given in the text. 56. Samuel Johnson, The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992–94), 1:151–52. Johnson is evidently asking for a continuation of the kind of work begun in Edward Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica (Oxford, 1707), in which Lhuyd investigated the affinities of Welsh with other Celtic languages, such as Breton. 57. Charles O’Conor, Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland, rev. ed. (London, 1766), iv, quoted in ibid., 1:151, n. 4. 58. Thomas Watts,“On the Probable Future Position of the English Language,” Proceedings of the Philological Society 4 (1850): 209. Subsequent references are given in the text. 59. Pope, one might note, cited these two lines in Peri Bathos (1728) to illustrate the bathetic effect produced by anticlimax: the first line of the couplet, with its imperial conceit, raises expectations that are disappointed by the paltry success commemorated in the second line (Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams [Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1969], 416). 60. Thomas B. Macaulay,“Minute on Indian Education,” in Selected Writings, ed. John Clive and Thomas Pinney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 243. 61. John Hughes, An Essay on the Ancient and Present State of the Welsh Language (London: Privately printed, 1822), 52. Subsequent references are given in the text. 62. For a discussion of this “renaissance,” see Saunders Lewis, A School of Welsh Augustans: Being a Study in English Influences on Welsh Literature during Part of the Eighteenth Century (Wrexham, UK: Hughes and Son, 1924) and Morgan, The Eighteenth-Century Renaissance (see n. 54). 63. Roland Mathias, Anglo-Welsh Literature.An Illustrated History (Bridgend, UK: Poetry Wales Press, 1987), 53–54. 64. [ John Wolcot], The Poetical Works of Peter Pindar, Esq.A Distant Relation to the Poet of Thebes (Dublin: A. Colles et al., 1791), 96 and unnumbered note. 65. This seems to me to mark the major limitation of the otherwise compelling recent scholarly work by Robert Crawford, Leith Davis, Janet Sorensen, and others on Anglo-Scottish literary and cultural relations since the Union of 1707. By focusing its attention on domestic “British” contexts, such work fails to assess the intersections of domestic hegemony, European rivalry, and overseas imperialism in the construction of the empire of English.

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The Republic of Letters

1. Marc Fumaroli,“The Republic of Letters,” Diogenes 143 (1988), 136–39. For the fullest account of the early history of the phrase, see Françoise Waquet, “Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres? Essai de sémantique historique,” Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 147 (1989): 473–502. See also Elizabeth Eisenstein, “The Republic of Letters and the Printed Book-Trade,” The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. in 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 136–59, esp. 137, n. 287 where she notes the use of the phrase in 1417. 2. Dibon, “L’Université de Leyde et la République des Lettres,” 26–27 (see chap. 1, n. 3). The (religious) notion of “Christendom,” however, was becoming outmoded by the early eighteenth century, if not already by the mid-seventeenth century, its place being taken by the newer (cultural or civilizational) notion of “Europe,” and it is this latter concept that provides the contextual frame for the eighteenth-century republic of letters. On the shift from “Christendom” to “Europe,” see Franklin Le Van Baumer, “The Conception of Christendom in Renaissance Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 6 (1945): 131–56; Denys Hay,“ ‘Europe’ and ‘Christendom’:A Problem in Renaissance Terminology and Historical Semantics,” Diogenes 17 (1957): 45–55; Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, rev. ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968); and Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance, 3–15 (see chap. 1, n. 14). 3. For general studies of the érudit republic of letters of the seventeenth century, see (in addition to the works cited previously): Hans Bots,“L’Esprit de la République des Lettres et la tolérance dans les trois premier périodiques hollandais,” XVIIe Siècle 116 (1977): 43–57; Hans Bots and Françoise Waquet, eds., Commercium Litterarium: Forms of Communication in the Republic of Letters 1600–1750 (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1994); Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 367–86; Paul Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica literaria of the 17th Century,” Respublica Litteraria: Studies in the Classical Tradition 1 (1978): 43–55; Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters 1680–1750 (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1995); Maarten Ultee, “The Place of the Dutch Republic in the Republic of Letters of the Late Seventeenth Century,” Dutch Crossing 31 (1987): 54–78; Maarten Ultee, “The Republic of Letters: Learned Correspondence, 1680–1720,” The Seventeenth Century 2 (1987): 96–112; Maarten Ultee, “Res publica litteraria and War, 1680–1715,” in Res Publica Literaria: Die Institutionen der Gelehrsamkeit in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Sebastian Neumeister and Conrad Wiedeman, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1987), 2:535–46; Françoise Waquet,“De la lettre érudite au périodique savant: les faux semblants d’une mutation intellectuelle,” XVIIe Siècle 140 (1983): 347–59; Françoise Waquet,“Les Éditions de correspondances savantes et les idéaux de la République des Lettres,”

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XVIIe Siècle 178 (1993): 99–118.These scholars stress the foundation of the early republic of letters on personal (rather than institutional) relations and practices (Goldgar); the small size of the active community of the republic of letters—not more than 1,200 persons in any given year (according to Ultee, “The Republic of Letters,” 100); and the central importance of learned correspondences as the chief modality through which the republic of letters was sustained. Guez de Balzac quoted in Waquet, “Qu’est-ce que la République des lettres?” 501, n. 125 (see n. 1); Sir Richard Blackmore, Eliza:An Epick Poem. In Ten Books (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1705), 89. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 138 (see n. 1). Subsequent references to this work are given in the text. Variations on the notion of the republic of letters recur in the writings of scores of English-language authors from George Wither in the midseventeenth century to Hazlitt and Southey in the early nineteenth century—including, Sir Thomas Browne; Sir Richard Blackmore; Thomas Rymer; John Dennis; John Dryden; Sir William Temple; John Locke; Joseph Addison; Samuel Cobb; Jonathan Swift; Charles Gildon; John Oldmixon; John Gay; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury;Thomas Tickell; Jonathan Richardson; Henry Fielding; Edward Young; Samuel Derrick; John Langhorne; Charles Churchill;William Julius Mickle; Frances Burney; David Hume; Samuel Johnson; Laurence Sterne; George Huddesford;Thomas Jefferson; Joel Barlow; Lemuel Hopkins; James Boswell; Oliver Goldsmith; Christopher Anstey; William Hayley; Henry James Pye; Bishop Richard Hurd; and Samuel Ireland. I discuss a few of these examples more directly in the course of this chapter. Thomas Chatterton. “The Whore of Babylon,” line 359, and “Kew Gardens,” line 859, both in vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S.Taylor, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Sir Joseph Banks’s letter and its translation by the French Ministry of Marine and Colonies quoted in G. R. de Beer, “The Relations between Fellows of the Royal Society and French Men of Science when France and Britain were at War,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 9 (1951–52): 271, 272; and Elizabeth Hamilton, Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999), 55. David Garrick, The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 1:143. [N. Bonaventure d’Argonne],“Vigneul-Marvilliana,” in Ana, ou Collection de bons mots, contes, pensées détachées, traits d’histoire et anecdotes des hommes célèbres, depuis la renaissance des lettres jusqu’à nos jours; suivis d’un choix de propos joyeux, mots plaisans, réparties fines et contes a rire.Tirés de différens recueils [comp. Charles Georges Thomas Garnier], 10 vols. (Amsterdam: et se trouve, à Paris, Chez Visse, 1789), 5:414–17. Henry Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, 9 vols. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

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1966), 2:27–28. It is perhaps worth remarking that, while “49 per cent of the Fellows of the Royal Society were foreigners” in 1740 ( J. S. Bromley, “Britain and Europe in the Eighteenth Century,” History 66 [1981]: 394), “no woman was elected to full membership in the Royal Society until 1945” (Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? 26 [see intro., n. 32]). Monthly Review 18 (March 1758): 249-50. [N. Bonaventure d’Argonne], Mélanges d’Histoire et de Litterature, 3 vols. (Rotterdam: Chez Elie Yvans, 1700–02), 1:262. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L’An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante (rev. ed., 1786), chap. 47, quoted in Edward D. Seeber, “Ideal Languages in the French and English Imaginary Voyage,” PMLA 60 (1945): 596. For a full discussion of the complex publishing history of this work, see John Dowling, Diego de Saavedra Fajardo (Boston, MA:Twayne, 1977). Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Respublica Literaria: or, The Republick of Letters; being a Vision, trans. “J. E.” (London: S. Austen, 1727), 1–3. (Subsequent references to this work are given in the text.) It is perhaps worth noting that Dante’s palace of Limbo in canto 4 of the Inferno has often been construed as a palace of Fame, with its seven walls representing the seven liberal arts, and that its inhabitants—the poets, philosophers, and “great souled” men and women of Greece, Rome, the Islamic world, and Italy—form a kind of proto-republic of letters. Dante (d.1321) precedes the first recorded use of the phrase respublica literaria by a hundred years but his example suggests that the concept antedates the term— and his inclusion of figures like Avicenna,Averroes, and Saladin shows us that equating the idea of the republic of letters with the respublica Christiana, even in its early days, leads us to ignore the cultural work it is used to effect. Likewise, one might note, the only woman, ancient or modern, mentioned in Swift’s Battle of the Books (pub. 1704) is “Afra the Amazon” (i.e., Aphra Behn), though the forces of the moderns are numbered at “fifty thousand” (“A Full and True Account of the Battel Fought last Friday between the Antient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library,” in The Oxford Authors: Jonathan Swift, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984], 16, 6). Lady Mary Wortley Montagu [Letter to Anna Maria van Schurman] (ca.1742–46), in Essays and Poems and “Simplicity, a Comedy,” ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (1977; repr. with new preface, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 166. Lady Mary, one recalls, reflected on the stigma attached to women’s participation in the republic of letters when she advised that a woman should “conceal whatever Learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness” (quoted in Robert Halsband, “Ladies of Letters in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Lady of Letters in the Eighteenth Century. Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar January 18, 1969 by Irvin Ehrenpreis and Robert Halsband [Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969], 35). David Hume, “Of Essay-Writing,” in Essays, Moral Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 537. (Subsequent citations are given in the text.)

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20. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 2001), 66. 21. Sarah Fielding, The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Peter Sabor (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), [3] (original in italics). 22. Halsband,“Ladies of Letters in the Eighteenth Century,” 50–51 (see n. 18). 23. [William Rose], Review of History of England, by Catherine Macaulay, Monthly Review 29 (1763): 372–82; Henry Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, ed. Horst W. Drescher (Münster:Verlag Aschendorff, 1967), 70. The Restoration and eighteenth-century period witnessed, of course, the emergence of a number of important groupings of literary women from the circle around Katharine Philips, to the “female senate” around Swift, to the female coterie around Richardson, and the Bluestocking circles of the later eighteenth century. 24. Critical Review, 2d ser., 5 (1792): 132, quoted in Laura L. Runge,“Gendered Strategies in the Criticism of Early Fiction,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (1995): 375. 25. Pope, “The Temple of Fame,” in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, lines 278–81, 288–91 (see intro., n. 7). Subsequent references to this poem are provided in the text. 26. Pope,“Essay on Criticism,” in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, lines 478–83 (see intro., n. 7). 27. Thomas Sheridan, A Dissertation on the Causes of the Difficulties Which Occur, In Learning the English Tongue, quoted in Adam Beach, “The Creation of a Classical Language in the Eighteenth Century,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 43 (2001): 125. 28. William Kenrick in the Monthly Review 21 (November 1759): 381, quoted in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 1:247. Subsequent references to Goldsmith’s Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning are also from this edition and are provided in the text. 29. On the importance of this theme in eighteenth-century English literary culture, see Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1986). 30. Dibon writes regarding Grotius:“Pour lui, l’activité intellectuelle est essentiellement ordonnée à la praxis, au service de la cité” (“L’Université de Leyde et la République des Lettres,” 32) (see chap. 1, n. 3). 31. Joseph Addison, Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 281. 32. Sir Joseph Banks, letter to Déodat de Dolomieu, 1801, quoted in de Beer, “The Relations between Fellows of the Royal Society and French Men of Science,” 275 (see n. 7). 33. Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 1:2–3. Subsequent citations of this work, all from volume one, will be incorporated into the text. 34. On Browne’s relation to the concept of the republic of letters, see R. J. Schoeck,“Sir Thomas Browne and the Republic of Letters: Introduction,” English Language Notes 19 (1982): 299–312 and Jean-Jacques

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Denonain, “Thomas Browne and the ‘Respublica Litteraria,’ ” English Language Notes 19 (1982): 370–81. Cf. other seventeenth-century comments that emphasize the cultural nationalist import of writing in English: e.g., Sir Edward Coke explains why he wrote the first part of his Institutes (Coke on Littleton, 1628) in English: “This part we have . . . published in English, for that they are an introduction to the knowledge of the national law of the realm. . . . We have left our author to speak his own language, and have translated him into English, to the end that any of the nobility or gentry of this realm, or of any other estate or profession whatsoever, that will be pleased to read him and these Institutes, may understand the language wherein they are written” (quoted in John W. Cairns, “Blackstone, an English Institutist,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 4 [1984], 330). Similarly, Milton comments, in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), that his work “might perhaps more fitly have been written in another tongue [i.e., Latin]: and I had done so, but that the esteem I have of my country’s judgment, and the love I bear to my native language to serve it first with what I endeavor, made me speak it thus, ere I assay the verdict of outlandish readers” (Complete Poems and Major Prose, 702 [see intro., n. 28]). One notes that in the postcolonial world, too, the choice of language in which to write is bound up with issues of cultural nationalism. Pseudodoxia Epidemica did, of course, go on to acquire a wider European audience: it was translated into Dutch (in 1668), into German (in 1680), into French (in 1733), and from the French into Italian (in 1737). See Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). Likewise, the tendency to take note of French recognition of English literary achievements betrays a similar, though more direct, concern with extraterritorial opinion. Even so nationalistic a critic as John Dennis—who insists (as we will see in chapter 3) on the national distinctiveness of each culture on the basis of its “Religion, Climate, and Customs” (12) and who asserts, “I love my Country very well, and therefore should be ravished to see that we out did the French in Arts, at the same time that we contend for Empire with them” (10)—evidences this kind of deference to foreign opinions. In The Impartial Critick (1693), he writes of Edmund Waller:“We all of us have reason to Honour the Man, who has been an Honour to England: And it is with an inexpressible pleasure, that I find his Death lamented by two great French Wits, viz. La Fontaine, and Monsieur St. Euremont” (13). La Fontaine and Saint-Evremond thus function to ratify English self-regard. (All citations are from The Critical Works of John Dennis, vol. 1 [see intro, n. 34].) The character of English responses to French comments, whether positive or negative, about English culture bears a striking analogy, indeed, to Scottish and Irish responses to English comments on their cultural traditions and achievements. Adam Smith,“Letter to the Edinburgh Review,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed.W. P. D.Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), 243.

