|
English literature
|
The 18th century
|
Richard Steele
Joseph Addison
Alexander Pope
PART I.
"The Rape
of the Lock"
Illustration by Aubrey
Beardsley,
PART II.
"An Essay
on Man"
James Thomson
Matthew Prior
John Gay
"The Beggar's Opera"
John Arbuthnot
"History of John Bull",
Caricatures of John Bull
Jonathan Swift
I.
"Gulliver's Travels"
,
II. "A
VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT",
III. "A
VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG"
IV. "A
VOYAGE TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB,
AND JAPAN",
V. "A
VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS"
Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of
Shaftesbury
Bernard de Mandeville
William Law
John Dennis
Francis
Hutcheson
Joseph
Butler
David Hume
"AN
ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING",
"A TREATISE OF
HUMAN NATURE",
"THE NATURAL
HISTORY OF RELIGION"
Edmund
Burke
Adam Smith
William Robertson
Adam
Ferguson
|
|
|
Publication of political literature
The expiry of the
Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press.
During the next 20 years there were to be 10 general
elections. These two factors combined to produce an enormous
growth in the publication of political literature. Senior
politicians, especially Robert Harley, saw the potential
importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a
wavering electorate, and numberless hack writers produced
copy for the presses. Richer talents also played their part.
Harley, for instance, instigated
Daniel Defoe’s industrious
work on the Review (1704–13), which consisted, in essence,
of a regular political essay defending, if often by
indirection, current governmental policy. He also secured
Jonathan Swift’s polemical skills for contributions to The
Examiner (1710–11). Swift’s most ambitious intervention in
the paper war, again overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of
the Allies (1711), a devastatingly lucid argument against
any further prolongation of the War of the Spanish
Succession. Writers such as
Defoe and
Swift did not confine
themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their
pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and
invented personae to carry the attack home. In doing so,
both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity
that was conventional at the time. According to contemporary
testimony, one of Defoe’s anonymous works, The Shortest-Way
with the Dissenters (1702), so brilliantly sustained its
impersonation of a High Church extremist, its supposed
narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing.
Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe
in his novels and for Swift in his prose satires.
Journalism
The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary
appetite for reading matter generally and, in the increasing
sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers,
assisted in preparing the way for the astonishing growth in
popularity of narrative fiction during the subsequent
decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of
the 18th century: periodical journalism. After Defoe’s
Review the great innovation in this field came with the
achievements of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in
The
Tatler (1709–11) and then The Spectator (1711–12). In a
familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics,
from politics to fashion, from aesthetics to the development
of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished
to see a purification of manners after the laxity of the
Restoration and wrote extensively, with descriptive and
reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their
political allegiances were Whig, and in their creation of
Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the
landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities,
but feckless and anachronistic. Contrariwise, they spoke
admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a
healthy, and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison,
the more original of the two, was an adventurous literary
critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his
enthusiastic account of Chevy Chase and hymned the pleasures
of the imagination in a series of papers deeply influential
on 18th-century thought. His long, thoughtful, and probing
examen of Milton’s Paradise Lost played a major role in
establishing the poem as the great epic of English
literature and as a source of religious wisdom. The success
with which Addison and Steele established the periodical
essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that
they were to have more than 300 imitators before the end of
the century. The awareness of their society and curiosity
about the way it was developing, which they encouraged in
their eager and diverse readership, left its mark on much
subsequent writing.
Later in the century other periodical forms developed.
Edward Cave invented the idea of the “magazine,” founding
the hugely successful Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731. One of
its most prolific early contributors was the young
Samuel
Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of Johnson’s
career, as it was for writers such as
Fielding and
Goldsmith. The practice and the status of criticism were
transformed in mid-century by the Monthly Review (founded
1749) and the Critical Review (founded 1756). The latter was
edited by
Tobias Smollett. From this period the influence of
reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to
acknowledge their importance.
Richard Steele
born 1672, Dublin, Ire.
died Sept. 1, 1729, Carmarthen, Carmarthenshire,
Wales
English essayist, dramatist, journalist, and
politician, best known as principal author (with
Joseph Addison) of the periodicals The Tatler
and The Spectator.
Early life and works.
Steele’s father, an ailing and somewhat
ineffectual attorney, died when the son was
about five, and the boy was taken under the
protection of his uncle Henry Gascoigne,
confidential secretary to the Duke of Ormonde,
to whose bounty, as Steele later wrote, he owed
“a liberal education.” He was sent to study in
England at Charterhouse in 1684 and to Christ
Church, Oxford, in 1689. At Charterhouse he met
Joseph Addison, and thus began one of the most
famous and fruitful of all literary friendships,
which lasted until disagreements (mainly
political) brought about a cooling and a final
estrangement shortly before Addison’s death in
1719. Steele moved to Merton College in 1691
but, caught up with the excitement of King
William’s campaigns against the French, left in
1692 without taking a degree to join the army.
He was commissioned in 1697 and promoted to
captain in 1699, but, lacking the money and
connections necessary for substantial
advancement, he left the army in 1705.
Meanwhile, he had embarked on a second
career, as a writer. Perhaps partly because he
gravely wounded a fellow officer in a duel in
1700 (an incident that inspired a lifelong
detestation of dueling), partly because of
sincere feelings of disgust at the
“irregularity” of army life and his own
dissipated existence, he published in 1701 a
moralistic tract, “The Christian Hero,” of which
10 editions were sold in his lifetime. This
tract led to Steele’s being accused of hypocrisy
and mocked for the contrast between his austere
precepts and his genially convivial practice.
For many of his contemporaries, however, its
polite tone served as evidence of a significant
cultural change from the Restoration (most
notably, it advocated respectful behaviour
toward women). The tract’s moralistic tenor
would be echoed in Steele’s plays. In the same
year (1701) Steele wrote his first comedy, The
Funeral. Performed at Drury Lane “with more than
expected success,” this play made his reputation
and helped to bring him to the notice of King
William and the Whig leaders. Late in 1703 he
followed this with his only stage failure, The
Lying Lover, which ran for only six nights,
being, as Steele said, “damned for its piety.”
Sententious and ill-constructed, with much
moralizing, it is nevertheless of some
historical importance as one of the first
sentimental comedies.
A third play, The Tender Husband, with which
Addison helped him (1705), had some success, but
Steele continued to search for advancement and
for money. In the next few years he secured
various minor appointments, and in 1705,
apparently actuated by mercenary motives, he
married a widow, Margaret Stretch, who owned
considerable property in Barbados. Almost
immediately the estate was entangled in his
debts (he lost two actions for debt, with
damages, in 1706), but, when, late in 1706,
Margaret conveniently died, she left her husband
with a substantial income. Steele’s second
marriage, contracted within a year of Margaret’s
death, was to Mary Scurlock, who was completely
adored by Steele, however much he might at times
neglect her. His hundreds of letters and notes
to her (she is often addressed as “Dear Prue”)
provide a vivid revelation of his personality
during the 11 years of their marriage. Having
borne him four children (of whom only the
eldest, Elizabeth, long survived Richard), she
died, during pregnancy, in 1718.
Mature life and works.
Steele’s most important appointment in the
early part of Queen Anne’s reign was that of
gazetteer—writer of The London Gazette, the
official government journal. Although this
reinforced his connection with the Whig leaders,
it gave little scope for his artistic talents,
and, on April 12, 1709, he secured his place in
literary history by launching the thrice-weekly
essay periodical The Tatler. Writing under the
name (already made famous by the satirist
Jonathan Swift) of Isaac Bickerstaff, Steele
created the mixture of entertainment and
instruction in manners and morals that was to be
perfected in The Spectator. “The general purpose
of the whole,” wrote Steele, “has been to
recommend truth, innocence, honour, and virtue,
as the chief ornaments of life”; and here, as in
the later periodical, can be seen his strong
ethical bent, his attachment to the simple
virtues of friendship, frankness, and
benevolence, his seriousness of approach
tempered by the colloquial ease and lightness of
his style. Addison contributed some 46 papers
and collaborated in several others, but the
great bulk of the 271 issues were by Steele
himself, and, apart from bringing him fame, it
brought a measure of prosperity. The exact cause
of The Tatler’s demise is uncertain, but
probably the reasons were mainly political: in
1710 power had shifted to the Tories and Steele,
a Whig, had lost his gazetteership and had come
near to losing his post of commissioner of
stamps. The Tatler had contained a good deal of
political innuendo, some of it aimed at Robert
Harley, the Tory leader, himself, and Harley may
well have put pressure on Steele to discontinue
the paper.
The Tatler’s greater successor, first
appearing on March 1, 1711, was avowedly
nonpolitical and was enormously successful. The
Spectator was a joint venture; Steele’s was
probably the more original journalistic flair,
and he evolved many of the most celebrated ideas
and characters (such as Sir Roger de Coverley),
although later Addison tended to develop them in
his own way. Steele’s attractive, often casual
style formed a perfect foil for Addison’s more
measured, polished, and erudite writing. Of the
555 daily numbers, Steele contributed 251
(though about two-thirds made up from
correspondents’ letters).
Of Steele’s many later ventures into
periodical journalism, some, such as The
Englishman, were mainly politically partisan.
The Guardian (to which Addison contributed
substantially) contains some of his most
distinguished work, and The Lover comprises 40
of his most attractive essays. Other,
short-lived, periodicals, such as The Reader,
Town-Talk, and The Plebeian, contain matter of
considerable political importance. Steele
became, indeed, the chief journalist of the
Whigs in opposition (1710–14), his writings
being marked by an unusual degree of principle
and integrity. His last extended literary work
was The Theatre, a biweekly periodical.
Steele’s political writings had stirred up
enough storms to make his career far from
smooth. He resigned as commissioner of stamps in
1713 and was elected to Parliament, but, as a
consequence of his anti-Tory pamphlets “The
Importance of Dunkirk Consider’d” and “The
Crisis” (advocating the Hanoverian succession),
he was expelled from the House of Commons for
“seditious writings.” Calmer weather, however,
and rewards followed on George I’s accession:
Steele was appointed to the congenial and fairly
lucrative post of governor of Drury Lane Theatre
in 1714, knighted in 1715, and reelected to
Parliament in the same year.
Steele’s health was gradually undermined by
his cheerful intemperance, and he was long
plagued by gout. Nevertheless, he busied himself
conscientiously with parliamentary duties and,
more erratically, with his part in the
management of Drury Lane. One of his main
contributions to that theatre’s prosperity was
his last and most successful comedy, The
Conscious Lovers (1722)—one of the most popular
plays of the century and perhaps the best
example of English sentimental comedy.
In 1724 Steele retired to his late wife’s
estate in Wales and began to settle his debts.
His closing years were quiet, but his health
continued to deteriorate.
Assessment.
Both as man and writer Steele is one of the
most attractive figures of his time, much of his
writing—easy, rapid, slipshod, but deeply
sincere—reflecting his personality. “There
appears in his natural temper,” wrote his
contemporary, the philosopher George Berkeley,
“something very generous and a great benevolence
to mankind.” An emotional, impetuous,
good-natured, and idealistic man, he always
found it easier to get money than to keep it,
and his career can be seen as in part shaped by
the constant need to keep his head above the
waters of debt.
Reginald P.C. Mutter
|
|
|
Joseph Addison
born May 1, 1672, Milston,
Wiltshire, England
died June 17, 1719, London
English essayist, poet, and dramatist, who, with
Richard Steele, was a leading contributor to and
guiding spirit of the periodicals The Tatler and
The Spectator. His writing skill led to his
holding important posts in government while the
Whigs were in power.
Early life
Addison was the eldest son of the Reverend
Lancelot Addison, later archdeacon of Coventry
and dean of Lichfield. After schooling in
Amesbury and Salisbury and at Lichfield Grammar
School, he was enrolled at age 14 in the
Charterhouse in London. Here began his lifelong
friendship with Richard Steele, who later became
his literary collaborator. Both went on to the
University of Oxford, where Addison matriculated
at Queen’s College in May 1687. Through
distinction in Latin verse he won election as
Demy (scholar) to Magdalen College in 1689 and
took the degree of M.A. in 1693. He was a fellow
from 1697 to 1711. At Magdalen he spent 10 years
as tutor in preparation for a career as a
scholar and man of letters. In 1695 A Poem to
his Majesty (William III), with a dedication to
Lord Keeper Somers, the influential Whig
statesman, brought favourable notice not only
from Somers but also Charles Montague (later
earl of Halifax), who saw in Addison a writer
whose services were of potential use to the
crown. A treasury grant offered him opportunity
for travel and preparation for government
service. He also attained distinction by
contributing the preface to Virgil’s Georgics,
in John Dryden’s great translation of 1697.
The European tour (1699–1704) enabled Addison
not only to become acquainted with English
diplomats abroad but also to meet contemporary
European men of letters. After time in France,
he spent the year 1701 in leisurely travel in
Italy, during which he wrote the prose Remarks
on Several Parts of Italy (1705; rev. ed. 1718)
and the poetic epistle A Letter from Italy
(1704). From Italy Addison crossed into
Switzerland, where, in Geneva, he learned in
March 1702 of the death of William III and the
consequent loss of power of his two chief
patrons, Somers and Halifax. He then toured
through Austria, the German states, and the
Netherlands before returning to England in 1704.
Government service
In London Addison renewed his friendship
with Somers and Halifax and other members of the
Kit-Cat Club, which was an association of
prominent Whig leaders and literary figures of
the day—among them Steele, William Congreve, and
Sir John Vanbrugh. In August 1704 London was
electrified by the news of the duke of
Marlborough’s sweeping victory over the French
at Blenheim, and Addison was approached by
government leaders to write a poem worthy of the
great occasion. Addison was meanwhile appointed
commissioner of appeals in excise, a sinecure
left vacant by the death of John Locke. The
Campaign, addressed to Marlborough, was
published on December 14 (though dated 1705). By
its rejection of conventional classical imagery
and its effective portrayal of Marlborough’s
military genius, it was an immediate success
that perfectly expressed the nation’s great hour
of victory.
The Whig success in the election of May 1705,
which saw the return of Somers and Halifax to
the Privy Council, brought Addison increased
financial security in an appointment as
undersecretary to the secretary of state, a busy
and lucrative post. Addison’s retention in a
new, more powerful Whig administration in the
autumn of 1706 reflected his further rise in
government service. At this time he began to see
much of Steele, helping him write the play The
Tender Husband (1705). In practical ways Addison
also assisted Steele with substantial loans and
the appointment as editor of the official London
Gazette. In 1708 Addison was elected to
Parliament for Lostwithiel in Cornwall, and
later in the same year he was made secretary to
the earl of Wharton, the new lord lieutenant of
Ireland. Addison’s post was in effect that of
secretary of state for Irish affairs, with a
revenue of some £2,000 a year. He served as
Irish secretary until August 1710.
The Tatler and The Spectator
It was during Addison’s term in Ireland that
his friend Steele began publishing The Tatler,
which appeared three times a week under the
pseudonym of Isaac Bickerstaff. Though at first
issued as a newspaper presenting accounts of
London’s political, social, and cultural news,
this periodical soon began investigating English
manners and society, establishing principles of
ideal behaviour and genteel conduct, and
proposing standards of good taste for the
general public. The first number of The Tatler
appeared on April 12, 1709, while Addison was
still in England; but while still in Ireland he
began contributing to the new periodical. Back
in London in September 1709, he supplied most of
the essays during the winter of 1709–10 before
returning to Ireland in May.
The year 1710 was marked by the overturn of
the Whigs from power and a substantial Tory
victory at the polls. Although Addison easily
retained his seat in the Commons, his old and
powerful patrons were again out of favour, and,
for the first time since his appointment as
undersecretary in 1705, Addison found himself
without employment. He was thus able to devote
even more time to literary activity and to
cultivation of personal friendships not only
with Steele and other Kit-Cats but, for a short
period, with Jonathan Swift—until Swift’s shift
of allegiance to the rising Tory leaders
resulted in estrangement. Addison continued
contributing to the final numbers of The Tatler,
which Steele finally brought to a close on
January 2, 1711. Addison had written more than
40 of The Tatler’s total of 271 numbers and had
collaborated with Steele on another 36 of them.
Thanks to Addison’s help The Tatler was an
undoubted success. By the end of 1710 Steele had
enough material for a collected edition of The
Tatler. Thereupon, he and Addison decided to
make a fresh start with a new periodical. The
Spectator, which appeared six days a week, from
March 1, 1711, to December 6, 1712, offered a
wide range of material to its readers, from
discussion of the latest fashions to serious
disquisitions on criticism and morality,
including Addison’s weekly papers on John
Milton’s Paradise Lost and the series on the
“pleasures of the imagination.” From the start,
Addison was the leading spirit in The
Spectator’s publication, contributing 274
numbers in all. In bringing learning “out of
closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to
dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables,
and in coffee-houses,” The Spectator was
eminently successful. One feature of The
Spectator that deserves particular mention is
its critical essays, in which Addison sought to
elevate public taste. He devoted a considerable
proportion of his essays to literary criticism,
which was to prove influential in the subsequent
development of the English novel. His own gift
for drawing realistic human characters found
brilliant literary expression in the members of
the Spectator Club, in which such figures as
Roger de Coverley, Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew
Freeport, and the Spectator himself represent
important sections of contemporary society. More
than 3,000 copies of The Spectator were
published daily, and the 555 numbers were then
collected into seven volumes. Two years later
(from June 18 to December 20, 1714), Addison
published 80 additional numbers, with the help
of two assistants, and these were later
reprinted as volume eight.
Addison’s other notable literary production
during this period was his tragedy Cato.
