Chiastic Effect 449731

Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century
Author(s): Ronald Paulson

Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Summer, 1976, Vol. 16, No. 3,
Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Summer, 1976), pp. 517-544
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/449731
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Recent Studies in the Restoration
and Eighteenth Century
RONALD PA ULSON
At the risk of exposing myself to the

charge of anticlimax, I will say that the most interesting new woIk
this year is on Dryden. James D. GarrisonIs Dryden and the Tradition2
of Panegyric (UJniversity of California, 1975), a model of unpretein-
tious scholarship and critical clarity, forces a revaluation of Dryden
and the whole tradition of Augustan poetry by outlining a precise
account of the tradition and conventions of a crucial (and pivotal)
genre of oratorical poetry. In long introductory chapters, Garrison
traces panegyric from its Greek and Roman models (Pindar anid
Pliny) to Cowley and Waller and defines its chiastic effect as a
demonstrative (laudatory) celebration combined with a deliberative
(advisory) restriction of the monarch; as instruction aimed at the king
and propaganda aimed at his people, or praise stimulating obedience
from the people and admonition subordinating the king to law. The
conventional themes are of restoratiotn and limitatioi, aind their
appropriateness is perfectly clear wheni we reach the Restoration, a
period notable for the close congruence of tenors and vehicles.
One of the things Garrison makes us see is the parallelism of
panegyric to the other classical genres. Like pastoral, georgic, and
epic, it celebrates an ideal world of a golden age in the light of all
actual world of political manipulation, contrasting past and present,
absence and return, winter and spring, night and day, with the titans
(fallen angels) as emblem of impiety and rebellion. At no point,
however, does Garrison allow generic sameness to obscure a poem's
difference. He demonstrates precisely and fully what Drvden's
particular kind of "oratorical poetry" means and its debt to the
panegyric tradition; the problems involved in his joining panegyric
to epic or romance; and his inability in his particular historical
situation to retain the unity of praise and limitationi, of moniarch aI
people, and thus maintain an assured oratorical stance. In his
brilliantly illuminating section on MacFlecknoe, Garrison gives us a
reprise: here are the processional and coronation topoi, the familiar
allusions to the gospel and Virgil, Flecknoe's two orations which
both elevate Shadwell to the throne and admnonish him to go into
exile-the celebration of impotence rather than power. Astrea Redux

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518 RECENT STUDIES
was about restoration, MacFlecknoe about "decay" and reductioln;

after which it only remained for Absalom and Achitophel "to make
incipient usurpation the new occasion for panegyric." After realding
Garrison, I am not sure how much longer we can continue to uLse the
old, vague, and (as it now appears) increasingly impressionistic
accounts of what the mock heroic mode was and how it operated. The
centrality of Pope's "Praise undeserv'd is scandal in disguise"
becomes apparent. Most of the accounts of Restoration political
poetry also sound naive and impressionistic after reading this
sophisticated account of generic context.
A book that is more difficult, abrasive, and in some ways deeper-
(though formally less satisfying) is Michael McKeon's Politics and
Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden 's "A onnus
Mirabilis" (Harvard, 1975). There is not space to do justice to
McKeon's elaborate and complicated account of Annus Al ira bi/is, bu
his basic premise is that Dryden's ideological moderation is but
rhetorical pose. This is perhaps an obvious fact to literary critics of
the 1970's, but McKeon uses it to correct a literary historian like
Harth, who accepted Dryden's rhetoricas his ideology, and Schilling,
who posited the "conservative myth" as part of everybody's
storehouse of commonplaces, rather than as "politically neutral"
rhetorical commonplaces which were in fact used to very different
ideological purposes. But McKeon is also arguing, as his criticism of
Norman Cohn as well as Schilling suggests, that the historiani
erroneously tends to accept as real, as part of the public or popular
consciousness, what Dryden (or any political poet) wants us to think
is real. He thus identifies Dryden with "the age's political
institutions, whose interest lies precisely in convincing others to
identify 'the established order' with the greater 'mythological order'
which all people value . . . whereby opponents of Dryden or
opponents of the Stuart-Anglican order are necessarily opponents of
that greater, cosmic order." Here McKeon places himself quite solidly
in the camp of a radical historian like E. P. Thompson, who, in his
attempt to show the truly popular assumptions (vs. the aristocratic
ones of the men in power) forces us to reassess the "reality" of the
England projected by more conventional historians. It is to McKeon's
credit that as he carries on with this assumption, giving us
remarkable accounts of the popular (nonconformist) and the
privileged (Anglican) traditions of prophecy as they bear on Dryden's
poem, he never loses touch with the individual poet Dryden who is
shaping these commonplaces. The difficulty in such a study is to
maintain a balance between "the interests of one social group" and
the consciousness of the poet.

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RONALD PA ULLSON 519
The scholarship and commentary in the latest volume of the

California Dryden is worth reading with more care than Dryden's
text, his translation of Maimbourg's History of the League, which
has not been reprinted, except for the dedication and postscript, since
1684. The fascination lies in the editors' (Alan Roper and Vinton A.
Dearing) careful account of how Dryden uses Maimbourg. They are
excellent on the exemplary quality of this in itself uninteresting
text-on, for example, the collision of Maimbourg's Ciceronian style
and his translator's Anticiceronian, of a "mediated syntax [which]
expresses a predetermined pattern of relationships upon which
judgment has been passed" and Dryden's "syntax of discovery.'
Dryden's metaphrase translation tries to pass Maimbourg off as true
history, though in places slipping into paraphrase (a squinting kind
of history), and in his postscript Dryden overtly adopts the litigious
mode, relating the League to the present situation in England. The
difficulty, neatly explored by the editors, was that Maimbourg's own
text, violently litigious, was open to embarrasingly contrary
interpretations; and by the time Dryden's translation appeared
(ordered by Charles II) it was just one book too many in a campaign of
overkill.
Besides these three important works, another useful volume is
Samuel Holt Monk's John Dryden: A Survey and Bibliographty of
Critical Studies (originally 1895-1940) updated to 1974 by David J.
Latt (Minnesota, 1976). It is by far a fuller list than John A.
Zamonski's Annotated Bibliography of John Dryden for 1949-73
(Garland, 1975), including virtually all the material in the Zamonski
volume plus the chapters oIn Dryden hidden away in books without
Dryden in the title.
Following close on the heels of Geoffrey Marshall's interesting
Restoration Serious Drama (University of Oklahoma, 1975, reviewed
here last year) is a larger and more ambitious attempt to redefine the
limits of the whole subject of English drama between 1660 and 1710:
Robert D. Hume's The Development of English Drama in the late
Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976). Recall that to Fujimura, for
example, "Restoration Comedy" meant mainly Etherege, and even to
Holland only the major works of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve.
Hume asks us to approach the period as a historian and include every
play from best to worst, the result being a great many more categories
than before, covering many more plays. "Typical of the period," not
excellence, is Hume's criterion; but perhaps this is a small price to
pay for a more precise idea than we have had before of the ingredients
that went into the best plays and the nature of a great many others.
The strength of this sober and conservative book lies in its treatment

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520 RECENT STUDIES
of the serious drama and in the careful chronology which shows how
one play or kind of play led, virtually year by year, into the next.
The comedies-what we have thought the great Restoration
plays-balk at this treatment. We are given long sections on the major
plays of the "big three" while being asked to treat them no longer as
peaks in a rather modest range but as nodes of skillful adaptation in a
much larger organism. As Hume admits, one of the things he wishes
to demonstrate as historian is that all the critical "nonsense" about
philosophical background (which he elevates on his own authority
into "philosophical system"), profundity, theme, and unity should
be swept away. I must state my own bias, which tends to see Hume
taking what is good from a good critic (e.g., Barbeau on Dryden's
heroic plays), ridding it of "strident exaggerations, exclusions, and
dismissal of previous critics," and then accepting it as a "substratum"
of the play beneath the bombast or farce of everyone else's view (which
Barbeau was trying to correct). I confess I prefer Barbeau's kind of
criticism, which may ultimately be Alexandrian and cannot avoid
overstating to make an original and striking discovery (it is difficult
not to "inflate to undue prominence" what was not seen before and
will probably not be now if decently subordinated), to Hume's kind,
which seeks to use these insights while defusing them and muffling
the excitement of discovery. My main criticism of Hume's book is that
much of it reads like a very long review article, showing both the
irresponsible power and the scavenging propensity of reviewers. (The
one you are reading is no exception, but it purports to be a review.)
After dealing with all of these erring critics, and an awesome
amount of parsing and quibbling (with sentences like "This reading
is extremely plausible and quite satisfying, but is it right?"), what
does Hume tell us about the great plays? Much of the time he sounds
like Rymer on Othello (as quoted by him, p. 152); but his conclusions
are the ones entombed by Sutherland years ago: The Man of Mode is
"a delightfully satiric entertainment," and The Country Wife is "an
immensely enjoyable play in which we take almost nothing
seriously," in fact "profound it is not, and only a prude, a hypocrite,
or a stuffy academician would have it otherwise." There is a basic
misunderstanding here of "serious" and "profound," apparent in the
analogues Hume adduces-Chaplin, Gilbert and Sullivan, the Marx
Brothers. It is not "significant themes" which (as he claims) mar The
Great Dictator and Monsieur Verdoux but abstractly-stated doctrine,
or what Hume loosely calls "philosophy" (vs. philosophical context
or background). The Gold Rush and City Lights, as well as The Moan
of Mode, have "significant themes," but Hume does not seem to
realize that he is saying this when he asserts (against a subtle critic like

