Abstract
In order to police feeling and maintain social order, Shaftesbury inclined towards a notion of taste that was shared by his peers through tacit, ‘intuitive’, class understanding. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, Whig aestheticians sought to put the regulation of affect onto a more transparent footing. Hume, Gerard and Burke, among others, demanded greater rigour of the philosophical discourse on aesthetics, and even suggested that the task required experts who specialised in the discipline — critics. This work of clarification revealed significant problems with the Whig project, but it also provided Wordsworth with added opportunity and material for his study of affect.
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Notes
Ian Haywood, Bloody Romanticism: Spectacular Violence and the Politics of Representation, 1776–1832 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006), p. 60. Haywood cites Luke Gibbon’s remark that Burke’s aesthetics of ‘“violence, pain and sympathy”’ gave him a ‘“set of diagnostic tools to probe the dark side of enlightenment”’ (p. 60).
Ernest Tuveson, ‘Shaftesbury and the Age of Sensibility’, Studies in Criticism and Aesthetics 1600–1800, eds H. Anderson and J. Shea (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press 1967), p. 74.
Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999), p. 86.
John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–80: An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson 1983), p. 64.
See Robert Jones’ discussion of fears that ‘while commerce polished and improved, it also assaulted and softened the basis of republican personality’ (Robert Jones, Gender and the Formation of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998), p. 21.
John Hume, Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1963), p. 234.
Ibid., p. 242.
Ibid..
Ibid., p. 245.
Ibid.
Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth Century England (New Hampshire: Croom Helm 1986), p. 42. On the first page of his An Essay on Taste, Gerard admits his debt to another prominent Shaftesburean: ‘Mr Hutcheson was the first who considered the powers of imagination as so many senses. In his Inquiry concerning beauty and virtue, and his Essay on the passions, he calls them internal senses’ (ET 1). All references to Gerard’s Essay are to this — the greatly expanded third edition.
Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell 1989), p. 81.
On the subject of taste in architecture, Smith writes: ‘Can any reason, for example, be assigned why the Doric capital should be appropriated to a pillar, whose height is equal to eight diameters; the Ionic volute to one of nine; and the Corinthian foliage to one of ten? The propriety of each of those appropriations can be founded upon nothing but habit and custom’ (Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments [Edinburgh 1759], p. 264).
On the word ‘literature’, Siskin writes: ‘The word that referred through most of the eighteenth century to all kinds of writing — Britannica still defined “literature” in the 1770s as simply “learning or skill in letters” — came, in the space of a few decades, to refer more narrowly to only certain texts in within certain genres. It came to define, that is, the specialised subject matter of a discipline’ (Clifford Siskin, ‘More is different: literary change in the mid and late eighteenth century’ in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1610–1780 810, ed. John Richetti [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005], p. 810).
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1998), p. 6.
Ibid., p. 95.
Brian Goldberg, ‘“Ministry More Palpable”: Wordsworth and the Making of Romantic Professionalism’, Studies in Romanticism 36 (1997): 336.
H. A. Wichelns argues that the additions Burke made to the second edition of the Enquiry in 1759 — the most notable being the new ‘Introduction on Taste’ — were almost all ‘called forth by the opinions expressed in the three reviews’ that greeted the first edition (H. A. Wichelns, ‘Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and its Reviewers’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXI [1922]: 649). Burke’s Enquiry, then, was noticed on publication: its impact on debate, however, was not necessarily immediate.
Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, vol. 1, 1 April 1744–June 1768, ed. Thomas Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1958a), p. 18. See also F. P. Lock: ‘Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue … is the probable source of E. B.’s remarks. The idea of beauty as ‘variety in uniformity’ is a leitmotiv in Hutcheson’s Inquiry. E. B.’s letter continues in a rhapsodic style that may be intended as a parody of Shaftesbury. Whether meant seriously or not, the letter shows E. B.’s familiarity with current modes of aesthetic discourse (F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke Vol. I, 1730–84 [The Clarendon Press: Oxford 1998], p. 94 n. 11.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1993), p. 202.
Ibid., p. 203.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, trans. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press 1993), p. 114.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1993), p. 202. The number of texts on the sublime produced in eighteenth-century England testifies to the heightened interest in the relationship between art and sensation in the period. Lyotard, however, working out of a primarily Germanic tradition, considers the work of Kant to be the major text in the development of the aesthetic into what Lacoue-Labarthe calls ‘“sensuous knowledge” (cognito sensitiva)’ (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, ed. Thomas Trezise, trans. Thomas Trezise, Hugh J. Silverman, Gary M. Cole, Timothy D. Bent, Karen McPherson, and Claudette Sartiliot [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1993], p. 151). In the Critique of Judgement, Kant even incorporates the sublime into the heart of philosophy. The Kantian sublime is ‘the giddy feeling of unboundedness which then yields us a negative presentation of the infinity of moral Reason’ (Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic [Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1994], p. 91): this newly sensuous version of the aesthetic is taken as one of the main conditions for reason. Indeed, for Lacoue-Labarthe the privileging of sensation in aesthetics occurs in 1735 with Baumgarten’s Meditaiones philo-sophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus, a work which, like Kant’s, signals a ‘revalorization of the sensuous (of the aïstheta) [that] is all the stronger and more powerful as it is not accompanied by any correlative devaloriza-tion of the intelligible’ (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, p. 152). There are distinct differences between the structures of the Kantian and British sublime, but both adhere to an idea of the aesthetic as typified by sensation and ethical force.
William H. Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1993), p. 123.