Performed at Drury Lane on April 14, 1713, the
play was a resounding success—largely, no doubt,
because of the political overtones that both
parties read into the play. To the Whigs Cato
seemed the resolute defender of liberty against
French tyranny, while the Tories were able to
interpret the domineering Caesar as a kind of
Roman Marlborough whose military victories were
a threat to English liberties. The play enjoyed
an unusual run of 20 performances in April and
May 1713 and continued to be performed
throughout the century.
Later years
With the death of Queen Anne on August 1,
1714, and the accession of George I, Addison’s
political fortunes rose. He was appointed
secretary to the regents (who governed until the
arrival of the new monarch from Hanover) and in
April 1717 was made secretary of state. Ill
health, however, forced him to resign the
following year. Meanwhile, he had married the
dowager countess of Warwick and spent the
remaining years of his life in comparative
affluence at Holland House in Kensington. A
series of political essays, The Free-Holder, or
Political Essays, was published from December
23, 1715, to June 29, 1716, and his comedy The
Drummer was produced at Drury Lane on March 10,
1716.
Meanwhile, Addison had a quarrel with the
most gifted satirist of the age, Alexander Pope,
who after Addison’s death would make him the
subject of one of the most celebrated satiric
“characters” in the English language. In 1715
Pope had been angered by Addison’s support of a
rival translation of the Iliad by Thomas
Tickell, and in 1735 Pope published “An Epistle
to Dr. Arbuthnot,” in which there appears a
notable portrait of Addison as a narcissistic
and envious man of letters. A second quarrel
further embittered Addison; the dispute over a
bill for restricting the peerage, in which he
and Steele took opposing sides, estranged the
two friends during the last year of Addison’s
life. Addison was buried in Westminster Abbey,
near the grave of his old patron and friend Lord
Halifax.
Assessment
Addison’s poem on the Battle of Blenheim
brought him to the attention of Whig leaders and
paved the way to government employment and
literary fame. He became an influential
supporter of the Whigs (who sought to further
the constitutional principles established by the
Glorious Revolution) in a number of government
posts. As a writer, Addison produced one of the
great tragedies of the 18th century in Cato, but
his principal achievement was to bring to
perfection the periodical essay in his journal,
The Spectator. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s praise of
The Spectator as a model of prose style
established Addison as one of the most admired
and influential masters of prose in the
language.
Donald F. Bond
Ed.
|
Major political writers
Pope
Alexander Pope contributed to
The Spectator and moved for a
time in Addisonian circles; but from about 1711 onward, his
more-influential friendships were with Tory intellectuals.
His early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on
Criticism (1711) combining ambition of argument with great
stylistic assurance and Windsor Forest (1713) achieving an
ingenious, late-Stuart variation on the 17th-century mode of
topographical poetry. The mock-heroic
The Rape of the Lock
(final version published in 1714) is an astonishing feat,
marrying a rich range of literary allusiveness and a
delicately ironic commentary upon the contemporary social
world with a potent sense of suppressed energies threatening
to break through the civilized veneer. It explores with
great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet (a pair of
five-stress rhyming lines). Much of the wit of Pope’s verse
derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion,
and antithesis. That he could also write successfully in a
more plaintive mode is shown by Eloisa to Abelard (1717),
which, modeled on Ovid’s heroic epistles, enacts with moving
force Eloisa’s struggle to reconcile grace with nature,
virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labours
between 1713 and 1720 was his energetically sustained and
scrupulous translation of Homer’s Iliad (to be followed by
the Odyssey in the mid-1720s). His Iliad secured his
reputation and made him a considerable sum of money.
From the 1720s on, Pope’s view of the transformations
wrought in Robert Walpole’s England by economic
individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered
and despairing. In this he was following a common Tory
trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the writings of his
friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount
Bolingbroke. Pope’s Essay on Man (1733–34) was a grand
systematic attempt to buttress the notion of a God-ordained,
perfectly ordered, all-inclusive hierarchy of created
things. But his most probing and startling writing of these
years comes in the four Moral Essays (1731–35), the series
of Horatian imitations, and the final four-book version of
The Dunciad (1743), in which he turns to anatomize with
outstanding imaginative resource the moral anarchy and
perversion of once-hallowed ideals he sees as typical of the
commercial society in which he must perforce live.
Alexander Pope
PART I.
"The Rape of the Lock"
Illustration by Aubrey
Beardsley
PART II.
"An Essay on Man"
born May 21, 1688, London, England
died May 30, 1744, Twickenham, near London
poet and satirist of the English Augustan
period, best known for his poems An Essay on
Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock
(1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on
Man (1733–34). He is one of the most
epigrammatic of all English authors.
Pope’s father, a wholesale linen merchant,
retired from business in the year of his son’s
birth and in 1700 went to live at Binfield in
Windsor Forest. The Popes were Roman Catholics,
and at Binfield they came to know several
neighbouring Catholic families who were to play
an important part in the poet’s life. Pope’s
religion procured him some lifelong friends,
notably the wealthy squire John Caryll (who
persuaded him to write The Rape of the Lock, on
an incident involving Caryll’s relatives) and
Martha Blount, to whom Pope addressed some of
the most memorable of his poems and to whom he
bequeathed most of his property. But his
religion also precluded him from a formal course
of education, since Catholics were not admitted
to the universities. He was trained at home by
Catholic priests for a short time and attended
Catholic schools at Twyford, near Winchester,
and at Hyde Park Corner, London, but he was
mainly self-educated. He was a precocious boy,
eagerly reading Latin, Greek, French, and
Italian, which he managed to teach himself, and
an incessant scribbler, turning out verse upon
verse in imitation of the poets he read. The
best of these early writings are the Ode on
Solitude and a paraphrase of St. Thomas ą
Kempis, both of which he claimed to have written
at age 12.
Early works
Windsor Forest was near enough to London to
permit Pope’s frequent visits there. He early
grew acquainted with former members of John
Dryden’s circle, notably William Wycherley,
William Walsh, and Henry Cromwell. By 1705 his
Pastorals were in draft and were circulating
among the best literary judges of the day. In
1706 Jacob Tonson, the leading publisher of
poetry, had solicited their publication, and
they took the place of honour in his Poetical
Miscellanies in 1709.
This early emergence of a man of letters may
have been assisted by Pope’s poor physique. As a
result of too much study, so he thought, he
acquired a curvature of the spine and some
tubercular infection, probably Pott’s disease,
that limited his growth and seriously impaired
his health. His full-grown height was 4 feet 6
inches (1.4 metres), but the grace of his
profile and fullness of his eye gave him an
attractive appearance. He was a lifelong
sufferer from headaches, and his deformity made
him abnormally sensitive to physical and mental
pain. Though he was able to ride a horse and
delighted in travel, he was inevitably precluded
from much normal physical activity, and his
energetic, fastidious mind was largely directed
to reading and writing.
When the Pastorals were published, Pope was
already at work on a poem on the art of writing.
This was An Essay on Criticism, published in
1711. Its brilliantly polished epigrams (e.g.,
“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” “To
err is human, to forgive, divine,” and “For
fools rush in where angels fear to tread”),
which have become part of the proverbial
heritage of the language, are readily traced to
their sources in Horace, Quintilian, Boileau,
and other critics, ancient and modern, in verse
and prose; but the charge that the poem is
derivative, so often made in the past, takes
insufficient account of Pope’s success in
harmonizing a century of conflict in critical
thinking and in showing how nature may best be
mirrored in art.
The well-deserved success of An Essay on
Criticism brought Pope a wider circle of
friends, notably Richard Steele and Joseph
Addison, who were then collaborating on The
Spectator. To this journal Pope contributed the
most original of his pastorals, The Messiah
(1712), and perhaps other papers in prose. He
was clearly influenced by The Spectator’s policy
of correcting public morals by witty
admonishment, and in this vein he wrote the
first version of his mock epic, The Rape of the
Lock (two cantos, 1712; five cantos, 1714), to
reconcile two Catholic families. A young man in
one family had stolen a lock of hair from a
young lady in the other. Pope treated the
dispute that followed as though it were
comparable to the mighty quarrel between Greeks
and Trojans, which had been Homer’s theme.
Telling the story with all the pomp and
circumstance of epic made not only the
participants in the quarrel but also the society
in which they lived seem ridiculous. Though it
was a society where
…Britain’s statesmen oft the fall foredoom
Of foreign tyrants, and of nymphs at home;
as if one occupation concerned them as much
as the other, and though in such a society a
young lady might do equally ill to
…Stain her honour, or her new brocade;
Forget her pray’rs, or miss a masquerade;
Pope managed also to suggest what genuine
attractions existed amid the foppery. It is a
glittering poem about a glittering world. He
acknowledged how false the sense of values was
that paid so much attention to external
appearance, but ridicule and rebuke slide
imperceptibly into admiration and tender
affection as the heroine, Belinda, is conveyed
along the Thames to Hampton Court, the scene of
the “rape”:
But now secure the painted vessel glides,
The sunbeams trembling on the floating tides:
While melting music steals upon the sky,
And soften’d sounds along the waters die;
Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,
Belinda smil’d, and all the world was gay.
A comparable blend of seemingly incompatible
responses—love and hate, bawdiness and decorum,
admiration and ridicule—is to be found in all
Pope’s later satires. The poem is thick with
witty allusions to classical verse and, notably,
to Milton’s Paradise Lost. The art of allusion
is an element of much of Pope’s poetry.
Pope had also been at work for several years
on Windsor-Forest. In this poem, completed and
published in 1713, he proceeded, as Virgil had
done, from the pastoral vein to the georgic and
celebrated the rule of Queen Anne as the Latin
poet had celebrated the rule of Augustus. In
another early poem,Eloisa to Abelard, Pope
borrowed the form of Ovid’s “heroic epistle” (in
which an abandoned lady addresses her lover) and
showed imaginative skill in conveying the
struggle between sexual passion and dedication
to a life of celibacy.
Homer and The Dunciad
These poems and other works were collected
in the first volume of Pope’s Works in 1717.
When it was published, he was already far
advanced with the greatest labour of his life,
his verse translation of Homer. He had announced
his intentions in October 1713 and had published
the first volume, containing the Iliad, Books
I–IV, in 1715. The Iliad was completed in six
volumes in 1720. The work of translating the
Odyssey (vol. i–iii, 1725; vol. iv and v, 1726)
was shared with William Broome, who had
contributed notes to the Iliad, and Elijah
Fenton. The labour had been great, but so were
the rewards. By the two translations Pope
cleared about £10,000 and was able to claim
that, thanks to Homer, he could “…live and
thrive / Indebted to no Prince or Peer alive.”
The merits of Pope’s Homer lie less in the
accuracy of translation and in correct
representation of the spirit of the original
than in the achievement of a heroic poem as his
contemporaries understood it: a poem Virgilian
in its dignity, moral purpose, and pictorial
splendour, yet one that consistently kept Homer
in view and alluded to him throughout. Pope
offered his readers the Iliad and the Odyssey as
he felt sure Homer would have written them had
he lived in early 18th-century England.
Political considerations had affected the
success of the translation. As a Roman Catholic,
he had Tory affiliations rather than Whig; and
though he retained the friendship of such Whigs
as William Congreve, Nicholas Rowe, and the
painter Charles Jervas, his ties with Steele and
Addison grew strained as a result of the
political animosity that occurred at the end of
Queen Anne’s reign. He found new and lasting
friends in Tory circles—Jonathan Swift, John
Gay, John Arbuthnot, Thomas Parnell, the earl of
Oxford, and Viscount Bolingbroke. He was
associated with the first five in the Scriblerus
Club (1713–14), which met to write joint satires
on pedantry, later to mature as Peri Bathouse;
or, The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728) and the
Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741); and these
were the men who encouraged his translation of
Homer. The Whigs, who associated with Addison at
Button’s Coffee-House, put up a rival translator
in Thomas Tickell, who published his version of
the Iliad, Book I, two days after Pope’s.
Addison preferred Tickell’s manifestly inferior
version; his praise increased the resentment
Pope already felt because of a series of slights
and misunderstandings; and when Pope heard
gossip of further malice on Addison’s part, he
sent him a satiric view of his character,
published later as the character of Atticus, the
insincere arbiter of literary taste in An
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735).
Even before the Homer quarrel, Pope had found
that the life of a wit was one of perpetual
warfare. There were few years when either his
person or his poems were not objects of attacks
from the critic John Dennis, the bookseller
Edmund Curll, the historian John Oldmixon, and
other writers of lesser fame. The climax was
reached over his edition of Shakespeare. He had
emended the plays, in the spirit of a literary
editor, to accord with contemporary taste
(1725), but his practice was exposed by the
scholar Lewis Theobald in Shakespeare Restored
(1726). Though Pope had ignored some of these
attacks, he had replied to others with squibs in
prose and verse. But he now attempted to make an
end of the opposition and to defend his
standards, which he aligned with the standards
of civilized society, in the mock epic The
Dunciad (1728). Theobald was represented in it
as the Goddess of Dullness’s favourite son, a
suitable hero for those leaden times, and others
who had given offense were preserved like flies
in amber. Pope dispatches his victims with such
sensuousness of verse and imagery that the
reader is forced to admit that if there is
petulance here, as has often been claimed, it
is, to parody Wordsworth, petulance recollected
in tranquillity. Pope reissued the poem in 1729
with an elaborate mock commentary of prefaces,
notes, appendixes, indexes, and errata; this
burlesque of pedantry whimsically suggested that
The Dunciad had fallen a victim to the spirit of
the times and been edited by a dunce.
Life at Twickenham
Pope and his parents had moved from Binfield
to Chiswick in 1716. There his father died
(1717), and two years later he and his mother
rented a villa on the Thames at Twickenham, then
a small country town where several Londoners had
retired to live in rustic seclusion. This was to
be Pope’s home for the remainder of his life.
There he entertained such friends as Swift,
Bolingbroke, Oxford, and the painter Jonathan
Richardson. These friends were all enthusiastic
gardeners, and it was Pope’s pleasure to advise
and superintend their landscaping according to
the best contemporary principles, formulated in
his Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl
of Burlington (1731). This poem, one of the most
characteristic works of his maturity, is a
rambling discussion in the manner of Horace on
false taste in architecture and design, with
some suggestions for the worthier employment of
a nobleman’s wealth.
Pope now began to contemplate a new work on
the relations of man, nature, and society that
would be a grand organization of human
experience and intuition, but he was destined
never to complete it. An Essay on Man (1733–34)
was intended as an introductory book discussing
the overall design of this work. The poem has
often been charged with shallowness and
philosophical inconsistency, and there is indeed
little that is original in its thought, almost
all of which can be traced in the work of the
great thinkers of Western civilization.
Subordinate themes were treated in greater
detail in Of the Use of Riches, an Epistle to
Bathurst (1732), An Epistle to Cobham, of the
Knowledge and Characters of Men (1733), and Of
the Characters of Women: An Epistle to a Lady
(1735).
Pope was deflected from this “system of
ethics in the Horatian way” by the renewed need
for self-defense. Critical attacks drove him to
consider his position as satirist. He chose to
adapt for his own defense the first satire of
Horace’s second book, where the ethics of satire
are propounded, and, after discussing the
question in correspondence with Dr. John
Arbuthnot, he addressed to him an epistle in
verse (1735), one of the finest of his later
poems, in which were incorporated fragments
written over several years. His case in An
Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot was a traditional one:
that depravity in public morals had roused him
to stigmatize outstanding offenders beyond the
reach of the law, concealing the names of some
and representing others as types, and that he
was innocent of personal rancour and habitually
forbearing under attack.
The success of his First Satire of the Second
Book of Horace, Imitated (1733) led to the
publication (1734–38) of 10 more of these
paraphrases of Horatian themes adapted to the
contemporary social and political scene. Pope’s
poems followed Horace’s satires and epistles
sufficiently closely for him to print the Latin
on facing pages with the English, but whoever
chose to make the comparison would notice a
continuous enrichment of the original by
parenthetic thrusts and compliments, as well as
by the freshness of the imagery. The series was
concluded with two dialogues in verse,
republished as the Epilogue to the Satires
(1738), where, as in An Epistle to Dr.
Arbuthnot, Pope ingeniously combined a defense
of his own career and character with a
restatement of the satirist’s traditional
apology. In these imitations and dialogues, Pope
directed his attack upon the materialistic
standards of the commercially minded Whigs in
power and upon the corrupting effect of money,
while restating and illustrating the old
Horatian standards of serene and temperate
living. His anxiety about prevailing standards
was shown once more in his last completed work,
The New Dunciad (1742), reprinted as the fourth
book of a revised Dunciad (1743), in which
Theobald was replaced as hero by Colley Cibber,
the poet laureate and actor-manager, who not
only had given more recent cause of offense but
seemed a more appropriate representative of the
degenerate standards of the age. In Dunciad,
Book IV, the Philistine culture of the city of
London was seen to overtake the court and seat
of government at Westminster, and the poem ends
in a magnificent but baleful prophecy of
anarchy. Pope had begun work on Brutus, an epic
poem in blank verse, and on a revision of his
poems for a new edition, but neither was
complete at his death.
The death of Alexander Pope from Museus, a threnody by William Mason.
Diana holds the dying Pope, and John Milton,
Edmund Spenser, and Geoffrey Chaucer prepare to welcome him to heaven.