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RONALD PA ULSON 521
Underwood) that The Man of Mode's "meaning is communicated as

a vivid sense of experience, not as an abstract propositioni. T'Ihe r esult
of Hume's critical populism is that the importance of his book may bc
lost in many readers' irritation with the way he trivializes great plays
and levels them with competent plays, failing to give us the new light
we might expect on genuinely puzzling plays like Venice Preserved.
In sum, this is a querulous, rather mean-spirited book, but one whose
quibbles will have to be taken into account, a book that illustrates uie
dangers of building so largely out of the opinions (true, false,
contested) of others; a book that is decidedly strongest wheni it treats
formulations of seventeenth-century criticism and of obscure anid
neglected plays, and weakest when it deals with great works of
liter'ature.
The genuine density and fulness of Hume's historical scholarshiip,
however, make the other books in the field seemn superficial. W. R.
Chadwick's Th-e Four Plays of William Wycherley (Mouton, 1975)
and Harold Love's Corigreve (Rowan and Littlefield, 1975) are both
slim and pleasant but forgettable monographs which make us see
anew certain scenes but do not alter our opinions about the plays or
playwrights. Joan C. Grace's Tragic T/heory in the Critical Works of
Thomas Rymer, John Dennis, and John Dryden (Fairleigh
Dickinson, 1975), a respectable work of scholarship, sounds muted
and pedestrian beside Hume's sections oIn the development of tragic
theory. One of the virtues of Hume's book is its focus on the
contingencies of theatrical politics and staging. 'IThis dimension is
the one most thoroughly explored for the later period in the 1750-1880
volume of The Revels History of Drama in English (Vol. VI,
Methuen, 1975). The strongest sections are by Richard Southern on
the Georgian theater, and not the least attraction of this well-
produced book is its excellent illustrative plates. In passing I must
mention a sound account of Neo-Classical Dramatic Criticism 1560-
1770 by Thora Burnley Jones and Bernard de Bear Nicol (Cambridge,
1976), which devotes chapters to French neo-classicism, the English
Restoration, Rowe, Pope, and Johnson. Robert F. Willson, Jr.'s
'Their Form Confounded': Studies in the Burlesque Play from Udall
to Sheridan (Mouton, 1975) has amusing chapters on The Rehearsal,
The Tragedy of Tragedies, and The Critic; and Jean B. Kern's
Dramatic Satire in the Age of Walpole (Iowa State, 1976) doggedly
covers satiric object after satiric object without saying anything new
or producing annotation beyond the level of the DNB. Allan
Rodway's English Comedy (California, 1975), though on a higher
level of sophistication than Kern's survey, is a very general account of
comedy in all its forms, which manages to include large generaliza-

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522 RECENT STUDIES
tions of the sort Hume forces us to reconsider on the Restoration "big

three" plus Farquhar, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Fielding, and Sterne.
More interesting than these is the first volume of the Contexts series, a
collection of facsimile documents that form the context of Gay's
Beggar's Opera (Archon, 1976; ed. J. V. Guerinot and Rodney D.
Jilg). Although the collection is mostly aimed at defining back-
ground, there is a section on the "first season," and accordingly I was
surprised to see no mention at all (not even an index reference) to
Hogarth's Beggar's Opera paintings of 1728-29. A pseudo-Hogarth is
reproduced on the jacket.
The really towering work of scholarship this year is David Foxon's
English Verse, 1701-1750 (Cambridge, 1975), two gigantic volumes
listing all the poems, by author and title, that were separately printed
in the first half of the century (some 10,000 entries), with notes on
contemporary collected editions. The second volume contains an
index of the first lines and chronological, subject, and other indexes.
One can only remain silent before this awesome monument.
With the completion of the Yale Poems on Affairs of State by
Volume VII, 1704-14, impeccably edited by Frank H. Ellis, George
Lord has gathered a selection of all seven volumes into a single not-
unwieldy volume (available in paperback, Yale, 1975). A complement
to the Yale edition is John Harold Wilson's Court Satires of the
Restoration (Ohio State, 1976), which prints the court satires which
were largely omitted by the Yale editors in favor of political satires. It
is a handy, well-produced volume with excellent annotation and brief
biographies of the courtly objects of satire. Among other texts a
facsimile of Garth's Dispensary, edited by Jo Allen Bradham
(Scholars' Facsimiles, 1975), provides access to a still much-neglected
work, and Nahum Tate's version of King Lear has been edited for the
Regents Restoration Drama series by James Black (Nebraska, 1975).
Irene Simon has brought out the second volume of Selected Sermons,
Three Restoration Divines: Barrow, South, Tillotson (Paris, Societe
d'Editions, 1976), which is itself in two volumes, one South and the
other Tillotson. The selection and editing are both of the high
quality we have come to associate with the work of Simon. A very
different purpose is served by Slava Klima's edition of Joseph
Spence's Letters from the Grand Tour (McGill-Queen's, 1976), which
brings together Spence's descriptions of sights-from the Venus de
Medici to Vaucanson's duck-with thorough commentary to
produce a superior introduction to the whole subject of the Grand
Tour and its significance.
The Pope book of the year is Howard Erskine-Hill's The Social

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RONALD PAULSON 523
Milieu of Alexander Pope (Yale, 1975). It consists of seven long and

engrossing chapters, biographical sketches admirably researched
from primary sources, on six of Pope's exemplary people: John Kyrle
"the Man of Ross," John Caryll (two chapters), Lord Digby, and
Ralph Allen are the "good men," husbandmen, stewards, and
builders. Peter Walter and Sir John Blunt are the others, one
representing the evil steward and the corruption that can overtake
country values, and one representing city corruption. These chapters
create context (or matrix) of a density which might have dismayed
even Wasserman: they are, as Erskine-Hill admits, enormously
expanded annotation of a few Pope poems, and their pragmatic
interest is to show how relatively accurate are Popes references to
each. But they also convincingly demonstrate, for example, the
centrality of Blunt-and the South Sea Bubble-to the Epistle to
Bathurst (and less convincingly, I think, that of "Diamond" Pitt).
The final three chapters construct a system of values embodied in the
satires (primarily Bathurst and Burlington). I found most
illuminating the account of Peter Walter as an epitome of the evil
explored by Pope. Walter is the steward whose obligation is to his
lord, the landowner or nobleman, and to the dependents, tenants,
laborers, and poor who fall under his practical care. He is related to
the Swiftean figure who mediates between landlords and tenants and
issues modest proposals (whom Swift treats specifically as steward in
some works, as a kind of Adolf Eichmann in others). In Pope's terms
he is an analogue to Walpole, another steward who is dishonest both
to his master the king and to the people of England. The theme is, on
one level, the mismanagement of estates, and so the corruption of the
rich landlords and the oppression of the poor tenants; on another, the
falling apart of the social structure that binds rich and poor, and so a
model and symptom of the moral and civil decline of England. In
these chapters, Erskine-Hill lives up to the old cliches about shedding
new light on poems and showing that a well-worn subject is by no
means beyond refurbishing.
There is not much to say about Swift this year. A. L. Rowse has
published a spirited but dreadful life of Swift which essentially finds
the Dean to have been an earlier incarnation of A. L. Rowse
(Jonathan Swift, Scribners, 1976), and Philip Pinkus has collected
much disparate and by now shop-worn material in two pamphlets
which are Nos. 3 and 4 in the University of Victoria English Literary
Studies, under the general title Swift's Vision of Evil, one on A Tale of
a Tub, the other on Gulliver's Travels. The Victoria Studies will have
to do better than this. Much more substantial is Hector Monro's The
Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville (Oxford, 1975), a philosopher's