Two years after publication of the Enquiry, Adam Smith’s The Theory of the Moral Sentiments — the book which ‘opened the floodgate to a rising tide of interest in the sympathetic imagination’ (James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1981], p. 149) — predicated the bonds of social affection on pleasure. He argued that ‘nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast’ (Adam Smith, Moral Sentiments, p. 9). The sentiments do not arise from self-love, but more often from shared delight: ‘A man is mortified when, after having endeavoured to divert the company, he looks around and sees that nobody laughs at his jests but himself. On the contrary, the mirth of the company is highly agreeable to him, and he regards this correspondence of their sentiments with his own as the greatest applause’ (p. 10). An individual’s pleasure is hardly a pleasure at all, it seems, without a social component.
Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (London: Routledge 1992), p. 1; italics mine.
Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993).
Robert Mitchell argues that in The Theory of the Moral Sentiments Adam Smith makes a similarly surprising link between sympathy, violence and death: ‘Through the action of sympathy, criminal actions generate contagious resentment, which threatens to undo the social bond. However, the execution of the condemned allows justice to prevail, while at the same time attending to the need for sympathy on the part of both the condemned and the execution spectators’ (Robert Mitchell, ‘The Violence of Sympathy;Adam Smith on Resentment and Executions’, 1650–1850; ideas, aesthetics, and inquiries in the early modern era 8 [January 2003]: 322).
By contrast, Elizabeth Samet argues that theatre, for Burke, ‘trains us how to react, especially during historical crises in which excessive suffering is generally regarded with indifference’ (Elizabeth D. Samet, ‘Spectacular History and the Politics of Theatre: Sympathetic Arts in the Shadow of the Bastille’, PMLA 118.5 [2003]: 1311).
Susan Manly writes that ‘We might draw an analogy between Wordsworth’s fear of the “rapid communication” of “men in cities” and the “rashness of decision” of those who do not recognize his poetry as such, and Burke’s anxiety about “innovation” and the loss of “wise prejudice” in the depredations of the French revolutionaries’ (Susan Manly, Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s; Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth [Aldershot: Ashgate 2007], p. 116).
Wordsworth had probably read the Reflections by 1793 (Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading 1770–1799 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993], p. 22).
Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England 1988), p. 7.
J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press 1985), p. 20. See the discussion in Chapter 4 of Wordsworth’s letter about Michael and The Brothers for his counterview.
Pocock argues that Burke’s antipathy to the Revolution was a resistance to ‘the freedom of discourse to create the world unilaterally’ (J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Edmund Burke and the Redefinition of Enthusiasm: the Context as Counter-Revolution’ in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture. Vol. 3: The Transformation of Political Culture 1789–1848, eds Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf [Oxford: Pergamon 1989], p. 20). However, Pocock does not conclude that Burke’s objections to the Revolution were a dispute over linguistic theory. Burke was defending the ‘ideology of manners, which English and Scottish moralists had constructed to explain how ethics and culture could flourish in a society based on an economy of moveable goods’ (p. 31). The linguistic enthusiasm of the Revolutionaries — an enthusiasm in which ‘All must be transparence; the world must incarnate itself immediately’ (p. 20) in identity with the self-sufficient word — fatally undermined, so Burke believed, the delicate pattern of social interrelations necessary for commerce.
For a useful discussion of Burke’s conception of ‘experience’, see Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkley: University of California Press 2005), p. 177–83.
Ibid., p. 101.
Wordsworth read the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly by Spring 1793 (Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, p. 22).
Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, IX, I: The Revolutionary War 1794–1997, II: Ireland, eds R. B. McDowell and William B. Todd (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1991), p. 198.
Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1993), p. 4.
William Wordsworth, The Borderers by William Wordsworth, ed. Robert Osbourne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1982), p. 64.
Lucy Newlyn, ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1993), p. 110; p. 111.
Ibid., p. 110.
William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W. J. B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985), 7. 512.
William Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, V, The Later Years, Part II, 1829–34, ed. Alan G. Hill (Oxford: The Clarendon Press 1979), pp. 407–8.
H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1977), p. 248.
Mark Philp, ‘English Republicanism in the 1790s’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 6 (1998): 240. Philp continues: ‘The claim was intelligible because they contrast republics with despotisms or tyrannies, not with monarchies. Republican government was a government of laws directed towards the common good of the people; despotism was arbitrary government, with the capricious will of the tyrant subordinating the political realm to his or her interests’ (240).
William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 275.
James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1984), p. 80.
Paul Hamilton, ‘Coleridge’s Stamina’ in Repossessing the Romantic Past, eds Heather Glen and Paul Hamilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), p. 174.
For a discussion of poetry as a life-animating force in Wordsworth, see Richard Eldridge, ‘Wordsworth and the Life of a Subject’ in The Meaning of ‘Life’ in Romantic Poetry and Poetics, ed. Ross Wilson (London: Routledge 2009), pp. 61–5.
On the tension between individual and national freedom in Cintra, Benjamin Kim observes that although the essay ‘stresses the importance of personal liberty, … whenever the two come into conflict, Wordsworth chooses national liberty’ (Benjamin Kim, ‘Generating a National Sublime: Wordsworth’s The River Duddon and The Guide to the Lakes’, Studies in Romanticism 45 [Spring 2006]: 54).
Richard Gravil argues that while ‘Certain phrases and arguments in The Convention of Cintra seem Burkean … it requires considerable sophistry to interpret the work as Burkean in the common acceptance of the term. Such common acceptance tends … to forget that Burke came to prominence as an advocate of cultural diversity (India’s for example) and of national independence and liberty (America’s most notably)’ (Richard Gravil, Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2003], p. 230).
David Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1993), p. 48.
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© 2010 Stuart Allen
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Allen, S. (2010). Burke, Wordsworth and the Poet. In: Wordsworth and the Passions of Critical Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283343_2
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