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39. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania OzSalzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 28, 29. 40. The centrality of the notion of “emulation” to eighteenth-century British literary culture is highlighted by Howard Weinbrot in Britannia’s Issue:The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), but he sees the concept as contributing to a benign cosmopolitanism, whereas I see it as feeding a competitive cultural nationalism. 41. Addison, writing before the Union of Scotland and England in 1707, works with an “English” framework, but Pope’s prefatory poem, originally published in Pope’s Works of 1720 and reprinted in Tickell’s edition of Addison’s Works in 1721, speaks in a “British” idiom.The poem was further revised in 1726, and published in the 1735 edition of Pope’s Works. 42. Joseph Addison, Dialogues upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals. Especially in Relation to the Latin and Greek Poets (wr. 1702; pub. 1721), in The Works of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, ed. Richard Hurd, 6 vols. (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1811), 1:339. (Pope’s prefatory “Verses” are found on pages 337–38. The text here prints the 1721 version of the poem, without the six lines [lines 5–10] that Pope added in 1726, and includes three substantive variants from the final version of the poem.) Subsequent references to these works will be provided in the body of the text. 43. The contrast between the opening section of the poem and its close is even more noticeable when one considers the six lines not included in this reprinting of the poem. In those lines, Pope describes critically some of the “wonders” of ancient Rome that have fallen into ruins or have disappeared altogether: Imperial wonders rais’d on Nations spoil’d, Where mix’d with Slaves the groaning Martyr toil’d; Huge Theatres, that now unpeopled Woods, Now drain’d a distant country of her Floods; Fanes, which admiring Gods with pride survey, Statues of Men, scarce less alive than they. (lines 5–10) (see “To Mr Addison, Occasioned by his Dialogues on Medals,” in The Poems of Alexander Pope, 215 [see intro., n. 7]) The message is clear that not only is it vain to imagine that such “wonders” will survive, but also that they are dubious achievements in the first place, being dependent on “slaves” and “martyr[s]” and on “nations” that have been despoiled. Given this emphasis, it is even more striking that by the end of the poem Pope should entreat his compatriots to emulate and succeed Rome. Howard Erskine-Hill offers a rich reading of Pope’s poem (“The Medal Against Time: Pope’s Epistle to Mr. Addison,” in The Augustan Idea in English Literature [London: Edwin Arnold, 1983], 267–90), but one which, to my mind, too easily resolves the tension in the poem between its opening suspicion of Roman acts of glory and its concluding endorsement of British emulation of the ancient Romans. Pope’s poem may offer ways of

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revivifying the decayed monumentality of Augustan Rome (by translating it into the career of modern Britain), but it never offers any adequate answer to the moral dubiousness of Roman grandeur. A particularly telling instance of this inability to view the ancients except by way of the polite world of continental Europe occurs in Cynthio’s praise of Horace’s satiric finesse, in contrast to the crude management of “our English satirists” (369): “Horace knew how to stab with address,” Cynthio declares, “and to give a thrust where he was least expected. Boileau has nicely imitated him in this, as well as his other beauties. But our English libellers are for hewing a man downright, and for letting him see at a distance that he is to look for no mercy.” “I own to you,” Eugenius responds, “I have often admired this piece of art in the two satirists you mention . . .” (370). Here, the “beauties” of Horace become indistinguishable from the beauties of Boileau, and it is almost as if Cynthio and Eugenius have learned to see in Horace what they have been trained to notice by Boileau. Addison’s remarks here echo Dryden’s comments in his “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1692): Dryden remarks on the “fineness of raillery” in artful satire that serves to distinguish “the slovenly Butchering of a Man,” from “the fineness of a stroak that separates the Head from the Body, and leaves it standing in its place,” before going on to instance his portrait of Zimri in Absalom and Achitophel as something he is proud of in this regard (The Works of John Dryden, vol. 4, 71 [see chap. 1, n. 21]). It is especially telling that while Addison seems to have Dryden’s language in the back of his mind here, he evokes it only to criticize “our English satirists”—presumably, including Dryden himself. (Dryden’s own comment has been related, through Thomas Rymer’s 1674 translation, to René Rapin’s Reflexions sur l’Aristote: see P. J. Smallwood,“A Dryden Allusion to Rymer’s Rapin,” Notes and Queries 23 [1976]: 554.) For one account of the demise of the republic of letters in the nineteenth century, precisely as the result of the increasingly irreconcilable divorce between scholarship and belles lettres over the course of the eighteenth century, see Joseph Levine, “Strife in the Republic of Letters,” in Commercium Litterarium, ed. Bots and Waquet, 310–19 (see n. 3). Antony van Zijlvelt’s engraving is preserved in the Academisch Historisch Museum, Leiden; a reproduction is available in Th. H. Lunsingh Scheurleer and G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, eds., Leiden University in the Seventeenth Century: An Exchange of Learning (Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden / E. J. Brill, 1975), 460. In a letter to George Stepney, written from Vienna in November 1702, while he was at work on the Dialogues upon Medals, Addison writes:“I have endeavour’d to treat my subject, that is in itself very bare of ornaments, as divertingly as I could. I have propos’d to my self such a way of Instructing as in Dialogues on the Plurality of Worlds [by Fontenelle, 1686].This very owning of designe will I believe look like a piece of Vanity . . .” (Letters of Joseph Addison, 35–36 [see n. 31]). This comment suggests the distance between Addison’s polite discourse and the erudite discourse of the

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49.

50.

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52.

53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

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59. 60.

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numismatists, and it indicates the exemplary status of French works both in leading this shift toward a broader readership and as models for emulation. One discerns behind Addison’s critical comments here a submerged awareness of Tacitus’s discussion of cultural imperialism and the Roman arts of rule. Commenting on Agricola’s Romanization of the Britons, Tacitus (Agricola, 21) writes: “Roman dress, too, became popular and the toga was frequently seen. Little by little there was a slide towards the allurements of degeneracy. . . . In their inexperience the Britons called it civilization when it was really all part of their servitude” (quoted in Peter Salway, Roman Britain [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984], 142). Aping Roman attire is shameful, Addison knows, not only because it is unmerited and parodic, but also because it is a mark or a residue of colonization and subjection. For a useful discussion of representations of Britain in Roman literature, see Katharine Allen,“Britain in Roman Literature,” University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature 3 (1919): 133–48. Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 28:144 (see intro., n. 20); Frances Burney, Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Margaret Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 7 (original in italics). Edward Gibbon, “Essai sur l’étude de la littérature,” in The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, 4:27–28 (see intro., n. 15); Jonathan Swift, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–65), 3:217. Samuel Richardson, Pamela or,Virtue Rewarded, ed.T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 5. Subsequent references to this work are provided in the text. Anna Williams, “Verses Addressed to Mr. Richardson, on his History of Sir Charles Grandison,” Miscellanies (London:T. Davies et al., 1766), 32. Joseph Addison,“An Essay on the Georgics,” in The California Edition of the Works of John Dryden, vol. 5, The Works of Virgil in English, 1697, ed.William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 145. Fumaroli, “The Republic of Letters,” 145 (see n. 1). Thomas Shadwell, The Virtuoso: A Comedy (London: Henry Herringman, 1676), 2. Aphra Behn,“The Translator’s Preface,” to her translation of Fontenelle’s A Discovery of New Worlds (1688), in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993), 4:75. Mercure galant (October 1694), quoted from Louis Réau, L’Europe française au siècle des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 1971), 23, with modifications based on Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française des origines à nos jours (Paris: A. Colin, 1967), 5:137. Henry Fielding, The Grub-Street Opera, ed. Edgar V. Roberts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 54. See Jean Sgard, ed., Dictionnaire des Journaux, 1600–1789, 2 vols. (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991).

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61. Voltaire, letter to Pierre Guyot, August 7, 1767, in The Complete Works of Voltaire, ed. Theodore Besterman, vol. 116 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1974), D14340. 62. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 147 (see n. 1). 63. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, Grub Street Abroad: Aspects of the French Cosmopolitan Press from the Age of Louis XIV to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 38–39.Within France itself, through the mid-sixteenth century, more books were published in Latin than in French, but by the midseventeenth century, the Latin proportion had declined to about 20% of the total number of titles published. By 1700, the Latin proportion was approximately 10% of the total and “by 1764 publications in ancient and foreign languages only accounted for 4.5 per cent of printed output in the kingdom” (Françoise Waquet, Latin or the Empire of a Sign [London:Verso, 2001], 81). Waquet also notes that “about 20 per cent” of the learned periodicals published in Europe between 1665 and 1747 were in Latin (84) and that 31% of the texts reviewed in the Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savants de l’Europe between 1728 and 1740 were written in Latin (83–84). 64. Goldsmith, Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning, 292 (see n. 28). 65. Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), ed. Paula L. Barbour (Los Angeles:William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1980), 34. 66. Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot, trans. Richard N. Schwab and Walter E. Rex (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 92–93. 67. “A Character of Saint-Evremond,” in The California Edition of the Works of John Dryden, vol. 20, Prose 1691–1698, ed. A. E. Wallace Maurer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,1989), 7. (The second half of this “Character” is written by John Dryden.) 68. Pierre Bayle, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres [1684–87], repr. as vol. 1 of his Oeuvres Diverses, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1727; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1964–68). My citations of the Nouvelles are from the Olms photographic reprint of the Oeuvres Diverses, vol. 1, here, 416. Subsequent references to this work will be given by page number in the body of the text. 69. For a useful brief history of the periodical, see Raymond Birn, “Le Journal des Savants sous l’Ancien Régime,” Journal des Savants (1965): 15–35. 70. Pierre Desmaizeaux, Lettres de M. Bayle, publiées sur les originaux, avec des remarques (Amsterdam, 1729), quoted in Waquet, “Qu’est-ce que la République des Lettres?” 485 (see n. 1). 71. With regard to religious schisms in the republic of letters, see Rosalie Colie, who describes Bayle as one of “a host of men . . . who took advantage of increasing literacy to mobilize international Protestantism into a republic of letters” (“John Locke in the Republic of Letters,” Britain and the Netherlands, vol. 1, ed. J. S. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann [London: Chatto and Windus, 1960], 118) and Mario Rosa, who speaks of an ecclesiastic or monastic republic of letters established by the Maurists (“Un ‘méditateur’ dans la

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République des Lettres: le bibliothécaire,” in Commercium Litterarium, ed. Bots and Waquet, 87 and 96) (see n. 3). However, I see these Protestant and Catholic formations as sectoral divisions within the European republic of letters rather than as autonomous formations in their own right. See also Peter van Rooden, “Sects, Heterodoxies, and the Diffusion of Knowledge in the Republic of Letters,” in Commericum Litterarium, ed. Bots and Waquet, 51–64 (see n. 3): Rooden argues that the Jewish intellectual world, while equally international in character, remained separate and apart from the European republic of letters, which never quite lost its roots in the notion of the common corps of Christendom. 72. Henri Basnage de Beauval, Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans (November 1687), quoted in Bots, “L’Esprit de la République des Lettres,” 49 (see n. 3). 73. Descartes had already declared, in his “The Search After Truth by the Light of Nature,” that “it is no more the duty of an ordinary well-disposed man to know Greek and Latin than it is to know the languages of Switzerland or Brittany” and this work of his is designed to show, that “an unlettered man” is fully capable of philosophical inquiry even without school learning: nonetheless, this work was itself first published in 1701 in Latin (though it had been composed in French) (see The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R.T. Ross, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931], 1:309, 304). In England, as William Sacksteder argues, the lifetime of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) serves to mark the shift away from Latin: Hobbes is “at the watershed between scholarly employment of Latin and creative philosophy in English. Previous British thinkers had written only popular works in the vernacular, and his successors wrote all major works therein” (33); still, Hobbes’s own practice of composing his major works in both English and Latin, and his constant utilization of the different conceptual resources and implications of Greek, Latin, and English terms suggest the limits of the vernacularization that has taken place by the Restoration period. (See William Sacksteder, “Hobbes: Teaching Philosophy to Speak English,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 [1978]: 33–45.) Similarly, Locke may have composed (and published) his Essay Concerning Human Understanding in English, but when he prepared a Latin edition of the work, he undertook to revise it and wrote to his friend William Molyneux to request assistance in “paring off some of the superfluous repetitions . . . left in for the sake of illiterate men and the softer sex, not used to abstract notions and reasonings” (Locke to Molyneux, April 26, 1695, in John Locke, Selected Correspondence, ed. Mark Goldie [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 209).The late seventeenth-century shift in the language of composition noticed by Sacksteder is important, but the differentiation of Latin and English readerships continued to be significant throughout the eighteenth century for philosophical and other “serious” literature. 74. Sir William Temple, “Of Heroic Virtue,” in The Works of Sir William Temple, 4 vols. (London: S. Hamilton, 1814; repr. New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), 3:323. (Subsequent references to this work are provided in the text.)

