Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Repetition in Early Modern British and European Cultures 9781442679405

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction
PART I. OVERTURE
Chapter One. Cycles of Repetition: Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and the Chaconne
PART II. REPETITION, THE SELF, AND THE EMOTIONS
Chapter Two. Repetition and Narration: Tracking the Enlightenment Self
Chapter Three. Escape from Repetition: Blake versus Locke and Wordsworth
Chapter Four. Emerging Emotion Theory: Forgiveness and Repetition
PART III. RITUAL AND REGIME
Chapter Five. Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England
Chapter Six. Christopher Smart's Late Religious Lyrics: Building Churches in the Air
PART IV. ROUTINE AND RHYTHM
Chapter Seven. 'The Year Runs Round': The Poetry of Work in Eighteenth-Century England
Chapter Eight. Seven Reasons for Rhyme
PART V. REPLICATING ORIGINALS
Chapter Nine. Translation as Original Composition: Reading the Work of Pierre Le Tourneur
Chapter Ten. Multiple Heads: Pope, the Portrait Bust, and Patterns of Repetition
Index

Citation preview

RITUAL, ROUTINE, AND REGIME: REPETITION IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH AND EUROPEAN CULTURES

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RITUAL, ROUTINE,

AND REGIME REPETITION IN EARLY MODERN

BRITISH AND EUROPEAN CULTURES

Edited by Lorna Clymer

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

www.utppublishing.com © The Regents of the University of California 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN-13: 0-978-0-8020-9030-0 ISBN-10: 0-8020-9030-3

Printed on acid-free paper UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Ritual, routine and regime : repetition in early modern British and European cultures / edited by Lorna Clymer. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 0-978-0-8020-9030-0 ISBN-10: 0-8020-9030-3 1. Repetition in literature. 2. Repetition (Aesthetics). Repetition (Philosophy). 4. Humanities - Europe - History - 17th century. 5. Humanities - Europe - History - 18th century. I. Clymer, Lorna BH301.R46R582006

OQl.3'09'032

C2006-901125-7

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction

3

LORNA CLYMER

PART I: OVERTURE

1 Cycles of Repetition: Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and £Ag Chaconne 21 SUSAN MCCLARY PART II: REPETITION, THE SELF, AND THE EMOTIONS

2 Repetition and Narration: Tracking the Enlightenment Self 49 LEO DAMROSCH

3 Escape from Repetition: Blake versus Locke and Wordsworth 63 LAURA QUINNEY

4 Emerging Emotion Theory: Forgiveness and Repetition 80 PAUL NEWBERRY

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Contents PART III: RITUAL AND REGIME

5 Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England 103 PAULINA KEWES

6 Christopher Smart's Late Religious Lyrics: Building Churches in the Air 132 CHRIS MOUNSEY

PART IV: ROUTINE AND RHYTHM

7 'The Year Runs Round': The Poetry of Work in Eighteenth-Century England 153 DAVID FAIRER

8 Seven Reasons for Rhyme 172 J. PAUL H U N T E R

PART V: REPLICATING ORIGINALS

9 Translation as Original Composition: Reading the Work of Pierre Le Tourneur 201 J U L I E C A N D L E R HAYES

10 Multiple Heads: Pope, the Portrait Bust, and Patterns of Repetition 224 MALCOLM

Index

BAKER

247

Acknowledgments

Collected here are selected essays, many of which were first presented as papers at a two-day conference on repetition in the early modern period, held in spring 2001 at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, and hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. My thanks go to the staff of the center, who efficiently managed every aspect of the conference, and to the staff of the Clark Library, who generously assisted me and many of the volume's contributors in research matters. I am especially grateful to Peter Reill, the director of the center, who tirelessly supported both the conference and the volume. Others have offered welcome suggestions and assistance; Richard A. Barney, Patrick Coleman, Helen Deutsch, Peter McCullough, and Michael Newman were especially helpful.

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Contributors

Malcolm Baker is Professor of Art History at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His publications include Figured in Marble: The Making and Viewing of ~Eighteenth-Century Sculpture (2000) and (co-authored with David Bindman) Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre (1995), which was awarded the 1996 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art. He is currently working on a book about the portrait bust and its roles in eighteenth-century England. Lorna Clymer is Professor of English, Emerita at California State University, Bakersfield. She has published essays on poetry and representations of death in early modern Britain. She is currently working on a booklength project concerning long didactic British poems. Leo Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He has written on figures ranging from the seventeenthcentury antinomian James Nayler to the nineteenth-century antinomian William Blake, and recently completed a biography, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (2005). David Fairer is Professor of Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. His most recent book is English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700-1789 (2003). He is also the author of Pope's Imagination (1984), The Poetry of Alexander Pope (1989), and editor of Pope: New Contexts (1990) and The Correspondence of Thomas Warton (1995). With Christine Gerrard he has edited Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (1999, 2004).

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Contributors

Julie Candler Hayes is Professor of French at the University of Richmond. She has written on topics ranging from the literary and philosophical world of the ancien regime to the published correspondence of Jean-Luc Nancy and Simon Hantai. Her most recent books are Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion (1999) and Using the Encyclopedia: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading, an anthology co-edited with Daniel Brewer (2002). The present essay stems from a work in progress, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and Britain, 16001800. J. Paul Hunter is the author of many studies of eighteenth-century fiction, including Before Novels, which won the Gottschalk Prize in 1991. He is also the long-time author-editor of the Norton Introduction to Poetry (8th ed., 2002) and is now at work on a cultural history of the anglophone couplet, tentatively entitled Sound Argument. Recent essays include 'Form and Meaning: Pope and the Ideology of the Couplet' (ECTI), 'Formalism and History: Binarism and the Anglophone Couplet' (MLQ), 'Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?' (ECS), 'Couplets and Conversation' (in The Cambridge Companion to EighteenthCentury Poetry, 2001), 'The Poetry of Occasions' (in A Concise Companion to the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 2005) and 'Political, Satirical, Didactic and Lyric Poetry: From the Restoration to the Death of Pope' (in The New Cambridge History of English Literature, 2005). He is Professor of English at the University of Virginia and Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago. Paulina Kewes is Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford. Her publications include Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (1998) and articles on Shakespeare, Dryden, Rochester, and Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenthcentury drama. She is the editor of Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003) and The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2005), and is currently completing a book on the staging of history in Elizabethan drama and civic pageantry. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Susan McClary, Professor of Musicology, University of California, Los Angeles, specializes in the cultural criticism of music. She is the author of Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000), and Modal Subjectivities: SelfFashioning in the Italian Madrigal (2004). She is now completing a book

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titled Power and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Music. McClary received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995. Chris Mounsey is a lecturer in English at the University of Winchester. Author of the biography Christopher Smart: Clown of God (2001), the editor of Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture (2001), and co-editor of Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality in the Long Eighteenth Century (2006), Chris has published extensively in poetry and gender studies and is currently working on a new biography of Daniel Defoe. Work also progresses on a monograph on William Blake's The Four Zoas. Chris edits the British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Paul Newberry is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Bakersfield. He has published two articles on forgiveness and the emotions: 'Joseph Butler on Forgiveness: A Presupposed Theory of Emotions' (in the Journal of the History of Ideas) and 'The Three Dimensions of Forgiveness' (in Philosophy in the Contemporary World). He is currently at work on a book on forgiveness and the emotions, tentatively titled Forgiveness and Resentment in the Examined Life. Laura Quinney is Associate Professor of English at Brandeis University. She has written two books: Literary Power and the Criteria of Truth (1995) and The Poetics of Disappointment: Wordsworth to Ashbery (1999).

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RITUAL, ROUTINE, AND REGIME: REPETITION IN EARLY MODERN BRITISH AND EUROPEAN CULTURES

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Introduction LORNA CLYMER

What does repetition - at once the act and instance of repeating indicate about British and European cultures of the early modern period? Significant competing or even incongruous perspectives on repetition's value emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The centrality and often problematic ambiguity of ritual, routine, and regime are rarely assessed accurately because repetition has often been considered indicative of practices quaintly primitive or embarrassingly visceral, something to be transcended as early modern becomes modern. Yet, to think so is to overlook how instances of repetition consistently structured important modes of thought and behaviour.1 Both an imperative and an increasingly devalued strategy in early modern life, repetition could be understood as an attempt to impose continuity on incongruities, or as an effort to come to terms with difference located within sameness. Imitation in a neoclassical context was simultaneously a matter of recapitulation and creation.2 While a relatively new scientific method derived its authority from the replicability of experiments, the proof of creative authority gradually shifted from effective imitation or translation of the past to the production of an ostensible original.3 The issue of repetition also in part provoked the ancient-modern controversy: should a nation and its literature reiterate another era or move ahead into a modernity that self-consciously separates itself from a past?4 In another emergent arena, national identities can be seen as formulated through repetition to become regime, either at institutionalized levels or as the incorporation of individual values that are attributed to national character, habit, and routine.5 One of neoclassicism's most salient characteristics is found in the assumption

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that a particular repeats, and thereby reveals, a corresponding universal principle. This assumption supports, among other concerns, an early modern concentration on exemplarity as a rhetorically and morally effective strategy.6 The importance given to a particular's ability to repeat something larger than itself is also evident in writers' frequent use of synecdoche, metonymy, and other related figures of substitution, especially in early to mid-eighteenth-century satire. By the mid to late eighteenth century, however, not repeating oneself - or anyone else, for that matter - gradually became a sign of mastery, of original artistic or rhetorical achievement.7 In a period in which an object could be replicated more easily than ever before by the harnessing of industrial power, what exactly was original became a matter of pressing concern. Closely related to these developments were increasingly rigorous copyright laws, by which originality could be claimed as an artist's property.8 These changes do not, however, indicate the triumph of originality over repetition. Instead, the relationship between an original and its imitation or copy is defined differently. One could even say that as greater emphasis came to be placed on originality, repetition became more obviously its problematic double. As a consequence, we find increasing fascination with forgery, impersonation, the translated 'discovery' later revealed to be non-authentic and pseudo-archaic, etc.9 Although its declared value declined as the eighteenth century drew to a close, repetition should not simply be dismissed as the disagreeable result of slavish imitation or mechanical replication.10 Furthermore, as Edward Casey asserted, it would be wrong to assume that the realm of the imagination is entirely distinct from that of repetition, or that the first is future directed and the second 'confined to replicating what is past.' In literature, we find that imagination and repetition are combined in an ongoing present of reading, whatever the dominant aesthetics are held to be.11 Defining the nature of repetition itself is difficult. We are apt to limit our thinking if we consider repetition, cautioned Gilles Deleuze, 'in terms of the identical, the similar, the equal or opposed.' We should consider instead that 'variation is not added to repetition in order to hide it, but is rather its condition or constitutive element.'12 This idea promotes a more nuanced sense of the nature of representation, which does not necessarily obediently mirror its cultural circumstances. Instead, as John Bender has described, any representation and works of art specifically may 'clarify structures of feeling characteristic of a given moment and thereby predicate those available in the future ... serv[ing]

Introduction

5

as a medium of cultural emergence through which new images of society, new cultural systems, move into focus and become tangible.'13 In addition, consideration of variation in repetition reveals how older forms do not merely give way to newer. Traditional or ostensibly outmoded practices can continually shape cultural expression. The old repeats and is progressively varied until it is finally perceived as something else; sameness exists as at least a trace within difference. Repetition allows us, ironically, to account effectively for change, in single representation, in an author's oeuvre, as well as within and across genres and periods.14 To be sure, some instances of repetition can be convincingly interpreted as the productions of an anxiety of influence or of unfinished trauma, of any pressure towards change that remains arrested and apparitional. Freud's work remains a locus dassicus for our understanding of the work repetition can be made to do as a psyche persists in recreating what is painful and repressed. We may misunderstand the nature of repetition in early modern culture, however, if we rely too heavily on these psychoanalytic accounts, which posit repetition as uncanny evidence of distortion, repression, unresolved doubling, or, at the least, arising through a disruptive gap of some sort.15 Even a compulsion to repeat, apparently at odds with an otherwise strong pleasure principle, may itself involve pleasure.16 Whatever its source, an absorbing and peculiar enjoyment is often aroused by representations based in repetition, an enjoyment perhaps both compelled and compelling. For example, the momentary suspension and then resumption of pattern, perceived as a welcome return, can create an aesthetic delight. At the least, we find such pleasure evocative. For example, end words of the sestina create an eerie continuity of both sameness and difference. Or, repetition may supplement meaning that would otherwise seem inadequately expressed. William Wordsworth suggested that repetition and 'apparent tautology are frequently beauties of the highest kind' because 'the mind luxuriates in the repetition of words which appear successfully to communicate the feelings.'17 Such luxuriating is involved in what Casey described as the forestalling of absence: 'the act of repetition represents a response to the absence which haunts human being-in-the-world.'18 The human body itself may luxuriate in repetition. A repeated pattern at a basic kinetic level, as found in rhythmic, choreographed movement, has long been understood as meaningful, even profoundly so. An individual participating with others in coordinated movements may experience a feeling of well-being. Ironically, in precisely executed movement,

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a single dancer may find that a customary boundary between self and group has become blurred.19 This visceral component to repetition, often considered pleasurable, can also be considered embarrassing or threatening precisely because it is so compelling, as if distinct selfhood would be dangerously diminished by uninhibited immersion in formations larger than itself.20 Relying on a similar view of an ostensible threat to selfhood from repeated patterns, some relatively recent approaches to art and culture have asserted that many methods of representation are fraudulent and manipulative because their supporting aesthetics are an imposition of coercive ideologies.21 Consequently, during the last few decades, aesthetics in general has become a guilty pleasure and an especially problematic topic of scholarly inquiry. Recent studies have searched for ways to restore aesthetics to discussions of culture and complex ideologies; some consider in particular how an examination of formal elements can lead us to a better sense of artistic history, and of history in general.22 In their examination of the foundational roles repetition can play in the creation of related aesthetic, cultural, and national meanings, the contributors to this volume reveal the convergences of ritual, routine, and regime. They judiciously negotiate between early modern practices and twentieth- and twenty-first-century accounts of the institutions of repetition. They analyse repetition's contested interpretations and describe its demands and satisfactions, whether musical, textual, or sculptural. As the overture to this volume, the first essay (McClary) shows how a repeated musical pattern, occurring in various institutional contexts, suggests very different meanings and assumptions, especially when repetition competes with linear progression. The three essays that follow in Part II (Damrosch, Quinney, Newberry) explore a similar conflict besetting writers who draw on, or seek to reject, definitions of selfhood arising from empiricism's reliance on repetition. In addition, formative early modern definitions of forgiveness, which contribute to theories of emotions, paradoxically depend on repetition as the means of arresting an otherwise endless cycle of repeated injuries. The connections between ritual and regime are explored in two essays in Part III (Kewes, Mounsey), one concerning rhetoric, politics, and textuality, the other about forms of worship and religious expression. The two essays in Part IV (Fairer, Hunter) describe the burdens and pleasures of routine and rhythm, especially as found in the poetry of work and the work of poetry. Finally, the two essays in Part V (Hayes, Baker) explore tensions between repli-

Introduction

7

cated copy and its original in translation and in sculpture. In general, the interdisciplinary range of the essays gathered here attests to the heuristic value of the volume's central topic. Susan McClary explores the chaconne, a repetitive musical form associated with primitive expression, whose complex history can be understood as a 'mis-en-abime of the concept of repetition.' Standard histories of Western music make repetition ritualistic and something consequently to be resisted. A significant musical pattern, itself quite repetitive, may remain identifiable as it passes through various cultures and periods. This pattern may also accrue different, even original cultural significances as each culture does much more than simply appropriate. Perhaps originally an import from the New World, the chacona in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was considered to have irresistible danceinspiring, off-beat accentual rhythms that were regarded as either liberating or dangerously addictive and obscenely lascivious. It was used in Italian and French music significant to the institutions of both courts and churches, however, to suggest pleasurable repetition in dance rhythms, even if it was inserted in compositional styles considered more accomplished aesthetically. The chaconne or ciaccona also appeared in a mournful, minor key version, the passacaglia, whose repetitions were evocative of grief, as in Dido's lament by Purcell. The final movement of Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita II in D Minor for Unaccompanied Violin, probably written circa 1720, is a chaconne. An intensely challenging piece to perform, it vividly demonstrates Bach's extraordinary ability to transform available musical patterns. In this case, Bach recapitulates and condenses the chaconne's previous meanings, and places its traditional elements in conflict. Passages suggestive of uninhibited pleasure arising from repetition are emphatically countered by a larger structure that suggests a self struggling vigorously to escape repetition, in order to emerge as self-conscious, progressive, and autonomous. This struggle between repetition and progression anticipates how the history of music of the last two hundred years has defined musical values, by privileging linearity and disparaging what is understood as redundancy. As the drama of selfhood in Bach's partita illustrates, tensions between sequential progression and an identity created by repetition are found in central early modern definitions of the self. Leo Damrosch and Laura Quinney show how some writers confronted or eluded difficulties in an empiricist model of character and subjectivity. On the one hand, traditional thinking about character, as established by Theophrastus and

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others, asserted that types would repeat their natures. On the other hand, an empiricist proto-psychological model for personhood posited sequentially ordered, remembered perceptions as the relatively stable grounds for identity. This model purported to solve problems of continuity: how do we recognize ourselves as the 'same' person we were in an earlier period? And how do we know that a succession of sense impressions will contribute to our awareness of ourselves as a single entity? Not all philosophers, of course, answered these questions in the same way, but an empiricist answer was widespread.23 Working from a basic empiricist model, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot suggested two types of Enlightenment selfhood that rely on the notion of repetition. Damrosch's essay compares these selves, established by Rousseau and Diderot, formulated first in their narratives that anticipate later theoretical writing in the field of psychology. Rousseau explores how a coherent self is revealed in what initially seem to be peculiar, even inexplicably strange, episodes. Anticipating Freud, he describes the assertion of sexual desires that are usually repressed successfully. Such assertions, infrequent but repetitive, reveal in a distorted form the nature of a personality that is in fact coherent, despite the appearance of contradictory behaviour. This personality is established not 'in sequential experience, but in an inner state of identity' that remains the same, even as it asserts itself in apparently new ways. Thus, Rousseau defines the self through a structuring repetition found in sexual impulses, reoccurring both in the imagination and in actions. He therefore partially escapes from the empiricist model of his near contemporaries. By contrast, Diderot describes a 'performative and improvising self in his fictional exploration of determinism, Jacques leFataliste. Within its playful artificiality, the novel's form is discernable. Embedded plots, created by characters telling stories, suggest that we should interpret the stories as illustrations of patterns of meaning. But patterns do not necessarily suggest a ideological dimension. Diderot sought to overturn a 'metaphysical dimension of fatalism' and to suggest that repetition, although culminating in discernable patterns, is in fact unmotivated. Quinney shows that William Blake critiqued Lockean empiricism as a stultifying bondage to repetitive, material reality. His attempt to provide an imaginative antidote to this view, however, was less successful than his urgent, visionary' verse might suggest. Blake's indignant responses to Wordsworth's poetry, therefore, reveal some of his own conflict with materialism. 'Blake recognized that William Wordsworth had elaborated a phenomenology of the subject out of Locke's epistemology, and so

Introduction

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exposed, especially in "Tintern Abbey," the disappointments of Natureworship and the tormented self-division of the subject resigned to uniquely natural existence.' In Blake's own verse, he vividly treats the incoherence and wretchedness of subjectivity. He presents the fragmented, empiricist-based condition, however, as remediable through the exercise of imagination, which is supposedly free of natural constraints. But in Blake's work there remains a troubling, implicit division between 'natural and transcendental man,' despite his insistence on the reconciliation of mind and body in a 'transcendental experiment.' Some theologically based definitions of what constitutes good human behaviour, and its relationship to definitions of selfhood, often suggest theories of emotion. These definitions were far from settled in the early modern period, and are revealed by Paul Newberry to be 'in an exciting state of flux.' Currently, some philosophers assert that forgiveness is an action involving the overcoming of resentment. Joseph Butler is sometimes said to be the first to hold this view. Newberry finds that in fact Butler 'defines forgiveness as the ... withholding of revenge, not the overcoming of resentment.' In addition, Butler was only one of several prominent theologians and philosophers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to write about forgiveness in this way; other suggestive texts include the sermons of John Tillotson and Samuel Clarke and the philosophical writings of the Earl of Shaftesbury. Newberry traces the ways in which these writers defined forgiveness through repetition, especially in a theological context. In particular, in forgiving others humans are to repeat how God forgives sin. Resentment is understood as a natural and useful response to any injury; it may prevent the 'wrongdoer from repeating his crime ... and his sin.' While resentment may be useful, an eschewal of revenge halts a possible repetition of the 'injuries the wrongdoer committed' first. These ideas arise in part as an extension of Butler's religious views, which Newberry contends are consistently misunderstood in current philosophical work. The historical background for definitions of forgiveness, therefore, has not been accurately recapitulated, in part because we have failed to 'comprehend the ways in which Butler's view is itself enmeshed in a repetitive framework' defined by early modern theology. Repetitive, institutional frameworks grounded in ritual and supporting various kinds of regimes are explored by Paulina Kewes and Chris Mounsey. Determining the nature of official forgiveness for the regicide and upheaval of the Civil War was a preoccupation of the early Restoration court. A rhetorical experiment involving highly motivated repeti-

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tions of possible meanings of the Civil Wars and the Interregnum is the subject of Kewes's essay. She describes how between 1660 and 1662 the newly restored king and his advisors sought effective, official ways of referring to the conflict of the mid-century. Anxious that the history of the recent civil strife not be repeated in another civil conflict, they set out to manage, in legal and historical texts, the meanings of this period. 'It was essential for them to propose an interpretation of the midcentury crisis that would allay the myriad insecurities and fears and so help legitimize the Stuart Restoration.' In addition, the authorities considered 'contemporary historical writings' as a potentially effective method of repeating the preceding history in an attempt to shape attitudes, but the idea of commissioning an official history was eventually abandoned as too risky. In general, these Stuart efforts to strengthen the regime by managing national memory had failed by mid-1662. The meaning of repetitious practices in ecclesiastical settings, and their connections to poetic practices, are the subjects of Chris Mounsey's essay. The use or rejection of repetition in practices of worship revealed denominational differences. Uniformity of imposed liturgy during the Commonwealth period was thought to reduce the autonomy of one's conscience. After the Restoration and the re-establishment of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Anglicans repeated their services according to established cycles of readings and prayers. Nonconformists, however, preferred a service that was grounded not in repetition but in interpretation: both the minister's interpretation of the scriptural passage for that day and the worshipper's prayer, 'a personal interpretation of the scriptures.' The hymn did not become an established element in Anglican service until the nineteenth century. Until then, it was considered primarily a Nonconformist or Methodist practice because these compositions were often interpretations of the Psalms or other religious verse. It is therefore noteworthy that Christopher Smart, ostensibly an Anglican poet, wrote two significant religious texts in hymnal form, A Song to David (1763) and A Translation of the Psalms of David (1765). Ambiguities in Smart's poetry have consistently challenged critics due to the presence of 'Dissenting rhetoric and practice.' Mounsey argues that enthusiastic elements in Smart's verse, and in the language of similar Anglican writers, are intended as a guard against Dissenting enthusiasm. Smart intended these texts to be used as supplementary Anglican materials, part of a literature of preparation for church attendance, designed to ensure that difficult language used in the actual service would be meaningful.

Introduction

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In the next section, David Fairer and J. Paul Hunter explore routines and rhythms associated with and integral to poetry. The rhythms of work and their possible alignment with natural cycles have long been a concern of the georgic poem. Fairer considers early- to mid-eighteenthcentury British poetry about human labour written by 'labouring-class' poets. We might expect that the georgic celebrates while the labourer's poem disparages the demands of repetitive work. In fact, each relies on complex, ambiguous views of repetitive work, in which the patterns of human work are both set against and correlated with the patterns of nature. Taking into account 'new challenges and disturbing contingencies [that] are always waiting to disrupt the pulse of life,' the georgic poem 'has to retrieve repeatable strategies from a world of experience where decay and death have entered.' And, 'as human routines encounter demanding regimes,' any poetry of work must consider 'what place ... individual skill and energy [may] have within a wider system.' With these ideas in mind, differences among eighteenth-century poets who write on the topic of human labour can be discerned and the distinct ways in which these poets use the concept of repetition can be identified. Some labouring-class poets suggested a correlation between the rhythms of their labour and the rhythms and rhymes of their poetic lines. Currently, rhyme is not consistently understood as a source of general satisfaction in many types of poetry, but this was not always the case. How can we make 'traditional rhymed poetry more attractive and understandable to present-day readers'? Hunter outlines 'seven reasons for the use of rhyme,' relating to rhyme's various functions, which would have been known or sensed by early modern poets. He first finds at work in the traditional functions of 'memory, emphasis, ornament, and structure' greater complexities than are usually recognized. He also explores three other functions: that of expectation and satisfaction, the ways in which meaning is implied or suggested by the juxtaposition of rhyming words, and the creation of a 'prevailing tone or mood through sound.' Far from limiting, therefore, the repetition at work in rhyme is shown to be suggestive of many kinds of meaning and is found in a complex set of functions. In the final section, Julie Candler Hayes and Malcolm Baker demonstrate how complex the relationship can be between original and replicated copy as they occur in particular arts: the translation of literary works and the sculpted portrait bust. These essays also illustrate some aspects of a rich and complicated exchange between British and French cultures. In addition, both Hayes and Baker suggest that we need to

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apply with care any relatively modern definition of 'the' copy to avoid obscuring conditions peculiar to early modern cultures. Literary translation, in its reliance on adaptation and originality, makes visible some of the ways in which any literary experience is produced when imagination is combined with repetition. Hayes investigates French translations of British works during the mid-eighteenth century. She demonstrates why it would be reductive to claim that such translations lack receptiveness to foreign values. Instead, many translators sought to broaden contemporary viewpoints by employing a range of 'discursive strategies' that would allow for an appealing repetition of otherwise unfamiliar literary works and traditions. Such strategies and a rich convergence of aesthetic and philosophical concerns are particularly evident in the translations of Pierre Le Tourneur. His mid- to late-eighteenth-century editions of British writers brought to French readers a complete Shakespeare and the ostensibly melancholy, 'preromantic' writers, such as Young, Hervey, Gray, and Ossian, with whom he was quickly identified. Le Tourneur was best known for his full-length versions of works already known in previous translations and for his extensive, self-reflective critical prefaces. He intentionally selected some works to translate because they 'offered new directions for writing in French.' In an examination of Le Tourneur's 'Discours' preceding his freely adapted and radically altered translation of Young's Night Thoughts, Hayes finds that the translator incorporated ideas on genius and originality that were both central to a later work of Young, the Conjectures on Original Composition, and indicative of 'pre-Romantic' sensibilities. Working from Young's criticism, Le Tourneur asserted that translation should be understood in terms similar to that of originality. This assertion, along with other strategies, indicates a strongly adaptive approach in neoclassical translation with surprising implications for the study of repetition. In this case, the copy becomes original. Samuel Johnson asserted that copying is always problematic and likely to result in something inferior to the model, but several centuries later Walter Benjamin observed that when a work of art is freely reproduced, it is 'emancipate[d] from its parasitical dependence on ritual.'24 We find, however, both critical observations complicated by the portrait busts of Alexander Pope executed by Louis Francois Roubiliac in the mid-eighteenth century. Malcolm Baker shows why, more obviously than in other forms of visual representation, the portrait bust's meaning was variously grounded in a repetition of creative imitation. As a genre that reworked antique, classical conventions, the bust linked the individual

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commemorated to authoritative traditions. Because Roubiliac repeated Pope's image in a variety of materials and sizes, the marble image cannot be understood as the original standing behind the replication of similar images in less expensive materials such as terracotta. None of Roubiliac's replications can be considered as having been mechanically produced. Furthermore, Roubiliac repeated essentially the same image in four marble versions, each of which make a claim to be considered 'original.' Thus, Roubiliac's popular repeated busts of Pope ironically contribute to a mid-century celebration and commodification of originality through the ownership of replicated images. These marbles and their reception force us to reconsider our notion of repetition as an instance of an original in a debased or diminished form. In fact, the ways in which these images were disseminated throughout English culture show that an ambiguous relationship between original and replica was a key factor in Roubiliac's prominent standing, in Pope's reception, and in the use of such busts to indicate cultural standing based in mastered rituals of 'politeness.' As a collection, these essays may suggest a critical rubric that will make possible additional discoveries and descriptions of repetition at work in early modern cultures. Notes 1 Descriptions of 'the' Enlightenment, which often stress innovation over tradition and autonomous individualism over ostensibly restrictive communal demands, may obscure the crucial role repetition plays in early modern cultures. In a different vein, critiques of capitalism regard repetition as one mode by which the 'culture industry' is maintained; see Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Gumming (New York: Continuum, 1944, 1994), 8, passim. In literary studies, attention to repetition tends to be genre specific, and the peculiar nature of repetition itself is often assumed to need little exploration. In philosophy, repetition is put to work in a variety of ways, far too numerous to list here. See also Edward W. Said's meditation on repetition and historical continuities, 'On Repetition,' in The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. Angus Fletcher (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), 135-58. 2 The 'imitation' as a poetic form is hardly a copy; see, for example, Samuel Johnson's 'The Vanity of Human Wishes' as an ostensible imitation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire. Douglas Lane Patey corrects the idea of 'imitation as

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mere formal and generic recapitulation': 'Augustan imitation was a mode of cultural transmission that crucially involved correction of a tradition from within' ('The Institution of Criticism in the Eighteenth Century,' in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 8). As Patey points out, Joseph Trapp presents imitation as transmission: 'poetry "by lively Copies produces new Originals'" (qtd. in 'Institution of Criticism,' 8). (His Lectures on Poetry were first printed in Latin in two volumes, Praekctiones Poeticae, 1711 and 1715; the English translation did not appear until 1742. Trapp's contribution, therefore, to an ongoing debate about the nature of imitation was earlier than some citations of the English edition alone might suggest.) Furthermore, Trapp presents imitation as a basic response arising from our limited human condition. 'This Fondness of Mankind for imitating, proceeds, probably, from nothing else but their Desire of Knowledge and Power.' Being unable to create, to 'produce something out of nothing, [which] is the peculiar Property of the Almighty,' Mankind imitates God to the extent of his abilities by 'imitating Things already made' (Lectures on Poetry, trans. William Bowyer and William Clarke [London: Printed for C. Hitch and C. Davis, 1742], 30). For an investigation of related assumptions concerning imitation, see Martin Battestin's The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), esp. 50ff. John Dennis's late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century criticism illustrates a pervasive tension between original and copy. For example, he asserts in The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701): 'Besides, the most famous of the Roman Poets, copied particular Grecian Authors, as Horace did Pindar, and consequently, fell short of them in the Freeness and Flame of their Spirit, as Copies must necessarily do of Originals' (The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943], 1:243). For imitation more generally as the basis of representation in Western culture, see Erich Auerbach's classic study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). A recent study focused primarily on modern culture's investment in duplication is Hillel Schwartz's The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996). 3 For a valuable collection of essays on early modern science, see EighteenthCentury Science, ed. Roy Porter, vol. 4 of the Cambridge History of Science Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). A richly suggestive,

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thematically organized collection of primary materials is Literature and Science, 1660-1834, general ed. Judith Hawley, 8 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003-4). 4 For a perceptive study of this complex, early modern concern, see Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). For a useful overview, see Douglas Lane Patey, 'Ancients and Moderns,' in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 4, The Eighteenth Century, 32—71. 5 To name only one recent study contributing to the subject of nationhood and its ostensible connection to routine and character, see Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Characters, 1650-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 6 Two recent books provide a useful overview of the complex rhetorical and moral functions of exemplarity: Alexander Gelley, ed., Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995); and John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 7 Edward Young's essay Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) clearly marks one moment in eighteenth-century British criticism when an 'original' is to be preferred over an imitation; an organic whole, spontaneously arising, is to be desired over a manufactured, crafted production. Several decades later, the Romantic movement will stress organic integrity as a hall-mark of originality, authenticity, and aesthetic accomplishment. Several useful studies explore this shift from imitation to purportedly autonomous expression. See, for example, M.H. Abrams's biased but useful The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), and Susan Stewart's insightful 'Preface to a Lyric History,' in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 199-218. 8 For the development of intellectual property as a concept and of related legislation, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 9 Critical debates about the works of Ossian and of Chatterton illustrate the problematic and often sensational cultures involved in such 'discoveries.' For one significant contribution to the Ossian controversy, see Hugh Blair's A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, 2nd ed. (London: T. Becket and PA. De Hondt, 1765; New York: Garland Publishing, 1970). 10 Repetition and substitution in literature can be highly significant. One famous example is found in The Rape of the Lock. By means of a deft, syntactically concentrated passage, Pope asserts that it is within the coquettes'

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shifting hearts 'Where Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-knots Sword-knots strive' (1.101). Pope thus disparages the coquettes' mutable desire, which settles on a progression of objects only apparently different but tediously the same. In a later era, Walter Benjamin will assert that repetition of an original makes the distinction between original and copy meaningless, an observation Andy Warhol took to heart and to the bank. See Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in • the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,' in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955, 1968). 11 Edward Casey, 'Imagination and Repetition in Literature: A Reassessment,' Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 249. For an eerie account of the strange compulsions at work in an ongoing present of reading, in which the text replicates itself in its host, the reader, see George Poulet's 'Phenomenology of Reading,' New Literary History 1 (1969): 53-68 (reprinted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch [New York: W.W. Norton, 2001], 1320-33). 12 Gilles Deleuze, Repetition and Difference, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968, 1994), xvi. Furthermore, the traditional discipline of rhetoric has systematically noticed and named variation as a 'constitutive element' of repetition. See Richard A. Lanham's user-friendly A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). For a comprehensive treatment, see Heinrich Lausberg's invaluable Handbook of Literary Rhetoric: A Foundation for Literary Study, trans. Matthew T. Bliss etal. (Leiden: Brill, 1960, 1973, 1998). Brian Vickers gives a helpful overview of rhetoricians' explanations of repetition, its various patterns, and its capacity to imitate or to arouse different emotions; see his 'Repetition and Emphasis in Rhetoric: Theory and Practice,' in Repetition, ed. Andreas Fischer (Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature series, vol. 7) (Tubingen: Narr, 1994), 85-113. 13 John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 7. 14 Attention to literary practices can make repetition visible, but the inherent peculiarity of sameness within difference rarely is addressed directly. For one powerful study of how the varied nature of the allusion can create distinct styles, see Jeffrey Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 15 See Jacques Lacan's work on the unconscious and repetition in his The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), I7ff. 16 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (NewYork: W.W. Norton, 1989), 611. See also another central essay of

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Freud in a new translation, The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003). Useful work on the uncanny in literature and culture includes: Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (New York: Routledge, 2003). 17 William Wordsworth, note to 'The Thorn,' in Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green, Cornell Wordsworth Series (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 351. 18 Casey, 'Imagination and Repetition in Literature,' 252. 19 Such experiences may be neurological in origin. One historian has recently explored how drill, dance, and even battle 'create and sustain group cohesion.' See William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 10. 20 Some immersion in repeated patterns is viewed as salutary. Pedagogical history shows that habit and memorization have been often considered efficacious in the moulding of character. For an explanation of contexts for Locke's understanding of the importance of habit in education, see Richard A. Barney, Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 41-2, 50-2. A nineteenth-century text for English schoolchildren presents as essential the memorization of literary passages, many of which rhyme predictably; see Charles Bilton, Repetition and Reading Book for Pupil Teachers and the Upper Classes of Schools: Consisting of Selections of Prose and Poetry from the Best English Authors (London: Longmans, Green, 1866). 21 The possible deleterious effect of literary representation has long been a concern in criticism. For two standard examples, see Plato, Republic, X.595ff., and Samuel Johnson, Rambler, no. 4 (1750). 22 In literary studies, we are still struggling to make profitable use of our problematic New Critical heritage. Not all close reading, of course, must culminate in a revelation of the organic union created from repeated patterns. (Similarly, attention to repetition can quickly seem excessively structuralist in methodology, in which an individual instance is entirely assimilated into the articulation of a larger pattern, created by repetition.) To name only three fairly recent studies that posit a convergence of formalism and ideology or literary history, see J. Paul Hunter's essay 'Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?' Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2000): 1-20; the anthology of essays Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), espe-

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cially his introductory essay; and Susan J. Wolfson, Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Kathleen Lea meditatively catalogued the many roles repetition could play in poetry; see her The Poetic Powers of Repetition, Warton Lecture on English Poetry, Proceedings of the British Academy 55 (1969): 51-76. Helen Deutsch has described the intricate and poignant rhyme created by Alexander Pope's poetic style and his contemporaries' perceptions of his physical deformity; see her Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 23 In his account of personal identity and its reliance on repetition, John Locke often implicitly or explicitly relies on the concept of repetition. See, for example, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), bk. 2, chap. 27, para. 10, p. 335. Not all felt equally satisfied with Lockean empiricist definitions of identity, of course. Hume proposed something quite different. And the satiric episode of Martinus Scriblerus's double mistress shows what sport could be made of the concept of 'same person': is Lindamora-Indamora one person or two because she/they share 'but one Organ of Generation'? (Scriblerus Club, Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller [New York: Oxford University Press, 1988], 159). In a later period, Romantic poets will often worry that what is within the self may not be regained fully or productively. 24 Johnson, The Rambler, no. 121, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 2:286-91; Benjamin, The Work of Art,' 226.

PART I OVERTURE

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chapter one

Cycles of Repetition: Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and the Chaconne SUSAN McCLARY

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, repetitive procedures in music acquired a singularly bad reputation. Frankfurt School critic Theodor W. Adorno - who based his aesthetic principles on the resistance to reiteration in the music of Beethoven and Schoenberg fulminated against the moral dangers of such procedures, especially as they lured unwary listeners into mindless dances such as the jitterbug, into Stravinsky's primitivism, or into the herd mentality encouraged by bourgeois affirmative culture and later exploited by the rise of European fascism.1 The ethical imperative of Schoenberg's serialism grounded itself in this horror of repetition and of the kinds of subjectivities it breeds; decades after everyone had forgotten the original rationale behind prohibitions of musical redundancy, the commandment Thou shall not repeat patterns in thy compositions' still held sway over university-trained musicians. Of course, any rule that strident and seemingly arbitrary only invites reaction, and the minimalist musics of the last thirty years have revelled in repetition, in deliberate violation of High Modernism's most cherished taboo.2 The musicians who have participated in this return to repetition have paid for their sins by getting excluding from official histories of Western music, which still want to trace an upward trajectory away from ritualistic reiterations and towards increasingly autonomous, non-redundant formal processes. As a result, most textbooks make it as far as Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt, then lose their narrative thread. Surely Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and John Adams (to say nothing of James Brown, Parliament, or Missy Elliott) cannot be the next step along this carefully plotted path! There must be some mistake.

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This collection of essays concerns not the crises of contemporary culture, but rather the institutional functions of repetition in a much earlier era - the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet I have begun with this discussion of repetition's fate in more recent years because that allergy to repetition has also coloured the analytical methods and standards of judgment developed in musicology in the wake of Beethoven. To the extent that Beethoven teaches us implicitly in his music to abhor repetition, he instills in us a principle we apply to all musics. My work, along with that of a growing number of musicologists and ethnomusicologists, has attempted to interrogate those 'purely musical' standards - to understand how they developed as ideological constraints and to construct other ways of approaching the musics that do not yield to Beethovenian (or Schoenbergian) standards.3 It seems clear to many of us that the linear, narratively conceived art music of the last two hundred years has set itself up as a false universal; in fact, most musics of the planet - and even of western Europe - have happily embraced repetition for purposes of ritual, dance, religious trance, community consolidation, and much else. Historian William McNeill's Keeping Together in Time even argues that a society's survival depends on its ability to implement such repetitious practices successfully.4 Up against that larger picture, the imperative to eschew repetition appears as a mere blip on the screen - and a fairly perverse blip at that. The question that now arises is why European art musics since the eighteenth century have pursued this very different course. In view of this set of issues, I want to revisit a moment in European art music that engaged in musical procedures of repetition, to ascertain how those procedures operated within their own social frameworks, how they performed cultural work. As it turns out, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries nurtured one peculiar pattern that was within itself highly redundant and that spawned hundreds of reiterations from the late sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. It qualifies, in other words, as a mis-en-abime of the concept of repetition. Yet if this procedure inspired copycat imitations everywhere it went, each new site embued it with very particularized sets of meanings, often very different from and even antagonistic to those developed within other institutional contexts. The procedure continued to signify strongly wherever it went, but its implications changed radically, depending on the ideological priorities of each place and time. It thus affords us a glimpse into several very distinct cultural worlds, united in their interest in inhabiting this simple pattern, even if diametrically opposed in their deployments of it.

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The Chacona: Origins and Disseminations Our story begins somewhere in the New World, where sixteenth-century conquistadors encountered a kind of music they liked well enough that they included it (or some version of it) in the booty they brought back to Spain. Musicologist Richard Hudson has speculated as to the chacona's origins: possibly Mexico, a site sometimes mentioned in early sources; perhaps South America, where Andean musicians still play rhythmic and harmonic patterns uncannily like those of the chacona; perhaps even African settlements, for the slave trade had already flourished for some decades by the time the chacona made it back across the Atlantic, and the cross-rhythms characteristic of the chacona also mark many of the impulses of African-Latin musics.5 Like so many musics born of the cultural collisions brought about by colonization and diaspora, the chacona bears tantalizing (if imprecise) witness to events buried in a past incompletely recorded. Moreover, its transporters inevitably translated whatever it was they heard in its original contexts into patterns familiar to their European ears and conceptual schemata. Nonetheless, transferal of something from the New World back to the Old took place, and many Spanish sources - including mentions by Cervantes and Lope de Vega - testify to its rapid spread in its new environment.6 It sparked a dance craze that inspired a familiar set of reactions: on the one hand, it was celebrated for liberating bodies that had been stifled by the constraints of European civilization; on the other, it was condemned as obscene, as a threat to Christian mores. But all sources concurred that its rhythms - once experienced - were irresistible: its practioners had only to shout 'Vida bona!' (the good life) to signal the beginning of the. music that would pull everyone within earshot into its compelling groove. For instance, the lyrics for one extended chacona describe a funeral at which the officiating priest by mistake mutters 'vida bona,' the signal for the dance to begin; the clergy, the nuns, the family of the deceased, and even the corpse itself respond by wiggling and leaping with uninhibited glee. When they go afterwards to beg forgiveness, the bishop asks (strictly as a point of legal information) to hear one refrain and spends the next hour gyrating with his skirts raised; his congregation shakes the house for another six. At the conclusion of this carnivalesque fantasy, the bishop forgives his flock.7 In a sequence of events paralleled still today whenever a dance-type bubbles up from the wrong social group, a backlash against the chacona soon ensued. Like rhythm and blues at a later historical moment, the chacona crossed over cautiously guarded class and racial boundaries.