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524 RECENT STUDIES
assessment. The result is informative but not altogether satisfying for

readers of The Fable of the Bees as a literary text. Monro sees
Mandeville's assumption of various roles as the explanation of his
"ambivalence" and of the puzzlement readers have expressed trying to
ascertain Mandeville's true point of view. These roles-of wit, doctor,
social reformer, psychologist, theologian, and moralist-allow
Monro to get at the different, perhaps conflicting aspects of the works,
but they also prevent him from coming to terms with the
Mandevillian distrust of conventional labels, the central fact of his
major writings. It seems more likely that Mandeville's role is of a
person who avoids roles though aware of the roles his contemporary
readers expect of him. In the penultimate and longest chapter, Monro
discusses Mandeville's role as moralist through all those moral
theories that have been at one time or another attributed to him-
moral skepticism, immoralism, rigorism or asceticism, utilitariani-
ism, and ethical egoism-with the same frustrating results. (This
attempt of a philosopher to deal with a literary figure should be
compared with Bernard Harrison's of Fielding, discussed below.)
If there is almost nothing on Swift this year, there is little more on
Johnson. One good book deserves mention: Richard B. Schwartz's
Samuel Johnson and the Problem of Evil (Wisconsin, 1975), a
shortish essay that makes the worthwhile point that in his attack on
Jenyns, Johnson's main concern was the difficulty of coining to any
conclusion as to what is evil, given our psychological imake-up. This
allows Schwartz to demonstate Johnson's knowledge of the latest
philosophical developments of Berkeley and Hume. As he argued in
his earlier book, Samuel Johnson and the New Science (1971), that
Johnson was not opposed to the science of his day, so in this one he
argues that Johnson, for all his disagreements with Hume's view of
God, was by temperament and by reading a part of the empirical
tradition. The book includes a facsimile of the review of Jenivis as it
first appeared in The Literary Magazine. There is also ail attractive
volume in the "World" series, Samuel Johnson and hlis [World
(Harper and Row, 1975) by Margaret Lane. The text is sound and the
illustrations include most of the portraits (well produced); there is a
striking photograph of the death mask. Otherwise, all I could turn up
was Joseph Moses' The Great Rain Robbery (Houghton Mifflin,
1975), with drawings by David Levine, a children's mystery about the
constant rainfall in Jipswich and the consequent loss of all the J's in
Ipswich, -ohnson, etc.-recovered by the Doctor, who deduces that
they were taken for umbrellas. The pastiche is bad but the drawings
are good.
Once again the great majority of books are on fiction. Tfhe two

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RONALD PAULSON 525
studies of Defoe are, not very suprisingly, about selfhood in tlhe

novels. This can take the form, familiar from much earlier Defoe
scholarship, of the individual surviving against odds in a maigiinal
situation, or the newer one of the individual tryinig OIl different
identities as he tries to redefine himnself after an initial "fall from
grace" (the degree of quotation varies froin scholar to scholar). John
J. Richetti's Defoe's Narratives (Oxford, 1975) is a dense, subtle, aIld
personal meditation on the Defoe hero's attemnpt to reconstruct
something of the lost Eden in a fallen world. It is written with tact and
leaves the reader convinced perhaps because he was already convinced
before beginning. Everett Zimmerman's Defoe and the Novel
(California, 1975) takes greater risks, is more flippant and at times
wrong, but leaves a reader thinking along new lines. The self
according to Zimmerman is the solipsistic, amoebic, and all-
engrossing self of Augustan satire; indeed, his thesis is that Defoe's
characters are "novelistic counterparts to the central figures in
Augustan satire." Closely related is a second (more familiar) thesis,
that the characters are portrayed in the novels through a double,
sometimes triple, perspective. He refers, of course, to conversion as
death and rebirth, the two selves of a spiritual autobiography, the "t'-
in-progress and the interpreter of many years later who renders his
feelings. (In Moll Flanders he detects a third perspective, that of the
"editor" who has slightly edited Moll's text.)
The connection with the "heroes" of Augustan satire lies in a
character's "illuminating misapprehension of his life" or tlhe
"tenuous relationship between a surface of bourgeois respectability
and the chaos within." frue, the Swiftean Grub-street Hack or
Gulliver resembles the Defoe prototype, but Zimmerman thinks
Defoe, like his antitype Swift, sees through the "the hollow man ...
who, because of his sense of inner vacuousness or incoherence,
desperately tries to give a shape to his life through conventional piety
and the rituals of business." "Of course," he adds, "Defoe himself
sometimes seems not to grasp the incongruities of his character's
actions," but he stresses the connection with the satiric Defoe of The
Shortest Way. Swift and Defoe were contemporaries, close observers
of the same scene, and shared certain assumptions; Gulliver's Travels
relies on Crusoe in important ways, and it is potentially of some
importance to see how much Crusoe had built into him of the proto-
Gullivers of Swift, Dryden, and Butler. The weakness of Zimmer-
man's argument comes through, however, when he quotes the
passage from A Tale of a Tub about " the mind of man, when he gives
the spur and bridle to his thoughts" as describing "both the structure
of Robinson Crusoe and the central figure's mind": "Crusoe's bathos

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526 RECENT STUDIES
derives from his metaphysical expansiveness, his attempts to soar; his

flights toward the exalted end not just in a disappointingly ordinary
reality but in 'the lowest Bottom of Tfhings."'
Zimmerman's analyses derive from both the model of the s.dtiri(
figure (in my Satire and the Novel) aiid the fragile bulwarks of tle
Augustan psyche according to Emrys Jones, C. J. Rawson, and
others. Phrases like "the process of external ordering hidecs dlc
disorder within" keep appearing, and at bottom is the old problem
of whether the discrepancy between early and later viewpoints reveals
a spiritual dimension or creates psychological complexity. Zimmer-
man is for the second explanation and carries the argument further
thatn it has been taken before. He is very good on the function of the
lists, plague bills, cataloguing and collecting in Journal of tlte
Plague Year: "the enumerating, the organizing of oneself in verbal
possessions" is to explain the "inexplicable, the Plague, or the
unknown of an island," and to hold off or control the "fear" which is
"finally of the rage within." The possessions, fortresses, lists, "all
serve as self-protective diversions" against the character's inner chaos.
From his point of view it is then logical to argue that Defoe uses
providential design in the same way (see pp. 38-39) to dramatize or
register the character's psychological instability ("to subdue his
destructive impulses"). Zimmerman, in fact, asserts a total seculariza-
tion, which will surprise some Defoe scholars: Crusoe's overtones of
microchristus, of pilgrim, and so on, down to echoes of Job, are only
"fragments of meaning" shored up around a center of "chaotic
energy": "Crusoe is the forms he adopts only for so long as he adopts
them. "
From Zimmerman's point of view, this relates back to Swift's
clothes philosophy in the Tale: "Material accumulations, literary
traditions, and traditional theology-all serve a self-protective
purpose. [The Defoe hero] attempts to organize everything external as
part of himself." From the point of view of Richetti this is Crusoe's
need "to observe and to order." From the point of view of Sacvan
Bercovitch in his impressive Puritan Origins of the American Self
(Yale, 1975), this is the role-playing (which Hector Monro uses
loosely to explain Mandeville) which must be placed in its historical
locus in the Puritan ethos. Bercovitch's book, while developing a
thesis concerning the American tradition, also explains some of the
basic and lingering problems of English historical and novelistic
writing. The crucial chapter is "Puritanism and the Self," which goes
to the root of the Puritan paradox of selfhood. With great subtlety
Bercovitch explores the well-known conflict between the Puritan's
great self-assertiveness in the demonstration of his selflessness. "To

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RONALD PAULSON 527
affirm and to turn against," as he says, "are both aspects of self-

involvement," and one result is the psychomachia, another the
proportionate public affirmation to private insecurity, and the force
of I-ness that is transparent in the violent vocabulary of self-
abhorrence which both Zimmerman and Richetti detect at the heart of
Defoe's fiction.
Max Byrd has gathered a representative selection of Defoe essays in
his Twentieth-Century Views volume (1976), though I do riot
understand why he omits both Homer Brown and Zimnmermani,
whose essays (1971 and 1972) carried the work of Hunter and Starr
into the 1970's and made possible such studies as those under review.
According to Paul Zweig in The Adventurer (Basic Books, 1974),
Crusoe is not a Beowulf or a Hercules, but (alluding to Virginia
Woolf's phrase) "an old earthenware pot." The period, accorditng to
Zweig, is one in which the adventurer becomes the villain of satire anid
Crusoe the normative figure-for Swift, he believes, as well as Defoe.
He is the ostensible adventurer who in fact builds walls arounid
himself and reduces adventure to lists of possessions. As this example
might suggest, Zweig's book is to be taken only with a grain of salt,
but it is to be taken. The grain of salt is to notice that "adventurer'
means the under-man (vs. iubermensch), the criminal outcast of Sade,
Genet, Celine, and Mailer. TI hough Zweig makes a brave attempt at
giving his tradition authority by going back to Odysseus-via
Dimock's play on Odysseus-meaning-trouble-he can only do so by
omission and distortion. Odysseus is in fact part of the despised
bourgeois tradition of the novel with its norm of middle-class
domesticity, walls, interior, detail, and law-abidingness. For Zweig's
anti-Leavisite thesis is that all that is worthwhile (i.e. in modern
fiction of the moment) came from the rebels who did not fit into the
"novel" tradition. This kind of critical "blindness" or decentering
does, however, make one see some things more clearly than before; the
book is well worth a reading, especially its chapter on Gothic fiction,
if it is read (as it was intended) as a poetic meditation.
Robert Alter's Partial Magic (California, 1975), also very much to
the moment, is about "the kind of novel ... that is acutely aware of
itself as a mere structure of words even as it tries to discover ways of
going beyond words to the experiences the words seek to indicate."
He is, however, aware of the historical question: whether the
intention is formalist (in the Russian sense) or realist; whether the
end is a play with conventions or a search for the real; whether Sterne
makes more sense in the tradition of Rabelais and Swift or of
Richardsonian "formal realism." Thus there is a chapter on Don
Quixote (where Alter credits Harry Levin's "Example of Cervantes"