Assessment
Pope’s favourite metre was the 10-syllable
iambic pentameter rhyming (heroic) couplet. He
handled it with increasing skill and adapted it
to such varied purposes as the epigrammatic
summary of An Essay on Criticism, the pathos of
Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, the
mock heroic of The Rape of the Lock, the
discursive tones of An Essay on Man, the rapid
narrative of the Homer translation, and the
Miltonic sublimity of the conclusion of The
Dunciad. But his greatest triumphs of
versification are found in the Epilogue to the
Satires, where he moves easily from witty,
spirited dialogue to noble and elevated
declamation, and in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,
which opens with a scene of domestic irritation
suitably conveyed in broken rhythm:
Shut, shut the door, good John! fatigu’d, I
said:
Tie up the knocker, say I’m sick, I’m dead.
The Dog-star rages! nay ’tis past a doubt,
All Bedlam, or Parnassus, is let out:
Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land;
and closes with a deliberately chosen
contrast of domestic calm, which the poet may be
said to have deserved and won during the course
of the poem:
Me, let the tender office long engage
To rock the cradle of reposing age,
With lenient arts extend a mother’s breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep a while one parent from the sky!
Pope’s command of diction is no less happily
adapted to his theme and to the type of poem,
and the range of his imagery is remarkably wide.
He has been thought defective in imaginative
power, but this opinion cannot be sustained in
view of the invention and organizing ability
shown notably in The Rape of the Lock and The
Dunciad. He was the first English poet to enjoy
contemporary fame in France and Italy and
throughout the European continent and to see
translations of his poems into modern as well as
ancient languages.
John Everett Butt
Ed.
|
Thomson, Prior, and Gay
James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but
his poetry sustained a much more optimistic vision. In The
Seasons (first published as a complete entity in 1730 but
then massively revised and expanded until 1746), Thomson
meditated upon and described with fascinated precision the
phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of
erudition and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of
post-Civil War science (especially Newtonian science), from
whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed
of man’s relationship to, and cultivation of, nature
provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization and
wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his
judgment, contemporary England enjoyed. The diction of The
Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian
echoes. In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson’s model is
Spenserian, and its wryly developed allegory lauds the
virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement.
A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special
urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat and politician of some
distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the
Vanity of the World (1718), a disquisition on the vanity of
human knowledge, but who also wrote some of the most direct
and coolly elegant love poetry of the period. Prior’s
principal competitor as a writer of light verse was
John
Gay, whose Trivia; or, The Art of Walking the Streets of
London (1716) catalogues the dizzying diversity of urban
life through a dexterous burlesque of Virgil’s Georgics. His
Fables, particularly those in the 1738 collection, contain
sharp, subtle writing, and his work for the stage,
especially in The What D’Ye Call It (1715), Three Hours
After Marriage (1717; written with John Arbuthnot and
Pope),
and The Beggar’s Opera (1728), shows a sustained ability to
breed original and vital effects from witty generic
cross-fertilization.
James Thomson
(11 September 1700 – 27 August 1748)
JAMES THOMSON, English poet, author of The Seasons,
was born at Ednam, in Roxburghshire, on the 11th
of September 1700 - the third son and fourth
child of Thomas Thomson, minister of that place.
His mother, Beatrix, was the daughter of Mr
Trotter of Fogo, whose wife, Margaret, was one
of the Homes of Bassenden. About 1701 Thomas
Thomson removed to Southdean near Jedburgh. Here
James was educated at first by Robert
Riccaltoun, to whose verses on Winter he owed
the suggestion of his own poem. In 1712 he
attended a school at Jedburgh, held in the aisle
of the parish church. He learnt there some
Latin, but with difficulty, and the earliest
recorded utterance of the future poet was
"Confound the building of Babel." He began very
soon to write verses, and we are told that every
January he destroyed almost all the productions
of the preceding year. And this was just as
well, for the little that has escaped the fire
contains no promise of his future powers.
In 1715 he went to the university of
Edinburgh. It is said that as soon as the
servant who brought him thither had quitted him,
he returned full speed to his father's house,
declaring that he could read just as well at
home; he went back, however. He made friends at
the university with David Mallock, who
afterwards called himself Mallet, and with
Patrick Murdoch, his Suture biographer. In 1719
he became a divinity student, and one of his
exercises so enchanted a certain Auditor Benson,
that he urged Thomson to go to London and there
make himself a reputation as a preacher. It was
partly with this object that Thomson left
Edinburgh without a degree in March 1725. His
mother saw him embark, and they never met again;
she died on the 10th of May of that year.
There is sufficient evidence that on his
arrival in London he was not in the extreme
destitution which Dr Johnson attributes to him;
and in July 1725 we find him engaged, as a
make-shift, in teaching "Lord Binning's son to
read." This son was the grandson of Lady Grizel
Baillie, a somewhat distant connexion of
Thomson's mother. She was the daughter of Sir
Patrick Home, whom, after the defeat of Argyll,
she fed in his concealment near his own castle;
she was also, like other Scottish ladies, a
writer of pretty ballads. This heroine and
poetess is supposed to have encouraged Thomson
to come to England, and it is certain that she
procured him a temporary home. But he had other
friends, especially Duncan Forbes of Culloden,
by whom he was recommended to the duke of
Argyll, the earl of Burlington, Sir Robert
Walpole, Arbuthnot, Pope and Gay. Some
introductions to the literary world he may have
owed to Mallet, then tutor in the family of the
duke of Montrose.
Thomson's Winter appeared in March 1726. It
was warmly praised by Aaron Hill, a man of
various interests and projects, and in his day a
sort of literary oracle. It was dedicated to Sir
Spencer Compton, the Speaker, who rewarded the
poet, to his great disgust, with a bare twenty
guineas. By the 11th of June 1727 a second
edition was called for. Meanwhile Thomson was
residing at Mr Watts's academy in Tower Street
as tutor to Lord George Graham, second son of
the duke of Montrose, and previously a pupil of
Mallet.
Summer appeared in 1727. It was dedicated in
prose, a compliment afterwards versified, to
Bubb Dodington. In the same year Thomson
published his Poem to the Memory of Sir Isaac
Newton, with a fulsome dedication to Sir Robert
Walpole, which was afterwards omitted, and the
verses themselves remodelled when the poet began
to inveigh against the ministry as he did in
Britannia, published in 1729.
Spring appeared in 1728, published by Andrew
Millar, a man who, according to Johnson, dealt
handsomely by authors and "raised the price of
literature." It was dedicated to the countess of
Hertford, afterwards duchess of Somerset, a lady
devoted to letters and the patroness of the
unhappy Savage. In 1729 Thomson produced
Sophonisba, a tragedy now only remembered by the
line "O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O," and the
parody "O Jemmy Thomson, Jemmy Thomson, O,"
which caused him to remodel the unhappy verse in
the form, "O Sophonisba, I am wholly thine." A
poem, anonymous but unquestionably Thomson's, to
the memory of Congreve who had died in January
1729, appeared in that year.
In 1730 Autumn was first published in a
collected edition of The Seasons. It was
dedicated to the Speaker, Onslow. In this year,
at the suggestion of Rundle, bishop of Derry,
one of his patrons, he accompanied the son of
Sir Charles Talbot, solicitor-general, upon his
travels. In the course of these he projected his
Liberty as "a poetical landscape of countries,
mixed with moral observations on their
government and people." In December 1731 he
returned with his pupil to London. He probably
lived with his patrons the Talbots, leisurely
meditating his new poem, the first part of which
did not appear until the close of 1734 or the
beginning of 1735. But meanwhile his pupil died,
and in the opening lines of Liberty, Thomson
pays a tribute to his memory. Two months after
his son's death Sir Charles Talbot became
chancellor and gave Thomson a sinecure in the
court of chancery. About this time the poet
worked for the relief of Dennis, now old and in
extreme poverty, and induced even Pope to give a
half-contemptuous support to the bitter critic
of the Rape of the Lock.
Liberty was completed in five parts in 1736.
The poem was a failure; its execution did not
correspond with its design; in a sense indeed it
is a survey of countries and might have
anticipated Goldsmith's Traveller. It was not,
however, the poem which readers were expecting
from the author of The Seasons, who had taken
them from the town to the country, and from
social and political satire to the world of
nature. It is in the main a set of wearisome
declamations put in the mouth of the goddess,
and Johnson rightly enough remarks that "an
enumeration of examples to prove a position
which nobody denied as it was from the beginning
superfluous, must quickly grow disgusting." The
truth is that Thomson's poetical gift was for
many years perverted by the zeal of
partisanship.
He was established in May 1736 in a small
house at Richmond, but his patron died in
February 1737 and he lost his sinecure; he then
"whips and spurs" to finish his tragedy
Agamemnon, which appeared in April 1738, not
before he had been arrested for a debt of £70,
from which, according to a story which has been
discredited on quite insufficient grounds, Quin
relieved him in the most generous and tactful
manner. Quin, it is said, visited him in the
sponging-house and "balanced accounts with him"
by insisting on his accepting a hundred pounds
as a return for the pleasure which the actor had
received from the poet's works. The incident
took place probably a little before the
production of Agamemnon, in which Quin played
the leading part. The play is of course modelled
upon Aeschylus and owes whatever of dignity it
possesses to that fact; the part of Cassandra,
for instance, retains something of its original
force, pathos and terror. But most of the other
characters exist only for the purpose of
political innuendo. Agamemnon is too long absent
at Troy, as George is too long absent in
Germany; the arts of Aegisthus are the arts of
Walpole; the declamations of Arcus are the
declamations of Wyndham or Pulteney; Melisander,
consoling himself with the muses on his island
in Cyclades, is Bolingbroke in exile.
Thomson about this time was introduced to
Lyttelton, and by him to the prince of Wales,
and to one or the other of these, when he was
questioned as to the state of his affairs, he
made answer that they were "in a more poetical
posture than formerly." Agamemnon was put upon
the stage soon after the passing of Walpole's
bill for licensing plays, and its obvious bias
fixed the attention of the censorship and caused
Thomson's next venture, Edward and Eleanora,
which has the same covert aim, to be proscribed.
The fact has very generally escaped notice that,
like its predecessor, it follows a Greek
original, the Alcestis of Euripides. It has
also, what Agamemnon has not, some little place
in the history of literature, for it suggested
something to Lessing for Nathan der Weise, and
to Scott for the Talisman. The rejection of the
play was defended by one of the ministry on the
ground that Thomson had taken a Liberty which
was not agreeable to Britannia in any Season.
These circumstances sufficiently account for the
poet's next experiment, a preface to Milton's
Areopagitica.
He joined Mallet in composing the masque of
Alfred, represented at Clieveden on the Thames
before the prince of Wales, on the 1st of August
1740. There can be little question that "Rule
Britannia," a song in this drama, was the
production of Thomson. The music of the song, as
of the whole masque, was composed by Arne. In
1744 Thomson was appointed surveyor-general of
the Leeward Islands by Lyttelton with an income
of £500 a year; but his patron fell into
disfavour with the prince of Wales, and in
consequence Thomson lost, at the close of 1747,
the pension he received from that quarter. For a
while, however, he was in flourishing
circumstances, and whilst completing at his
leisure The Castle of Indolence produced Tancred
and Sigismunda at Drury Lane in 1745. The story
is found in Gil Blas, and is ultimately to be
traced to The Decameron. It owes much to Le Sage
in language, plot and sentiment, and the
conflict of emotion, in depicting which Thomson
had some little skill, is here effectively
exhibited. He was assisted herein by his own
experience. The "Amanda" of The Seasons is a
Miss Elizabeth Young, a lady of Scottish
parentage, whose mother was ambitious for her
and forbade her to marry the poet, anticipating
that she would be reduced to singing his ballads
in the streets. The last years of his life were
saddened by this disappointment.
The Castle of Indolence, after a gestation of
fifteen years, appeared in May 1748. It is in
the Spenserian stanza with the Spenserian
archaism, and is the first and last long effort
of Thomson in rhyme. It is not impossible that
his general choice of blank verse was partly due
to the fact that he had not the southron's ear
and took many years to acquire it. The great and
varied interest of the poem might well rescue it
from the neglect into which even The Seasons has
fallen. It was worthy of an age which was
fertile in character-sketches, and like Gay's
Welcome to Pope anticipates Goldsmith's
Retaliation in the lifelike presentation of a
noteworthy circle. There is in it the same
strain of gentle burlesque which appears in
Shenstone's Schoolmistress, whilst the tone and
diction of the poem harmonize with the hazy
landscape, the pleasant land of drowsyhead, in
which it is set. It is the last work by Thomson
which appeared in his lifetime.
In walking from London to his house at
Richmond he became heated and took a boat at
Hammersmith; he thus caught a chill with fatal
consequences and died on the 27th of August
1748. He was buried in Richmond churchyard. His
tragedy Coriolanus was acted for the first time
in January 1749. In itself a feeble performance,
it is noteworthy for the prologue which his
friend Lyttelton wrote for it, two lines of
which "He loved his friends - forgive the
gushing tear! Alas! I feel I am no actor here"
were recited by Quin with no simulated emotion.
It may be questioned whether Thomson himself
ever quite realized the distinctive significance
of his own achievement in The Seasons, or the
place which criticism assigns him as the pioneer
of a special literary movement and the precursor
of Cowper and Wordsworth. His avowed preference
was for great and worthy themes of which the
world of nature was but one. Both the choice and
the treatment of his next great subject,
Liberty, indicate that he was imperfectly
conscious of the gift that was in him, and might
have neglected it but that his readers were
wiser than himself. He has many audacities and
many felicities of expression, and enriched the
vocabulary even of the poets who have disparaged
him. Yet it is difficult to believe that he was
not the better for that training in refinement
of style which he partly owed to Pope, who
almost unquestionably contributed some passages
to The Seasons. And, except in The Castle of
Indolence, there is much that is conventional,
much that is even vicious or vulgar in taste
when Thomson's muse deals with that human life
which must be the background of descriptive as
of all other poetry; for example, his bumpkin
who chases the rainbow is as unreal a being as
Akenside's more sentimental rustic who has "the
form of beauty smiling at his heart."
But if Thomson sometimes lacks the true
vision for things human, he retains it always
for things mute and material, and whilst the
critical estimate of his powers and influence
will vary from age to age, all who have read him
will concur in the colloquial judgment which
only candour could have extorted from the
prejudice of Dr Johnson- "Thomson had as much of
the poet about him as most writers. Everything
appeared to him through the medium of his
favourite pursuit. He could not have viewed
those two candles burning but with a poetical
eye."
D. C. Tovey
|
|
|
Matthew Prior
Matthew Prior (21 July 1664 – 18
September 1721) was an English poet and
diplomat.
Prior was the son of a Nonconformist joiner
at Wimborne Minster, East Dorset. His father
moved to London, and sent him to Westminster
School, under Dr. Busby. On his father's death,
he left school, and was cared for by his uncle,
a vintner in Channel Row. Here Lord Dorset found
him reading Horace, and set him to translate an
ode. He did so well that the earl offered to
contribute to the continuation of his education
at Westminster. One of his schoolfellows and
friends was Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of
Halifax. It was to avoid being separated from
Montagu and his brother James that Prior
accepted, against his patron's wish, a
scholarship recently founded at St John's
College, Cambridge. He took his B.A. degree in
1686, and two years later became a fellow. In
collaboration with Montagu he wrote in 1687 the
City Mouse and Country Mouse, in ridicule of
John Dryden's The Hind and the Panther.
It was an age when satirists could be sure of
patronage and promotion. Montagu was promoted at
once, and Prior, three years later, became
secretary to the embassy at the Hague. After
four years of this, he was appointed a gentleman
of the King's bedchamber. Apparently he acted as
one of the King's secretaries, and in 1697 he
was secretary to the plenipotentiaries who
concluded the Peace of Ryswick. Prior's talent
for affairs was doubted by Pope, who had no
special means of judging, but it is not likely
that King William would have employed in this
important business a man who had not given proof
of diplomatic skill and grasp of details.
The poet's knowledge of French is specially
mentioned among his qualifications, and this was
recognized by his being sent in the following
year to Paris in attendance on the English
ambassador. At this period Prior could say with
good reason that "he had commonly business
enough upon his hands, and was only a poet by
accident." To verse, however, which had laid the
foundation of his fortunes, he still
occasionally trusted as a means of maintaining
his position. His occasional poems during this
period include an elegy on Queen Mary in 1695; a
satirical version of Boileau's Ode sur le prise
de Namur (1695); some lines on William's escape
from assassination in 1696; and a brief piece
called The Secretary.
After his return from France Prior became
under-secretary of state and succeeded John
Locke as a commissioner of trade. In 1701 he sat
in Parliament for East Grinstead. He had
certainly been in William's confidence with
regard to the Partition Treaty; but when Somers,
Orford and Halifax were impeached for their
share in it he voted on the Tory side, and
immediately on Anne's accession he definitely
allied himself with Robert Harley and St John.
Perhaps in consequence of this for nine years
there is no mention of his name in connection
with any public transaction. But when the Tories
came into power in 1710 Prior's diplomatic
abilities were again called into action, and
until the death of Anne he held a prominent
place in all negotiations with the French court,
sometimes as secret agent, sometimes in an
equivocal position as ambassador's companion,
sometimes as fully accredited but very
unpunctually paid ambassador. His share in
negotiating the Treaty of Utrecht, of which he
is said to have disapproved personally, led to
its popular nickname of "Matt's Peace."
When the Queen died and the Whigs regained
power, he was impeached by Robert Walpole and
kept in close custody for two years (1715–1717).
In 1709, he had already published a collection
of verse. During this imprisonment, maintaining
his cheerful philosophy, he wrote his longest
humorous poem, Alma; or, The Progress of the
Mind. This, along with his most ambitious work,
Solomon, and other Poems on several Occasions,
was published by subscription in 1718. The sum
received for this volume (4000 guineas), with a
present of £4000 from Lord Harley, enabled him
to live in comfort; but he did not long survive
his enforced retirement from public life,
although he bore his ups and downs with rare
equanimity. He died at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire,
a seat of the earl of Oxford, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey, where his monument may be
seen in Poets' Corner. A History of his Own Time
was issued by J Bancks in 1740. The book
pretended to be derived from Prior's papers, but
it is doubtful how far it should be regarded as
authentic.