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Whatever the chacona signified in its original contexts, it quickly came to be associated in Europe (by friends and foes alike) with forbidden bodily pleasures and potential social havoc. Like syphilis, which also followed the conquistadors back home, the chacona qualified as a venereal contagion, and the sensual pleasure associated with both ensured their unchecked spread throughout Europe. Attempts were made to insulate upper-class ladies from the chacona's influence, and the church banned it in 1615 on grounds of its 'irredeemably infectious lasciviousness.' But the horse had already left the stable, thanks in large part to new technologies of music printing, which made its dissemination quick, cheap, and unstoppable. For the introduction of the chacona coincided with a market dedicated to self-help manuals - in this case, books that promised to teach you how to play guitar in the comfort of your own home. Aimed exclusively at amateurs, these publications offered only the bare essentials of tuning and frets, along with a few easily executed patterns. The older virtuosic mode of performance, which required complex plucked finger work (punteado), was replaced by rasgueado, the technique of strumming simple chords. The chacona fit perfectly into this new demand for music playable by three-chord wonders, who employed their quickly acquired rasgueado for rhythmic vitality and could happily play the chacona - like the blues - all night long. Very much like the folk, art-school, or garage musicians of a later era who sometimes learned how to play their requisite three chords the same day as their public premieres in bands, people could, with these manuals, take musicking into their own hands, to provide the soundtrack for la vida bona.8 These self-help manuals are our principal source of written documentation for the musical details of the early chacona. A few slightly different patterns appeared in print under this name; they all share, however, a very restricted number of chord changes (conforming to the most basic of contemporaneous cadential formulas), a strong rhythmic accent on the offbeats, and the instruction that one simply play the tiny pattern (four to eight seconds in duration) over and over again (fig. 1.1). The harmonic pattern itself did not arouse consternation, but that offbeat accent seemed to provoke explicitly sexualized motions in the bodies of dancers,9 while the infinite iterations of the pattern became addictive, putting its listeners into the ecstatic trance-state sought after by many rituals, from those of whirling dervishes to Cuban Santeria to raves.10 The fact of the chacona's 'barbaric' pedigree enhanced simultaneously its appeal for its devotees and the hysterical denunciations of its opponents.

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Figure 1.1. Spanish chaconas

Had the chacona stayed within the realm of amateur guitar manuals and community music-making, musicologists probably would have paid no more attention to it than to dozens of other practices that similarly left only the barest of outlines for purposes of improvisation. Imagine having to reconstitute the richness of the blues tradition or trying to make sense of all the verbal testimonies to its power if, instead of recordings, we had only the twelve-bar schema that underwrites it. Fortunately for our story, the chacona soon trickled upward from its humble origins to infiltrate the highest levels of cultural production, to enter contexts within which court composers wrote out and thus preserved their inventions in lavish detail for posterity. Some memory of the chacona's titillating past came with it to each new environment, but its mythology and the effects of its repetitions meant very different things as it jumped from host to host. The Italian Ciaccona The chacona first travelled from Spain to Italy along with fashionable guitarists and the international marketing of improvisatory manuals. In its new home, the ciaccona (as Italians called it) soon became the musical background for dancing and a common item in instrumental variations. The renowned organist at Saint Peter's in Rome, Girolamo Frescobaldi, included ciaccona sections within his keyboard partitas, for instance, and references - labelled as such or not - show up frequently in Italian vocal and instrumental musics of the early 1600s (fig. 1.2). By far the most famous of Italian ciaccona settings is Claudio Monteverdi's accompanied duet for two tenors 'Zefiro torna,' published

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Figure 1.2. Italian ciaccona

in the collection Scherzi musicaliin 1632 (fig. 1.3a). The poetic text hails the return of spring and spins out verse after verse enumerating the season's delights; but towards the end, the anguish and alienation of the poet's inner self suddenly erupt into the text, setting up a stark Petrarchan contrast with the splendour of the natural world. For most of the duet, the ciaccona proliferates its dance pattern with reckless abandon, each temporary conclusion breeding only the desire for yet another repetition. As the lines concerning the poet's emotional condition appear, however, the music swerves into a concentrated passage featuring some of the most chromatic, dissonant writing available to the mannerist avantgarde. The duet ends by pivoting between the overwrought agony that guarantees the 'authenticity' of the subject's inferiority and the carefree, seductive ciaccona rhythms of 'nature,' of the body11 (fig. 1.3b). Note that this 'body' is no longer the body of colour or of the lower classes from which the ciaccona was taken; it now stands for the 'universal' (i.e., white) body - albeit a body yoked explicitly in binary opposition with the tortured, deeply feeling soul. It thus traces a Cartesian mind/ body split, whereby the unbridled pleasures of the flesh compete with the White Man's Burden: the alienation nurtured by thought and zealous self-fashioning.12 Monteverdi allows us to have it both ways, as he indulges us in course after course of the ciaccona's contagious impulse, though periodically dunking us into the chilly waters of tormented inferiority. Nor did the ciaccona remain strictly within the realm of secular composition in Italy. In his capacity as maestro di cappella at San Marco (a church frequently resistant to Roman authority), Monteverdi happily brought to his sacred music his entire toolkit of devices, which included the ciaccona. For instance, in a solo setting of Psalm 150 (the psalm that recites the inventory of King David's instruments), the ciaccona suddenly enters with the verse: 'Praise God upon the loud cymbals, praise him upon the high sounding cymbals.' The mere mention of 'primitive' percussion instruments diverts the music from its rather more gracious impulse and, as though someone had shouted 'vida bona,' immerses us in the party rhythms of the New World. Whereas each of the previous verses of the psalm had received a brief setting, the cymbals and their attendant

Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and the Chaconne

Figure 1.3a. Monteverdi, 'Zefiro torna'

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Figure 1.3b. 'Zefiro,' mm. 122-37

ciaccona run on for nearly a quarter the length of the whole piece. Only the need to proceed to the final verse, 'Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord,' brings a reluctant halt to the festivities; even here, the high spirits of the ciaccona seem to have compromised the decorum established earlier in the psalm setting, requiring that the voice go out in a blaze of glory - in a delirium of coloratura ornamentation.13 Although the ciaccona enjoyed a period of considerable popularity in early seventeenth-century Italy, it nearly always functioned as though within quotation marks, as in the two Monteverdi examples just dis-

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Figure 1.3b. (concluded)

cussed. To be sure, Italian courtiers included dance among their entertainments, and dance-oriented rhythms appear in both vocal and instrumental genres of the time. But elite Italian composition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused on the arousal of the passions, on representations of interiority — especially inferiority under duress. The Renaissance madrigal developed an extensive arsenal of devices for simulating conflicted inner states, and opera, which emerged around 1600, likewise pursued this highly subjective agenda.14 Dance occupied a decidedly backseat position with respect to cultural prestige. Thus even when the ciaccona intrudes into pieces such as the ones mentioned above, it is marked as pleasurable yet somehow as a distraction; variously aligned with nature, with the dancing body, or with percussion, it resides on a lower level within the aesthetic hierarchy than those components that lend insight into interiority. The tenors in 'Zefiro torna' sing exuberantly about how nice it would be to feel at one with the unproblematic springtime landscape, but the entire ciaccona section regardless of its length and energy - converts to a subjunctive 'as if as soon as the 'reality' of tortured emotions pushes to the surface.15 Psalm

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150 includes no anguished imagery to juxtapose to the ciaccona, but Monteverdi still situates his reference to New World rhythms in the position of the primitive. In short, the ciaccona constitutes a guilty pleasure within the Italian cultural lexicon. This is not to suggest that the Italians hesitated to indulge in such delights, for hedonism ranked high among their values. But we would be missing something important if we failed to notice how Italian composers framed the ciaccona as cheap thrill. The French Chaconne Some time around 1650, Cardinal Mazarin brought the Italian virtuoso Francesco Corbetta to the French court to teach Spanish guitar to Louis XIV himself. No three-chord wonder, Corbetta had brought to this lowly instrument the kinds of punteado techniques associated with the highclass lute, making him the first in a line of Guitar Gods (as my generation called Eric Clapton and his heavy-metal descendants). Corbetta published some of his compositions based on the ciaccona, and we can follow in his scores some of the strategies a skilled performer of the time could bring to this dance: they begin with the simple rasgueado strumming featured in instruction manuals, then build with ever more difficult figuration to encompass finally the whole range of devices available to fretted instruments.16 In Corbetta's hands, the ciaccona became a pretext for intellectual exploration. If he retains something of the old second-beat accent, Corbetta's successive variations pull the ear further and further away from the mere physical impulse and exact repetition it had offered in previous incarnations. As the changes unfold, the infectious dance rhythms get sacrificed to ornamental filigree and to contrapuntal display, slowing the tempo and making the ciaccona increasingly an abstract platonic form. When French harpsichordists such as Jean-Henry D'Anglebert started writing chaconnes for solo keyboard, they established an essentially new genre. First, they revised the repetitious quality of the old ciaccona. Instead of proceeding through consecutive iterations of the basic unit, the keyboard chaconne fused with the rondeau format. Although the rondeau refrain still clings to the harmonic patterning of the ciaccona (again a very simple cadential formula; Fig. 1.4), it alternatives with episodes that introduce other keys, that explore other musical options. Without question the refrain serves as the focal point of the resulting composition: the listener waits through the imaginative episodes with

Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and ^Chaconne

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Figure 1.4. D'Anglebert, Chaconne

the sure expectation that the refrain will return intact. But the structural priorities of the keyboard chaconne differ from those of the much simpler ciaccona.17 More important, the French brought the chaconne back into the realm of actual dance. In contrast to the Italians, who preferred the passionate medium of vocal music, the French shaped their court rituals around dance, which served both to provide recreational distraction and to inscribe courtiers physically into the neoplatonic ideology prescribed by the Sun King.18 Far from referring to the unbridled exuberance of the primitive body, the French chaconne delineates the most stately of rhythmic impulses - parallel, in fact, with the upwardly mobile ascent of the sarabande, a dance likewise reputed to have originated in orgiastic rituals of the New World but gradually refined at court to represent the height of elegance. Both chaconne and sarabande maintain an accent on the second beat; but in their much slower tempos, they no longer inspire (nor would they condone) the ill-behaved gestures of the body that had so scandalized the chacona's early foes. In its new French manifestation, the chaconne climbed even further up the ladder of cultural prestige until it reached the summit. JeanBap tiste Lully, Louis's dance-and-music czar, often positioned a chaconne as the concluding element in his ballets and operas.19 At this point following the plot's denouement, spectators joined professional performers in dancing around the body of the King, thereby simultating the orbit of planets around the sun. The repetitious - and thus timeless quality of the chaconne provided the musical stimulus for this ritual in which the court participated in affirming immutable verities of power and pleasure. For instance, in Lully's tragedie-lyrique Amadis (1684), the legendary hero Amadis of Gaul (intended as a thinly disguised allegorical stand-in for Louis himself) finally triumphs, leading to a chaconne-finale, in which nature and humanityjoin in celebration.20 The chaconne lasts for quite a long time: long enough certainly to induce the state of bliss that

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Figure 1.5. Lully, Chaconne from Amadis

comes of 'keeping together in time' and through a process identical to that practiced by religions that seek the erasure of self-awareness through musical drones and recitation of mantras (fig. 1.5). The ideological shift in the meanings of the ciaccona/chaconne that occurred at Versailles relates to fundamental differences in cultural priorities. Spanish, Italian, and French observers recognized the extraordinary effect of this dance-type, but in Spain and Italy its mesmerizing quality encouraged motions of the body defined as illicit or somehow dissonant with the proper focus on individualistic feelings and reason. In France, where dance served as one of the principal tools for instilling conformity, the chaconne represented a means of eliciting the highest degree of pleasure and, simultaneously, the greatest sense of neoplatonic order and group identification. Not surprisingly, the French authorities viewed the Italian obsession with interiority with suspicion, to the extent that Lully had Italian music banned in France. The ability of the chaconne to erase the boundaries of the self and to produce in dancers the sense of unity with the cosmos made it an invaluable resource. Recent neurobiologists have found that radical changes in brain function occur in people involved in such rituals, especially those involving music and dance. The parts of the brain responsible for orienting us as individuated selves as we move through space actually shut down their

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chromatic passacaglia Figure 1.6. Passacaglias

activity, causing subjects to experience as reality that merger with timelessness.21 Mystics interpret this phenomenon as evidence of divine union. But long before scientific evidence confirmed this set of connections, Louis XIV deployed the chaconne pragmatically to turn 'the God trick': to seduce his courtiers into that neurological condition in which they dissolved into a state ofjouissance - not coincidentally with the king himself as centre. The chaconne had a Dopplegdnger, however - one that sometimes alternated unproblematically with the chaconne itself but that could also carry rather different affective charges. In the Amadis finale, for instance, the major-key chaconne gives way to a minor-mode version of the same cadential figure. Nothing ruffles the serenity of the apotheosis; the shift into the minor only produces a welcome contrast for a short while before the major reappears. But the minor-key version of the chaconne, often known as the passacaglia, had a somewhat different chain of cultural referents. Even if both procedures appeared in early guitar manuals as pretexts for improvisation, the passacaglia more frequently fused with the signs not of 'la vida bona' but rather of lament22 (fig. 1.6). The most famous ostinato of this sort is Monteverdi's famous Lamento della ninfa, in which a solo female singer bewails her entrapment and abandonment, all over an unchanging tetrachord descent in the bass. The association of this figure with ritualized mourning became so strong that it could signal grief all by itself in instrumental as well as vocal pieces. Purcell's celebrated farewell aria for Dido, 'When I Am Laid in Earth,' draws brilliantly on the sedimented history of this formula, elaborated chromatically, and Marin Marais's Tombeau pour Mr de SaintColombe for viol starts off with an allusion to the descending-tetrachord lament as a means of establishing the elegiac tone of his funeral commemoration.23 Musicologists used to love to write articles that attempted to draw a decisive line between 'chaconne' and 'passacaglia': graduate exams back

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Figure 1.7. Lully, Passacaille d'Armide

in the early 1970s still typically demanded that students produce a rule of thumb for distinguishing the two. The fact is, however, that seventeenthcentury musicians cared much less about generic boundaries than do historians, and they sometimes used the two terms interchangeably. Yet the music of the time often treats the two in very different ways; if there exists a gray area of overlap in which one can substitute for the other, there are also contexts in which the carefree ciaccona/chaconne has nothing to do with its melancholy twin, the lamenting passacaglia. And even the gray area of overlap can present difficulties: not of the sort pursued by musicologists who want each to have its own separate box, but for anyone concerned with musical meanings. Consider, for instance, the Passacaille in the final act of Lully's tragedielyrique Armide (1686). Armide, a Saracen sorceress, has seduced the great crusader Roland from his task of 'liberating' Jerusalem. She holds him captive in bonds of pleasure so powerful that he lies helpless in her lair. At the beginning of this last act, Armide finds she must leave Roland for a short while, and she entrusts him to a gaggle of demons, who maintain his paralytic condition by performing a passacaille.24 To gentle dance rhythms identical to those of the Amadis chaconne, they serenade him for nearly seventeen minutes with soft strings and woodwinds, with occasional choral entries in praise of'plaisir' and 'amour' (fig. 1.7). The spell shatters only when Roland's companions-in-arms awaken him from his stupor and persuade him to go back to battle with them. (Armide returns, finds that Roland is gone, delivers a brief tirade, and thus ends the opera; the Passacaille qualifies as the show-stopper for the act.) To some extent, this passacaille functions identically to the chaconne from Amadis: both serve to induce that state that eradicates inside and outside, that pulls theatrical characters and spectators alike into that timeless zone of infinite pleasure. Yet the minor key of the passacaille, its rather more yearning melodic shapes, and its dramatic context make it available for a somewhat different reading: one that resonates with

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entrapment by a surfeit of sensual pleasure, one that may even connect back to the non-European origins of such musical procedures. Roland's French raison is held hostage by this repetitious soundscape, requiring that his comrades forcibly rescue him from the blandishments of his Saracen captor, who knows that her music itself suffices to keep him blissfully enslaved.25 This passacaille, I would argue, brings us much closer to warnings against repetitious music implicit in 'Zefiro torna' and ecclesiastical bans. Too much depends on who controls such a powerful resource - the king or diabolical forces of Oriental witches - to make the Armide Passacaille an unambiguously innocuous procedure, even in the heavily regulated French court. J.S. Bach and the Chaconne By far the most famous chaconne in the repertory is the final movement of Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita II in D Minor for Unaccompanied Violin. It still stands at the pinnacle of violin virtuosity: to say 'chaconne' to a developing violinist is tantamount to saying 'Everest' to an aspiring mountain climber. Many of us have encountered the chaconne and other baroque genres (French dances, chorale elaborations, Italian concertos, fugal techniques) solely through Bach's compositions, and we treat Bach as a kind of ground zero of music history, the earliest canonic source we think we need. As a result, we miss much of the cultural work Bach achieved in his music. If we honour him as self-contained and beyond history or criticism, we also fail to engage with his compositions as socially meaningful texts.26 I have argued elsewhere that Bach worked throughout his career to translate everything he had inherited - the dances of the Absolutist court, the relatively static fugues of earlier North German organists, even the Lutheran chorale - into the dynamic, narrative-oriented style elevated to the status of an international lingua franca by Antonio Vivaldi.27 A virtual sponge, Bach acquired and processed all new ideas as soon as they became available, whether through printing or trips to sites of musical innovation. He remained, however, in what were then regarded as the backwaters of European culture, always resentful of his lack of worldly recognition, yet enabled by that very isolation to conduct musical experiments and to produce any hybrid he could imagine. Bach's re-readings of French dance-types have gone unnoticed, in large part because we have taken his 'French' dances (including the chaconne) as the standard and have judged those by, say, D'Anglebert as

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Figure 1.8. Bach. 'Jesu, der du meine Seele'

insipid. But if we take D'Anglebert's compositional aesthetic seriously, then we can also begin to see how Bach more or less assaulted the foundations of French cultural values.28 Given a choice between the timeless physicality of Versailles and the dramatic impulse of the concerto, Bach opted every time for the latter. In his simulations, the elegant hovering of a courante became intolerable stagnation, to be converted forcibly into the progressive, modulatory dynamism of Vivaldi. The tension between the French and Italian models involves far more than mere taste or personal preference; to Bach, faced with mutually exclusive structures of temporality and subjectivity, the differences warranted a lifetime of creative struggle. If he bequeathed to us a predisposition towards the Italianate mode of being (adopted by his German/ Austrian successors tout court as 'the way music is supposed to go'), he also managed to hide his tracks to the extent that few even realize the stakes of his fundamental choices. The French chaconne, with all its Absolutist trappings and extreme suspension of time, posed a particular challenge to Bach, and in his composition for solo violin we have something of a microcosm of his modus operandi - his obsession with saturating his pieces with far-flung, often contradictory references, which must then work their way towards some kind of formal and semiotic detente. We cannot doubt that Bach knew the codes already discussed above. The tetrachord-descent with its roots in Monteverdi and Purcell underwrites the Crucifixus in the B Minor Mass. Moreover, he seems to have had access to Lully's frequentlyanthologized Ar/mefe passacaille, which he interpreted in his own reworking as unambiguously sinister. In the astonishing opening movement of his Cantata 78, Jesu, der du meine Seele, he appropriates Lully's passacaille as a simulation of entrapment in sin (fig. 1.8). The repetitious pattern relents only once: on the line of text expressing the hope that Christ will pull us forcibly from the jaws of the Devil. But this statement remains provisional, and the movement ends back in the passacaille with the plea

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732

Figure 1.9a. Bach, Chaconne, mm. 132-140

that God will stand by us. The lyrics to Armide's plaisir-drenched lullaby have no place in this musical landscape that resembles those circles in Dante in which sinners - stuck in slime up to their ears - cry out with remorse. Subsequent movements of the cantata, based on the acknowledgment of guilt and the confession of faith, pull us gradually out of the mire and into the teleological temporality that Bach uses to simulate a trajectory towards redemption. The movement for unaccompanied violin, of course, has no lyrics to render specific its meanings. In modern editions it usually sports the title 'Chaconne,' although Bach's manuscript labels it 'Ciaccona.' (The same 'correcting' of Bach's labels also occurs when pieces he properly calls 'Corrente' get published as 'Courante,' as though all dances must come from France, as though differences between the types must be negligible.) Moreover, as the piece begins, it quite clearly aligns itself more closely with the minor-mode, lament-oriented passacaglia. I will follow convention and call it 'Chaconne,' for any single title to Bach's hybrid composition proves inadequate. Indeed, the history of the alternate titles and the first four measures of the movement, which announce the passacaglia, suffice to set the conflicted terms for this remarkable movement — the condensation and ultimate transformation of all the traditions we have been tracing, and deservedly the most renowned instance of the genre.29 We first hear something genuinely resembling a dignified French chaconne about two-thirds of the way through the movement when Bach suddenly alters the minor mode to its parallel major (fig. 1.9a).30 In other words, he presents formally a reverse image of the Amadis chaconne, which begins and ends in major but includes a minor-key episode in the middle. Here, in this extended passage at least, Bach gives us a taste of timeless bliss, of repetition welcomed and celebrated. The rich harmonies and apparently effortless arpeggios of this extended passage immerse us in a haven of warmth and freedom of physical motion - so long as we remain content with endless refrains in D major. But this island of D-major reminiscent of Amadis serves only as a

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delusion, a refuge of false consciousness, as Bach's larger compositional strategy indicates. For he frames this placid section within a movement that works desperately to extricate itself from the repetitive coils of the chaconne (or passacaglia). And the fact that the lone violinist must both furnish the redundant ostinato and also fight tooth and nail against it locates the antagonism inside a single subject. Like Monteverdi's nymph, the violin fights to escape the obsession that holds it down; it is as though we witness Roland awakening from his drugged state but finding himself incapable - even with the most heroic exertion - of liberating himself from Armide's spell. A song by Purcell states: 'I attempt from Love's sickness to fly in vain, since I am myself my own fever and pain.' Bach's piece presents with far greater affective intensity that same struggle to pull oneself out of one's own skin, to transcend the material conditions of being, to resist the jouissance afforded by repetitious structures so as to follow a progressive trajectory of Bildung- a German idealist model of subjectivity just beginning to appear on the cultural map. Yet as in the first movement ofjesu, der du meine Seele, the Chaconne's formal commitments will not allow us into the promised land. We witness instead Laocoon or Samson wrestling valiantly despite all odds, concluding not with triumph but with unbowed determination not to concede defeat or to accept the terms offered by the ciaccona/chaconne/passacaglia. Bach's Chaconne begins with a tonic triad - simple harmonically but requiring that the performer sweep the bow across three strings of the violin in order to execute what the mere drop of a hand could accomplish on a keyboard; even in this starting position, a sense of unresolvable tension already arises, as this melody instrument has to take upon itself the tasks of the harmonic bass in addition to its own singing voice (fig. 1.9b). The tension increases exponentially at the downbeat, as the melodic line leaps up a fifth, producing a harsh dissonance against the bass - now articulated as the lowest of four pitches, demanding the sweep over all four strings. For a few beats the melodic (read: subjective) line of the violin seems to prevail, and the passacaglia bass secerns to conform to its dictates. The top line gives the appearance of escaping the downward pull of the ostinato. But the escape turns out to be provisional; the energies expended in launching the top line up through its leap and its subsequent ascent to F deplete its resources, and the line then falls parallel to the generating bass until it even closes up the initial triad: in m. 4, the melody collapses to meet the bass on D. A flurry of activity pushes towards a renewed effort, and this time the top line jumps all the way to a high Bb, from which vantage point it almost seems to bring about the cadence by itself.

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Figure 1.9b. Chaconne

But, of course, the cadence only initiates another statement of the ostinato, this time with an inner voice leading while the top line makes itself heard solely through intermittent gasps. As the variations unfold, the distinctions between voices sometimes dissolve into running ornamental notes and hair-raising passages of arpeggiation for which the performer must saw raucously through chord progressions, concentrating the attention on the almost unbearable strife between the inevitable

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Figure 1.9c. Chaconne, 118-41

bass and the resistant melodic line. When the smoke clears, we find ourselves right back at the beginning, for Bach casts his opening strain also as a refrain - a refrain that both first establishes the stakes of the composition and also reappears periodically to consolidate identity, even as it concedes the inability of the persona, despite its superhuman efforts, to progress beyond the conundrum first posed at the very outset (fig. 1.9c). It is after this concession that Bach suddenly drops us into the far more serene realm of D-major and the tight, consonant harmonies of the courtly chaconne. As the violin's persona becomes accustomed to this new world of plaisir, it expands virtuosically to nearly equal the technical feats of the opening segment. Alas, this whole D-major passage functions in the subjunctive mode.31 Following the confident final arrival on octave Ds, the piece suddenly awakens to find itself back in the context of the minor. With nothing more than a sleight of hand, the illusory vision collapses like a house of cards: 'if this, then ...' But no.

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The concluding D-minor segment allows another series of variations, each of which expands both the pyrotechnic scope of the violin and the attempts at pushing beyond the dilemma to some kind of narrative development and closure. Yet at the very end, the violin simply reiterates the refrain that opened the composition, and the two antagonistic lines - the top one of which repeatedly defied gravity in its determination to escape the inexorable pull of the bass - fall to a unison, a single pitch. The title of this volume emphasizes the intersections between institutions and rituals of repetition, and my discussions of Italy and France located the meanings of the ciaccona/chaconne squarely within the cultural centres of courts and churches. Bach's Chaconne is more difficult to situate institutionally, however. He probably wrote it during his tenure at Cothen around 1720, but it would not have contributed to social dance, especially given its tormented gestures and extreme discontinuities. Like much of Bach's music, it served as a showpiece for any virtuoso equal to the task, but even more as the exhaustive, comprehensive pedagogical exploration of a specific compositional technique. In short, he intended this as the chaconne to end all chaconnes. If Bach did not write his piece for a particular institution, however, he himself became the cornerstone of the German canon that still dominates our conceptions of music history. We inherit from Bach many of the musical values we take as self-evident, values that themselves have defined the institutions of concert music and pedagogy for the last two hundred years. Adorno never refers in his Bach essay to the Chaconne,32 but his philosophy of music might have proceeded from this composition alone. For here we have the dramatic enactment of repetition as narcotic, as that which prevents the Self from developing autonomously. Try as it might, the violin in the Chaconne cannot throw off its chains — the connections back to the autocratic oppressions of French court life (still alive and flourishing in the Potsdam of Frederick the Great at the end of Bach's life), the siren song to regress to the warm certainties of social dance and domesticity; it cannot make the leap from these ideologically saturated procedures to the dynamic drive of Vivaldi, for even when it annexes Vivaldi's virtuosic figuration, its will to proceed through progressive modulation is blocked by the generically imposed imperative to repeat. The pleasurable dance rhythms evoked by Monteverdi, the simulations of cosmological order choreographed by Lully have turned into nightmares, from which only the ability to self-invent can extricate us. Mozart will similarly pit Bildung against pleasurable regression in his mature works,33 and Beethoven will nearly blow up the tonal ground on

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which he stands in his anxiety to eschew conventional formula - or else he will, like Bach does in his Chaconne, so overdo repetition that it calls attention to itself as imprisonment.34 We need Freud only to explain in words the drives and contradictions associated with this particular brand of subjectivity, already firmly in place in Bach. Adorno will then build his rise-and-fall narrative of Western art music by moving from Bach to Beethoven to Schoenberg. The Bach Chaconne stands, then, as the final chapter in the history of the repetitive procedure imported from the New World in the late 1500s. It sums up both the sensual delights and the autocratic tendencies already aligned with various branches of the tradition, and points in the direction of other musical structures and devices - ones that will rule classical music for a couple of hundred years. But those exalted structures and devices have proved no match against the next wave of repetitive procedures that have now emerged from the New World in the form of blues, jazz, rock, rap, and electronic dance music. This time around, it seems, the descendants of the chacona get to win.35 Notes 1 See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), especially the sections on Stravinsky; and 'Perennial Fashion: Jazz,' in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1980). 2 See my 'Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late Twentieth-Century Culture,' in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum/The Wire, 2004), 289-98; and 'Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Composition,' Cultural Critique 12 (Spring 1989): 57-81. 3 See my Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). 4 William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 5 Richard Hudson, Passacaglia and Ciaccona: From Guitar Music to Italian Keyboard Variations in the 17th Century (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981). 6 See Alex Silbiger's entry for 'Chaconne,' in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie (London: Macmillan, 2000). 7 The poem appears in translation in Hudson, Passacaglia and Ciaccona, 4. 8 I owe the concept of 'musicking' to Christopher Small, whose insistence on

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shifting from the noun 'music' to the verb emphasizing action and participation has had a radical effect on musicology. See his Musicking (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). 9 We know very little about the actual choreography of the chacona. Gordon Haramaki, who specializes in the dance music of this era, has reminded me that the elaborate garb of noblewomen would have severely restricted movements of the torso. Yet the dance did reach the courts by way of the lower classes, who would not have had to contend with such corseting. My thanks to Gordon for his insights. 10 See Gilbert Rouget, Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession, trans. Brunhilde Biebuyck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999). 11 Many recordings of 'Zefiro torna' exist. My favorite is Nigel Rogers and Ian Partridge, tenors; Jiirgen Jiirgens, director, Madrigals and Sacred Concertos (Archiv415 295-2, 1972/73). 12 For more on this phenomenon, see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance SelfFashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also my Model Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 13 Monteverdi, Laudatedominum (1640),Judith Nelson, soprano; Concerto Vocale, Rene Jacobs, director, Un concert spirituel (Harmonia Mundi 1901032, 1980). The ciaccona section begins at 2'. 14 See my Modal Subjectivities. 15 I owe the concept of the 'subjunctive' in musical structure to my graduate student Stuart De Ocampo, who has found it operating in repertories as distant from each other as Chopin ballades and Alessandro Grandi's earlyseventeenth-century setting of the Song of Songs. 16 Francesco Corbetta, Chiacona, Paul O'Dette, guitar, with The King's Noyse; David Douglass, director, Pavaniglia: Dances and Madrigals from 17h-c. Italy (Harmonia Mundi 907246, 1997). 17 Jean-Henry D'Anglebert, Pieces in D Major, Chaconne Rondeau, Christophe Rousset, harpsichord (Decca 458 588-2, 2000). 18 For an extended discussion of the political uses of music and dance under Louis XIV, see my 'Unruly Passions and Courtly Dances: Technologies of the Body in Baroque Music,' in From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century France, ed. Sara Melzer and Kathryn Norberg (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 85-112. 19 See Geoffrey Burgess, 'The Chaconne and the Representation of Sovereign

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Power in Lully's Amadis (1684) and Charpentier's Medee (1693),' in Dance and Music in French Baroque Theatre: Sources and Interpretations, ed. Sarah McCleave (London: Institute of Advanced Musical Studies, King's College London, 1998), 81-104. 20 Jean-Baptiste Lully, Amadis (1684); act 5, finale: 'Chaconne,' Chatham Baroque, DanseRoyale: Music of the French Baroque Court & Theatre (Dorian Recordings 90272, 1999). 21 See Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001). 22 For a useful overview of this figure, see Ellen Rosand, 'The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,' Musical Quarterly 55 (1979): 346-59. 23 For recordings, try Monteverdi, Lamento della Ninfa, book VIII (1638), Montserrat Figueras, soprano; La Capella Reial de Catalunya, Jordi Savall, director, Madrigali guerrieri et amorosi, Book VIII (Auvidis/Nai've ES 9944, 2000); Marin Marais, Tombeau pour Mr de Sainte-Colombe, Jordi Savall, soundtrack to Tous les matins du monde (Auvidis/Valois V4640, 1991). Many recordings of the Purcell exist. 24 Lully, Armide, act 5, scene 2: 'Passacaille,' Collegium Vocale/La Chapelle Royale, Philippe Herreweghe, director (Harmonia Mundi 901456.57, 1992). The keyboard arrangement in fig. 1.7 is D'Anglebert's. 25 Strong evidence points to Lully's affiliation with sodomitical activities at Versailles. His association of entrapment with feminine evil and of rescue with renewed homosocial bonding may have had other resonances for original audiences. See Davitt Moroney's entry on Lully in Encyclopedia of Lesbian and Gay Histories and Cultures, ed. Bonnie Zimmerman and George Haggerty (New York: Garland, 2000). 26 See my 'The Blasphemy of Talking Politics during Bach Year,' in Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13-62; and Adorno, 'Bach Defended against His Devotees,' Prisms, 133-46. 27 See my Conventional Wisdom, chap. 3. 28 See my 'Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in SeventeenthCentury French Music,' ECHO3 (November 2000), http://www.humnet.ucla. edu/ECHO. 29 Bach also composed the piece most often thought of as the Passacaglia: a virtuoso piece in C minor for organ. Bach's 'Passacaglia' unfolds over a mostly unbending ostinato pattern of eight bars, and he follows it with a fugal treatment of the ground. The organ composition parallels the violin chaconne in its sense of profound disquiet, articulated by syncopated figures

Chacona, Ciaccona, Chaconne, and £/^Chaconne

30 31 32 33

34

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that attempt in vain to escape the law of the repeating pattern. It does not, however, share the Chaconne's accented second beat, which recalls - however faintly - the dance patterns of its predecessors. I recommend the recording by Rachel Podger, Bach: Sonatas and Partitas, vol. 1 (Channel Classic 12198, 1999). See n. 13 above. Adorno,'Bach Defended.' See my 'Narratives of Bourgeois Subjectivity in Mozart's "Prague" Symphony', in Understanding Narrative, ed. Peter Rabinowitz and James Phelan (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1994), 65-98. See the discussion in Rose Rosengard Subotnik, 'Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition,' in Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). I wish to thank Gordon Haramaki, Robert Walser, and the late Philip Brett for reading and commenting on an earlier draft of this essay. Special thanks go to Maiko Kawabata, who performed the Bach Chaconne with exemplary bravado at the Clark conference where I presented these ideas as a talk.

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PART II REPETITION, THE SELF, AND THE EMOTIONS

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chapter two

Repetition and Narration: Tracking the Enlightenment Self LEO DAMROSCH

The concept of repetition was central to the Enlightenment project of achieving a modern empiricist psychology, freed from all the old models: the physiology of the humours, the determinism of astrology, the teleology of original sin. I have entitled this chapter 'Tracking the Enlightenment Self because the idea was to follow one's own footsteps into the past and then, by assembling a sufficient number of remembered perceptions, to construct a connect-the-dots picture of the sequential moments of the self. Of course, this procedure might produce surprises: Locke thought memory was adequate to sustain the integrity of the self, but Hume argued that all it really did was concoct specious fictions, with the unsettling conclusion that a person is 'nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.'1 However, Hume was being deliberately provocative when he said that; his real target was overweening claims for philosophical certainty, not our normal belief that life makes sense. Despite his rhetoric about the self as a jumble of sense-impressions, he consistently stressed the role of habit which is to say, acquired repetitive behaviour - as a reliable basis of living. Empiricist thought, with its mechanist basis in passively received sense impressions, took for granted not just repetition in individual lives, but replicability among human beings in general. Its roots were still in the classical concept of character, which assumed the perennial persistence of a limited number of types. The moralists of the seventeenth century were programmatically non-narrative, writing in the present tense on the

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model of 'this is what always happens'; La Rochefoucauld said, 'It is easier to know man in general than to know a particular man,' and La Bruyere suggested that people are machines that endlessly repeat what they are programmed to do, like a watch whose gears keep returning the hands to the place they started from.2 In the eighteenth century the philosophes of the Enlightenment claimed to be committed to change and 'progress,' but even so, they remained wedded to reiteration and replicability. As Carl Becker noticed long ago, they threw out dogmatic Christianity but retained its notion of history making sense, and finding recurrent patterns is an obvious way of locating sense. So the historiography of the philosophes, as Horkheimer and Adorno said, ended up explaining 'every event as repetition.'3 And their psychology wasn't really a psychology at all: it was an epistemology, which served better to underpin the social order than to interpret the perplexities of individual experience. It also worked best for secure personalities like Hume, le bon David as they called him in Paris, who remarked that metaphysical dread could always be dispelled by having a drink and playing a game of backgammon with one's friends. His critic Thomas Reid complained that we learn from him that 'a succession of ideas and impressions may eat, and drink, and be merry,'4 and that's exactly what he did believe. Thus although empiricist thought placed a new emphasis on the temporal experience of the self, different in principle from the timeless verities of the older moralists, it didn't really know where to go with this insight, and fell back on old assumptions of generic sameness. An ancient Greek, Hume said, was pretty much the same as a modern Frenchman. The move towards a more searching and flexible psychology came not in theoretical writing but in narratives that were openly fictive. Indeed, whereas the history of ideas has always tended to privilege theory and to look to literature as merely illustrating it, I would argue that art was the first to conceive what theory only gradually learned to formulate. It is no accident that Rousseau was a passionate reader of novels from childhood onward, and a best-selling novelist himself, before he invented modern autobiography in his Confessions. In life conceived in novelistic terms, the self comes to be understood as genuinely changing through time, rather than as repeating inevitable behaviours as in La Rochefoucauld or Hume. For the remainder of this chapter I will focus on two great writers, fraternal enemies as they've been called, Rousseau and Diderot. Rousseau's achievement was to create a concept not of character but of personality, though he didn't

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call it that, in which structures at a deep level - an unconscious level, we would say today - reveal a coherent self even when it seems most paradoxical and contradictory. Repetition is still the key, but no longer the empiricist kind: rather, we learn to look for clues to fundamental patterns that keep asserting themselves in altered and disguised forms the return of the repressed, as Freud would call it. Diderot, very differently, insisted on a performative and improvising self, created from moment to moment in the give-and-take of social interaction. His novel Jacques leFatalisteis totally without plot, and full of playful reminders of its own artificiality. Yet all the same it is a work of art, not a random collage, and as the twentieth-century modernists discovered, even if you believe that life makes no sense, it's almost impossible to represent human experience without imposing form. In Waiting for Godot, nothing happens - twice; when Beckett was asked why the play had two acts he replied that one would have been too little, and three would have been too many. That is profoundly true: two acts establish repetition. In principle the curtain could keep going up again on the same scene, ad infinitum. But not in the theater. The logic of Godot is endless, a Mobius strip, but the play itself is complete, two acts and no more. And of course the very process of creating a work of art entails repetition; as the sparrow sings in Elizabeth Bishop's elegy for Lowell, 'Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise.'5 Let us begin with Rousseau, the proto-Freud, and afterwards turn to Diderot, the proto-postmodern. The opening page of the Confessions asserts absolute originality, in the modern sense ('original' used to mean what was there at the beginning, as in original sin). 'I am resolved on an undertaking that has no model and will have no imitator ... I am not made like any that I have seen; I venture to believe that I was not made like any that exist.'6 Rousseau recycles the title of what was then the most famous autobiography ever written, yet asserts that his experience is his own and can't be mapped onto Augustine's or anyone else's. Thus the story of his life, in which a runaway apprentice who never went to school for a single day became the most famous writer in Europe, has to be explained in terms of a personality that is literally unique. So far as theory goes, Rousseau is to some extent stuck with the empiricist model, tracing as he says 'the chain of feelings that have marked the successive stages of my being.' But his real goal is very different: he wants to explore himself by a process of inward descent, au dedans de moi? Hume says that one's bundle of impressions is nothing but an impression itself, conjuring up the fiction of the self but not

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establishing any deeper truth about it. Rousseau's chain of linked moments leads backwards and downwards to a bedrock of psychic identity. To illustrate that interior descent, one may recall some well-known passages in the Confessions that describe Rousseau's erotic development, noting first that it was really quite unprecedented to regard erotic experience as a key to personality. The usual view in Rousseau's time was more like Gibbon's: The grosser appetite which our pride may affect to disdain, because it has been implanted by Nature in the whole animal creation, Amor omnibus idem... less properly belongs to the memoirs of an individual, than to the natural history of the species.'8 First, then, the famous episode of the fessee, the spanking in boyhood that, Rousseau said, permanently shaped his erotic imagination. At the age of ten, effectively an orphan since his mother had died at his birth and his father had decamped to avoid an arrest, Rousseau was sent with a cousin to board with the Lamberciers, a village minister and his unmarried sister who undertook to look after the boys and give them some instruction. On a memorable occasion Jean-Jacques committed some minor offence and received a spanking from Mile Lambercier, who 'felt for us the affection of a mother,' and to his surprise he enjoyed it: T had found in the pain inflicted, and even in the shame that accompanied it, an element of sensuality which left me with more desire than fear at the prospect of experiencing it again from the same hand.'9 An old proverb held Qui aime bien, chdtie bien, 'He who loves well, punishes well.' As Philippe Lejeune suggests, Rousseau, too little loved by his own family, evidently experienced this truism the other way around and took the spanking for a sign of affection.10 His yearning to be spanked again was in due course met, but the sequel was discouraging in the extreme. 'This second was also the last, for Mile Lambercier, who no doubt inferred from some sign I gave that the punishment was not achieving its aim, declared that she could not continue with it, that it exhausted her too much. Up until then we had slept in her room and sometimes, in winter, even in her bed. Two days later we were moved to another room, and I had henceforward the honour, which I would gladly have foregone, of being treated by her as a big boy.'11 Growing up meant loss of physical intimacy, and a realization that he had naively revealed a sensual pleasure that ought to have been concealed. For the rest of his life Rousseau sought a certain kind of affectionate yet stern reproof from women. As he observed in the Confessions, 'To be at the knees of an imperious mistress, to obey her commands, to be

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obliged to beg for her forgiveness, have been for me the sweetest of delights [jouissances]'; in an earlier draft he was still more specific: 'I had an affection for acts of submission, confusing the posture of a suppliant lover with that of a penitent schoolboy.'12 It would be banal to conclude that what he wanted was literally to be spanked; if that was all, he would soon have figured out how to purchase it, since it was widely available for libertines of the time. What he had learned from Mile Lambercier was the thrill of being reproved without the physical contact, an erotic charge that was all the more intense for being taboo and withheld. Similarly, the notorious episode, also during his teens, when he exposed his posterior to the astonished women of Turin was not conventional exhibitionism, since the act did not give pleasure in itself. Its purpose was to provoke the women to intuit the shameful wish that he could not bring himself to state. And when he did eventually state that wish in the Confessions, it was addressed to an anonymous reading public, as when, in the winter some years back, it was so cold that someone said the exhibitionists in Central Park were only describing themselves. My interpretation here, indebted as it is to the brilliant work of Lejeune and Jean Starobinski, relies on twentieth-century theorizing that Rousseau could not have anticipated; as Starobinski says, it took Freud to think Rousseau's feelings, and Cocteau asked, 'Is Jeanjacques' posterior the rising sun of Freud?'13 What I want to emphasize is that modern theorizing of this kind grew directly from Rousseau's insight into the importance of formative impulses that lurk far deeper than the collection of associations - bundle or chain, same difference - that his contemporaries were accustomed to talk about. 'Who would have believed,' Rousseau says after describing the originary fessee, 'that this ordinary form of childhood punishment... should have decided my tastes, my desires, my passions, my whole self [de moi], for the rest of my life?'14 However seldom the act itself may have been repeated, the fantasy of repeating it was replayed over and over, a structuring repetition that had nothing to do with the flurry of fleeting 'impressions' that constitute the empiricist self. In fact the fessee did recur at least once, at a time when Jean-Jacques was still young enough to play games in a childish way. An imperious girl nicknamed Goton enjoyed acting out the schoolmistress with him, and this gave him intense pleasure, even while he was indulging in a sort of theoretical adoration of a woman in her twenties named Mile Vulson. In his later comments he showed great insight into the complementary nature of these relationships, versions of which persisted for the rest of

