Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780 – 1830

Neoclassical Satire and the Romantic School 1780 – 1830Band 12
Herausgegeben von
Rolf Lessenich
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Bonn University Press
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Samuel Daniel, Musophilus: containing a general defence of learning (1599)
Rouse up, O young men of the new age! Set up your foreheads against the ignorant hirelings! For we have hirelings in the camp, the court and the university, who would, if they could, for ever depress mental and prolong corporeal war.
William Blake, Milton (MS 1800 – 1804)
Contents
I. The Classical Tradition and the Poetics of Satire . . . . . . . . . . 49
II. Tory Periodicals and Anti-Jacobin Satire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
III. William Gifford against the Della-Cruscan Poets and the Non-Classical Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
IV. Lord Byron in Defence of the Classical Tradition . . . . . . . . . . 159
V. The Function of Criticism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179
VI. Arguments in the Debate against the Romantic School . . . . . . . 197
VII. The Romantic School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377
VIII. Neoclassicism, Romantic Disillusionism, Victorianism, and after . 385
Select Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 411
Preliminary
This book is based on the theoretical models and comparative studies developed between 2006 and 2010 by the interdisciplinary research group Streitkultur – The Art of Arguing at the Centre for the Classical Tradition at the University of Bonn. The group was comprised of scholars in the fields of literary and cultural studies, social studies, classical studies, medieval studies, Renaissance studies, theology, philosophy, law, history, and the fine arts, who investigated forms, spheres, and functions of public dispute in Western traditions of arguing. These were exemplified in specific times, situations, and genres from ancient Greece to the Romantic Period, encompassing further reference to Victorianism, Deca- dence, Modernism, and Postmodernism. In doing so, the group collaborated with smaller research groups in various departments at various universities, including my senior seminar on Romanticism and Neoclassicism at the Uni- versity of Bonn’s Department of English, American, and Celtic Studies (IAAK). It also corresponded with other Centres for the Classical Tradition and specialists in the field at universities all over the world and convened a major international congress as well as a number of separate minor congresses of the ten collabo- rating disciplines and internal interdisciplinary workshops.
The group took for granted that the decisive element of the Western cultural tradition, which has established the coherence of occidental cultures in all their diversity over thousands of years even until now, is its double root in pagan antiquity and Christianity.
In accordance with the proceedings from the group’s individual research, workshops, and international congresses convened in Bonn, the Classical Tra- dition is here understood as both the process and the result of the tradition of the cultural heritage of Greek and Latin classical and late antiquity, including its Christian forms. Christianity grew from a controversy with and adaptation of the pagan tradition of classical antiquity. The pagan and Judaeo-Christian double heritage of antiquity was thus combined, transmitted, and transformed in the occidental societies and cultures which succeeded the breakdown of the West Roman Empire.
The Classical Tradition is, however, not a fixed and definable body of trans- mitted texts. From ancient Greece to postmodern Europe, the Classical Tradition has been highly selective, controversial, and protean. The images of classical Greek and Latin as well as of Christian antiquity have changed considerably throughout the centuries, chiefly because various authors across the ages fo- cussed on aspects relevant to their own contemporary issues. In Augustan England and France, for instance, the Classical Tradition was largely understood as the heritage of the literature of the age of Emperor Augustus, with Dryden and Boileau updating the poetics of Horace and seeing Greek literature, Homer as well as Plato, overcome by superior Latin culture and refinement. The querelle des anciens et des modernes in France and England was a debate centred around the relative value of ancient authors weighed against their modern successors and updaters of the Classical Tradition. The anciens made it easy for the later Romantics to argue polemically that the Classical Tradition was a mummified corpse without vitality and modern relevance. And the Neoclassicists of the Romantic Period would respond that the Classical Tradition was not the picking up of the ashes, but the keeping alive of the embers.