Prior's poems show considerable variety, a
pleasant scholarship and great executive skill.
The most ambitious, i.e. Solomon, and the
paraphrase of The Nut-Brown Maid, are the least
successful. But Alma, an admitted imitation of
Samuel Butler, is a delightful piece of wayward
easy humour, full of witty turns and
well-remembered allusions, and Prior's mastery
of the octo-syllabic couplet is greater than
that of Jonathan Swift or Pope. His tales in
rhyme, though often objectionable in their
themes, are excellent specimens of narrative
skill; and as an epigrammatist he is unrivalled
in English. The majority of his love songs are
frigid and academic, mere wax-flowers of
Parnassus; but in familiar or playful efforts,
of which the type are the admirable lines To a
Child of Quality, he has still no rival.
"Prior's"—says Thackeray, himself no mean
proficient in this kind—"seem to me amongst the
easiest, the richest, the most charmingly
humorous of English lyrical poems. Horace is
always in his mind, and his song and his
philosophy, his good sense, his happy easy turns
and melody, his loves and his Epicureanism, bear
a great resemblance to that most delightful and
accomplished master."
Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire is said to be
where Prior wrote Henry and Emma, and this is
now commemorated by a plaque. Prior has been
commemorated by other poets as well; Everett
James Ellis named Prior as a significant
influence and source of inspiration.
|
|
William Hogarth A Scene from the "Beggar's Opera"
|
John
Gay
"The
Beggar's Opera"
born , June 30, 1685, Barnstaple, Devon,
Eng.
died Dec. 4, 1732, London
English poet and dramatist, chiefly
remembered as the author of The Beggar’s Opera,
a work distinguished by good-humoured satire and
technical assurance.
A member of an ancient but impoverished
Devonshire family, Gay was educated at the free
grammar school in Barnstaple. He was apprenticed
to a silk mercer in London but was released
early from his indentures and, after a further
short period in Devonshire, returned to London,
where he lived most of his life. Among his early
literary friends were Aaron Hill and Eustace
Budgell, whom he helped in the production of The
British Apollo, a question-and-answer journal of
the day. Gay’s journalistic interests are
clearly seen in a pamphlet, The Present State of
Wit (1711), a survey of contemporary periodical
publications.
From 1712 to 1714 he was steward in the
household of the Duchess of Monmouth, which gave
him leisure and security to write. He had
produced a burlesque of the Miltonic style,
Wine, in 1708, and in 1713 his first important
poem, Rural Sports, appeared. This is a
descriptive and didactic work in two short books
dealing with hunting and fishing but containing
also descriptions of the countryside and
meditations on the Horatian theme of retirement.
In it he strikes a characteristic note of
delicately absurd artificiality, while a
deliberate disproportion between language and
subject pays comic dividends and sets a
good-humoured and sympathetic tone. His finest
poem, Trivia: or, The Art of Walking the Streets
of London (1716), displays an assured and
precise craftsmanship in which rhythm and
diction underline whatever facet of experience
he is describing. A sophisticated lady crossing
the street, for example:
Her shoe disdains the street: the lady fair
With narrow step affects a limping air.
The couplet does not aim to startle the
reader, yet the experience is perfectly
conveyed. Another couplet, on the presence of
spring felt throughout the whole of creation,
states:
The seasons operate on every breast:
’Tis hence that fawns are brisk,
and ladies drest.
Here the effect is at once satirical,
sympathetic, and—in its correlation of the
animal and human kingdoms—philosophical. It is
in such delicate probing of the surface of
social life that Gay excels. The Shepherd’s Week
(1714) is a series of mock classical poems in
pastoral setting; the Fables (two series, 1727
and 1738) are brief, octosyllabic illustrations
of moral themes, often satirical in tone.
Gay’s poetry was much influenced by that of
Alexander Pope, who was a contemporary and close
friend. Gay was a member, together with Pope,
Jonathan Swift, and John Arbuthnot, of the
Scriblerus Club, a literary group that aimed to
ridicule pedantry. These friends contributed to
two of Gay’s satirical plays: The What D’ye Call
It (1715) and Three Hours After Marriage (1717).
His most successful play was The Beggar’s
Opera, produced in London on Jan. 29, 1728, by
the theatre manager John Rich at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields Theatre. It ran for 62 performances (not
consecutive, but the longest run then known). A
story of thieves and highwaymen, it was intended
to mirror the moral degradation of society and,
more particularly, to caricature the prime
minister Sir Robert Walpole and his Whig
administration. It also made fun of the
prevailing fashion for Italian opera. The play
was stageworthy, however, not so much because of
its pungent satire but because of its effective
situations and “singable” songs. The production
of its sequel, Polly, was forbidden by the lord
chamberlain (doubtless on Walpole’s
instructions); but the ban was an excellent
advertisement for the piece, and subscriptions
for copies of the printed edition made more than
£1,000 profit for the author. (It was eventually
produced in 1777, when it had a moderate
success.) His Beggar’s Opera was successfully
transmitted into the 20th century by Bertolt
Brecht and Kurt Weill as Die Dreigroschenoper
(1928; The Threepenny Opera).
“Honest” John Gay lost most of his money
through disastrous investment in South Sea
stock, but he nonetheless left £6,000 when he
died. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, next
to the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and his epitaph
was written by Alexander Pope.
|
|
|
John Arbuthnot
"History of John Bull"
Caricatures of John Bull
born April 1667, Inverbervie, Kincardine,
Scot.
died Feb. 27, 1735, London, Eng.
Scottish mathematician, physician, and
occasional writer, remembered as the close
friend of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and
John Gay and as a founding member of their
famous Scriblerus Club, which aimed to ridicule
bad literature and false learning.
After taking a medical degree in 1696 at the
University of St. Andrews, Arbuthnot became a
fellow of the Royal Society in 1704 and was one
of Queen Anne’s physicians from 1705 until her
death. Though he published mathematical and
other scientific works, his fame rests on his
reputation as a wit and on his satirical
writings. The most important of the latter fall
into two groups. The first consists of a
political allegory dealing with the political
jockeying of the British, French, Spanish, and
Dutch that led up to the Treaty of Utrecht
(1713). Published in five pamphlets, the
earliest appearing in 1712, it was collected in
1727 under the composite title Law is a
Bottom-less Pit; or, The History of John Bull,
and it established and popularized for the first
time the character who was to become the
permanent symbol of England in cartoon and
literature. An edition by A.W. Bower and R.A.
Erickson was published in 1976.
The other satire in which Arbuthnot had an
important share was the Memoirs of Martinus
Scriblerus, a mocking exposure of pedantry,
first published in the 1741 edition of Pope’s
works but largely written as early as 1713–14 by
the members of the Scriblerus Club. The other
members of the club acknowledged Arbuthnot as
the chief contributor and guiding spirit of the
work. Arbuthnot was indifferent to literary
fame, and many of his witticisms and ideas for
satires were later developed by and credited to
his more famous literary friends.
|
 |
John Bull
in literature and political caricature, a
conventional personification of England or of
English character. Bull was invented by the
Scottish mathematician and physician John
Arbuthnot as a character in an extended allegory
that appeared in a series of five pamphlets in
1712 and later in the same year published
collectively as The History of John Bull; he
appeared as an honest clothier, bringing action
with his linen-draper friend Nicholas Frog
(Holland) against Lewis Baboon (Louis XIV) for
interfering with trade. The wide circulation of
the satire fixed Bull as a popular
personification in 18th-century political
writings.
Subsequently, the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars brought John Bull’s first great
period in caricature, when such satirists as
James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson
conventionalized a gross, rather stupid figure,
weighed down with debt or taxation or
oppression, according to the artists’ political
allegiance; but, less than 50 years later, “HB”
(John Doyle) raised John Bull in the social
scale, and he became the portly, prosperous
citizen. This was the typical native
representation, however; hostile foreign
caricature identified him with “perfidious
Albion.”
John Bull’s widest recognition came in the
middle and late 19th century, especially through
the influential cartoons portraying him in the
periodical Punch. The most familiar and frequent
representation was that developed by Punch
cartoonists John Leech and Sir John Tenniel: the
jovial and honest farmer figure, solid and
foursquare, sometimes in Union Jack waistcoat
and with bulldog at heel. John Bull had by now
become so universally familiar that the name
frequently appeared in book, play, and
periodical titles and pictorially as a brand
name or trademark for manufactured goods.
|
|
Swift
Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality
throughout his career, like Gay favoured octosyllabic
couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial
speech. His technical virtuosity allowed him to switch
assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the
intricately textured humour of Verses on the Death of Dr.
Swift (completed in 1732; published 1739) and to the
delicate humanity of his poems to Stella. But his prime
distinction is, of course, as the greatest prose satirist in
the English language. His period as secretary to the
distinguished man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the
chance to extend and consolidate his reading, and his first
major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s
learning to chart the anarchic lunacy of its supposed
creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity,
coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom from Christian or
Classical tradition. Techniques of impersonation were
central to Swift’s art thereafter. The Argument Against
Abolishing Christianity (1708), for instance, offers
brilliant ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger”
controversy through the carefully assumed voice of a
“nominal” Christian. That similar techniques could be
adapted to serve specific political goals is demonstrated by
The Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful
campaign to prevent the imposition of a new, and debased,
coinage on Ireland. Swift had hoped for preferment in the
English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the
ambivalent nature of his relationship to that country and
its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing—above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in
which the ironic use of an invented persona achieves perhaps
its most extraordinary and mordant development. His most
wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous:
Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift grouped himself with Pope
and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the
Hanoverian court, and that preoccupation leaves its mark on
this work. But Gulliver’s Travels also hunts larger prey. At
its heart is a radical critique of human nature in which
subtle ironic techniques work to part the reader from any
comfortable preconceptions and challenge him to rethink from
first principles his notions of man. Its narrator, who
begins as a prideful modern man and ends as a maddened
misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its
satire.
Jonathan Swift
I.
"Gulliver's
Travels"
II. "A
VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT"
III. "A
VOYAGE TO BROBDINGNAG"
IV. "A VOYAGE
TO LAPUTA, BALNIBARBI, LUGGNAGG, GLUBBDUBDRIB, AND JAPAN"
V. "A
VOYAGE TO THE COUNTRY OF THE HOUYHNHNMS"
Irish author and clergyman
pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff
born Nov. 30, 1667, Dublin, Ire.
died Oct. 19, 1745, Dublin
Main
Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English
language. Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he
wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and A Modest Proposal
(1729).
Early life and education
Swift’s father, Jonathan Swift the elder, was an Englishman who had
settled in Ireland after the Stuart Restoration (1660) and become
steward of the King’s Inns, Dublin. In 1664 he married Abigail Erick,
who was the daughter of an English clergyman. In the spring of 1667
Jonathan the elder died suddenly, leaving his wife, baby daughter, and
an unborn son to the care of his brothers. The younger Jonathan Swift
thus grew up fatherless and dependent on the generosity of his uncles.
His education was not neglected, however, and at the age of six he was
sent to Kilkenny School, then the best in Ireland. In 1682 he entered
Trinity College, Dublin, where he was granted his bachelor of arts
degree in February 1686 speciali gratia (“by special favour”), his
degree being a device often used when a student’s record failed, in some
minor respect, to conform to the regulations.
Swift continued in residence at Trinity College as a candidate for
his master of arts degree until February 1689. But the Roman Catholic
disorders that had begun to spread through Dublin after the Glorious
Revolution (1688–89) in Protestant England caused Swift to seek security
in England, and he soon became a member of the household of a distant
relative of his mother named Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, Surrey.
Swift was to remain at Moor Park intermittently until Temple’s death in
1699.
Years at Moor Park
Temple was engaged in writing his memoirs and preparing some of his
essays for publication, and he had Swift act as a kind of secretary.
During his residence at Moor Park, Swift twice returned to Ireland, and
during the second of these visits, he took orders in the Anglican
church, being ordained priest in January 1695. At the end of the same
month he was appointed vicar of Kilroot, near Belfast. Swift came to
intellectual maturity at Moor Park, with Temple’s rich library at his
disposal. Here, too, he met Esther Johnson (the future Stella), the
daughter of Temple’s widowed housekeeper. In 1692, through Temple’s good
offices, Swift received the degree of M.A. at the University of Oxford.
Between 1691 and 1694 Swift wrote a number of poems, notably six
odes. But his true genius did not find expression until he turned from
verse to prose satire and composed, mostly at Moor Park between 1696 and
1699, A Tale of a Tub, one of his major works. Published anonymously in
1704, this work was made up of three associated pieces: the Tale itself,
a satire against “the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and
learning”; the mock-heroic Battle of the Books; and the Discourse
Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, which ridiculed the
manner of worship and preaching of religious enthusiasts at that period.
In the Battle of the Books, Swift supports the ancients in the
longstanding dispute about the relative merits of ancient versus modern
literature and culture. But A Tale of a Tub is the most impressive of
the three compositions. This work is outstanding for its exuberance of
satiric wit and energy and is marked by an incomparable command of
stylistic effects, largely in the nature of parody. Swift saw the realm
of culture and literature threatened by zealous pedantry, while
religion—which for him meant rational Anglicanism—suffered attack from
both Roman Catholicism and the Nonconformist (Dissenting) churches. In
the Tale he proceeded to trace all these dangers to a single source: the
irrationalities that disturb man’s highest faculties—reason and common
sense.
Career as satirist, political journalist, and churchman
After Temple’s death in 1699, Swift returned to Dublin as chaplain and
secretary to the earl of Berkeley, who was then going to Ireland as a
lord justice. During the ensuing years he was in England on some four
occasions—in 1701, 1702, 1703, and 1707 to 1709—and won wide recognition
in London for his intelligence and his wit as a writer. He had resigned
his position as vicar of Kilroot, but early in 1700 he was preferred to
several posts in the Irish church. His public writings of this period
show that he kept in close touch with affairs in both Ireland and
England. Among them is the essay Discourse of the Contests and
Dissensions between the Nobles and the Commons in Athens and Rome, in
which Swift defended the English constitutional balance of power between
the monarchy and the two houses of Parliament as a bulwark against
tyranny. In London he became increasingly well known through several
works: his religious and political essays; A Tale of a Tub; and certain
impish works, including the “Bickerstaff” pamphlets of 1708–09, which
put an end to the career of John Partridge, a popular astrologer, by
first prophesying his death and then describing it in circumstantial
detail. Like all Swift’s satirical works, these pamphlets were published
anonymously and were exercises in impersonation. Their supposed author
was “Isaac Bickerstaff.” For many of the first readers, the very
authorship of the satires was a matter for puzzle and speculation.
Swift’s works brought him to the attention of a circle of Whig writers
led by Joseph Addison, but Swift was uneasy about many policies of the
Whig administration. He was a Whig by birth, education, and political
principle, but he was also passionately loyal to the Anglican church,
and he came to view with apprehension the Whigs’ growing determination
to yield ground to the Nonconformists. He also frequently mimicked and
mocked the proponents of “free thinking”: intellectual skeptics who
questioned Anglican orthodoxy. A brilliant and still-perplexing example
of this is Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1708).
A momentous period began for Swift when in 1710 he once again found
himself in London. A Tory ministry headed by Robert Harley (later earl
of Oxford) and Henry St. John (later Viscount Bolingbroke) was replacing
that of the Whigs. The new administration, bent on bringing hostilities
with France to a conclusion, was also assuming a more protective
attitude toward the Church of England. Swift’s reactions to such a
rapidly changing world are vividly recorded in his Journal to Stella, a
series of letters written between his arrival in England in 1710 and
1713, which he addressed to Esther Johnson and her companion, Rebecca
Dingley, who were now living in Dublin. The astute Harley made overtures
to Swift and won him over to the Tories. But Swift did not thereby
renounce his essentially Whiggish convictions regarding the nature of
government. The old Tory theory of the divine right of kings had no
claim upon him. The ultimate power, he insisted, derived from the people
as a whole and, in the English constitution, had come to be exercised
jointly by king, lords, and commons.
Swift quickly became the Tories’ chief pamphleteer and political
writer and, by the end of October 1710, had taken over the Tory journal,
The Examiner, which he continued to edit until June 14, 1711. He then
began preparing a pamphlet in support of the Tory drive for peace with
France. This, The Conduct of the Allies, appeared on Nov. 27, 1711, some
weeks before the motion in favour of a peace was finally carried in
Parliament. Swift was rewarded for his services in April 1713 with his
appointment as dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin.
Withdrawal to Ireland
With the death of Queen Anne in August 1714 and the accession of George
I, the Tories were a ruined party, and Swift’s career in England was at
an end. He withdrew to Ireland, where he was to pass most of the
remainder of his life. After a period of seclusion in his deanery, Swift
gradually regained his energy. He turned again to verse, which he
continued to write throughout the 1720s and early ’30s, producing the
impressive poem Verses on the Death of Doctor Swift, among others. By
1720 he was also showing a renewed interest in public affairs. In his
Irish pamphlets of this period he came to grips with many of the
problems, social and economic, then confronting Ireland. His tone and
manner varied from direct factual presentation to exhortation, humour,
and bitter irony. Swift blamed Ireland’s backward state chiefly on the
blindness of the English government; but he also insistently called
attention to the things that the Irish themselves might do in order to
better their lot. Of his Irish writings, the Drapier’s Letters (1724–25)
and A Modest Proposal are the best known. The first is a series of
letters attacking the English government for its scheme to supply
Ireland with copper halfpence and farthings. A Modest Proposal is a
grimly ironic letter of advice in which a public-spirited citizen
suggests that Ireland’s overpopulation and dire economic conditions
could be alleviated if the babies of poor Irish parents were sold as
edible delicacies to be eaten by the rich. Both were published
anonymously.