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75. Descartes, “Discourse on Method,” in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Haldane and Ross, 1:81, 119 (see n. 73). 76. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Preface to the Novissima Sinica,” in Writings on China, ed. and trans. Daniel J. Cook and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), 45. 77. James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T. Cadell and William Creech, 1790), 1:31. 78. [ John Gilchrist], The Oriental Linguist,An Easy and Familiar Introduction to the Popular Language of Hindoostan (Calcutta: printed by Ferris and Greenway, 1798), dedication (original in italics). 79. Immanuel Kant, Education, trans. Annette Churton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 14–15. 80. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 47 (original in italics). 81. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ ” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Reiss, 57. 82. See Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 77 (December 11, 1750), in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 4, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1969), 41. For Wollstonecraft, see A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 271. For Thomas Jefferson, see his letter to John Hollins, February 19, 1809, in which he explains “the nature of the correspondence which is carried on between societies instituted for the benevolent purpose of communicating to all parts of the world whatever useful is discovered in any one of them”: “These societies are always in peace, however their nations may be at war. Like the republic of letters, they form a great fraternity spreading over the whole earth, and their correspondence is never interrupted by any civilized nation” (Thomas Jefferson: Writings [New York: Library of America, 1984], 1201). 83. William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802),” in The Oxford Authors: William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 606. 84. Smith, “Letter to the Edinburgh Review,” 249 (see n. 38). 85. William Julius Mickle, The Lusiad; or, the discovery of India. An Epic Poem. Translated from the Original Portuguese of Luis de Camoëns (London: Cadell et al., 1776), 291, in LION (note to book 6, line 351). 86. Dibon, “Communication in the Respublica Literaria of the 17th Century,” 54, n. 12 (see n. 3). 87. Edward Young, “Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison,” in Edward Young’s “Conjectures on Original Composition” in England and Germany: A Study in Literary Relations by Martin William Steinke (New York: Stechert, 1917), 41–73. French translation by Pierre Le Tourneur as “Conjectures sur la composition originale, Epitre adressée à l’Auteur de Charles Grandison,” in Oeuvres Diverses du Docteur

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Young,Traduites de l’Anglois, 4 vols. (Paris: Le Jay, 1770), 3:227–360. (References to both works will be given by page number in the text.) See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans.Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). Subsequent references to this work will be incorporated into the body of the text. Eisenstein, Grub Street Abroad, 5 (see n. 63). The Enlightenment concept of the public thus already anticipates (unlike Habermas’s formulation) the problem of minorities in majoritarian democracies, an issue developed in the nineteenth century by J. S. Mill, and one that has acquired a renewed importance in twentieth-century Western thinking about multicultural societies. The issue has also figured importantly in the African–American tradition and in the constitutional thought of independent India and post-apartheid South Africa, to cite a few significant instances. See, e.g., the documentation and discussion in Paul Merrill Spurlin, The French Enlightenment in America: Essays on the Times of the Founding Fathers (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984). Bayle is reviewing Daniel Georg Morhof ’s, De Patavinitate Liviana Liber (1685), and refers here to Rapin’s Comparison of Thucydides and Livy, an English translation of which was subsequently published at Oxford in 1694. Cf., e.g., a remark by La Rochefoucauld in his Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1665), which Aphra Behn translates as follows:“The accent of the Country where we are born lives in our hearts, and minds, as well as on our tongues and in our Language” (Reflections on Morality or Seneca Unmasqued [1685], in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, vol. 4 [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993], 50). See Ruth Whelan, “République des Lettres et littérature: le jeune Bayle épistolier,” XVIIe Siècle 178 (1993): 72, n. 6. Elisabeth Labrousse writes of Bayle’s childhood in Le Carla at the foot of the Pyrenees:“The language he could hear all around him was Occitan, and though French was spoken in the household of his father, pastor Jean Bayle, it was with a thick southern accent which Pierre himself never lost” (Bayle [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983], 12–13). This aspect of the hierarchical ordering of the cultural realm is, of course, no less relevant today than it was in the early modern period. Jacques Derrida, e.g., reflecting on his “French Algerian” origins, writes, “One entered French literature only by losing one’s accent” (45)—which means, of course, by acquiring the right accent. Derrida continues, I retain, no doubt, a sort of acquired reflex from the necessity of this vigilant transformation. I am not proud of it, I make no doctrine of it, but so it is: an accent—any French accent, but above all a strong southern accent—seems incompatible to me with the intellectual dignity of public speech. (Inadmissible, isn’t it? Well, I admit it.) Incompatible, a fortiori, with the vocation of poetic speech: for example, when I heard René Char read his sententious aphorisms

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with an accent that struck me as at once comical and obscene, as the betrayal of a truth, it ruined, in no small measure, an admiration of my youth. (Monolinguism of the Other; or the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998], 46)

96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101.

Derrida’s remarks, in their bluntness, help us to reflect on how the issue of “Scotticisms” and a “Scotch” accent figured in the anglophone literary culture of the eighteenth century, and on how the accents of Third World Englishes resonate in the context of the modern internationalization of the language. Garrick, Letters of David Garrick, ed. Kahrl and Little, 1:221 (see n. 8). Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From “The Spectator” to PostStructuralism (London:Verso, 1984), 13. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu’s argument regarding the relative autonomy of the literary field and the consequences he draws thereby: “External determinants . . . , which the Marxists used to invoke, cannot exert themselves except through the intermediary of transformations in the structure of the field which results from them.The field exerts an effect of refraction . . . and it is only on the condition of knowing the laws specific to its function (its ‘coefficient of refraction,’ that is, its ‘degree of autonomy’) that one can understand what it is that occurs”(“Principles of a Sociology of Cultural Works,” in Explanation and Value in the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 179). Louis M. Chaudon, Dictionnaire, Historique, Critique et Bibliographique, 30 vols. (Paris: Ménard and Desenne, 1821), s.v. “Bayle, Pierre,” 3:214. Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature. Second Series (New York: William Pearson, 1835), 400. D’Israeli is presumably referring to the Laurentian Library in Florence, founded in 1444 and opened to the public in 1571. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman, intro. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 708.

Chapter 3 National Differences and National Autonomy 1. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1:62 (see chap. 1, n. 47). Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text. 2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Relation de l’état présent de la République des Lettres,” in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, herausgegaben Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vierte Reihe, Politische Schriften, erster Band, 1667–1676 (Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag, 1931), 568. 3. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, “A New Edition” [trans. John Lockman] (London: J. and R.Tonson, 1767), 83–84 (letter 14). Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text. 4. Friedrich Klopstock, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774), quoted in Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters,” 373 (see chap. 2, n. 3).

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5. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, 88–89 (see chap. 2, n. 66). While acknowledging the use the Encyclopedists have made of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), d’Alembert describes Chambers’s compilation as simply a “translation” of various French writings, and positions the project he himself is engaged in as not so much itself a translation of Chambers as a transcendence of his work (109–11). Similarly, in his discussion of the relationship between Bacon’s division of the various branches of the arts and sciences of memory, reason, and imagination, and the classificatory scheme adopted for the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert again walks a fine line between acknowledging derivation from and asserting superiority to the prior work (49–50, 76–77, 159–64). More generally, after a discussion of the achievements of Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Locke, d’Alembert writes: “We may conclude from all this history that England is indebted to us for the origins of that philosophy which we have since received back from her” (85)—as though the question of national indebtedness were precisely what was at stake in his historical retrospective. 6. Edwin Cannan, commenting on this issue, remarks of the Wealth of Nations: “Its composition was spread over at least the twenty-seven years from 1749 to 1776. During that period economic ideas crossed and recrossed the Channel many times, and it is as useless as it is invidious to dispute about the relative shares of Great Britain and France in the progress effected” (Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan [New York: Random House, 1937], lv). 7. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann cite this remark by Pascal and suggest that it may be said to contain “in nuce” the fundamental problem confronted by the sociology of knowledge, the problem of the “amazing variety of forms of thought” in historically and culturally distinct societies (The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge [Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966], 5). 8. Cf. Howard Weinbrot,“Enlightenment Canon Wars:Anglo-French Views of Literary Greatness,” ELH 60 (1993): 79–100. 9. Christine Gerrard, in her important study The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), explores the ways in which “the Patriot poets of the 1730s and early 1740s engaged in a process of recovering British cultural as well as constitutional roots,” thus contributing to “current critical debates about the origins of literary nationalism” (121). As I show in this chapter, and more generally in this book as a whole, nationalism in English-language literary culture goes back well before the 1730s. 10. P.W. K. Stone, The Art of Poetry 1750–1820:Theories of Poetic Composition and Style in the Late Neo-Classic and Early Romantic Periods (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967), 24–25. 11. Earl Miner,“Introduction: Borrowed Plumage,Varied Umbrage,” in Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers, ed. Earl Miner and Jennifer Brady (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 3.

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12. John Oldmixon, Essay on Criticism (1728), ed. R. J. Madden (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1964), 46. There is some discussion of this phenomenon in relation to Dryden in John Sherwood’s “Dryden and the Rules: The Preface to Troilus and Cressida” (Comparative Literature 2 [1950]: 73–83). Sherwood argues: “One should not be misled by Dryden’s statement that ‘Aristotle with his interpreters, and Horace, and Longinus’ are the authors to whom he owes his ‘lights.’ These authors were evidently consulted and may be found quoted in the Preface; but Aristotle is almost invariably seen through the eyes of the French ‘interpreters’ [especially Rapin and Le Bossu], and Longinus was evidently known to Dryden chiefly through the translation of Boileau” (75). 13. Adrien Baillet, Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs. Par Adrien Baillet. [1685]. Revûs, corrigés, & augmentés par M. De la Monnoye de l’Académie Françoise, 7 vols. (Paris: Charles Moette et al., 1722). References to this work, all taken from the first volume unless otherwise specified, will be given in the text. 14. Sir John Chardin, Voyages en Perse (1670, 1711), quoted. in Warren E. Gates, “The Spread of Ibn Khaldun’s Ideas on Climate and Culture,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 418. Ibn Khaldun had adapted the climatological theory in the fourteenth century to valorize his own society, accepting the traditional argument that a temperate climate produced superior civilization, and merely adding that the Arabian climate was a temperate one (Charles Konigsberg, “Climate and Society: A Review of the Literature,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 4 [1960]: 69). Ibn Khaldun’s work was picked up and absorbed by Chardin, who, in turn, was the acknowledged source for Du Bos and an important influence both directly and through Du Bos on Montesquieu’s climatological theory. Thus, “a theory of climate which had reached a dead end in Europe was suddenly revitalized by a contribution from the East, giving a new impetus to western social philosophy” (Gates, “The Spread of Ibn Khaldun’s Ideas,” 422). 15. There is an extensive bibliography of scholarship on this subject. For an introduction to it, see James William Johnson, “Of Differing Ages and Climes,” Journal of the History of Ideas 21 (1960): 465–80; Pat Rogers,“North and South,” Eighteenth-Century Life 12.2 (1988): 101–11; Nussbaum, Torrid Zones (see intro., n. 8); and Roxann Wheeler, “The Empire of Climate,” in The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 1–48 (esp. 21–28). For the extension of the theory of climate into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Mark Harrison,“ ‘The Tender Frame of Man’: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760–1860,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70 (1996): 68–93; David N. Livingstone, “The Moral Discourse of Climate: Historical Considerations on Race, Place, and Virtue,” Journal of Historical Geography 17 (1991): 413–34; and Konigsberg (n. 14). 16. Baillet had argued, previously, that “Il y a de l’injustice à donner à toute une Nation les vices & les défauts que l’on aura remarqués dans quelques

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18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

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particuliers, comme à render de bonnes qualités universelles lorsqu’elles ne sont que personelles” (187). This objection against false or premature generalization should apply equally whether the generalizations are based on climatological or sociocultural hypotheses. It turns out, however, that Baillet objects more to negative characterizations of Europeans than to the making of stereotyping generalizations as such. See, e.g., the discussion in chapter 2 of Saavedra Fajardo’s Republic of Letters, a work that ignores the cultures of northern Europe as insignificant to the world of letters. Swift’s image of “Gothic swarms” coming forth from “Ignorance’s universal north” (in his “Ode to the Athenian Society,” in The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers [London: Penguin, 1983], lines 298–99) captures the traditional prejudice against the northern countries/climates, which equates them with ignorance and barbarity. For Johnson’s critique of the climatological theory, see Idler no. 11 ( June 24, 1758) and his “Life of Milton.” Like his contemporaries, Johnson frequently speaks of particular national characteristics, but that he views such characteristics in a sociocultural light, rather than as fixed, innate characteristics, is evident from his remark that “there is no permanent national character; it varies according to circumstances.Alexander the Great swept India; now the Turks sweep Greece” (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 494 [see chap. 2, n. 101]). For Hume’s views, see his essays “Of National Characters” (1748) and “Of Commerce” (1752) in Essays, Moral Political and Literary (see chap. 2, n. 19). Addison and Steele, The Spectator, 1:268 (see chap. 1, n. 29). Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text. Dominique Bouhours, The Art of Criticism (1705), intro. Philip Smallwood (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1981), 29. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. Cf. the comments of Matthew Prior in his commonplace book, ca. 1720–21:“I believe no Man now alive is so absolutely Master of the Greek or Latin tongue as to be able to read one Sentence without stopping a little to consider the Grammatical construction of it: add to this that the Customs of these Nations, their Cloathing, their Utensils, their Houses, husbandry, Encampments, their laws, the manner of their pleadings, and the placing their words, their proverbs in common discourse are so different from Ours, that whole Volumes of Critics & Commentators must not only be read but remembered before a Man is master of One oration of Demosthenes or Cicero or One Comedy of Aristophanes or a Satyr of Horace or Juvenal” (The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, 1:1005–06 [see intro., n. 33]). Dominique Bouhours, Les Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, ed. René Radouant (Paris: Editions Bossard, 1920), 57, 55. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 86. John Oldmixon, The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick (1728) (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1976), 173. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text.

