EIGHT

Continental Pressures
and the
English National Culture

The power and subsequent influence of English art and ideas is grounded in the English national culture. A strong national tradition makes a great difference as to what kinds of art grow from it, what kinds of art are liked, the ideas embodied in the art itself, and the language used to express admiration, displeasure, appreciation, and so forth, for certain works of art. Despite the international character of Renaissance humanism, the new science, canons of sophisticated art and behavior, general ideas about education, and the whole conception of great painting, poetry, music, and the other arts always differ to some extent from one nation to another.¹ Artists and critics from different countries use different kinds of imagery and allude to different artistic models. A French critical work becomes peculiarly English in translation or when considered from an English point of view because words that are supposedly equivalent have different connotations. Artistic freedom, for example, means something different to each culture, although it may be stated by each in the same way, and a seventeenth-century Englishman saw things in Homer and Michelangelo beyond the ken of an ordinary contemporary Frenchman, recalling from his own cultural experience different successions of feelings and impressions. Likewise, as Pierre Legouis accurately points out, critics and historians do not fully realize how opaque higher French art was to the Restoration English, even in that age of French influence.² An understanding of national cultural history as well as European cultural (or sociological or economic) history thus becomes crucial to an understanding of specific works of art.

I

Seventeenth-century French critics gave the English a vocabulary with which to talk about art. French treatises in England, translations of French and Italian works on all the arts (which inundated England during the Restoration), the creation of a critical vocabulary derived from French, and native rules critics like the highly respected Thomas Rymer influenced the English to accept Continental rules and correctness. A survey of Donald Wing’s Short Title Catalogue and A Gallery of Ghosts shows the dissemination of Continental works. Wing lists about seventeen editions on architecture,³ six editions on painting,⁴ and only one translation into English of musical theory (by Descartes) although there are a number of songbooks by Pietro Reggio and others. The lack of translations of musical theory does not negate Italian influence, considering the international character of musical composition and the fact that English music at the time was composed in the Italian mode. The interest in French literature, criticism, history, logic, rhetoric, and religious works was immense—there are something like 228 translated editions.⁵ The number of translations of French and Italian works, the popularity of the French language itself (as recorded in drama and elsewhere), and the many references to both original and translated works in English writings give an indication that many Continental works were also read in their original tongues. Dryden, to point out a few examples, uses Corneille (in the “Essay of Dramatic Poesy,” 1668), Boileau (in “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence,” 1667), and Bouhours (in the Dedication to Amphyitryon, 1690) before their works were translated into English. With the immense number of French works available, translated and untranslated, it is no wonder that the French influence can be seen everywhere, at least on the surface.⁶ English critical thought was not annihilated but augmented and improved. The improvement occurs primarily in vocabulary, in the new, sophisticated way the English express themselves, and comes from the introduction of French words into English, the use of English words with the meanings of their French equivalents, the cultivation of the French critical style, and the discussion of questions raised by French criticism.

The creation of an English critical vocabulary was mainly the work of John Dryden. Earlier English critics show the clumsiness of English critical language, which points up the importance of Dryden’s achievement and the Continental influence. The inadequacy of the English vocabulary is everywhere apparent. Henry Peacham, for example, says:

Of Latine Poets of our times, in the iudgment of Beza and the best learned, Buchanan is esteemed the chiefe; who albeit in his person, behauior, and fashion he was rough hewen, slouenly, and rude, seldome caring for a better outside than a Rugge-gowne girt close about him, yet his inside and conceipt in Poesie was most rich, and his sweetnesse and facilitie in a verse unimitably excellent.⁷

Inside apparently refers to Buchanan’s soul; conceipt refers to the invention of ideas or images. And we might say Peacham means Buchanan has a “most rich soul” and a “most rich invention,” phrases that are part of a Drydenian vocabulary although Dryden probably would not have used the vague “most rich.” Peacham’s “sweetnesse and facilitie” refer to the smoothness and easiness of Buchanan’s Latin verse; “unimitably excellent” is obvious. Peacham lacked a critical vocabulary as such and was forced to use imprecise, ordinary language in a way for which it was not meant. No writer from the latter part of the century could have written such a passage.