Examples that demonstrate the constructed and changing notion of the Classical Tradition throughout the centuries are legion. The Enlightenment’s estimation of Plato was generally low, opposed to what its philosophers under- stood as the less speculative Aristotle and the more practically minded Sophists, Plato’s adversaries. Revolutionary France upheld the preference for Rome, not least for its Roman republican myth and ideology, whereas post-revolutionary Britain, to mark its opposition to France during the Twenty Years’ War and after, shifted its sympathy from Rome to Greece, with a renewed dispute over the relative merits of Athens and Sparta. Simultaneously, a dispute over the Classical Tradition of Greece was conducted among the Romantics, who had begun to undermine the hegemony of the Classical Tradition and to mix it with national and regional traditions and myths, over the relative merits of Plato (Positive Romanticism) and Pyrrho (Negative Romanticism). Moreover, the Radicals of the Hampstead and Marlow circles selected the liberal, pagan, erotic tradition of Greece, as we see in the case of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, whereas their Tory adversaries selected the patriotic, patrician, military, ascetic tradition of Greece, as we see in the case of the later Wordsworth. In the view of the Liberals and Radicals, most of them Romantics, the ancien r¦gime was no less mum- mified a corpse than the rule- and reason-bound Classical Tradition itself, whereas, in fact, Metternich and Carlyle strove dynamically to adapt the ancien r¦gime to the needs of their time. The Liberals and Radicals saw Plato and Greek democracy less as a specific product of the Classical Tradition than as one of many manifestations of the universal and ubiquitous human anamnesis of un- quenchable liberty, expressed in myths all over the world and at all times. Thus,
the Classical Tradition was reinvented for every time and purpose.1 In musical composition, for instance, Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner either re- constructed or rewrote Christoph Willibald Gluck’s classical operas in polemical response to Jacques Offenbach, to suit their own very dissimilar “modern” constructions of the “shifting terrain” of Greece.2 Classical antiquity was a quarry, which various authors in various ages and for various reasons mined for resources, reassembling them to suit their needs. The Classical Tradition and the culture of public debate, which has remained the foremost characteristic of Western civilization from Greece and Rome throughout the history of Western civilization, has itself remained a matter of dispute on all levels.3
As an ontological category, the problematic nature of public dispute has also been a subject of philosophical reflection ever since classical antiquity when Heraclitus distinguished between destructive and productive dispute, also manifested in the ancient myth of the double goddess Eris. Jacob Burckhardt defined das Agonale as a conscious and declared principle of ancient Greek life. As a central medium of decision-making and finding one’s own position, the public exchange of arguments is documented at the beginning of Homer’s Iliad, in the violent (and ultimately destructive) verbal dispute conducted in two pairs of speeches between the Greek leaders Agamemnon and Achilles. The result of this unwise dispute between army commanders, who insult and debase each other in public, was the Trojan War. Other disputes in other public spheres were naturally less inclined to verbal or physical injury, such as symposia and col- lations, or, later, disputations of a theological, scholastic, or academic nature, along with the competitions between poets and artists. But all ritualized disputes within the frame of reference of the Classical Tradition were aware of the ex- istence of a limit of tolerability, the historically shifting borderline between productive and destructive dispute on a field defined by the extremes of peitho (persuasion) and bia (violence). Thus, parrhesis (honesty of speech), indis- pensable in constructive dispute, was restricted by rules and laws protecting the honour of the adversary or the heads of state and religion, as early as in ancient Greek comedy or by the lex contra famosos libellos of Emperor Augustus. Public face and dignity demanded respect, in order to prevent the potentially dangerous degeneration of a dispute as exemplified in the Iliad.
In his ground-breaking treatise “On Liberty” (1859), John Stuart Mill iden-
1 Marilyn Butler, Myth and Mythmaking in the Shelley Circle, in: English Literary History, 49 (1982), 50 – 72.
2 Simon Goldhill, Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity : Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity, Princeton NJ and Oxford 2011, 87 – 124.
3 This study follows the theoretical model of Gerhard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres, Columbia SC 1999, rather than Jürgen Habermas’s assumption of the existence of one sole public sphere.