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25. London Journal (May 1732), quoted in Roger B. Oake, “Political Elements in Criticism of Voltaire in England 1732–47,” Modern Language Notes 57 (1942), 350; Walpole, Yale Edition of the Correspondence of Horace Walpole, 41:148, n. 1 (see intro., n. 20). 26. Charles Gildon, The Life of Mr. Thomas Betterton, the late Eminent Tragedian (1710; repr. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970). 27. Petronius, The Works of Petronius Arbiter, in Prose and Verse (1736; repr. New York: AMS Press, 1975). 28. [John Langhorne], Letters Supposed to have passed between Mr. de St. Evremond and Mr.Waller. Now first Collected and Published (London, 1770). 29. Dryden, “A Character of Saint-Evremond,” 11 (see chap. 2, n. 67). 30. Saint-Evremond, “A Discourse upon the Grand Alexander,” in Works of Mr. de St. Evremont, 2 vols. (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1700), 1:191. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. 31. Saint-Evremond, “Reflections upon the Different Genius of the Roman People, at different Times of the Republick,” in Works of Mr. de St. Evremont, 1:1–100. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. 32. Saint-Evremond, “Upon Tragedies,” in Works of Mr. de St. Evremont, 1:503–04. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. 33. Saint-Evremond, “Of the English Comedy,” Works of Mr. de St. Evremont, 1:518–20. 34. Cibber, Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, 169–70 (see intro., n. 7). 35. Voltaire, An Essay upon the Civil Wars of France extracted from curious manuscripts.And also upon the Epick Poetry of the European Nations, from Homer down to Milton (1728), 104, repr. in Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic, ed. Stuart Curran (Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1970). 36. Saint-Evremond, “Upon Comedies,” in Works of Mr. de St. Evremont, 1:509–10 (see n. 30). 37. Le Bossu, Monseiur Bossu’s Treatise of the Epick Poem (London, 1695), 2, repr. in Le Bossu and Voltaire on the Epic (see n. 35). Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. 38. Francis Douce, Illustrations of Shakespeare and of Ancient Manners, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807), 2:104–05. 39. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom,” in The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays,Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 86. 40. Cibber, Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, 19–20 (see intro., n. 7);Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, rev. ed., 2 vols. (1762; repr. New York: Haskell House, 1969), 1:4; Robert Dodsley, “Sir John Cockle at Court,” in Miscellanies by the late R. Dodsley, Vol. 1, 2nd ed. (London: J. Dodsley, 1777), 83. 41. The notion of national specificity and autonomous self-sufficiency that adheres to the common law tradition is nicely evoked by Sir John Davies in his Irish Reports (1612), where he writes that English customary law is “so framed and fitted to the nature and disposition of this people, as we may properly say it is connatural to the Nation, so as it cannot possibly be ruled

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46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

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by any other Law.This Law therefore doth demonstrate the strength of wit and reason and self-sufficiency which hath been always in the People of this Land, which have made their own Laws out of their wisedome and experience, (like a silk-worm that formeth all her web out of her self only) not begging or borrowing a form of a Commonweal, either from Rome or from Greece, as all other Nations of Europe have done” (quoted in J. G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century [1957; repr. New York:W.W. Norton, 1967], 33–34). John Dennis, “Remarks on . . . Prince Arthur,” in The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:91 (see intro., n. 34). Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book the First (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765), 14. Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry, 2 vols. (London: Charles Rivington, 1718), 1:135. Nathanael Culverwel, in An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature (1652), refers to innate ideas as the “first and Alphabetical notions” that enable us to “spell out the Laws of Nature”: “There are stampt and printed upon the being of man, some cleare and undelible Principles; some first and Alphabetical notions; by putting together of which it can spell out the Law of Nature” (Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, ed. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971], 54). Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 156 (September 14, 1751), in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 5, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1969), 66. It is worth remarking, perhaps, that Gildon himself writes elsewhere, “as in Physic, so in Poetry, there must be a regard had to the Clime, Nature, and Customs of the People, for the Habits of the Mind as well as those of the Body, are influenced by them” (“An Essay at a Vindication of the LoveVerses of Cowley and Waller” [1694], in Critical Essays of the Eighteenth Century 1700–1725, ed. Willard Durham [1915; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961], 4). Here, the diversity of cultures (of literatures) is in fact produced, in part, by the diversities of nature, including those of climate. So, even for Gildon, the notion of “uniformity” across ages and nations is an extreme position. John Dennis, “The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry,” in The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:202 (see intro., n. 34). John Dennis,“Remarks on . . . Prince Arthur,” 1:96. Subsequent references to this work are provided in the text. John Dennis, “The Impartial Critick,” in The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:11. Subsequent references to this work are provided in the text. Sir William Davenant, “Preface to Gondibert,” in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957), 2:20. John Dryden, All for Love, ed. David M. Vieth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 17.

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53. Samuel Butler,“Upon Critics Who Judge of Modern Plays Precisely by the Rules of the Antients,” in Satires and Miscellaneous Poetry and Prose, ed. René Lamar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 61. 54. [Elkanah Settle], A Farther Defence of Dramatick Poetry (London: Eliz. Whitlock, 1698), 28. 55. When Saul Bellow asserts,“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read them” (quoted in Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988], 256), he suggests a conditional claim along these lines: show me the African Tolstoy, then I will recognize the claims of African literature. Across the long eighteenth century, English-language writers understand that a similar demand directed by the French at English drama can only be satisfied if the claims of English literature are first accorded a measure of respect; otherwise, the demand will always only turn up a series of barbarian failures, including most of all that of Shakespeare. If Bellow understood better the historical dynamics through which European cultures achieved recognition, especially the Englishlanguage tradition in which he writes, he might be less inclined to pose as a kind of grand inquisitor of the claims of non-European cultures. 56. George Farquhar,“A Discourse upon Comedy, in Reference to the English Stage. In a Letter to a Friend,” in Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge, 2 vols. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), 1:85. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text. 57. John Hayward, ed., The Letters of Saint Evremond (London: Routledge, 1930), 163–64. 58. Colley Cibber, The Careless Husband, ed. William W. Appleton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), epilogue, lines 2–3. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. 59. Monsieur Bossu’s Treatise of the Epick Poem, 18 (see n. 37). 60. Pope,“Essay on Criticism,” in Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Butt, lines 711–22 (see intro., n. 7). Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. 61. John Dryden, Prologue to The Tempest, Or The Enchanted Island, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 10, Plays:The Tempest,Tyrranick Love, An Evening’s Love, ed. Maximillian E. Novak (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), lines 5–8 (italics reversed). 62. John Dryden, Preface to Albion and Albanius, in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 15, Plays: Albion and Albanius, Don Sebastian, Amphitryon, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 4–5. 63. I have discussed Farquhar earlier; Sir Richard Blackmore, in the preface to his Paraphrase on the Book of Job (1700), disputes in very similar terms the authority granted to Homer and Virgil as models of what epic poetry must be: “But upon what Authority is this imposed on the World? What Commission had these two Poets to settle the limits and extent of Epick Poetry, or who can prove they ever intended to do so? . . . ’Tis therefore to be wish’d

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65.

66.

67.

68.

69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

74. 75.

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that some good Genius, qualify’d for such an Undertaking, would break the Ice, assert the Liberty of Poetry, and set up for an Original in Writing in a way accommodated to the Religion, Manners, and other Circumstances we are now under” (quoted in David Womersley, ed., Augustan Critical Writing [London: Penguin, 1997], xxii–xxiii). Advertisements from Parnassus (1704), quoted in Paul Spencer Wood, “The Opposition to Neo-Classicism in England between 1660 and 1700,” PMLA 43 (1928): 193. Otway assumes the place occupied by Tasso in the original version of this story. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones A Foundling, intro. Martin C. Battestin, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 1:77–78 (bk. 2, chap. 1). Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story, ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 12. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text. Goldsmith, Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 294 (see chap. 2, n. 28). Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. Montesqieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans.Anne M. Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 315. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, 1:15 (see n. 40). Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. Henry Boyd, trans., The Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri, 3 vols. (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1802), 1:1–2. One might compare the opening part of Boyd’s statement quoted in the text with the assertion of one of John Dennis’s characters in The Impartial Critick (1693): “the Authority of Aristotle avails little with me, against irrefutable Experience” (The Critical Works of John Dennis, 1:21 [see intro., n. 34]). After more than a century of reiteration, the appeal from Aristotle to “Nature” or to actual literary “Experience” might indeed be said to have “grown familiar.” Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century (1904; repr. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), 2. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 142. John Dryden, “Dedication of the Aeneis,” in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 5, Poems:The Works of Virgil in English 1697, ed.William Frost and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 267–341. References to this work will be provided in the text. Prior, Preface to Solomon on the Vanity of the World, in Literary Works of Matthew Prior, 1:309 (see intro., n. 33). Edward Young, “A Discourse on Lyric Poetry” (1728), in The Complete Works, Poetry and Prose, of the Rev. Edward Young, 2 vols. (London: William Tegg and Co., 1854), 1:419.

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76. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (1924; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1988), 2:297. 77. [George Lyttelton], “An Epistle to Mr. Pope. From Rome, 1730,” in A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By several Hands (London: J. Dodsley, 1775), 2:37–38. 78. James Thomson, The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), “Autumn,” line 22. 79. Joseph Addison, “A Discourse of Ancient and Modern Learning,” in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914), 458–59. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text. 80. Joseph Addison, “Letter from Italy,” in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison (see previous note). 81. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 5th ed., 2 vols. (London:W. J. and J. Richardson et al., 1806), 1:4–5. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. 82. Royall Tyler, Prologue to The Contrast: A Comedy, intro. Thomas J. McKee (New York: Burt Franklin, 1970), xxxviii (original in italics). 83. Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike, Toward the Decolonization of African Literature: African Fiction and Poetry and Their Critics (1980; repr. London: KPI Limited, 1985), 172. 84. William Mason, ed., The Poems of Gray, To which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings (York: Printed by A.Ward, 1775), 90–91. 85. Goldsmith, The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1:113 (see chap. 2, n. 28). 86. Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, compared with the Greek and French Dramatic Poets. With Some Remarks upon the Misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire (1769; repr. New York:Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), 57. 87. Nicholas Rowe, The Tragedy of Jane Shore, ed. Harry William Pedicord (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 9 (prologue). Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. 88. Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 2:69. 89. Jonathan Swift, Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, D.D., vol. 1, Letters 1690–1714, ed. David Woolley (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999), 239; Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), no. 4 (April 19, 1709);Addison and Steele, The Spectator, no. 5 (March 6, 1711) (see chap. 1, n. 29). 90. See Mita Choudhury,“The Italian Incursions and ‘English’ Opera,” in Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theater, 1660–1800, 35–60 (see intro., n. 8). William Hogarth’s very popular print “The Bad Taste of the Town” (also referred to as “Masquerades and Operas”) (February 1723/24) is a notable example of this contemporary critique of the taste for Italian operas. Ronald Paulson offers an extended reading of this work in his study of Hogarth (Hogarth, vol. 1, The “Modern Moral Subject” 1697–1732 [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991], 74–90), interpreting it in

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terms of Addison’s privileging of an aesthetics of “common sense” in the Spectator and in terms of Hogarth’s own aesthetic preference for “nature” or “life” over “the opera’s rendition of form” (76). The nationalistic emphasis of Hogarth’s engraving is noted by Paulson but is more pungently expressed in Nikolaus Pevsner’s summary comment that in this work Hogarth “castigate[s] Raphael and Michelangelo together with Italian opera for the neglect of home-made English art, represented by the works of Shakespeare, Jonson, Dryden, Congreve, and Otway carted away on a wheelbarrow as waste-paper” (The Englishness of English Art [1956; repr. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1964], 26). Addison’s influence on Hogarth is clear enough, but one might also point to a more proximate antecedent in Leonard Welsted’s “A Prologue occasioned by the Revival of a Play of Shakespeare” (1721), which specifically evokes a scene of Shakespeare (and English drama more generally) being ousted from public favor by “alien toys,” such as French tumblers and Italian opera singers: To low provincial Drolls, in crowds, you run, By foreign modes and foreign nonsense won; To see French Tumblers three long hours you sit, And Criticks judge of capers in the Pit. What art shall teach us to refine your joys, And wean your sickly taste from alien toys? For this we toil, and in our cause engage Th’immortal Writers of an earlier age: ................................. Fond labour! antient sense must quit the field, And Shakespear to the soft Bercelli yield: Whence is this change in nature! one would swear That Eunuchs were not form’d to lead the Fair. (lines 39–52) Welsted’s equation of foreign arts with castrated masculinity (“Things that are not Men” [line 56]), in contrast to traditional English “True Masculinity” (line 54), strikes a characteristic note of this discourse of cultural nationalism. 91. Richard Steele, The Tender Husband, ed. Calhoun Winton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 78. 92. Cf. Steele’s comment in a letter of October 7, 1708 to J. Keally: “The taste for Plays is expired. We are all Operas, performed by eunuchs every way impotent to please” (Correspondence of Richard Steele, ed. Rae Blanchard [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941], 25).This was a particularly common element in the critique of foreign arts (as inimical to English masculine virility), as we have already seen with Welsted’s “Prologue” of 1721. So, too, the author of To the H—nble Sir J——B—— (1734), referring to “French Dancers and Harlequins, . . . Effeminate Eunuchs, and Sod[omitica]l Italians,” exclaims that English is “so debauch’d with Effeminacy and Italian

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94.

95.