Certain events in Swift’s private life must also be mentioned. Stella
(Esther Johnson) had continued to live with Rebecca Dingley after moving
to Ireland in 1700 or 1701. It has sometimes been asserted that Stella
and Swift were secretly married in 1716, but they did not live together,
and there is no evidence to support this story. It was friendship that
Swift always expressed in speaking of Stella, not romantic love. In
addition to the letters that make up his Journal to Stella, he wrote
verses to her, including a series of wry and touching poems titled On
Stella’s Birthday. The question may be asked, was this friendship
strained as a result of the appearance in his life of another woman,
Esther Vanhomrigh, whom he named Vanessa (and who also appeared in his
poetry)? He had met Vanessa during his London visit of 1707–09, and in
1714 she had, despite all his admonitions, insisted on following him to
Ireland. Her letters to Swift reveal her passion for him, though at the
time of her death in 1723 she had apparently turned against him because
he insisted on maintaining a distant attitude toward her. Stella herself
died in 1728. Scholars are still much in the dark concerning the precise
relationships between these three people, and the various melodramatic
theories that have been suggested rest upon no solid ground.
Swift’s greatest satire, Gulliver’s Travels, was published in 1726.
It is uncertain when he began this work, but it appears from his
correspondence that he was writing in earnest by 1721 and had finished
the whole by August 1725. Its success was immediate. Then, and since, it
has succeeded in entertaining (and intriguing) all classes of readers.
It was completed at a time when he was close to the poet Alexander Pope
and the poet and dramatist John Gay. He had been a fellow member of
their Scriblerus Club since 1713, and through their correspondence, Pope
continued to be one of his most important connections to England.
Last years
The closing years of Swift’s life have been the subject of some
misrepresentation, and stories have been told of his ungovernable temper
and lack of self-control. It has been suggested that he was insane. From
youth he had suffered from what is now known to have been Ménière’s
disease, an affliction of the semicircular canals of the ears, causing
periods of dizziness and nausea. But his mental powers were in no way
affected, and he remained active throughout most of the 1730s—Dublin’s
foremost citizen and Ireland’s great patriot dean. In the autumn of 1739
a great celebration was held in his honour. He had, however, begun to
fail physically and later suffered a paralytic stroke, with subsequent
aphasia. In 1742 he was declared incapable of caring for himself, and
guardians were appointed. After his death in 1745, he was buried in St.
Patrick’s Cathedral. On his memorial tablet is an epitaph of his own
composition, which says that he lies “where savage indignation can no
longer tear his heart.”
Gulliver’s Travels
Swift’s masterpiece was originally published without its author’s name
under the title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. This
work, which is told in Gulliver’s “own words,” is the most brilliant as
well as the most bitter and controversial of his satires. In each of its
four books the hero, Lemuel Gulliver, embarks on a voyage; but shipwreck
or some other hazard usually casts him up on a strange land. Book I
takes him to Lilliput, where he wakes to find himself the giant prisoner
of the six-inch-high Lilliputians. Man-Mountain, as Gulliver is called,
ingratiates himself with the arrogant, self-important Lilliputians when
he wades into the sea and captures an invasion fleet from neighbouring
Blefescu; but he falls into disfavour when he puts out a fire in the
empress’ palace by urinating on it. Learning of a plot to charge him
with treason, he escapes from the island.
Book II takes Gulliver to Brobdingnag, where the inhabitants are
giants. He is cared for kindly by a nine-year-old girl, Glumdalclitch,
but his tiny size exposes him to dangers and indignities, such as
getting his head caught in a squalling baby’s mouth. Also, the giants’
small physical imperfections (such as large pores) are highly visible
and disturbing to him. Picked up by an eagle and dropped into the sea,
he manages to return home.
In Book III Gulliver visits the floating island of Laputa, whose
absent-minded inhabitants are so preoccupied with higher speculations
that they are in constant danger of accidental collisions. He visits the
Academy of Lagado (a travesty of England’s Royal Society), where he
finds its lunatic savants engaged in such impractical studies as
reducing human excrement to the original food. In Luggnagg he meets the
Struldbruggs, a race of immortals, whose eternal senility is brutally
described.
Book IV takes Gulliver to the Utopian land of the Houyhnhnms—grave,
rational, and virtuous horses. There is also another race on the island,
uneasily tolerated and used for menial services by the Houyhnhnms. These
are the vicious and physically disgusting Yahoos. Although Gulliver
pretends at first not to recognize them, he is forced at last to admit
the Yahoos are human beings. He finds perfect happiness with the
Houyhnhnms, but as he is only a more advanced Yahoo, he is rejected by
them in general assembly and is returned to England, where he finds
himself no longer able to tolerate the society of his fellow human
beings.
Gulliver’s Travels’s matter-of-fact style and its air of sober
reality confer on it an ironic depth that defeats oversimple
explanations. Is it essentially comic, or is it a misanthropic
depreciation of mankind? Swift certainly seems to use the various races
and societies Gulliver encounters in his travels to satirize many of the
errors, follies, and frailties that human beings are prone to. The
warlike, disputatious, but essentially trivial Lilliputians in Book I
and the deranged, impractical pedants and intellectuals in Book III are
shown as imbalanced beings lacking common sense and even decency. The
Houyhnhnms, by contrast, are the epitome of reason and virtuous
simplicity, but Gulliver’s own proud identification with these horses
and his subsequent disdain for his fellow humans indicates that he too
has become imbalanced, and that human beings are simply incapable of
aspiring to the virtuous rationality that Gulliver has glimpsed.
Assessment
Swift’s intellectual roots lay in the rationalism that was
characteristic of late 17th-century England. This rationalism, with its
strong moral sense, its emphasis on common sense, and its distrust of
emotionalism, gave him the standards by which he appraised human
conduct. At the same time, however, he provided a unique description of
reason’s weakness and of its use by men and women to delude themselves.
His moral principles are scarcely original; his originality lies rather
in the quality of his satiric imagination and his literary art. Swift’s
literary tone varies from the humorous to the savage, but each of his
satiric compositions is marked by concentrated power and directness of
impact. His command of a great variety of prose styles is unfailing, as
is his power of inventing imaginary episodes and all their accompanying
details. Swift rarely speaks in his own person; almost always he states
his views by ironic indiscretion through some imagined character like
Lemuel Gulliver or the morally obtuse citizen of A Modest Proposal. Thus
Swift’s descriptive passages reflect the minds that are describing just
as much as the things described. Pulling in different directions, this
irony creates the tensions that are characteristic of Swift’s best work,
and reflects his vision of humanity’s ambiguous position between
bestiality and reasonableness.
Ricardo Quintana
|
Shaftesbury and others
More-consoling doctrine was available in the popular
writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of Shaftesbury,
which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners,
Opinions, Times (1711). Although Shaftesbury had been
tutored by Locke, he dissented from the latter’s rejection
of innate ideas and posited that man is born with a moral
sense that is closely associated with his sense of aesthetic
form. The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically
idealistic, benevolent, gently reasonable, and unmistakably
aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial than now
seems likely: such religion as is present there is Deistic,
and the philosopher seems warmer toward pagan than Christian
wisdom.
Anthony Ashley Cooper,
3rd earl of Shaftesbury
born Feb. 26, 1671, London, Eng.
died Feb. 15, 1713, Naples [Italy]
English politician and philosopher,
grandson of the famous 1st earl and one of the
principal English Deists.
His early education was directed by John
Locke, and he attended Winchester College. He
entered Parliament in 1695 and, succeeding as
3rd Earl of Shaftesbury in 1699, attended
Parliament regularly in the House of Lords for
the remainder of William III’s reign. He pursued
an independent policy in the House of Lords as
well as in the House of Commons. In July 1702 he
retired from public life.
Shaftesbury’s philosophy owed something to
the Cambridge Platonists, who had stressed the
existence in man of a natural moral sense.
Shaftesbury advanced this concept against both
the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Fall and
against the premise that the state of nature was
a state of unavoidable warfare.
Shaftesbury’s Neoplatonism, his contention
that what man sees of beauty or truth is only a
shadow of absolute beauty or truth, dominated
his attitude to religion and to the arts. During
his lifetime his fame as a writer was
comparatively slight, for he published little
before 1711; in that year appeared his
Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times, in which his chief works were assembled.
The effect of this book was immediate and was
felt on the European continent as well as in
England; indeed, English Deism was transmitted
to Germany almost entirely through translations
of his writings. Alexander Pope, Joseph Butler,
Francis Hutcheson, Mark Akenside, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and Immanuel Kant were among those
who were to some degree affected by Shaftesbury.
|
His optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville, whose
Fable of the Bees (1714–29), which includes The Grumbling
Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest (1705), takes a closer look
at early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to
do. Mandeville stressed the indispensable role played by the
ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing society’s
prosperous functioning. He thus favoured an altogether
harsher view of man’s natural instincts than Shaftesbury did
and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to
oppose the various contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical
and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw it.
Indeed, he is less a philosopher than a satirist of the
philosophies of others, ruthlessly skewering unevidenced
optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue.
He was, in his turn, the target of acerbic rebukes by,
among others, William Law, John Dennis, and Francis
Hutcheson.
George Berkeley, who criticized both
Mandeville
and Shaftesbury, set himself against what he took to be the
age’s irreligious tendencies and the obscurantist defiance
by some of his philosophical forbears of the truths of
common sense. His Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and
Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-century debates about
the nature of human perception, to which René Descartes and
John Locke had contributed. The extreme lucidity and
elegance of his style contrast markedly with the
more-effortful but intensely earnest prose of Joseph
Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to
confront contemporary skepticism and ponders scrupulously
the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
In a series of works beginning with
A Treatise of Human
Nature (1739–40),
David Hume identified himself as a key
spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly
the human mind’s propensity to work by sequences of
association and juxtaposition rather than by reason. He
uniquely merged intellectual rigour with stylistic elegance,
writing many beautifully turned essays, including the
lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain
(1754–62) and his piercingly skeptical Dialogues Concerning
Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779. Edmund
Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) merged psychological and
aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the spectator’s
or reader’s delight in the sublime depended upon a sensation
of pleasurable pain. An equally bold assumption about human
psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious, socially
oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of
Adam
Smith’s masterpiece of laissez-faire economic theory, An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776). Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with
others such as Hutcheson, William Robertson, and
Adam
Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment—a flowering of
intellectual life centred in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the
second half of the 18th century.
Bernard de Mandeville
born November 1670, Rotterdam, Neth.
died Jan. 21, 1733, Hackney, London, Eng.
Dutch prose writer and philosopher who won
European fame with The Fable of the Bees.
Mandeville graduated in medicine from the
University of Leiden in March 1691 and started
to practice but very soon went abroad. Arriving
in England to learn the language, he “found the
Country and the Manners of it agreeable” and
settled in London. In 1699 he married an
Englishwoman, with whom he had two children. His
professional reputation in London was soon
established, and he attracted the friendship and
patronage of important persons.
Mandeville’s first works in English were
burlesque paraphrases from the 17th-century
French poet Jean de La Fontaine and the
17th-century French writer Paul Scarron.
The 1714 edition of Mandeville’s most
important work, The Fable of the Bees, was
subtitled Private Vices, Publick Benefits and
consisted of a preface, the text of The
Grumbling Hive, an “Enquiry into the Origin of
Moral Virtue,” and “Remarks” on the poem. The
1723 edition included an examination of “The
Nature of Society” and provoked a long
controversy. The 1729 edition remodeled the
entire argument to suit Mandeville’s
philosophical commitment but nevertheless
retained something of the original purpose of
diverting readers.
Mandeville’s argument in The Fable, a
paradoxical defense of the usefulness of
“vices,” is based on his definition of all
actions as equally vicious in that they are all
motivated by self-interest. Yet while the
motives must be vicious, the results of action
are often socially beneficial, since they
produce the wealth and comforts of civilization.
|
|
|
William Law
born 1686, King’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire,
Eng.
died April 9, 1761, King’s Cliffe
English author of influential works on Christian
ethics and mysticism.
He entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1705
and in 1711 was elected a fellow there and was
ordained. Upon the accession of George I in
1714, however, he was dismissed from Cambridge
as a nonjuror (refusing to take an oath of
allegiance). By 1727 he was serving as tutor to
Edward Gibbon, father of the historian. From
1740 Law lived in retirement at his birthplace.
His chief contribution lies in his
delineation of the Christian ethical ideal for
human life and its actualization through the
disciplined practices of private mysticism. His
Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection
(1726) and his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy
Life (1728), considered his best work, both
espouse a mild mysticism within the bounds of
the normative Christian tradition. His stress
upon the union between the Creator and the
creature, however, as expressed in The Way to
Divine Knowledge (1752), The Spirit of Prayer
(1749), and The Spirit of Love (1752), has
seldom found acceptance among Christian moral
theologians. Each of these works was strongly
criticized by such contemporaries as John
Wesley. Nevertheless John and Charles Wesley
both expressed an indebtedness to Law’s work.
|
|
|
John Dennis
born , 1657, London, Eng.
died Jan. 6, 1734, London
English critic and dramatist whose insistence
upon the importance of passion in poetry led to
a long quarrel with Alexander Pope.
Educated at Harrow School and the University of
Cambridge, Dennis traveled in Europe before
settling in London, where he met leading
literary figures. At first he wrote odes and
plays, but, although a prolific dramatist, he
was never very successful.
The most important of Dennis’ critical works
are The Usefulness of the Stage (1698), The
Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry
(1701), The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry
(1704), and An Essay on the Genius and Writings
of Shakespear (1712). His basic contention was
that literature, and especially drama, is
comparable to religion in that its effect is to
move men’s minds by means of the emotions. What
Dennis looked for primarily in a work of art was
passion and elevation rather than decorum and
polish. His idol among English poets was John
Milton, and he had an enthusiasm for the
sublime, a concept that was newly fashionable in
England and France. This bias may explain
Dennis’ antipathy toward Pope and probably
accounts for the hostility between them. Pope,
who thought Dennis’ work bombastic, included an
adverse allusion to Dennis in his “Essay on
Criticism.” Dennis replied with Reflections
Critical and Satyrical (1711), which mixed
criticism of Pope’s poem with a vicious personal
attack upon Pope as “a hunch-back’d toad” whose
deformed body mirrored a deformed mind. Despite
a temporary reconciliation, the quarrel
continued sporadically until Dennis’ death.
Dennis figures a good deal in Pope’s mock epic
The Dunciad (1728), especially in its sarcastic
footnotes. Dennis also defended the drama
against the English bishop Jeremy Collier’s
condemnation of it in 1698. Dennis argued that
plays discouraged disaffection by spreading
pleasure and providing exercise for the
passions.
|
|
|
Francis
Hutcheson
born Aug. 8, 1694, Drumalig, County Down,
Ire.
died 1746, Glasgow
Scots-Irish philosopher and major exponent of
the theory of the existence of a moral sense
through which man can achieve right action.
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Hutcheson
studied philosophy, classics, and theology at
the University of Glasgow (1710–16) and then
founded a private academy in Dublin in 1719. In
1729 he returned to Glasgow as professor of
moral philosophy, a position he held until his
death.
Hutcheson was licensed as a preacher in 1719
by Irish Presbyterians in Ulster, but in 1738
the Glasgow presbytery challenged his belief
that people can have a knowledge of good and
evil without, and prior to, a knowledge of God.
His standing as a popular preacher was
undiminished, however, and the celebrated
Scottish philosopher David Hume sought his
opinion of the rough draft of the section “Of
Human Morals” in Hume’s Treatise of Human
Nature.
Hutcheson’s ethical theory was propounded in
his Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of
Beauty and Virtue (1725), in An Essay on the
Nature and Conduct of the Passions and
Affections, with Illustrations upon the Moral
Sense (1728), and in the posthumous System of
Moral Philosophy, 2 vol. (1755). In his view,
besides his five external senses, man has a
variety of internal senses, including a sense of
beauty, of morality, of honour, and of the
ridiculous. Of these, Hutcheson considered the
moral sense to be the most important. He
believed that it is implanted in man and
pronounces instinctively and immediately on the
character of actions and affections, approving
those that are virtuous and disapproving those
that are vicious. Hutcheson’s moral criterion
was whether or not an act tends to promote the
general welfare of mankind. He thus anticipated
the Utilitarianism of the English thinker Jeremy
Bentham, even to his use of the phrase “the
greatest happiness for the greatest number.”
Hutcheson was also influential as a logician and
theorist of human knowledge.
|
|
|
Joseph
Butler
born May 18, 1692, Wantage, Berkshire,
England
died June 16, 1752, Bath, Somerset
Church of England bishop, moral philosopher,
preacher to the royal court, and influential
author who defended revealed religion against
the rationalists of his time.
Ordained in 1718, Butler became preacher at the
Rolls Chapel in London, where he delivered his
famous “Sermons on Human Nature” (1726),
addressed to the practical side of Christian
living. After several years as a parish priest,
he was appointed in 1736 head chaplain to
Caroline, wife of King George II. In the same
year, he published his most celebrated work, The
Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to
the Constitution and Course of Nature, attacking
Deist writers whose approach to God consisted in
arguing rationally from nature rather than from
faith in the doctrine of revelation. Butler
sought to demonstrate that nature and natural
religion were encumbered with the same kind of
uncertainties as revealed religion. The book,
together with the Wesleyan revival, silenced the
importance of Christian Deism in England. His Of
the Nature of Virtue, appended to the Analogy,
presented a refutation of hedonism and of the
notion that self-interest is the ultimate
principle of good conduct; for this work Butler
has been considered by some critics to be one of
the foremost British moral philosophers.