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his life: as he put it, they have 'nothing in common, although they are both very violent: one is sensual, or from temperament, the other is platonic, or from opinion.'15 In the terms of the theory he eventually developed, romantic love, however intense and apparently authentic, is in fact socially conditioned, and would never have been experienced by natural man in the pre-civilized state. Sexual desire is more immediate or unmediated, based in 'temperament' rather than social conventions, and presumably that was what he felt toward Goton. Yet this feeling too was shaped and determined, overdetermined one might say, by social experience: if Rousseau had never received pleasure at the hand of the maternal Mile Lambercier, he would not have required the specialized gratification supplied by Goton, which the other kids jeered at when they found out about it: 'Goton tic-tac Rousseau.' Natural man, as Rousseau imagined him in the Discourse on Inequality, would have been able to live contentedly in the moment; if he encountered a woman he might mate with her, but with no intensity of passion, and then they would go their separate ways. Who was that natural man? What the binarism of Goton and Vulson showed, as Rousseau grasped with remarkable insight, was that a perennially reiterated pattern had been established: with Vulson, a chaste passion that was openly avowed but essentially imaginary; with Goton, erotic satisfaction that was potentially real enough, but shameful and doomed to disappointment. With Vulson he was trying to act as a precocious, if ridiculous, adult; with Goton he was acting as a bad boy being punished, but at the hands of a juvenile dominatrix from whom he had actually nothing to fear. Tracking the self, then, was for Rousseau something totally different from connecting the dots. Quite the contrary: it was a search for strange, even atypical moments that yield clues to personality in the repetition not of routine behaviour, but of structuring patterns that the conscious mind may not even suspect. Pondering the events of his life, indeed, he couldn't help but be struck by episodes of amazing inconsistency. 'There are times,' he admits, 'when I am so unlike myself [semblable a moi-meme] that you might take me for another man with a character quite contrary to my own.'16 An episode that took place when Rousseau was twenty-five will illustrate the point. He had been living for several years with his benefactor Mme de Warens, whom he called Maman and who called him Petit, and whose lover he very reluctantly became. During a journey he fell into company with another older woman, named Mme de Larnage, and had a brief but unexpectedly satisfying liaison on the road. This was the only

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time in his entire life, he claims, that he experienced full sexual enjoyment. 'She had restored to me that self-confidence,' he says, 'whose lack has almost always prevented me from being myself [d'etre mm'].'17 Yet bizarrely enough, this triumph of the self was accomplished by means of a preposterous deception. Acting on impulse, Rousseau had passed himself off as an Englishman named Budding, and he was on tenterhooks the whole time for fear of exposure because he spoke no English at all. Now, if this isn't the histrionic, performative self, what is? But Rousseau insists in the Confessions that it was nevertheless his true self that found expression, even though it was also, in obvious ways, a self that had taken on a drastically different guise. For Hume, the claim that we have a true self even when we differ from it would make no sense. We simply are the roles that we play. But Rousseau feels deeply that even when he was passing himself off as Budding, the atypical immediacy of pleasure that resulted somehow reflected the true and authentic JeanJacques. A psychoanalytic interpretation is once again tempting. Rousseau comments elsewhere that he was romantically attracted to ladies, but able to achieve gratification only with women whom he perceived as inferior. This pattern corresponds perfectly with the condition described by Freud in his essay 'The Most Prevalent Form of Begradation in the Erotic Life' (more prevalent, one hopes, in early-twentieth-century Vienna than today). One may not want to go all the way with Freud, and accept his explanation that this inhibition with ladies was invariably due to the incest taboo. But it is certainly true that Rousseau felt uneasy about sleeping with the woman he called Maman, even though, as his own mother died immediately after he was born, he might seem to be one person who could not possibly violate the incest taboo. With Mme de Warens, in effect, he found himself committing surrogate incest. The receptive traveller Mme de Larnage can be seen as an older woman who is no better than she should be, and is therefore able to liberate Rousseau, in his guise as Budding, to be fully himself by not being his usual repressed and conflicted self. What Rousseau is creating is the Romantic paradigm that privileges epiphanic moments, unforeseeable re-startings, that are connected in an intuitive leap by imagination working on memory. The result is like a trompe 1'oeil display one sometimes sees in science museums. Under ordinary light a stream of water appears as a continuous flow, but under a blinking strobe light the stream is transformed into a chain of separate quivering droplets. But of course the 'same' droplet as one gazes at it,

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when the light is flashing at exactly the right speed, is actually a rapid succession of very similar droplets that successively occupy the same point in space. Even in the science museum, one can't step into the same stream twice. Rousseauian recollection transforms process into stasis, and identifies a stable self by de-temporalizing it. Repetition, in effect, takes place not in sequential experience, but in an inner state of identity where what is new and different is always old and the same. In the end, therefore, having theorized repetition in a new and profound way, Rousseau sought to escape it, to exist so fully in the moment that the archeology of the self would become irrelevant. In the Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire, which he was working on at the very end of his life, this condition is figured in the period when he fled from the French police and then from the villagers of Metiers, and found refuge on the He St Pierre in the Lac de Bienne near Neuchatel. Perfect freedom no longer depended on a human mother, as it had with Mme de Warens, but rather on an infinitely maternal Nature, and under her soothing influence Rousseau could drift at random in a little boat in a Zen-like state of phenomenological plenitude. 'From time to time some faint and brief reflection arose concerning the instability of the things of this world, whose image was presented on the surface of the water, but soon these light impressions were effaced in the uniformity of the continuing movement that rocked me' - me berfait, like an infant in a cradle.18 Not even the impressions of empiricism can impinge any more on this trancy self, which attains a duree that is not so much an escape from time as an immersion in the moment so intense that the passage of time ceases to have any meaning. The only repetition now is the small-scale, local oscillation of the lapping waves. The ultimate expression of this atemporal ideal is the accident recalled in the Reveries when, strolling in the streets of Paris, Rousseau was bowled over and knocked unconscious by a huge dog that was dashing along at the side of some rich person's carriage. Returning to consciousness, he had no idea at all where he was, or even who he was. He had always been haunted by the past and obsessed by the future; now he was overwhelmed by the immediacy of a state in which he literally had no past. By the lights of empiricist psychology he was no longer anyone at all, since persons were defined by the coherence of their memories. But according to his own intuition he was at last truly himself, no longer deformed by the internalized expectations of other people and by the wearisome repetition of his own unique compulsions. This is a self that no longer needs to be tracked: it just is.

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That's the ideal, anyway. At best it was attained only temporarily, and most of the time Rousseau remained the prisoner of compulsions that collected themselves into a paranoia that deepened until it included almost everyone in western Europe. 'Me voici done seul sur la terre,' the Reveries begins: 'Here I am then, alone on the earth.'19 But Hume and Diderot, both of whom tried to help him and got bitten, would have said that no one can be alone on the earth, and that privileging an interior autonomy was what got Rousseau into trouble in the first place. Nor would they have been impressed by the ways in which his imagination (if riot his posterior) anticipated the theories of Freud. Freud's system is itself an allegory, with its superego and id and birth trauma and primal scene and penis envy. Its elevation of largely conjectural sexual episodes to primary importance would have struck them as bizarre, the application, as Nabokov called it, of ancient Greek myths to our private parts. It is instructive, therefore, to recall the interpretation of behaviour that Diderot elaborates in Jacques le Fataliste, which although lacking in plot contains, like parasites or viruses, a whole series of embedded plots. Often the characters tell stories that turn out to be about real people, that is, people who actually existed. But Diderot's own view is that such identifications are not only trivial but irrelevant, since human life continually repeats itself and a made-up story can parallel a real one in such a way as to make one question the meaning of 'real.' The point is no longer classical verisimilitude, which sought to be 'similar to truth' because, as Aristotle said, poetry shows us what always happens. Rather, the point is that human beings can't help telling themselves stories, and stories inevitably produce patterns because the human mind can't get along without them. A striking example occurs when Jacques tells the story of his former captain's friend who fought repeated duels with another army officer. Jacques warns his master that he may find the story incredible, not because it couldn't happen, but because it already did happen to somebody else, a certain M de Guerchy whom we know to have really existed. Jacques's master replies, 'If you tell it to me, you'll kill two birds with one stone, since you'll tell the story of two people which I don't know' - not 'whom I don't know,' which would mean the duelists, but 'which I don't know,' the identical story shared among them. So Jacques launches into his narrative, with constant reminders that two separate stories are running exactly parallel: 'The knifeman, M. de Guerchy or my Captain's friend, received a sword thrust to the body ... They fought a second and third time, then eight or ten times, and it was always the knifeman who

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was wounded ... Up to this point the stories are identical; they are one and the same story and that is why I have named them both.'20 There's no reason why similar stories shouldn't often happen, but by now the two are so implausibly identical that they really do seem to be the same (the whole concept of sameness, of course, posed a vexing riddle for empiricist thought). So what we have to recognize is that the people may be different but their stories are the same. Storytelling cleans up loose ends, arranges material in intelligible sequence, and relies on repetition to give a sense of structure. Rousseau's narratives including his autobiography - belong to the genre of the Bildungsroman, in which repetition is presented as a revelation of unique personality rather than an artifice concocted by the storyteller. Diderot's narratives, recounted by a series of people who jostle and compete for air time, belong to a metafictional genre that foregrounds its own inventedness. The four duelists - two real people and two made up by Diderot - are anything but unique, and seem prophetic of Borges. This is not to say that Diderot's people are mere puppets, although they certainly do exhibit repetition in the Humean sense of inveterate habits. We are told of Jacques's master, 'Without his watch, without his snuff-box, and without Jacques, he didn't know what to do. They were the three mainstays of his life, which was spent in taking snuff, looking at the time, and questioningjacques, which he did in every possible combination.'21 But if the characters have no inkling of unconscious motives, there's a sense in which Diderot does. The narrator proposes this explanation for the duel that never ends: Jacques's captain and his friend could have been tormented by a violent and secret jealousy. It is a feeling which friendship does not always extinguish ... Without suspecting it, each was trying to rid himself of a dangerous rival.' Motives of this kind, however, even if unconscious, are also universal, like the perennial recurrences of La Rochefoucauld, who likewise wrote bleakly about the jealousy inseparable from friendship; they are not the shaping recurrences of a unique personality. So the narrator goes on, 'Let us say it was their area of madness. The madness of our two officers was for several centuries the madness of all Europe, and it used to be called the spirit of chivalry.'22 With Rousseau we seek subterranean connections between the childhood spanking and the relationship with Mme de Warens and the moment of jouissance as Dudding. With Diderot there's no question of that sort of archeology of the self: duelists are simply duelists, in the middle ages or the eighteenth century. The two pairs of rivals repeat

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their fight with the predictability of Tweedledum and Tweedledee, strapping on the pillows and saucepans to have another bash before the inevitable arrival of the monstrous crow. Inevitable arrivals make one think of determinism, and determinism is indeed the idea that underlies Diderot's novel. Rousseau, driven by compulsions he only partly understood, desperately needed to believe in free will. At one point in his youth, disturbed by the predestinarian doctrines of Jansenism, he tried to ascertain his fate by throwing a stone at a tree, with the notion that if he hit it he would know he was saved, and if he missed he would know he was damned. Fortunately he hit the tree right in the middle, but as he afterwards admitted, the tree was so big and he stood so close that it would have been impossible to miss. Diderot, on the other hand, who like Hume was a far more secure personality than Rousseau, believed in a strict determinism that controls absolutely everything that ever happens in the world. To be sure, the modern concept of determinism had not yet been clearly formulated, and the fatalism that Jacques espouses, in which all of our actions are recorded in a great scroll up above, is a soldier's rough-and-ready philosophy of accepting what can't be avoided: every bullet has its billet. The great scroll is superimposed on the human experiences it narrates, exactly as the two pairs of duelists inhabited a single story. 'I am wondering,' Jacques's master says, 'whether your benefactor would have been cuckolded because it was written up above, or whether it was written up above because you were going to cuckold your benefactor.' To this ageold theological conundrum Jacques replies, 'The two were written side by side. Everything was written at the same time. It is like a great scroll which is unrolled little by little.'23 That part is true enough, because it's Diderot himself who is unrolling the scroll. Diderot's attempts to theorize determinism were intended to delete the metaphysical dimension of fatalism, the teleology implied in the phrase 'written up above.' But probably every determinism - as opposed to a theory of randomness - is a metaphysics in the end. Darwin was the first to reconcile necessity with pure randomness (a lesson people still have trouble grasping: they want natural selection to be purposive). And even randomness can yield pattern that is all the more fascinating for being unmotivated. Another science museum exhibit is a box, filled with regularly spaced pegs, into which ping-pong balls are dumped. As they hop and skitter from peg to peg, they gradually build up a bell curve. We want this beautiful instance of repetition to mean something, but it doesn't. Modern probability theory is simply descriptive: it can tell us

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that if we drop enough ping-pong balls, they will form a bell curve, but it can't tell us why. They just do. Any 'why' explanation would be a covert metaphysics. But human stories, as opposed to clattering ping-pong balls, cannot manage without a covert metaphysics, even when it survives only as a ghostly echo. As a character says in Beckett's Endgame, 'Ah, the old questions, the old answers; there's nothing like them!'24 Jacques leFatalisteis engagingly prophetic of postmodernism, and at a time when Freud has been toppled from his pedestal, its take on repetition may seem more persuasive than Rousseau's psychological quest romance. Maybe life has no pattern, and repetition is merely coincidence, but art requires pattern and it forces coincidence to seem meaningful. And Rousseau certainly didn't need us to tell him that if life resembles art, it's because we code our understanding through the categories of repetition that art has taught us. When Mme d'Epinay provided him with a rural retreat called the Hermitage he was convinced that his time for love was past, though he bitterly regretted never having tasted 'that intoxicating pleasure,' cette enivrante volupte, that he felt in his soul. Meditating in the pastoral groves, he summoned up images of all the women who had attracted him during his life, not omitting Mme Larnage; 'My blood quickened and caught fire, my head turned despite its already graying hair, and voila the grave Citizen of Geneva, voildthe austere JeanJacques at almost forty-five, suddenly become again the passionate shepherd.'25 Soon this rejuvenated swain was peopling his imagination with beings even more delicious than the real ones he never got to enjoy, and the next thing he knew he was writing a novel, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Heloise, in which an idealized version of his youthful self becomes the ideal lover of an ideal young woman. Right on cue, an actual woman came along to occupy the role that was waiting for her. This turned out to be Mme d'Houdetot, sister-in-law of his current benefactor Mme d'Epinay and mistress of one of his friends, who appeared on horseback in male garb, another version of the dominatrix perhaps. Rousseau's account in the Confessions is absolutely clear about the way it worked: his feeling of being swept away was perfectly real, but it was based entirely on a fantasy projection. 'I was intoxicated with love that had no object, it fixed itself on her, I saw my Julie in Mme d'Houdetot, and soon I saw only Mme d'Houdetot, but clothed in all the perfections with which I had just been adorning the idol of my heart.'26 Rousseau had thus succumbed to exactly the illusions of civilized sexuality that his

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theory described: not the straightforward desire of natural man for natural woman, but the mediated desire of socialized man for an imaginary object that gets localized, by transference, in one temporary human site after another. He imagined himself into his novel, and then he imagined his novel into his life, with the added benefit that since Mme d'Houdetot was his friend's lover, he didn't have to sleep with her but could experience his usual inhibitions more nobly as the grandeur of renunciation. Always different yet always the same, this is the kind of psychological repetition that Rousseau, more than anyone, taught the world to see. Life is lived as art because our minds constantly generate patterns that art adapts and shapes, and the librarians' distinction between fiction and non-fiction is too reductive to be any use. For as Diderot says in Jacquesand he should have the last word - 'Someone who took what I'm writing for the truth would perhaps be less mistaken than someone who took it for a fable.'27 Notes 1 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), I.iv.6, p. 252. 2 Francois, due de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes et Reflexions Diverses, ed. Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1977), no. 436, p. 82; Jean de la Bruyere, Les Caracteres, ed. Robert Garapon (Paris: Garnier, 1990), 'De la Cour,'no. 65, p. 243. 3 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Gumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 12. See also Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932). 4 Hume, Treatise, I.iv.7, p. 269; Reid, cited by S.A. Grave, The Scottish Philosophy of Common Sense (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 98n. 5 'North Haven.' 6 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5. 7 Bk. VII, p. 270; French original in Oeuvres Completes (hereafter cited as O.C.), vol. 1 (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 278. 8 The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (London: J. Murray, 1896), 150. 9 Confessions, 14.

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10 Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 65—6. 11 Confessions, 15. 12 O.C. 1:17,1157 (my translations; the Oxford edition, p. 17, translates etreaux genoux as 'to lie at the feet,' which is not what Rousseau says). 13 Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 115; Cocteau as quoted by Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique, 51 ('Le posterieur de JeanJacques est-il le soleil de Freud qui se leve?'). 14 Confessions, 15 (O.C. 1:15). 15 O.C. 1:1247, note (a) to p. 27. 16 Confessions, 125 (O.C. 1:128). 17 Confessions, 246 (O.C. 1:252). 18 Cinquieme Promenade, O.C. 1:1045. 19 O.C. 1:995. 20 Denis Diderot, Jacques theFatalist, trans. Michael Henry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 116-18; Diderot, Oeuvres, ed. Andre Billy (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 568. (Tu m'apprendras 1'aventure de ces deux personnages, carje 1'ignore.') 21 Jacques theFatalist, 40. 22 Jacques theFatalist, 75 (modified from the Penguin translation; Pleiade edition, 529). 23 Jacques theFatalist, 25 (modified from the Penguin translation; Pleiade edition, 479). 24 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1970), 38. 25 O.C. 1:426-7. 25 O.C. 1:440. 26 Pleiade edition, 484-5. 27 Jacques theFatalist, 30 (modified from the Penguin translation; Pleiade edition, 484-5).

chapter three

Escape from Repetition: Blake versus Locke and Wordsworth LAURA QUINNEY

In his treatise 'There Is No Natural Religion,' Blake contemns Lockean empiricism for providing a reductive account of subjective experience. Empiricism slights, or even represses, the imaginative component of perception - what Blake calls 'the Poetic or Prophetic character' or, more plainly, 'Inspiration and Revelation.' According to empiricism, we have for our originary stimulus only the elements of material reality: the pitiful circle of things, the routines of clock time and nature. If we truly are confined to natural reality, then our subjective experience must be increasingly homogeneous. Blake concludes, 'If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, & stand still unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.'1 The subject, as empiricism conceives it, is condemned to monotony, and hence to stultification — known in Blake as the sleep of Urizen, or 'Forgetfulness, dumbness, necessity!': 'Despair must be his eternal lot' (75, 2). Blake does not believe that we are confined to natural reality, and he means to show, by reductio, that Locke's account is mistaken. But an ironic subtext cuts across this assurance: as Blake knows, many people do find experience a 'dull round,' overwhelmed as they are by the temptations of philosophical materialism - and thus despair is their lot. What Blake calls 'natural man,' or the human being defined as a physical creature, is only 'a worm of sixty winters,' 'a poor mortal vegetation/ Beneath the moon of Ulro' (120). Anyone who believes in merely natural man must sooner or later see himself (or herself) as a worm. Nature will emerge as an omnipotent reality, possessed of the force of necessity, and will consequently come to seem tyrannical and malicious.

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In Milton, the 'Shadowy Female' exemplifies the panic of natural man. She is a projection of his view of nature as malignant, and so she speaks like a threatening sadist: I will lament over Milton in the lamentations of the afflicted My Garments shall be woven of sighs & heart broken lamentations. The misery of unhappy Families shall be drawn out into its border Wrought with the needle with dire sufferings, poverty, pain & woe Along the rocky Island & thence throughout the whole Earth There shall be the sick Father & his starving Family! there The Prisoner in the stone Dungeon & the Slave at the Mill I will have Writings written all over it in Human Words That every Infant that is born upon the Earth shall read And get by rote as a hard task of a life of sixty years [.] (Ill) Nature's ambition is to defeat human agency, to 'teach' the 'worm of sixty winters' his helplessness, by demonstrating to him that life is an inescapable round of miseries, and to demonstrate this invariably until he learns it 'by rote,' abandoning all will and hope. Every 'poor mortal vegetation' shall be broken on this same wheel, 'the Circle of Destiny,' or conviction of one's entrapment, over and over. Something malevolent in the order of reality wills us to suffer not only defeat but also the consciousness of it. Blake thinks that one is led to this paranoid view by granting the superior reality of nature. But who, to Blake's mind, had manifested this kind of despair? It certainly was not the unexcitable Locke, but, I will argue, it was Wordsworth. Blake recognized that Wordsworth had elaborated a phenomenology of the subject out of Locke's epistemology, and so exposed, especially in 'Tintern Abbey,' the disappointments of nature-worship and the tormented self-division of the subject resigned to uniquely natural existence. Blake made his indignation with Wordsworth clear in his annotations to Wordsworth's Poems, 1815, and to the preface to The Excursion, 1814. His objections are well known: Blake thought that in his preface Wordsworth willfully denied the priority of Inspiration or Imagination, while, by the converse logic, in his poems he timidly paid homage to the primacy of nature. Worst of all was the philosophical program that emerged out of these stances, the watery Kantianism through which, in plain bad faith, Wordsworth maintained that the mind belongs to the world and harmonizes with it. Blake expertly demolished this pious

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pretense: 'You shall not bring me down to believe such fitting & fitted I know better & Please your Lordship' (667). We might summarize Blake's critique in this way: against his own better knowledge, Wordsworth accorded too little independence to the mind, and too much independence - too much inevitably fearful reality and power - to the material or natural world. This is the critique as it has been received and paraphrased. It is certainly where Blake begins. But I think that his quarrel, or better, his engagement with Wordsworth runs deeper: Wordsworth was to Blake the contemporary poet who gave the most moving, authoritative, and persuasive rendition of subjective experience as the empiricists had - in Blake's view - monstrously misconstrued it. In fact, Blake sympathized with the misery of those who believed this version of subject life, for he thought it codified an inevitable ideological temptation. Thus Blake felt the genuine force in Wordsworth - not of course in Wordsworth's bogus solutions, but in his articulation of the uneasiness and despair that natural man must suffer. Blake himself ventriloquized this despair with great pathos in The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem. He would have heard the cry of 'Living self moving mourning lamenting & howling incessantly' (120) in the elegiac strain of 'Tintern Abbey' and the Intimations Ode, poems in which the speaker has been betrayed and bewildered by nature, however much he may struggle to deny it. Blake must have seen Wordsworth as the most eminent, most compelling spokesman of the existential sorrow whose ineluctability Blake was bent on denying. He would have been moved by Wordsworth's sadness, but thought it exemplary of the damage caused by the 'fatal opinion [s]' of empiricism. To speak of Wordsworth as a nature poet here, or to speak of the problem in terms of a misconception of nature, is mere shorthand. For Blake, the deepest and most dangerous effect of empiricism was its distortion of psychic experience, or the T's' experience of its relation not only to the world but to itself. At stake is not simply the status of nature or of humankind in nature, but the condition and character of subjectivity. The version of experience adumbrated in empiricism (according to Blake) and extrapolated, or given force and life, in Wordsworth dissolves the confidence and integrity of consciousness: The T,' the mind or consciousness or self, experiences itself as solitary, belated, and besieged. It finds that it has awoken in an object-world that existed before it, and whose reality is greater than its own; this world is empty and monotonous at the same time that it is frightening and unpredictable, and the T feels small, isolated, and adrift. It cannot even com-

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rnand the contents of its own interior, but finds the self amorphous, incoherent, and mysterious, occupied by floating chunks of alterity that have somehow invaded it from the world beyond. Now why should empiricism have such dark psychological consequences? In Fearful Symmetry, Northrop Frye paraphrased, with unsurpassable lucidity, what we might call the first order of Blake's critique: 'empiricism,' 'Natural Religion,' and 'Deism' exalt to an authoritative philosophical position what is actually a terrible fear haunting humankind: the fear that the natural world is the real world. 'Natural Religion' and 'Deism' frame this notion in religious terms by proposing that the natural world is part of the Creation, and that it therefore expresses something about the essence of God.2 Empirical science says more simply that material reality is the only certain, solid, and knowable reality. In Blake's argument, these claims come to the same thing and have the same dire implications. The natural world is a world of death; it contains either objects that are merely inert or subjects that are merely short-lived phantoms; it is the world of linear time, or inexorable clocktime, which brings forth living things only in order to extinguish them and replace them with others in endless, vain cycles of mortality. From the laws of nature springs necessity, and surrendering to necessity spells helplessness and despair. How dreadful for us if this is the 'reality': for then we must believe that we dwell in a fundamentally hostile world, and that the soul will be dismissed to 'Non-Entity.' As Urizen, the Zoa most afflicted with the horror of the void, laments: 'Eternal death haunts all my expectation/Rent from Eternal Brotherhood we die & are no more' (328). Christianity ought to give us some relief from this terror in so far as it imagines that God made both this world and a better one: but Blake suggests that nobody who believes in the divine origin of natural reality can believe without doubt in the afterlife. For if God made this world, if it is a reality expressing his being, then he is a vicious monster from whom we have every reason to dread the worst. From this dark suspicion arises the concept of a punitive God whom we need to appease by means of sacrifice, for if he is a bloody, death-loving monster only blood can please him. In the world of death, death is the currency. All the deep crimes humanity commits against itself - all the nightmares of 'War & Religion' - follow this sacrificial logic, by which an incurable despair frantically spends itself in idle violence. In Night VIII of The Four Zoas, death exults in its psychological hegemony: in alarm and superstition, all are drawn to it, and secretly venerate it, as if it were a capricious but omnipotent deity.

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[T]he grave mock[s] & laugh [s] at the plowd field saying I am the nourisher thou the destroyer in my bosom is milk & wine And a fountain from my breasts to me come all multitudes To my breath they obey they worship me I am a goddess & queen. (383)

In this pre-emptive parody of Wordsworthian discourse, Blake suggests that Nature-worship, though it seems benign, conceals submission to the truth of 'Death Eternal,' and that a submission of this kind, however tacit, leads to self-centred anxiety and desperation. In the second order of his argument, Blake moves inwards, to trace the impact of such thinking on the structure of interior lives. Here he makes his most original claim: that this fearful definition of reality, and its philosophical and institutional ratification, causes the psyche to experience itself as fragmented. The sense of self-fragmentation creates passivity and paralysis; it is at the core of abjection. For this reason, Blake defines the Fall as a fall into self-division, and he shows that an acute sense of self-division can result from what we might term 'mere' intellectual error - from misconceptions of the self and its relation to the world. In Blake's psychology, the vital metaphors used to characterize the interior life affect its experience of itself. Empiricism injures us in so far as it attempts to persuade us, not only that the mind is passive in relation to material reality, but that is divided and passive in relation to itself. But empiricism did not invent this misconception; its perspective brings an age-old pattern to its culmination. Blake's ideological itinerary begins with the Greeks, the first 'natural philosophers.' To accept the reality of the natural world is automatically to be plunged into despair and paranoia about the status of the self: what am I? how shall I endure in this wretched world of death? why am I cursed with subjectivity? This is the despair and paranoia exemplified in Stoicism, and once the Stoical definition of reality is granted, then the Stoical solution follows: all that I can govern is my interior life, I must shape my experience of experience, and that requires mental and emotional self-discipline, specifically, the exertion of Reason. To Blake, the engorgement of Reason is a disaster, a social and cultural disaster but also a psychic disaster, for it isolates and reifies one aspect of the self while subjugating others, and this can only produce internal distortion and tormenting self-alienation. All models of faculty psychology from Plato onwards that oppose Reason and Passion propagate a noxious concept.. The empiricists and the philosophes, the thinkers of the 'Age of Reason,' recreate this destructive error by embracing the secular humanism

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of the classical period: so Blake insists when he says, in his accusatory address 'To the Deists,' 'But your Greek Philosophy ... teaches that Man is Righteous in his Vegetated Spectre: an Opinion of fatal & accursed consequence to Man' (200). The 'Vegetated Spectre' is natural reason. To teach that 'Man is Righteous in his Vegetated Spectre' is to teach that Reason is the loftiest faculty and its cultivation the highest form of humanity. These teachings depend on the premise that if the natural world is reality, then natural man is the only man, and his greatest achievement is to become the chief thing in nature; this he does by becoming its 'master,' dominating it through knowledge and analysis. Not only is this clearly a doomed enterprise, but even to aspire to master nature means to grasp its laws through an aspect of thought - Reason that can know them, ironically, not because it can transcend them but because it most nearly mimes their mechanical processes. The New Science is, as Blake comments, a 'Science of Despair' (142). Natural reason struggles vainly to distinguish itself from nature vainly because it has already given up the game. Natural reason therefore inclines to defensive paranoia. And now we begin to see why Blake calls the exaltation of Reason 'an Opinion of fatal and accursed consequence to Man' (my italics). The violent caprice and the punishing 'clock-time' of the natural world make it, for us, a hateful chaos; we exert the 'I,' a fierce little node of self-consciousness, against it, but that requires isolating this node out of the rest of the interior, and all else that is in us then seems alien and chaotic too; it is the inscrutable part of us conspiring with foreign nature. Out of this increased apprehension now of inner as well as outer chaos - we bulk up the little T or ego, but the more power and autonomy it tries to seize, the smaller and more helpless it becomes, because it is futile for any creature of the order of nature to crave power over it or even autonomy in it. The paranoid, grasping ego, the 'condensed' or 'opake' precipitate of one's anxieties, is the Selfhood, or what Blake also calls 'the Spectre.' The Selfhood is a misconstruction of the self, an ill-fated and delusory fragment falsely representing itself as the whole. For it is no more than the T or node of consciousness, a particularly pathetic entity fighting a losing battle to protect its boundaries, that is, its own sense of itself as real, substantial, and effectual. It will lose this battle because it is selfdoubting - it perceives that it does not have the substance of a material thing - and it is acquisitive, imperialist, vaunting, violent, tyrannical, and defensive in proportion as it is secretly terrified. The character of Urizen, 'Self-closed, all-repelling,' is essentially the character of the Selfhood or

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Spectre, opposing its imperiled vital singularity to a encroaching world of death, in vain: First I fought with the fire; consum'd Inwards, into a deep world within: Avoid immense, wild dark & deep, Where nothing was; Natures wide womb And self-balanc'd stretched o'er the void I alone, even I! (72)

This insistence on singularity - or the uniqueness of the soul - necessarily leads to the dread of 'Death Eternal,' and then on to gross selfishness. As the Spectre of Urthona says of himself, in assaulting Enitharmon, 'Thou knowest that the Spectre is in Every Man insane brutish/Deformd that I am thus a ravening devouring lust continually/Craving & devouring' (360). The ego desperate to preserve its reality will descend into mad possessiveness. Ironically, this bestial formation, as the precipitate of consciousness or the ego, is also Enlightenment Reason, brought to its disassociated and distorted extreme. Instead of being the seat of objectivity, it is the source of self-concern. Blake's Milton, who has overcome his narrow rationalism, consequently pledges himself to 'SelfAnnihilation,' and he denounces 'Satan's' Churches for promoting a craven longing after personal salvation: Thy purpose & the purpose of thy Priests & of thy Churches Is to impress on men the fear of death; to teach Trembling & fear, terror, constriction; abject selfishness Mine is to teach Men to despise death & to go on In fearless majesty annihilating Self[.] (139)

The 'Self whose hold Milton dissolves is the ego, the singular soul, or what philosophical discourse calls 'personal identity.' To privilege one's uniqueness is a mistake, since it gives rise to a profound sense of vulnerability - and hence, as we have seen, to anxieties about loneliness, incapacity, and death. Blake thinks adherence to identity a misguided aim, and a form of constraint. When it means personal uniqueness, 'identity' is a hostile term in his vocabulary. Satan, the hypocrite, makes 'to himself Laws from his own identity,' while the pitiful, well-meaning Tharmas can be seen 'Pursuing the Vain Shadow of Hope fleeing from identity.' (104,383).

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The final, definitive error is the limitation of the true or full self to this 'Identity.' I use the words 'true or full self advisedly. Blake would not use them, since he treats 'self,' 'Selfhood,' and 'Identity' synonymously, as three names for the illusion of the unique, atomic T; his alternative, his term for the unbounded wealth of the interior, is 'Imagination,' a universal rather than individual reserve. Blake provocatively suggests that Albion, or England, 'los[es] the Divine Vision' by 'Turning his Eyes outward to Self,' as if the Selfhood were superficial and inauthentic, outlying (313). This is what Blake's Milton claims, too, when he rejects his Selfhood as 'a false Body: an Incrustation over my Immortal/Spirit' (142). The location of all the value and power of the inner world in this 'crust,' this Selfhood, is manifestly reductive, and in its reductiveness it automatically creates a sense of self-division. Urizen identifies himself with his Reason, and the result is a paranoid relation to his interior life: 'The Spectre is the Man the rest is only delusion & fancy' (307). To Urizen, Reason is respectable, and 'the rest' - passion and imagination, or whatever terms we wish to use - is foreign, suspicious, and disturbing. One of the worst crimes of the Enlightenment is to encourage this identification of the 'real self with Reason or the seat of consciousness. In his chapter on personal identity, Locke explicitly defines the self as the 'I' of present consciousness, and its memories, and no more. But to see the depth to which, in Blake's view, Lockean empiricism contributes to the fragmentation of subjectivity, we must go back a few steps. Locke's epistemology proposes that the mind is passive before an overwhelming external force, nature, which is irrational, insensible, and sinister. This representation implicitly formulates a concept of .subjectivity in which the subject is consigned to psychic division and existential terror. Locke's views teach us terror by teaching us to regard the mind as the slave of the external world. His views consequently promote self-division by encouraging us to experience the relation of consciousness - not just to the world - but to its own contents (the 'impressions' and 'reflections') as enfeebled. An examination of the language of Locke's Essay suggests that Blake is not extrapolating recklessly. Blake detects real implications of Locke's argument: the reduction of the mind to merely natural status, and the concomitant redescription of it as narrow, mechanical, self-divided, and self-occluded. In his very first paragraph, Locke makes a rallying-cry of the mind's imperfect self-knowledge:

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The Understanding, like the Eye, whilst it makes us see and perceive all other Things, takes no notice of it self: And it requires Art and Pains to set it at a distance and make it its own Object. But whatever be the Difficulties, that lie in the way of this Enquiry; whatever it be that keeps us so much in the Dark to our selves, sure I am, that all the Light we can let in upon our own Minds; all the Acquaintance we can make with our own Understandings, will not only be very pleasant, but bring us great Advantage, in directing our Thoughts in the search of other Things.3

According to Locke, it is a consequence of the very constitution of the mind that it should be unable fully to know itself. In this way he demonstrates the structural necessity of subjectivity's self-bewilderment. Blake would term this a deliberate act of self-sabotage. Locke goes on to emphasize our mental limitations; he refers to 'the narrowness of our Minds' and says he wishes 'to prevail with the busy Mind of Man, to be more cautious in meddling with things exceeding its Comprehension.'4 His anatomy of mental operations justifies this reduction of its status, for he describes the mind in materialist terms, as a kind of natural organ with a fixed province and fixed processes. This account leads in turn to an almost wilful emphasis on the mind's passivity: In this Part [sensation] the Understanding is meerly passive; and whether or no, it will have these Beginnings, and as it were, materials of Knowledge, is not in its own power. For the Objects of our Senses, do, many of them, obtrude their particular Ideas upon our minds, whether we will or no: And the Operations of our minds, will not let us be without, at least some obscure Notions of them. No Man, can be wholly ignorant of what he does, when he thinks. These simple Ideas, when offered to the mind, the Understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter, when they are imprinted, nor blot them out, and make new ones in it self, than a mirror can refuse, alter, or obliterate the Images or Ideas, which, the Objects set before it, do therein produce.5

Locke likens the mind to a mirror, compelled or forced to reflect images. It is true that he describes only simple ideas here; but he renders even the formation of complex ideas in singularly increative terms. He is, as Frye says, subducting mental processes that could be conceived of as active and imaginative into automatic, reflexive, unconscious ones.6 Though Locke is not discussing the operations of the rational faculty

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here, his emphasis on the mechanical functions of mind tallies with the enlightenment conception of Reason to which Blake so vividly objected. To Blake, one of the appalling aspects of the enshrinement of Reason is that it isolates and exalts the 'legal' or logical mental processes, the aspect of mind that, though conscious, most resembles the sinister Necessity of nature, with its Newtonian regulation and monotony. Exalting Reason equals exalting the aspect of conscious mind that is most like a mechanism: to Blake this is sheer paradox. The mind that cows itself with obedience to laws - the laws of nature and, just as bad, its own laws or the laws of logic - pledges itself to stultification. Enlightenment Reason is perversely self-limiting, or self-enclosing and selfenglobing. It is impressive that Locke reduces even 'reflection' to a mechanical status. Reflection is 'that notice which the Mind takes of its own Operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof, there come to be Ideas of these Operations in the Understanding.'7 Locke defines reflection in a way that both divides and passivates the mind: one half of it becomes the passive observer of automatic 'operations' in the other half. In fact - and this is startling - he says that when the mind takes itself as an object, it incorporates the dichotomy of internal and external into its own structure: the mind relates to its own operations in the same way that it relates to the outside world. '[S]uch are, Perception, Thinking, Doubting, Believing, Reasoning, Knowing, Willing, and all the different actings of our own Minds; which we being conscious of, and observing in our selves, do from these receive into our Understandings, as distinct Ideas, as we do from Bodies affecting our Senses. This Source of Ideas every Man has wholly in himself: And though it be not Sense, as having nothing to do with external Objects; yet it is very like it, and might properly enough be call'd internal Sense.'8 This description divides the mind into subject and object, or T (point of consciousness) and Other (outside and alien), and thus imports into the very structure of the interior the passivation and bewilderment of the Lockean subject in the material world. The experiencing consciousness undergoes two forms of alienation, from the outside world and from itself. It may lament, with Blake's Tharmas, T am like an atom/A Nothing left in darkness yet I am an identity' (302). In this quotation Blake means to summarize the predicament of Lockean consciousness. For Locke's notion of consciousness creates its own abyss: the point of consciousness is diminished radically, but it remains self-conscious, an anomaly in creation. Blake found that Lockean empiricism was ratifying an account of

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interior experience as an experience of chaos and helplessness. Locke might protest that he is not a psychologist: he has no theory of the self and gives no representation of the inner life. But Wordsworth, who put the empiricist metaphors into play, wrote the autobiography of the Lockean subject in his poems of the 1790s. Just think how this passage must have horrified Blake! I deem that there are Powers Which of themselves our mind impress, That we can feed this mind of ours In a wise passiveness. ('Expostulation and Reply,' 21-5)9

These mysterious external Towers' exemplify what Blake meant by the 'Female Will,' and the subjection of the mind to them leads on to the fearful worship of 'Natures cruel holiness' (137), by which Wordsworth often comes to grief. Meanwhile, this passive mind, stamped with the brand of external powers, must be perplexed in its experience of itself. It will be haunted by its fragmentation and made anxious by its want of selfmastery. This is the character of interior life as Wordsworth dramatizes it though not necessarily as he theorizes it. After all, at the end of The Prelude, he seems happily to assert that the mind is 'lord and master' (1805,11.271) .10 But it's an open secret that its Kantian conclusion is not the most evocative part of The Prelude, and that Wordsworth is at his most moving, and is closest to the source of his own power, in the childhood books of The Prelude (1 through 5), when he presents the relationship of mind to world in terms that are exactly the opposite: the T is constantly thrown off balance by 'vexing' external stimuli and baffling inward movements, neither of which it can master. It comes as no surprise that Wordsworth wrote the early books of The Prelude in the 1790s, when he was most under the influence of Lockean empiricism.11 Wordsworth's depiction of the passive and disconcerted 'I,' floundering in an alien world, draws out the figure of the self that is implicit in the tenets of empiricism. Any number of famous passages from the opening books of The Prelude, in their adumbration of a self-mystifying interior, betray an obvious debt to the concepts of the autonomous 'impression' that invades the mind and the secondary 'reflection' that floats about in it. The T finds itself jostling for place in the interior with foreign material 'unknown modes of being,' 'phantoms,' and second selves.

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Many of the most well known 'sublime' episodes in the early books of The Prelude turn on this phenomenon of internal alienation. For example: I had hopes Still higher, that with a frame of outward life I might endue, might fix in a visible home, Some portion of those phantoms of conceit That had been floating loose about so long, And to such beings temperately deal forth The many feelings that oppressed my heart. (1805, 1.127-33) after I had seen That spectacle, for many days my brain Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being. (1805, 1.417-20) A tranquillizing spirit presses now On my corporeal frame, so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-presence in my mind That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses - conscious of myself, And of some other being.