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airs . . . [that] we daily see our Male Children . . . dwindle almost into Women” (quoted in Kathleen Wilson,“The Good, the Bad, and the Impotent: Imperialism and the Politics of Identity in Georgian England,” in The Consumption of Culture, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer [London: Routledge, 1995], 243). Similarly, the author of Satan’s Harvest Home (1749) associates the Italian opera’s “Corruption of the English stage” with other “corruptions” of aristocratic manners, such as the “Contagion” of men kissing each other and their degeneration into “enervated effeminate Animal[s]” given to “unnatural Vices” (quoted in Michael McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy:The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 [1995]: 321, n. 68, 311). On the logic of the mean in “neoclassical” literary culture see Edward Pechter, Dryden’s Classical Theory of Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) and Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). The editors of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, acknowledge the inadequacy of the traditional “classic to romantic” narrative but their response is to eschew categorizing labels altogether rather than to offer a counter-narrative (“The present volume has in general sought to avoid categorisations, whether of the traditional or revisionist varieties” [xv]—the reference being to Northrop Frye’s replacement of “preromanticism” with the notion of an “age of sensibility”). But as I argued at the start of this chapter, such attempts to bury well-established narratives under a mound of silence are bound to fail. If one wants to prevent the constant return of the dead, one needs to drive a stake through its heart by offering an account that could take its place as an explanatory narrative of literary historical change across the period in question. Douglas Lane Patey, “The Institution of Criticism in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, 22 (see previous note). In another essay in this volume, Patey does acknowledge that French “cultural nationalism” had already reached a kind of climax in the 1670s and 1680s (“Ancients and Moderns,” 36). William Collins, “Oriental Eclogues,” in The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 2–3 (italics reversed). One might compare Collins’s remarks with Aphra Behn’s comment in her “epistle dedicatory” to Oronooko (1688): “If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear so to us, because New and Strange” (The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, The Fair Jilt and Other Short Stories, ed. Janet Todd [Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1995], 56 [original in italics]). Hugh Blair, “Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian,” in The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, ed. Howard Gaskill (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

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100.

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102.

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University Press, 1988), 345. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. In his History of English Poetry (1781),Thomas Warton is able to quote with approval Hobbes’s dictum that,“In a good poem both judgment and fancy are required; but the fancy must be more eminent, because they please for the EXTRAVAGANCY, but ought not to displease by INDISCRETION” (quoted in Earl Wasserman, Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1947], 231). Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, intro. Hoyt Trowbridge (Los Angeles:William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1963), 63. Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole, 121 (see n. 9). See, e.g., such important works as Walter Jackson Bate’s From Classic to Romantic: Premises of Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), Norman Maclean’s “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century,” in Critics and Criticism:Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), and René Wellek’s A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, vol. 1, The Later Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1955). But the narrative logic I am discussing is so pervasive as to be found almost anywhere. Thus, e.g., regarding Henry Mackenzie’s description of Robert Burns as a “Heaven-taught ploughman” in his famous review of the latter’s poems in 1786, Robert Crawford notes:“his discussion of natural literary genius is of a piece with the view of genius put forward by [Hugh] Blair and other eighteenth-century teachers of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, and dates back at least to the seventeenth-century Réflexions sur la Poétique d’Aristote (1674) by René Rapin, who writes of a poet’s ‘elevation of Soul that depends not on Art or Study, and which is purely a Gift of Heaven, and must be sustain’d by a lively Sence and Vivacity’ ” (“Robert Fergusson’s Robert Burns,” in Robert Burns and Cultural Authority, ed. Robert Crawford [1996; repr. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997], 2). (One might, indeed, trace this view back to Bede’s description of Caedmon.) Likewise, regarding the twin principles of “historical” criticism—that in interpreting a work we must place it within the cultural context of its own age, and that in evaluating it we must attend to the literary conventions and expectations that prevailed when it was written—Hoyt Trowbridge remarks that neither of these ideas “was at all novel” in the hands of the Wartons and others in the late eighteenth century:“Wellek,Wasserman, and Wimsatt and Brooks [have shown] that similar statements were made by sixteenth-century Italian defenders of Ariosto, by Chapelain and Dryden in the seventeenth century, and by Hughes, Upton, and other commentators on Shakespeare, Spenser, and Ben Jonson in the eighteenth century.The same slogans were applied to Hebrew poetry by Lowth, to Homer by Blackwell and Wood, and to the

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104.

105. 106.

107.

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Greeks and Romans generally by Gibbon, but the finest statement of these ideas, as well as their most impressive exemplification in practice, was probably the preface and notes of Dr. Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare (1765)” (Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, intro.Trowbridge, iv–v [see n. 100]). See, e.g., the important work of Edward Pechter on Dryden’s criticism (n. 93), and Emerson R. Marks’s studies of neoclassical criticism, Relativist and Absolutist:The Early Neoclassical Debate in England (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955) and The Poetics of Reason: English Neoclassical Criticism (New York: Random House, 1968). With regard to this point, and the more general issue at stake in this section of the chapter, see Ralph Cohen, “Some Thoughts on the Problems of Literary Change 1750–1800,” Dispositio 4 (1979): 145–62; A. D. Harvey, “Neo-classicism and Romanticism in Historical Context,” in his Literature into History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 125–70; Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Robert J. Griffin,“The Eighteenth-Century Construction of Romanticism:Thomas Warton and the Pleasures of Melancholy,” ELH 59 (1992): 799–815; Griffin, Wordsworth’s Pope: A Study of Literary Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Fairer, “Historical Criticism and the English Canon: A Spenserian Dispute of the 1750s,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000): 43–64; and Terry,“Classicists and Gothicists:The Division of the Estate,” in Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781, 286–323 (see chap. 1, n. 18). As Griffin states in his 1992 essay, what we need to understand is “not how mirror became lamp, but how this particular episode of literary history came to be constructed in that way” (802). John Keats, “Sleep and Poetry,” in The Oxford Authors: John Keats, ed. Eleanor Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), line 181. Wasserman, Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century, 35 (see n. 99). Subsequent references to this work will be provided in the text. (More recently, Margaret Anne Doody’s The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985] implicitly develops certain continuities between Elizabethan and Augustan poetry by reexamining the characteristics of the latter poetic mode.) R. S. Crane has sought to preserve some of this sense of things in his essays on the history of criticism in the eighteenth century. He refers to “a more or less common framework of characteristic fundamental terms and distinctions which critics throughout the period, for all their disagreements on points of doctrine or appreciation, found it natural to utilize in the statement of their questions and the justification of their answers” (“On Writing the History of Criticism in England 1650–1800,” in The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays, 2 vols. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967], 2:167). Crane’s account of “neoclassical” criticism is an important contribution to my own understanding of “critical pluralism,” but his larger narrative of a shift from this “neoclassical” criticism to

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“romantic” aesthetics reinstalls the traditional narrative of a linear shift from one set of critical concerns to another new one.We are left with the familiar narrative of a movement from classic to romantic, even though Crane has usefully reinterpreted what the basic characteristics of this “classic” critical mode were.


INDEX This index covers the main text and the notes. For references to primary works in the notes, only the first citation of the work (which includes full bibliographic information) is indexed. Primary works are listed as subentries under their author’s name; they appear after all other subentries for the author. Secondary works are indexed by author only, without a subentry for the title of the work. Abrams, M. H., 211 n. 101 Achillini, Claudio, 123 Adams, John Papers of John Adams, 24, 40–1, 42, 43, 181 n. 4 Addison, Joseph cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115, 119, 142–4, 153, 156–60, 162–3, 166, 208–9 n. 90 fame of, 26, 28, 77–8, 100–1 republic of letters and, 57, 77, 79–84, 122, 142–3, 189 n. 6 status of English culture and, 31, 34, 53, 72, 79, 81–4, 86, 194 n. 44, 195 n. 48 works: “Account of the Greatest English Poets,” 31, 184 n. 21; Dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals, 57, 77, 79–84, 156, 193 nn. 41, 42, 194 n. 44, 194–5 n. 47, 195 n. 48; A Discourse on Ancient and Modern Learning, 156–60, 166, 208 n. 79; “Essay on the Georgics,” 86, 195 n. 54; The Freeholder, 25, 182 n. 7; Letter from Italy, 157, 159, 208 n. 80; letters, 72, 191 n. 31, 194–5 n. 47; Spectator, 34, 122, 142–3, 143–4, 157, 162–3, 185 n. 29

Adorno,Theodor, 7, 178 n. 9 Advertisements from Parnassus, 147–8, 207 n. 64 Allen, Katharine, 195 n. 49 Amherst, Gen. Jeffrey, 13 Anacreon, 140 anglocentrism, 5, 45 Anstey, Christopher, 189 n. 6 Aravamudan, Srinivas, 178 n. 8 Arcadians, academy of, 61–2 Ariosto, Ludovico, 150, 211 n. 102 Aristophanes, 203 n. 21 Aristotle cultural authority of: asserted, 69, 116, 137, 145, 146, 169, 202 n. 12; challenged or circumscribed, 120–1, 132–4, 136, 139–41, 143, 147–8, 151, 152, 207 n. 70 arts and arms topos, see English literary culture Ascham, Roger, 50 Augustan criticism, see neoclassical criticism Ayres, Philip, 14, 180 n. 27 Bacon, Francis fame of, 26, 28, 39, 78, 183 n. 14 influence on Encyclopédie, 113, 201 n. 5 republic of letters and, 61, 74

216

INDEX

Bailey, Richard, 185 n. 36 Baillet, Adrien cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115, 117–18, 119, 120–2, 124, 126, 128, 134, 137 works: Jugemens des savans sur les principaux ouvrages des auteurs, 117–18, 120–2, 202 n. 13, 202–3 n. 16 Balibar, Renée, 184 n. 24 Banks, Joseph republic of letters and, 59, 72, 189 n. 7, 191 n. 32 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia, 68 Barlow, Joel, 189 n. 6 Barrington, Daines, 52–3 Bate,Walter Jackson, 211 n. 101 Bathurst, Ralph, 28 Baugh, Daniel, 3, 177 n. 4 Baumer, Franklin Le Van, 188 n. 2 Bayle, Pierre French language in republic of letters and, 91, 94–5 provincialisms and, 105, 118, 199 nn. 92, 94 republic of letters and, 92–4, 96, 107, 113, 196 n. 71 works: Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, 91–5, 105–6, 196 n. 68 Bayly, C. A., 179–80 n. 19 Beach, Adam, 191 n. 27 Beattie, James works: Elements of Moral Science, 98, 198 n. 77; London Diary 1773, 14, 180 n. 26 Beaumont, Francis, 28 Bede the Venerable, 211 n. 102 Behn, Aphra, 66, 190 n. 17 works: Oronooko, 210 n. 97; Reflections on Morality or Seneca Unmasqued, 199 n. 93; “The Translator’s Preface” (to Fontenelle), 87, 195 n. 57 Bellow, Saul, 206 n. 55 Benjamin,Walter, 7

Berger, Peter, 201 n. 7 Berlin, Isaiah, 8, 178 n. 10 Bertaut, Jean, 36 Bibliothèque raisonnée des ouvrages des savants de l’Europe, 196 n. 63 Bilderdijk,Willem, 59 status of Dutch culture and, 22–5, 48, 104, 181–2 n. 5 Birn, Raymond, 196 n. 69 Blackmore, Sir Richard cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 119, 147, 157–8, 206–7 n. 63 republic of letters and, 56, 189 n. 6 works: Eliza: An Epick Poem, 56, 189 n. 4; Paraphrase on the Book of Job, 206–7 n. 63 Blackstone, Sir William Commentaries on the Laws of England, 136, 205 n. 43 Blackwell,Thomas, 211 n. 102 Blair, Hugh neoclassical and romantic poetics and, 114, 167, 168–71, 172, 211 n. 102 works: Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, 168–71, 172, 210–11 n. 98; Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, 168 Boccalini,Traiano Ragguagli di Parnasso, 147 Bodin, Jean, 119 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicholas cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115, 117–18, 122, 134, 137 English emulation and competition with, 17–18, 34–7, 38, 86, 116, 144–5, 194 n. 44, 202 n. 12 works: Art poétique, 34–7, 117–18, 122, 185 n. 32 Boscawen, Adm. Edward, 13 Boswell, James, 189 n. 6 Life of Johnson, 200 n. 101, 203 n. 18 Bots, Hans, 188 n. 3, 197 n. 72

INDEX

Bouhours, Dominique, 127 cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115, 122–7, 128, 132, 134, 137 fame of, 116, 122 works: Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, 122, 124–6, 203 n. 22; La manière de bien penser, 122, 123–4, 126–7, 132, 203 n. 20 Bourdieu, Pierre, 200 n. 98 Bowen, H.V., 179 n. 18 Boyd, Rev. Henry (Trans. ) Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri, 151, 207 n. 70 Boyle, Robert, 39 Brandell, Gunnar, 182 n. 6 Bromley, J. S., 190 n. 10 Brooke, Frances, 67 Brooks, Cleanth, 211 n. 102 Brown, Laura, 178 n. 8 Browne,Thomas republic of letters and, 73–5, 79, 82, 94, 189 n. 6, 191–2 n. 34 works: Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 73–5, 191 n. 33, 192 n. 36 Brunot, Ferdinand, 195 n. 58 Burney, Frances republic of letters and, 84, 189 n. 6 works: Evelina, 84, 195 n. 50 Burns, Robert, 211 n. 102 Burrell,William, 11, 179 n. 18 Butler, Samuel, 28 cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 139 works: “Upon Critics Who Judge of Modern Plays … by the Rules of the Antients,” 139, 206 n. 53 Caedmon, 211 n. 102 Caesar, Julius, 82, 105 Cairns, John W., 192 n. 35 Camden,William, 183 n. 14 Camoëns, Luis Vaz de, 68, 99 Cannan, Edwin, 201 n. 6 Cannon, John, 180 nn. 22, 23 Carlson, C. Lennart, 186 n. 41