It is not until the writings of Hobbes and Davenant, after their stays in France, that a new critical spirit emerges, although their work also is limited in scope and vocabulary. Davenant, for example, takes three pages to say the same things about wit that Dryden expresses more exactly in a paragraph. The comparison between a good writer and a great one is somewhat unfair, but still it is impossible to say things as incisively without a precise, critical vocabulary. Davenant says this about wit:

A wit is the laborious and the lucky resultances of thought, having towards its excellence, as we may say of the strokes of a painting, as well a happinesse as care. It is a webb consisting of the subt’lest threads; and like that of the spider is considerably woven out of ourselves; for a spider may be said to consider, not only respecting his solemnesse and tacit posture (like a grave scout in ambush for his enemy), but because all things done are either from consideration or chance, and the works of chance are accomplishments of an instant, having commonly a disimilitude, but hers are the works of time, and have their contextures alike.⁸

Wit is not only the luck and labor, but also the dexterity of thought, rounding the world, like the sun, with unimaginable motion, and bringing swiftly home to the memory universall surveys [Neoplatonic image]. It is the soul’s powder, which when supprest, as forbidden from flying upward, blows up the restraint, and loseth all force in a farther ascension to Heaven (the region of God), and yet by nature is much less able to make any inquisition downward towards Hell, the Cell of the Devill; But breaks through all about it as farr as the utmost it can reach, removes, uncovers, makes way for light where darkness was inclos’d, till great bodies are more examinable by being scattered into parcels, and till all that find its strength (but most of mankind are strangers to Wit, as Indians are to powder) worship it for the effects as deriv’d from the Deity.⁹

Davenant is explicit about the mystery and the force of imagination but he has to use metaphors and similes for everything.

Dryden, with an improved critical vocabulary, can make nuances of thought much clearer (1667):

But to proceed from Wit, in the general notion of it, to the proper wit of an heroic or historical poem, I judge it chiefly to consist in the delightful imaging [a word not really available to Davenant] of persons, actions, passions, or things. ’Tis not the jerk or sting of an epigram, nor the seeming contradiction of a poor antithesis (the delight of an ill-judging audience in a play or rhyme), nor the jingle of a more poor paranomasia; neither is it so much the morality of a grave sentence affected by Lucan, but more sparingly used by Virgil; but it is some lively [alive, animated, having the breath of life in it, derived from the imagination; see Chapter V for a discussion of this important word.] and apt description [derived from the judgment], dressed in such colors of speech that it sets before your eyes the absent object as perfectly and more delightfully than nature.¹⁰

Dryden’s criticism is obviously superior in vocabulary and sophistication, and here, early in his career, he defines wit as encompassing both judgment and imagination; whereas Davenant in the older, Renaissance tradition says wit comes primarily from imagination. Dryden shows his awareness of increased English urbanity and correctness when he says (1672):

By expanding the meanings of current English words and words from languages other than French and, more important, by using French meanings for English words with French equivalents (when the previous English meanings are sometimes quite different) and by introducing French critical words and their connotations into English, Dryden developed a critical vocabulary that the English language lacked. He could not have done so unless his readers were attuned to French, and the Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française (Paris, 1694) as well as historical French dictionaries such as Émile Littré’s Dictionnaire de la langue française (1956) often are more likely to produce meanings for Dryden’s critical terms than is the OED.¹² Sweetness, as one example among many, is usually the critical equivalent of the French douceur, and we can see this association not only through definitions but also in translations. In Nicholas Boileau’s Traité du sublime (Paris, 1674), there are two phrases we might consider: “une certaine douceur agréable et fleurie” and “les douceurs et les grâces.”¹³ The first is construed as “a certain agreeable and blooming sweetness” by Boileau’s translator J. Pulteney (A Treatise of the Loftiness or Elegancy of Speech [London, 1680]); the second, as “sweetness and grace” by F. Langbaine (An Essay Upon Sublime . . . Composed With the French of the Sieur Dépreaux Boileau [London, 1698]). As another example, the seventeenth-century French concept of génie is closer to the eighteenth-century English meaning of genius than it is to the normal seventeenth-century English usage. Boileau says, “Je sens que mon esprit travaille de génie” (Boileau, “Satire VII,” in Oeuvres [Paris: Garnier Frères, 1961], p. 47, 1. 41). According to Cayrou, “Il [génie] prend déjà, à la fin du siècle, son sens fort actuel et se dit surtout des aptitudes supérieures de l’esprit.”¹⁴