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528 RECENT STUDIES
with being the "seminal essay on Cervantes as the paradigmatic

novelist' '-forgetting Ortega's Meditations on Quixote of some
thirty years earlier), followed by chapters on Sterne and (a very good
onie) Diderot's Jacques le fataliste. In the chapter on the nineteenth-
century novel, which Alter sees as taking its illusions seriously and
falling in love with its fictions, he gives us his most elaborate
formulation of the historical differences distinguishing all of these
Quixotes (or of what separates one Quixote from another by its
moment of composition): these "techniques of fictional self-
consciousness . . . produce an experiential realism in Sterne, a
metaphysical realism in Diderot, an epistemological realism in
Cervantes, and ... a moral-intellectual realism in Fielding." This is
an elegant statement, but the more I think about it the more it seems
not very different from the formulation of Ian WVatt twenity years ago
(though seen in the light of Borges, Pynchon, and Barth). One other
problem, emergent in the chapter on the nineteenth Century, is
whether only degree separates any two novels on the spectrum of
artifice and self-reflexivity. As Zimmerman shows, Defoe too reveals
and is in some degree aware of the difference (cf. Moll's "editor')
which is inherent in the telling of a story and in the natur-e of
language.
This is the question which links Alter's book with a lai-ge,
overarching study of fiction-making, Edward Said's Beginl l irlgs
(Basic Books, 1975). Said sees the desire of the "classical novelist" (he
echoes Barthes) as the desire "to initiate and promote a reduplication
of life and, at the same time, to allow for a convincing portrayal of
how that sort of life leads inevitably to the revelation of a merely
borrowed authority." For Said this points to the dual concern of the
novelist and of his protagonist with beginnings, births, and rebirths.
The novelist (as Watt pointed out long ago) is always starting aniew,
and his protagonist is an orphan, outcast, parvenu, solitary, or
deranged type whose background is either rejected or unknown. Both
novelist and protagonist seek a secondary and alternative filiation to a
Sidi Hamete or an Amadis. The alternatives Said characterizes as (1)
filiation or relationships linked by familial analogy-dynastic,
bound to sources and origins, mimetic, following the process of
genesis or of story-telling; and (2) complementariety and adjacency,
not father but brother, paragenesis, or what Rene Girard has called
"triangular desire." In other words, both author and hero seek not a
source (or origin) but a beginning or point of departure, not a story
but a construction, not a narrative but a building (a reconstruction).
Although Said sees these as consecutive (agreeing with Barthes and
Alter), I suspect that from Fielding to Sterne at least, perhaps in all
fiction, they are simultaneous.

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RONALD PA ULSON 529
Thomas Maresca's Epic to Novel (Ohio State, 1974) finds

genealogy and filiation to be the crucial conltinuutm between the epic
tradition and the novel. By epic tradition, however, Maresca ineanis
the interpretations secreted around the classical epics by the early
commentators; following Wasserman, he emphasizes the centrality
not of the Aeneid itself but of the commentaries-of Macrobius,
Servius, Fulgentius, Bernardus Silvestris, and Landino-which
interpreted it to the eighteenth century. Tfhis "A eneid," not very close
to the one we read, served as a compost heap out of which the novel
grew once the viability of the poetic epic had been lost in the
projections of the commentators. Here we find the analogy between
this literary creation and God's; the function of the etymological
mode of interpretation as providing clues to the deeper ineaning of
the fable (names like Kreuznaer, Allworthy, Primrose); the awareness
of the non-referentiality of language, leading into the self-generating
linguistic systems parodied by Dryden and Swift; the arguments over
whether the hero should be raised to the status of exceptional man or
remnain a "mixed character"; and the great emphasis on the relations
of fathers and sons, kings and subjects, minds and bodies.
It is best to read Maresca's chapter on epic conventions and
meditate yourself on the implications. Maresca loses the thread in his
attempt to find a real eighteenth-century epic (Amelia) and in his
elaborate and ingenious readings of MacFlecknoe and Absolom and
A chitophel, Swift's Tale and Gulliver, as epics-for-the-time. He never
quite reaches the "novel" part of his title or makes of his book more
than an intriguing and very suggestive fragment. But even the
readings of the Augustan satires are well worth having. Like his
readings in Pope's Horatian Poems, they are valuable for their sharp
details and the boldness with which they push an idea (or a
methodology) to its utmost limit and beyond.
Thomas Noel's Theories of the Fable in the Eighteenth Century
(Columbia, 1975) has a subject of some promise, since from le Bossu
onward "fable" was a continuum at one end of which was epic and at
the other beast fable, with poetry the only mark that distinguished
them. The introduction suggests interesting possibilities: the relation
to children's literature (he begins with Locke's Thoughts on
Education), to revolutionary literature at the end of the century, and
to the apologue. But the title proves all too accurate: it is only a
general listing of the varying theories of fable (in France, England,
Germany, and Spain), and in practice "fable" means little more than
beast fable. Even here we get no indication of what these beast fables
were like-of, for example, how Gay's differed from La Fontaine's or
La Motte's.
David H. Richter's Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in

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530 RECENT STUDIES
Rhetorical Fiction (Chicago, 1974) focuses on one kind of fable, the

apologue, the form Sacks discussed in Fiction and the Shape of Belief.
"Completeness and Closure" are in the title primarily to be redefined
in relation to apologues, those fictions in which argumnent
determines structure. The distinction is between closure and
completeness, made in a discussion which is VeFx elemciitai'v
compared with Said's in Beginnings. The classification (folloWing
Crane and then Sacks) of novels of action, of character, and of thoughlt
(the apologue) is also, it seems to me, reductive. Rasselas, the c hief
example from the eighteenth century, especially suffers; Richter-'s key
phrase is "In Rasselas, as in all rhetorical fictions" -a phrase which
precisely misses the point of Rasselas' uniqueness. TI he Rasselas lie
treats is the Rasselas of Kolb and Sacks; there is no mentioni of Ekmrys
Jones's brilliant essay on its un-apologueness, its demonstrationi of
the impossibility in life of both apologues and closure. An exalnplc, I
might add, of the profitable building on Jones's essay, and thle essay
on Rasselas to read this year, is the late E. R. Wasserman's "Johnsoin's
Rasselas: Implicit Contexts" (JEGP, Jan. 1975), his last publication
and a fine piece of scholarship which argues for, among other thinigs,
a "conclusion" in heaven.
Connected by Noel with the fable, but left undeveloped, is d1c
subject of children's literature. The eighteenth century witnessed the
rise of the genre in England, and two lavish publicationis celebrate
this: one, Gerald Gottlieb's Early Children's Books atnd thleir
Illustrations, was the catalogue for an exhibitioni at the M\Iorgain
Library (1975); the other is Cobwebs to Catch Flies: Illustrated Books
for the Nursery and Schoolroom 1700-1900, by Joyce Irene Whalley
(California, 1975), whose research derives from the V'ictoria and
Albert Museum's unrivalled collection. (A third book, which skips
the eighteenth century, but deals with the theoretical dimension of
the subject, is Isabelle Jan's On Children's Literature [Schocken
Books, 1974].) Both begin with the certain fact that the mode was
dominated by adults "who knew little about the minds and hearts of
children," and the aim was to give children what they ought to read
whether they liked it or not-to save their souls from hell or to educate
them to survive in a Newtonian-Lockean world. The fact was that in
the eighteenth century adult books could, with sometimes only minor
changes, become children's books: Pilgrim's Progress, Robinson
Crusoe, and Gulliver's Travels; with children even reading
abridgements-admittedly radical-of Clarissa and Tom Jones.
A particularly unperceptive review of Gottlieb, by Martin Gardner
(New York Times Book Review, Jan. 18, 1976), argues that the
children were just like children today and so hated the books. "We