217

Carlyle,Thomas, 18, 181 n. 35 Carter, Elizabeth, 14, 68 Carter, Philip, 191 n. 20 Case of Madam Mary Carleton,The, 25–6, 182 n. 10 Cave, Edward, 40 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 177–8 n. 5 Chambers, Ephraim Cyclopedia or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 113, 201 n. 5 Chapelain, Jean, 211 n. 102 “A Character of Saint-Evremond,” see Dryden Chardin, John Voyages en Perse, 119, 202 n. 14 Charleton,Walter, 39 Chatterton,Thomas works: “Kew Gardens,” 59, 189 n. 7; “The Whore of Babylon,” 59, 189 n. 7 Chaucer, Geoffrey mutability of English and, 33, 34, 70 progress of English topos and, 28, 31, 32 Chetwood, Knightly “To the Earl of Roscommon on his Excellent Poem,” 31, 184 n. 21 Chinweizu, 158, 208 n. 83 Choudhury, Mita, 178 n. 8, 208 n. 90 Chudleigh, Mary, Lady progress of English topos and, 30–1 works: “To Mr. Dryden, on his excellent Translation of Virgil,” 30–1, 183 nn. 19, 20 Churchill, Charles, 189 n. 6 Cibber, Colley cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 131–2, 135, 142 status of English culture and, 4 works: An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, 4, 131–2, 135, 178 n. 7; The Careless Husband, 142, 206 n. 58 Cicero, 69, 203 n. 21 Clark, Arthur Melville, 183–4 n. 20

218

INDEX

classic and romantic, see English literary culture Clive, Robert, 11, 13–14 Cobb, Samuel progress of English topos and, 31, 38–9 republic of letters and, 189 n. 6 works: “Of Poetry,” 38, 39, 185 n. 37; Poetae Britannici, 31, 38, 184 n. 21 Cohen, Ralph, 212 n. 104 Coke, Sir Edward Institutes, 192 n. 35 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 42, 186 n. 47 Colie, Rosalie, 196 n. 71 Colley, Linda, 2, 10, 11, 12, 15, 177 n. 3, 179 nn. 14, 17 Collins,William cultural differences and, 166–7, 210 n. 97 works: Persian Eclogues, 166–7, 210 nn. 96, 97 Committee on the Legal Status of the Welsh Language, 186 n. 52 Congreve,William, 28, 209 n. 90 Corneille, Pierre, 139, 153 Cornwallis, Charles Cornwallis, Earl of, 13 Cowley, Abraham, 147 progress of English topos and, 5, 21, 31 Cowper,William The Task, 11–12, 180 n. 24 Crabbe, George, 27, 183 n. 17 Craggs, James, 78 Crane, R. S., 212–13 n. 107 Crawford, Robert, 187 n. 65, 211 n. 102 Creech,Thomas, 81 Cressy, David, 179 n. 12 Critical Review, 32, 68, 191 n. 24 cultural nationalism, see English literary culture Culverwel, Nathanael An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature, 205 n. 45

Dacier, André, 79, 116, 153 D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond cultural nationalism and, 113, 201 n. 5 French language in republic of letters and, 89–90 works: “Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia,” 89–90, 113, 196 n. 66, 201 n. 5 Daniel, Samuel, 38 Dante Alighieri, 63, 151, 190 n. 16 D’Argonne, Bonaventure, see Vigneul-Marville Dart, John Westminster Abbey, a Poem, 31, 184 n. 21 Daston, Lorraine, 112, 188 n. 3, 200 n. 4 Davenant,William laws of poetry and, 138, 148 mutability of English and, 32–3 progress of English topos and, 35, 36 works: Gondibert, An Heroick Poem, 138, 148, 205 n. 51 Davies, Sir John Irish Reports, 204–5 n. 41 Davis, Leith, 187 n. 65 De Beer, G. R., 189 n. 7, 191 n. 32 De Deugd, Cornelius, 182 n. 5 Demosthenes, 47, 203 n. 21 Denham, John progress of English topos and, 27, 31 works: “On Abraham Cowley, his Death and Burial amongst the Ancient Poets,” 31, 184 n. 21 Dennis, John cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 18, 136, 137–8, 192 n. 37 laws of poetry and, 137, 207 n. 70 republic of letters and, 189 n. 6, 192 n. 37 works: The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, 137, 205 n. 48; Critical Works, 18, 181 n. 34; Impartial Critick,

INDEX

137, 192 n. 37, 205 n. 50, 207 n. 70; Remarks on … Prince Arthur, 136, 137, 138, 205 n. 42 Denonain, Jean-Jacques, 191–2 n. 34 De Quincey,Thomas “William Wordsworth,” 37, 41 Derrick, Samuel, 189 n. 6 Derrida, Jacques, 199–200 n. 95 Descartes, René cultural nationalism and, 112–13, 201 n. 5 republic of letters and, 97, 99, 197 n. 73 works: Discourse on Method, 97, 99, 198 n. 75; “The Search After Truth by the Light of Nature,” 197 n. 73 Desmaizeaux, Pierre Lettres de M. Bayle, 92, 196 n. 70 Desportes, Philippe, 36 Dibon, Paul, 56, 72, 99, 181 n. 3, 188 nn. 2, 3, 191 n. 30, 198 n. 86 Dictionnaire, Historique, Critique et Bibliographique, 200 n. 99 D’Israeli, Isaac Curiosities of Literature, 108, 200 n. 100 Dodsley, Robert “Sir John Cockle at Court,” 135, 204 n. 40 Donatus, 116 Doody, Margaret Anne, 212 n. 106 Douce, Francis Illustrations of Shakespeare, 134–5, 204 n. 38 Douglas, George, 99 Dowling, John, 190 n. 14 Drayton, Michael, 28 Dryden, John, 81, 83, 128, 140, 141 cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115, 116, 131–2, 139, 143, 150, 153–6, 157, 166, 183–4 n. 20, 211 n. 102 imperialism and, 16, 36–7, 38, 50 laws of poetry and, 146, 147, 149 mutability of English and, 34, 70

219

progress of English topos and, 28, 30–1, 32, 34–7 republic of letters and, 26, 189 n. 6, 202 n. 12 status of English culture and, 3–4, 18, 38–9, 153, 194 n. 44, 209 n. 90 works: Albion and Albanius, 147, 206 n. 62; All for Love, 139, 205 n. 52; The Art of Poetry, 34–7, 38, 50, 185 n. 32; Aureng-Zebe, 3–4, 178 n. 6; “A Character of Saint-Evremond,” 90–1, 128, 196 n. 67; “Dedication of the Aeneis,” 153–6, 157, 166, 207 n. 73; “Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire,” 194 n. 44; The Hind and the Panther, 16, 180 n. 30; The Tempest, 146, 149, 206 n. 61; “To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve,” 31, 184 n. 21; “To My Honoured Friend, Dr Charleton,” 38–9, 185 n. 38; “To the Earl of Roscommon on his Excellent Essay on Translated Verse,” 31, 184 n. 21 Du Bos, Jean Baptiste, 119, 202 n. 14 Duncan, Carol, 181 n. 36 Dutch literary culture, 23–4, 25 republic of letters and, 89, 92–3 status of English culture and, 26, 27, 154, 192 n. 36 Dyer, Gen. Reginald E. H., 13 Eagleton,Terry, 106–7, 200 n. 97 East India Company, 11, 13–14, 185 n. 33 East Indies, 10, 11, 15, 37, 50, 65, 69, 99, 121, 128, 179 n. 19, 185 nn. 33, 34, 203 n. 18 Eco, Umberto, 203 n. 23 Eisenstein, Elizabeth, 56–7, 88, 89, 102–3, 188 n. 1, 189 n. 5, 196 n. 62, 63, 199 n. 89

220

INDEX

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 18–19, 181 n. 36 Encyclopédie, 61, 89, 201 n. 5 English literary culture arts and arms topos and, 18, 26, 72–3, 164 barbarism of, 3–4, 70, 83–4, 86, 109, 155, 156, 203 n. 17, 206 n. 55 classic and romantic in, 6, 114, 165–75, 210 n. 94 cultural nationalism and, 1–3, 6, 7–8, 8–10, 111–14, 117, 135, 138, 139–42, 149, 150, 153–65, 166, 175, 183–4 n. 20, 192 n. 35, 193 n. 40, 201 n. 9, 208–9 n. 90, 209–10 n. 92, 210 n. 95 French translations of, 27, 40, 89, 99–100 geopolitical standing and, 6–7, 10–13, 16, 18, 21, 40–2, 50, 109, 164, 178 n. 8 imperial ambitions of, 2, 13–14, 15–16, 18–19, 36–7, 109, 156, 159, 163–4, 175, 185 n. 34, 193–4 n. 43 metropolitan or provincial status of: in the European context, 1–2, 5, 12–13, 16–18, 21–2, 24–8, 58, 68–70, 83–4, 85–6, 95, 108–9, 139, 150, 165, 175, 192 n. 37, 195 n. 48; in the British Isles context, 5, 14, 22, 44–53, 106, 187 n. 65, 192 n. 37; in the global context, 37–44 mutability of English language and, 32–4 postcolonial perspective on, 1–2, 115, 139, 150, 156, 158–9, 177–8 n. 5 progress of English topos and, 5, 21–2, 27–32, 35, 37–44, 45, 175 provincial anxieties of, 1–3, 22, 115, 117, 165, 175 xenophobia and, 2–3, 75–6 Erasmus, Desiderius, 56, 68

Erskine-Hill, Howard, 193–4 n. 43 Euripides, 137 Eustathius, 116 Eyre, Gov. Sir John, 13 Fabian, Bernhard, 27, 183 n. 16 Fairer, David, 212 n. 104 Fairfax, Edward, 28, 35 Falconer,William, 119 Farquhar, George cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 139–42, 147, 149, 153 works: “A Discourse upon Comedy,” 139–42, 206 n. 56 Feingold, Mordecai, 181 n. 3 Fenton, Elijah “An Epistle to Mr. Southerne,” 31, 184 n. 21 Ferguson, Adam Essay on the History of Civil Society, 76, 193 n. 39 Ferguson, Moira, 178 n. 8 Fielding, Henry, 84, 115, 189 n. 6 works: Amelia, 85; The Grub-Street Opera, 88, 195 n. 59; Tom Jones, 85, 148, 207 n. 65 Fielding, Sarah David Simple, 67, 191 n. 21 Finn, Margot, 8–9, 179 n. 13 Fletcher, John, 28, 141, 146 Florio, John His Firste Fruites, 25, 182 n. 8 Fludd, Roger, 183 n. 14 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier, sieur de, 112, 194–5 n. 47 Frederick the Great, 11 Freedman, Morris, 184 n. 20 French language, see republic of letters French literary culture critical discourse of, 115, 116–35, 137, 138, 140, 210 n. 95 metropolitan urbanity of, 3–4, 52, 79, 86, 105 republic of letters and, 41–2, 56–7, 72, 74, 86–91, 102, 103, 104

INDEX

status of English culture and, 1, 2, 3, 17, 25, 26–7, 35–7, 38, 40, 50, 76–7, 89, 139, 142, 150, 153, 154, 155, 156, 163, 164–5, 192 n. 37, 194–5 n. 47, 201 n. 5, 202 n. 12, 206 n. 55 Freval, Jean Baptiste de, 85 Frye, Northrop, 210 n. 94 Fumaroli, Marc, 55–6, 87, 188 n. 1, 195 n. 55 Galt, John, 47 Gandhi, Leela, 181 n. 36 Garnier, Jean, 50 Garrick, David, 59, 106, 189 n. 8 Gates,Warren E., 202 n. 14 Gay, John, 28, 189 n. 6 George III, 11 George, Rev. James The Mission of Great Britain to the World, 43–4, 186 n. 50 Germaine, Lord George, 11 Gerrard, Christine, 201 n. 9, 211 n. 101 Gibbon, Edward cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 111, 211–12 n. 102 French language in the republic of letters and, 41–2 republic of letters and, 12, 84, 85, 111 status of English culture and, 9–10, 41–2 works: Essai sur l’étude de la littérature, 84, 85, 195 n. 51; The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 42, 111, 186 n. 47; Miscellaneous Works, 9, 179 n. 15 Gilbert,William, 39 Gilchrist, John The Oriental Linguist, 98, 198 n. 78 Gildon, Charles laws of poetry and, 136–7, 205 n. 47 republic of letters and, 189 n. 6 works: Complete Art of Poetry, 136–7, 205 n. 44; “Essay at a

221

Vindication of the Love-Verses of Cowley and Waller,” 205 n. 47; Life of Mr.Thomas Betterton, 127–8, 204 n. 26 Goldgar, Anne, 188–9 n. 3 Goldsmith, Oliver cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 119, 149–50, 160 republic of letters and, 70–2, 84, 89, 189 n. 6 works: An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 70–2, 89, 149, 191 n. 28 Gower, John, 28 Graham, Gerald S., 180 n. 21 Gray,Thomas works: The Bard, 160; “The Progress of Poesy,” 31, 160, 184 n. 21 Greenfeld, Liah, 179 n. 12, 180 n. 31 Griffin, Robert J., 212 n. 104 Griffith, Elizabeth, 68 Grotius, Hugo, 72, 89, 191 n. 30 Guest, Edwin A History of English Rhythms, 43, 186 n. 50 Guez de Balzac, Jean-Louis, 56, 106, 189 n. 4 Habermas, Jürgen, 58, 73, 101–3, 106, 108, 199 nn. 88, 90 Hadfield, Andrew, 179 n. 12 Hale, John, 183 n. 14, 188 n. 2 Halifax, Charles Montagu, Earl of, 157 Halsband, Robert, 67, 190 n. 18, 191 n. 22 Hamilton, Elizabeth Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 59, 189 n. 7 Harrison, Mark, 202 n. 15 Harvey, A. D., 212 n. 104 Harvey,William, 39, 183 n. 14 Hastings,Warren, 13 Hawke, Adm. Edward, 13 Hay, Denys, 188 n. 2 Hayley,William, 189 n. 6 Hazlitt,William, 189 n. 6