Preliminary 11
tified individuality, diversity of opinions, and public dispute as the major legacy of the Classical Tradition from ancient Greece, which sharply distinguishes European cultures from such collectivist cultures as the Chinese, where public opinion is decreed and supervised from above. Mill defined all “public opinion”, including what is today called “political correctness”, as the bane of the Euro- pean democratic heritage of Greece. Nobody is infallible, and the suppression of individual ideas and opinions is naturally inimical to the finding of truths. Europe’s identity and progress lies in its freedom of speech and in its culture of public contention, not in fossilizing collectivist and totalitarian tendencies of “making all people alike, all governing their thoughts and conduct by the same maxims and rules”.4 Mill’s warning has proved prophetic:
The modern r¦gime of public opinion is, in an unorganized form, what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organized; and unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against this yoke, Europe, notwithstanding its noble antecedents and its professed Christianity, will tend to become another China.5
John Stuart Mill, son of the Romantic Period Radical Utilitarian James Mill, was keenly aware of the limits of freedom of speech and opinion. In his moderate Utilitarian philosophy, they end where the happiness and liberty of others are threatened, as in calls for censorship, persecution of heretics and minorities, or armed physical aggression.
The Romantic Period in Britain was especially sensitive to this heritage of the Classical Tradition. With their experience of the war of ideas derailed from con- structive conflict into the political chaos and bloodshed of the Gordon Riots, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the consequent repression of free speech by government legislation and espionage in Britain, English literati were not only involved in the debates of their age. They also reflected how a return from chaos to a constructive culture of dispute could be brought about. Radicals though they were, the literati and artists that assembled and discussed political justice and true art in Joseph Johnson’s bookshop in London at the time of the reformist London Corresponding Society (1792–1799) agreed on the need for a peaceful change in politics as well as art and poetics. William Godwin and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft advocated reform through independent Enlightenment reason, both in their philosophical prose and in their fictions, showing the disastrous effects of violence as inevitably leading to further bloodshed. William Godwin’s insight into the evil effects of violence, which would of necessity produce new hatred and carnage, is brilliant, though history has ever contradicted the feasibility of his rational millenarianism, most of all in his own lifetime:
4 Mill, On Liberty, 1869, in: Collected Works, ed. J.M. Robson, Toronto 1981 – 1891, XVIII. 274. 5 Ibid.
Here a thousand ill passions are generated. The perpetrators, and the witnesses of murders, become obdurate, unrelenting, and inhuman. Those who sustain the loss of relations and of friends by a catastrophe of this sort, are filled with indignation and revenge. Distrust is propagated from man to man, and the dearest ties of human society are dissolved. It is impossible to devise a temper, more inauspicious to the cultivation of justice, and the diffusion of benevolence.6
The Godwins’ son-in-law, Percy Bysshe Shelley, would endorse the same view in his mythological drama Prometheus Unbound (MS 1818–1819, 1820), where the an- cien r¦gime and its errors collapse with the disappearance of hatred and revenge.
However, there were other Radical views of physical violence and war, antici- pating the opposition of later moral-force and physical-force Chartists. Though he was an advocate of reform through free imagination in diametrical opposition to the Godwins, Blake shared the Godwins’ conviction of the need for peaceful change, at least to the extent of its feasibility. In his visionary epic Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804– 1820), Blake’s Gnostic Christ, a rebel against his father Urizen-Zeus-Jehovah, admonishes fallen Albion (Universal Man) to drop his destructive wars – a result of his sinful Selfhood – and to return to the Divine Family of Love, where wars are constructive conflicts of the spirit:
“Albion, our wars are wars of life, & wounds of love, With intellectual spears, & long winged arrows of thought. Mutual in one another’s love and wrath all-renewing We live as One Man; for contracting our infinite senses We behold multitude; or expanding, we behold as one, As One Man all the Universal Family […]”7
But here, Blake’s mythopoetic imagination expressed a mere preference, pro- vided that man had a choice. Blake would not exclude the need for and benefits of victory on the battlefield altogether. While Blake’s Christ and Los are peaceful saviours, Blake’s Satan, Orc, and Fuzon are rebels given to violent change, but their bloodshed would be an instrument in the dialectical evolution of history. In Blake’s Gnostic reading of the Eucharist, fallen man is the grape crushed by the ancien r¦gime in the wine-presses of love (spiritual conflict) or war (physical conflict), both of which would yield the wine of the millennium after “the vineyards of red France.” The fire and blood of revolution would be the anti- thesis to the thesis of the ancien r¦gime, ensuring the downfall of kings and priests and the arrival of the necessary Edenic millennium. Or, in the more secular words of Karl Marx, violent revolution would be the antithesis to the
6 William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, 1793, 4th edition London 1842, I. 130.
7 Blake, Jerusalem, Emanation of the Giant Albion, 1804 – 1820, 34. 15 – 19, in: Complete Poems, ed. W.H. Stevenson, 1971 and 1989, 3rd edition London 2007, 729.