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RONA4LD PA ULSON 531
know because when they grew up many of them wrote about their
childhood." But Gardner's example, Charles Lamb, was writing
about them as Wordsworth wrote about Pope, as the nineteenth
century looked back on the eighteenth. I think Isaac Watts' Divine
SotIgs and Mrs. Barbauld's Hymns in Prose were read with the kind of
attention children not brought up on Dr. Seuss would have to give.
Children may have been warped by reading these books, but it is not
easy to say they didn't enjoy them. Gardner complains that Gottlieb is
not to be believed when he says that Pilgrim's Progress "was
enthusiastically seized upon" by youngsters: of course it was. The
children must have been far more fascinated by Vanity Fair and the
fiery death of Faithful, by the sad end of Ignorance, or by the cries of
Christian's wife and children, than by any of Zweig's pure adventure
stories. These are scenes they probably never forgot. I would like to
know more about how a child came at censored or uncensored fairy
tales (of the sort Bruno Bettelheim recommends to children) and how
these served to structure adult "realistic" literature in the next
generation. The process is more easily seen with the tradition of
cautionary tales which burst into literature in the 1790's, as the
children's tale itself became a vehicle for poets and novelists.
TIhe rnost notable Fielding event has been the publication of N. B.
Coley's Jacobite's Journal and Martin Battestin's Tom Jones in the
WVesleyan edition. Both of these are outstanidiing accomplishments,
but since SEL was not honored with copies by the publisher and I
have reviewed both elsewhere (MLR), I will pass on to J. Paul
Hunter's Occasional Form: Henry Fielding & the Chains of
Circumstance (Johns Hopkins, 1975). Following his important book
on Defoe, Hunter has made a broad-fronted attack on Fielding with
lively chapters on the plays, on Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and
Amelia. Hunter is most rewarding on the political allusions and the
structuring of the plays and Shamela on multiple figures: C'ibber-
Walpole, Middleton-Cibber, and Richardson (and in later chapters
on historical models like the careers of Chubb and Horlet for
Thwackum and Square). Hunter is also convincing on the rehearsal
play as a manipulation of various kinds of reality, representing the
conventions that play havoc with both living and representing (and
so back to Alter's self-reflexive novels). As to the analytic-perspectival
function of these plays, and its relation to the developing concerns of
the novels, he mentions the subject but seems unaware that anyone
else has written on the subject.
What strikes me about Hunter's book is that he has raised the most
important issues-Fielding's use of examples, journeys, the biblical
myth of expulsion, spatial metaphors; but I find myself disagreeing

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532 RECENT STUDIES
with his treatment as he either glides over or misunderstands each.

Take the question of examples (or models): while his researches have
sprung some interesting hares and he establishes a distinction
between imitation and evitation, even quoting passages that
demonstrate Fielding's (like Johnson's) awareness of the power and
danger of positive examples, he nowhere connects this with the first
chapter of Joseph Andrews, where the subject is adumbrated, or with
Bk. II, Chap. 1 on live examples (versus literary or stereotyped ones),
or even with the significance of Joseph's refusal at the end of the book
to be a literary example himself. The reason, I believe, is that Hunter
remains trapped in the syndrome of providential design, in which
such figures as the biblical Joseph and Abraham are ideal rather than
merely literary examples. And yet he knows that something is amiss.
He has unearthed the deist attacks on the biblical Joseph and
Abraham-amusing attacks intimating, for example, that Joseph's
abstinence vis 'a vis Potiphar's wife is so improbable that we must
assume he carried on with her under cover of his prison cell. Hunter is
quite aware-as Battestin was not in his first explication of the
biblical analogies-that the scene with Lady Booby is ridiculous and
that Joseph is so himself, at least to some extent. But he gets himself
out of the bind by arguing that (1) at this point Joseph is still a
rhetorical figure, out of the Pamela dispute, and so with development
becomes merely "a more credible vehicle for Fielding's moral
interests" (the same ones), "not because his nature changes but
because he learns to handle circumstance with less pomposity and
more grace." I believe he overlooks the fact that as Joseph sheds the
affectations of London, footmen, and readers of Pamela's letters and
Adams' sermons, he does change. (2) In making Joseph totally
ridiculous in this early scene, Hunter argues, Fielding is catching his
readers by their libertine assumptions and much later-he does not
explain how-traps them when Joseph has been vindicated. Joseph is
in fact vindicated very shortly after his encounter with Lady Booby
when we learn that his real motive for abstinence was his love of
Fanny. But Hunter does not see that examples in general, when they
are literary, enclose and make ridiculous even Joseph, whose
emergence as hero is a function of his freeing himself from the fetters
of epistles and sermons, and not a subtle justification of theological
discourse. The unhappy fact that Hunter cannot substantiate his
assertion shows an inability to reconcile his recognition of the
comedy in the Joseph-Lady Booby scenes and his persisting belief
that the biblical "Joseph" must be an ideal. His exantlation of
Morgan and the Deist anti-Joseph crowd (who even connect their
suspicions with Walpole through the "Prime Minister" Joseph

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RONALD PA ULLSON 533
eventually becomes) does not seem to contribute more than an

additonal perspective on the figures of Joseph and Adams. (He also
brings in the Deistic attack on Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac as if this
somehow explains the irony of Adams' immediately subsequent
response to the supposed death of his own son.) Certainly Fielding
was not supporting the Deists; but neither was he bothering to refute
them. Perhaps he shows some awareness of them as an added
dimension to his joke.
There are some curiously opaque jokes in Joseph Andrews
according to Hunter. He draws attention to the fact that Fielding,
with all his readers' knowledge of "Fanny" as both "behind" and
Pope's (and his own, in Shamela) Lord Hlervey, names his heroine
Fanny. The answer would seem to me simply the old-fashioned one,
that Fielding began writing a parody of Pamela in which there was a
girl who could neither read nor write and whose name was the
deflating one (with perhaps a Hervey tincture), Fanny. But Hunter
finds it significant that Fanny as heroine appears early on and then
near the end encounters Beau Didapper, who (Battestin has shown)
probably alludes to Hervey. Thus Didapper falls for Fanny because
he sees himself ("amphibious desires . . . divided self . .. vain self
image . . . groundless self-love"). Attractive as it may be, and despite a
long quotation, the contention finds no support in Fielding's text.
To me it raises the question: Why has Hunter not related the subject
of examples to the multiple selves and shifting, unreliable selfhood of
the Puritan tradition? Why has he not seen the obvious continuum
between Defoe (about whom he has written so cogently) and
Fielding?
As I have tried to suggest, Hunter's is a book of interesting but
unresolved topics. I must mention one more: Fielding's use of
Fenelon's TNelmaque. Hunter's important insight is that in its
original version the Telemaque was eighteen books, rather than
twelve or twenty-four, the usual number for an epic: i.e., divided as is
Tom Jones. (He notes that it was translated the same year Joseph
Andrews was published, but the first English translation in fact was
in 1699.) Like Tom Jones, he argues, it falls into three equal parts:
Books 1-6, Telemachus and Calypso; 7-12, his "banishment,"
wanderings, and battles; 13-18 (or 18-24 in the later 24-book version),
his descent into the underworld. The parallel he draws is with Tom
Jones: Telemachus "becomes attached to three earthly ladies, and one
of them dominates each of the three sections, as Molly, Mrs. Waters,
and Lady Bellaston occupy Tom in the country, on the road, and in
the city." I do not know to what lady he refers in the second part; but
Calypso much more strongly resembles Lady Booby vis "a vis Joseph

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534 RECENT STUDIES
than she does Molly Seagrim. The third part has Antiope, daughter of
Idomeneus, whom Telemachus is destined to marry after he has
delivered Penelope from the suitors, and so Mentor stands between
them, despite her father's stratagems (the incident reminds me more
of Sophia in the stag hunt than of Lady Bellaston). In fact, the
parallel is with Joseph Andrews: Mentor, like Parson Adams, keeps
the two lovers apart until Joseph's education is completed. In terms of
Joseph Andrews, the descent into the underworld, with Telemachus
believing his father is dead only to discover that he is still alive and to
be the end of his quest, is paralleled by Mr. Wilson's descent into the
underworld of London, which reveals that he is Joseph's father
(Joseph thinks his father is Gaffer Andrews). In Joseph Andrews the
Telemaque parallel tells that it is the son's quest for a father that we
are to follow, not Joseph's quest for Fanny; and that this is an
education of Joseph. The point of the temptation of Antiope,
Fenelon tells us, is that "he was not now the same Telemachus who
had been such a slave to a tyrannical passion in the island of
Calypso."
Hunter's is a stimulating book that ought to be useful for raising
arguable points in class. A slim and narrowly-focused but exticinilv
fine book is Bernard Harrison's Henry Fielding's 'Tomn Jones': DIe
Novelist as Moral Philosopher (in the Text & Context series, Sussex
Univ., 1975). Harrison, a professional philosopher, is not the first to
see Coleridge's distinction between character and conduct to be at the
heart of Tom Jones, to see how profound an alternative Fielding's
method was to Richardson's, or to see the importance of Empson's
essay on Fielding's "double irony"; but he gives the best account I
know of the particular "mode of representation of the interaction of
character and conduct" developed in Tom Jones. Except for an
occasional slip (Edward Lear, not Lewis Carroll, invented "runci-
ble") he keeps his literary aplomb and shows the value of bringing a
professional philosopher's training to bear on a fictional text-
evident, for example, in his brilliant analysis of the episode Coleridge
singled out, Blifil's freeing of Sophia's bird Tommy.
Harrison's conclusions bear both on the novelistic technique anid
on the philosophical problem of goodness or virtue. He interprets
Empson's "double irony" as meaning that "no one viewpoint is ever
'guaranteed', ever wholly adequate as a basis from which to grasp the
nature of human reality," and argues "that certain kinds of
knowledge of a man's inwardness, of what he is, are easier to convey
through the ironic juxtaposition of viewpoints than through the
creation of an illusion of direct knowledge of a character's stream of
consciousness" (adding Wittgenstein's remark that "even if God