To indicate more clearly the kind of stylistic change in vocabulary that takes place during the Restoration we can look at a passage from the beginning of Chapter VI of Boileau’s Traité du sublime (1674) and the same passage in Pulteney’s translation, A Treatise of the Loftiness or Elegancy of Speech (London, 1680), and in the 1712 English edition of Boileau’s Works, Translated by Several Hands (London, 1712).

Traité du sublime (1674)

Il y a, pour ainsi dire, cinq sources principales du sublime; mais ces cinq sources présupposent comme pour fondement commun une faculté de bien parler, sans quoi tout le reste n’est rien.

Cela posé la, la première et la plus considerable est “une certaine élévation d’esprit qui nous fait penser heureusement les chose,” comme nous l’avons déjà montré dans nos commentaires sur Xénophon.

Le seconde consiste dans le pathétique; j’entends par pathétique cet enthousiasme et cette véhémence naturelle qui touche et qui émeut. Au reste, à l’égard de ces deux premières, elles doivent presque tout à la nature, et il faut qu’elles naissent en nous; au lieu que les autre dépendent de l’art en partie.

La troisième n’est autre chose que les “figures tournées d’une certaine manière.” Ou les figures sont de deux sortes: les figures de pensée, et les figures de diction.

Nous mettons pour la quatrième “la noblesse de l’expression,” qui a deux parties: la choix des mots, et la diction élégante et figurée.

Pour le cinquième, qui est celle, à proprement parler, qui produit le grand et qui renferme en soi toutes les autres, c’est “la composition et l’arrangement des paroles dans toute leur magnificence et leur dignité.”

A Treatise of the Loftiness or Elegancy of Speech (1680)

There are five principal heads of loftiness, but they all presuppose a good faculty of speaking, as a common foundation, without which they cannot stand. That therefore being supposed the first and most considerable is, “a regular elevation of thought.” As is already shown in our remarks upon Xenophon. The second consists in being pathetical; by which is meant that Enthusiasm and Natural vehemency which touches and affects us. These two first we owe chiefly to Nature, and have from our cradles; whereas the two latter do partly depend upon Art. The third is nothing but “figures diversely fashioned.” And those are of two sorts, figures in thoughts, and figures in words. The fourth Shall be “a stateliness of Expression.” Which may be subdivided into two parts (viz.) the choice of words and elegant figurative phrases. The fifth and last (whence, properly speaking, all greatness is derived, and which includes the other four) “is the ordering and well placing of sentences according to their magnificence and dignity.”

A Treatise of the Sublime (1712)

We may affirm that there are five original or principal causes of the sublime; but these five causes presuppose a common foundation to all, “a faculty of speaking well, without which all the rest is worth nothing.”

The first and chiefest of those causes “is that elevation of mind, by which we think happily on everything,” as we have already shewn in our commentaries upon Xenophon.

The second consists in the pathetick. By pathetick I mean that enthusiasm and natural vehemence which touch and move. These two causes are almost entirely the gift of nature, and must be born with us; whereas the other three depend in some measure upon art.

The third is nothing but a happy turn of figures. Now figures are of two sorts; figures of thought, and figures of diction.

For the fourth we put nobleness of expression, which has two parts; choice of words, and an elegant and figurative diction.

The fifth is that which properly speaking, produces the sublime, and contains all the others in itself; being the composition and disposition of words with all the magnificence and dignity they are capable of.