After the queen died in 1737, Butler went in
1738 to Bristol as bishop. His abilities as
chaplain, however, had impressed the king, and
in 1746 Butler was recalled to the royal
household. A year later Butler declined an offer
to become primate (archbishop of Canterbury),
but in 1750 he accepted the bishopric of Durham.
Among the many thinkers subsequently influenced
by his arguments in favour of traditional
theology was the Roman Catholic cardinal John
Henry Newman (1801–90).
|
|
|
David Hume
"AN
ENQUIRY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING"
"A TREATISE OF
HUMAN NATURE"
"THE NATURAL
HISTORY OF RELIGION"
Scottish philosopher
born May 7 [April 26, Old Style], 1711, Edinburgh, Scot.
died Aug. 25, 1776, Edinburgh
Main
Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known
especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism.
Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive, experimental science
of human nature. Taking the scientific method of the English physicist
Sir Isaac Newton as his model and building on the epistemology of the
English philosopher John Locke, Hume tried to describe how the mind
works in acquiring what is called knowledge. He concluded that no theory
of reality is possible; there can be no knowledge of anything beyond
experience. Despite the enduring impact of his theory of knowledge, Hume
seems to have considered himself chiefly as a moralist.
Early life and works
Hume was the younger son of Joseph Hume, the modestly circumstanced
laird, or lord, of Ninewells, a small estate adjoining the village of
Chirnside, about nine miles distant from Berwick-upon-Tweed on the
Scottish side of the border. David’s mother, Catherine, a daughter of
Sir David Falconer, president of the Scottish court of session, was in
Edinburgh when he was born. In his third year his father died. He
entered Edinburgh University when he was about 12 years old and left it
at 14 or 15, as was then usual. Pressed a little later to study law (in
the family tradition on both sides), he found it distasteful and instead
read voraciously in the wider sphere of letters. Because of the
intensity and excitement of his intellectual discovery, he had a nervous
breakdown in 1729, from which it took him a few years to recover.
In 1734, after trying his hand in a merchant’s office in Bristol, he
came to the turning point of his life and retired to France for three
years. Most of this time he spent at La Flèche on the Loire, in the old
Anjou, studying and writing A Treatise of Human Nature. The Treatise was
Hume’s attempt to formulate a full-fledged philosophical system. It is
divided into three books: book I, on understanding, aims at explaining
man’s process of knowing, describing in order the origin of ideas, the
ideas of space and time, causality, and the testimony of the senses;
book II, on the “passions” of man, gives an elaborate psychological
machinery to explain the affective, or emotional, order in man and
assigns a subordinate role to reason in this mechanism; book III, on
morals, describes moral goodness in terms of “feelings” of approval or
disapproval that a person has when he considers human behaviour in the
light of the agreeable or disagreeable consequences either to himself or
to others. Although the Treatise is Hume’s most thorough exposition of
his thought, at the end of his life he vehemently repudiated it as
juvenile, avowing that only his later writings presented his considered
views. The Treatise is not well constructed, in parts oversubtle,
confusing because of ambiguity in important terms (especially “reason”),
and marred by willful extravagance of statement and rather theatrical
personal avowals. For these reasons his mature condemnation of it was
perhaps not entirely misplaced. Book I, nevertheless, has been more read
in academic circles than any other of his writings.
Returning to England in 1737, he set about publishing the Treatise.
Books I and II were published in two volumes in 1739; book III appeared
the following year. The poor reception of this, his first and very
ambitious work, depressed him; but his next venture, Essays, Moral and
Political (1741–42), won some success. Perhaps encouraged by this, he
became a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh in
1744. Objectors alleged heresy and even atheism, pointing to the
Treatise as evidence. Unsuccessful, Hume left the city, where he had
been living since 1740, and began a period of wandering: a sorry year
near St. Albans as tutor to the mad marquess of Annandale (1745–46); a
few months as secretary to Gen. James St. Clair (a member of a prominent
Scottish family), with whom he saw military action during an abortive
expedition to Brittany (1746); a little tarrying in London and at
Ninewells; and then some further months with General St. Clair on an
embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin (1748–49).
Mature works
During his years of wandering Hume was earning the money that he needed
to gain leisure for his studies. Some fruits of these studies had
already appeared before the end of his travels, viz., a further Three
Essays, Moral and Political (1748) and Philosophical Essays Concerning
Human Understanding (1748). The latter is a rewriting of book I of the
Treatise (with the addition of his essay “On Miracles,” which became
notorious for its denial that a miracle can be proved by any amount or
kind of evidence); it is better known as An Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, the title Hume gave to it in a revision of 1758. The
Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) was a rewriting of
book III of the Treatise. It was in these works that Hume expressed his
mature thought.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is an attempt to define the
principles of human knowledge. It poses in logical form significant
questions about the nature of reasoning in regard to matters of fact and
experience, and it answers them by recourse to the principle of
association. The basis of his exposition is a twofold classification of
objects of awareness. In the first place, all such objects are either
“impressions,” data of sensation or of internal consciousness, or
“ideas,” derived from such data by compounding, transposing, augmenting,
or diminishing. That is to say, the mind does not create any ideas but
derives them from impressions. From this Hume develops a theory of
meaning. A word that does not stand directly for an impression has
meaning only if it brings before the mind an object that can be gathered
from an impression by one of the mental processes mentioned. In the
second place, there are two approaches to construing meaning, an
analytical one, which concentrates on the “relations of ideas,” and an
empirical one, which focuses on “matters of fact.” Ideas can be held
before the mind simply as meanings, and their logical relations to one
another can then be detected by rational inspection. The idea of a plane
triangle, for example, entails the equality of its internal angles to
two right angles, and the idea of motion entails the ideas of space and
time, irrespective of whether there really are such things as triangles
and motion. Only on this level of mere meanings, Hume asserts, is there
room for demonstrative knowledge. Matters of fact, on the other hand,
come before the mind merely as they are, revealing no logical relations;
their properties and connections must be accepted as they are given.
That primroses are yellow, that lead is heavy, and that fire burns
things are facts, each shut up in itself, logically barren. Each, so far
as reason is concerned, could be different: the contradictory of every
matter of fact is conceivable. Therefore, any demonstrative science of
fact is impossible.
From this basis Hume develops his doctrine about causality. The idea
of causality is alleged to assert a necessary connection among matters
of fact. From what impression, then, is it derived? Hume states that no
causal relation among the data of the senses can be observed, for, when
a person regards any events as causally connected, all that he does and
can observe is that they frequently and uniformly go together. In this
sort of togetherness it is a fact that the impression or idea of the one
event brings with it the idea of the other. A habitual association is
set up in the mind; and, as in other forms of habit, so in this one, the
working of the association is felt as compulsion. This feeling, Hume
concludes, is the only discoverable impressional source of the idea of
causality.
Mature works » Belief
Hume then considers the process of causal inference, and in so doing he
introduces the concept of belief. When a person sees a glass fall, he
not only thinks of its breaking but expects and believes that it will
break; or, starting from an effect, when he sees the ground to be
generally wet, he not only thinks of rain but believes that there has
been rain. Thus belief is a significant component in the process of
causal inference. Hume then proceeds to investigate the nature of
belief, claiming that he was the first to do so. He uses this term in
the narrow sense of belief regarding matters of fact. He defines belief
as a sort of liveliness or vividness that accompanies the perception of
an idea. A belief is more than an idea; it is a vivid or lively idea.
This vividness is originally possessed by some of the objects of
awareness, by impressions and the simple memory images of them. By
association it comes to belong to certain ideas as well. In the process
of causal inference, then, an observer passes from an impression to an
idea regularly associated with it. In the process the aspect of
liveliness proper to the impression infects the idea, Hume asserts. And
it is this aspect of liveliness that Hume defines as the essence of
belief.
Hume does not claim to prove that the propositions, (1) that events
themselves are causally related and (2) that they will be related in the
future in the same ways as they were in the past, are false. He firmly
believed both of these propositions and insisted that everybody else
believed them, will continue to believe them, and must continue to
believe them in order to survive. They are natural beliefs,
inextinguishable propensities of human nature, madness apart. What Hume
claims to prove is that natural beliefs are not obtained and cannot be
demonstrated either by empirical observation or by reason, whether
intuitive or inferential. Reflection shows that there is no evidence for
them and shows also both that we are bound to believe them and that it
is sensible or sane to do so. This is Hume’s skepticism: it is an
affirmation of that tension, a denial not of belief but of certainty.
Mature works » Morals and historical writing
The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals is a refinement of
Hume’s thinking on morality, in which he views sympathy as the fact of
human nature lying at the basis of all social life and personal
happiness. Defining morality as those qualities that are approved (1) in
whomsoever they happen to be and (2) by virtually everybody, he sets
himself to discover the broadest grounds of the approvals. He finds
them, as he found the grounds of belief, in “feelings,” not in
“knowings.” Moral decisions are grounded in moral sentiment. Qualities
are valued either for their utility or for their agreeableness, in each
case either to their owners or to others. Hume’s moral system aims at
the happiness of others (without any such formula as “the greatest
happiness of the greatest number”) and at the happiness of self. But
regard for others accounts for the greater part of morality. His
emphasis is on altruism: the moral sentiments that he claims to find in
human beings, he traces, for the most part, to a sentiment for and a
sympathy with one’s fellows. It is human nature, he holds, to laugh with
the laughing and to grieve with the grieved and to seek the good of
others as well as one’s own. Two years after the Enquiry was published,
Hume confessed, “I have a partiality for that work”; and at the end of
his life he judged it “of all my writings incomparably the best.” Such
statements, along with other indications in his later writings, make it
possible to suspect that he regarded his moral doctrine as his major
work. He here writes as a man having the same commitment to duty as his
fellows. The traditional view that he was a detached scoffer is deeply
wrong: he was skeptical not of morality but of much theorizing about it.
Following the publication of these works, Hume spent several years
(1751–63) in Edinburgh, with two breaks in London. An attempt was made
to get him appointed as successor to Adam Smith, the Scottish economist
(later to be his close friend), in the chair of logic at Glasgow, but
the rumour of atheism prevailed again. In 1752, however, Hume was made
keeper of the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh. There, “master of 30,000
volumes,” he could indulge a desire of some years to turn to historical
writing. His History of England, extending from Caesar’s invasion to
1688, came out in six quarto volumes between 1754 and 1762, preceded by
Political Discourses (1752). His recent writings had begun to make him
known, but these two brought him fame, abroad as well as at home. He
also wrote Four Dissertations (1757), which he regarded as a trifle,
although it included a rewriting of book II of the Treatise (completing
his purged restatement of this work) and a brilliant study of “the
natural history of religion.” In 1762 James Boswell, the biographer of
Samuel Johnson, called Hume “the greatest writer in Britain,” and the
Roman Catholic Church, in 1761, paid him the attention of putting all
his writings on the Index, its list of forbidden books.
The most colourful episode of his life ensued: in 1763 he left
England to become secretary to the British embassy in Paris under the
Earl of Hertford. The society of Paris accepted him, despite his
ungainly figure and gauche manner. He was honoured as eminent in breadth
of learning, in acuteness of thought, and in elegance of pen and was
taken to heart for his simple goodness and cheerfulness. The salons
threw open their doors to him, and he was warmly welcomed by all. For
four months in 1765 he acted as chargé d’affaires at the embassy. When
he returned to London at the beginning of 1766 (to become, a year later,
undersecretary of state), he brought Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss
philosopher connected with the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert,
with him and found him a refuge from persecution in a country house at
Wootton in Staffordshire. This tormented genius suspected a plot, took
secret flight back to France, and spread a report of Hume’s bad faith.
Hume was partly stung and partly persuaded into publishing the relevant
correspondence between them with a connecting narrative (A Concise and
Genuine Account of the Dispute Between Mr. Hume and Mr. Rousseau, 1766).
In 1769, somewhat tired of public life and of England too, he again
established a residence in his beloved Edinburgh, deeply enjoying the
company—at once intellectual and convivial—of friends old and new (he
never married), as well as revising the text of his writings. He issued
five further editions of his History between 1762 and 1773 as well as
eight editions of his collected writings (omitting the Treatise,
History, and ephemera) under the title Essays and Treatises between 1753
and 1772, besides preparing the final edition of this collection, which
appeared posthumously (1777), and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,
held back under pressure from friends and not published until 1779. His
curiously detached autobiography, The Life of David Hume, Esquire,
Written by Himself (1777; the title is his own), is dated April 18,
1776. He died in his Edinburgh house after a long illness and was buried
on Calton Hill.
Adam Smith, his literary executor, added to the Life a letter that
concludes with his judgment on his friend as “approaching as nearly to
the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of
human frailty will permit.” His distinguished friends, with ministers of
religion among them, certainly admired and loved him, and there were
younger men indebted either to his influence or to his pocket. The mob
had heard only that he was an atheist and simply wondered how such an
ogre would manage his dying. Yet Boswell has recounted, in a passage in
his Private Papers, that, when he visited Hume in his last illness, the
philosopher put up a lively, cheerful defense of his disbelief in
immortality.
Significance and influence
That Hume was one of the major figures of his century can hardly be
doubted. So his contemporaries thought, and his achievement, as seen in
historical perspective, confirms that judgment, though with a shift of
emphasis. Some of the reasons for the assessment may be given under four
heads:
Significance and influence » As a writer
Hume’s style was praised in his lifetime and has often been praised
since. It exemplifies the classical standards of his day. It lacks
individuality and colour, for he was always proudly on guard against his
emotions. The touch is light, except on slight subjects, where it is
rather heavy. Yet in his philosophical works he gives an unsought
pleasure. Here his detachment, levelness (all on one plane), smoothness,
and daylight clearness are proper merits. It is as one of the best
writers of scientific prose in English that he stands in the history of
style.
Significance and influence » As a historian
Library catalogs still list Hume as “Hume, David, the Historian.”
Between his death and 1894, there were at least 50 editions of his
History; and an abridgment, The Student’s Hume (1859; often reprinted),
remained in common use for 50 years. Though now outdated, Hume’s History
must be regarded as an event of cultural importance. In its own day,
moreover, it was an innovation, soaring high above its very few
predecessors. It was fuller and set a higher standard of impartiality.
His History of England not only traced the deeds of kings and statesmen
but also displayed the intellectual interests of the educated citizens,
as may be seen, for instance, in the pages on literature and science
under the Commonwealth at the end of chapter 3 and under James II at the
end of chapter 2. It was unprecedentedly readable, in structure as well
as in phrasing. Persons and events were woven into causal patterns that
furnished a narrative with the goals and resting points of recurrent
climaxes. That was to be the plan of future history books for the
general reader.
Significance and influence » As an economist
Hume steps forward as an economist in the Political Discourses
incorporated in Essays and Treatises as part 2 of Essays Moral and
Political. How far he influenced his friend Adam Smith, 12 years his
junior, remains uncertain: they had broadly similar principles, and both
had the excellent habit of illustrating and supporting these from
history. He did not formulate a complete system of economic theory, as
did Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, but Hume introduced several of
the new ideas around which the “classical economics” of the 18th century
was built. His level of insight can be gathered from his main
contentions: that wealth consists not of money but of commodities; that
the amount of money in circulation should be kept related to the amount
of goods in the market (two points made by Berkeley); that a low rate of
interest is a symptom not of superabundance of money but of booming
trade; that no nation can go on exporting only for bullion; that each
nation has special advantages of raw materials, climate, and skill, so
that a free interchange of products (with some exceptions) is mutually
beneficial; and that poor nations impoverish the rest just because they
do not produce enough to be able to take much part in that exchange. He
welcomed advance beyond an agricultural to an industrial economy as a
precondition of any but the barer forms of civilization.
Significance and influence » As a philosopher
Hume conceived of philosophy as the inductive science of human nature,
and he concluded that man is more a creature of sensitive and practical
sentiment than of reason. On the Continent he is seen as one of the few
British classical philosophers. For some Germans his importance lies in
the fact that Immanuel Kant conceived his critical philosophy in direct
reaction to Hume. Hume was one of the influences that led Auguste Comte,
the 19th-century French mathematician and sociologist, to positivism. In
Britain his positive influence is seen in Jeremy Bentham, the early
19th-century jurist and philosopher, who was moved to utilitarianism
(the moral theory that right conduct should be determined by the
usefulness of its consequences) by book III of the Treatise, and more
extensively in John Stuart Mill, the philosopher and economist who lived
later in the 19th century.
In throwing doubt on the assumption of a necessary link between cause
and effect, Hume was the first philosopher of the postmedieval world to
reformulate the skepticism of the ancients. His reformulation, moreover,
was carried out in a new and compelling way. Although Hume admired
Newton, Hume’s subtle undermining of causality called in question the
philosophical basis of Newton’s science as a way of looking at the
world, inasmuch as this rested on the identification of a few
fundamental causal laws that govern the universe. As a result the
positivists of the 19th century were obliged to wrestle with Hume’s
questioning of causality if they were to succeed in their aim of making
science the central framework of human thought. In the 20th century it
was Hume’s naturalism rather than his skepticism that attracted
attention, chiefly among analytic philosophers. Hume’s naturalism lies
in his belief that philosophical justification could only be rooted in
regularities of the natural world. The attraction of this for analytic
philosophers was that it seemed to provide a solution to the problems
arising from the skeptical tradition that Hume himself, in his other
philosophical role, had done so much to reinvigorate.