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RONALD PA U LSON 535
knew the contents of my mind he would still not know what I was
thinking"). This is done by Fielding's "contrast between what all
interlocutor, looking at what a character says and does froml a
particular viewpoint, might make of him, and what a seconld
viewpoint might make of the commerce between them. Fielding's
concept of character, in short, is founded in the notion of the
coherence of a man's speech and action when seen from different
viewpoints" -and further, on the assumption that only truth and
simplicity will survive such close scrutiny. These perspectives do not
suggest relativismn; while indicating the complexity and difficulty of
understanding an action, they show us hoW to understand it-and
just what the "central doctrine" Empson referred to might be.
This is the problemn of goodness or virtue, and Harrison believes
that in this novel Fielding has found a way around (or between) the
dichotomies of reason-sentiment, principle-impulse, duty-pleasure,
and thought-feeling. The literary technique sketched above allows
for this "painstaking construction of an antireductionist phenome-
nology of the moral life." If Fielding is placed in the context of the
opposed traditions of egoism and benevolism, which keep virtue and
precept opposed to pleasure, then we begin to see that the "doctrine
that only acts done solely out of reverence for the Moral Law can be
regarded as moral, or virtuous, acts" is opposed to the idea of "doing
this [good deed] out of fondness for and sympathy with his
neighbours" as moral action. Fielding, says Harrison, clarifies the
pleasure pole of the dichotomy by distinguishing between appetites
and human needs-the latter invoking the conscious states and needs
of other people. Sexual desire, which could be either, thus becomes a
crucially important test case for Tom; and it is equally significant
that he is contrasted to "someone who, because he has no needs
which go beyond appetites, has no grasp of real force and weight of
the concept of friendship, or of any other moral notion." Love of
another, or feeling the needs of another rather than your own need of
him/her, is a good only when it is (now quoting Fielding) "without
any abstract Contemplation on the Beauty of Virtue, and without the
Allurement or Terrors of Religion." Harrison's is the best exposition
in print of Fielding's embodiment of moral doctrine in Tom Jones.
Margaret Anne Doody's A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels
of Samuel Richardson (Oxford, 1974) is a major contribution to the
criticism of Richardson. After a perfunctory introductory chapter,
and quite a bit of the expected talk about sub-literary context, Doody
gets into some very commonsensical observations on Pamela and the
pastoral tradition, some interesting examples of Richardson's use of
emblems, and then excellent chapters on Clarissa, dwelling in

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536 RECENT STU'DIES
particular on Richardson's use of theater and prison metaphors.

Throughout the book one senses a very good mind on the one hand
and inexperience on the other: Doody never seems to have read the
scholarship on a subject she broaches, certainly not recent or
pertinent work. Nevertheless, she has produced several chapters that
anyone interested in the course Richardson criticism is taking will
have to read. There is also a very slight book by Anthony Kearny,
Samuel Richardson: 'Clarissa' (Arnold, 1975), which is little more
than an undergraduate introduction to the novel, and a very welcome
text, the late A. D. McKillop's edition of The Apprentice's Vade
Mecum (Augustan Reprint Society, 1975), which he first demon-
strated to be Richardson's.
The Oxford English Novel series continues to inailitaiii an
extraordinarily high standard of quality. Robert Adams Day's edi tion
of Coventry's Pompey the Little is one of the best anid also IlloSt
needed volumes to appear. Coventry's one novel, published in 1751,
paid specific homage to Joseph Andrews, as his essay on thte "'new
species of writing founded by Mr. Fielding" paid general homniage to
the master. In Pom pey the Little, although the presence of Totn Jotnes
is felt and the model is Jonathan Wild, behind the title lies (as Pat
Rogers noticed in a TLS review) Plutarch's Pompey the (Great. Day
has done some admirable research and given us the best account
available of Coventry's life and work; his annotation is both careful
and thorough. In excellence, I would place Day's volume alongside
two recent Smollett volumes, David Evans' Sir Launcelot Greaves
and Damien Grant's Ferdinand Count Fathom.
The Garland Press has published a number of useful texts and
facsimiles this year, in particular an excellent Annotated Biblio-
graphy of works by and about Mary Wolistonecraft (by Janet M.
Todd) and facsimiles of Wollstonecraft's Vindication of thaeRighltsof
Woman and Godwin's St. Leon. Robert J. Gemmett has produced
English translations of Beckford's three long tales, originally in
French, with an account of their histories and a bibliography
(Episodes of Vathek, Fairleigh Dickinson, 1976), and David J.
McNutt has brought out The Eighteenth-Century Gothic Novel: A-p
Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Selected Texts (also
Garland, 1975).
Sentimental fiction, a subject reopened by Brissenden's Vlirtue in
Distress and by Leo Braudy's essays, is represented by Gerard A.
Barker's Henry Mackenzie (Twayne, 1975), a workmanlike introduc-
tion with its best insights reserved for Julia de Roubigne. There is too
much plot summary, but Barker does make us look again at The Man
of Feeling and the whole question of the sentimental by bringing to

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RONALD PAULSON 537
bear Adamn Smith's passages on spectators and observers in his

Theory of Moral Sentiments. Josephine Grieder, in Translations of
French Sentimental Prose Fiction in late Eighteenth-Century
England (Duke, 1975), provides important data in her list of works
translated with their English titles. She also discusses the vogue for
French novels in England, arguing that the rash of translations was
initiated by alert booksellers and waned in the 1790's with the Gothic
craze.
Sterne's stature and the interest of scholars, critics, and students

seem to grow with every year. He is the one figure students can import
directly into the 1970's, sometimes losing a miodicum in the process.
This year we have the bedrock biography we have needed for so long
(Wilbur Cross's was out of date by the 1940's). I have learned a great
deal from the first volume of Arthur Cash's fine biography (Barnes &
Noble, 1975), which takes Sterne's life up to the publication of
Tristrarn Shandy. The intricate politics of York Minister is
fascinating to watch as it unwinds toward the year 1759 and the
suppression of the Political Romance followed by the amazingly fast
writing of the first two volumes of Shandy. Although the whole of
Cash's first volume is directed to explaining this phenomenon, I
remain incredulous. One has to presuppose great masses of witty
fragments as well, of course, as the "Sermon on Conscience," and
then somehow account for the immensely disciplined outpouring in
a few months of a man who has only now found a "form" and decided
what to say. Cash describes with admirable clarity the pressures
building up from the failure of Sterne's career in the church, the
scandal spread (by his hostile uncle Jaques) that he allowed his
mother to be put in jail rather than pay her bills, the increasing
difficulties with his wife, and her insanity along with the deaths of his
difficult mother and uncle just as he was writing. Though published
at a prohibitively high cost, the book is handsomely produced with
good pictures and an appendix of Sterne portraits. There are careful
accounts of the political pamphlets, the sermons, and the Political
Romance, and much attention is paid to Sterne's reading and sources,
such as the close relationship between Tristram Shandy and The
Memoirs of Scriblerus and A Tale of a Tub. Considering the breadth
of the literary survey, I was surprised that Cash did not treat the
subject of language and eighteenth-century linguistic theory, going
on to the work Tristram links to Swift's Tale, Warburton's Legation
of Moses, which broaches some of Sterne's linguistic innovations.
Helene Moglen's Philosophical Irony in Tristram Shandy is a
thorough and competent survey of the uses of irony, well-constructed