A comparison of Boileau’s Traité with the two translations indicates the trend in English vocabulary. The relative sophistication of the 1712 translation comes from the French influence. The English word sublime owes the origin of its acceptance to Boileau. Loftiness is the usual English equivalent to sublime until Dryden, who uses the term for the first time in “The Author’s Apology for Heroic Poetry and Poetic Licence,” prefixed to The State of Innocence (1677), applies it to Milton’s Paradise Lost. The general English use of sublime dates from that time.¹⁵ Dryden also uses diction for the first time in 1685, although the OED records its first use in 1700.¹⁶ There are other characteristics of the 1712 translation that show its greater sophistication: the use of “elevation of mind” instead of “elevation of thought” for “élévation d’esprit”; “composition and disposition of words” instead of “the ordering and well placing of sentences” for “la composition et l’arrangement des paroles”; and “touch and move” instead of “touches and affects” for “touche et . . . émeut.” The increased sophistication of the English critical vocabulary allows the second translation to be much closer to the French, word for word, while at the same time the style remains more elegant.

The influence of French attitudes toward art both from translations and from French treatises finds its purest English expression in the works of the English rules critic Thomas Rymer. Dryden disagrees with much of what Rymer says and speaks about him rather derogatorily, calling Rymer a venomous insect (1693),¹⁷ and “arrogant” and “ill-natured” (1694).¹⁸ But he always respects Rymer’s learning, and the part of Dryden that likes “justness,” regularity, and balance agrees with Rymer. He says, “Mr. Rymer sent me his book [ Tragedies of the Last Age], which has been my best entertainment hitherto: ’Tis certainly very learned, and the best piece of criticism in the English tongue; perhaps in any other of the modern.”¹⁹ Dryden later mentions Rymer’s wit and asserts that no man can answer him.²⁰ John Dennis also has mixed feelings about Rymer,²¹ but Blackmore calls him “our best English critic” (however, Blackmore is Rymer’s disciple).²² Spence in 1736 quotes Pope:

Rymer, a learned and strict critic? Aye, that’s exactly his character. He is generally right, though rather too severe in his opinion of the particular play he speaks of, and is on the whole one of the best critics we ever had.²³

It is apparent that the English were put off by Rymer. Dryden was much more widely published,²⁴ and even Thomas Pope Blount’s De re poetica (London, 1694), oriented toward Continental critics, being a compendium of critical opinions drawn mostly from Adrien Baillet’s Jugemens des savans (1685-86),²⁵ quotes Dryden more frequently than anyone else except René Rapin, although some of Dryden’s best criticism had not yet been written.²⁶ Almost all that Blount quotes from Rymer comes from the Preface to his translation of Rapin’s Réflexions sur la poétique d’Aristote (1674), and all of Blount’s uses of Rapin come from Rymer’s translation. Despite his Tragedies of the Last Age (1674) and A Short View of Tragedy (1693), Rymer does not loom very large in the total scope of English criticism, at least according to Blount.

The differences between French and English ideas are not found in the critical vocabulary itself, however, but in the artistic allusions called up by that vocabulary, allusions that affect the kind of images Baroque artists use in their work, or the kind of works upon which critics founded their theories. The term sublime, for instance, meant something different to an English as opposed to a French audience because of differing cultural traditions. A visual image in Dryden’s poetry often alludes to an artistic vision clearly different from one alluded to by Boileau in a similar context. Writers use images from painters they like and admire most, and someone who believes more in imagination is more likely to see images created by other imaginative artists. An English writer unless he is almost totally under Continental dominance is more likely to be influenced by Shakespeare than he is by Racine. As it turns out, a visual image like Rubens’s might easily enter an Englishman’s mind when induced to do so by an allusion; whereas a Frenchman would more likely envisage a painting by Poussin.

II

The odd double vision about Baroque English translations of French literature and French terminology is caused by a literary history or tradition unknown to French writers. What was felt to be profound and moving to many seventeenth-century Englishmen would have seemed ill-conceived, rough, and disjointed to Frenchmen of the same time. A play like William Wycherley’s Plain Dealer, an English adaptation of Molière’s Le Misanthrope, is typically much more irregular and full of violent emotions. Because of the powerful influence exerted by French art and criticism, the tension between the two cultures produces what can be called an English dilemma.