(1805, 2.27-33) Of course Blake would not have known these early books of The Prelude, but he could have anticipated something of their content from hints in the autobiographical poems that Wordsworth did publish in this period, especially 'Tintern Abbey.' Blake recognizes that Locke's philosophy gives scientific authority to the subject's apprehension that its advent is belated: Locke's rejection of the doctrine of innate ideas stipulates that the subject brings nothing of its own into the world - it merely stumbles into awareness of a prior and supervening reality. This is the experience of floundering subjectivity as it is adumbrated in 'Tintern Abbey,' where the self awakens to find itself deracinated and spectral. In this poem, Wordsworth entertains the anxiety (characteristically expressed as denial) that nature will - or already

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has - 'betray[ed] the heart that loves her': having honoured the grandeur of an external force in nature, he now finds it asserting its autonomy, departing from him, and leaving him a transient anomaly upon the earth, 'an atom in darkness,' as Blake might say. For to Wordsworth the withdrawal of natural ministration, or the suspicion that it was never there, spells the dissolution of ontological security. Without his special bond to nature, the T of his present consciousness is now adrift, haunted by memories of a delusional past and aghast at the prospect of an empty future. Wordsworth entertains his anxiety tentatively, acknowledging that the new unmeaning nature leaves him in 'somewhat of a sad perplexity,' and that his old confidence may have been 'but a vain belief.' He is compelled to be circumspect because the stakes are so great. If his anxieties are justified, and nature is no thoughtful guide but a dead world, withdrawn and inert, then he is plunged into an abyss, condemned to a ghostly singularity, like Urizen. Blake might sigh for him and say, 'The little weeping Spectre stands on the threshold of Death/Eternal' (126). No wonder that Wordsworth is reluctant to remain in this predicament: as the poem goes on, he tries to reinvent his faith in nature, and to contrive a benevolent scheme of 'compensation' to redeem his loss. He can claim thereby that he remains 'a worshipper of Nature' and that she is still 'the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart.' Blake would have heard such claims as symptoms of desperation: Wordsworth has foreseen the inevitable defeat of his attempt to lodge value and benignity in nature, and now he is trying vainly to regress. Wordsworth's other major autobiographical poem, the Intimations Ode, was published in 1807, after Blake had written his major poetry. But Blake clearly interpreted it as a confirmation of his general views and of his interpretation of Wordsworth. We actually have a record of his response to the Intimations Ode. Crabb Robinson visited him and read him the poem in 1825, commenting that 'he heartily enjoyed' it. Blake made 'The same half crazy crochets about the two worlds ... Again he repeated today - "I fear Wordsworth loves nature" ... It was remarkable that the parts of Wordsworth's ode which he most enjoyed were the most obscure & those I the least like & comprehend.'12 Blake 'enjoyed' the Intimations Ode presumably because in it Wordsworth comes as close as he ever does to dismissing the siren song of nature. He nearly acknowledges that, as Blake puts it, without the contribution of human imagination, 'This world is too poor to produce one Seed' (656). When the veil of glory, which is a projection of imagination, drops away from the phenomenal world, it becomes a place of dreary repetition: 'But yet I

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know, where'er I go, / That there hath past away a glory from the earth' (17-18) and 'The Pansy at my feet / Doth the same tale repeat' (54-5). The truth has been revealed: nature is dull and vacant. But if the power of projecting 'glory' unto it is lost with childhood, how is the adult to endure the monotony of merely natural existence? In the first four stanzas, the speaker finds himself, like the speaker of Tintern Abbey,' struggling precariously to keep his balance in the void created by his estrangement from nature. The exacerbating effect of this estrangement is that it throws consciousness itself into turmoil - as the speaker oscillates from wishfulness to panic to denial - so that at last he has only invidious alternatives to choose from: the tedium of the world or the frenzy of the interior. Blake would say that Wordsworth is finally facing up to the consequence of nature-worship, which is abandoment and terror. These are the result of his abject dependence on nature, for anyone who thinks nature is a Mother (our source and origin, the authority and reality that supervenes over the subject) must sooner or later doubt her, and then come to think of her as treacherous. The speaker is both sad and resentful when he calls nature a 'homely Nurse,' who 'doth all she can / To make her foster-child, her Inmate Man, / Forget the glories he hath known.' Here Wordsworth is letting his maternal metaphor play out to its logical end. As 'Tintern Abbey' demonstrates, the notion of nature as good mother cannot be sustained. It is impossible consistently to regard the material world as animated by a principle of benevolence. When Blake said, 'I fear Wordsworth loves Nature,' he must have meant that he feared for him, since nature-worship becomes its own torture. Thel's morale collapses in just this way, as her attempts to contrive a redemptive vision of natural reality fail, and she is left alone with her alienation from the insatiate mortal body. The logical conclusion of any attempt to redeem nature is paranoia and horror of it, or of it in so far as it is in us. We will turn bitter against nature in the end and say, with Stevens: 'What good .is it that the earth is justified?'13 Of course it is at this point that the Intimations Ode takes a surprising turn into mythography. Blake liked the 'obscure' - that is, as Leopold Damrosch points out, the neoplatonic passages of the Intimations Ode.14 He liked them precisely because they propose, against Locke, that we do have innate ideas - and they recur to us in the form of episodes of Berkelian idealism - or occlusions of natural reality. Locke scoffs: ' 'Tis strange, if the Soul has Ideas of its own, that it derived not from Sensation or Reflection, (as it must have, if it thought before it received any impres-

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sions from the Body) that it should never, in its private thinking ... retain any of them, the very moment it wakes out of them, and then make the Man glad with new discoveries.'15 I suppose Blake took the Intimations Ode as a riposte to this kind of argument. Yet Wordsworth's neoplatonic solution does not restore unity to the interior, which is one of Blake's major therapeutic goals. Neither the idealized child, with its 'Blank misgivings of a Creature/Moving about in worlds not realized,' nor the adult who has recovered his memory of a transcendental origin is less internally divided than the original mourner. In approving of the Ode's neoplatonic passages, Blake implicitly approved the bifurcation of natural and transcendental man. This implicit contradiction is echoed throughout his work: the more Blake exalts Imagination and denigrates Nature, the more difficult it is for him to claim, as he seems to want to claim in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that bodily perception can provide an access to 'infinity,' that is, that mind and body can be reconciled in a transcendental experiment. As Damrosch argues, while Blake critiques both dualism and psychologies that accept the necessity of self-division, or implicitly promote it, he did not fully overcome dualism in his own theories.16 But he did intend to; he meant to surmount dualism by creating an intellectual regimen for the restoration of the will. In the totality of his work, Blake addresses a fundamental form of the unhappiness of subjectivity, a form described under other names, later, by Hegel, Heidegger, and Freud, among others: feeling oneself to be pitiable and helpless in the world, 'incoherent' or un-self-coincident within. We identify the self with the Selfhood, but a Selfhood can never be other than wretched, and we uneasily sense that there is more to us than a Selfhood, anyway: this T really is not I. Of course many other thinkers - Lacan is the obvious example - consider this failure of self-coincidence to be essential; they say it is constitutive of subjectivity. But true to form, Blake insists that it is not. He implores us to identify inferiority with Imagination, 'an opening' or perceiving 'center' whose qualities are opposite to the Selfhood's. In Blake's percipient analysis, the root of anguish lies in the frustration or deprivation of agency. To identify with Imagination is to recover agency. Because the Imagination does not belong to the order of nature, it is genuinely transcendent. It is freedom itself, exerting its dominion over nature because it is not itself natural. Therefore it is confident and unafraid, amorphous, bountiful, expansive, creative, and happy. If self became Imagination, then the whole question of elusiveness, fragmentation, and unease would be rendered obsolete. Imagination has no form

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or identity to defend, and without them the self would not require integrity. Unfortunately, this solution has a rhetorical flavour. It seems unlikely that anyone apart from Blake could sustain his intellectual posture for any length of time. Though his determination is impressive, his critique was, and has remained, more compelling than his therapy. In the high Romantic tradition, Wordsworth, with his theme of the atomic self and its depressive paranoia, prevailed: Coleridge seems to have thought as he did, and the younger Romantics take after them. Perhaps Blake underestimated the tenacity of the despair whose provenance he so keenly analysed. Yet he did not underestimate its force. Blake may maintain that experience is not irredeemably tragic, but he powerfully and lingeringly evokes grief, suffering, and the afflictions of the tragic sense. Seven out of the nine books of The Four Zoas dwell on the characters' psychological nightmare: it was the error and subsequent torment that gripped Blake. He gives full utterance to the temptations. What he found in Wordsworth was really something of himself - the panic and sadness and labouring hope - and that is why, in this one-sided debate, Blake has the air of conversing with his spectral compeer. His poetry has been treated as the triumphant announcement of his victory over desperation. But in fact it records his own conflict, a conflict that was evidently persistent and intense. Notes 1 William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 3. Parenthetical citations in the text are to this work. 2 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947). 3 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 43. 4 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 45, 44-5. 5 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 118. 6 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 22. 7 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 105. 8 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 105.

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9 William Wordsworth, Poems in Two Volumes, 1807, ed. Helen Darbishire, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). 10 The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth et al. (New York: W.W.Norton, 1979). 11 See Alan Grob, The Philosophic Mind: A Study of Wordsworth's Poetry and Thought: 1797-1805 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1973). 12 Quoted in Leopold Damrosch, Jr, Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 165. 13 Wallace Stevens, 'World without Peculiarity,' in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954). 14 Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth, 88. 15 Locke, AnEssay Concerning Human Understanding, 113-14. 16 Damrosch, Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth, 165—243.

chapter four

Emerging Emotion Theory: Forgiveness and Repetition PAUL NEWBERRY

I did not desire the ruin of any man, and therefore at his request I would forgive the wretch; it was below me to seek any revenge. Defoe, MollFlanders

These lines by Moll Flanders, the fictional heroine of Daniel Defoe's 1722 novel, suggest a way of forgiving quite at odds with what most of us today would expect. While we might readily agree with Flanders that revenge is not consistent with forgiveness, I doubt that many of us would consider the mere checking of revenge as sufficient for forgiveness. Isn't it also of great importance to us that whoever forgives us is no longer angry? Certainly, this is the view of most current philosophers who theorize about the definition of forgiveness, or what forgiveness is. In order to forgive, according to the most widely held view among these theorists, we must rid ourselves of the negative emotions we feel towards those we forgive. Specifically, we must overcome our resentment.1 Forgiveness, under this definition, is not only about how we act - as we see in the words from Moll Flanders - but also involves how we feel. Many of these theorists find the genesis of their definition of forgiveness in two sermons by the influential Anglican bishop Joseph Butler, published in 1726.2 Yet Butler did not hold the view now commonly attributed to him. I have argued elsewhere that Butler defines forgiveness as the checking, or withholding, of revenge, not the overcoming of resentment.3 For Butler, as with the fictional Moll Flanders, forgiving is not about what we feel, it is about what we do (or rather, refrain from

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doing). And Butler was not alone in this view. Other writers from early modern England discussed forgiveness in the same terms. We will examine three similar texts in this paper: writings by fellow Anglican divines John Tillotson and Samuel Clarke and by the philosopher Lord Shaftesbury. While it is perhaps surprising that these writers conceived of forgiveness in a fundamentally different way than we do today, it is even more surprising that current philosophers who hold that forgiveness is the overcoming of resentment (mis) perceive in Butler the progenitor of their own view. This essay is an attempt to support what I believe to be the answers to two questions that arise from this discrepancy in definitions of forgiveness: Why did these prominent thinkers in early modern England conceive of forgiveness differently than we do today? And what causes philosophers in our own time to misinterpret that view in Butler's sermons? Emotions - the way they are understood and the terminology by which that understanding is articulated - are central to both answers. In an earlier article, I argued that Butler's view is misinterpreted because of a current failure to understand and appreciate the theory of emotions presupposed by his view of forgiveness (a feeling theory of emotions), especially as it differs from the theory presupposed when forgiveness is defined as the overcoming of resentment (a cognitive theory). While I still hold to this, I now believe there is more to the story, and we can uncover it if we pay closer attention to the environment in which his ideas developed. Butler's conception of forgiveness and his understanding of emotions were shaped by the ideas and vocabulary of his day. In his sermons, his ideas and the vocabulary he uses to express them are conditioned by his Christian beliefs, while at the same time he attempts to move beyond those constraints to understand forgiveness and resentment within a framework that is more psychological and less theological. One unfortunate consequence for his sermons is an inevitable textual ambiguity regarding the nature of emotions and their relation to forgiveness. It is this ambiguity that has allowed current theorists to misread Butler. We might more broadly claim that Butler says what he does about forgiveness because of his historical context, and what he says is misinterpreted by theorists who are hampered by their own. The constraints of historical context in both directions - on these four early modern writers from their predecessors and their religion and on current philosophers who see in Butler the roots of their own theory can be usefully explored through instances of repetition, and specifically

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the restatement of ideas and vocabulary from the past. This repetition can be a way not only of maintaining consistency through time, a means of connecting one's ideas to a tradition, but also a way of being made prisoner to the past and being constrained by it. These writings on forgiveness and resentment contain multiple instances of repetition, some of which determine the extent of the author's inventiveness: they limit how far each can venture into a new way of envisioning and articulating ideas about these subjects. Seven instances of repetition connect these works on forgiveness and resentment to Christian tradition. First, the three sermons examined here begin with a sermon text that is a repetition of words from scripture. Second, people are commanded to forgive, because human forgiveness is a means of sharing in God's grace. When people forgive they repeat God's forgiveness of sins. Third, since forgiving is acting as God does, people must forgive in the same way God does. Fourth, repetition of the vocabulary related to Christian forgiveness includes emotion terms. So, repetition of the ideas and vocabulary from the religious tradition not only determines to some extent the framework within which individuals can think about forgiveness and the emotions, but also presents the vocabulary by which they must articulate what they think. The notion of forgiveness itself contains two additional themes of repetition. Fifth, resentment of wrongdoing may prevent a wrongdoer from repeating his or her crime, and thus repeating the relevant sin. Sixth, the scriptural injunction to forgive proscribes revenge, and revenge can be seen as a repetition of the injuries the wrongdoer inflicted, done now in the name of justice and fairness. Finally, the unacknowledged discrepancy between current and early modern models of forgiveness involves a failed attempt at repetition. An idea that can be shown to have a historical heritage is a form of repetition. Repetition can provide a foundation for a current idea, as the past is repeated in a new, but related, form. Yet the effort to show the current definition of forgiveness as repeating Butler's definition fails, in part because Butler's writings repeat ideas and terminology from a religious tradition he took for granted and that we now hold quite separate from philosophy. In other words, the current attempt to regard a new definition as historically grounded, as repeating the views of Butler, fails to comprehend the ways in which Butler's view is itself enmeshed in a repetitive framework. It is through instances of these kinds of repetition that I will attempt to support my account of the discrepancies between these early modern

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notions of forgiveness and current ones. Using textual exegesis of sermons by Butler, Tillotson, and Clarke and various philosophical writings by Shaftesbury, I will attempt to establish four claims: (1) each held views of forgiveness and of emotions at odds with current views; (2) their views are shaped by repetitions of various kinds; (3) repetition accounts in large part for the differences in these early modern views and current views of forgiveness and emotions; (4) and as a speculation to motivate further enquiry, what appears as ambiguities and confusion about emotions in these early modern writings actually are indicative of the emotion theory of the day in an exciting state of flux. I've settled on these particular thinkers to represent the thinking on forgiveness and the emotions during this period for a number of reasons. Butler is the focal point since it is to his views specifically that current theorists refer. The others were chosen because all were intellectual giants, significant and influential in their day and long afterward. The four of them represent a broad spectrum of views shaped by Christianity. During an age when the categories of theologian and philosopher were not exclusive as they are today, Tillotson is the most purely theological, while Shaftesbury is most singularly philosophical. Both Butler and Clarke are highly regarded in both worlds. Nevertheless, although these four represent a significant breadth of perspective on this subject among intellectuals in early modern England, they are only a sampling, neither an inclusive nor an exclusive list of those who wrote about forgiveness in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. My hope is that my argument will be persuasive enough to encourage others to explore this region of intellectual activity more fully. Joseph Butler (1692-1752) Butler's two sermons directly related to forgiveness, Sermon VIII, 'Upon Resentment,' and Sermon IX, 'Upon Forgiveness of Injuries,' both repeat the same text from Matthew: 'Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy: but I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.'4 Butler uses these commands not only to edify his congregation, but also to analyse forgiveness and resentment. His central concern is the apparent conflict between the need to protect oneself and the precept that we must love our enemies. He instigates his investigation of this conflict by examining resentment.

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Butler assumes that because emotions are given to us by God, they must be intended for our betterment. The sermon on resentment is meant to resolve the question that arises once one makes that assumption: how can a socially disruptive emotion like resentment be consistent with a loving God, and how can it work for our best interest? Butler's answer, in brief, is that resentment serves to protect us from unjustified harm (or 'injury'), and as such is a necessary tool for our very survival. Yet there is no denying that such a volatile emotion can cause pain to others and be at least as socially disruptive as the injury it seeks to prevent. However, since indignation - our emotional response to someone else's being wronged - can be justified, resentment, too, can be an appropriate emotional response to wrongdoing: 'But no man could be thought in earnest, who should assert, that, though indignation against injury, when others are the sufferers, is innocent and just; yet the same indignation against it, when we ourselves are the sufferers, becomes faulty and blameable' (IX, 2,113). Butler contends that the problem lies not in resentment, but in 'the excess and abuse' of resentment. Butler lists five abuses of resentment: (1) when we imagine an injury where there is none; (2) when we imagine the injury greater than it is; (3) when we resent justified harm rather than injury; (4) when the emotion is inappropriate in degree to the injury; and (5) when we inflict pain or harm 'merely in consequence of, and to gratify, that resentment, though naturally raised' (VIII, 11, 109). In the first four cases the emotion is unjustified and thus inappropriate. The fifth, retaliation or revenge, is likewise unjustifiable, argues Butler, although many people believe otherwise (IX, 3, 113). It is the fifth case of unjustified resentment, revenge, that is inconsistent with the scriptural commands 'to forgive, and to love our enemies' Butler identifies in the epigraph he takes from Matthew. Love is 'the general obligation to benevolence or good-will towards mankind' (a way of acting, we should note, not a way of feeling), and resentment is compatible with that kind of love (IX, 12, 117). We may love our enemies, argues Butler, and still resent their injurious behaviour. But revenge is not compatible with love: revenge 'destroys our natural benevolence' (IX, 13, 118). Thus, forgiveness, according to Butler, is withholding revenge (or forbearance), not the overcoming of resentment. While Butler's definition of forgiveness as the withholding of revenge might seem incomplete by our lights, since no emotional change is required, it is reasonable if we consider the numerous instances of repetition that contributed to its conception. First, he repeats the pas-

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sage from scripture containing the commands to forgive and love our enemies. Second, Butler assumes that resentment is given to us by God to protect ourselves against injury, and, thus, a resentful response is compatible with God's goodness because it lessens the likelihood that the injury will be repeated. Also, since we are commanded to love our enemy, and 'gratifying' resentment with revenge is incompatible with love, we are forbidden to repeat the crime done to ourselves. Thus, it is revenge that is proscribed by the two precepts in the epigraph, not resentment. Additional instances of repetition also contribute to Butler's view of forgiveness. Because God is the model for forgiveness, human forgiveness of trespasses against us must be like God's forgiveness of our trespasses. That is, human forgiveness must attempt to repeat, as much as humanly possible, divine forgiveness. The nature of God's forgiveness, then, will help determine whether forgiveness is defined only in terms of what we must do (withhold revenge) or in terms of how we must feel (free of resentment). Butler does not consider God capable of emotional reactions similar to ours. He says that God 'cannot possibly be affected or moved as we are' (IX, 28, 123). But he does recognize that divine forgiveness is related to our own: 'there is an apprehension and presentiment, natural to mankind, that we ourselves shall one time or other be dealt with as we deal with others' (IX, 28, 123). He repeats scripture consistent with this: 'He that revengeth shall find vengeance from the Lord' (IX, 28, 123). All three of these passages suggest that the model of forgiveness God provides is forbearance, or withholding of revenge. God is not affected as we are because he lacks the emotional states we have. But he will 'deal with' us, which is to act some way towards us; consequently, revenge towards others begets revenge from God. So if we repeat God's forgiveness, we will withhold revenge upon those who trespass against us because God will not avenge himself when we trespass against him. I should note, however, that, as described in Butler's sermons, forgiveness by humans differs from God's forgiveness in an important way. Perhaps inadvertently, in neither of these sermons does Butler mention that anything is required of the wrongdoer in order to be deserving of our forgiveness. No mention is made of an obligation for the wrongdoer to repent, apologize, be trustworthy, nor even forgiving in turn. Yet we are required to forgive our fellows in order to be eligible for forgiveness from God. Finally, repetition of vocabulary, specifically the equivocal use of the

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term 'revenge' in connection with forgiveness, not only helps shape the definition of forgiveness Butler uses, but also contributes to the likelihood that his view would be misunderstood by theorists in our day. That Butler repeats the vocabulary, I will show through exegesis of the other three writers who use the term 'revenge' in a similarly equivocal manner. That he equivocates can be seen by the way he uses the term. That current theorists may misinterpret him because of that equivocation can be seen if we note a distinction made in current emotion theories that is absent in early modern ones. Butler equivocates about whether revenge is an action arising in consequence of an emotion or is an emotion itself. By identifying revenge as an instance of excessive or abusive resentment, as he does when he says that resentment, when excessive, 'becomes malice or revenge' (IX, 13, 118), he describes it as an extension of the emotion of resentment or a greater degree of that emotion, and thus an emotion itself. Yet he also characterizes the withholding of revenge as something we do— an action - when he associates it with retaliation, the act of returning like for like. Additional ambiguity of the term arises when he designates revenge as a means of 'gratifying' an emotion (Preface, 36, 17). Does Butler consider the gratification of an emotion a higher degree of that emotion, another emotion entirely, or an act that is meant to satisfy some desire the emotion produces or entails? The basis for this question may be made clearer with a brief discussion of a distinction accepted within most current theories of emotion, one not made in early modern theories of emotion. Most current theorists, no matter their serious disagreements on other points, consider emotions to consist of three aspects - the cognitive, feeling, and conative aspects. The cognitive aspect of an emotion is made up of the beliefs, perceptions, or judgments that make an emotional response what it is. For example, the cognitive aspect of resentment would include a belief that one was injured unjustly. The feeling aspect of an emotion refers to either the physical manifestations of the emotion (i.e., an increased heart rate), the conscious awareness of those physical symptoms, or both. Finally, the conative aspect refers to both the actions the emotion motivates and the motivating desire. Few current theorists, therefore, would consider either revenge or the desire for it to be an emotion. Rather, they would consider the desire for revenge and the action resulting from that desire as a conative aspect of resentment. They may think they have followed Butler, as the progenitor of their favoured definition, but his equivocation about the term shows they did not.

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John Tillotson (1630-94) John Tillotson, the latitudinarian preacher who rose to become Archbishop of Canterbury (1691), preached sermons so magnificent they served as models for the subsequent generation of divines. His numerous sermons, described by one twentieth-century commentator as 'the ethical handbook of the new age,'5 were collected and published soon after his death, filling fourteen volumes. In Sermon XXXIII, 'Of Forgiveness of Injuries, and Against Revenge,' preached 'before the Queen' at Whitehall on 8 March 1689, Tillotson exhorts his audience to practice forgiveness in order to be better followers of Christ.6 He finds the precepts that order our forgiveness injesus's words from the Sermon on the Mount (as did Butler later), which he takes as his sermon text: 'But I say unto you, love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you; pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you (Matthew: 44)' (387). It is from these words that he discerns what forgiveness requires of us: it is loving, blessing, doing good to, and praying for our enemies. Even though he never sets out a specific definition of forgiveness - his interests were practical, not theoretical - we can gain an understanding of what he takes forgiveness to be by careful examination of the text. However, his concept of forgiveness is more elusive than Butler's. Is forgiveness something that we do, an action like foregoing revenge, or does it require that we feel a particular way? We find both kinds of claims. That forgiveness requires some emotional changes is suggested by the apparent identification of forgiveness with the love of our enemies. According to Tillotson's explication of the sermon text, the precept to love our enemies is a command that we feel a particular way towards the wrongdoer. Loving our enemies requires 'inward affection'7 (387), and our duty is to 'bear a sincere affection to our most malicious and implacable Enemies, and be ready upon occasion to give real testimony of it' (388). This passage combines the requirement that we feel a particular way with the necessity of acting rightly towards our enemy. But the actions are secondary - they give evidence that we have the proper love. He further explains the nature of the love required: to love is to be 'kindly affection'd towards all, to bear no grudge or ill-will' (388). But in order for this command to be something we can satisfy, Tillotson distinguishes this requisite love from love that is a 'meer Passion' because it is 'under the government of our Reason' (388). Yet, he equivocates about what he means by the love that is commanded. While giving us reasons

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to love our enemies, he declares love the 'greatest and most perfect of all Graces and Virtues' (390). This love he equates not with an emotion but rather with charity, a benevolent goodwill akin to Butler's 'love.' If forgiveness can be understood by connection to what we ought to do and feel towards enemies, it is also illuminated by what it forbids. God forbids revenge, Jesus tells us (387). 'Forgiveness,' says Tillotson, 'is much more generous than Revenge' (390) and is an 'abstaining from Revenge' (393). It is clear from these statements that forgiveness must stand in opposition to revenge. However, whether revenge is an emotion or a way of acting is left unclear because he suggests both. Proposing a further reason to love our enemies, he declares that love is more pleasant than the 'vexatious Passions,' of 'ill-will, and hatred, and revenge' (388). Here revenge is specifically identified as a passion, that is, as an emotion. And its inclusion with hatred suggests likewise (although 'illwill' suggests more of an attitude than it does an emotion). Elsewhere he supports that interpretation of revenge: he claims that revenge 'puts the Spirit into an unnatural fermentation and tumult' (388), and one who 'meditates' revenge is 'always restless, his very soul is stung, swells and boils, is in pain and anguish, hath no ease, no enjoyment of it self so long as this Passion reigns' (388). Even though in this passage Tillotson explicitly calls revenge a 'passion,' which suggests it is an emotion, his claim that turmoil occurs in the person who 'meditates' it suggests revenge is an action. In another passage he leaves the same impression, admonishing one who 'seeks revenge,' decrying an endless circle of 'Injuries and Revenges,' and warning that 'the Revenge of one Injury doth naturally draw on more' (388). In each of these cases, the term 'revenge' suggests retaliation, not an emotion. The relationship of forgiveness, as Tillotson envisions it, and emotions, whether love or the 'passion' revenge, becomes murkier when he suggests two levels, or types, of forgiveness. Sometimes, as noted above, forgiveness requires only the withholding of revenge. Yet in other cases forgiveness requires, in addition, 'a perfect Reconciliation' (393), the return of the wrongdoer to the embrace of our friendship. And while a renewal of friendship might signal a renewal of love, it need not. According to what Tillotson says in this context, reconciliation may require a change in emotion, but, interestingly, only on the part of the wrongdoer - the enemy is fit for reconciliation only if 'they have repented of their Enmity' (393). In neither level of forgiveness is a change in the emotions of the person forgiving called for: in the first type, only for-

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bearing revenge is required; in the second, only the wrongdoer must overcome 'enmity,' while, apparently, the victim can reconcile with anger intact. Tillotson's view of forgiveness has both a positive and a negative aspect. On the one hand, forgiveness requires the love of our enemies and a loving treatment of them; on the other, it forbids revenge. This conception, I submit, is shaped by instances of repetition. First, Tillotson's concept of forgiveness is shaped by the scriptural text he repeats. In this text he finds the command that we forgive our enemies and the description of what forgiveness entails: loving, blessing, doing good to, and praying for those who have wronged us. As Tillotson repeats the text, he repeats the vocabulary of forgiveness and the emotions contained within the same Christian heritage. And this results, I contend, in his equivocating about whether the love required of us is a way of feeling or a way of acting towards our enemies. Love as spoken of in the sermon text suggests a way that we feel about our enemies, yet Christian love, the love God has and that we are to repeat, called in Greek agape, was typically translated into caritas in Latin, and hence into 'charity' in English.8 'Charity' itself is ambiguous: it suggests both the feeling of love and benevolence, a disposition, or way of acting. His ambiguous use of 'revenge' suggests the effects of repetition. We already have discovered that ambiguity in Butler's sermons, and will note it further in the works of Clarke and Shaftesbury. The sermon exhibits yet another instance of repetition that helps shape the concept of forgiveness Tillotson advocates. When he enjoins us to forgive because God forgives us, he claims that we should strive to be like, that is, to repeat the virtues of, God.9 The examples of forgiveness meant to motivate us to forgive come from 'God himself, and of the Son of God in the Nature of Man' (391). Thus, if God is the model of forgiveness, the question becomes whether God forgives by holding back on vengeance or by overcoming his resentment towards his creation. In part, the answer depends upon whether God has emotions - for he will not need to overcome resentment if he has no capacity for resentment in the first place - and on this point Tillotson equivocates. When he claims that God is 'slow to anger,' it appears God does have emotions (392), but the subsequent discussion of God's forgiveness is not in terms of the emotions God has, but in terms of his dispositions. God is 'tender hearted,' 'kind,' and 'merciful,' not the names of emotions but character traits that dispose him to act in particular ways (391). Neither does Tillotson discuss Jesus's forgiveness in terms of emotions; instead, he

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uses terms that denote actions. While we might think that the divinity in human form could be expected to have human emotions, the only emotion Tillotson attributes to Jesus is love: Jesus 'loves' those who did him the gravest injustice. The other parts of the discussion are in terms of action: Jesus 'render'd good for evil to all Mankind,' a way of acting, not feeling. Also, he 'prayed for those that despitefully used him,' again an action. Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) Samuel Clarke was another influential latitudinarian who wrote on forgiveness. Clarke, a respected debater, writer, and preacher, was called 'a veritable reasoning-machine' by Voltaire10 and praised by none other than Samuel Johnson for his preaching.11 He is best known now for two sets of Boyle lectures he delivered in 1704-5 in defence of rational theology. Among his published works are a number of sermons, including one on forgiveness (Sermon CLX, 'Of Forgiveness of Injuries').12 The exact date of the sermon is unknown, but it was probably delivered sometime in the early years of the eighteenth century. ' As we saw in Tillotson's text, Clarke does not intend an analysis of forgiveness, so his sermon lacks a clearly stated definition of the term. Yet in different contexts within the text he suggests two distinct meanings for the concept. As he discusses the emotions that are incompatible with forgiveness, forgiveness appears to be the overcoming of an emotion. Yet when he sees in forgiveness a human repetition of God's forgiveness, it appears as an action. We'll examine each context in order. The sermon text is from the latter part of Ephesians 4:32: 'Forgiving one another, even as God, for Christ's sake, hath forgiven you' (288). Clarke begins his sermon with a tacit acknowledgment of the appropriateness of repetition in taking these ancient scriptural words and addressing them to his eighteenth-century English audience. After all, he says, St Paul habitually added 'general Exhortations to the practice of Virtue' to his epistles on a 'particular subject' (288). The general exhortations are appropriate, not only to the audience Paul directly addressed, but also to 'all Christians at all times and in all places,' including those in Clarke's audience (288). Clarke's sermon, one can therefore infer, will repeat this scriptural passage as a general exhortation on the value of forgiveness, first as a preventative for the perils of being ruled by passions. 'The most dangerous Evil, and most destructive of this great Design of Christianity, is mens

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[sic] suffering their Passions and worldly Views to intermix with their Religion. By which means, the very things which Religion was chiefly intended to prevent, are, among ignorant and deluded men, following their Passions instead of their Reason' (288). To prevent this evil, Clarke notes 'the obligation Christians are under to promote universal Love and Good-Will amonst [sic] Men' (289). And several lines later he repeats St Paul's injunction and urges 'forbearing one another in love' (289). But if love is one passion that does not interfere with Christian tenets, Clarke quotes several that Paul indicates do: 'Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamour and evil-speaking be put away from you, with all malice' (289). Instead, he exhorts his audience to be 'tender-hearted, forgiving one another' (289). In these passages we can find clues to Clarke's definition of forgiveness, most of them pointing to forgiveness as the overcoming of negative emotions. Since we are obliged to love and extend goodwill to others, such negative emotions as bitterness, anger, and malice must be 'put away' or overcome. But in this passage forgiveness is not defined only in terms of how we feel about each other; it also demands that we treat one another in the right way. This is because among the negative emotions in that passage are intermixed evil actions: 'clamour and evil-speaking.' Elsewhere in this sermon, forgiveness appears only as a way of acting. Clarke, as did Tillotson and Butler, makes use of one sort of repetition by using God as an example of forgiveness that we should emulate. But Clarke depicts God's role differently than did Tillotson. God, being under no obligation to bestow eternal life, has every right to punish with death those who transgress his laws: 'God can at any time destroy with exemplary Judgments Any disobedient Creatures, and create to himself Others' (289-90). However, with repentance on the part of those who have been 'disobedient,' God can 'forbear' and not destroy them. Clark calls this God's forgiveness (290). In this light, forgiveness, if we were to model ourselves on God, would be forbearance or the withholding of revenge. Nothing here indicates the need for an emotional change on the part of the forgiven Thus, Clarke suggests an equivocal view of forgiveness. On the one hand, when forgiveness is contrasted with the passions, it appears as an overcoming of emotion. On the other hand, when we see forgiveness as it is modelled by God, it is defined as the withholding of revenge. And this equivocation continues throughout the sermon. For example, he cites the same passage from Matthew used by Tillotson, with its ambiguous admonition to love, bless, do good to, and pray for those who abuse

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us. At least three of the four requirements are ways of acting. He also quotes Peter, who proscribes 'rendering evil for evil' (292), a way to act, not a way to feel. Later, he speaks in terms of desires and dispositions as he warns us not to be 'solicitous for Revenge,' and not to desire 'vexation and needless damage to our Adversary: In a word; 'tis the Duty of the Disciples of Christ, to have in general a kind and charitable disposition' (292). Further on, however, he seems to urge us to change emotions: we should 'not be under the Power of fretful Passions, and the lasting Resentments of a revengeful Spirit' (292). Lord Shaftesbury (1671-1713) Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, was one of the most important moral philosophers and proponents of freethinking (Deism) of the eighteenth century. Shaftesbury's influence was clearly 'enormous,' in his day and beyond, with his philosophical heritage carried forward by those such as Francis Hutcheson, Bishop Butler (called 'Shaftesbury's most important Christian heir'), and his protege, the influential freethinker John Toland.13 In 1711 Shaftesbury published Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, an anthology composed of new and previously published material. Although in it he writes in various formats and on a range of topics, Lord Shaftesbury considered it to be a work of philosophy.14 It is as a philosopher that we consider him in this essay, as a counterpoint to Tillotson in particular, and to a lesser degree to the philosophical divines Clarke and Butler. In his writings, Shaftesbury's main interest is virtue and morality, but forgiveness and emotions figure in a number of the works, some of which we will examine here. While Shaftesbury does not attempt to repeat injunctions about forgiveness from scripture, as do the divines Tillotson, Clarke, and Butler, when he discusses forgiveness he does repeat many of the same ambiguous terms they do. We will begin with the work in which the emotions play the largest role, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, first published in 1699. Although forgiveness plays a minor role in this work and is not clearly defined by Shaftesbury, we can analyse what he means by forgiveness from what he says about resentment and revenge. For example, in one passage Shaftesbury says: 'In the same manner, where instead of regard or love there is rather an aversion to what is good and virtuous (as, for instance, where lenity and forgiveness are despised and revenge highly

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thought of and beloved), if there be this consideration added, that "lenity is, by its rewards, made the cause of a greater self-good and enjoyment than what is found in revenge," that very affection of lenity and mildness may come to be industriously nourished and the contrary passion depressed' (186). In this passage, lenity- that is, kindness - and mildness are characterized as 'affections,' so the question becomes whether forgiveness, apparently related to lenity in the passage, is an affection or emotion. If so, this kind of definition is closer to the current kinds of definitions of forgiveness that emphasize the emotional aspect of the act. In addition, Shaftesbury seems to suggest that revenge is the 'contrary passion' being referred to. Thus, this quotation appears consistent with Butler's definition (or, to be more accurate chronologically, Butler's definition is consistent with Shaftesbury's). However, Shaftesbury's distinction between natural and unnatural passions makes it highly unlikely that forgiveness is the overcoming of resentment. Shaftesbury not only anticipates Butler's claim that passions are natural, that is, they have been provided to us for our personal benefit as well as the benefit of the species, but he also anticipates Butler's claim that natural passions can be carried to an unnatural extreme when they are contrary to the goodwill, or love, that we are to feel for our enemies (and neighbours). Affections can be either 'good and natural' or 'ill and unnatural' (170). Certain passions and affections are 'ill,' no matter the degree to which they are held, among them 'envy, malice, forwardness or other such hateful passions' (172). Others are bad because of the degree to which they are felt. Among these are 'the excess of motherly love,' 'over-great pity, [that is] effeminacy and weakness; over-great concern for self-preservation, [that is] meanness and cowardice; too little [concern, that is] rashness' (172). Those not deemed 'ill' for either of these reasons are good passions. None of the passions appear to be neutral. In regard to forgiveness, the question is whether an ill emotion needs to be overcome, and if so, whether it is an emotion that is bad per se or one that is bad because it is held in an inappropriate degree. The emotion that those who forgive must overcome depends upon which emotion Shaftesbury believes is appropriate to moral injury of oneself, which he does not clearly state. In one passage, resentment is that emotion: 'when he voluntarily offends or does harm to anyone, he cannot fail to create an apprehension and fear of like harm and consequently a resentment and animosity in every creature who observes him' (178). Thus, resentment has as its object moral injury, but it is not yet defined to preclude referring to the emotion held by witnesses, rather

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than by victims, of an injury. Elsewhere he labels that passion 'anger' which helps convince the injurer that injury will not pass with impunity. In other passages, hatred, malice, and the like are used in place of resentment to describe the emotion of an injured party. Thus, his usage is consistent with that of Butler, who says, 'Let this be called anger, indignation, resentment, or by whatever name any one shall choose; the thing itself is understood, and is plainly natural' (IX, 2, 112-13). By whatever name it is known, an emotional response to moral injury is good for the individual and for the species; yet when carried too far, the emotion can become unnatural. Anger, certainly, can be carried to extremes: 'But there is hardly need we should explain how mischievous and self-destructive anger is, if it be what we commonly understand by that word, if it be such a passion as is rash and violent in the instant of provocation or such as imprints itself deeply and causes a settled revenge and an eager vindictive pursuit' (219). The affections that constitute selflove, which would include the reaction to moral injury, 'if they are moderate and within certain bounds, are neither injurious to social life nor a hindrance to virtue, but, being in an extreme degree, they become cowardice, revengefulness, luxury, avarice, vanity and ambition, sloth' (217). By contrast, to lack the emotions that constitute self-love would be out of keeping with nature as well: 'For if a creature be self-neglectful and insensible of danger or if he want such a degree of passion in any kind as useful to preserve, sustain or defend himself, this must certainly be esteemed vicious in regard of the design and end of nature' (197). Shaftesbury's definition of forgiveness, and the means by which he arrives at it, are quite similar to Butler's. Resentment is not an 'ill' emotion since it is not injurious to social life. What is injurious to social life, however, is holding resentment in too great a degree so that it becomes 'revengefulness' or 'causes a settled revenge.' Thus, forgiveness does not require the overcoming of resentment, since in the proper degree the latter is justified, even necessary. Instead, it requires the withholding of revenge, because it is revenge that interferes with social harmony. Shaftesbury not only repeats, as the divines did, what we now see as the standard ambiguity about forgiveness - suggesting at once that it necessitates overcoming an ill emotion and also that it is retaliation that must be curtailed in one who forgives - he also repeats the related ambiguity about the status of revenge. Is revenge an emotion, or is it an action related to an emotion and, thus, what we would now consider an aspect of an emotion? On the one hand, in some passages Shaftesbury suggests that it is an emotion. For example, he says: 'The dormant fury, revenge,

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being raised once and wrought up to her highest pitch, rests not till she attains her end' (219). Again, 'To see the sufferance of an enemy with cruel delight may proceed from the height of anger, revenge, fear and other extended self-passions' (226). Finally, he lists passions of 'tyranny, revenge, malice or cruelty' (227). On the other hand, elsewhere in the Inquiry Shaftesbury suggests that revenge is not an emotion but an act caused by an emotion. For example, 'Nor can it be wondered at if, to persons thus agitated and oppressed, it seems a high delight to appease and allay for the while those furious and rough motions by an indulgence of their passion in mischief and revenge' (228). In 'A letter concerning enthusiasm,' revenge appears not to be an emotion: 'A man of tolerable good nature who happens to be a little piqued may, by improving his resentment, become a very fury for revenge' (5). The nature of revenge and the question whether forgiveness requires the overcoming of resentment or the withholding of revenge are further complicated when we examine what Shaftesbury has to say about God and forgiveness. Since humans are considered to be repeating the response of God in cases of forgiveness, as we've seen in Butler, Tillotson, and Clarke, what God does to forgive, and what passions he is believed capable of, will shed additional light on revenge and resentment in the context of forgiveness. Again, this is not the explicit topic of Shaftesbury's writings, so we have to glean what we can from what he says in a variety of contexts. What we find suggests that neither revenge nor resentment is appropriately ascribed to God. For instance, in describing the dangers of enthusiasm ('extravagance in religious devotion'),15 he seems to be denying certain emotions in the Deity: it is only in adversity, ill health, or disturbance of mind that 'we see wrath and fury and revenge and terrors in the Deity' (18). I take this to mean that those who suggest God is resentful or vengeful have temporarily or permanently clouded judgment. In the same passage, he questions whether the goodness we ascribe to God is consistent with 'those forms of justice, those degrees of punishment, that temper of resentment and those measures of offence and indignation, which we vulgarly suppose in God' (18, italics mine). To 'fear his anger and resentment' is to 'presume him bad and flatly contradict that pretended character of goodness and greatness' (18). Further on in the same work he accuses people of anthropomorphism in assigning these states to God: 'provocation and offence, anger, revenge, jealousy in point of honour or power, love of fame, glory and the like, belong only to limited beings' (20). '[D] effects of passion' are inconsistent with the goodness of God (21). If Shaftesbury intends to deny that God is capable of such states as

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resentment and revenge, and if he were to hold that God's forgiveness is the model of our own, then it would appear that neither the overcoming of resentment nor the withholding of revenge was necessary for forgiveness. That is, if resentment is impossible for God, then he need not overcome it to forgive. And if God is not one to take revenge, then he would not need to hold back, since he, presumably, is never tempted to strike back. Summary These works by Butler, Tillotson, Clarke, and Shaftesbury demonstrate that attempts to repeat the scriptural injunctions on forgiveness reveal not only an extensive interest in, but also a number of confusions about, emotions. The confusions are mainly theoretical, but not because each writer adopted an errant theory of emotions. These confusions suggest, I believe, that a number of theoretical and conceptual issues confronted those taking emotions seriously, and that by taking emotions seriously these thinkers have unwittingly revealed inconsistencies and problems in how that period understood, and could articulate ideas about, the emotions. The conceptual confusions are the following: 1. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England, there was no consistent use of the terminology of emotions. A number of terms, such as 'passion,' 'affection,' and 'emotion,' were sometimes used as synonyms, sometimes to demarcate differences. Other terms also appeared as unspecified cognates: 'sentiment' and 'sensibility' are two such.16 2. The three aspects of emotions, commonly accepted in current emotion theory, were not yet clearly distinguished. As a result: (a) the difference between an emotion and an action resulting from an emotion was obscured; (b) the power one possessed over one's emotion was obscured. The cognitive aspect of the emotion was noticed but not yet theoretically situated, so thinkers had trouble deciding whether we could be enjoined to overcome an emotion (assuming that 'ought' implies 'can') or whether emotions are mere happenings for which we have no moral responsibility. For example, in this passage Francis Hutcheson (1694—1746) seems to deny sufficient control: 'Sometimes the calm motion of the will conquers the passion, and sometimes is conquered by it. Thus

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lust or revenge may conquer the calm affection toward private good and sometimes are conquered by it.'17 Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) considers emotions out of control: 'I believe man ... to be a compound of various passions, that all of them, as they are provoked and come uppermost, govern him by turns, whether he will or no.'18 3. Emotion labels are applied inconsistently. It is notoriously difficult to come to an agreement on emotion labels in any period, and much of what is agreed upon results from stipulative definitions. Yet the stipulative nature of these labels is seldom explicit. These eighteenth-century writers appear to use what they understand as ordinary meanings of the words, but their texts reveal a wide disparity among understood meanings. Apart from merely stipulating definitions, the lack of uniform emotion labels is most likely an inevitable and irreconcilable problem in emotion theory, but in recent years a number of theoretical criteria concerning the meanings of emotion terms have been clarified. These were, of course, unknown in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.19 4. Confusion exists about supposed 'excessive' emotional responses and 'gratifying emotions,' as when Butler refers to 'the gratification' of passions. These writers, who agreed that resentment was an allowable response to moral injury inasmuch as it is natural, were forced to reconcile this with the scriptural command to forgive and love our enemies. They clearly attempted to argue that resentment was allowed but that 'gratifying' resentment, or excessive resentment, was proscribed by scripture. The problem was, though, that no clear meaning was attached to such terms as 'gratifying' an emotion or an 'excessive' emotion. 5. There are disagreements about the relationship of emotion and reason. To be sure, one generalizes too broadly when one declares that emotion was distrusted in an age of the ascension of reason, since by the eighteenth century emotions are seen more and more as an integral part of our psychological economies. Conclusion Butler's writings on forgiveness share a great deal with writings on that topic by his contemporaries, and the religious aspects of his views of forgiveness are easily, but mistakenly, overlooked or undervalued by philosophers. The larger issue for the works examined in this paper, I

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think, concerns the emotions. We discover in these texts a nascent interest in the emotions, an interest lacking a broad theoretical framework, yet one clearly informed by a philosophical methodology. These thinkers sought an understanding of the actual role emotions play in our lives generally, but they were particularly interested in the role of emotions in our moral lives. The light these documents shine on our knowledge of the roots of definitions of forgiveness and of the early modern interest in emotion theory should lead us to appreciate more fully one side in the long-standing philosophical debate about historical documents: we must seek more ways to enrich our understanding of philosophical concepts by deepening our understanding of historical context. Specifically, I have argued that examining instances of repetition involved in writings about forgiveness, especially those that underlie theoretical differences between early modern and late twentieth-century conceptions of forgiveness, is a useful way to broaden the historical context we consider. By examining instances of repetition, we are better able to understand why forgiveness was conceived of differently in early modern England than it is today, and why philosophers in our own time have misinterpreted the early modern view. Notes 1 R.S. Downie, 'Forgiveness,' Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1965): 128-34; A.C. Ewing, The Morality of Punishment (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1970); Martin Hughes, 'Forgiveness,' Analysis^ (1975): 113-17; Kathleen Dean Moore, Pardons: Justice, Mercy and the Public Interest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 2 Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, 15, 35; Joram Graf Haber, Forgiveness (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 7; Marilyn McCord Adams, 'Forgiveness: A Christian Model,' Faith and Philosophy 8 (1991): 283-4; Anne C. Minas, 'God and Forgiveness,' Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975): 144. 3 Paul Newberry, Joseph Butler on Forgiveness: A Presupposed Theory of Emotions,' Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 2 (April 2001): 233-44. 4 Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (London: Printed by W. Botham, for James and John Knapton, 1726). References to Butler will be to The Works of Bishop Butler, ed. J.H. Bernard, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1900). (Citations for passages from the Sermons include sermon, paragraph, and page number, and appear in parentheses.)