222

INDEX

Headley, Henry, 170 Helgerson, Richard, 179 n. 12 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 8, 114 “Uber Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker,” 168 Hill, Aaron, 85 Hill, Christopher, 8–9, 179 n. 11 Hippocrates, 120–1 Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans, 94, 197 n. 72 Hobbes,Thomas neoclassical criticism and, 170, 211 n. 99 status of English culture and, 26, 32–3, 197 n. 73 works: “Answer to Davenant,” 32–3, 184 n. 25 Hobsbawm, Eric, 8, 178 n. 10 Hogarth,William “The Bad Taste of the Town,” 208–9 n. 90 Hogg, James, 47 Homer, 166 cultural authority of, 33, 68, 69, 146, 147, 169 cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 133–5, 141, 154, 157, 159, 206–7 n. 63, 211 n. 102 Hopkins, Lemuel, 189 n. 6 Horace, 81 cultural authority of, 69, 86, 116, 144, 147, 153–4, 169, 194 n. 44, 202 n. 12 cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 41, 122, 133–4, 140, 146, 203 n. 21 works: Ars poetica, 153–4 Hubert, Sir Francis, 28 Huddesford, George, 189 n. 6 Hughes, Jabez “Verses Occasion’d by Reading Mr. Dryden’s Fables,” 31, 184 n. 21 Hughes, John (1677–1720), 211 n. 102

Hughes, John (1776–1843) Essay on the Ancient and Present State of the Welsh Language, 50–2, 187 n. 61 Humboldt,Wilhelm von, 62 Hume, David cultural differences and, 122, 203 n. 18 republic of letters and, 12, 66–7, 189 n. 6 status of English culture and, 41–2 works: letters, 41–2, 186 n. 46; “Of Commerce,” 203 n. 18; “Of Essay-Writing,” 66–7, 190 n. 19; “Of National Characters,” 203 n. 18 Hurd, Richard cultural differences and, 115 neoclassical and romantic criticism and, 167, 170–1, 173 republic of letters and, 189 n. 6 works: Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 170–1, 211 n. 100 Hutchinson,Thomas, 119 Ibn Khaldun, 202 n. 14 India, see East Indies; see also “Oriental” cultures Ireland, 11, 14, 40, 48, 106, 180 n. 19, 192 n. 37 Ireland, Samuel, 189 n. 6 Irish language, 46, 47, 48, 49 Italian literary culture, 1, 28, 39, 40, 65, 68, 71, 74, 79, 88, 124, 130, 145, 147, 155, 156 Italian opera, 143–4, 147, 162–4, 184 n. 20, 208–9 n. 90, 209–10 n. 92 Jefferson,Thomas, 98, 189 n. 6, 198 n. 82 Jemie, Onwuchekwa, 158, 208 n. 83 John Bull, 3, 4 Johnson, James Weldon The Book of American Negro Poetry, 42–3, 186 n. 48 Johnson, James William, 202 n. 15

INDEX

Johnson, Samuel cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 47–8, 122, 161, 203 n. 18, 212 n. 102 laws of poetry and, 137 mutability of English and, 33 republic of letters and, 59, 84, 98, 108, 189 n. 6 status of English culture and, 18, 38, 47–8 works: Idler, 203 n. 18; Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 47, 48, 187 n. 55; letters, 48, 187 n. 56; Lives of the English Poets, 161, 203 n. 18, 208 n. 88; Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language, 38, 185 n. 35; “Preface to the Dictionary,” 18, 181 n. 34; “Preface to Shakespeare,” 33, 185 n. 26, 212 n. 102; Rambler, 98, 137, 198 n. 82, 205 n. 46 Johnson,Walter R., 177 n. 3 Johnstone, Mrs. Christian Isobel, 47 Jones, Edwin, 179 n. 12 Jones, Henry, 106 Jones, J. R., 182–3 n. 12 Jones, Richard F., 32, 179 n. 11, 184 n. 23 Jones,William Jervis, 183 n. 16 Jonson, Ben, 28, 106 cultural authority of, 141, 146, 209 n. 90 cultural differences and, 141, 211 n. 102 Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor, 11 Journal des Savants, 88–9, 91–2, 104 Juvenal, 140, 203 n. 21 Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 169 Kant, Immanuel autonomy and self-imposed laws and, 92, 151 cultural differences and, 119 republic of letters and, 96, 98, 102, 113

223

works: “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ ”, 98, 198 n. 81; Education, 98, 198 n. 79; “Idea for a Universal History,” 98, 198 n. 80 Kaufmann, Angelica, 68 Kaul, Suvir, 178 n. 8 Keats, John “Sleep and Poetry,” 173, 212 n. 105 Kenrick,William, 191 n. 28 Kenyon, J. P., 1, 177 n. 2 Keynes, Geoffrey, 192 n. 36 Klopstock, Friedrich Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik, 112–13, 200 n. 4 Knorr, Klaus E., 180 n. 29 Kohn, Hans, 179 n. 11 Konigsberg, Charles, 202 nn. 14, 15 Kossman, E. H., 181 n. 3 Kreissman, Bernard, 183 n. 15 La Beaumelle, Laurent Angliviel de, 71 Labrousse, Elisabeth, 199 n. 94 La Calprenède, Gauthier de Costes, sieur de, 131 La Fontaine, Jean de, 192 n. 37 Langhorne, John, 189 n. 6 Letters Supposed to have passed between M. De St. Evremond and Mr. Waller, 128, 204 n. 28 Lansdowne, George Granville, Lord Essay upon Unnatural Flights in Poetry, 122 La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales, 199 n. 93 La Rue, Charles de, 153 Latin language, see republic of letters laws of poetry, see neoclassical criticism Le Bossu, René cultural authority of, 116, 142–3, 153, 169, 202 n. 12 cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115, 132–6, 137, 142–3

224

INDEX

Le Bossu, René—continued works: Traité du poëme épique, 132–4, 142–3, 204 n. 37 Le Clerc, Jean, 153 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm republic of letters and, 61, 89, 97, 111–13 works: Novissima Sinica, 97, 198 n. 76; “Relation de l’état présent de la République des Lettres,” 111–12, 200 n. 2 Lenman, Bruce, 11, 179 n. 19, 185 n. 33 Lennox, Charlotte, 68, 134 Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 11 Le Tourneur, Pierre (Trans.) “Conjectures sur la composition originale,” 99–101, 198 n. 87 Levine, Joseph, 194 n. 45 Levine, Lawrence, 206 n. 55 Lewis, Saunders, 187 n. 62 Lhuyd, Edward Archaeologia Britannica, 187 n. 56 Livingstone, David N., 202 n. 15 Livy, 105, 118 Locke, John, 189 n. 6, 201 n. 5 works: letters, 197 n. 73; Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 46 London Journal, 127, 204 n. 25 Longinus, 116, 169, 202 n. 12 Louis XIV, 17, 36–7, 116, 123, 129, 135, 183 n. 12 Lowth, Robert, 211 n. 102 Lucan, 81 Lucian, 140 Luckmann,Thomas, 201 n. 7 Lucretius, 105 Lyttelton, George Epistle to Mr. Pope, 155, 208 n. 77 Macaulay, Catherine, 67, 68, 191 n. 23 Macaulay,Thomas Babington status of English culture and, 9–10, 12, 42, 50 works: “Minute on Indian Education,” 42, 50, 187 n. 60;

“Sir James Mackintosh,” 9–10, 179 n. 16 Mackenzie, Henry, 211 n. 102 letters, 67, 191 n. 23 Maclean, Norman, 211 n. 101 Macpherson, James, 40, 115, 186 n. 42; see also Ossian Madan, Judith Cowper “The Progress of Poesy,” 31, 184 n. 21 Madubuike, Ihechukwu, 158, 208 n. 83 Makin, Bathsua An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, 89, 196 n. 65 Malherbe, François de, 36, 106, 153 Mandeville, Bernard The Fable of the Bees, 155, 208 n. 76 Marivaux, Pierre, 84 Marks, Emerson R., 212 n. 103 Marlborough, John Churchill, Duke of, 13, 142 Marot, Clément, 36 Mason,William, 84 works: “Musaeus, a Monody on the Death of Mr. Pope,” 31, 184 n. 21; (Ed.) Poems of Gray,To which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life, 160, 208 n. 84 Mathias, Roland, 51, 187 n. 63 Maupertuis, Pierre-Louis Moreau de, 113 McKeon, Michael, 210 n. 92 Meehan, Michael, 191 n. 29 Mémoires de Trévoux, 88 Menander, 141 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien L’An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante, 62–3, 190 n. 13 Mercure galant, 87, 195 n. 58 metropolitan status, see English literary culture Mickle,William Julius, 189 n. 6 The Lusiad … Translated from the Original Portuguese, 99, 198 n. 85

INDEX

Mijnhardt,Wijnand W., 181 n. 3 Mill, John Stuart, 199 n. 90 Milton, John cultural differences and, 119, 132, 183–4 n. 20 mutability of English and, 34 progress of English topos and, 28, 30, 31 republic of letters and, 93 status of English culture and, 25, 26–7, 34, 42, 50, 51, 68, 192 n. 35 works: Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 192 n. 35; Paradise Lost, 15, 157, 180 n. 28; Reason of Church Government, 25, 182 n. 9 Miner, Earl, 116, 201 n. 11 Montagu, Elizabeth, 14 cultural nationalism and, 160 republic of letters and, 67, 68 works: Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare, 160, 208 n. 86 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley republic of letters and, 66, 67, 189 n. 6, 190 n. 18 Montaigne, Michel de, 154 “Of Custom,” 135, 204 n. 39 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 119, 202 n. 14 The Spirit of the Laws, 149–50, 207 n. 68 Monthly Review, 61–2, 67, 68, 190 n. 11, 191 nn. 23, 28 More, Hannah, 68 More,Thomas, 26, 50 Morgan, Prys, 187 nn. 54, 62 Morhof, Daniel Georg, 199 n. 92 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of, 153 Namier, Sir Lewis, 8 Napoléon Bonaparte, 23, 24, 25, 48, 59, 72 national characters, 3, 62–3, 117–22, 125, 132, 154, 167

225

nationalism, cultural, see English literary culture Nelson, Horatio Nelson,Viscount, 13 neoclassical criticism climatological theories and, 115, 118–22, 128, 131, 137, 150, 167, 202 n. 14 cultural difference and, 6, 109, 113–15, 116, 117–18, 124–6, 128–32, 133–5, 137–8, 139–40, 142–3, 205 n. 47, 206–7 n. 63 cultural nationalism and, 109, 111–15, 125–7, 143, 152 historical specificity and, 116, 124, 129–30, 134–5, 157, 211–12 n. 102 laws or rules of poetry and, 6, 115, 132, 133, 135–53 uniformity and, 114, 123, 132–3, 136–7, 147, 152, 153, 157 Newman, Gerald, 2, 177 n. 3, 179 n. 14 Newton, Isaac, 78, 112–13, 136, 201 n. 5 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 44, 45 Nisbet, H. B., 210 n. 94 Nussbaum, Felicity, 178 n. 8, 202 n. 15 Oake, Roger B., 204 n. 25 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 9 O’Conor, Charles Dissertations on the Ancient History of Ireland, 48, 187 n. 57 Oldenburg, Henry letters, 61, 189–90 n. 10 Oldham, John “Bion. A Pastoral … Bewailing the Death of the Earl of Rochester,” 31, 184 n. 21 Oldmixon, John cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 126–7 republic of letters and, 116, 122, 189 n. 6 works: The Arts of Logick and Rhetorick, 126–7, 203 n. 24; Essay on Criticism, 116, 202 n. 12

226

INDEX

“Oriental” cultures climatological theory and, 118–20, 150, 202 n. 14 cultural difference and, 121–2, 123, 124, 128, 129, 150, 166–7 cultural status of, 68–9, 118 Ossian cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 8, 114 neoclassical and romantic criticism and, 167–70 republic of letters and, 22, 40 status of English culture and, 40, 186 n. 42 see also Macpherson, James Otway,Thomas cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 147–8, 207 n. 64, 209 n. 90 Pagden, Anthony, 8, 178–9 n. 10 Palgrave, Francis Turner The Golden Treasury, 42, 186 n. 48 Pascal, Blaise, 113, 201 n. 7 Patey, Douglas Lane, 166, 210 n. 95 Patin, Guy, 79 Paulson, Ronald, 208–9 n. 90 Pechter, Edward, 210 n. 93, 212 n. 103 Peckham, Sir George A True Report of the Late Discoveries, 15, 180 n. 29 Pennycook, Alastair, 186 nn. 50, 51 Percy,Thomas, 115 Petronius, 128, 204 n. 27 Philips, Katharine, 191 n. 23 Pindar, 69, 147 Pindar, Peter, see Wolcot, John Piozzi, Hester Lynch Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, 27, 183 n. 15 Plato, 78, 120–1 Plautus, 141 Plumb, J. H., 12–13, 180 n. 25 Pocock, J. G. A., 205 n. 41 Pollio (Gaius Asinius Pollio), 78, 105

Pope, Alexander cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 77–9, 81, 82, 144–6, 155, 158 imperialism and, 77–9, 187 n. 59, 193–4 n. 43 laws of poetry and, 144–6, 151, 169 mutability of English and, 34, 70 neoclassical and romantic criticism and, 173 progress of English topos and, 5, 21, 28, 31–2 republic of letters and, 22, 26, 69–70, 71, 84–5 status of English culture and, 4, 26, 53, 69–70, 72, 73, 109, 187 n. 59 works: Dunciad, 109; Essay on Criticism, 4, 34, 70, 84–5, 144–7, 169, 178 n. 7; Pastorals, 158; Peri Bathos, 187 n. 59; The Temple of Fame, 69–70, 191 n. 25; “Verses occasion’d by Mr. Addison’s Treatise on Medals,” 77–9, 81, 193 nn. 41, 42, 193–4 n. 43 The Present State of the Republick of Letters, 39, 186 n. 40 Prior, Matthew cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 17–18, 154–5, 203 n. 21 status of English culture and, 17–18, 26 works: Commonplace Book, 203 n. 21; A Letter to Monsieur Boileau Despreaux, 17–18, 180 n. 33; Solomon on the Vanity of the World, 154–5, 207 n. 74 provincial anxieties, see English literary culture provincialisms, 47–8, 105–6, 117–18, 199 nn. 93, 94, 199–200 n. 95 provincial status, see English literary culture