Thomas Edmund Jessop
Maurice Cranston
|
|
|
Edmund
Burke
born January 12?, [January 1, Old Style],
1729, Dublin, Ire.
died July 9, 1797, Beaconsfield,
Buckinghamshire, Eng.
British statesman, parliamentary orator,
philosopher, and political thinker prominent in
public life from 1765 to about 1795 and
important in the history of political theory. He
championed conservatism in opposition to
Jacobinism in Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790).
Early life
Burke, the son of a solicitor, entered
Trinity College, Dublin, in 1744 and moved to
London in 1750 to begin his studies at the
Middle Temple. There follows an obscure period
in which Burke lost interest in his legal
studies, was estranged from his father, and
spent some time wandering about England and
France. In 1756 he published anonymously A
Vindication of Natural Society…, a satirical
imitation of the style of Viscount Bolingbroke
that was aimed at both the destructive criticism
of revealed religion and the contemporary vogue
for a “return to Nature.” A contribution to
aesthetic theory, A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful, which appeared in 1757, gave him some
reputation in England and was noticed abroad,
among others by Denis Diderot, Immanuel Kant,
and G.E. Lessing. In agreement with the
publisher Robert Dodsley, Burke initiated The
Annual Register as a yearly survey of world
affairs; the first volume appeared in 1758 under
his (unacknowledged) editorship, and he retained
this connection for about 30 years.
In 1757 Burke married Jane Nugent. From this
period also date his numerous literary and
artistic friendships, including those with Dr.
Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua
Reynolds, and David Garrick.
Political life
After an unsuccessful first venture into
politics, Burke was appointed secretary in 1765
to the Marquess of Rockingham, leader of one of
the Whig groups, the largely liberal faction in
Parliament, and he entered the House of Commons
that year. Burke remained Rockingham’s secretary
until the latter’s death in 1782. Burke worked
to unify the group of Whigs that had formed
around Rockingham; this faction was to be the
vehicle of Burke’s parliamentary career.
Burke soon took an active part in the
domestic constitutional controversy of George
III’s reign. The main problem during the 18th
century was whether king or Parliament
controlled the executive. The king was seeking
to reassert a more active role for the
crown—which had lost some influence in the
reigns of the first two Georges—without
infringing on the limitations of the royal
prerogative set by the revolution settlement of
1689. Burke’s chief comment on this issue is his
pamphlet “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present
Discontents” (1770). He argued that George’s
actions were against not the letter but the
spirit of the constitution. The choice of
ministers purely on personal grounds was
favouritism; public approbation by the people
through Parliament should determine their
selection. This pamphlet includes Burke’s
famous, and new, justification of party, defined
as a body of men united on public principle,
which could act as a constitutional link between
king and Parliament, providing consistency and
strength in administration, or principled
criticism in opposition.
In 1774 Burke was elected a member of
Parliament for Bristol, then the second city of
the kingdom and an open constituency requiring a
genuine election contest. He held this seat for
six years but failed to retain the confidence of
his constituents. For the rest of his
parliamentary career he was member for Malton, a
pocket borough of Lord Rockingham’s. It was at
Bristol that Burke made the well-known statement
on the role of the member of Parliament. The
elected member should be a representative, not a
mere delegate pledged to obey undeviatingly the
wishes of his constituents. The electors are
capable of judging his integrity, and he should
attend to their local interests; but, more
importantly, he must address himself to the
general good of the entire nation, acting
according to his own judgment and conscience,
unfettered by mandates or prior instructions
from those he represents.
Burke gave only qualified support to
movements for parliamentary reform; though he
accepted the possibility of widening political
participation, he rejected any doctrine of mere
rule of numbers. Burke’s main concern, rather,
was the curtailment of the crown’s powers. He
made a practical attempt to reduce this
influence as one of the leaders of the movement
that pressed for parliamentary control of royal
patronage and expenditure. When the Rockingham
Whigs took office in 1782, bills were passed
reducing pensions and emoluments of offices.
Burke was specifically connected with an act
regulating the civil list, the amount voted by
Parliament for the personal and household
expenses of the sovereign.
A second great issue that confronted Burke in
1765 was the quarrel with the American colonies.
Britain’s imposition of the Stamp Act there in
1765, along with other measures, provoked unrest
and opposition, which soon swelled into
disobedience, conflict, and secession. British
policy was vacillating; determination to
maintain imperial control ended in coercion,
repression, and unsuccessful war. Opposed to the
tactics of coercion, the Rockingham group in
their short administration of 1765–66 repealed
the Stamp Act but asserted the imperial right to
impose taxation by the Declaratory Act.
Burke’s best-known statements on this issue
are two parliamentary speeches, “On American
Taxation” (1774) and “On Moving His Resolutions
for Conciliation with the Colonies” (1775), and
“A Letter to…the Sheriffs of Bristol, on the
Affairs of America” (1777). British policy, he
argued, had been both imprudent and
inconsistent, but above all legalistic and
intransigent, in the assertion of imperial
rights. Authority must be exercised with respect
for the temper of those subject to it, if there
was not to be collision of power and opinion.
This truth was being ignored in the imperial
quarrel; it was absurd to treat universal
disobedience as criminal: the revolt of a whole
people argued serious misgovernment. Burke made
a wide historical survey of the growth of the
colonies and of their present economic problems.
In the place of narrow legalism he called for a
more pragmatic policy on Britain’s part that
would admit the claims of circumstance, utility,
and moral principle in addition to those of
precedent. Burke suggested that a conciliatory
attitude be shown by Britain’s Parliament, along
with a readiness to meet American complaints and
to undertake measures that would restore the
colonies’ confidence in imperial authority.
In view of the magnitude of the problem, the
adequacy of Burke’s specific remedies is
questionable, but the principles on which he was
basing his argument were the same as those
underlying his “Present Discontents”: government
should ideally be a cooperative, mutually
restraining relation of rulers and subjects;
there must be attachment to tradition and the
ways of the past, wherever possible, but,
equally, recognition of the fact of change and
the need to respond to it, reaffirming the
values embodied in tradition under new
circumstances.
Ireland was a special problem in imperial
regulation. It was in strict political
dependency on England and internally subject to
the ascendancy of an Anglo-Irish Protestant
minority that owned the bulk of the agricultural
land. Roman Catholics were excluded by a penal
code from political participation and public
office. To these oppressions were added
widespread rural poverty and a backward economic
life aggravated by commercial restrictions
resulting from English commercial jealousy.
Burke was always concerned to ease the burdens
of his native country. He consistently advocated
relaxation of the economic and penal
regulations, and steps toward legislative
independence, at the cost of alienating his
Bristol constituents and of incurring suspicions
of Roman Catholicism and charges of partiality.
The remaining imperial issue, to which he
devoted many years, and which he ranked as the
most worthy of his labours, was that of India.
The commercial activities of a chartered trading
concern, the British East India Company, had
created an extensive empire there. Burke in the
1760s and ’70s opposed interference by the
English government in the company’s affairs as a
violation of chartered rights. However, he
learned a great deal about the state of the
company’s government as the most active member
of a select committee that was appointed in 1781
to investigate the administration of justice in
India but which soon widened its field to that
of a general inquiry. Burke concluded that the
corrupt state of Indian government could be
remedied only if the vast patronage it was bound
to dispose of was in the hands neither of a
company nor of the crown. He drafted the East
India Bill of 1783 (of which the Whig statesman
Charles James Fox was the nominal author), which
proposed that India be governed by a board of
independent commissioners in London. After the
defeat of the bill, Burke’s indignation came to
centre on Warren Hastings, governor-general of
Bengal from 1772 to 1785. It was at Burke’s
instigation that Hastings was impeached in 1787,
and he challenged Hastings’ claim that it was
impossible to apply Western standards of
authority and legality to government in the
East. He appealed to the concept of the Law of
Nature, the moral principles rooted in the
universal order of things, to which all
conditions and races of men were subject.
The impeachment, which is now generally
regarded as an injustice to Hastings (who was
ultimately acquitted), is the most conspicuous
illustration of the failings to which Burke was
liable throughout his public life, including his
brief periods in office as paymaster general of
the forces in 1782 and 1783. His political
positions were sometimes marred by gross
distortions and errors of judgment. His Indian
speeches fell at times into violent emotion and
abuse, lacking restraint and proportion, and his
parliamentary activities were at times
irresponsible or factious.
The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789
was initially greeted in England with much
enthusiasm. Burke, after a brief suspension of
judgment, was both hostile to it and alarmed by
this favourable English reaction. He was
provoked into writing his Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790) by a sermon of the
Protestant dissenter Richard Price welcoming the
Revolution. Burke’s deeply felt antagonism to
the new movement propelled him to the plane of
general political thought; it provoked a host of
English replies, of which the best known is
Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791–92).
In the first instance Burke discussed the
actual course of the Revolution, examining the
personalities, motives, and policies of its
leaders. More profoundly, he attempted to
analyze the fundamental ideas animating the
movement and, fastening on the Revolutionary
concepts of “the rights of man” and popular
sovereignty, emphasized the dangers of democracy
in the abstract and the mere rule of numbers
when unrestrained and unguided by the
responsible leadership of a hereditary
aristocracy. Further, he challenged the whole
rationalist and idealist temper of the movement.
It was not merely that the old social order was
being pulled down. He argued, further, that the
moral fervour of the Revolution, and its vast
speculative schemes of political reconstruction,
were causing a devaluation of tradition and
inherited values and a thoughtless destruction
of the painfully acquired material and spiritual
resources of society. Against all this, he
appealed to the example and the virtues of the
English constitution: its concern for continuity
and unorganized growth; its respect for
traditional wisdom and usage rather than
speculative innovation, for prescriptive, rather
than abstract, rights; its acceptance of a
hierarchy of rank and property; its religious
consecration of secular authority and
recognition of the radical imperfection of all
human contrivances.
As an analysis and prediction of the course
of the Revolution, Burke’s French writings,
though frequently intemperate and uncontrolled,
were in some ways strikingly acute; but his lack
of sympathy with its positive ideals concealed
from him its more fruitful and permanent
potentialities. It is for the criticism and
affirmation of fundamental political attitudes
that the Reflections and An Appeal from the New
to the Old Whigs (1791) retain their freshness,
relevance, and force.
Burke opposed the French Revolution to the
end of his life, demanding war against the new
state and gaining a European reputation and
influence. But his hostility to the Revolution
went beyond that of most of his party and in
particular was challenged by Fox. Burke’s long
friendship with Fox came to a dramatic end in a
parliamentary debate (May 1791). Ultimately the
majority of the party passed with Burke into
support of William Pitt’s government. In 1794,
at the conclusion of Hastings’ impeachment,
Burke retired from Parliament. His last years
were clouded by the death of his only son, on
whom his political ambitions had come to centre.
He continued to write, defending himself from
his critics, deploring the condition of Ireland,
and opposing any recognition of the French
government (notably in “Three Letters Addressed
to a Member of the Present Parliament on the
Proposals for Peace, with the Regicide Directory
of France” [1796–97]).
Burke’s thought and influence
Burke’s writings on France, though the most
profound of his works, cannot be read as a
complete statement of his views on politics.
Burke, in fact, never gave a systematic
exposition of his fundamental beliefs but
appealed to them always in relation to specific
issues. But it is possible to regard his
writings as an integrated whole in terms of the
constant principles underlying his practical
positions.
These principles are, in essence, an
exploration of the concept of “nature,” or
“natural law.” Burke conceives the emotional and
spiritual life of man as a harmony within the
larger order of the universe. Natural impulse,
that is, contains within itself self-restraint
and self-criticism; the moral and spiritual life
is continuous with it, generated from it and
essentially sympathetic to it. It follows that
society and state make possible the full
realization of human potentiality, embody a
common good, and represent a tacit or explicit
agreement on norms and ends. The political
community acts ideally as a unity.
This interpretation of nature and the natural
order implies deep respect for the historical
process and the usages and social achievements
built up over time. Therefore, social change is
not merely possible but also inevitable and
desirable. But the scope and the role of thought
operating as a reforming instrument on society
as a whole is limited. It should act under the
promptings of specific tensions or specific
possibilities, in close union with the detailed
process of change, rather than in large
speculative schemes involving extensive
interference with the stable, habitual life of
society. Also, it ought not to place excessive
emphasis on some ends at the expense of others;
in particular, it should not give rein to a
moral idealism (as in the French Revolution)
that sets itself in radical opposition to the
existing order. Such attempts cut across the
natural processes of social development,
initiating uncontrollable forces or provoking a
dialectical reaction of excluded factors.
Burke’s hope, in effect, is not a realization of
particular ends, such as the “liberty” and
“equality” of the French Revolution, but an
intensification and reconciliation of the
multifarious elements of the good life that
community exists to forward.
In his own day, Burke’s writings on France
were an important inspiration to German and
French counterrevolutionary thought. His
influence in England has been more diffuse, more
balanced, and more durable. He stands as the
original exponent of long-lived constitutional
conventions, the idea of party, and the role of
the member of Parliament as free representative,
not delegate. More generally, his remains the
most persuasive statement of certain
inarticulate political and social principles
long and widely held in England: the validity of
status and hierarchy and the limited role of
politics in the life of society.
Charles William Parkin
Ed.
|
|
|
Adam Smith
Scottish philosopher
baptized June 5, 1723, Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scot.
died July 17, 1790, Edinburgh
Main
Scottish social philosopher and political economist. After two
centuries, Adam Smith remains a towering figure in the history of
economic thought. Known primarily for a single work—An Inquiry into the
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), the first
comprehensive system of political economy—Smith is more properly
regarded as a social philosopher whose economic writings constitute only
the capstone to an overarching view of political and social evolution.
If his masterwork is viewed in relation to his earlier lectures on moral
philosophy and government, as well as to allusions in The Theory of
Moral Sentiments (1759) to a work he hoped to write on “the general
principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they
have undergone in the different ages and periods of society,” then The
Wealth of Nations may be seen not merely as a treatise on economics but
also as a partial exposition of a much larger scheme of historical
evolution.
Early life
Much more is known about Adam Smith’s thought than about his life. He
was the son by second marriage of Adam Smith, comptroller of customs at
Kirkcaldy, a small (population 1,500) but thriving fishing village near
Edinburgh, and Margaret Douglas, daughter of a substantial landowner. Of
Smith’s childhood nothing is known other than that he received his
elementary schooling in Kirkcaldy and that at the age of four years he
was said to have been carried off by gypsies. Pursuit was mounted, and
young Adam was abandoned by his captors. “He would have made, I fear, a
poor gypsy,” commented his principal biographer.
At the age of 14, in 1737, Smith entered the University of Glasgow,
already remarkable as a centre of what was to become known as the
Scottish Enlightenment. There he was deeply influenced by Francis
Hutcheson, a famous professor of moral philosophy from whose economic
and philosophical views he was later to diverge but whose magnetic
character seems to have been a main shaping force in Smith’s
development. Graduating in 1740, Smith won a scholarship (the Snell
Exhibition) and traveled on horseback to Oxford, where he stayed at
Balliol College. Compared with the stimulating atmosphere of Glasgow,
Oxford was an educational desert. His years there were spent largely in
self-education, from which Smith obtained a firm grasp of both classical
and contemporary philosophy.
Returning to his home after an absence of six years, Smith cast about
for suitable employment. The connections of his mother’s family,
together with the support of the jurist and philosopher Lord Henry
Kames, resulted in an opportunity to give a series of public lectures in
Edinburgh—a form of education then much in vogue in the prevailing
spirit of “improvement.” The lectures, which ranged over a wide variety
of subjects from rhetoric to history and economics, made a deep
impression on some of Smith’s notable contemporaries. They also had a
marked influence on Smith’s own career, for in 1751, at the age of 27,
he was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow, from which post he
transferred in 1752 to the more remunerative professorship of moral
philosophy, a subject that embraced the related fields of natural
theology, ethics, jurisprudence, and political economy.
Glasgow
Smith then entered upon a period of extraordinary creativity, combined
with a social and intellectual life that he afterward described as “by
far the happiest, and most honourable period of my life.” During the
week he lectured daily from 7:30 to 8:30 am and again thrice weekly from
11 am to noon, to classes of up to 90 students, aged 14 to 16. (Although
his lectures were presented in English rather than in Latin, following
the precedent of Hutcheson, the level of sophistication for so young an
audience strikes one today as extraordinarily demanding.) Afternoons
were occupied with university affairs in which Smith played an active
role, being elected dean of faculty in 1758; his evenings were spent in
the stimulating company of Glasgow society.
Among his wide circle of acquaintances were not only members of the
aristocracy, many connected with the government, but also a range of
intellectual and scientific figures that included Joseph Black, a
pioneer in the field of chemistry; James Watt, later of steam-engine
fame; Robert Foulis, a distinguished printer and publisher and
subsequent founder of the first British Academy of Design; and, not
least, the philosopher David Hume, a lifelong friend whom Smith had met
in Edinburgh. Smith was also introduced during these years to the
company of the great merchants who were carrying on the colonial trade
that had opened to Scotland following its union with England in 1707.
One of them, Andrew Cochrane, had been a provost of Glasgow and had
founded the famous Political Economy Club. From Cochrane and his fellow
merchants Smith undoubtedly acquired the detailed information concerning
trade and business that was to give such a sense of the real world to
The Wealth of Nations.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
In 1759 Smith published his first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Didactic, exhortative, and analytic by turns, it lays the psychological
foundation on which The Wealth of Nations was later to be built. In it
Smith described the principles of “human nature,” which, together with
Hume and the other leading philosophers of his time, he took as a
universal and unchanging datum from which social institutions, as well
as social behaviour, could be deduced.