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538 RECENT STUIDIES
but finally not very exciting. The main source "of Sternes vision aind
its expression," we learn, is Locke: a subject MIoglen covers
thoroughly. In Tristram Shandy she discusses the old questions of
duration, association of ideas, love and sexuality and death, and thie
uses of language. A final section is an interesting accOuInt of the
contemporaneity of Tristram Shandy which brings in XVilliamn
James, Bergson, and Freud.
One difficult, exasperating, but necessary book on tthe traditioln of
the novel remains to be discussed. Eric Rothstein's thesis in Systelis
of Order & Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (C(alifornia,
1975), which at first sounds very complex in the dense sentences of Ills
introduction, is that the major eighteenth-century Eiinglish novels
(really ending with Shandy but including later survivors) are
constructed on "formal procedures" or "systems of order" and atre
about "epistemological procedures" or "systems of inquiry" thalt -Ire
also to be found in other eighteenth-century concerns-in philo-
sophy and in the general verbal assumptions of living (Foucatult's
epistemes). What this amounts to is that all of these novels, which
tend to be about the Quixotic situation of organized systems being
tested in a real world, proceed by analogy and (Rothstein's terIn)
modification, which means variation or difference. This v'ery general,
almost unavoidable, mode of composition allows the critic tlhe
opportunity for a great deal of new and ingenious annotationi of
Rasselas, Fielding's Amelia, Smollett's Humphry Clinker, (;odwin's
Caleb Williams, and, of course, Tristram Shandy.
I will take the example of Shandy, Rothstein's centerpiece as it was
Alter's; and I should add that Rothstein not only gives us many nice
details but seriously tries to understand the process-or system-of
the novel, its form of unity, by taking Volume VI and relating its parts
to each other, to Volumes V and VII, and so on. I admire his
perserverance in these pages, where the principle of analogy seems to
work best for him. Shandy is, of course, constructed on analogical
relationships, far more than a novel that relies on succession,
sequence, derivation, filiation, and chronology. But the principle is
so powerful, as Rothstein sees it, that Walter, Toby, and Tristram
become "a trio representing thought, action, and (taking Tristram as
an author) creative force." "Action," however, distorts our sense of
Toby, for whom action was in fact back at Namur; now he is only re-
creating or re-acting; action with the Widow Wadman never
materializes. Such stretching of character to fit category seems
necessary to a scheme of total analogizing. It also follows for
Rothstein that Tristram must derive his own character by analogy
from Walter and Toby, as combination of thought and action.

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RONALD PA ULSON 539
Further, since "Walter [is] devoted to logic and analogy, Toby to

chronology; Tristram takes his thematic and rhetorical sequence (and
the subject matter 'opinions') from his father, and the sequential
order of his recollections (and the subject matter 'life') from his
uncle."
This is heady stuff; but it raises the question: Who makes these
analogies, Sterne or Tristram (or Rothstein)? For Rothstein ITristram
is the maker, who has "mastered his [Shandean] heritage by trapping
his world in an iron web of analogy"; but has he also, as Rothstein
insists, become "a third familial fly as well as the mechanical spider"
of Swift's Battle of the Books? Rothstein wonders "if his methods do
not reduce or cripple reality as his father's and uncle's have reduced
and crippled him"; i.e., Fristram attacks the systems of Walter and of
Locke but is not himself immune from the same system-building. He
is his father's son, and his activity is as negatively apprehended as
N\Talter's; like Zimmerman's Crusoe, he is another Swiftean villain.
But how are we to take Tristram's (Sterne's) typography? We are to
note, says Rothstein, the discrepancy between "Toby's intensity of
feeling . . . lavished on the dying Le Fever, and Tristram's on the
ingenious machinery of punctuation and rhythm with which the
death agony is mimicked." I should have thought the typography was
Tristram's poignant attempt to render the death, the failure of which
he indicates by giving way to the literary conventions he has had to
use and wryly shrugging them off ("shall I go on?----No."). At
one point Rothstein pauses to accuse Alter of conflating Tristram and
Sterne, and of course his case depends on the text being Tristram's
memoirs as Alter's does on its being Sterne's novel. Is it about Sterne
writing a novel or about characters like Tristram, Walter, and Toby,
with the writing of the memoirs only Tristram's part, analogous to
the obsessive behavior of the other two? Is it Tristram (or Sterne) who
reworks his father's theory of names, itself discredited, by describing
characters named Bridget whose sexual exploits break bridges,
Phutatorius who writes a book on concubines, etc.-in short, who
vindicate Walter's theory? Recalling the marvelous Shandean names
in Cash's list of acknowledgements (Canon Cant, Gyopay the
bookduster, Peek, Wombwell, Gee, and of course Monkman himself),
I am more inclined to think that Sterne, correctly, sees language as
itself operating in this way, beyond the control of either Tristram or
himself. I think we can accept Alter's Tristram, whose linguistic
structures inevitably reveal the rock-bottom sexuality under all his
and his family's quixotic gestures, rather than Rothstein's "bun-
gling, gaudy, pert, lip-licking Tristram," who loves to supply us with
double entendres (an up-dated version of Thackeray's Sterne).

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540 RECENT STUDIES
At any rate, after reading Cash we can no longer doubt how

vexingly close Sterne and Tristram are. Who precisely is it who writes
the eighteenth chapter of Volume I on March 9, 1759, and the twenltv-
first on March 25? We know now that Sterne was literally writing
those pages on those days. Rothstein would say the assertion of those
specific dates is pretty much the same as the Grub-street Hack's selft-
absorption; Alter would say that Sterne takes the device of immnediacy
and exalts it into "a fundamental problematic, both literary and
philosophical," and I think (given his interesting discussion of death
in Tristram Shandy) he would add that fastening on the precise
moment for Sterne-Tristram is part of the process of coming to terms
with (warding off) that figure who finally makes his physical
appearance at the beginning of volume VII.
For all the stimulation it provides, there is also, after so lonlg, a
dreary sameness in Rothstein's book. I grow a little tired wheni, in the
chapter on Humphry Clinker, I learn that Bramble is a satirist, and
therefore Jery and others too; that Bramble's satire is true but he is
himself untrustworthy and hardly normative; that he is vet another
Swiftean hack or spider and everything from Chowder to ITabitha and
Humphry is analogous with modifications. I find myself noticing
analogies between the virtues and shortcomings of Rothstein,
Tristram, Bramble, and even Maresca as observers: all are fascinated
by detail, by analogies, by annotation, looking for a thesis that will
accomodate their findings, and not quite succeeding, because these
organized systems do not stand the test of the real world (though they
are none the worse as organized systems for that).
Turning from books on fiction to books on poetry is like turning
from a lush jungle to Alaskan tundra. There is a book of Critical
Essays on Robert Burns, edited by Donald A. Low (London,
Routledge, 1975), which offers seven new essays and two old ones on
every aspect of Burns's career from his dialect to his satires; there is
Brian Hepworth's useful Selected Poems of Edward Young (Fyfield
Books, 1975), which also contains a sensible introduction; and Peter
New's George Crabbe's Poetry (St. Martin's Press, 1976). TIhe last,
though it spends most of its time on the nineteenth century, is a sound
introduction which argues for Crabbe's unconcern with epistemol-
ogy, either new or old, and makes too much of the "progress
tradition."
As we have seen, especially in the one major book on poetry

(Pope's, by Erskine-Hill), this is a year of the historian. In fact some of
the strongest historical writing in years was published during the last
twelve months. Of these the most important, it seems to me, is thatof

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RONALD PA ULSON 541
E. P. Thompson, whose Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black

Act (Pantheon, 1976) and Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in
Eighteenth-Century England (ed. by Thompson, with Douglas Hay
and Peter Linebaugh; Pantheon, 1976) reopen the English historico-
political scene in a way as radical as Namier's work of half a century
ago. Thompson's exploration is "from below," which means not
quite the same as among the French historians of Les Annales;
perhaps the closest parallel would be with Marc Bloch's Les Rois
thaumaturges in that he seeks out the structures and ceremonials
created by the governing class to govern and by the working class to
make possible a certain dignity in an age so completely controlled by
their betters. One revision offered by Thompson's history is of
Plumb's happy Age of Walpole: Thompson is unable to find anyone
who benefited much from the Walpolian Peace "beyond the circle of
Walpole's own creatures." Criminals are thus divided into the
categories of real criminal and protester, men out to settle a personal
score and men whose traditional way of life appears threatened and
who respond in ways that were called at the time criminal by such
blanket categories as the "Black Law." This law applied the death
penalty to almost every imaginable rural offence against property;
but in particular to the game laws which protected the sanctity of the
deer park and the chase, important primarily to Walpole, Town-
shend, Cobham and a few others (not even including the king).
A second kind of history takes a historical moment and unravels its
significance. Paul Langford's The Excise Crisis (Oxford, 1975) shows
how reasonable were Walpole's plans and yet how far awry they went
when he proposed to substitute collection of duty on wine and
tobacco at the grocer's rather than the importation-point-indeed,
with the object of reducing the Land Tax and pleasing the country
gentlemen. Langford's study is of interest to the literary scholar
because of the weight The Craftsman and the Opposition journalists
carried in the crisis. He shows directly how misunderstandings
abetted by political propaganda affected the outcome, indirectly
confirming Thompson's thesis that smuggling and cheating of
customs had become an important part of the way of life in the 1730's.
Sheilah Biddle has written a brilliant double portrait, Bolingbroke
and Harley (Knopf, 1974), which far outdistances the Elizabeth
Hamilton biography of Harley and is equal to H. T. Dickinson's
Bolingbroke. By juxtaposition she produces a truer history than
either figure can generate alone of those crucial years leading up to
1714. A fascinating ancillary work is The Diary of Sir David
Hamilton, 1709-1714 (ed. Philip Roberts, Oxford, 1975), which
covers these years from the ultimate worms'-eye view. Even Swift,