The English dilemma about what kind of art to regard as great is apparent in Sir William Soames’s translation of Boileau’s “L’Art poétique.” He reveals a blind-sided rules bias toward art, omitting the most important English writers and trying to twist English literary history and achievement into a paradigm of the French. The only English writers praised are those known for their correctness :

The other Englishmen mentioned honorifically are John Dryden (only as a critic), Abraham Cowley, John Denham, and Samuel Butler (in burlesque). All the rest are criticized as low or mistaken: William Davenant, Thomas Shadwell, George Chapman, John Milton (by implication only, in connection with Du Bartas), and Elkannah Settle. With few exceptions, the English writers who are praised for correctness would not ordinarily be mentioned among the greatest English authors. Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Milton are conspicuously absent by name, their virtues falling outside the categories postulated by the French rules critics, of whom Boileau was one. Even Ben Jonson is criticized for his lack of decorum, his use of farce. There are other problems as well. Fairfax and Spenser do not correspond well with Villon and Morot, nor is Davenant a close parallel to Ronsard. Malherbe was more clearly a moving force for French letters than his supposed equivalent Edmund Waller. The parallel that is most apt is that of Ben Jonson with Molière, but even here we see a great deal of difference between the tones of the two playwrights. The greatest heroes of Boileau’s own time and country are, as we might expect, Corneille and Racine, while Benserade will “amuse les ruelles” and Segrais is best in the eclogue. The English translator can scratch up as literary heroes only Spenser (in pastorals), Cowley, Denham, and Waller. It becomes evident that the similarities between the French and English attitudes toward art are found only in common classical backgrounds and in Soames’s yearning for English literature to be like the French. He indicates less interest in literature than in literary prestige judged against the rules.

The English dilemma about the arts also is reflected in political and religious controversies. Those who were more generous toward religious enthusiasm were more likely to favor imagination in the arts and more likely to be against increasing the king’s authority (which is analogous to the rule of judgment in the human soul.) It is not surprising that the Cambridge Neoplatonists, libertarian philosophers, came from a dissenting background. Gerald Cragg in several places is even more specific, saying that they came from Puritan backgrounds and were reacting to the dogmatism and rules of Puritanism itself.²⁸ John Dennis’s enthusiastic religious analysis of the sublime in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries emanates from Neoplatonic thought (as well as from Boileau’s Traité du sublime) and is essentially low church.²⁹ Religious enthusiasm and imagination was suspect to those who thought possession of the inner light blasphemous,³⁰ to people who remembered the excesses of Cromwell’s parliamentary forces, and to those who supported the Stuarts, who were in turn partially supported (even financially) by the French themselves. There are variations in thought, however, since the English were divided both within and among themselves. A leading critic like Dryden, a Tory, a Catholic, distrusted both the imagination and the rules, the imagination because of his belief in decorum and reason, the rules because of his appreciation of irregular great art. Yet he also felt drawn toward each, and that is where the problem lies.

Saint-Évremond, the elegant French critic exiled in London, makes some interesting observations in his comparisons between, and judgments about, French and English art. He thinks English comedy, for instance, the best in the seventeenth century because it represents “human life in common, according to the diversity of humours, and several characters of men.”³¹ Saint-Évremond seems to allude to Jonsonian comedies of humours in his phrase “several characters,” implying the classification of people into types, perhaps types classified by humours. The French, he thinks, “content themselves with the first image received from objects: and to stop at the mere outsides of things, an appearance almost always serves instead of truth; and what is easy, for that which is natural” (pp. 33-34). In other words, English characters are more like actual people, less like types or abstractions. The English themselves also thought their comedy went beyond French understanding of the genre.³² Sir William Temple sets off English comedies of humours from the French, saying that “humour [is a] word peculiar to our language,”³³ and he also ascribes the superiority of English comedy to its use of humours in characterization.³⁴ Saint-Évremond and Sir William Temple both are probably referring to Ben Jonson’s comedies as well as other regular plays of the Restoration. Saint-Êvremond’s statements seem perceptive, but he undoubtedly leaves out a whole range of plays that are more irregular than he likes.