Preliminary 13
thesis of feudal society and by necessity produce the synthesis of classless so- ciety as the pre-decreed end of history.
In counter-distinction to the Godwins and Shelley, Blake formulated peaceful conflict with the weapons of rhetoric as preferable to physical warfare, but not as the only way to overcome error and create a better world. Here, the visionary was more of a realist that the rational philosopher. Blake’s mythical narratives teem with descriptions of the outbreak of physical violence, because fire alone can melt the Urizenic ice. Forgiveness as advocated by his saviour Christ and re- integrative art as practised by his saviour Los would not always work, as fallen man is a potentially greedy and aggressive creature. There arose situations which required physical self-defence, personal as well as national. Blake had a shaping experience with the soldier John Scolfield in Felpham in 1803, possibly an agent provocateur of the government whom he violently chased from his premises. Blake’s ensuing trial for high treason in Chichester made him keenly aware of the limitations of fallen human nature. Passions could run out of control, and then man would overstep the red line between peaceful and violent conflict. As Sig- mund Freud put it later in his brilliant treatise Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930), there is no solution for every life problem, and naturally aggressive man would perversely destroy his own culture again and again.
The continuity of the Classical Tradition in the Romantic Period becomes evident in its arsenal of weapons – its denigrations and argumentative strategies – which had already been complete in classical antiquity.
The categories of polemical denigration of the adversary have remained the same from the literature of ancient Greece and Rome to the literature of the Romantic Period and beyond. The denigrations that the Neoclassicists of the Romantic Period put forward against their Romantic adversaries comprised: 1) Metaphysics: The adversary is of the party of the devil and chaos. 2) Chain of Being: The adversary is a mere animal of the lowest order (wolf,
toad, serpent, carrion kite). 3) Status: The adversary belongs to a lower class or group, to the subordinate
sex, or comes from a lower profession (slave, Jew, homosexual, orphan, woman, handicraftsman).
4) Education: The adversary is childish, ignorant, pampered, undisciplined, erratic, contradictory, and deficient in classical languages, schooling, phi- losophy, elegance, expressiveness or even interest.
5) Entourage: The adversary keeps low or bad company and writes for the uneducated populace.
6) Health of body: The adversary deviates from the norm of the creation as a suffering patient or cripple, or is too effeminate or pampered to perform great deeds.
7) Health of mind: The adversary lacks self-control or self-knowledge or mental vigour (erraticism, confusion, mania, excess, sexual deviation, masturbation, stupidity).
8) Ethics: The adversary practises and propagates private and public im- morality against the laws of God and nature.
9) Respectability : The adversary is guilty of perjury, faithlessness, heresy, high treason, or demagogy.
10) Integrity : The adversary’s conduct of life contradicts his public teaching. 11) Constancy : The adversary is fickle, unreliable, or a turncoat. 12) Courage: The adversary is a coward or wimp. 13) Inventiveness: The adversary is a mere imitator, epigone, plagiarist, or
bricoleur. 14) Honesty : The adversary is a mere liar, impostor, or quack. 15) Posthumous fame: The adversary will be stored in the cultural memory of
mankind as a monster, clown, bungler, charlatan, ignoramus, phil- osophaster, poetaster, or producer of excrement from mouth or anus.
16) Success: The adversary’s works are little read or will soon be consigned to oblivion.
But, as in classical antiquity, these polemical denigrations could be turned both ways. Imagination has recently been redefined as a means of articulating re- sistance in times of crisis rather than a faculty of truth, i. e. the driving force in the art of arguing.8 A low origin, a female sex, the lack of a formal education, and even the…