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5 Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason (1648-1789) (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1960), 159. 6 John Tillotson, The works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson ... containing fifty four sermons and discourses, on several occasions. Together with The rule of faith being all that were published by His Grace himself, and now collected into one volume. To which is added, an alphabetical table of the principal matters, 5th ed. (London: Printed for B. Aylmer, 1707). (Citations for passages from his sermon appear in parentheses.) 7 Cf. Butler's use of the term, above. 8 F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingston, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26. 9 In the New Testament, the parable of the Great Debtor (Matthew 18:21) and the petition of the Lord's Prayer teach that God's forgiveness is the model of forgiveness that humans should extend to one another. (James Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 6 [New York: Scribner's, 1925-32], 81). 10 Voltaire, Philosophical Letters, trans. Ernest Dilworth (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1961), letter 7, 28. 11 Cross and Livingston, Oxjvrd Dictionary of'the Christian Church, 358. 12 Samuel Clarke, The Works, vol. 2 (London: 1738; repr. New York: Garland, 1978). (Citations for passages from his sermon appear in parentheses.) 13 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3, 97-8. 14 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), vii. (Citations for passages from his works appear in parentheses.) 15 Cross and Livingston, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 549. 16 On 'sentiment' see Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1967), 176-7. 17 Francis Hutcheson, An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections. With Illustrations on the Moral Sense, 3rd ed. (1742), reprinted in British Moralists 1650-1800, ed. D.D. Raphael, vol. 1 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 303. 18 Bernard Mandeville, An Inquiry Into the Origin of Moral Virtue, 4th ed. (1725), reprinted in British Moralists, 229. 19 See Robert Gordon, The Structure of Emotions: Investigations in Cognitive Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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PART III RITUAL AND REGIME

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chapter five

Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England PAULINA KEWES

The fear that history would repeat itself, and that the country would be torn apart by another civil war, haunted post-1660 England until (and beyond) the relatively bloodless revolution of 1688-9. Parallels between the recent past and the present were being obsessively drawn: during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis the Whigs were accused of aping the seditious politics of the Puritan rebels; Charles II and in due course James II were denounced by their opponents as popish tyrants in the mould of Charles I. The rallying cry of the loyalists was '1641 is come again'; the opposition appropriated and recycled arguments of the midcentury parliamentarians. The humanist belief that history provides a guide to present conduct had had its heyday in the late Tudor and early Stuart era. In the aftermath of the revolution and the regicide, the intellectual weight of such claims diminished. Now the emphasis was not so much on the lessons that could be learned from the past as on the practical measures that should be taken to prevent another disaster from occurring. The strategy common to both supporters and opponents of the Crown was to recall, by means of allusion, paraphrase, verbatim quotation, or republication (in toto or in part), the claims and actions of the enemy in order to magnify the enormity of their conduct or else to lay bare the chasm between past promises and present actions. 'Nor was the King less early in Hypocrisie and breach of Promise,' wrote of Charles II the anonymous author of The Secret History of the Reigns ofK. Charles II. And K. James II (1690), 'For the confirmation of which to be a Solemn Truth, there needs no more than to lay the Foundation of the Proof upon his own Words and Solemn Engagements. For in the Kings Letter to the

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Speaker of the House of Commons just before his Restauration, he has these Words. "We assure you upon our Royal Word that none of our Predecessors have had a greater esteem of Parliaments than We have ..." This in part demonstrates his Prevarications with Man: Now for his Prevarication with Heaven, we must produce another Paragraph of the same Letter, wherein he uses these flattering Expressions.'1 Here repetition of the king's very words serves to vilify him. This essay is concerned with repetition as a rhetorical move aimed at securing ideological rather than narrowly partisan ends; my focus is on the uses of repetition in the public rhetoric deployed by the architects of the Stuart Restoration whose aim was to foster consensus, not division, and so forestall another bout of bloody internecine strife. Towards a Consensual View of the Past? [T] o the end that the fear of punishment may not engage any, conscious to themselves of what is passed, to a perseverance in guilt for the future, by opposing the quiet and happiness of their country in the restoration both of king, peers, and people, to their just, ancient and fundamental rights, we do by these presents declare, that we do grant a free and general pardon, which we are ready upon demand to pass under our Great Seal of England, to all our subjects, of what degree or quality soever, who within forty days after the publishing hereof, shall lay hold upon this our grace and favour, and shall by any public act declare their doing so, and that they return to the loyalty and obedience of good subjects (excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by parliament). Those only excepted, let our loving subjects, how faulty soever, rely upon the word of a king, solemnly given by this present Declaration, that no crime whatsoever, committed against us or our royal father before the publication of this shall ever rise in judgment or be brought in question against any of them, to the least endamagement of them either in their lives, liberties or estates, or (as far forth as lay in our power) so much as to the prejudice of their reputations by any reproach or term of distinction from the rest of our best subjects, we desiring and ordaining that henceforward all notes and discord, separation and difference of parties be utterly abolished among all our subjects, whom we invite and conjure to a perfect union among themselves, under our protection, for the resettlement of our just rights and theirs in a free parliament, by which, upon the word of a king, we will be advised. (Declaration of Breda, 14 April 1660)2

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As this message from Charles II to the nation suggests, one of the key issues in the spring of 1660, when the restoration of the monarchy was being brokered, was how to speak of the immediate past. The king and his advisers were keenly aware that although they could not avoid referring to the bloody internecine strife of the preceding two decades, they had to do so without offending the sensibilities of a highly polarized society. It was essential for them to propose an interpretation of the midcentury crisis that would allay the myriad insecurities and fears and so help legitimize the Stuart Restoration. Although by early 1660 the royalist outlook was in the ascendant, even royalists differed in their interpretations of the conflict between Charles I and the Long Parliament, and of its aftermath. To overcome the divisiveness of partisan interpretations of the nation's recent history, both Charles II and the Convention Parliament that met in April 1660 set out to develop a version of the past that, whether or not it was accurate, would be acceptable to the largest possible number of people. In negotiating that broadly consensual approach rhetoric was of signal importance. Not only the substance of what was being said about the erstwhile opponents of the Crown but also the manner of conveying it served to communicate the readiness of the authorities to overlook the culpability of particular political or religious groups, and to work with them in establishing the contours of the new regime. Successive official documents alluded to, quoted, and rewrote earlier ones, deploying an array of rhetorical devices to build what was meant to be the normative view of the late troubles. The impulse in the immediate aftermath of the Stuart Restoration to suppress the memory of the Civil Wars and the Interregnum, and to supplant the symbols associated with the Commonwealth by monarchical imagery, has been extensively documented.3 So has the opposing tendency - in favour of memory rather than forgetting - to commemorate the martyrdom of Charles I and celebrate the return of Charles II through annual solemnities and rejoicings that were to be held on 30 January and 29 May respectively, in churches throughout the realm, and in which all subjects were expected to participate.4 As a rule, it was the conciliators who wanted to forget and the hardliners who wanted to remember - not least the royalists who felt that their services and sufferings ought to be noted and rewarded. Modern scholars have been preoccupied with the long-term political impact of the various acts of oblivion and remembrance, whether public or private, scripted or spontaneous, loyalist or oppositional. My focus is

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not on the observance of such acts, but on their genesis. I shall concentrate on the brief but momentous period from 1660 until 1662, when the king's return and its terms were under debate, and when the Restoration Settlement was becoming entrenched in law. In order to understand how an official approach to the immediate past developed in letters, speeches, legal acts, and proclamations that the authorities designed for print and frequently for oral dissemination, we need to explore the significance of public documents and legislation at the moment of their inception. More generally, we must assess the role of contemporary historical writings in shaping attitudes towards the Civil War. Throughout the 1660s we find calls for an authoritative account, one that would emulate Augustan historiography of Rome's civil wars. The establishment, in 1661, of the post of Historiographer Royal may indicate that Charles II had planned to charge the incumbent with chronicling the late passages of state. Yet no such account materialized; and none of the shorter publications summarizing the events of the preceding twenty years bore the royal imprimatur. However much the government may have consolidated its power base, by the second half of 1662 its bid for consensus - about both the past and the present - had largely failed. Religious and political divisions were being acknowledged in parliamentary legislation such as the Act of Uniformity, and the king's subsequent declaration, and in printed propaganda. How the official interpretation of the mid-century crisis evolved in the early 1660s, and what its rhetorical strategies were, will be the twin themes of this chapter. Writing as from Breda [T]he end of [the Declaration of Breda] was to satisfy all interests, and to comply with every man's humour, and indeed to suffer every man to enjoy what he would. Clarendon, History of the Rebellion'

Although addressed to 'all our loving subjects, of what degree or quality soever,' the Declaration of Breda was originally aimed at the Convention Parliament, which began sitting on 25 April 1660, and to whom General Monk presented the declaration on 1 May. In order to win its members over, Charles II knew he had to provide assurances on several key points. In addition to granting amnesty to his erstwhile enemies, he had to pledge, first, his commitment to some form of religious toleration;

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secondly, his respect for liberty and property; thirdly, his dedication to the rule of law and to working with Parliament; and, fourthly, his readiness to pay the arrears owed to Monk's soldiers. He also had to underline his determination to avoid bloodshed in attempting to regain the throne - his father had been condemned, after all, as a 'Man of Blood.'6 The emphasis on the prominent role the king envisaged for Parliament was more than a sign of his willingness to take counsel; it was also a means of deflecting difficult decisions - such as those concerning the nature of the future religious settlement or the exceptions from the terms of the general pardon - on to a body whose legislation, as Charles and Clarendon well knew, would be subject to ratification, and possible rescinding, by a newly elected Parliament.7 To appreciate the rhetorical complexity of the declaration, we need to read it alongside the other missives that, according to Clarendon, were likewise 'prepared and dated as from Breda.'8 Those included Charles's letters to Monk, to the Commons, to the Lords, to the City authorities, and to Monk and Montague as joint commanders of the fleet. The attitude towards the immediate past in all these documents, drafted chiefly by Clarendon, is coloured by the context of their inception and anticipated reception: the king was making a bid for support to people who had, to varying degrees, opposed the Stuart monarchy or who had become servants of the regimes that had replaced it.9 His precarious position is signalled by references to their 'power': they might choose to assist in his restoration but they might also work to prevent it. The language of providentialism offers a convenient ploy: should the various constituencies he addresses resolve to aid him, they will act as God's 'instruments'; their choice will be part of a divine plan. Aside from the professions of mercy, forgiveness, and desire for peace that are common to all of them, the content and rhetoric of the letters are carefully tailored to appeal to their recipients.10 In writing to Monk (who was if not a ghostwriter of the declaration, at least a collaborator),11 the king alludes to the 'force' and 'circumstances' by which he has been dispossessed of his right, only to announce his decision to let bygones be bygones so as not to 'aggravate by any sharp expressions, but rather wish that the memory of what is past may be buried to the world.'12 (The image of burial will recur in the preamble to the Act of General Pardon and elsewhere.) As significant as his refraining from explicit condemnation of rebellion is Charles's implicit invocation of the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. By hearkening to the king's appeal for a peaceful restoration, states the letter, Monk will 'acknowl-

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edge that your armies have complied with their obligations for which they were first raised, for the preservation of the Protestant religion, the honour and dignity of the King, the privileges of Parliament, the liberty and property of the subject, and the fundamental laws of the land.'13 Although the Solemn League is not cited directly, this sequence echoes both its full title - 'A solemn league and covenant for reformation and defence of religion, the honour and happiness of the King, and the peace and safety of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland' - and its provisions.14 That the Solemn League should be alluded to in Charles's letter to Monk need not surprise us. As Clarendon reports, in the early months of 1660 the covenant was reprinted and displayed in churches. Many preachers used it as something of a stalking horse for Stuart propaganda: they 'discoursed of the several obligations in it, that, without exposing themselves to the danger of naming him ... every body understood that they thought it necessary that the people should return to their allegiance.'15 Charles II had taken the covenant not once but twice during his ill-fated Scottish venture in 1650-1.16 In the letter to Monk, he evokes it to claim the allegiance of the army, implying that it might serve as a legal basis of his reinstatement. That this was an astute move is demonstrated, as we shall see, by the Commons' answer to the letter they received from the king. In addressing the Commons, Charles reiterates his commitment to parliamentary rule that was one of the fundamental tenets of the Declaration of Breda. The hyberbolic wording of the letter hints at his father's possible deficiency in that respect: 'none of our predecessors have had a greater esteem of Parliaments than we have.'17 For such professions to carry conviction, however, the king's attitude towards the Long Parliament must be, if not spelled out in detail, at least articulated in a way that would leave little room for uncertainty. It is here that the king's letter to the Commons makes its most important rhetorical contribution. Through its periphrastic mode of describing the genesis of the late crisis - it speaks of 'the mistakes and misunderstandings which have produced, and contributed, to inconveniences which were not intended'18 - the king at once indicates his willingness to overlook the Long Parliament's culpability and offers the Commons a vocabulary they would be able to adopt were they to join him in developing a mutually satisfactory version of recent history. If the clause promising 'a liberty to tender consciences' in the Declaration of Breda was famously murky,19 the one delegating to Parliament the right to name exceptions to the general pardon seemed positively

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unambiguous. Yet we know - again Clarendon is our source - that this apparent restraint arose from the king's reluctance to accept the proposal that he name as exceptions only four regicides. Instead, he 'chose rather to refer the whole consideration of that affair, without any restriction, to the conscience of the Parliament; yet with such expressions and descriptions that they could not but discern that he trusted them in confidence that they would do themselves and the nation right, in declaring their detestation, and preparing vengeance of that parricide.'20 Although omitted from the declaration, those 'expressions and descriptions' figure prominently in the letter to the Commons. There, having stressed the Parliament's responsibility for ensuring peace and national reconciliation by indemnifying those who 'either wilfully or weakly have transgressed those bounds which were prescribed, and have invaded each other's rights,' the king deftly switches from the language of human to that of divine law, and proceeds to signal who he thinks ought to be denied pardon: 'If there be a crying sin, for which the nation may be involved in the infamy that attends it, we cannot doubt but that you will be as solicitous to redeem and vindicate the nation from that guilt and infamy as we can be.'21 The regicide cannot go unpunished - as indeed it did not. Through stylistic echoes and verbal repetitions of both the Declaration of Breda and the royal missive, and through the adoption of their circumlocutions, the Commons' answer to the king's letter attests to the rhetorical efficacy of those documents. In that answer we witness the emergence of a shared outlook and language, and the passage devoted to the Long Parliament illustrates this process: [W]e beseech your majesty we may add this further, for the vindication of Parliaments, and even of the last Parliament convened under your royal father of happy memory, when (as your majesty well observes), through mistakes and misunderstandings many inconveniences were produced which were not intended; that those very inconveniences could not have been brought upon us by those persons who had designed them without violating the Parliament itself; for they well knew it was not possible to do a violence to that sacred person whilst the Parliament which had vowed and covenanted for the defence and safety of that person remained entire.22

We also find new elements here that serve to bolster the (self-) exculpatory thrust of the Commons' epistle. Building on Charles's tactfully oblique phraseology- 'mistakes,' 'misunderstandings,' and unintended 'inconveniences' - the Commons put forward a full-blown conspiracy

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theory: it is not the Long Parliament but its subverters who are to blame for the regicide. Having effectively written the Rump out of existence, they argue that 'both profession and true professors [of the truth of religion], and the nation itself, as well as the Parliament, were most innocent of it; having been only the contrivance and act of some few ambitious and bloody persons and such others as by their influence were misled.' The displacement of responsibility on to a few malefactors, and the adoption of the rhetoric of outrage - the regicide is described as 'that horrid act' that can only be thought of 'with such a detestation and abhorrency as we want words to express it'23 - became familiar motifs in later documents and legislation. But there was another dimension of the Commons' answer that before long turned out to be both an anachronism and a liability. According to Clarendon, its inordinate length and numerous references to the Solemn League and Covenant were designed to placate the Presbyterian members who 'seemed very solicitous that somewhat should be concluded in veneration of the Covenant, and at least that somewhat should be inserted in their answer to the discountenance of the bishops'; the committee in charge of drafting the answer obliged by 'using some expressions which would please them and could do the King no prejudice.'24 It may well be that the Presbyterians picked up the king's allusion to the covenant in the letter to Monk, which was read out in the House. Even if they did not, there is no reason to suppose that they intended the references to the covenant as a provocation. On the contrary, for them as for many others - the Solemn League and Covenant still constituted a legitimate foundation on which to build a future settlement. That state of affairs was soon to change.25 The episcopacy was undeniably on its way back, and yet the covenant was a promise to extirpate it. On 20 May 1661 the Convention's successor, the Cavalier Parliament, issued an order for the immolation by the common hangman of the Solemn League and Covenant, which it condemned as a 'villainous Combination.' It also undertook to erase the covenant from collective memory by ruling that 'the said Covenant be forthwith taken off the Record in the House of Peers, and in all other Courts, and Places, where the same is recorded; And that all Copies thereof be taken down out of all Churches, Chapels, and other publick places in England, and Wales, and in the Town of Barwick upon Twede, where the same are set up.'26 Those measures were supplemented by the Declaration of Acknowledgement in the Act of Uniformity of 24 August 1662, which demanded a comprehensive abjuration of the covenant: T do declare that I do hold, there lies no Obligation upon me, or on any other person

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from the Oath, commonly called the Solemn League and Covenant, to endeavour any change, or alteration of Government, either in Church, or State; and that the same was in it self an unlawful Oath, and imposed upon the Subjects of this Realm against the known Laws and Liberties of this Kingdom.'27 By early summer 1663 Roger L'Estrange attributed seditious intentions to those who in 'all their Schismatical Papers have 'Recourse ... to the Obligation of the Covenant; which is no other, than to Conjure the People under the Peyn of Perjury, to Treat Your Majesty, as the Covenanters did Your Father.'28 The evocations of the Solemn League and Covenant by public documents issued in spring and autumn 1660 illustrate its ambiguous status. The king's letter to Monk implied that the logical fulfilment of the Solemn League and Covenant would be the restoration of the monarchy; in the absence of any formal conditions for the restoration, the pointed references to the covenant in the Commons' answer to the king's letter served as a reminder of what was expected of him, and what might be the consequence of his failure to meet those expectations. The partisan provenance of those references, however, of which Charles and Clarendon were no doubt aware, must have militated against their rhetorical force. By early autumn, in the Worcester House Declaration issued on 25 October 1660, Charles complained about unwanted reminders of his own covenanting past and castigated those who 'unseasonably caused to be printed, published and dispersed throughout the kingdom a declaration heretofore printed in our name during the time of our being in Scotland, of which we shall say no more than that the circumstances by which we were enforced to sign that declaration are enough known to the world.'29 The king would gladly benefit, it seemed, from clause 24 of the recent Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion, which made it unlawful 'malitiously to call or alledge of, or object against any other person or persons any name or names, or other wordes of reproach any way tending to revive the memory of the late Differences or the occasions thereof.'30 The letter the king directed from Breda to the Lords was brief and unremarkable, pointing as it did to the affinity of his 'sufferings' and theirs, and referring them to his ampler missive to the Commons.31 (Charles could not be sure whether the Lords would sit, which may in part account for the brevity of his letter.) Of greater note is the perspective on the recent past developed in his message to the City authorities. Rather than piling up circumlocutions or subtly shading his meanings as he has done in addressing the Commons, Charles brazenly misrepresents the City's part in the late troubles. This is no mere offer of a

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common periphrastic language, but a crude - one is tempted to say cynical - gesture of complicity that relies on compliment and flattery for its effect. However conciliatory, the king's letter to the Commons conveyed mild reproach for past 'mistakes' and 'misunderstandings'; here, by contrast, we find outright praise for the 'good example' of the City authorities that, he says, 'encouraged' the revival of royalist sentiment in London. Blatantly disregarding the capital's seditious past, he thanks it for 'discountenancing] the imaginations of those who would subject our subjects to a government they have not yet devised, and, to satisfy the pride and ambition of a few ill men, would introduce the most arbitrary and tyrannical power that was ever yet heard of.' In place of the conditional syntax that characterizes the letter to the Commons, with its successive anaphoric 'if clauses, this one relies on litotes - 'We have not the least doubt... And you will have no reason to doubt... we would not be thought to be without...' - to stress the king's confidence in the firm allegiance of his 'native city,' whose charter and privileges he promises to confirm, and whose prosperity he vows to advance.32 No wonder the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council were 'transported with the King's goodness towards them, and with the expressions of his royal clemency.'33 Aware that the official imprimatur would confer on the Declaration of Breda and his other despatches an authority lacking in surreptitious copies,34 Charles repeatedly called for their publication. Printed by order of Parliament, and read out by clergymen to their congregations and by army commanders to their forces, these documents soon reached the nation at large. In addition to outlining the contours of the future settlement and providing reassurance that it would be based on a general amnesty, they broadcast the emergence of an ostensibly consensual approach to the recent past. Now, however, that consensus would have to be developed by the restored king in concert with his Parliament. National Guilt and Its Exculpation Let us remember how we were deceived; and let not the same artifices over-reach us again. Clarendon's speech at the opening of the Cavalier Parliament, 16 May 166133

Let us look forward, and not backward; and never think of what is past, except men put us in mind of it, by repeating faults we had forgot; and then let us remember no more than what concerns those very persons. 'The King's Speech on passing the Act of Oblivion,' 8 July 166136

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A ... how earnestly his Majesty pressed the Parliament for the act of oblivion, and how few were excepted out of it; you know as well as I. B. But I have not yet observed in the Presbyterians any oblivion of their former principles. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or The Long Parliament (cornp. 1667; pub. 1679)37

The 'Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion,' which was passed by the Convention in August 1660 and ratified by its successor, the Cavalier Parliament, in June 1661,38 reassured the Crown's erstwhile opponents that there would be no royalist revenge. With very few exceptions, they need not fear for their life or property; their reputations, too, were accorded legal protection, malicious reminders of past misconduct having been made subject to fines. Jonathan Sawday has dismissed this piece of legislation as 'a collective act of national forgetting.'39 But the Act of Oblivion and the context of its passage and ratification should rather be seen as an attempt to control historical memory. Different kinds of forgetting and remembrance were implicit in the new law's status as an act at once of oblivion and of pardon. An act of oblivion ostensibly indicates an intentional disregard or an arranged state of having been forgotten, while a pardon seems to be an intentional remembrance of an act, only to excuse or forgive it. While presenting the Act of Oblivion on 29 August 1660, the Speaker of the Convention also submitted the 'Act for a perpetual Anniversary Thanksgiving to be observed and kept upon the 29th of May,' the date of Charles II's birthday and his re-entry into London. '[Tjhis great blessing [the Restoration] is already registered in your people's thankful hearts,' he said, 'and they desire that the memory thereof may be perpetuated.'40 Good memories were hard to separate from bad ones, and the arbitrary nature of selective forgetting and selective remembering was obvious to everyone. Even as he praised the 'extensiveness' of the amnesty granted by the king, the Speaker justified the exception of the worst offenders from its provisions, citing 'a long, black, prodigious, dismal roll and catalogue of malefactors.'41 The sense that, although forgiven, their misdeeds had not been forgotten was underlined in the king's speech of acceptance of the bills, in which he stressed that his clemency would give way to 'rigour and severity' in punishing those who 'shall not now acquiesce, but continue to manifest their sedition and dislike to the government, either in action or words.'42 The king soon had to ward off attempts by members of his own party to alter or circumvent the provisions of the act that related to issues of memory and property.43 Addressing the Convention on behalf of Charles

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on 16 September 1660, Clarendon enjoined the Lords and Commons to comply with the clause penalizing malicious reminders of anyone's seditious past. The king, he said, feels that the fine is too small a penalty and 'added another penalty more insupportable, even his high displeasure.' Clarendon went so far as to equate any breach of 'this blessed Act of Oblivion' with 'rebel [lion] against the person of the king,' and he urged his audience to 'teach your neighbours and your friends how to pay a full obedience to this clause of the statute, how to learn this excellent art of forgetfulness.'44 His choice of words was telling: 'forgetfulness' is an 'art,' a skill that has to be learned and practised as well as a ploy that may in time be altered or abandoned. (In fact, the relevant clause of the Act of Oblivion was to be in force for no more than three years, so one could simply postpone raking over one's enemies' murky past until its expiry.) As the king and his chief minister were all too aware, for the Act of Oblivion to be an effective measure, not only individual speech acts but language itself would have to be monitored, a far more challenging proposition. '[M]y lords and gentlemen,' spoke Clarendon, 'whilst we conspire together to execute faithfully this part of the Bill, to put all old names and terms of distinction into utter Oblivion, let us not find new names and terms to keep up the same, or a worse distinction. If the old reproaches of Cavalier, and Round-Head, and Malignant, be committed to the grave, let us not find more significant and better words, to signify worse things; let not piety and godliness grow into terms of reproach, and distinguish between the court, and the city, and the country.'45 The terms of opprobrium cited by Clarendon were to remain an integral part of England's political lexicon. Even as it acknowledged the crimes of many, the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion ruled that only a few would be punished. The amnesty was a necessary precondition for future stability, but it was not a sufficient one. Given the scale of the mid-century upheaval and given the widespread involvement of Englishmen in acts of hostility towards the monarchy, whether military or judicial, what was needed in addition to indemnity from prosecution was nothing less than a retrospective exculpation of the entire nation. The English were both guilty and not guilty. They had transgressed but must be forgiven for the sake of national peace; they had been misled by, and had suffered innocently at the hands of, the evil few so that their providential delivery would only enhance their unity and loyalty to the restored monarch. This is not a paradox as much as a sign of divergence between law and ideology. The law was pragmatic in its approach to the past: even as it

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granted a general amnesty, it sanctioned the recently - and often shadily - acquired property titles, much to the chagrin of the impoverished royalists. By contrast, ideological consensus required a drastic rewriting of history. We have witnessed the emergence of the conspiracy theory (and of the rhetoric of exculpation in which it was couched) in the letters exchanged among the king, the Commons, and the City Council in April and May 1660. The wish to promote it was behind the institution of a new annual rite, the commemoration of the regicide on 30 January. The conspiracy theory was spelled out in the relevant royal proclamation. Modern scholars have written extensively about the uses of anniversary sermons as loyalist propaganda during the troubled years of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis and as vehicles for Jacobite (and Williamite) sentiment in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688-9. The view shared by most commentators is that the January solemnities served as a powerful reminder of Englishmen's collective culpability. As John Spurr put it, 'There was no better occasion upon which to reveal the guilt of the whole nation than the anniversary of the regicide.'46 It is true that ritual humiliation and atonement quickly became the hallmarks of the yearly observance. Yet to rub in the people's guilt was only one of its aims. Another was to unite the English by placing the blame squarely on a handful of reprobates. Anniversary sermons typically highlighted the immediate responsibility of the few and the culpability of all. The bill 'for an Anniversary Fast on the 30th of Jan. unless a Sunday, for ever' was proposed by Sir Heneage Finch on 7 November 1660.47 It was subsequently included in the Act of Attainder of the regicides that was passed by the Convention on 7 December 1660.48 A Proclamation, For Observation of the Thirtieth day of January as a day of Fast and Humiliation according to the late Act of Parliament for that Purpose appeared on 25 January 1661. The content and rhetoric of the proclamation are revealing of the motives of its makers and its intended effect on those who read or heard it. The proclamation was more than an announcement that a new solemnity was being added to the public calendar. It reproduced verbatim the Act of Attainder's heavily biased account of the events leading up to Charles I's trial and execution. Designed as a vindication of the Long Parliament, the army, and the nation at large, that account attributed the blame for the royal martyr's death to a few miscreants. In contrast to the Act of Attainder, however, the proclamation named no names, implying a widespread knowledge of the culprits' identity. Crucially, although the proclamation was cast as an address by the king to his subjects, the interpretation of the recent past that it

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embodied was firmly established as originating with the Convention Parliament: 'in Our late Parliament held at Westminster, in the Twelfth year of Our Reign, The Lords and Commons therein Assembled did shew and declare unto Us, That the execrable murther of Our Royal Father CHARLES the First, of ever Blessed and Glorious Memory, hath been committed by a Party of Wretched men, desperately wicked and hardened in their Impiety.'49 To accomplish their treasonable designs, those subverters of monarchy, religion, and the law had seized control of both army and Parliament: [They] seduce [d] some part of the then Army into a compliance, and then kept the rest in subjection to them, partly for hope of preferment, and chiefly for fear of losing their Imployments and Arrears ... [they] seize[d] upon the House of Commons, Seclude [d] and Imprison [ed] some Members, force [d] out others; And there being left but a small Remnant of their own Creatures (not a tenth part of the whole) did seek to shelter themselves by this weak pretence, under the name and authority of a Parliament, and in that name labored to prosecute what was yet behind, and unfinished of their long intended Treason and Conspiracy.

Having staged a mock trial of the king, they put him to death, a 'horrid Action' by [which] the Protestant Religion hath received the greatest wound and reproach, and the people of England, the most insupportable shame and infamy that it is possible for the Enemies of God and the King to bring upon them, whilst the Fanatick rage of a few miscreants (who were as far from being true Protestants, as they were from being true Subjects) stands imputed by our Adversaries to the whole Nation.

So the English as a nation are not guilty of the regicide. The proclamation (and the Act of Attainder from which it derived) was the most vivid embodiment of the conspiracy theory. No other account delineating the state-sponsored interpretation of the past was so succinct and so widely disseminated. In addition to fostering a sense of common cause against the anti-monarchists, the document featured the most forceful official statement of the doctrine of non-resistance that, like the conspiracy theory, was said to have originated with the Parliament:

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They the said Lords and Commons in Parliament Assembled ... did beseech Us that it might be Declared, And it is by the said Act Declared, That by the undoubted Fundamental Laws of this Kingdom, neither the Peers of the Realm, nor the Commons, nor both together in Parliament, nor the People collectively or representatively, nor any other persons whatsoever, ever had, hath, or ought to have any coercive power over the Persons of the Kings of this Realm. The structure of the proclamation (and of the legal act behind it), attests to its makers' order of priorities: first, to exonerate the English nation from the charge of spilling blood royal, with the exception of the few regicides; secondly, to inculcate passive obedience to the sovereign; and, thirdly, to set up the 30 January solemnity 'for the better vindication of themselves to posterity, and as a lasting Monument of their otherwise inexpressible detestation and abhorrency of that villainous and abhominable Fact.' The legislators appear keen to promote national unity, not to aggravate anyone by making them feel shame or remorse. Not everyone's intentions were conciliatory. To appreciate the potentially divisive impact of the 30 January solemnity we have to go back to the moment of its inception in autumn 1660. On 25 October, during a parliamentary recess, Charles published the so-called Worcester House Declaration, a document that was based on the deliberations of leading Anglican and Presbyterian divines and that went some way towards fulfilling the promise of religious toleration made in the Declaration of Breda. On 6 November, when the Parliament reconvened, 'The King [was] thanked for his Declaration concerning Ecclesiastical Affairs.' Several MPs moved that the Declaration be made law; others opposed the motion; and still others argued that it should be referred to a committee. The debate then shifted to the subject of common prayer and whether it should be read in the House. There ensued a showdown between adherents of the Church of England and its liturgy and their Presbyterian colleagues: 'The lord Bruce moved for having the Common Prayer read in the house, or some other set form, and not to leave it to the spirit of men. Sir Walter Erie reproved his lordship for speaking so meanly of those who prayed by the Spirit.'50 The debate continued on 7 November, and it was on that day that Finch, a vocal advocate of having a set form of prayer read in the House, proposed the establishment of the annual fast on 30 January. His was an astute move. Finch knew that no one would dare question or oppose it lest his loyalty appear suspect; at

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the same time, the annual solemnity would be a perfect occasion on which to enforce participation of all loyal subjects in a set form of liturgy that would be anathema to the Presbyterians and other sects.51 An order for the solemnity was duly printed; following the passage of the Act of Uniformity in August 1662, it was incorporated into the revised Book of Common Prayer.52 By then, the ideals of toleration and comprehension enunciated in the Declaration of Breda and elsewhere had been virtually abandoned. ' [W]e know it impossible (in such variety of apprehensions, humours, and interests, as are in the world) to please all,' wrote the revisers of the Book of Common Prayer, 'nor can expect that men of factious, peevish, and perverse spirits should be satisfied with any thing that can be done in this kind by any other than themselves.'53 To say this was to acknowledge that religious divisions - and, by implication, political ones - were there to stay. The Politics of Restoration Historiography Seeing there had been so many shiftings of the supreme authority, I pray you, for memory's sake, repeat them briefly in times and order. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 195

[I]t was in the peaceful reign of Augustus, after the conclusion of their long Civil Wars, that most of their perfect Historians appear'd. And it seems to me, that we may expect the same progress amongst us. There lye now ready in Bank, the most memorable Actions of Twenty years: a Subject of as great Dignity, and Variety, as ever pass'd under any Mans hands: the peace which we injoy, gives leisure and incouragement enough: The effects of such a Work would be wonderfully advantageous, to the safety of our Country, and to His Majesties Interest: for there can be no better means to preserve his Subjects in obedience for the future, than to give them a full view of the miseries, that attended rebellion. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society [1667]54

Royal proclamations and anniversary sermons were the most effective means of publicizing the official stance towards the recent past, occasionally providing brief but pointed summaries. Yet only a detailed history of the Civil Wars would ensure the preservation of the correct record and understanding of the immediate past for posterity. The creation of the post of Historiographer Royal in 1661 may suggest that the king intended to commission such an account. James Howell,

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the first incumbent, saw his role as that of both chronicler and propagandist, and he cited the example of foreign powers, notably France, that took proper care to memorialize the past: 'The prudentest and best policy'd states ... have a Minister of state appointed and qualified with the title historiographer general... to digest in writing and to transmit to posterity the actions and counsels of that state as also to vindicate them.'55 In the event, no such state-sponsored account of the Civil Wars was commissioned of either Howell or John Dryden, who succeeded him in 1669, perhaps because of indolence on the part of the government, or more likely because of recognition that any such venture could be politically hazardous. An important by-product of the mid-century crisis was a revolution in the writing of history. That revolution affected both content and form of native historiography, and it was marked by two fundamental departures from previous practices. First, following the breakdown of ideological consensus and the lapse of effective censorship, accounts of the past increasingly mirrored and even exacerbated the political divisions of the present. Hostile depictions of the Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, and eulogistic ones of English parliaments, proliferated.56 Secondly, the gap between events taking place and being accorded the status of history rather than that of news was narrowed. With contemporaries realizing they had lived through a period of historic change, the demand for narrative accounts of recent years or even months intensified. Those accounts shared ground with newsbooks and newsletters, but they ultimately superseded those more ephemeral publications. Among the most distinguished were The history of the Parliament of England (1647) and A Breviary of the History of the Parliament of England (1650) by Thomas May, which gave a Roundhead interpretation of the conflict between king and Parliament.57 Responding to the development of partisan historiography, one royalist pamphleteer fulminated in 1648: 'writing your Kings Chronicles in their life time is a doctrine of Devils.'58 In the 1660s there were many who shared the sentiment. 'It makes the English Nation cheap in the Eyes of the World,' wrote Roger L'Estrange in his Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press (1663) - a pamphlet that sealed his bid for the post of Surveyor of the Press - ' to find the Bloud and Virtues of the Late King, appear so little to be consider'd, beside the Hazardous Consequence of Blasting the Royal Cause, and o/Discourageing Loyalty to Future Generations, by transmitting the whole Party oftheRoyallists, in so many Millions of virulent Libels, to Posterity, for a prostitute Rabble of Villeins, and Traytours.' And he complained that 'as much III is said, and Published of

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'our Present Sovereign' and the 'Royal Family ... as is possible for the Wit of Man to Utter, or for the Malice of Hell to Invent.'^ For L'Estrange, May's republican historiography was as objectionable as the republican pamphleteering of Milton and Needham. According to Thomas Sprat, the English Civil Wars provided a subject that rivaled the Roman Civil Wars in its weight and gravity; to tackle it would be to take up an intellectual challenge as well as fulfilling a patriotic duty. For, as he, L'Estrange, and many others recognized, there was an urgent need ' to deliver the Reputation of That Blessed Martyr [ the Late King], from the Diabolical Calumnies, and Forgeries, which are yet Extant against his Person, and Government.'60 Yet it would have been difficult to write a serious account of the 1640s and 1650s without reproducing even if only to rebut - the criticisms leveled at Charles I by his opponents and without taking some note of the present monarch's far from glorious conduct (which included, among other things, twice taking the two covenants), let alone without referring to Cromwell's impressive military and diplomatic successes or acknowledging the acceptance of the Protectorate by the vast majority of the population. Such reminiscences would have been uncomfortable. Indeed, the publications that L'Estrange singled out for immediate suppression, were precisely those that would have been the prime documentary sources for a historian of the Civil War: 'First, All Printed Papers pressing the Murther of the late King. Secondly, All Printed Justifications of that Execrable Act. Thirdly, All Treatises Denying His Majesties Title to the Crown of England. Fourthly, All Libels against the Person of His Sacred Majesty, His Blessed Father, or the Royal Family. Fifthly, All Discourses manifestly tending to stirr up the People against the Establish 'd Government. Sixthly, All Positions Terminating in This Treasonous Conclusion that His Majesty may be Arraign'd, Judg'd, and Executed, by his People.'61 The problem was with the material as much as its treatment. James Heath's A Brief Chronicle of All the chief Actions so fatally falling out in these three Kingdoms ... From the year, 1640. to this present twentieth of November, 1661 declined to analyse the roots of the Civil War, for '[t]he secondary causes of it, are so many and so uncertain; so variously reported and believed, that it would spend the paper allotted to this Epitome in ascertaining them.'62 Determined to avoid controversy at all cost, Heath devoted more of his flimsy octavo booklet to recounting Charles's escape after Worcester than to chronicling military and political developments. Heath also played safe in excoriating Cromwell in his Flagellum: or The Life and Death, Birth and Burial of Oliver Cromwel The late Usurper (1663). '

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Cast in the form of four dialogues, Thomas Hobbes's fervently royalist analytic account of the Civil War, Behemoth, or The Long Parliament, was based on Heath's plodding and uncontentious narrative. There can be nothing more instructive towards loyalty and justice,' Hobbes asserted in dedicating a manuscript copy to Sir Henry Bennet, 'than will be the memory, while it lasts, of that war.' 63 Yet the king who read the work some time in 1667 forbade Hobbes to publish it. He must have realized that, with its rabid attack on the Presbyterians and an uncompromising endorsement of the absolutist creed, Hobbes's book would rile many of its readers, perhaps even fuel anti-royalist sentiments among them.64 Although there were those such as Sprat who looked to the flowering of English historiography under Charles-Augustus, and although several royalist histories of the Civil Wars such as Heath's did appear shortly after the Restoration, none of them was memorable and none carried the royal imprimatur.65 Clarendon's History remained unprinted until the eighteenth century. Given that any retelling of the recent past was bound to alienate individuals or sections of society (and so work against the spirit if not the letter of the Act of Oblivion), the king may well have concluded that the potential benefits of a royally sponsored history were unlikely to outweigh its negative consequences.66 Parliament, for its part, decided closely to monitor the publication of historical writings: dated 26 July 1661, the 'Abstract of a proposed Act for preventing the printing of seditious or schismatical books and papers' ruled that all history books be licensed by the secretaries of state, a provision that was incorporated into the Licensing Act of 10 June 1662.67 The closest approximation to an official history of the English Civil Wars was the two-volume edition of Basilika. The Workes of King Charles the Martyr, which was brought out in 1662 by Richard Royston, Book-seller to His most Sacred Majesty. Basilika offers the reader more for his money than the abbreviated title might lead one to expect (and than modern commentators have acknowledged). Prefaced with a hagiographic life of the royal author by Richard Perrinchiefe, and supplemented with an account of his trial and execution, Charles I's writings occupy the first volume of the book. The second volume comprises A Collection of Declarations, Treaties, and Other Principal Passages concerning the Differences Betwixt King Charles I. and His Two Houses of Parliament. Clearly Manifesting The Justice of His Cause. His Sinceritie in Religion. His Constant Endeavours for Peace. The Collection was modelled on John Rushworth's Historical Collections (1659), to which it provided a royalist rejoinder. Addressed 'to the Nobility and Gentry of England,' the preface makes a strong case for a

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careful study of the recent past by 'those Ranks of men whom the Favour of Princes hath raised above the Common Multitude, to this one End, that they may assist Them in the administration of Their Government, and in keeping Peace and good order in their Countries.' Only by understanding the genesis of the conflict will these be able to prevent its repetition: If it were as easie to root out the remembrance of the ill Examples, as it is to remit the punishment of the Crimes, by Acts of Grace, and Pardon, and Oblivion; it were perhaps no Imprudence to let those Mischiefs sleep with their Authors, and leave their Memories buried in the Ruines they have made. But since many that are content to take the utmost advantage of a Pardon, are yet too good to acknowledge they ever stood in need of any; since most will remember onely What hath been done, and few trouble themselves to inquire How, or Why: it cannot be thought impertinent, together with the Actions, to represent also the true Causes that have produced such Effects, and the Circumstances that attended them; which may remain as Marks to warn Posterity of those Errors which have cost the present Age so dear.68

The editor does not provide a continuous narrative. Instead, he brings together a selection of 'the Publick and Authentick Writings ... digested in such order, that the Reader may compare what both sides had to say for themselves.'69 'An Historical Table of both Volumes' makes possible a reconstruction of the chronological sequence of writings and events: That the Reader may more easily discern the Order of those Historical Papers which are digested under their several Heads in the First Volume, and more readily conjoin them in their proper places with the Second; it is thought fit to represent both together in this Table, according to their Dates and Dependencies.