INDEX

Pufendorf, Samuel, 89 Pye, Henry James, 189 n. 6 Pyrrhus and Demetrius, 162 Quarterly Review, 18, 181 n. 35 Quintilian, 116, 169 Racine, Jean Alexandre le Grand, 128 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 28 Rapin, René cultural authority of, 105, 116, 194 n. 44, 202 n. 12 works: La comparaison de Thucydide et de Tite Live, 199 n. 92; Reflexions sur l’Aristote, 194 n. 44, 211 n. 102 Rawson, Claude, 210 n. 94 Réau, Louis, 195 n. 58 republic of letters belletristic versus erudite, 5–6, 55–8, 80–1, 194 n. 45 censorship and, 92–4 center and peripheries of, 6, 55, 58, 63, 73, 86–96, 104, 106–9, 175 cultural diversity and, 6, 28, 55, 57–8, 62–3, 65, 90, 96–8, 103–4, 108, 111–12, 143, 175 English-language writers and, 58–9, 68–70, 73–86, 95, 104, 108 French language in, 56–7, 87–91, 94–5, 103–4 Latin language in, 64–5, 73–4, 82, 87, 88–91, 94–5, 104, 196 n. 63, 197 n. 73, 203 n. 21 mechanical arts and, 61, 64, 107–8 public sphere and, 58, 99–104, 199 n. 90 religion and, 55–6, 60, 65, 93–4, 97, 188 n. 2, 190 n. 16, 196–7 n. 71 states or polities and, 71–3, 91–2, 103 universality and, 60–1, 95–8, 101–3, 108, 113–14, 198 n. 82

227

women in, 56, 57, 60, 61, 65–8, 94–5, 96, 105, 190 nn. 10, 17, 18, 191 n. 23 Richardson, Jonathan, 189 n. 6 Richardson, Samuel republic of letters and, 26, 27, 84, 85–6, 100, 191 n. 23 works: Clarissa, 85–6; Pamela, 27, 85–6, 195 n. 52 Robertson,William, 119 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 26, 127 Rogers, Pat, 202 n. 15 Ronsard, Pierre de, 36 Rosa, Maria, 196–7 n. 71 Ross,Trevor, 183 n. 18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 84 Rowe, Nicholas, 81 The Tragedy of Jane Shore, 160–2, 208 n. 87 rules of poetry, see neoclassical criticism, laws of poetry Runge, Laura L., 191 n. 24 Rymer,Thomas cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 26, 137, 141 provinciality and, 187 n. 54 republic of letters and, 189 n. 6, 194 n. 44 works: “Preface to Rapin,” 26, 182 n. 11 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego de cultural differences and, 64–5, 69, 90 republic of letters and, 63–6, 68–9, 71 status of English culture and, 68–9, 203 n. 17 works: Republica literaria, 63–6, 68–9, 90, 190 nn. 14, 15, 203 n. 17 Sacksteder,William, 197 n. 73 Saint-Evremond, Charles cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115, 127–32, 134, 137, 140, 146

228

INDEX

Saint-Evremond, Charles—continued laws of poetry and, 132, 136, 140, 146 status of English culture and, 192 n. 37 works: “Discourse upon the Grand Alexander,” 128–9, 204 n. 30; letters, 140, 206 n. 57; “Of the English Comedy,” 131, 204 n. 33; “Reflections upon the … Genius of the Roman People,” 129–30, 204 n. 31; “Upon Comedies,” 132, 204 n. 36; “Upon Tragedies,” 130–1, 204 n. 32 Sallo, Denis de, 91–2, 94 Salway, Peter, 195 n. 48 Samuel, Richard The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, 68 Sandwich, John Montagu, Earl of, 11, 180 n. 23 Sappho, 65–6, 140 Satan’s Harvest Home, 210 n. 92 Scaliger, Joseph, 79 Schiebinger, Londa, 180 n. 32, 190 n. 10 Schoeck, R. J., 191 n. 34 Schoneveld, Cornelius W., 181 n. 1 Scodel, Joshua, 210 n. 93 Scott, H. M., 180 n. 22 Scott, Sir Walter, 47 Seeber, Edward D., 190 n. 13 Segrais, J. R. de, 116, 153 Seneca, 81, 120–1 Settle, Elkanah A Farther Defence of Dramatick Poetry, 139, 206 n. 54 Seven Years’War, 3, 11, 16 Sewell, George “To Mr. Pope, on his Poems and Translations,” 31, 184 n. 21 Sgard, Jean, 195 n. 60 Shadwell,Thomas The Virtuoso, 87, 195 n. 56

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of republic of letters and, 67, 189 n. 6 status of English culture and, 1, 4 works: Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,Times, 1, 177 n. 1 Shakespeare,William cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 127, 134–5, 141, 160–2, 209 n. 90, 211–12 n. 102 laws of poetry and, 146 mutability of English and, 33 progress of English topos and, 28 republic of letters and, 26–7, 168 status of English culture and, 26–7, 42, 50, 51, 206 n. 55 Shelburne, Lord, 11 Sheridan, Elizabeth Anne, 68 Sheridan,Thomas mutability of English and, 34 provinciality and, 47 status of English culture and, 40, 46, 70 works: British Education, 34, 185 n. 31; A Discourse. Being Introductory to His Course of Lectures on Elocution, 40, 46, 47, 186 n. 43; A Dissertation on … Learning the English Tongue, 70, 191 n. 27 Sherwood, John, 202 n. 12 Sidney, Philip, 28 Sigonio, Carlo, 79 Simon, Richard Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, 126 Siskin, Clifford, 212 n. 104 Smallwood, P. J., 194 n. 44 Smart, Christopher, 186 n. 40 Smith, Adam cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 76, 113 republic of letters and, 76, 99

INDEX

works: “Letter to the Edinburgh Review,” 76, 99, 192 n. 38; Wealth of Nations, 113 Smollett,Tobias provinciality and, 47–8 republic of letters and, 84 works: Humphrey Clinker, 47–8 Soame, Sir William, 34; see also Dryden, The Art of Poetry Sophocles, 137 Sorensen, Janet, 178 n. 8, 186 n. 42, 187 n. 65 Southey, Robert republic of letters and, 22–5, 59, 181–2 n. 5, 189 n. 6 status of English culture and, 18, 24–5, 181 n. 35 works: “Epistle to Allan Cunningham,” 22–5, 59, 181 n. 2; letters, 181–2 n. 5 Spanish literary culture, 1, 28, 39, 40, 65, 68, 88, 124, 130, 131 Spenser, Edmund cultural differences and, 150–1, 171, 173, 211 n. 102 laws of poetry and, 150–1, 171 progress of English topos and, 27, 28, 31, 35 Sprat,Thomas status of English culture and, 17, 18, 26 works: History of the Royal Society, 17, 180 n. 32; Observations on Mons. de Sorbiere’s Voyage into England, 17, 180 n. 31 Spurlin, Paul Merrill, 199 n. 91 Steele, Sir Richard cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 163–5, 166, 209 n. 92 works: letters, 209 n. 92; The Tender Husband, 163–5, 166, 209 n. 91 Stephen, Leslie, 152, 207 n. 71 Sterne, Laurence, 189 n. 6

229

Stevens, Paul, 180 n. 29 Stone, P.W. K., 114, 201 n. 10 Stratford, E. C.W., 179 n. 11 Sudan, Rajani, 178 n. 8 Suleri, Sara, 43, 186 n. 49 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 28 Sussman, Charlotte, 178 n. 8 Swift, Jonathan cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 162 mutability of English and, 33 republic of letters and, 84, 189 n. 6, 190 n. 17, 191 n. 23 status of English culture and, 4, 203 n. 17 works: Battle of the Books, 190 n. 17; letters, 84, 162, 195 n. 51, 208 n. 89; “Ode to the Athenian Society,” 203 n. 17; Proposal for Correcting … the English Tongue, 4, 33, 178 n. 7 Tacitus Agricola, 195 n. 48 Tasso,Torquato, 38, 68, 154, 207 n. 64 Tatler, 162, 208 n. 89 Temple, Sir William cultural differences and, 119 mutability of English and, 33 progress of English topos and, 28 republic of letters and, 96–7, 98, 189 n. 6 works: “Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” 33, 185 n. 28; “Of Heroic Virtue,” 96–7, 98, 197 n. 74 Terence, 140 Terry, Richard, 183 n. 18, 184 n. 22, 187 n. 54, 212 n. 104 Thomson, James, 119 The Seasons, 155, 208 n. 78 Tickell,Thomas mutability of English and, 34 republic of letters and, 189 n. 6

230

INDEX

Tickell,Thomas—continued status of English culture and, 4 works: On the Prospect of Peace, 4, 34, 178 n. 7 Tillotson, John, 28 To the H___nble Sir J___ B____, 209–10 n. 92 Tonson, Jacob, 34 Trevelyan, G. M., 1 Trollope, Anthony Barchester Towers, 27, 183 n. 17 Trowbridge, Hoyt, 211–12 n. 102 True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, 180 n. 29 Trumpener, Katie, 153, 207 n. 72 Tyler, Royall The Contrast, 158, 208 n. 82 Ultee, Maarten, 188–9 n. 3 Universal Visiter, 28–30, 39, 62, 186 n. 40 Upton, John, 211 n. 102 Vaillant, Jean-Foi, 79–80 Van Rooden, Peter, 197 n. 71 Van Zijlvelt, Antony, 80, 194 n. 46 Varro, 63, 105 Vaugelas, Claude Favre, seigneur de, 106 Vernon, Adm. Edward, 13 Vico, Giambattista, 119 Vigneul-Marville, M. de (pseud. of Bonaventure d’Argonne) republic of letters and, 59–63, 64, 65, 66, 71, 90, 97, 189 n. 9, 190 n. 12 Villon, François de, 36 Virgil cultural authority of, 32–3, 34, 47, 63, 68, 69, 133, 146, 147, 156 cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 133–4, 138, 154, 155, 157, 159, 206–7 n. 63 status of English culture and, 78, 81, 83, 86, 155, 156 works: Aeneid, 32–3, 34, 133, 153, 157; Eclogues, 83, 112

Voltaire cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 112, 127, 132, 208 n. 86 republic of letters and, 88, 107 status of English culture and, 26, 69 works: Essay on the Epic Poetry of the European Nations, 26, 132, 204 n. 35; Histoire de Charles XII, 127; letters, 26, 88, 196 n. 61; Letters Concerning the English Nation, 26, 112, 200 n. 3; Siècle de Louis XIV, 107 Vossius, Gerardus Johannes (Gerhard Johann Voss), 79 Waller, Edmund mutability of English and, 33 progress of English topos and, 27, 28, 30, 31, 35–6, 51 status of English culture and, 26, 49–50, 51, 192 n. 37 works: “Of English Verse,” 33, 185 n. 27 Wallography, 46–7, 187 n. 54 Walpole, Horace cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 127 laws of poetry and, 148–9 republic of letters and, 84 status of English culture and, 11, 26 works: letters, 11, 84, 180 n. 20; Castle of Otranto, 148–9, 207 n. 66 Waquet, Françoise, 188 n. 1, 188–9 n. 3, 189 n. 4, 196 nn. 63, 70 Ward, Edward “To the Pious Memory of … Mr. John Dryden,” 18, 181 n 34 War of American Independence, 10, 11–12, 179 n. 19 Warton, Joseph cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115, 158, 159–60

INDEX

neoclassical and romantic criticism and, 170, 173, 211 n. 102 works: Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 158, 159–60, 208 n. 81 Warton,Thomas cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 115 laws of poetry and, 150–1 neoclassical and romantic criticism and, 173, 211 nn. 99, 102 status of English culture and, 135 works: History of English Poetry, 211 n. 99; Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser, 135, 150–1, 204 n. 40 Wasserman, Earl, 173, 211 nn. 99, 102, 212 n. 106 Watts,Thomas status of English culture and, 49–50 works: “On the Probable Future Position of the English Language,” 49–50, 187 n. 58 Weinbrot, Howard, 193 n. 40, 201 n. 8 Wellek, René, 211 nn. 101, 102 Welsted, Leonard cultural differences and cultural nationalism and, 209 nn. 90, 92 progress of English topos and, 31, 39 status of English culture and, 45 works: “Epistle to the Duke of Chandos,” 31, 39, 45, 184 n. 21; “A Prologue occasioned by the Revival of a Play of Shakespeare,” 209 n. 90

231

Wesley, Samuel An Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry, 31, 184 n. 21 West Indies, 10, 11, 15, 180 n. 19 Wheeler, Roxann, 202 n. 15 Whelan, Ruth, 199 n. 94 Williams, Anna “Verses addressed to Mr. Richardson,” 85–6, 195 n. 53 Williams, Basil, 2–3, 177 n. 4 Williams, Raymond, 104 Wilson, Kathleen, 209–10 n. 92 Wimsatt,W. K., 211 n. 102 Wither, George, 189 n. 6 Wolcot, John (pseud. “Peter Pindar”), 52–3, 187 n. 64 Wolfe, Gen. James, 13, 14 Wollstonecraft, Mary republic of letters and, 66, 68, 98 works: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 98, 198 n. 82 Womersley, David, 207 n. 63 Wood, Paul Spencer, 207 n. 64 Wood, Robert, 211 n. 102 Wordsworth,William “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” 98–9, 198 n. 83 Wycherley,William, 28 Wyse,Thomas, 19, 181 n. 36 Young, Edward cultural nationalism and, 155 republic of letters and, 99–101, 189 n. 6 works: Conjectures on Original Composition, 99–101, 198 n. 87; “On Lyric Poetry,” 155, 207 n. 75

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