In his statements on tragedy, Saint-Évremond clears up for us the conceptual differences between French and English ideas of freedom and imagination. He often shows a seeming reasonableness about the rules of tragedy:

To avoid confusion, we ought to observe rules and directions, and to follow true judgment and good sense, which may allay the heat of an inflamed imagination: yet we are to undress those rules of all tormenting restraint, and to banish a scrupulous reason, which through too close embracing of justness, leaves nothing free and natural behind it.³⁵

It is statements like these that made some Restoration Englishmen think they agreed with French theorists. As Joel Spingarn says, after quoting a passage in which Rapin criticizes the strictness of the rules, “It is these occasional elements of freedom in Rapin’s theory that made his book popular in England.”³⁶ The issue is not simply freedom versus rules, however; it concerns more exactly the emphasis on either the rationalities of plot or the emotional qualities involved in characterization. The English were certainly less concerned with plot. Although he exhibits much more knowledge about English dramatic works than other Frenchmen, Saint-Évremond’s idea even of reasonable freedom falls outside the English tradition.³⁷ His statements about Jonson corroborate his distaste for irregular, indecorous writing; he cannot bear English music (p. 54); and after stating that French tragedies are most excellent, he criticizes English tragedies, tastes, and behavior:

There are four or five English tragedies where in good truth, many things ought to be retrench’d; and with this curtailing they wou’d be rendered altogether exact and compleat. In any of the rest you can see nothing but matter without form and digestion, an heap of confused events: and without consideration of places or times, without any regard to decency; their cruel eyes delight to see blood and wounds and most direful murders. . . . Men of sense do disallow of this custom, establisht perchance on no very civil and humane sense in the minds of men: but it is an ancient habit and way, wherein the nation’s taste in general takes place over the delicacy of particular persons. [P. 9]

Saint-Évremond is stating that the English on the whole are savages by comparison to the French, a prevailing view among Frenchmen of the time. (The English, in turn, thought the French effeminate.) The whole experience of Elizabethan tragedy is foreign to Saint-Évremond’s nature, as is English music (not to mention painting). Saint-Évremond’s view is unique only because he (unlike other French writers) actually talks about English art. His statements are all the more striking when we realize that except for a stay in the Netherlands from 1665 to 1670 he lived in England from 1661 until his death in 1703. Dryden’s classic expression sums up the common English answer to the kind of criticism voiced by Saint-Évremond. He thinks that the concentration on plot devices limits too much the liveliness that is the result of imaginative invention :

By their [the French] servile observations of the unities of time and place, and integrity of scenes [ liaison des scènes], they have brought on themselves that dearth of plot, and narrowness of imagination which may be observed in all their plays.³⁸

Usually the Restoration English thought they should accept the seeming rationality of the rules but felt they should not. The seeming paradoxes candidly expressed by Saint-Évremond give reasons why much French criticism impressed the English and suggest the way in which it did:

There is no country, where reason is more rare, than it is in France; when it is found there, there is not a purer in the world.

For the most part all is fancy, but a fancy so fine, and a capricio so noble, in what regards the outside, that strangers ashamed of their judgment, as of a gross quality, seek to make themselves esteemed among them, by the imitation of our [French] modes, and renounce essential qualities, to affect an air, and ways, which is hardly possible for them to invent. Thus that continual alteration in our habits, which they reproach us with, and is always followed, becomes insensibly a very great piece of wisdom; for besides, infinite sums of money which we [the French] draw from thence, ’tis an interest more solid than is imagined, to have Frenchmen dispersed throughout, who form the outside of all people by our own; who begin by enslaving the eyes, when the heart is still opposed to our laws; who gain the senses in favor of our government, when the opinions still hold for liberty. [Miscellaneous Essays, I, pp. 192-93]

Saint-Évremond’s observation is shrewd. The English were won over by appearances, by French manners, rather than by the substance of French culture. English taste still embraced the liberty inherent in the English cultural tradition, even when it appears not to do so. A knowledge of the differences between the two national cultures leads to a clearer understanding of both criticism and art.