The well-born and well-heeled reader - at two portly folio volumes Basilika was an expensive and an elite publication - is assumed to possess the moral and intellectual capacity that will enable him to arrive at a correct understanding of the materials before him. Those less exalted did not merit such trust. To ensure their proper schooling in the divine right of kings and in the subject's 'Duty and Allegiance,' the government ordered the reprinting of God and the King, a Jacobean pamphlet by Richard Mocket originating in the controversy

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over the Oath of Allegiance. James I, at whose behest the piece had been composed, sought to insure its wide dissemination by issuing A Proclamation for the confirmation of all Authorized Orders, tending to the Universall publishing and teaching of a certaine Religious Treatise, compiled by Authontie, And Intitutled by the Name of God, And the King (London, 8 November 1615).70 In the Restoration, too, the pamphlet's mass circulation was guaranteed both institutionally and commercially. Ecclesiastical and lay authorities of every level throughout the realm were required to advise and direct all School-masters and Teachers of the English and Latine Tongue, to teach their Scholars the said Book or Treatise, either in Latine or English, according to their respective capacities. And also, that it be recommended to all Masters of Families and Apprentices to have one of the said Books or Treatises, with advice to read and be instructed in the same.71 Their task was to be facilitated by an imposition of price control: God and the King was to cost no more than sixpence. How unlikely this measure was to achieve its intended end becomes obvious to anyone who glances at the revived pamphlet. Designed to rebut Catholic objections to the Oath of Allegiance, God and the King took the form of a dialogue between Theodidactus and Philalethes. Abounding in abstruse allusions to late sixteenth-century English history, the classics, and the Bible, it would have been virtually incomprehensible to the 'Scholars' named in the royal proclamation, let alone to the uneducated. The claim that it 'did in those times (by the blessing of Almighty God) prove an effectual means ... for the instruction of the People in their Duty and Allegiance' was questionable, the hope that it would do so now misguided. Despite the authorities' belief to the contrary, this old piece of ideological propaganda must have seemed eerily out of place in the post-regicide world. In 1660-2 the authorities promoted an understanding of the Civil War that would be acceptable to most people. Yet this purportedly consensual understanding of the recent past was not articulated in a serious historical study. The debates surrounding both the passage and ratification of the Act of Oblivion and the proprieties of licensing and censorship of history books suggest that in the climate of national reconciliation and apparent royalist euphoria the commissioning of an account of the English Civil War was perceived as a potential threat to stability. Partisan history might jeopardize the search for national concord that formed

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the basis of the Restoration settlement; an impartial account might expose the ideological contradictions behind it.

Although many feared that history might repeat itself, and that monarchy might be overthrown again, the belief that that eventuality might be averted by a programme of what we could term, anachronistically, historical education was not sufficiently strong to induce the government to implement it. That official restraint disappeared only in the mid-1670s, in the face of mounting criticism of the Stuart monarchy.72 Notes 1 The Secret History of the Reigns ofK. Charles II. And K. James II (London: 1690), 9. See Eve Tavor Bannet, '"Secret History": Or, Talebearing Inside and Outside the Secretorie,' in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes, special double issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly 68 (2005): 1-2, 375-96. 2 Cited from J.P. Kenyon, ed., The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688: Documents and Summary, 2nded. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 331-2. 3 Jonathan Sawday, 'Re-Writing a Revolution: History, Symbol, and Text in the Restoration,' The Seventeenth Century 7 (1992): 171-99. 4 See, inter alia, David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989); Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 43-51; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645-1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 167-93; and the essays collected in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 5 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888; repr. 1992), 6:194. For an illuminating account of Clarendon's history, see Marline Watson Brownley, Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). 6 See Patricia Crawford, '"Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood," 'Journal of British Studies 16 (1977): 41-61. 7 Clarendon, History, 6:197. For an incisive reading of the Declaration of Breda and, more generally, a thoughtful account of the Stuart Restoration, see N.H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 68-70.

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8 Clarendon, History, 6:201. 9 In due course a high proportion of 'parliamentarians, Cromwellians, neutrals, and side-changers'joined the ranks of Restoration civil servants. See Gerald Aylmer, The Crown's Servants: Government and Civil Service under Charles II, 1660-1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157-8. 10 It was understood that the letters would be read out in Parliament, and that all of them would be published - as indeed they were. 11 Keeble, The Restoration, 28. 12 'To our trusty and well-beloved general Monck, to be by him communicated to the President and Council of State, and to the officers of the armies under his command,' in Clarendon, History, 6:202-3, at p. 202. 13 Clarendon, History, 6:203. 14 For the text of the Solemn League, see Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 239-42. 15 Clarendon, History, 6:193. 16 See Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 45, 48-9, 53-4, 59-60,148-9. 17 'To our trusty and well-beloved the Speaker of the House of Commons,' in Clarendon, History, 6:203-5, at p. 204. 18 The phrase reappears in the singular in Charles's letter 'To our trusty and well-beloved general Monck and general Mountague, generals at sea; to be communicated to the fleet': in addressing the seamen, the king refers to 'the mistake and misunderstanding of their predecessors.' See Clarendon, History, 6:208-9, at p. 208. 19 See Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 332. 20 Clarendon, History, 6:199. 21 Clarendon, History, 6:205. 22 Clarendon, History, 6:217-19, at p. 218. 23 Clarendon, History, 6:218. 24 Clarendon, History, 6:217. 25 For the changing views of the covenant, see The Privileges of Parliament which the Members, Army, and this Kingdom have taken the Protestation and Covenant to maintain. Reprinted for Consideration and Confirmation on the 5th. of January, 1659. the day appointed to remember them ([n.p.] 1659); The Kingdoms Remembrancer: or, The Protestation, Vow, and Covenant, Solemne League and Covenant, Animadverted, So far as it concerns Religion. By W. Wickins, late Minister at St. Geo. Southwarke (London, 1660); Certain Scruples and Doubts of Conscience About taking the Solemne League and Covenant; First Printed in theyeare 1643. Wherein Is briefly intimated the invalidity thereof, inconsistency with, and contradiction to it self, and all former Oathes, and the very Protestation so lately before imposed upon the

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people of this Nation, by the same Authority that did force upon us the said League and Covenant... Together with a Letter directed to the Author of the said Scruples and Doubts, By John GaudenD.D. and Chaplain to his Majesty in Ordinary (London, 1660). 26 The Parliamentary History of England, from the earliest period to the year 1803, ed. William Cobbett, 36 vols. (London: Longman et al., 1806-20), 4:209. John Ogilby reproduced the parliamentary order for the immolation of the covenant to gloss his account of Charles II's coronation pageantry on 22 April 1661: Ogilby suggests that the iconography of the first triumphal arch anticipated the legislation that was not passed until the following month. See his The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in His Passage through the City of London to His Coronation (London, 1662), a facsimile with introd. by Ronald Knowles (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 39-40. 27 The Book of Common-Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments, and Other Rites & Ceremonies Of the Church According to the Use of the Church of England (London, 1662), sig. blv. 28 'To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty,' in Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press: Together with Diverse Instances of Treasonous, and Seditious Pamphlets, Proving the Necessity thereof (London, 1663), sig. A4r. 29 English Historical Documents, 13 vols., gen. ed. David C. Douglas, vol. 8, English Historical Documents, 1660—1714, ed. Andrew Browning (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966), 365-70, at p. 366. 30 An Act of Free and General Pardon Indempnity [sic] and Oblivion, 12 Car. II. c. 11, in Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London, 1810-28), 5:226-34, at p. 230. 31 'To the Speaker of the House of Peers, and to the Lords there assembled,' in Clarendon, History, 6:207-8, at p. 207. 32 'To our trusty and well-beloved the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council, of our city of London,' in Clarendon, History, 6:209-10. 33 Clarendon, History, 6:216. 34 For an account of missives to the nation that were published in 1659-60, and that purported to have been written by Charles II, see Carolyn Edie, 'News from Abroad: Advice to the People of England on the Eve of the Stuart Restoration,' Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 76 (1984): 382-407. 35 Parliamentary History, 4:207. 36 Parliamentary History, 4:213. 37 Ed. F. Tonnies, introd. M.M. Goldsmith, 2nd ed. (London: Frank Cass & Co., 1969), 203-4. 38 Charles had earlier reiterated his commitment to a general amnesty that

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would 'administer all just satisfaction and ease to the mindes of our people, and ... remove all feares and Jealousies which may concern their security' in A Proclamation Concerning His Majesties gracious Pardon, In pursuance of His Majesties former Declaration (London, 15 June 1660); in a letter to the Cavalier Parliament of 22 June 1661, the king urged it to ratify the act of Oblivion. On the passage of the act and its confirmation, see Parliamentary History, 4:64 passim and 209—13 respectively. 39 Sawday, 'Re-Writing a Revolution,' 185. 40 Parliamentary History, 4:111,113. 41 Parliamentary History, 4:113. As Sawday has noted, 'long rolls' naming those involved in the trial and execution of the king were published in the form of suggestively titled broadsides - for instance, The Great Memorial and The Black Remembrancer- throughout the spring, summer, and autumn of 1660. See his 'Re-Writing a Revolution.' 42 Parliamentary History, 4:114. 43 For an account of the efforts to amend the Act of Indemnity, and of the private bills brought in by impoverished royalists who sought to reverse its financial implications, see Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661-1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 196 passim. 44 Parliamentary History, 4:125,126. 45 Parliamentary History, 4:127. 46 John Spurr, '"Virtue, Religion and Government": The Anglican Uses of Providence,' in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 29-47, at p. 35. Cf. Lois Potter, 'The Royal Martyr in the Restoration: National Grief and National Sin,' in Corns, The Royal Image, 240-62, at p. 245: 'An important aim of the 30 January sermons was that of uniting the whole congregation in a cathartic experience of grief and humiliation. National fasts were normally held to atone for the sins which might have brought misfortune on the country, but the regicide was the most spectacular example of National Sin yet to be impressed on a congregation.' On the uses of the anniversary of regicide sermon in the 1690s as Williamite propaganda, see Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 102-4. 47 Parliamentary History, 4:142. 48 Parliamentary History, 4:158. See 'An Act for the Attainder of severall persons guilty of the horrid Murther of his late Sacred Majestic King Charles the first,' 12 Car. II. c. 30, in Statutes of the Realm, 5:288-9. 49 Cf. the reference to 'the most Trayterous Conspiracies and armed Power of

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Usurping Tyrants, and execrable and perfidious Traytors,' in A Proclamation, For the observation of the Nine and twentieth day of May instant, as a day ofPublick Thanksgiving, according to the late Act of Parliament for that purpose (London, 20 May 1661). 50 Parliamentary History, 4:141, 142. 51 From the mid-1640s onward, several forms of prayer, including those for the private observance of the anniversary of the regicide, were published surreptitiously by the defeated Anglicans. They included: [Brian Duppa], Private Forms of Prayer, Fit for these Sad Times (Oxford, 1645); John Hewitt, Prayers of Intercession for their Use who Mourn in Secret, for the Publick Calamities of this Nation. With an Anniversary Prayer for the 30th of January. Very Necessary and Useful in Private Families, as well as in Congregations (1659); and Private Forms of Prayers, Fitted for the late Sad-Times (1660). See John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646-1689 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 21; Andrew Lacey, 'The Office for King Charles the Martyr in the Book of Common Prayer, 1662-1685,' Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002): 510-26; see also Lacey's The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge, URBoydell, 2002). 52 'CHARLES R. Our will and pleasure is, That these Three Forms of Prayer and Service made for the Fifth of November, the Thirtieth q/January, and the Twenty ninth o/May, be forthwith Printed and Published, and for the future annexed to the Book of Common Prayer and liturgy of the Church o/England, to be used yearly on the said days ... Given at our Court at White-Hall the 2d day of May, in the 14th year of Our Reign'; see The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments, and Other Rites & Ceremonies Of the Church According to the Use of the Church of England (London, 1662). For 'A Form of Prayer, to be used yearly upon the xxx. day of January, being the day of the Martyrdom of K. CHARLES the first,' see sigs. Hh3v ff. The contrast between 'us' and 'them' is emphasized throughout. 53 Book of Common Prayer, sig. b6r. 54 History of the Royal Society by Thomas Sprat (1667), ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold W.Jones (St Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1958), 44. 55 Cited from Denys Hay, 'The Historiographers Royal in England and Scotland,' Scottish Historical Review 30 (1951): 15-29. For an account of Howell's writings, see Daniel R. Woolf, 'Conscience, Constancy, and Ambition in the Career and Writings of James Howell,' in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer, ed.John Morrill, Paul Slack, and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 244-78. 56 These were, among others: Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James (London, 1650); Arthur Wilson, The History of Great Britain, Being the

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Life and Reign of King lames the First, Relating To what passed from his first Accesse to the Crown, till his Death (London, 1653); Lambert van den Bos, The Life and Raigne of King Charles, From his Birth to his Death Faithfully and Impartially performed By Lambert Wood Gent. (London, 1659); Hamon L'Estrange, The Reign of King Charles. An History Disposed into Annalls (London, 1656); Sir Balthazar Gerbier, baron d'Ouvilly, The None-Such Charles His Character (London, 1651); Peter Heylyn, A Short View of the Life and Reign of King Charles (The second Monarch of Great Britain) from his Birth to his Burial (London, 1658); William Sanderson, A Compleat History of the Life and Raigne of King Charles from His Cradle to his Grave (London, 1658). See also Heylyn's Observations on The Historie Of the Reign of King Charles: Published by H.L. Esq. For Illustration of the Story, and Rectifying some Mistakes and Errors in the Course thereof (London, 1656). On the ideological divisions among Restoration historians, see Daniel R. Woolf, 'Narrative Historical Writing in Restoration England: A Preliminary Survey,' in The Restoration Mind, ed. W. Gerald Marshall (Newark: University of Delaware Press / London: Associated University Presses, 1997), 207-51. For an account of the changing status of history, see Woolf s Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500-1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 57 J.G.A. Pocock, Thomas May and the Narrative of Civil War,' in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 112-44. 58 The Kingdomes Briefe Answer, to the Late Declaration of the House of Commons, Feb. 11. 1647. Touching The Reasons of their no further Addresses to the King (London, 1648), 1-2. 59 L'Estrange, Considerations and Proposals, 9. 60 L'Estrange, Considerations and Proposals, 8. 61 L'Estrange, Considerations and Proposals, 7--8. 62 A Brief Chronicle of All the chief Actions so fatally falling out in these three Kingdoms; viz. England, Scotland & Ireland, From the year, 1640. to this present twentieth of November, 1661 (London, 1662), 1-2. 63 Behemothwas published in 1679, shortly before Hobbes's death, but without his knowledge or participation. 64 Commenting on its unauthorized printing twelve years later, David Wootton has jokingly speculated 'that some (perhaps all) of the five editions of Behemoth that appeared during the Exclusion Crisis were sponsored by Locke and his associates, people who thought that reading Behemoth would expose, not reinforce, the logic of absolutism.' See his 'Thomas Hobbes's Machiavellian Moments,' in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History,

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Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500-1800, ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 210-42, at 241. 65 Chief among them were James Heath's A Brief Chronicle of the Late Intestine Warrin the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland & Ireland (2nd ed., 1663) and William Younger's The History of the Late English Rebellion (1665). For an overview, see Royce MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974). On religious history and Non-conformist writings, see J.A.I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 25-52; Richard L. Greaves, Deliver UsfromEvil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660-1663 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 207-25; N.H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Non-Conformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), 93-126. 66 Daniel Woolf notes Charles II's encouragement of John Nalson and Robert Brady ('Narrative Historical Writing in Restoration England,' 225); however, their historical projects were undertaken in the mid-1670s in response to the mounting disillusionment with the Stuart monarchy, not in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration. See Nalson, An Impartial Collection of the great affairs of State, from the beginning of the Scotch Rebellion in 1639, to the murther of King Charles I. ... wherein ... the whole series of the late troubles in England, Scotland, Ireland are faithfully represented (2 vols., London, 1682, 1683); Brady, An Introduction to the Old English History, comprehended in Three Several Tracts (1684). 67 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles II, ed. M.A.E. Green, F.H. Blackburne Daniel, and F. Bickley, 28 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts, 1860-1939), 3:45. The Licensing Act passed in 1662 was to be effective for two years; thereafter, it would have to be renewed by Parliament. See Fredrick Seaton Siebert, Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776: The Rise and Fall of Government Controls (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1952), 237 passim. 68 Basilika. The Workes of King Charles the Martyr: With a Collection of Declarations, Treatises, And other Papers concerning the Differences betwixt His said Majesty and His Two Houses of Parliament, 2 vols. (London, 1662), 2: sig. A2v. 69 Basilika, 2: sig. A2v. 70 The pamphlet was issued in 1615 both in English and in Latin. The English edition, a duodecimo, featured an engraved frontispiece representing the enthroned king, above him a motto 'By Mee Kings Raigne.' The concluding engraving showed the taking of the oath of allegiance; the image was accompanied by the following injunction: 'Feare God. Obey the King.' See God

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and the King: Or, A Dialogue shewing that our Soueraigne Lord King lames, being immediate vnder God within his Dominions, Doth rightfully claime whatsoever is required by the Oath ofAttegeance (London: Imprinted by his Maiesties speciall priviledge and command, 1615). 71 See A Proclamation For the Re-printing, Publishing, and Using of a Book, Intituled, God and the King (London, 5 December 1662). The booklet was duly reprinted in quarto in 1663: God and the King: Or, A Dialogue, Shewing, That Our Soveraign Lord the King of England, being immediate under God within his Dominions, doth rightly claim whatsoever is required by the Oath of Allegiance. Formerly compiled and printed by the especial Command of KingJames (of blessed memory;) and now commanded to be reprinted and published by his Majesties Royal Proclamation, for the Instruction of all his Majesties Subjects in their Duty and Allegiance (London: Imprinted by his Majesties special Priviledge and Command, 1663). In emulation of its Jacobean predecessor, the pamphlet featured an engraved frontispiece representing Charles II. 72 The research for this essay was made possible by the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust, which awarded me a one-year Research Fellowship in 2002.1 am grateful to Lorna Clymer, Rob Hume, Nicholas von Maltzahn, John Spurr, and Blair Worden for their trenchant comments on earlier VERO

chapter six

Christopher Smart's Late Religious Lyrics: Building Churches in the Air CHRIS MOUNSEY

One of the commonest elements of the Anglican religious service today, the hymn, was looked upon with horror by eighteenth-century sticklers for orthodoxy. Orthodox Anglicans saw the hymn as the uncontrolled outburst of enthusiasm: the work of Nonconformists, their religious opponents, who were always marked with the stain of the political insurrection that blighted the previous century, and who had killed the king and nearly upset the divine order. Nevertheless, some of the most orthodox Anglicans of the century, such as Christopher Smart, wrote hymns. Modern debate about the function of the hymn in eighteenth-century Anglican life has been scarce; this essay will demonstrate that its function was to inculcate ritual into every moment of the lives of ordinary people. The repetition of bland formulas, Anglican hymns were never intended to be part of Anglican worship, but rather were meant to divert people from the free-thinking that was the religious cause of the civil war of the seventeenth century. For two decades under the rule of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell, the British Commonwealth promoted non-liturgical forms of Christian worship in the national church. Politically, the Commonwealth was based primarily on the idea of the autonomy of conscience. Cromwell is recorded as claiming that he would rather a man was Islamic than persecuted for his beliefs. In consequence, those who attempted to advance the uniform repetition of liturgy (Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and those using the English Prayer Book] were likely to be fined, since it was assumed that one's conscience could not be autonomous if one participated in an imposed liturgy.1 In 1660 the Restoration of Charles II brought with it not just the monarchy and its politics of divine right, but

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the re-imposition of uniform liturgy as established by Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1549, and revised several times). Not only was social conformity imposed on a people by their temporal lords, but at the same time common religious practice inculcated sacred conformity in their minds. Although both these forms of Christian worship, ad hoc and uniform liturgy, were Protestant, what separated them was the way in which it was thought that the 'Spirit of the Lord' came to the people as they worshipped together. Was it called down by the priest, or did it come spontaneously to the individual at prayer? Since the third century, the eucharistic prayer of Hyppolitus, known as the 'epiclesis,' was spoken by the celebrant of Holy Communion over both the elements and the congregation. This was the 'calling down' of the Holy Spirit onto the bread and wine, and onto the people who were about to share them. However, epiclesis was always problematic. The rites developed by Hyppolitus were perhaps the earliest versions of liturgy, or written services, but had little or no biblical authority. The word 'liturgy,' from the Greek 'litourgos' and meaning 'one who serves or ministers,' is itself derived solely from St Paul's Letter to the Hebrews: We have such an high priest, who is set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty of the heavens; A minister of the sanctuary, and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, not man. For every high priest is ordained to offer gifts and sacrifices.2

It is no surprise to find ideas such as this in Paul's propaganda designed to promote Christianity among the priests and scribes of the Jewish tradition. They were already heavily inculcated in the idea of a rabbinate repeating prayers in formulaic services, and consequently St Paul approaches them with language that will not alienate them. However, whether the high priest of these verses was supposed to be Jesus himself, or a human representative, is not quite clear, and as such remained open to interpretation. The Puritans (as their name suggests) searched for the purest forms of Christian worship in the most ancient sources. Therefore, any liturgy, including epiclesis and the role of a Christian priest as one who stands in God's tent,3 was eschewed in favor of a personal approach to God in common language. The situation was more complex for the Anglicans. Neither the quasi-divine nature of the priest nor the epiclesis itself can be found in Cranmer's liturgy. These were numbered with the Roman

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Catholic parts of Christianity, which all Protestants supposedly rejected. Nevertheless, they remained as the heart and soul of Anglican-imposed uniformity that Charles II brought with the Restoration. A priest drew down the Holy Spirit to his congregation, as did all other priests, and thereby all people found God only through the priest. One primary reason behind the Anglican retention of these 'Roman Catholic' elements was no doubt political. The King as head of the church could maintain temporal power over his people while they daily and weekly repeated the forms of words he sanctioned. A sense of community might thereby be imposed, disguised as the people's sharing the 'correct' words at the same times of the day and week and month throughout the changing seasons of the year. But this was anathema to the Nonconformists, who took their lead from the Puritans at the Reformation. They believed that liturgy was merely a product of the third-century church and accordingly unrelated to the earliest and purest worship of Christ. Little wonder there were objections. Little wonder there were ejections of ministers from their churches. As Michael Watts puts it: Initially the term 'Nonconformist' indicated neither Separatist nor Dissenter. It was used in the reign of Elizabeth of Puritans who were in communion with the Church of England but who declined to conform to certain practices prescribed by the Prayer Book of 1559. Only after 1662, when the state required of its clergy their 'unfeigned assent and consent' to everything in that Prayer Book, did the word Nonconformist come to mean separation from the Church of England.4

After the Restoration, religious separation became so complete that it required the building of new meeting-houses, and many such buildings in England date from this period. As visible signs of difference, these were largely built to resemble ordinary houses, and no longer featured a tower or steeple pointing to heaven. Like their new buildings, Nonconformist worship differed from the traditional practices laid down by the Act of Uniformity. Anglicans repeated their services in the form set out in the Book of Common Prayer. Collects, or prayers, readings, and psalms were fixed for each day of the year, to be inserted in services that otherwise did not vary. Nonconformists did not like to repeat. The practice of three of the main Nonconformist denominations should suffice to show to what degree repetition was out of favour. According to J.G. Davies, for the Baptists 'no one service would be

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considered typical.'5 Likewise for the Congregationalists 'there is no single official Congregational liturgy.'6 In the case of the Presbyterians, the situation was unclear. Presbyterian worship was never bound to a fixed liturgy. John Knox's book, which became the Book of Common Order (1564), allowed the Minister either to use the prayer provided or pray 'as the spirit of God shall move his harte.'7 Thus, we can begin to see that repetition was one of the main differences in how the Nonconformists and Anglicans worshipped. Whereas for the Anglicans the service was predetermined in content and largely also in the words that were to be spoken, for the Nonconformists the service centred upon a sermon, which was a minister's own interpretation of the scriptures, and upon individual prayer, which was the worshipper's personal interpretation of the scriptures. The Nonconformists brought their own words (professional or personal) to interpret the scriptures. Furthermore, because they had no typical form of worship, repetition was kept to a minimum. By the middle of the eighteenth century Anglicans and Nonconformists had largely polarized. Wesley's and Whitefield's hymn-singing Methodists were still in the Church of England, but only just. By 1784, upon John Wesley's ordination of ministers, they too would be ejected. In this world of entrenched views, writers defined themselves by what and how they wrote about religion. In particular, if they wrote hymns they were Nonconformists or Methodists, and not Anglicans. In 1763, after his release from seven years in a madhouse, the Anglican poet Christopher Smart published A Song to David, a paean to the psalmist in hymnal form. Two years later Smart published A Translation of the Psalms of David and Hymns for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England, both in hymnal form. When these religious verses appeared, Anglicans must have thought them singular to the point of eccentricity. For an Anglican to write in a Nonconformist form could be thought unusual, and for Smart, who was a High Anglican, it might appear very strange indeed. Marcus Walsh notes that there is 'some slight biographical evidence to connect Smart with Anglican Evangelicals.'8 Such men remained within the Anglican communion and were often suspicious of Whitefield and Wesley, but might, like William Cowper, write religious verses and call them hymns. However, Walsh points out that 'Smart's choice of the Book

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of Common Prayer as his text to be versified [as the Psalms] is ... consistent with, and arguably a confirmation of, his High Anglicanism.'9 Karina Williamson also demonstrates that Smart had some connections with Anglican Evangelicals,10 though her paper argues that Smart's work was very different from that of Methodist hymnists. Offering an alternate view, Clement Hawes gives an extended account of the history of Smart's poetic language in his religious verse.11 Hawes equates the enthusiasm of Nonconformist Protestants with the ecstatic outpouring of uncontrolled language, and thus with the language of mad people. Hence, his analysis of Ranting discourse in Smart's late religious poetry might suggest in some sort of extended sense that Smart was insane. And certainly, in the Smart canon there is a plethora of ecstatic religious outbursts such as the Jubilate Agno and A Song to David, as well as the low-church hymnal form of his Translation of the Psalms and Hymns. It can be of no surprise that Smart was long believed to be a madman: supposedly as an orthodox Anglican conformist he could not be sane and write so widely in the associative language and worship forms of the Dissenters. Hawes, however, offers a note of caution, arguing that literary and cultural criticism, far too often an anti-enthusiastic enterprise, should not use the vocabulary of individual pathology without the full awareness of its historical resonance.12

That is to say, Hawes suggests that when Smart wrote in enthusiastic language he was probably not actually mad, but merely using one of the many discourses that was available to him. He did not necessarily participate in or even agree with its provenance. In this way, the critical heritage demonstrates the interpretational difficulties at the heart of Christopher Smart's religious poetry: it is of Dissenting rhetoric and practice, but was written by an Anglican. Compounding the problem, after Smart's release from the mad-house, his Christianity always took the very highest form of Anglicanism, which believed wholeheartedly in the repetition of the formulas of the Book of Common Prayer and eschewed enthusiastic language at all costs.13 As a member of this non^uring community, Smart, if he argued at all about liturgical language, would not have been concerned with more than the matter of which Book of Common Prayer to use: the 1549, 1552, 1559, 1604, or 1662 edition. In this he held views in common with other High Anglican non jurors of the mid-eighteenth century.

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The problem might seem insoluble; however, as I note in my biography of Smart,14 what was most noticeable about the poet's character, a fact I came across again and again, was its doubleness. At Cambridge Smart was a drunken wastrel and an outstanding scholar. In his early years in London he wrote bawdy song lyrics for the pleasure gardens at the same time as he published poetical essays on the attributes of the Supreme Being. Later, he wrote for magazines that contained the most scurrilous political satire and for others that were pillars of ministerial orthodoxy. He was incarcerated for seven years in a madhouse, but when on his release he published what he had written, those writings demonstrated exemplary scholarship and application. However, the contextualizing process of writing a biography allowed me to trace a consistency of character in Christopher Smart, and to argue that the ostensibly contradictory elements of his behaviour were always accountable with reference to the circumstances in which he found himself. In the present case of doubleness, of his being a High Anglican while at the same time writing in enthusiastic language, I argued in the biography that his output was consistent with the tenets of the church he attended after his release from incarceration, St George the Martyr, Queen Square. This congregation of High Anglican non-jurors was set up by Robert Nelson (in 1710), the founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), and ministered to in Smart's time (17635) by William Stukeley, the antiquarian. Both Nelson and Stukeley were High Anglicans who recommended reciting hymns to prepare the mind for divine service, though not for use in the services themselves. My subject here is a revisitation of this argument from the biography, and an extension of it, which presents a new approach to understanding the enthusiastic elements of Smart's and other Anglican writers' language. I will argue that Smart and others used enthusiastic rhetoric as a guard against Dissenting enthusiasm, and so their use is consonant with non^uring Anglican ideas. I will explain how Smart, a High Anglican whose worship was associated with rigid repetition of the words of the Book of Common Prayer, could write hymns and psalms in hymnal form 'Adapted to the Divine Service' that would never have been performed in his own church.15 Characterizing nonjurors in the mid-eighteenth century was their desire for a religious orthodoxy based on the most ancient and biblical sources. Their anxiousness to keep as close as possible to the original of the Bible was based on a belief that the forms of the world ought to

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match as closely as possible the forms in heaven revealed by Christ. Two such forms, which I will touch on in this paper, are religious ceremonies and sacred buildings. To Be Right for the Right Rite Anglican non-jurors thought it very important that no accretions, which were the likely product of successive interpretations and translations, should mask the clarity of the divine revelation of Christ that gave meaning to their religious rites. They based their rituals upon the Edward VI prayer book (1549) and their theology upon the fourthcentury Apostolic Constitutions, which they mistook for an account of the organization of the earliest church. For them, correct repetition of standard rites and ceremonies was paramount, and St George the Martyr supplemented its daily celebration of the Eucharist with special celebrations for the fasts and festivals of the Church of England. The life envisaged for its nonjuring congregation was one of continual prayer,16 where attendance in church was only part of a religious life. As Robert Nelson argued in the preface to his Companion to the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England, religious observers needed to gather together to prepare themselves before divine offices with long meditative vigils: How they spend the Vigils, in preparing their Minds for a due Celebration of the ensuing Solemnity, is more private but not less commendable. And the great care they take to suppress the Dawning of Enthusiasm, and to discountenance the first Appearances of any vicious Practices among their Members, ... is such a preparation of the Minds of the Laity for the reception of that Discipline that is wanted in the Church.17

In this passage, which was written to recommend his SPCK study groups, we see that Nelson is careful that the time spent in private prayer should not be thought of as an undirected or self-directed search for inspiration that might be classed as enthusiasm. The problem as he saw it was that since there was no set form for such preparatory prayers that people could repeat, individuals might allow their minds to wander. There could be an element of spontaneity involved in unsupervised prayers that might lead to enthusiasm. For such private time to be controlled, therefore, Nelson's Companion presented question-and-answer sessions to direct thought and discussion, and collects (pre-written prayers for

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repetition on specific days) that could be repeated in preparation for, and as an explanation of, the prayers individuals would hear later in church. Two motivations are evident in Nelson's Companion: first, the laity does not have the right to read out loud the collects set out in the Book of Common Prayer since they are not ordained; and second, the language of the Edward VI prayer book is difficult to understand. Thus, the new collects were written so the laity could read them for themselves, and were written in the vernacular so they could understand them more easily than the prayers they would go on to hear in service. Nelson explains his idea in terms of differences in intelligence and application: Besides, a Man of moderate Attainments may be serviceable to those that have lesser Degrees of Knowledge, and to such who, tho' they may have Capacity yet have not Leisure nicely to enquire into these Matters.181 In this, Nelson suggests a typical Anglican hierarchy, in which the ordained priests repeat the divine revelations to those who are not ordained but who have the capacity to understand the language of the Book of Common Prayer. They, in turn, interpret them in simpler words to those who have a lesser capacity for understanding. But herein lies the problem: the original meaning will be lost in interpretation. The purpose of Nelson's Companion is, therefore, not to replace the language of the priest but to explain the difficult language of revelation to those who might not understand it, in order that they be prepared to understand the words repeated by the priest in the coming divine rite. The vernacular language used by the secondary writers, such as Nelson himself, does not fall back into 'enthusiasm' since it is scholarly, and has the imprimatur of ordained ministers. Of his own Companion, Nelson is clear: All the Sacred Remains of that kind [herein] are collected with so much Learning and Judgment by my worthy Friend, the Reverend Dr. Cave, that whatever I have advanced upon their Festivals, without Quotations, may be found in his Lives of the Apostles:/rom whence I have taken the Liberty to borrow what I thought might contribute towards the perfecting my Design.1^

His book, and similar works, must therefore be seen as an effective way of passing on the divine revelations, and as being based on the original message in its most ancient form, which is the service itself. Nevertheless,

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particularly in the question-and-answer sessions in Nelson's Companion, we do indeed find an element of spontaneity in this ultra-orthodox Anglicanism. For however goal directed the non^urors believed they had to be in order to avoid enthusiasm, they also had to induce an appropriate emotional state in worshippers, which could occur only if the specific needs of individuals were met: that is, through the use of their vernacular. The process (like the explanation of it) might seem rather laborious, but it must be borne in mind that these High Anglicans were horrified by the thought of the enthusiastic divine services of the Dissenters. Nonconformists changed their language continually in order to prevent themselves from losing the import of the revelation through the mere repetition of formulae. However, to the non-juring Anglicans, the beauty and grandeur of divine truth could only be grasped from as close as possible an approach to the original words. Since this might be difficult for the unordained or not very intelligent non-juror, Nelson's book presented easily understood versions of the revelations, or prompts to induce understanding of the revelations in the divine service, which were designed to alter readers' mental state before the rite and so help put them in touch with the divine truth when they heard the words of the priest repeated from the Book of Common Prayer. If we read Smart's translation of the Psalms and Hymns for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England as falling within Nelson's tradition of supplementary literature (and the title of the second calls out for the two to be associated), a brief comparison will serve to show how they worked in a supplementary way to illuminate the sacred texts. A comparison of the first few verses of Psalm 45 from the Edward VI Psalter demonstrates the changes that language had undergone in two hundred years: 1. My heart is endytyng of a good matter: I speak of the thyngs whyche I have made unto the kyng. 2. My tongue is the penne: of a readye wryter. 3. Thou arte fayrer then the chyldren of men: full of grace are thy lyppes, because God hath blessed thee for ever. 4. Gyrde thee with thy sweorde upon thy thyghe, (O thou most mightie:) accordyng to thy worshyp and renowne.

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5. Good lucke have thou with thyne honoure: ryde on, beecause of the worde of trueth, of mekenes and righteousnes, and thy ryght hand shall teach thee terrible things.

Smart's version, which he had checked against the earliest available sources, closely follows the verses of the Psalm but is always easier to understand. Exalted by a blessed thought My soul is on the wing; I speak, as in the spirit taught, The praise of Christ my King. My lips ate eager and delight Glad tidings to impart, As is the pen of them that write With equal ease and art. Thy form is fairer than the race Of men from Adam sprung; And God has giv'n eternal grace To thy persuasive tongue. Thy sword's effulgent lightning sheathe On thy redoubted thigh; And crown'd with fame and merit breathe The peace of God Most High. God thy thrice honour'd mission speed, In love and meekness ride To do the right thy word decreed, And truth shall be thy guide.20

In Smart's version, the only unusual word is 'effulgent,' though even this can be easily understood from its context. Thus, readers who had recited Smart's verses before the church service might be better able to understand the words of the 1549 Psalter when they were repeated in church. Furthermore, the jingling ABAB rhyme scheme adds an inevitability to the line ends, which not only aids comprehension and memory like a

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nursery rhyme, but also imbues the lines with the cheerfulness the Psalter's language misses. It is no wonder that Smart's last published work was hymns for children. Smart went still further to assist the understanding of the less accomplished in his Hymns, which act as detailed explications for each of the Church of England fasts and festivals for which they were written.21 Once again, a single example will suffice. The Book of Common Prayer collect for the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin is obscure in its description of the facts celebrated, and gives little hint of the lesson to be learned: We beseche the Lord, powre thy grace into our heartes, that as we have knowen Christ thy Sonnes incarnation by the message of an Angel; so by hys crosse and passion we maye be brought unto the glory of his resurrection, Throughe the same hrist our Lorde.

Smart, on the other hand, is didactic, and a message of sexual purity, set alongside the struggles against lust, is clear: O Purity, thou test Of love among the blest, How excellent thou art, The Lord Jehovah's heart, Whose sweet attributes embrace, Every virtue, praise and grace. Thou fair and good dispos'd 'Midst glories undisclos'd Inspire the notes to play Upon the virgin's day; High above all females nam'd, And by Gabriel's voice proclaim'd.

Praise him faith, hope, and love That tend Jehovah's dove; By men from lust repriev'd As females best conceiv'd; To remount the man and muse F[a]r above all earthly views.22

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The hymn explains the meaning of and the preparations necessary for the Feast of the Annunciation. The Virgin conceived Christ, and was told of it by the angel Gabriel. To celebrate the day we must be likewise sexually abstinent for God to 'powre his grace into our hearts.' Even the rhythmic break between lines 4 and 5, which creates a structure of 4 plus 2, suggests this will be a difficult task. In each of these examples, we see that Smart is using, if not everyday language, then words that would be more easily understandable to his readers than the Bible and prayer book. The rhythmic forms are simple and balladic, causing the language to appear easier to understand than it really is. The vernacular ballad form also allows Smart to discuss topics such as sexual abstinence that are only elliptically mentioned in the prayer book collects. When set to music, these banal-sounding lyrics would no doubt assist in bringing the unaccomplished participants to a deeper understanding of the ensuing rite, and preparing them for it. The difference between the prayer book and Smart's words, in religious terms, is that Smart's words are too profane to use in church worship, since they address the human side of the issues raised in the divine festivals. Like Nelson in his Companion, Smart prepares the readers or singers for the worship service by vernacular explication and discussion. His words cannot replace the Book of Common Prayer, though they are intended to revive the spirit of Christian worship. When Is a Church Not a Church? The introductory paragraph of the Psalms might seem fatal to my argument that Smart's Psalms and Hymns are part of the Nelsonian tradition of supplementary Anglican materials, that is, literature for preparation rather than use in church. [T]his translation ... was written with an especial view to the divine service, the reader will find sundry allusions to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, which are intended to render the work in general more useful and acceptable to congregations.

It is possible to read 'written with an especial view to the divine service' as m'eaning that the translations that follow are preparatory to the divine service and not part of it; and furthermore, Smart addresses the 'reader,' not the singer. However, his determined efforts to find musicians to set the Psalms goes a long way to suggest his translations were meant to be sung by congregations and therefore possibly as part of worship services,

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and not necessarily by families at home gathered around the harpsichord. In order to explain the consistency behind Smart's doubleness in writing worship material that his beliefs debarred from use in his own church, we must look briefly at the history of Anglican hymns, and reinterpret the non-juring idea of continual worship in that light. Grove's Dictionary of Music tells us that the hymn, as a metrical, vernacular lyric for use as an integral part of Christian worship, did not make much headway in the Anglican church until the nineteenth century. Although the Cranmer prayer book included twenty-six Latin hymns, they were excluded from the Edward VI Book of Common Prayer, which was so much beloved of nonjurors. Attempts made to reintroduce hymns to Anglican services were doomed after the ejection of the Presbyterians in 1662; however, vernacular metrical lyrics developed as a personal form of preparation for worship. This is not to say there were no early Anglican hymnists. George Herbert's The Temple (1633), though subtitled 'Sacred poems and Private Ejaculations,' reads so much like a hymnbook that Herbert's literary executor, Nicholas Ferrars, thought it necessary to gloss it as the work of an orthodox Anglican: His obedience and conformitie to the Church and the discipline thereof was singularly remarkable. Though he abounded in private devotions, yet went he every morning and evening with his familie to the Church; and by his example, exhortations, and encouragements drew the greater part of his parishoners to accompanie him dayly in the public celebration of Divine Service.23 Another Anglican hymnist whose work we can be certain had a direct influence upon Smart was Thomas Seaton, the founder of the poetry prize that Smart won five times. Seaton, like Herbert, was an orthodox divine, so he too hid his hymns behind a banal title that emphasized their private nature: The Devotional Life Render'd Familiar, Easy and Pleasant, In Several HYMNS Upon the most common Occasions of human LIFE.24 Both of these hymnbooks attempt to transform the private experience of their reader in a radical way. Not content with simply writing explanations in the vernacular, Herbert and Seaton attempt to alter imaginatively readers' physical location. In Herbert's Temple, the act of reading becomes an act of going to church. The first poem is called 'The Church Porch,' and prepares the reader to enter the church and see the altar. The layout of the second poem, 'The Altar,' is clearly pictorial:

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A Broken A L T A R , Lord, thy Servant reares; Made of a heart, and cemented with teares: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workmans tool hath touch'd the same. A H E A R T alone Is such a stone As nothing but Thy power doth cut Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy name: That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. O let thy blessed S A C R A F i C E b e mine, And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine.25

The words build the picture of the communion table on the page as they are seen, and also in the mind as they are read. The connection between the thing perceived and the mode of perception described thereby becomes central to the process of writing and reading. In this way, Herbert carefully guides his reader through a place of worship by imaginary reconstruction of the building in words and word pictures. As the hymns are repeated, the reader builds a church in his or her imagination. Herbert likewise constructs the ceremonies that take place in the church, for example, in the antiphonal conversation with angels that is at the heart of the divine office. Chor. Praised be the God of love, Men. Here below, Angels. And here above: Chor. Who hath dealt his mercies so, Ang. To his friend, Men. And to his foe;27

Because the antiphon is impossible to perform without the participation of angels, it could not be used for church services even if allowed. But to the reader the angels become as real as the altar, the chorus, and the men.