One question in particular interested Smith in The Theory of Moral
Sentiments. This was a problem that had attracted Smith’s teacher
Hutcheson and a number of Scottish philosophers before him. The question
was the source of the ability to form moral judgments, including
judgments on one’s own behaviour, in the face of the seemingly
overriding passions for self-preservation and self-interest. Smith’s
answer, at considerable length, is the presence within each of us of an
“inner man” who plays the role of the “impartial spectator,” approving
or condemning our own and others’ actions with a voice impossible to
disregard. (The theory may sound less naive if the question is
reformulated to ask how instinctual drives are socialized through the
superego.)
The thesis of the impartial spectator, however, conceals a more
important aspect of the book. Smith saw humans as creatures driven by
passions and at the same time self-regulated by their ability to reason
and—no less important—by their capacity for sympathy. This duality
serves both to pit individuals against one another and to provide them
with the rational and moral faculties to create institutions by which
the internecine struggle can be mitigated and even turned to the common
good. He wrote in his Moral Sentiments the famous observation that he
was to repeat later in The Wealth of Nations: that self-seeking men are
often “led by an invisible hand…without knowing it, without intending
it, [to] advance the interest of the society.”
It should be noted that scholars have long debated whether Moral
Sentiments complemented or was in conflict with The Wealth of Nations.
At one level there is a seeming clash between the theme of social
morality contained in the first and the largely amoral explication of
the economic system in the second. On the other hand, the first book can
also be seen as an explanation of the manner in which individuals are
socialized to become the market-oriented and class-bound actors that set
the economic system into motion.
Travels on the Continent
The Theory quickly brought Smith wide esteem and in particular attracted
the attention of Charles Townshend, himself something of an amateur
economist, a considerable wit, and somewhat less of a statesman, whose
fate it was to be the chancellor of the Exchequer responsible for the
measures of taxation that ultimately provoked the American Revolution.
Townshend had recently married and was searching for a tutor for his
stepson and ward, the young duke of Buccleuch. Influenced by the strong
recommendations of Hume and his own admiration for The Theory of Moral
Sentiments, he approached Smith to take the charge.
The terms of employment were lucrative (an annual salary of £300 plus
traveling expenses and a pension of £300 a year thereafter),
considerably more than Smith had earned as a professor. Accordingly,
Smith resigned his Glasgow post in 1763 and set off for France the next
year as the tutor of the young duke. They stayed mainly in Toulouse,
where Smith began working on a book (eventually to be The Wealth of
Nations) as an antidote to the excruciating boredom of the provinces.
After 18 months of ennui he was rewarded with a two-month sojourn in
Geneva, where he met Voltaire, for whom he had the profoundest respect,
thence to Paris, where Hume, then secretary to the British embassy,
introduced Smith to the great literary salons of the French
Enlightenment. There he met a group of social reformers and theorists
headed by François Quesnay, who called themselves les économistes but
are known in history as the physiocrats. There is some controversy as to
the precise degree of influence the physiocrats exerted on Smith, but it
is known that he thought sufficiently well of Quesnay to have considered
dedicating The Wealth of Nations to him, had not the French economist
died before publication.
The stay in Paris was cut short by a shocking event. The younger
brother of the duke of Buccleuch, who had joined them in Toulouse, took
ill and perished despite Smith’s frantic ministrations. Smith and his
charge immediately returned to London. Smith worked in London until the
spring of 1767 with Lord Townshend, a period during which he was elected
a fellow of the Royal Society and broadened still further his
intellectual circle to include Edmund Burke, Samuel Johnson, Edward
Gibbon, and perhaps Benjamin Franklin. Late that year he returned to
Kirkcaldy, where the next six years were spent dictating and reworking
The Wealth of Nations, followed by another stay of three years in
London, where the work was finally completed and published in 1776.
The Wealth of Nations
Despite its renown as the first great work in political economy, The
Wealth of Nations is in fact a continuation of the philosophical theme
begun in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The ultimate problem to which
Smith addresses himself is how the inner struggle between the passions
and the “impartial spectator”—explicated in Moral Sentiments in terms of
the single individual—works its effects in the larger arena of history
itself, both in the long-run evolution of society and in terms of the
immediate characteristics of the stage of history typical of Smith’s own
day.
The answer to this problem enters in Book V, in which Smith outlines
the four main stages of organization through which society is impelled,
unless blocked by wars, deficiencies of resources, or bad policies of
government: the original “rude” state of hunters, a second stage of
nomadic agriculture, a third stage of feudal, or manorial, “farming,”
and a fourth and final stage of commercial interdependence.
It should be noted that each of these stages is accompanied by
institutions suited to its needs. For example, in the age of the
huntsman, “there is scarce any property…; so there is seldom any
established magistrate or any regular administration of justice.” With
the advent of flocks there emerges a more complex form of social
organization, comprising not only “formidable” armies but the central
institution of private property with its indispensable buttress of law
and order as well. It is the very essence of Smith’s thought that he
recognized this institution, whose social usefulness he never doubted,
as an instrument for the protection of privilege, rather than one to be
justified in terms of natural law: “Civil government,” he wrote, “so far
as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality
instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who
have some property against those who have none at all.” Finally, Smith
describes the evolution through feudalism into a stage of society
requiring new institutions, such as market-determined rather than
guild-determined wages and free rather than government-constrained
enterprise. This later became known as laissez-faire capitalism; Smith
called it the system of perfect liberty.
There is an obvious resemblance between this succession of changes in
the material basis of production, each bringing its requisite
alterations in the superstructure of laws and civil institutions, and
the Marxian conception of history. Though the resemblance is indeed
remarkable, there is also a crucial difference: in the Marxian scheme
the engine of evolution is ultimately the struggle between contending
classes, whereas in Smith’s philosophical history the primal moving
agency is “human nature” driven by the desire for self-betterment and
guided (or misguided) by the faculties of reason.
Society and the “invisible hand”
The theory of historical evolution, although it is perhaps the binding
conception of The Wealth of Nations, is subordinated within the work
itself to a detailed description of how the “invisible hand” actually
operates within the commercial, or final, stage of society. This becomes
the focus of Books I and II, in which Smith undertakes to elucidate two
questions. The first is how a system of perfect liberty, operating under
the drives and constraints of human nature and intelligently designed
institutions, will give rise to an orderly society. The question, which
had already been considerably elucidated by earlier writers, required
both an explanation of the underlying orderliness in the pricing of
individual commodities and an explanation of the “laws” that regulated
the division of the entire “wealth” of the nation (which Smith saw as
its annual production of goods and services) among the three great
claimant classes—labourers, landlords, and manufacturers.
This orderliness, as would be expected, was produced by the
interaction of the two aspects of human nature, its response to its
passions and its susceptibility to reason and sympathy. But whereas The
Theory of Moral Sentiments had relied mainly on the presence of the
“inner man” to provide the necessary restraints to private action, in
The Wealth of Nations one finds an institutional mechanism that acts to
reconcile the disruptive possibilities inherent in a blind obedience to
the passions alone. This protective mechanism is competition, an
arrangement by which the passionate desire for bettering one’s
condition—“a desire that comes with us from the womb, and never leaves
us until we go into the grave”—is turned into a socially beneficial
agency by pitting one person’s drive for self-betterment against
another’s.
It is in the unintended outcome of this competitive struggle for
self-betterment that the invisible hand regulating the economy shows
itself, for Smith explains how mutual vying forces the prices of
commodities down to their “natural” levels, which correspond to their
costs of production. Moreover, by inducing labour and capital to move
from less to more profitable occupations or areas, the competitive
mechanism constantly restores prices to these “natural” levels despite
short-run aberrations. Finally, by explaining that wages and rents and
profits (the constituent parts of the costs of production) are
themselves subject to this same discipline of self-interest and
competition, Smith not only provided an ultimate rationale for these
“natural” prices but also revealed an underlying orderliness in the
distribution of income itself among workers, whose recompense was their
wages; landlords, whose income was their rents; and manufacturers, whose
reward was their profits.
 |
Economic growth
Smith’s analysis of the market as a self-correcting mechanism was
impressive. But his purpose was more ambitious than to demonstrate the
self-adjusting properties of the system. Rather, it was to show that,
under the impetus of the acquisitive drive, the annual flow of national
wealth could be seen to grow steadily.
Smith’s explanation of economic growth, although not neatly assembled
in one part of The Wealth of Nations, is quite clear. The core of it
lies in his emphasis on the division of labour (itself an outgrowth of
the “natural” propensity to trade) as the source of society’s capacity
to increase its productivity. The Wealth of Nations opens with a famous
passage describing a pin factory in which 10 persons, by specializing in
various tasks, turn out 48,000 pins a day, compared with the few pins,
perhaps only 1, that each could have produced alone. But this
all-important division of labour does not take place unaided. It can
occur only after the prior accumulation of capital (or stock, as Smith
calls it), which is used to pay the additional workers and to buy tools
and machines.
The drive for accumulation, however, brings problems. The
manufacturer who accumulates stock needs more labourers (since
labour-saving technology has no place in Smith’s scheme), and, in
attempting to hire them, he bids up their wages above their “natural”
price. Consequently, his profits begin to fall, and the process of
accumulation is in danger of ceasing. But now there enters an ingenious
mechanism for continuing the advance: in bidding up the price of labour,
the manufacturer inadvertently sets into motion a process that increases
the supply of labour, for “the demand for men, like that for any other
commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men.” Specifically,
Smith had in mind the effect of higher wages in lessening child
mortality. Under the influence of a larger labour supply, the wage rise
is moderated and profits are maintained; the new supply of labourers
offers a continuing opportunity for the manufacturer to introduce a
further division of labour and thereby add to the system’s growth.
|
Here then was a “machine” for growth—a machine that operated with all
the reliability of the Newtonian system with which Smith was quite
familiar. Unlike the Newtonian system, however, Smith’s growth machine
did not depend for its operation on the laws of nature alone. Human
nature drove it, and human nature was a complex rather than a simple
force. Thus, the wealth of nations would grow only if individuals,
through their governments, did not inhibit this growth by catering to
the pleas for special privilege that would prevent the competitive
system from exerting its benign effect. Consequently, much of The Wealth
of Nations, especially Book IV, is a polemic against the restrictive
measures of the “mercantile system” that favoured monopolies at home and
abroad. Smith’s system of “natural liberty,” he is careful to point out,
accords with the best interests of all but will not be put into practice
if government is entrusted to, or heeds, “the mean rapacity, the
monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor
ought to be, the rulers of mankind.”
The Wealth of Nations is therefore far from the ideological tract it
is often supposed to be. Although Smith preached laissez-faire (with
important exceptions), his argument was directed as much against
monopoly as against government; and although he extolled the social
results of the acquisitive process, he almost invariably treated the
manners and maneuvers of businessmen with contempt. Nor did he see the
commercial system itself as wholly admirable. He wrote with discernment
about the intellectual degradation of the worker in a society in which
the division of labour has proceeded very far; by comparison with the
alert intelligence of the husbandman, the specialized worker “generally
becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human being to
become.”
In all of this, it is notable that Smith was writing in an age of
preindustrial capitalism. He seems to have had no real presentiment of
the gathering Industrial Revolution, harbingers of which were visible in
the great ironworks only a few miles from Edinburgh. He had nothing to
say about large-scale industrial enterprise, and the few remarks in The
Wealth of Nations concerning the future of joint-stock companies
(corporations) are disparaging. Finally, one should bear in mind that,
if growth is the great theme of The Wealth of Nations, it is not
unending growth. Here and there in the treatise are glimpses of a
secularly declining rate of profit; and Smith mentions as well the
prospect that when the system eventually accumulates its “full
complement of riches”—all the pin factories, so to speak, whose output
could be absorbed—economic decline would begin, ending in an
impoverished stagnation.
The Wealth of Nations was received with admiration by Smith’s wide
circle of friends and admirers, although it was by no means an immediate
popular success. The work finished, Smith went into semiretirement. The
year following its publication he was appointed commissioner both of
customs and of salt duties for Scotland, posts that brought him £600 a
year. He thereupon informed his former charge that he no longer required
his pension, to which Buccleuch replied that his sense of honour would
never allow him to stop paying it. Smith was therefore quite well off in
the final years of his life, which were spent mainly in Edinburgh with
occasional trips to London or Glasgow (which appointed him a rector of
the university). The years passed quietly, with several revisions of
both major books but with no further publications. He died at the age of
67, full of honours and recognition, and was buried in the churchyard at
Canongate with a simple monument stating that Adam Smith, author of The
Wealth of Nations, lay there.
Assessment
Beyond the few facts of his life, which can be embroidered only in
detail, exasperatingly little is known about the man. Smith never
married, and almost nothing is known of his personal side. Moreover, it
was the custom of his time to destroy rather than to preserve the
private files of illustrious men, with the unhappy result that much of
Smith’s unfinished work, as well as his personal papers, was destroyed
(some as late as 1942). Only one portrait of Smith survives, a profile
medallion by James Tassie; it gives a glimpse of the older man with his
somewhat heavy-lidded eyes, aquiline nose, and a hint of a protrusive
lower lip. “I am a beau in nothing but my books,” Smith once told a
friend to whom he was showing his library of some 3,000 volumes.
From various accounts, he was also a man of many peculiarities, which
included a stumbling manner of speech (until he had warmed to his
subject), a gait described as “vermicular,” and above all an
extraordinary and even comic absence of mind. On the other hand,
contemporaries wrote of a smile of “inexpressible benignity” and of his
political tact and dispatch in managing the sometimes acerbic business
of the Glasgow faculty.
Certainly, he enjoyed a high measure of contemporary fame; even in
his early days at Glasgow his reputation attracted students from nations
as distant as Russia, and his later years were crowned not only with
expressions of admiration from many European thinkers but by a growing
recognition among British governing circles that his work provided a
rationale of inestimable importance for practical economic policy.
Over the years, Smith’s lustre as a social philosopher has escaped
much of the weathering that has affected the reputations of other
first-rate political economists. Although he was writing for his
generation, the breadth of his knowledge, the cutting edge of his
generalizations, and the boldness of his vision have never ceased to
attract the admiration of all social scientists, economists in
particular. Couched in the spacious, cadenced prose of his period, rich
in imagery and crowded with life, The Wealth of Nations projects a
sanguine but never sentimental image of society. Never so finely
analytic as David Ricardo nor so stern and profound as Karl Marx, Smith
is the very epitome of the Enlightenment: hopeful but realistic,
speculative but practical, always respectful of the classical past but
ultimately dedicated to the great discovery of his age—progress.
Robert L. Heilbroner
|
|
|
William Robertson
born Sept. 19, 1721, Borthwick,
Midlothian, Scot.
died June 11, 1793, Edinburgh
Scottish historian and Presbyterian minister. He
is regarded, along with David Hume and Edward
Gibbon, as one of the most important British
historians of the 18th century.
Robertson was educated at the University of
Edinburgh, completing his studies in 1741. He
was ordained a minister in the Church of
Scotland, and in 1743 he received the living of
Gladsmuir, near Edinburgh. He became a member of
the church’s General Assembly in 1746 and for
many years held a leading position in that
assembly’s Moderate party.
Robertson’s first major work, The History of
Scotland, During the Reigns of Queen Mary and of
King James VI (1759), established his reputation
as a historian; within the next few years he was
appointed principal of the University of
Edinburgh and historiographer royal for
Scotland. His next major work was The History of
the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769), which
saw several editions and was translated into all
of the major European languages; it was followed
by The History of America (1777).
Robertson’s histories reflect his interest in
social theory; they stress the importance of
material and environmental factors in
determining the course of civilization. His
writings were influential in the 19th century
but received little critical attention during
the 20th century.
|
|
|
Adam
Ferguson
born June 20, 1723, Logierait, Perthshire, Scot.
died Feb. 22, 1816, St. Andrews, Fife
historian and philosopher of the Scottish
“common sense” school of philosophy who is
remembered as a forerunner of modern sociology
for his emphasis on social interactions.
Ferguson’s article on history appeared in the
second edition of the Encyclopędia Britannica
(see Britannica Classic: history).
Educated at the University of St. Andrews,
Ferguson was appointed deputy chaplain to
Scotland’s Black Watch Regiment in 1745 and
engaged in combat in Flanders. In 1757 he
abandoned the clerical profession to succeed his
friend David Hume as keeper of the Advocates’
Library in Edinburgh. He became professor of
natural philosophy at the University of
Edinburgh in 1759 and professor of mental and
moral philosophy there in 1764. Before resigning
his chair in 1785, he had written his major
works, which include The Morality of Stage Plays
Seriously Considered (1757); Essay on the
History of Civil Society (1767); Institutes of
Moral Philosophy (1769); and Remarks (1776), in
which Ferguson proposed peace terms for the
North Americans fighting in the American
Revolution.
In 1778 Ferguson traveled to Philadelphia
with a British commission sent to negotiate with
American revolutionaries. He spent his later
years in retirement at St. Andrews. Sir Walter
Scott composed his epitaph.
Ferguson is chiefly remembered for the Essay
on the History of Civil Society, an intellectual
history that traces humanity’s progression from
barbarism to social and political refinement. In
his philosophy Ferguson emphasized society as
the wellspring of human morals and actions and,
indeed, of the human condition itself.
Among his other works are The History of the
Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic,
3 vol. (1783), and Principles of Moral and
Political Science, 2 vol. (1792).
Ferguson wrote the article on history for the
second edition of Encyclopędia Britannica
(1780), which included the first timeline
presented in the encyclopaedia.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