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542 RECENT STUDIES
who knew of Harley's access to the queen through Mrs. Masham and
was aware (with Gulliver) "How a Whore can govern the Back-stairs,
the Backstairs a Council, and the Council a Senate," would have been
interested to learn from Queen Anne's physician how a menstrual
cycle and a mixture of physiological and psychological maladies
influenced events. One thing never made clear by Roberts, however, is
the exact relationship between Hamilton and Arbuthnot, who seems
to have been chief or supervisory physician to the queen.
Another book of background interest to these years is Robert D.
Horn's Marlborough: A Survey (Garland, 1975). Horn lists, describes,
and quotes from the panegyrics, satires, and biographical writings on
the Duke between 1688 and 1788. The annotations, year by year, make
this more than mere bibliography. Another Garland book, just
published, is Stephen Parks's John Dunton and the English Book
Trade, which gives us all the facts from primary sources about this
neglected figure, known vaguely as the author of a precursor of
Tristram Shandy and as a prototypical Swiftean hack. Parks has
documented all Dunton's mottled careers as publisher, polemicist,
and autobiographer. He has carried out a very difficult and relatively
thankless task well, and we should be grateful: the larger part of the
book is a year-by-year checklist of all the works with which Dunton
can be shown to have been concerned in any way.
Two other political biographies are outstandingly successful:
William L. Sachse's Lord Somers (Wisconsin, 1975) and Reed
Browning's Duke of Newcastle (Yale, 1975). Somers, the dedicatee of
Swift's Tale, was the prototypical Whig as Dunton was prototypical
hack and Newcastle was prototypical electioneer. If Newcastle is most
interesting as a man it is because he is most enigmatic: the man who
held second (if not first) place in ministries for nearly forty years, yet
remains for us largely Smollett's Fika-Kaka with his twitches and
inanities. Another biography I found useful after ploughing through
many unsatisfactory books on the subject, was Hugh Douglas'
Charles Edward Stuart (London, Hale, 1975). Though a popular life,
it does live up to its subtitle, "The Man, the King, the Legend" by
giving the reader some sense of how the legend related to the man.
Paul S. Fritz's English Ministers and Jacobitism between the
Rebellions of 1715 and 1745 (Toronto, 1975) also sheds light on these
matters, though it could afford some awareness of R. C. Jarvis' studies
of the '45 (Jarvis does not even get a citation).
Ross J. S. Hoffman, in The Marquis: A Study of Lord Rock-
ingham, 1730-1782 (Fordham, 1975), sorts out Rockingham from
Burke and attempts to rehabilitate the Marquis himself as the driving
force behind the growth of the concept of party and of the minister

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RONALD PA ULSON 543
who wants the freedom to choose between serving king or country.

This is a skillful study of politics in action and the development of a
party system out of the morass of George III's attempt to surround
himself with "king's men." The Prime Ministers, edited by Herbert
van Thal (Stein and Day, 1975) is a useful reference book with
chapters by a variety of historians on each P. M. from Walpole
onward. Langford's on Rockingham is especially good, as is John
Brewer's on Bute. Another collection of essays, Lawrence Stone's The
University in Society (Princeton, 1974), has interesting chapters by
Nichols Phillipson on the role of education in the Scottish
enlightenment, and James McLachlan on the role of the Choice of
Hercules topos in American student societies. Other books that
isolate and examine some of the structures that informed thought in
the eighteenth century are David Brion Davis' excellent Problem of
Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Cornell, 1975) and Eric Foner's
Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (Oxford, 1976).
In art history the most valuable volume to my mind was Robert
Wark's Rowlandson (Huntington Library, 1975), a catalogue of the
Huntington's unrivalled Rowlandson collection, reproducing all the
drawings, and thus becoming at a bound the essential book to begin
any study of Rowlandson. Wark's definitive edition of Reynolds'
Discourses on Art (Yale, 1975) has been reissued as a photographic
reprint of the volume printed by the Huntington in 1959 and long
unavailable. Wark has made a few corrections and added two
appendices, Blake's marginalia and Hazlitt's essay on the Discourses.
The Scolar Press has brought out a revised edition of their facsimile of
Hogarth's Analysis of Beauty, which in its first edition carried by
mistake the 1810 copies of Hogarth's plates. rhis time they have
found the right plates, though it is questionable whether in the right
states; an introduction makes a totally unfounded claim that the
accepted order of the states for Plate II should be reversed (see my
review, Burlington Magazine). The Scolar Press was more successful
with its quite beautiful facsimile of Gilbert White's Garden Kalendar
1751, a magnificent piece of book-making; also of interest are their
facsimiles of Dolce's Aretin, a Dialogue, Gerard's Essay on Taste, and
Jonathan Richardson's Essay on the Theory of Painting.
David and Francina Irwin's Scottish Painters at Home and A broad
1700-1900 (London, Faber, 1975) fills in much new as well as old
information about the Scottish tradition. F. E. Pardoe has published
a handsome study of the art of printing, John Baskerville of
Birmingham: Letter-Founder & Printer (London, Muller, 1976).
John Hayes's Gainsborough (Praeger, 1975), the work of a great
Gainsborough scholar, is a good introduction to the artist, and Ruth

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544 RECENT STUDIES
S. Kraemer's Drawings of Benjamin West is another fine study-and-

catalogue published by the Morgan Library to accompany an
exhibition. Among the books on art published this year, I should
mention two books by the author of this review, the Hogarth
equivalent of Hayes' Gainsborough, The Art of Hogarth (Praeger,
1975), and a study of the post-Hogarth generation of artists and their
literary connections, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English
Art of the Eighteenth Century (Harvard, 1975).
Among a growing number of books on eighteenth-century English
gardening, I can single out only one, the most useful for the general
student. This is The Genius of the Place (Harper & Row, 1975), a
collection of writings on the English landscape garden from 1620 to
1820, compiled by John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, two of the most
knowledgeable scholars on the subject. This is an essential book for
literary scholars of the period to own. The introduction is elegant and
the selection is both comprehensive and full of surprises; the
illustrations are equally well chosen. Hunt has also edited Gilpin's
Dialogue upon the Gardens at Stow (1748), one of his important
discoveries, excerpted in Genius of the Place (Augustan Reprints, No.
176, 1976).
Though not in any ordinary category, James Knowlson's
Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600-1800
(Toronto, 1975) is a suitable book with which to end. Its limited and
specialized subject in fact allows Knowlson, in his readable and
extremely lucid survey, to raise in linguistic terms some of the central
issues we have seen in the books under review: the obsession with the
need to communicate combined with an awareness of insuperable
difficulties; a preference for things over words, a faith in gesture as an
alternative, or in "real characters," hieroglyphs, or even ideograms,
or in the most primitive roots of words; the construction of these
universal languages on principles of generic classification; and the
general appreciation of the arbitrary relationship of signifiers and
signifieds. Anyone interested in linguistic approaches to eighteenth-
century literature might begin with the extreme cases presented by
Knowlson.
Yale University

143.207.2.28 on Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:32:12 UTC

Chiastic Effect 449731

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Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century

Author(s): Ronald Paulson

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/449731

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At the risk of exposing myself to the

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was about restoration, MacFlecknoe about "decay" and reductioln;

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The scholarship and commentary in the latest volume of the

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Underwood) that The Man of Mode's "meaning is communicated as

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tions of the sort Hume forces us to reconsider on the Restoration "big

The Pope book of the year is Howard Erskine-Hill's The Social

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Milieu of Alexander Pope (Yale, 1975). It consists of seven long and

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assessment. The result is informative but not altogether satisfying for

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studies of Defoe are, not very suprisingly, about selfhood in tlhe

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derives from his metaphysical expansiveness, his attempts to soar; his

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affirm and to turn against," as he says, "are both aspects of self-

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with being the "seminal essay on Cervantes as the paradigmatic

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Thomas Maresca's Epic to Novel (Ohio State, 1974) finds

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Rhetorical Fiction (Chicago, 1974) focuses on one kind of fable, the

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with his treatment as he either glides over or misunderstands each.

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eventually becomes) does not seem to contribute more than an

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particular on Richardson's use of theater and prison metaphors.

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bear Adamn Smith's passages on spectators and observers in his

Sterne's stature and the interest of scholars, critics, and students

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Further, since "Walter [is] devoted to logic and analogy, Toby to

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At any rate, after reading Cash we can no longer doubt how

As we have seen, especially in the one major book on poetry

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E. P. Thompson, whose Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black

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who wants the freedom to choose between serving king or country.

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S. Kraemer's Drawings of Benjamin West is another fine study-and-

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