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Thomas Seaton makes his transformation in a different way, but the effect is similar. His hymns are short verses to be repeated during the normal activities of the day, such as awaking or getting dressed: Hymn I. When first you Awake in the Morning, let your Thoughts be devout, and fix'd upon God, expressing your hearty Thanks for his Protecting you the past Night. Psalm iii.5 I laid me down and slept, and awaked; for the Lord sustained me. Safe I arise, tho' ev'ry Sense Unguarded lay through Sleep; For Israels wakeful Shepherd did His helpless Servant keep. Hymn II. It has been the pious Advice of divers good Men in our Church to adapt an Ejaculation suitable to the several common Actions of Life — Accordingly when putting on your Cloaths. Job xxix.14. I'll put on Righteousness, and it shall cloath me; and Judgment shall be my Robe and Diadem. This House of Flesh in every Part I cloath with mighty Care. I'll see the Virtues thus, my Soul, Thy lovely Coverings are.27

The transformation here is that each act of the day, however insignificant, be it washing your hands or going out of the door,28 is sanctified. Repetition of Seaton's hymns does not so much build the church around the reader but transform the whole of the reader's life into divine service, and thus the whole world becomes in effect a church. In the work of both men, the limits of language, meaning, and world are exploited to offer the reader a reality that is not necessarily plastic or present, but is nonetheless affective and transformative. The games they play are linguistic, but the results are concrete in an emotional sense. That the words they use are vernacular, their forms often balladic, and their intended results emotionally or even physically transformational,29 make them the more acceptable to the ordinary reader. Smart, too, was a master of language games, and I have argued in the biography that Fragment C of his Jubilate Agno contains an architectural

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Figure 6.1. Ground Plan of St George the Martyr

plan of the Temple of Solomon within its 162 lines about plants and animals. Here, I will argue that Smart builds in a method that combines those of Herbert's Temple and Seaton's Devotional Life. He builds a church in the imagination of his readers, and transforms the world into a church. Smart follows Herbert's method in laying out the physical structure of his church by encoding Fragment C with the number nine. The only plant named twice is the Cacalianthemum, which appears at line 9 and line 90, that is, the ninth in each of two series of 81 (9 x 9) plants that make up the 162 lines of the fragment. The two series are also punctuated by the appearance of four animals at lines 1, 81, 82, and 162. The mystical shape of nine pieces made into a square as three rows of three would have been known by Smart, through the work of William Stukeley, the antiquarian minister of St George the Martyr, Queen Square. What was more, he would have known that it represented not only the Temple of Solomon, but also the Israelite military camp, the pectoral of Aaron, and the Schechina (or Mercy Seat, depicted on the Ark of the Covenant). A square is cut by four lines, making nine equal squares. That the shape is also a Christian church becomes clear when you see the ground plan of St George the Martyr (see fig. 6.1). Four pillars mark the crossing of the lines, and the congregation sit in pews set in the six unnamed squares.

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Its shape is no coincidence. The architect, Nicholas Hawksmoor, like William Stukeley, was interested in the shapes of early religious structures. In attempting to fulfil the requirements for Anglican worship in his work for the fifty new London churches commissioned by Queen Anne, Hawksmoor used square structures with columns to represent the sacred groves that were believed to be the earliest places of worship, and which were taken up by the Jews in building the temple of Solomon. Following Seaton's method of building a church out of everyday life, Smart describes the everyday behaviour of his cat Jeoffry in Fragment B of the Jubilate. Although the lines are empirically detailed, everything that Jeoffry does is for the glory of God and with reference to his saviour. Empirically, Jeoffry wakes (B698), washes himself (B702-10), and meets other cats (B714). But these observations are punctuated by references to the divine. Thus Jeoffry wakes: For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. (B697).

He washes himself: For having done his duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself. (B701).

He then goes out into the world: For having consider'd God and himself he will consider his neighbour. (B713)

The cat's morning routine becomes holy by its relationship with God. Thus, as in Seaton's hymns, Smart's lines about Jeoffry's repeated everyday behaviour reconstruct the world as a place of worship. If we consider the provenance of the Jubilate Agno, which was written while Smart was incarcerated in a madhouse with no recorded access to church service, it might be argued that his most obvious solution to this lack was to construct a church for himself and his cat out of the words of his poem. In this act of creation, Smart, like Herbert and Seaton, his Anglican forebears, was copying God's creation of the world with the use of language, although since he was merely human, no bricks-and-mortar church was likely to appear. Nevertheless, the combination of Herbert's and Seaton's methods has

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an effect on the usual definition of a church. Given the non-juring demand to pray continually, the physical location of a church building already begins to break up. We saw that private preparations for the service were, for Nelson, as important as the service itself. If one is praying continually, in even the most banal of one's actions, it is but a small leap to understand the whole world as a church: though it is necessarily the repetition of religious formulations that so transform the world. And if all the world's a church, the question of where Smart intended the Psalms to be sung becomes academic. Notes 1 In practice, although the Roman Catholics were assiduously controlled, fined, and even persecuted, the Anglicans tended to be left to their own devices, so long as ministers were not actually preaching against the government. The paradox of this position will not go unnoticed in this essay. 2 Hebrews, 8:1-3. 3 And thus is thought to be somehow the vehicle for ordinary people to reach God. 4 Michael Watts, The Dissenters, vol.1, From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 3. 5 J.G. Davies, ed., A New Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship (London: SCM Press, 1986), 326. 6 Davies, Dictionary, 327. 7 Davies, Dictionary, 446. And see Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 3: lOlff. 8 Walsh, The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987),3:xxx. 9 Walsh, Poetical Works of Smart, 3:xxxi. 10 'Christopher Smart's Hymns and Spiritual Songs,' Philological Quarterly 33 (1959): 413-24. 11 Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998). 12 Mania and Literary Style, Hawes, 230. 13 Marcus Walsh, in Poetical Works of Smart, also argues against the idea that Smart was drawing on the Dissenting tradition, but points out that he was 'the only Anglican hymn-writer of this period who was neither a Methodist nor an Evangelical.' It is this same tension that this paper seeks to address.

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14 Chris Mounsey, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 198-9. 15 See Karina Williamson and Marcus Walsh, eds., The Complete Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, 6vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 2:11. 16 Interestingly, that Smart prayed continually was taken as one of the signs of his mania by Hester Thrale, who put it down to drunkenness. 17 Robert Nelson, A Companion to the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England: With Prayers and Collects For Each Solemnity (London: W.B and AJ. Churchil [sic], I704),ix-x. 18 Nelson, Companion, xxii. 19 Nelson, Companion, x. 20 Smart, A Translation of the Psalms of David attempted to the Spirit of Christianity, and adapted to the Divine Service (London: Dryden Leach, 1765), 41-2. 21 The use of the material from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer is noted by Karina Williamson in 'Christopher Smart's Hymns and Sacred Songs,' Philological Quarterly 38 (1959): 416-17, and Marcus Walsh in Williamson and Walsh, Poetical Works, 2:6. 22 Smart, Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England (London: Dryden Leach, 1765), 164-5. 23 Ferrars, preface to George Herbert, The Temple (Cambridge: T. Buck and R. Daniel, 1633), Preface unpag. It may be remembered that Nicholas Ferrars was the Anglican divine at whose religious community of Little Gidding King Charles I spent the night before the last battle of the Civil War. 24 Seaton, Devotional Life (London: J. Roberts, 1734). 25 Herbert, Temple, 18. 26 Herbert, Temple, 85. 27 Seaton, Devotional Life, I. 28 The titles of hymns 3 and 4. 29 I am reminded here of Coleridge's 'This Lime Tree Bower,' and his mental shift to the hills with his friends.

PART IV ROUTINE AND RHYTHM

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chapter seven

'The Year Runs Round': The Poetry of Work in Eighteenth-Century England DAVID FAIRER

Work - work - work Till the brain begins to swim; Work — work - work Till the eyes are heavy and dim! Seam, and gusset, and band, Band, and gusset, and seam, Till over the buttons I fall asleep, And sew them on in a dream!1

Rarely have the pulse of poetry and the pulse of physical work coincided so oppressively as they do in Thomas Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' (1843). Most people are familiar with work as a mode of repetition, but its immediate demands are not usually so palpable - unless we spend the day prodding sizzling hamburgers or gluing the soles on trainers. Those who sit in strategy meetings discussing output, work patterns, restructuring, and time management may impose rhythms on others, but they in turn are subject to repetitions that are broader but no less rigorous: the accounting period, the business cycle, the global economy. Within this structure of work, as in a poetic structure, 'meaning' can be variously located. It is not just an end product, a final figure (like '42'), but the production line itself in all its intricacy. The concept of repetition offers a sobering reminder that nothing, no 'truth,' is all-embracing. Any pattern is waiting to be subsumed into a larger pattern, but the 'meaning' is not the container, the fattest Russian doll. Repetition dissociates

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'meaning' from 'power,' and all power over meaning must be resisted. The meaning of war includes the high-command strategy but also the marching songs of the troops. Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' announced to the Victorian age that work was not redeemed by its place in the vast scheme of things. Drudgery was no longer divine, and 'the trivial round, the common task' (in the words of the famous hymn) definitely did not 'furnish all we ought to ask.' Those words of John Keble placed the daily 'round' within the reassuring embrace of The Christian Year (1827), which offered 'New mercies each returning day' and gave life a sense of direction, 'a road / To bring us daily nearer God.'2 For Hood, however, there are no larger salvific patterns, and progress recoils on itself as the needle repeatedly turns round and the same task is done again and again ('Seam, and gusset, and band, / Band, and gusset, and seam'). The seamstress's returns are not those of her employer. With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A Woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger, and dirt, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch She sang the 'Song of the Shirt!' Work! work! work! While the cock is crowing aloof! And work - work — work, Till the stars shine through the roof! (1-12)

There she is, with Nature working its eternally repeated motions out there somewhere, while her fingers set a tighter and more insistant pulse. As dawn breaks, she has already begun her unpoetic day - indeed, the conventional 'rosy-finger'd dawn' and the 'opening eyelids of the morn'3 have become her 'fingers weary and worn,' her 'eyelids heavy and red.' This workhouse Aurora is trapped in repetition of a different order: Seam, and gusset, and band, Band, and gusset, and seam, Work, work, work, Like the Engine that works by Steam! (90-3)4

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The machine age has come. Even a single woman with her needle is powered by the factory rhythms of James Watt and George Stephenson, which exemplify that model of unerring repeatability on which the Industrial Revolution was based. But we can also hear being repeated some distant ironic echoes of a more primal rhetoric that has been part of the poetry of work for centuries, and takes us back to the world of Hesiod and Virgil, to Hesiod's Works and Days (Erga kai hemerai] from the eighth century BC and to Virgil's Augustan Georgics. It is a shorter journey than one might imagine from Hesiod to the Victorian workhouse - from the Erga to the erg, which in 1873 was established by the Gradgrinds of the day as the standard unit of work - 'the quantity of work done by a force that, acting for one second upon a mass of one gram, produces a velocity of one centimetre per second.'5 The repeatable was the measurable. Hesiod, after all, announced that his was the Age of Iron, in which mankind 'will never cease from toil and misery by day or night.'6 The Erga is the original of the myth that toil is the modern condition, in a world in which nature no longer offers its plenty freely, but demands endless labour from us at a time when all social cohesion has been lost. It lies behind the evocation of 'these iron Times' in James Thomson's Spring (1728), where 'all / Is off the Poise within,' and nothing is stable or predictable any more. Work in this Hesiodic context offers some way of bringing order and connectedness to what Thomson calls our 'broken World.'7 Throughout The Seasons, this lack of poise, and the need for repeated efforts to harness or even accommodate the forces of nature, checks the poem's Newtonian optimism so as to create a more complex dynamic. In the poetry of work, as human routines encounter demanding regimes, the question arises as to which sets the agenda - what place does individual skill and energy have within a wider system? How far does the economic/ergonomic imperative assume the role formerly taken by the necessities of nature? More specifically, in terms of repetitive human labour, what kinds of relationship are created between pattern and interpretation? Whose 'returns' carry meaning? Guided by such questions, this essay will look at some of the poetry written between 1700 and 1760 that takes human labour for its subject. The phrase 'The Poetry of Work' deliberately conflates two aspects of eighteenth-century poetry that have usually been kept apart: the georgic poem and the poetry of the labouring classes. In starting to think about this topic I had assumed they would form contrasting categories, in which repetition was in turn celebrated and deplored. Given that we might define economics as 'work viewed from a distance,' the georgic

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writer and the labourer ought to have opposed viewpoints and figure its repetitiveness differently. But the issue, as usual, turns out to be more complicated, and I hope fruitfully so. One worker who consciously places himself within a regimen that he interprets for us is Robert Tatersal, a bricklayer of Kingston-upon-Thames, author of The Bricklayer's Miscellany,9" a book of poems published in two parts in 1734-5. Tatersal manages, wittily and happily, to shape his life by three different modes of repetition - by the seasons, the hours of the day, and his lines of bricks. In the preface he presents himself (in the third person) as embodying the seasons' alternation: In Summer you will behold him full of Business, Money in his Purse, merry and jolly, gay, and all over Vivacity and Chearfulness ... But on the other hand, behold the terrible Change which attends the Approach of Winter: You may then behold him with an empty Purse, and no Work, forlorn, and dirty, a meager Countenance, and the very Picture of a hard Winter ... In this Manner do we live, until our friendly Sun ascends with the refreshing vernal Equinox, or in our own Terms, when he begins to dart his oblique Rays over Hampstead Hill; then we begin to creep from our Holes, as Bees from a Hive, and look as sharp after a Job, as a Hound would after a Hare, (ii-iv)8

He lets nature lead him through its stages as he waits for the year to roll round again. In the poem that he writes about his own work, 'The Bricklayer's Labours,' he does a similar thing with the working day, tracing the sun's rays at each stage as they shift in colour and warmth across the scene - letting them mark out like a refrain the activities of his day: At length the soft Nocturnal Minutes fly, And crimson Blushes paint the orient Sky (1-2) Till open Light corroborates the Day, And through the Casement darts his signal Ray (7-8) And now the Sun with more exalted Ray, With glowing Beams distributes riper Day (31-2) And now the Sun with full Meridian Ray, With scorching Beams confirms the perfect Day (62-3) At length the Western Breezes gently play, And Sol declining moderates his Ray (78-9)

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Here is an artist delighting in repetition with variation - like Monet painting the front of Rouen Cathedral. Tatersal ends by looking forward to the morrow, when 'all the joyous Scene revolves again' (109), and in this context he celebrates the routine of his job, the endless laying of bricks line upon line. He acknowledges that 'a Line, a Lines the constant Sound, / By Line and Rule our daily Labour's crown'd' (58-9); but this 'Line and Rule is no negative - it is part of the satisfaction he takes in his couplets, which are set neatly together in a pleasing pattern: When amidst Dust and Smoke, and Sweat and Noise, A Line, a Line, the Foreman crys, my Boys; When Tuck and Pat with Flemish bound9 they run, Till the whole Course is struck, compleat and done: (33-6)

He lays down the lines of his poem with a tangible sense of achievement - 'Tuck and Pat.' Robert Tatersal, by the nature of his job, built things up and left them behind him. Other labourers, of course, did not have this satisfaction. Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire farmworker whose worldly success became the dream of many a labourer-poet, writes so fascinatingly because he is in two minds about the nature and value of his work. This poem, The Thresher's Labour (published in 1730), swings from the detail of the moment to the system that embraces it, from the language of the threshing-barn to the language of Virgil and Milton, and with much greater unease and ambivalence than Tatersal. We encounter Duck in the poem rather like we do in the frontispiece to his Poems,10 occupying a vivid patch of light (which somehow isolates him) as he stands, smartly dressed, between a barn piled high with corn-sheaves and a writing desk set out with paper, pens, and ink pot. Both are calling for his attention, and he is caught between two kinds of labour. To emphasize the incongruity of the two regimes, he holds in his left hand a thresher's flail and in his right a copy of Milton - but he points the flail towards his writing desk and his Milton towards the barn. These ironic symmetries have their equivalent in the poem itself, and the types of repetition invoked. In the opening passage Duck alludes to the yearly cycle of the seasons, of which he is part - but with no sense of himself as a distinctive voice, which is subsumed into the plight of the labourer throughout the ages. He prepares To sing the Toils of each revolving Year: Those endless Toils, which always grow anew, And the poor Thresher's destin'd to pursue (8-10)n

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This larger pattern of repetition leaves Duck (and his language) cold. The abstract Toils' are plural, and predictably repeated. As the years revolve, he is left pursuing this abstraction, never quite there, never himself part of the action. How different a few lines later, when he can actually get to work and show us what he can do - agriculturally and poetically: Divested of our Cloaths, with Flail in Hand, At a just Distance, Front to Front we stand; And first the Threshall's gently swung, to prove, Whether with just Exactness it will move: That once secure, more quick we whirl them round, From the strong Planks our Crab-Tree Staves rebound, And echoing Barns return the rattling Sound. Now in the Air our knotty Weapons fly; And now with equal Force descend from high: Down one, one up, so well they keep the Time, The Cyclops Hammers could not truer chime (31-41)

The chiming and timing are true. The controlled energy is palpable, and Duck delights in the precise mechanical repetition. He has a sure sense of rhythm and symmetry - which are as important in threshing as in poetry.12 The lines themselves move with a 'just Exactness'; the two threshers, 'Front to Front,' work well together like the couplet, whose caesuras are similarly 'at a just Distance,' and once the movement is 'secure' the pulse of the threshing quickens like the rhythm of the verse. It is all effectively held in balance so as to achieve the right effect - the flails rise and descend 'with equal Force.' The threshers, facing each other in the barn, are a single contained unit. They set their own rhythm without reference to any exterior scheme. But things are subtly different when Duck is outside in the fields in summer, scything the hay. Now he begins to measure himself against the slower rhythms of the working day, and a note of weariness emerges as the reapers resume their accustomed place: Our Time slides on, we move from off the Grass, And each again betakes him to his Place. Not eager now, as late, our Strength to prove, But all contented regular to move: Often we whet, as often view the Sun, To see how near his tedious Race is run. (143-8)

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Keeping time in the threshing-barn was an expression of his energy and control. Here out in the fields time seems to stretch out lazily, and the pulse of the reaping is lower - still 'regular,' but now repeatedly interrupted by, and in tension with, the sun's implacable progress. In Duck's poem the slow, all-embracing repetitions of day, season, and year seem to sap his energies rather than support him and justify his aching limbs. It is no surprise, then, at the end of the poem, with the harvest-supper over, that Duck contemplates his annual routine in purely negative terms. He had found heroic energy in the repeated moment, even a contented regularity in the slower rhythms of reaping; but the revolving year finally makes him repetition's victim. He begins to understand how an eternal dynamic system seems to absorb his individual energies into itself, feeding off him and surreptitiously draining him of his personal identity, his own vivid language: ... the next Morning soon reveals the Cheat, When the same Toils we must again repeat: To the same Barns again must back return, To labour there for room for next Year's Corn. Thus, as the Year's revolving Course goes round, No respite from our Labour can be found: Like Sysiphus, our Work is never done, Continually rolls back the restless Stone: (273-81)

At the moment the rural year turns and the farmer contemplates his annual returns, Duck becomes acutely conscious of his own imminent return to the starting-point.13 He has moved from hero to victim. He doesn't rejoice in being part of a divine order, his toil redeemed by its place in the greater scheme. Quite the reverse. To the man who surveys the scene from above, this 'revolving Course' is a providential cycle of sowing and harvesting; but now back at day one, Duck understands that he is part of someone else's wider agenda ('that which is to be enacted'). This larger pattern remains out of his reach, and his response is exhaustion and frustration. Only when he can take some control (however localized) will he throw this off. It is the immediate repetitive rhythms he sets for himself that bring him to life. They become expressive of his own nature - not of an abstract (capitalized) 'Nature.' We know Stephen Duck had a small library of books that included Dryden's Virgil (1697), and his final vision of the 'Year's revolving Course' develops Virgil's comment on the labourer's lot in the second Georgia 'Thus in a Circle runs the Peasant's Pain, / And the Year rowls within it

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self again' (as Dryden's translation has it) ,14 But the undoing of his work, the continual rolling back, also seems to owe something to the passage in the first book, where Virgil's farmer is seen as fighting against the odds, repeatedly resisting the depredations of pests and the general tendency in nature towards degeneration, reversing all that has been achieved - in the words of a modern translation of the Georgics: 'So it is: for everything by nature's law / Tends to the worse, slips ever backward, backward.'15 Dryden's version continues: Thus all below, whether by Nature's Curse, Or Fate's Decree, degen'rate still to worse. So the Boat's brawny Crew the Current stem, And, slow advancing, struggle with the Stream: But if they slack their Hands, or cease to strive, Then down the Flood with headlong haste they drive. (I, 288-93)

For Duck, too, nature is continually turning back. Unlike Tatersal, he has no neat wall to be proud of. All has to be done again. As a farm labourer he is a victim of the same reversal as Thomas Hood's seamstress ('Seam, and gusset, and band, / Band, and gusset, and seam'). Forward and backward, forward and backward. That recoil pattern, the sense that Nature and Time are unravelling everything, becomes the principle against which labour repeatedly asserts itself. It has to confront a counterdynamic of reversal, a turning in (en-tropy) that is the opposite of en-ergy. In such a context, all work is a mode of repetition, a resistance to the natural dissipation of the intense energies of human work. For Duck, the dissipating principle, the entropy of his system, is represented by the women, who invade the hayfield just before breaktime and sit around chattering. He speculates that 'were their Hands as active as their Tongues, / How nimbly then would move their Rakes and Prongs' (169-70). All their energies seem to be channelled into their 'noisy Prattle' ('the brisk Chat renew'd, a-fresh goes round' [176]), and they compete with each other in a parody of the male rivalries we have witnessed during the reaping ('they bravely all go on, / Each scorns to be, or seem to be, outdone' [183-4]). An answer to Duck (and an answer was definitely needed) came from Mary Collier, the Hampshire washerwoman, who took it upon herself to 'vindicate [her] injured Sex.'16 In her epistle to Duck, The Woman's Labour (1739), she systematically counters his charges while showing that his manly work is in fact dependent on the female's, that besides helping

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in the fields, the woman is also the driving force of the domestic economy on which the whole system depends. If he comes home at the end of the day to his bacon and dumplings, who does he think has cooked them? Her energies literally supply his. Thanks to the woman's labours the man is able to settle into the repeated rhythms of his day: We all Things for your coming Home prepare: You sup, and go to Bed without delay, And rest yourselves till the ensuing Day; While we, alas! but little Sleep can have, Because our froward Children cry and rave (110-14)

They are two contrasting routines. If Duck's is more structured and focused, Collier implies, it is because women like her take the wider strain, and meet incessant demands from many directions ('Had we ten Hands, we could employ them all' [108]). Her poem is therefore less tightly structured than his, as she turns her attention to various jobs, each with a different context. There is none of Duck's temporal structuring of hour, day, month, and year. Collier must continually adapt herself to one regime after the other - as housewife, farmworker, hired cleaner - and each job sets a different clock. In her arrangement of words there is tense uncertainty rather than a natural rhythm: With heavy Hearts we often view the Sun, Fearing he'll set before our Work is done; For either in the Morning, or at Night, We piece the Summer'?, Day with Candle-light. Tho' we all Day with Care our Work attend, Such is our Fate, we know not when 'twill end: When Ev'ning's come, you Homeward take your Way, We, till our Work is done, are forc'd to stay (190-7)

Collier's work sustains several systems at once, while being not fully synchronized with nature. What unites her with Duck, however, is her own constant struggle against entropy. If Duck compared himself with Sysiphus, then women, she says, are like the Danaids, the sisters whose punishment in the underworld was having to fill leaking vessels continually with water - 'Our Toil increases as the Year runs Round' (238), she concludes.17 Collier's relationship with the sun, that marker of daily and yearly

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repetition, is an uncomfortable one. Instead of being an ally who signals the end of her day, he represents her alienation from natural rhythms, a symbol of the rest and renewal that are denied her. The labouring-class poet can write powerfully about exclusion, uneasiness, frustration, and discomfort, because each of these is a function of his/her misalignment to symbolic structures, to notions of reassuring pattern or satisfying completion. It is not that the worker is unaware of such meanings, but that he/she occupies an awkward, occasionally recalcitrant, position in the interpretive scheme. This can sometimes be a matter of physical location. In place of a satisfying comprehension (seeing life steadily and seeing it whole) there is a strong unaccommodating quality, a refusal to write from the expected viewpoint. It is evident from the very title of John Bancks's poem, 'Fragment of an Ode to Boreas, made while the Author sold Books in an Alley,' that his interpretive angle will be an oblique one: In vain upon the distant Tiles The God of Day indulgent Smiles! His Influence I should never know, But for the Drops of melted Snow. The melted Snow beneath my Feet Still makes thy Empire more compleat My aged Shoes, not Water proof, Admit those Droppings of the Roof.18 (41-8)

The repetition across the stanza-break signals the way the passage shifts between distant symbol and physically invasive reality. The 'melted Snow' finds its way to him on the dark side of the street, as a palpable thing. What the 'God of Day' offers on the far rooftops as a warm smile, he feels as dampness. The God's in-fluence (intentionally or not) becomes an unmistakeable flowing in. Into a single line (42) the poet packs three of the providential symbols from Thomson's Seasons (the 'powerful King of Day,' Summer, 81; 'indulgent Heaven,' Spring, 1145; and 'the general Smile / Of Nature,' Spring, 871), only to reposition and recategorize them. Bancks doesn't have a lofty enough vantage point to appreciate the grandeur of the monarch's 'Empire': he just feels its immediate impact on himself. The awkwardness here is less a poetic failure than an ironic resistance to Thomson's optimistic regime. Being simultaneously a georgic and a deistical theodicy, Thomson's

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Seasons is characterized by a tension between daily human necessities and the divine scheme. The Hesiodic passage on 'these iron Times' and the celebration in Autumn of human physical activity ('Industry! rough Power! / Whom Labour still attends, and Sweat, and Pain' [43-4]) is countered by visions of the divine workman occupied with labour of a transcendent kind who sustains the 'mysterious Round' and keeps the 'rolling Year' in motion: 'Man marks not THEE, marks not the mighty Hand, / That ever-busy, wheels the silent Spheres' ('Hymn on the Seasons,' 29-30). Which of these is actually keeping the system going: the worker or the supervisor? What can be seen as contradiction, however, may be Thomson's acknowledgment of the different gears within the vast machine of the universe - the interlocking of human energies and divine dynamics - that it is the poet's privilege to see. As the cycle of the year, and of his long poem, comes to an end, Thomson reaches for a universal perspective, and treats the symbolism of the year's turn in redemptive terms, lifting us out of the annual cycle to the viewpoint of 'PROVIDENCE, that ever-waking Eye,' which 'Looks down with Pity on the feeble Toil / Of Mortals' (Winter, 1020-2). For him, the annual rebirth of nature is a portent of the life to come, of 'The great eternal Scheme / Involving All, and in a perfect Whole / Uniting' (1046-8). Thomson moves, in other words, from the second Georgic to the fourth Eclogue, where Virgil had evoked that longest repetition of all, the return to the Age of Gold. This is Dryden again: The last great Age, foretold by sacred Rhymes, Renews its finish'd Course, Saturnicm times Rowl round again, and mighty Years, begun From their first Orb, in radiant Circles run. (5-8)

This so-called 'Great Year' seems a long way from Mary Collier's feeling of running around in circles, yet of all the rhythms of the universe, from the pulse beat, the 'Tuck and Pat,' outwards, this is the all-embracing one, the renewing of the cycle of ages. Stephen Duck's heart would sink at the thought. The georgic poem is at home with such ironies. As a 'mixed' genre characterized by its capaciousness and a willingness to embrace growth and development, the georgic accommodates varied rhythms. Unlike the repetitions of pastoral (a genre that finds its ironies in repeated scenic superimpositions and revisitings), georgic's routines are seldom free of specific pressures and constraints: new challenges and disturbing

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contingencies are always waiting to disrupt the pulse of life. Regularity is a struggle, and any poise is only momentary. If pastoral endlessly revisits the Garden of Eden, then georgic, from its location in a fallen landscape of decay and corruption, has to retrieve repeatable strategies from a world of experience where decay and death have entered. For the georgic poet, no less than for the labourer poet, the entropic principle (often linked to seasonal change, another result of the Fall) checks and reverses human activity. Well-tried ways of countering it need to be passed on. Christopher Smart, in The Hop-Garden (1743-4?) advises on how best to store hop-poles over the winter, and his answer is To stack the poles oblique in comely cones, / Lest rot or rain destroy them.' In this way they should be reusable the following spring. Smart is tackling the same problem that had faced Hesiod twenty-five hundred years earlier when he wrote about laying up a boat during winter: 'Pull the ship on to land and pack it with stones ... taking out the plug so that heaven's rains do not cause rot.'19 Prudential routines of this kind are important in georgic, particularly when rot, blight, or pests are waiting to frustrate even the most careful management. On the model of Virgil's Georgics, passages on disease or depredation seem necessary to create the counterforce against which georgic labour is repeatedly tested through time.20 In Works and Days, the wr-text of the georgic tradition, repetitions represent both a build-up of human experience over many generations and an acknowledgment of the interdependent forces that keep our world going. Both contribute to the interlocking patterns and correspondences on which its advice is based. From the temporal perspective the reader is conscious of natural cycles into which human activity fits at propitious moments. If we are waiting, for example, to set out on a sea voyage in spring and want to know when to embark, then Hesiod tells us: 'As soon as the size of the crow's footprint is matched by the aspect of the leaves on the end of the fig-branch, then the sea is suitable for embarcation.' To be successful, an action should conform to the tempo of nature rather than be a matter of individual decision, impulse, or initiative. 'You must,' says Hesiod, 'attend to all tasks in season.'21 It is the georgic imperative, and under its guidance human labour can draw support from the congenial principle ('congenial' in the sense of 'jointly creative') by which specific qualities or tendencies in things (climate or soil quality, for example) can help to forward our endeavours. All things have their 'season,' and success comes from knowing what is congenial to a task. This is not a matter of personal observation or empirical

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experience, but rather of 'experience' as an inherited body of knowledge based on patterns of repetition, cause and effect, trial and error. Virgil's second georgic offers the accumulated knowledge of many generations, a result of reading signs and knowing the 'ancient skills,' Virgil's res antiquae laudis et artis (Georgics, 2, 174). The relationship between the crow's footprint, the sprouting fig branch, and the spring tides was clearly not something Hesiod noticed for himself. It is an extreme example of a tendency that is an inherited feature of much eighteenth-century georgic, the offering of practical advice based on custom. The georgic poet tends to say, 'this is what time and experience have shown to be the best method' rather than 'you might just try this ...' Some eighteenth-century georgic poets do describe new methods and machinery, but these tend to be seen as collaborative and enabling, rather than as setting a fresh agenda and forcing a rethink of tradition.22 Repeatability is the keynote. In writing his poem Cyder (1708), about apple-growing and cider-making, John Philips reassures the reader that his advice has been culled from 'sage Experience' (1, 326) - in other words, it has worked for others time after time - and the same phrase is reused in both Dodsley's Agriculture (1753) and Grainger's Sugar-Cane (1764), and occurs three times in Joseph Warton's verse translation of the Georgics (1753).23 This concept of tested replication is attuned to slower habitual rhythms. The very nature of Hesiod's material is based on the assumption that this is so, has always been so, and that the gods have ordered it as 'best practice' - the phrase is Hesiod's coinage.24 Before unfolding his seafaring knowledge to us (not unlike those modern purveyors of 'best practice'), he explains that he himself has never been to sea, but once won a major poetry prize. Individual skill is of less value than knowledge of the gods, because they give human actions meaning. They require customary procedures that are known to be right and good, whereas human opportunism affronts Zeus and disrupts the proper order of things. Stretching behind Hesiod, as M.L. West has shown, is the ancient tradition of 'wisdom' literature traceable through Babylonian and Egyptian instructional texts to the Bible,25 so that it is possible to follow eighteenth-century georgic back to Sumerian advice manuals and to find links, for example, with the Solomonic wisdom of Ecclesiastes: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: / A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted' (3:1-2). Such repetitions are an inherent part of the layered history of the georgic. As Virgil remarks: 'Thus can we forecast weather, though the

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sky / Be doubtful, thus the time to reap or sow, / When best to impel the treacherous sea with oars / ... For not in vain we watch the constellations, / Their risings and their settings, not in vain / The fourfold seasons of the balanced year' (Georgics, 1, 252-8). Within this larger ordering, human energies work best when they are harnessed to practical objectives and have a degree of discipline. When Virgil tells the farmer in the second georgic how to plant his vines, order, repetition, and custom are combined in one idea of regularity: exactly Each avenue between the trees must square With each cross-path ... so let all Your vineyard be drawn up in regular Formation, rank and file spaced equally26

Here in Virgil is that other aspect of repetition-as-custom, regimen (or regiment, to use the common variant), the notion of a 'governing' principle that maintains order within a system. Virgil's military allusion offers a benign image of peacetime cultivation after the horrors of civil war, which he had pictured at the close of his first georgic. The phalanx of vines restores the land to proper government and fruitful prospects. Reworking this image in The Hop-Garden, Smart compares his regularly spaced hop-poles to ranks of soldiers that 'seem to march along th'extensive plain.' For him they evoke the Kentish resistance in Norman times: 'In neat arrangement thus the men of Kent, / With native oak at once adorn'd and arm 'd, / Intrepid march'd' (1, 355-7). Georgic work can be viewed as harnessing potentially violent energies in order to sustain culture and cultivate what will sustain us. A proper regimen, based on regular habits, was also thought important for the human body. John Armstrong, in The Art of Preserving Health (1744), that most original of georgic poems which treats the body as something to be cultivated with as much care as Virgil's grapes, sees physical work as a healthy routine that tones up the labourer's body, 'His habit pure with plain and temperate meals, / Robust with labour, and by custom steel'd / To every casualty of varied life' (3, 27-9). In these lines Armstrong brings together three crucial ideas between which the traditional georgic poem steers its way - custom, 'casualty' (i.e., accident), and variety. 'Toil and be strong,' he advises, 'By toil the flaccid nerves / Grow firm, and gain a more compacted tone' (3, 39-40). What seems 'the kindest regimen' (3, 300), he says, is not always the best, and he

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recommends regularly repeated 'Exercise' - not sudden bursts of energy, but a sustained habitual routine, an awareness of the regular ticking of the body's clock: ... pliant nature more or less demands, As custom forms her; and all sudden change She hates of habit, even from bad to good ... Slow may the change arrive, and stage by stage; Slow as the shadow o'er the dial moves, Slow as the stealing progress of the year. (3, 464-71) Here is Armstrong attuning himself to the organic rhythms of georgic. The body is part of nature, and should ideally be synchronized with its more measured patterns. It was remarked earlier that the georgic poem is more concerned with custom and experience than with innovation; but there is a notable exception in John Dyer's The Fleece (1757). In this poem about sheeprearing and the wool trade, we begin to feel the implications of the gathering Industrial Revolution. Dyer himself is comfortable with the repetitions of the rural year, and most of his poem celebrates the customary and regular, to the extent that he can compress the cycle of arable labour into just seven cursory lines. The round of work goes on, from day to day, Season to season. So the husbandman Pursues his cares; his plough divides the glebe; The seed is sown; rough rattle o'er the clods The harrow's teeth; quick weeds his hoe subdues; The sickle labours, and the slow team strains; Till grateful harvest-home rewards his toils. (3, 177-83) The 'round of work' has become so rapid and compressed that the 'toils' hardly register; but if we detect a tension here between the timelessness of the scene and the pace at which it moves past us, it is because cerealgrowing is not Dyer's main concern. Elsewhere in book 3 he attunes himself sympathetically to the ancient skills of the village women who sit patiently in their cottages at their spinning wheels, eye and hand in practised coordination as they 'guide and stretch the gently-less'ning thread' (3, 57). However, just a few pages later there enters on the scene an invader from another world: Lewis Paul's roller spinning machine

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(the very latest 1750s technology).27 When Dyer celebrates the new mechanism as a triumph of ergonomic efficiency, he pushes towards parody all I have said in this essay about the relationship between the pulse of human work and the slower rhythms of nature: We next are shown A circular machine, of new design, In conic shape: it draws and spins a thread Without the tedious toil of needless hands. A wheel, invisible, beneath the floor, To ev'ry member of th'harmonious frame Gives necessary motion. One, intent, O'erlooks the work: the carded wool, he says, Is smoothly lapp'd around those cylinders, Which, gently turning, yield it to yon cirque Of upright spindles, which, with rapid whirl, Spin out, in long extent, an even twine. (3, 291-302)

Here the man is detached from physical work. The single figure just 'o'erlooks,' as the machine runs through its endlessly repetitive motions. The 'tedious toil' of humanity has been replaced by the spindles' 'rapid whirl,' quicker than any human pulse can measure. The circles move continuously, their different speeds perfectly synchronized. The solitary 'intent' man indicates 'yon cirque' as if pointing to the heavens. We notice how this system of 'necessary motion' has been naturalized in georgic fashion, unproblematically fitted into Thomson's universe of Newtonian providence — only here the 'harmonious frame' is made of wood and metal. A new regime has arrived, but it still feels the need to repeat the old reassuring patterns. Dyer's vision of machines transforming laborious repetition into sublime motion was of course a deceptive one. The division of labour in factory work would impose tighter schedules on its human labour force, and by the early 1800s, with the blank-verse georgic a thing of the past, it is the insistent rhythm of the ballad that seems best attuned to the experience of industrial work. One aspect of the relationship between lyric and labour in the nineteenth century, as investigated by Anne Janowitz, is the 'communitarian' aspect of ballad rhythm, with its 'oral stress' that finds in lyric poetry not a solitary inwardness but 'a possibility for collective, embedded experience.'28 It also creates a sound to march to. This brings us full circle back to the voice of Thomas Hood, a balladeer who sensed keenly the tramp-tramp of early Victorian progress.

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At the close of his poem The Workhouse Clock,'29 he expresses a longing to escape time's regimentation and return to a more natural rhythm of life: Oh! that the Parish Powers, Who regulate Labour's hours, The daily amount of human trial, Weariness, pain, and self-denial, Would turn from the artificial dial That striketh ten or eleven, • And go, for once, by that older one That stands in the light of Nature's sun, And takes its time from Heaven! (77-85) But, as we have seen, some eighteenth-century labourers could find heaven's clock also tyrannical. If Hood's ending is an unreal, even wistful one, it is partly an attempt to transcend another rhythm that his poem has made us hear, an insistant pulse that gets louder and louder as he records the London poor moving through the streets and converging into a tide of exploited humanity: Leaving shuttle, and needle, and wheel, Furnace, and grindstone, spindle, and reel, Thread, and yarn, and iron, and steel Yea, rest and the yet untasted meal Gushing, rushing, crushing along, A very torrent of Man! Urged by the sighs of sorrow and wrong, Grown at last to a hurricane strong, Stop its course who can! Stop who can its onward course And irresistible moral force (40-50) In these lines we begin to hear another rhythm gathering momentum the sound of the 1840s. Notes 1 Lines 17-24. Thomas Hood's 'Song of the Shirt' first appeared in the Christmas 1843 issue of Punch (16 December) (hereinafter all poetry is cited in the text by line number).

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2 'Hues of the rich unfolding morn,' in John Keble, The Christian Year (1827) . Stanzas were extracted from it to form the hymn 'New every morning is the love.' See J.R. Watson, The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 328-34. 3 Both much repeated phrases, taken from Homer (passim) and Milton,

Lycidas (1637), 26. 4 The stanza containing these lines in Hood's manuscript was first printed in 1906. See Selected Poems of Thomas Hood, ed.John Clubbe (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 389-90. 5 The unit was established by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1873 Report, p. 224). See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. 'erg.' 6 Hesiod, Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M.L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 42. 7 James Thomson, Spring, incorporated into The Seasons (1730) 272-308, 318. 8 The Bricklayer's Miscellany. The Second Part. Containing Poems on Several Subjects. Written by Robert Tatersal, Of Kingston upon Thames, Bricklayer (London: Printed for the Author, 1735), ii-iv. 9 'Flemish bond' is a bricklaying technique 'in which each course consists of alternate "headers" and "stretchers."' (Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. 'bond'). 10 See the frontispiece to Duck's Poems on Several Subjects (1730), engraver unknown. It is reproduced as the frontispiece to William J. Christmas, The Lab 'ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebeian Poetry, 1730-1830 (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2001). 1 1 Quotations are taken from the first edition of Poems on Several Subjects (1730). The poem was revised for the first authorized edition of Poems on Several Occasions ( 1 736) . 12 As a shoemaker's apprentice in the 1770s, the poet William Gifford recalled, his earliest verses were 'beat out on pieces of leather as smooth as possible ... with a blunted awl.' See Bridget Keegan, 'Cobbling Verse: Shoemaker Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century,' The Eighteenth Century 42 (2001), 195-217, at 201. 13 John Goodridge notes how Duck exposes the 'cheat' at the moment when one annual rural cycle ends and the next begins: 'the next and the previous cycles in the story of eternal toil which is Duck's central theme - are being rapidly forgotten' (Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 78). 14 Georgics, 2, 556-7, in The Works of Virgil (6th ed., 1730), vol. 1, 261. Dryden translates Virgil's 2, 401-2. 15 Virgil, The Georgics, trans. L.P. Wilkinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 63. The passage is Georgics, 1, 199-203.

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16 'Remarks,' prefaced to Collier's The Woman's Labour: An Epistle to Mr. Stephen Duck; In Answer to his late Poem, called The Thresher's Labour (London, 1739). 17 For a reading of Duck and Collier that stresses 'their shared sense of the oppressive, exploitative practices surrounding early eighteenth-century labour,' see Christmas, TheLab'ringMuses, 63-129. 18 Poems on Several Occasions ... None of them ever before printed. ByJ. Bancks (London: Printed for the Author, [1733]), 168. John Bancks (1709-51) published several volumes of verse, including The Weaver's Miscellany (1730). See Christmas, The Lab'ring Muses, 96-106. 19 Theogony and Works and Days, 55. 20 In The Fleece (1757), 1, 251-320, John Dyer discusses sheep diseases at some length, and James Grainger devotes most of book 2 of The Sugar-Cane (1764) to the various disasters that face the planter. See Goodridge, Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 144-52; and John Gilmore, The Poetics of Empire (London: Athlone, 2000), 244-64. 21 Theogony and Works and Days, 56. 22 In The Hop-Garden Smart recommended the very latest ventilating fans for use in hop kilns. See Chris Mounsey, 'Christopher Smart's The Hop-Garden and John Philips's Cyder, a Battle of the Georgics? Mid-Eighteenth-Century Prose Discussions of Authority, Science and Experience,' British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1999): 67-84, (at 77). In Agriculture (1753) Robert Dodsley attacked the 'New Husbandry' advocated byjethro Tull, who in his Horse-hoing Husbandry (1733) had dismissed Virgil as a practical guide. 23 Philips, Cyder, 1, 326; Dodsley, Agriculture, 2, 50; Grainger, The Sugar-Cane, 2, 239; Joseph Warton (trans.), Georgics, 2, 29; 3, 556; 3, 675. 24 'For this was the rule for men that Kronos' son [= Zeus] laid down ... to men he gave Right, which is much the best in practice. For if a man is willing to say what he knows to be just, to him wide-seeing Zeus gives prosperity' (Works and Days, 45). 25 Hesiod: Works and Days, ed. M.L. West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 3-25. 26 The Georgics, 86 (Virgil's 2, 277-84). The poet explains that this ensures all the plants have equal access to water - the practical explanation shows we are no longer in Hesiod's world. 27 Lewis Paul (d. 1759), of Birmingham, patented his roller spinning machine in 1738 and a modified version in 1758. 28 Annejanowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7. 29 First published in Hood's Monthly Magazine and Comic Miscellany, April 1844. See Selected Poems, ed. Clubbe, 391.

chapter eight

Seven Reasons for Rhyme J. PAUL HUNTER

Despite centuries of prestige and pleasure-giving in many languages and cultures, rhyme seldom gives satisfaction now, not to poets, not to readers. Poets have, for most of a century, preferred to do without it, often mocking the earlier hunger for it,1 and readers - conditioned perhaps by contemporary writing practice - have more and more found rhymed poetry disappointing, puzzling, and difficult. That kind of hearing loss, which sometimes afflicts historical and even scholarly readers, contributed, during the second half of the twentieth century, to a larger slippage in the taste for poetry generally. School and university classrooms then came more and more to feature prose works of various kinds - the novel in particular gained enormous historical ground at the expense of verse - and the contents of critical and scholarly journals shifted sharply in their focus; poetry became more and more a minority issue, accorded shrinking attention, with a consequent loss of interest in a host of traditional poetic strategies, including rhyme. That could be changing, in a slow and modest way. Over the past decade, younger students in particular have again become interested in poetry - perhaps part of a revival of attention to formal issues more generally - and journals and conferences have begun to revise their profiles as well.2 Traditional poetry, which usually means rhymed poetry of some kind, is not yet the most pressing of literary subjects, but it may be time to reconsider issues such as rhyme that have long gone thin in serious critical discourse.3 My aim here is not to argue that rhyme needs resurrecting in current poetry - modern and contemporary poets have developed a rich array of sound and lineational devices to accomplish many of the traditional functions in different ways - but to make traditional rhymed poetry

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more attractive and understandable to present-day readers. Despite the almost ritualistic linking of rhyme to reason - in tradition, in phrase, in habit, in book titles, and almost everywhere in cultural consciousness rhyme has seldom been allowed to have its reasons. I want to delineate, partly by recalling older insights and partly by pressing in different critical directions, seven separate reasons for the use of rhyme, suggesting how older functions are still available to alert, sensitive, and aggressive readers. These reasons point to functions that often overlap, interact, and (at their best) converge, but I want to think about them separately in order to suggest the variety of things, involving both sound and sense, that rhyme has regularly accomplished during its long and almost hegemonic - though constantly challenged - dominance. Rhyme virtually defined the non-dramatic poetic traditions of most languages and cultures for a very long time - in most cases for many centuries. But not forever, it is worth remembering: rhyme is a relative latecomer among poetic strategies and devices. In the ancient poetries from which modern European poetry takes its cues - Greek and Latin primarily, but in lesser ways Hebrew and Chinese - rhyme can sometimes be found, but it is not a common or significant phenomenon; instances are mainly incidental and quite inconsistent. It is thus very strange that in English, by the early seventeenth century, rhyme became obligatory for the translation of ancient literary classics; it seemed to poets then to signal, much against historical reality, a seriousness, dignity, and authority that the classics offered to modernity, but the logic was entirely based on what rhyme had by then become in cultural expectation rather than on linguistic parallel or precedent.4 How rhyme attained that status, out of sporadic, ragtag practices over intervening centuries, is not only an untold story but (at least now) an untellable one. What is really impressive is what we do not know about how Slavic, German, Italian, French, and English verse came, for a long time, to adopt rhyme as virtually essential. In fact, in spite of extensive comparative linguistic study, especially during the period of structuralist dominance in the early to midtwentieth century, we have hardly more than a notion of where rhyme came from and how it gained its influence. The history is sketchy and the relationships and patterns of transmission are unclear. There is the enduring power of rhyme in Arabic, a lot of rhyme in the Persian tradition actually dating in some scattered forms back to several hundred years BC, a rapid global spreading of rhyme during the Middle Ages, a thickening and geographically expanding set of uses worldwide after that: we know these broad trends, but with little particularity.

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Perhaps the Western adoption of rhyme from Chinese or Persian or maybe Arabic, we are not sure; or perhaps independent hatches of rhyme in different places and languages at different times, without direct influence.5 What is clear is that from a position of no importance in early poetry, rhyme began to dominate worldwide by the early modern period; it held that commanding place for several centuries (different periods in different languages), then in the early twentieth century began to lose its hold and (again, pretty much worldwide) retreated to a position of almost no importance and finally little notice. Rhyme was, then, once (and for a long time) ubiquitous in the poetry of almost all languages - and virtually hegemonic in anglophone poetry (which is my chief reference point here). T.V.F. Brogan notes that in the original edition (1900) of the Oxford Book of English Verse, 867 of 883 poems were in some form of rhyme.6 Only over the last century has rhyme become a pariah in poetry; for five-sixths of the modern English tradition, rhyme ruled firmly, even though almost constantly under challenge. How to understand a historical phenomenon that was that powerful and, earlier and later, that weak? And how to explain its usefulness and its power? I

The four most commonly agreed on reasons for rhyme involve memory, emphasis, ornament, and structure, and I want to think briefly about these traditional functions before preceding to three more-problematic ones. All four of these functions are in some sense indisputable, but the most common representations of each are flawed by simplifications and a persistent desire for a one-size-fits-all or a one-function-invalidates-therest theory. For each of these four functions, I wish to suggest some clarification and modification of the usual formulation. Rhyme as a mnemonic aid is perhaps the function easiest to understand and illustrate. Nursery rhymes, folk poems, and oral and formulaic verses and ditties suggest that echoic sound patterns produce something close to a memory trigger. Apparently, sound repetition or near-repetition - even in publicist phrases and journalistic nicknames like 'the rumble in the jungle' (for the Foreman-Ali title fight) or King Kong Keller or Stan the Man Musial (for baseball stars)7 - makes things easier to remember for many people, and it may have been more significant in cultures more oral (and less written) than ours, especially in times when facts needed to be memorized in order to be accessible because it was physically difficult to look things up. We know, for example, that in earlytwentieth-century Croatia, folk poems were created describing how to

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start a tractor (a highly pragmatic use of both poetry and rhyme),8 and we know that preliterate children in a wide variety of rural and urban cultures create mnemonics using sound-alikes, echoes, and near-repetitions. Things seem to be easier to access in our heads if they hang on pegs of sound similarity and pattern. Here, for example is a little rhyme that I still remember from childhood. My father was a clergyman, more or less of an enlightened persuasion, and once when I was about six or seven a visiting clergyman of less liberal views occupied my father's pulpit. The visitor was wildly outraged by scientific accounts of evolution (and strongly anti-intellectual in general), and he cited or made up this memorable verse about the evolutionary chain: First he was a tadpole, beginning to begin; Then he was a froggy with his tail tucked in; Then he was a monkey in a bamboo tree; Now he's my professor with a Ph.D.

I've never been able to forget it, and I got a lot of mileage out of it in high school biology, so rhyme perhaps served its mnemonic purposes here, although I can also imagine other, more subjective reasons why the verse may have stuck. But note too that there's a lot of elementary associationism suggested (or at least conditioned) by the rhyme and that other sound patterns are powerful. It's not just the comically odd D of 'degree' with 'tree,' but the whole phrase, rhythm, accent, spondaic line endings, and juxtaposing of cultures that make it work. Rhyming 'Ph.D.' with 'bamboo tree' has the effect of yoking together (by positing contrast) supposed educational sophistication with primitive places and cultures. Substance as well as sound is at work here, though not necessarily in a reasonable or admirable way; academic appreciation of the final rhyme depends on a perceived irony, whereas other audiences wish to perceive the association as insight. In any case, rhyme here is not the only reason for memorability, and insofar as it is a reason, the process is far more complicated than a term like 'trigger' suggests. Rhymed poetry has of course produced a wealth of memorable lines as has blank verse, and perhaps to a lesser extent (or less agreed upon extent) free verse. Any reader of poetry can think of countless examples and may believe that rhyme is crucial in remembering them. Alexander Pope's quotability - he gets dozens of entries in every dictionary of quotations - is regularly trotted out as a classic example. I have no doubt that rhyme (and related echoic forms of near-repetition) helps slippery minds retain patterns and sometimes recover individual words that prompt

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phrases, but there are reasons to think that rhyme may not be, in itself or by itself, the crucial welder it is frequently said to be. In the first place, a lot of the most powerful quotations involve only fragments from a rhymed sequence, often leaving out the actual rhyme; single lines of a couplet are, for example, frequent as remembered wholes: Tor Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread' (Essay on Criticism, 625) 'To Err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine (Essay on Criticism, 525) 'Is it, in heav'n, a crime to love too well' ('Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' 6) 'At ev'ry Word a Reputation dies' (Rape of the Lock, 3.16) 'Charms strike the Sight, but Merit wins the Soul' (Rape of the Lock, 5.34) 'Hope springs eternal in the human breast' (Essay on Man, 1.95) 'The RIGHT DIVINE of Kings to govern wrong' (TheDunciad, 4:188)9

In cases like these, it cannot be that the memorability springs from the rhyme, and even in cases where rhyme may be an aid, as in many fully remembered couplets, the rhythm or metrical structure of the lines seems to be a factor at least equal to rhyme; almost certainly rhyme and rhythm work best in unison or cooperation. I know of no conclusive experiments proving the relative weights of different mnemonic factors, but informal tests are suggestive. In a variety of audiences from California to North Carolina and London to Germany to Istanbul, I have repeatedly quoted the famous single line of a couplet and asked the audience to supply the rhyming line. 'A little Learning is a dangerous thing' elicits 'Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring' nearly every time, often quoted in unison. But most other couplet one-liners produce no mate. My favourite is 'For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread'; only one listener ever was able to reproduce the rhyme and in fact the whole other line. (And it may be worth noting that almost all quoters from memory omit 'For' from the line, suggesting that metrics may also not be quite as powerful a factor as is usually thought.) Rhyme may help us remember, but it may be less directly causal than tradition has it; it seems to need a little help from its friends - metrical, rhetorical, and conceptual. II

A second function involves emphasis, the tendency of repetition to draw special attention to certain sounds and ultimately to particular words or

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phrases. Alliteration, especially when it involves words in close contiguity, famously (often notoriously) gives special cumulative force to the words linked in sound, and whether or not such a device promotes greater clarity, it plainly provides vocal emphasis that regulates and modifies the rhythms of the line and may alter meaning itself.10 At the very least, repetition of sound alters the 'music' in ways that have the effect of increasing volume or underlining vocal attention;11 often it appears to provide special clues to authorial desires and emphases and conclusions. Rhyme words almost inevitably call attention to themselves, partly because the regular chiming of sound seems to give them special status beyond that of alliteration or assonance and partly because their set position in a line - most often at the ends of lines and thus 'sealing' the ends of lines - gives them a 'place' status that draws both aural and visual attention. Even without end punctuation, the fact of a line ending tends to make oral readers pause noticeably, and the chiming effect of a second rhymed sound underscores the pause and suggests a vocal lingering. Placement (visual) and pause (aural) thus both tend to reinforce the sound repetition, with the result that rhyme words seem to have a special place in the vocabulary of the poem, often a place out of all proportion to their syntactical function, almost as if their special status gave them a separate semantics of their own. I will discuss later - as reason 6 - how the interaction of rhyme words can create its own special, simplistic, alogical syntax, but here I simply want to notice the isolation of each rhyme term - as if it had been singled out by the poet as an especially noteworthy word in itself. All this is pretty obvious: some words in any kind of discourse are positioned for special emphasis by one means or another (syntax, word order, punctuation, typographical devices such as italics or boldface, etc.), and often there is a high correlation between these stresses and key terms in the argument of the poem, an elemental case of sound enforcing meaning or even helping to create it. Rhyme, especially when backed by emphatic position at the end of a line, regularly participates in such strategy. The net effect is to give rhyme words a pole position and a privileged vocabulary status at the same time; rhyme words, perhaps more readily than most, can become key terms in the argument of the poem, though of course they can be manipulated not to be. What is perhaps more surprising is how often poets - especially talented and experienced poets anxious to keep some tension between sound and argument - fight, resist, subvert, or manipulate the tendency to make

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these terms central. Often a quick glance down the ends of rhymed lines yields a list of words that very nearly offer a brief review of the plot or argument of the poem. Here, for example, are the first sixteen rhyme terms in Pope's 'Epistle to a Lady': fall, all, bear, air, view, true, pride, side, man, Swan, cry, eye, shine, divine, saint it, paint it.12 They are not all 'giveaway' words (in the sense that they reveal the plot and argument), 'and a few seem irrelevant or parenthetical, yet one readily gets from this list as a whole a sense of the visual strategy and most of the issues in both gender and morality that inform the poem.13 But not the poem's key categories. Words like 'character,' 'mark,' 'soft,' and 'change' in fact never appear in a rhyme position in the whole poem; instead, they gain their central status by subtler means of placement, stress, and syntactic construction. The question of emphasis in rhymed verse is far more complicated and subtle than using rhyme to establish terms or hammer the memory. Ill

A third function of rhyme in traditional poetry involves decoration or ornament, sometimes defended vigorously as giving poetry its melodic harmony, aesthetic beauty, or at least its charm and luster; the argument is fundamentally one of rhyme for rhyme's sake. Most often, though (especially since the late eighteenth century),14 such a characterization represents at least indirectly a depreciation of rhyme: if it is a mere decoration or ornament, then it is surely superficial - an afterthought or trimming or frill or add-on, a kind of ribbon to prettify the package rather than a meaningful working component integral to the larger conception of the whole poem. To argue now for ornament as a legitimate function of rhyme is usually to trivialize - and quickly lose - the argument. And if ornament does simply mean surface decoration applied after the fact15 (i.e., after the conceptual process is essentially over) - if a poem is merely prose versified with the help of mechanical hearing aids - then rhyme's reason seems quite literally cosmetic, superficial, and arbitrary. In a sense, there is historically a reasonable basis for the idea of rhyme as added ornament, because the separate functions of poetry and prose were for a long time, from the early modern period into the nineteenth century, a good bit less agreed on. Often the long poems during this time - and these were the poems meant to create literary reputations were in effect treatises on serious subjects: political, philosophical, religious, mythological, historical, and geographical, sometimes with an

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epical, narrative, or descriptive direction, but even more often staged discursively as argument. Such are William Warner's Albion's England, Thomas Heywood's Troia Brittanica, or Great Britain's Troy, Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars, Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion, Abraham Cowley's Davideis, John Dryden's Religio Laid and The Hind and the Panther, Matthew Prior's Solomon on the Vanity of the World and Predestination, Henry Baker's The Universe, Henry Brooke's Universal Beauty, Walter Harte's Essay on Reason, Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, Edward Young's Love of Fame, and John Armstrong's The Art of Preserving Health. Many of these poems were more widely read in their own time than the shorter, anthology-fit ones we tend to read as 'representative' now, and if the poetic energy was mainly directed to the careful development of argument, a lot of attention also centred on making the poems sound attractive, weaving beauties into both the structure of argument and the language of expression. Many philosophers then and now have notoriously resented 'versifications,' as if the beauties of poetry somehow trivialized or weakened content and argumentative method, and Pope received abuse well beyond rational criticism for his thinking, especially in An Essay on Man. But even if the most obvious purpose of the rhyme was 'mere' decoration - a way to make hard concepts go down more easily - rhyme in poems like these did far more than provide a superficial stylishness or dressing.16 The sense of ornament at work in these poems (and in most good poems, long or short) is in fact a different, far more complex concept than most discussions of ornament over the last two centuries rely on. But recently there has been an effort to resurrect the classic sense that ornament, to be satisfactory in its total effect, has to proceed out of a central, integral, and holistic conceptual frame - that when conceived as trimming or afterthought or 'mere' decoration, it defeats or trivializes a sense of beauty, but can, if it proceeds naturally, seamlessly, and fully from a core understanding of the whole, provide both intellectual enhancement and deep aesthetic satisfaction. This is the deep sense of ornament crucially at work in early modern and eighteenth-century texts, as in titles like Christianity the Great Ornament of Human Life (1701). Very recent scholarly work on ornament has, in fact, stressed the centrality in design17 and, in quest of a way to lay aside the superficial implications of the term, gone back to its classic roots. George Hersey, for example, in The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi, notes that 'the word ornament, in origin, has little to do with beauty. It means something or someone that has been equipped or prepared, like a hunter, soldier, or priest.... The word has implications of honor, achievement, religious duty,'18 and Kent

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Bloomer insists on the concept of 'figuration' as central to the term, arguing that 'the term ornament, by most accounts, originated inside the Greek term Kosmos.'1^ Definitions of the term of course varied wildly over the centuries (as did evaluations of the seriousness and implications of the concept), and there are plenty of early modern precedents for devaluing the idea, but it is important to recognize that 'ornament' has respectable and serious associations as well as superficial ones. Some of the modern distaste for rhyme no doubt derives from common and superficial decorative uses in popular ditties, commercials, and sentimental greetings - where word pairings are predictable, cliched, and tiresome and where the tinkling and jingling regularity of sounds often seems more tedious or grating than soothing or pleasing. Thoughtless, automatic, and predictable pairing gives rhyme a bad name; the hallmark of cliched verse is a series of staple, overworked pairings corrupted by excessive predictability and designed for easy, thoughtless listening - 'moon' rhymes with 'June' or 'tune,' 'beauty' with 'duty,' 'treasure' with 'pleasure,' 'romance' with 'dance,' 'glance,' or 'France' but never with 'pants' (except perhaps as a verb). Only 'tuneful Fools' (as Pope reminds us) admire it: Where-e'er you find the cooling Western Breeze, In the next Line, it whispers thro the Trees', If Chrystal Streams with phasing Murmurs creep, The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep. (Essay on Criticism, 11. 350—3)

When rhyme is judged by its worst practitioners, it loses both the resonance and edge that the deeper sense of ornament embodies. To give a satisfying sense of ornament, rhyme needs not only to be integrated into the whole poem but from the start to be part of the conceptual fabric, to provide a sense of coherent pleasure that justifies the small harmonies and sound adornments. That is the reason why several different functions of rhyme typically work collaboratively to create a sense not of surface decoration but of both intellectual and aesthetic elegance. IV

A fourth traditional function of rhyme involves structure or the noticeable, formal signs of structure. There are many ways of structuring

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poems - intellectually, rhetorically, formally, visually - and a number of them include, at least indirectly, sound. But rhyme is a particularly hearable (and visible) one, for it involves a regular, predictable series of sound repetitions, usually at the ends of lines and notable to the eye as well as the ear. Rhyme does not of course necessarily structure or measure the thought or flow of thought, nor does it necessarily mark the syntax; like alliteration and assonance, it may occur in the middle of sentences and indicate only visual and oral patterns that provide merely an external form and sense of shape rather than an actual shaping of sense. But there is a tendency, especially obvious in couplets, to make the pattern of rhyme coincide with syntax, so that (for example) the ends of lines and the sealing of a second rhyme sound correspond to a pause in the development of thought, what is sometimes called closure in couplets and what often results in stanza breaks in cross-rhyme or more complex rhyme schemes.20 Such structural devices - either causal or testimonial - are easily seen in classic sonnets (of either the Italian or English pattern), in which both the rhyme patterns and the change in rhyme sounds signal breaks in thought. This Shakespearean sonnet, for example, virtually outlines its structure in rhyme - three quatrains, easily identified by their coherent and binding rhyme, followed by a final couplet - and parallel, partially repeated phrasings and striking image clusters also mark the divisions. That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west; Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the deathbed where on it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

The careful sectionings, partitioned argument, building of images, and funnelled intensification of feeling (signalled by the diminishing repre-

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sentations of time from season to day to moment) are perhaps clearer to the eye than ear here; poetry as early as the late sixteenth century (at least) seems just as dominated by page and eye concerns (in both manuscript and print forms) as by voice and ear ones, although the visual both guides and charts the aural. Similar structural signals occur often in that heavily dominant early modern poetic form, the couplet, in its various manifestations and permutations. Note how the visual impact of print in the opening lines of Pope's Essay on Criticism helps the reader see paragraphs, which here and in couplet poems generally often function as stanzas: the couplet is a rhyme scheme rather than a stanza form, and it uses print mechanisms to indicate its structural divisions: Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill Appear in Writing or in Judging ill; But, of the two, less dang'rous is th' Offence, To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense: Some few in that, but Numbers err in this, Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss; A Fool might once himself alone expose, Now One in Verse marks many more in Prose. 'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own. In Poets as true Genius is but rare, True Taste as seldom is the Critick's Share; Both must alike from Heav'n derive their Light, These born to Judge, as well as those to Write. Let such teach others who themselves excell, And censure freely who have written well. Authors are partial to their Wit, 'tis true, But are not Criticks to their Judgment too? Yet if we look more closely, we shall find ... (Essay on Criticism, 11. 1-19)

The syntax tends to follow (or allude to) the couplet rhyme, so that sound and sense structurally correspond, and lineation guides and reins in the mind, at least up to a point. This syntactical feature of the socalled closed couplet can easily be misinterpreted as fragmentation of thought and the privileging of epigrammatic, bumper-sticker-like thinking (a gross misunderstanding of what 'closure' means), when actually something almost opposite is true: couplets tend to build clauses care-

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fully upon one another, stacking up couplets and independent clauses like bricks until they add up to a larger thought unit - a full sentence or paragraph. The insistent end punctuation in Anne Finch's Nocturnal Reverie,^ for example, provides throughout its fifty lines firm pauses after almost every one of its twenty-five couplets, but there is only one full stop in the poem - at the very end. The poem consists of a single carefully built sentence. There are lots of short pauses between couplet units mortar between the bricks - but the sentence doesn't complete itself until the long paragraph, in this case the full poem, is fully constructed. I've demonstrated lengthily elsewhere the point about how couplet paragraphs develop and complicate,22 but I want to emphasize here the way punctuation fights the popular modern notion of closure and asks us instead to think about parts and units accumulating into a whole, in effect marking semi-closure and pointing to additive, cumulative structure in a paragraph (or, in this case, a whole poem). Rhyme helps us understand connections and developments, but the ear is often a less insistent guide than the eye; seeming structure here depends on what the eye tells the voice and mind. The visual reader has the benefit of a score and only an imagined performance through his or her own voice. Rhyme does itself structure - as well as record and graph - other structures of meaning, but through the eye and not the ear primarily, one reason that end-rhyme regularly trumps medial, internal, and other varieties of rhyme.

V V So far I have considered four functions of rhyme generally agreed on, and my point has been to modify - through quibbles, shifts of emphasis, doubts, and new or revived conceptual directions - ways of thinking about these functions. I turn now to three other kinds of use about which there is less or no agreement. A fifth function involves expectation and satisfaction, a fairly elemental (it is usually thought) kind of pleasure, too plain and simple to qualify as a real aesthetic or theoretical consideration worth discussing. But expectation is an undervalued literary category generally,23 especially in texts conscious of tradition or convention where experienced readers are able to harvest more than inexperienced ones, and it is an underrated aspect of rhyme. Expectation is complicated and variable. Anticipation of some particular event (usually an event of sound or meaning) starts the process, but what happens from there may lead to unpredict-

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able outcomes. All rhyme use implicitly promises a chiming or completion, and at some predictable place. Once a pattern of rhyming is set - in visual, aural, or mental expectation - readers 'know' that completion is on its way. And that then a new pattern will begin. In couplets, it works something like this: you hear a sound at a certain, expected point in a line, and you know it will resound a set number of syllables later - that is, there will be a chiming sound, indicating that the match game is complete - and that a new match will then begin, again set in a precisely predictable time and place. You don't know what the new sound will be and won't know until you get to the end of the line - but you know it will be different from the former one. Rhyme theory and historical practice almost universally do not allow, except for rare special effects, repeats of a rhyme sound in subsequent nearby couplets, so that there is both a predictability and an openness to the pattern - fulfilment and new surprise. Echoes repeat as pattern, but the same sound does not; each consecutive set of chiming sounds is different. Similarity, then difference. And the pattern is the same, with obvious timing variations, in verse that uses cross-rhymes or that features patterns more elaborate than couplets (terza rima, for example, or Spenserian stanza, or Pindaric ode). Here, then, is satisfaction in the completion of patterns, a sense of repetition but also of variation; a sense that things are going somewhere and that you can, up to a point, anticipate where, but beyond that, not. The pleasures of repetition and variation are thus triggered over and over, in predictable fashion that makes us feel at once knowing (and not tricked) and yet surprised by the variation that grows out of every satisfaction. Most of the effects generated by expectation have something to do with a sense of repetition gone slightly wrong or with unknowns unexpectedly being introduced. The classic pleasures of comic rhyme derive from one species of expectation - where the linkage of words goes askew in some way, involving either sounds or meanings that are mismatches. When words' that obviously don't belong together are incongruously linked by rhyme, we seem to become slightly embarrassed that language tolerates such apparent parallels; either we take the incongruity seriously (a use I will discuss as reason 6) or we dismiss — laugh at - its absurdity, sometimes finding the wit in the poet who constructs it, or sometimes in the nature of things. When Tom Lehrer, the comedy songwriter, rhymes 'Ave Maria' with 'Gee it's good to see ya' he's likely to get irreverent credit for finding the match/mismatch; but when a country song claims, 'When you fall on your knees/You are taller than trees' we are more likely to

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attribute the absurdity to a combination of cliche and unwitting mixed metaphor than cleverly plotted double rhyme depending on vertical denial. A lot of poets beyond Samuel Butler and Jonathan Swift (and modern descendants like Hillaire Belloc, George Starbuck, X J. Kennedy, and Roger Angel) play the depraved-expectation game extremely well, and they remain mostly underappreciated for their efforts. And this kind of surprised expectation penetrates deep into cultures that seem to depreciate rhyme itself unless it is allowed to play almost value-free in this way. Tin Pan Alley songwriters as a group were amazingly clever with rhyme when they parodied their sentimental tasks, and they helped create the whole satiric revue culture that sometimes bites deep (although also of course sometimes only yips and nips). Two understudied phenomena involve the ways actual oral practices influence rhyme possibilities. One has to do with performance collaboration and the way one creator builds on another's comedy, when, for example, Noel Coward (with the help of Ira Gershwin) elaborates Cole Porter's witty 'Let's Fall in Love': Birds do it, bees do it, Even monkeys in the trees do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love. E. Allan Poe (ho ho ho) does it, but he does it in verse H. Beecher Stowe does it, but she has to rehearse.

There's clever footwork here both in and beyond rhyme - internal rhyme, internal echoes, abbreviation of names to initials in the initial position as if setting up front-rhyme - but the final wit involves the way the key rhyme words (verse/rehearse) make fun of each other in holding a tension between the new and the repeated. The second phenomenon has to do with variable pronunciations in various places. Traditional rhyme criticism tends to fuss about 'false' or 'imperfect' or 'near' rhymes, often without much consciousness of historical or regional variations, but good rhymers old and new often put these variations to their own uses, as when in the film Cool Hand Luke Paul Newman sings, 'I don't care if it rains or freezes, / 'long as I got my plastic Jesus, / sittin' on the dashboard of my car' - where the rhyme only works if the voice takes on appropriate features of region, class, and belief. Theories of comic surprise help a bit with surprise itself, but I know of no discourse in aesthetics that contributes much to our understanding of exactly what pleasures are involved in foreknowledge, familiarity, and

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habit - and their defeat. We do know that a certain amount of not-toomuch repetition and predictability is satisfying (for whatever reason) to the eye, ear, and mind. Practices in ritual and communal activity provide rich and suggestive examples. Children's games (and especially urban rhyming games), for example, are useful in helping us see an elementary version of what this simple pleasure may consist in. And simple familiarity, the pleasure of recognition in hearing or seeing something over again - or recognizing a slight variation of it - may give us clues here to fundamental joy inherent in a certain amount (unspecified) of repetition. But 'repetition,' one of the usual terms in describing rhyme, especially in couplets, turns out to be not the right word, and other crucial terms 'ritual,' 'routine,' 'regime' - also need to be redefined in terms of the expectation they create and then modify or subvert. Setting up expectations for traditional repeated terms is crucial to the surprises that follow and then leads to quite different intellectual yokings than would otherwise be predicted. The principle of simultaneous similarity and difference begins to show itself in the very nature of rhyme, and that principle, perhaps articulately most suggestively by Kurt Stryjewski24 and espoused by Jakobson, obtains even more as we begin to address more directly issues of syntax and meaning, the next function of rhyme I want to discuss. VI

A sixth function of rhyme is more ambitious intellectually and much harder to understand, in part because it operates through associations that are not altogether rational. It involves the meaning statements that rhyme sometimes seems to make through its insistent linking or binding of words. Words that have very different meanings and implications can thus become associated, quite against reason, in readers' minds, and made to seem 'naturally' connected conceptually because they harbour related sounds. It goes sort of like this: when I compare trees to breeze, it implies some kind of prior meaningful connection that the poem is alluding to or reminding us of, rather than just asserting. The fact that words sound alike seems to imply that - somewhere, somehow, in some hidden order of things - they must be significantly related, and the reader's job, helped by the poet's prompt, is to figure out just what the relationship consists in. Sometimes - as in 'breeze' and 'trees' or 'dance' and 'romance' - the implied relationship is pretty obvious and not very intellectually taxing or vexing. The linkage can seem so natural that

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questioning its logical basis would seem unnecessary and even ludicrous; it is easier to accept the connection than to question or justify it. W.K. Wimsatt, in his justly celebrated essay 'One Relation of Rhyme to Reason: Alexander Pope,' is usually credited with having defined this kind of rhyme function, which involves rhyme's meandering complexities in relation to semantics or meaning, although he acknowledges earlier observations and articulations of it,25 and Hugh Kenner (in a follow-up essay) describes its practical uses and effects more extensively, with dozens of wonderful examples. Wimsatt's insight is sometimes called a 'syntax' of rhyme because two words that are not ordered by actual syntax in the poem are given a kind of syntax (implying meaningful or even causal connection) just by being rhymed with each other. When, for example (and this is a Wimsatt example), in the third canto of The Rape of the Lock, 'queen' is rhymed with 'screen' we are apt (prompted, even) to puzzle the connection - in this case both are topics of polite conversation and, therefore, in a sense inappropriately equalized even though of very different degrees of importance. That Pope himself believed readers made such connections is demonstrated dramatically by his famous couplet about Sir Robert Walpole's marriage and divorce where Pope becomes, in Walpole's mind, responsible for Lady Walpole's desertion because his name rhymes with 'elope.'26 The idea of a syntax of rhyme seems to me widely applicable; such associational strategy is capable of an even greater variety of effects than the Wimsatt-Kenner model suggests, and it is quietly influential in establishing attitudes that move beyond the poetic text. Take, for example, the key rhyme words in Pope's portrait of Sir Plume in The Rape of the Lock, words that readily stand for the character: 'vain' and 'cane' become metonymic mirrorings of the man and of each other. The words so perfectly match and reflect each other that each seems a comment on the other; 'cane' becomes a manifestation of 'vain,' so 'natural' that the association seems likely to stick beyond the poem's moment and certify a social symbol. And it doesn't take someone as subtle and skilful as Pope to make the trick work. Satirist after satirist in the Restoration and eighteenth century plays with royal terms that associate nervously but damningly. 'King' repeatedly, in poet after poet, rhymes with 'thing' (but almost never with 'swing' or 'spring' or 'fling'), and the 'rule'/'fool' pair similarly is everywhere, as is the slightly more complicated 'queen'/ 'mean' - the latter word usually disguised as 'mien,' but still making its 'mean' meaning clear in a kind of paronomasia-plus move. One of the beauties of such a strategy is that it puts the work on the

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shoulders - or rather into the mind - of the reader and leaves the poet, at least officially, free of implication or at least provable guilt. How could anyone be sure that a poet might 'mean' the connection? The poem does not say that the queen is mean or that kings are just things. Normal syntax plainly says something else, so it is, technically, the bloody-minded reader who is responsible for the connection. The poet is not responsible if there is a syntax of things in some prior nature. Meaning occurs, but the text is not responsible, and the route is not through reason. Kenner offers a kind of historical (and philosophical) logic for associational procedures. Noting seventeenth-century belief in an original common language that had formerly testified to a world where things and words were more perfectly ordered, he explains the syntax of rhyme as a kind of nostalgia for a lost world when a 'purer' language supposedly certified larger correspondences and symmetries in nature - where things that sounded alike were believed to be alike. He draws cleverly and usefully on An Essay Towards a ... Philosophical Language by John Wilkins (1668) to suggest a basis for sound echoing actual likeness. I think he is right that associationism works because of assumptions that symmetrical sounds or language parallels testify to larger symmetries, but I'm not sure the appeal is purely nostalgic or even that it depends on actual belief, personal or cultural. Sleight of hand has its appeal, too, especially when we wish something to be true. Readers don't actually have to believe in a harmonious, pre-Babel world for the illogical association to work; they only have to desire or dream of it, and later readers are just as capable, in some situations and moods at least, of such an 'as if move as Wilkins's contemporaries. Rhyme may have evoked some 'earlier' harmonic world more frequently and believably in Dryden's or Pope's time, but modern readers may long just as deeply for connections - and imagine them when they fail to find them. The interpretive issue involves the reader's desire for greater harmony; it is the hope for connection, not a belief in it, that gets the reader here into the kind of trouble that makes reading more resonant if less certain. Rhymed poetry is a poetry of fallen nature; it depends for its full effect on readers trapping themselves by hoping for a more rational, more whole world in which there are symmetries and harmonies everywhere but where belief in them leads inevitably to disappointment, dissonance, and mortal grief. What seems to me most important here - and what the traditional accounts of the syntactic function do not say - is that rhyme requires special work from the reader: based on parallels and associations, it

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makes demands that have to be sorted out. Rhymed poetry is almost by definition demanding on the reader because extratextual decisions have to be made. The text itself presents links but only tantalizingly; it refuses to sort. The cliche about rhymed (especially couplet) verse - that repetition of sound is likely to lull the reader, through its familiarity and predictability, into boredom and inattention - thus is nearly backward historically: it depends on more recent unappreciative and ignorant responses to rhyme. Actually, rhyme demands an astonishing amount of work from the reader: comparing, sorting, considering relationships, deciding about similarity and difference as posed in the text - actually distinguishing rather than passively accepting connections that the text makes. The text is raw material for thinking - a prompt book, a laboratory for similarity and difference - more than authoritative conclusion. Rhyme stimulates cognition and enforces a reading process involving the sorting out of similarity and difference. The work involved in reading older texts from these times is not easy, but it can be very rewarding, and rhyme is part of the work as well as the source of much of the pleasure. Rhyme then, is not a function of reason; it does not work rationally, and even its semantic function is not discursive but merely suggestive; it requires a reader who, if clever and diligent enough, can work cognitively to harvest the potential syntax of the verbal and aural universe. One other brief implication: I suggested earlier that the best poets often remove key terms from the emphatic rhyme position. One reason why is now clear: in a rhymed world, you cannot connect things lightly (your reader might overread), and so you have to avoids, lot of potential rhymes; avoiding rhyme often turns out to be more important than making rhyme. It is in fact surprising how often rhyme words in major poems are pretty innocuous; careful poets tend to put in the emphatic rhymed position nouns and verbs that carry little weight - counter to the intuitive demand of using your best and most precise terms in that emphatic spot. This means that some of the burden of meaning - and much of the vocabulary of argument - shifts to an earlier place in lines, so that it takes closer and harder reading to discover the key terms and follow their argument. VII

A seventh function is more abstract and frankly speculative. It is as yet, in fact, almost language-less, in spite of numerous attempts to describe aspects or forms of it; for now, let's call it vocal setting or tonal atmo-

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sphere. It involves creating a prevailing tone or mood through sound or the visualization of sound, or the sound-seeming of eye sense - rather than striving towards some kind of paraphrasable meaning per se. I'm dangerously close here to lapsing into musical analogy (and I agree with John Hollander's powerful suspicion that musical analogies have done much more harm than good in poetry criticism) ,27 But there seems to me no doubting that the 'pure' sounds of language carry some weight of their own apart from word meaning, some implication that starts with mood and affects the way the whole poem 'sets' in our consciousnesses. What I want to suggest is that the accumulating repetitions of certain sounds - especially prevailing vowel sounds (which can be more readily controlled by poetic choice than consonant sounds because there are fewer of them to manipulate) that have of themselves no necessary relationship to meaning as such - do in fact set up tonal associations that come close to, almost anticipate, a meaning function.28 Let me try first to suggest the issue through an anecdote (but not in fact an analogy) about music. The story involves the late singer Laura Nyro, something of a cult figure in the 1960s and 1970s and notoriously inarticulate (or at least non-verbal) about her considerable talent and art. Once, she turned to her accompanist at a recording session, it is said, and commanded about the song she was about to sing, 'Play it in the key of green.' He tried to comply and played what he thought she wanted. 'No, no,' she interrupted him quickly, 'Not light green, dark green.'29 I can't find the exact vocabulary here any more precisely than she could, but I think I have some little idea of what she meant and how it applies to prevailing sounds in poetry. Arthur Rimbaud, in a very famous sonnet of the 1870s, worked similarly with synesthetic categories in proposing colours for sound: Voyelles A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles, Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes: A, noir corset velu des mouches eclatantes Qui bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles, Golfes d'ombre; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes, Lances des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d'ombelles; I, pourpres, sang crache, rire des levres belles Dans la colere ou les ivresses penitentes;

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U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides, Paix des pads semes d'animaux, paix des rides Que 1'alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux; O, supreme Clairon plein des strideurs etranges, Silences traverses des Mondes et des Anges: - O 1'Omega, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!30

Nearly everyone agrees that sounds impinge on meaning (whether or not they directly create it) in some way. But how? And how broadly? Every single syllable produces a sound, but seldom do we assign meanings to individual syllables unless they are monosyllabic words. Can they 'refer' individually, or do they need to add up in some particular way, showing some kind of trend of sounds? There are countless 'sound and sense' - onomatopoeic or almost so - passages in which a brief mood setting is created, often through the re-creation of familiar sounds with associations that are soft, violent, laboured, speedy, and so on. Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows; But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore, The hoarse, rough Verse shou'd like the Torrent roar. When Ajax strives, some Rock's vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow?1 (Essay on Criticism, 11. 366-71)

John Hollander, usually a careful and conservative critic on issues of sound, ventures in one place to suggest that individual syllables can, in some cases, nearly mean, citing words in English that end in 'ick' 'stick,' 'pick,' 'flick,' 'tick,' and 'prick' - as sharing a quick and pointed quality,32 and it may be that meaning can in some cases be tentatively assigned in that way (but what are we to do with counterexamples like 'thick'?). The distinguished linguist Otto Jesperson famously believed that small language components such as syllables (or phonemes) could be assigned meanings, and built a system on the belief.33 But consonants prove to be a recalcitrant and messy lot, and my guess is that it would be more profitable to explore whether repeated, cumulative vowel sounds not associated with particular consonants are more worth watching, especially when they operate in clusters primed by frequently repeated

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vowel sounds in rhyme words. If prevalent, mood-establishing or moodenhancing patterns can be isolated here - so that poems turn out to be, in effect, nearly written in a particular key like G sharp or B flat - the dominant space for that sound would likely be in the rhyme, though of course other vowels in the line could support and extend it. Sylvia Plath's famous experiment in final 'oo' sounds in 'Daddy' -where forty-one out of eighty of the line-ending vowel sounds involve words like 'you' and 'do' and 'du' and 'Jew' and 'through' and 'shoe' and 'gobbledegoo' and 'achoo' - seem to project or add up to an attitude of mourning or anger or defiance or some summary constellation of these feelings and attitudes. They do not lead to a particular word that labels the emotion they do not directly mean - but they seem, almost irrationally in themselves, to stand for some wordless, moaning feeling of loss. Critical discussions of Plath and other instances like this do not take us terribly deep on the issue, but they at least isolate the phenomenon. My observation so far, tentative as it is, is merely about pattern and repetition. There seems to be a tendency to have some particular vowel sound dominant in the rhymes, as if setting a mood - somewhere between alluding to and mimicking how an event or idea might feel. In ages of rhyme, critics have been fierce in the prescription that sets of rhymes stay rigidly separate and widely spaced - that is, not to have consecutive sets of similar rhymes such as 'pair' and 'hair' followed by 'dare' and 'share,' regardless of meanings - and poets have usually complied except when they were making some specific repetitive point, as for example when Emilia Lanyer has, in her descriptive poem about Cookham, 'thee' rhyme with itself after being used as the rhyme word three times in the previous fourteen lines.34 Still, if the full rhyme sound repeats only seldom and usually at substantial intervals, particular vowel sounds often follow hard upon one another, sometimes repeating the same vowel sound for several rhymes in a row. It is probably not surprising, for example, that the dominant vowel sound in TheDunciad's rhymes seems to be a long i - and that is often true in Swift's satiric poems too, there made even more noticeable and insistent by the shortened (that is, tetrameter) couplet line. Here are words like ' mine' and 'my' and 'blind' and 'night' and 'rise' and 'acquire' and 'cry' and 'right' and 'might.' And I would guess - though I have not done the math on this that the long i sound dominates The Dunciad and similar anti-solipsistic poems of the period in non-rhyme positions as well, a case (if true) of rhyme setting sound (or sight as sound) patterns for non-rhyming parts of the poem, locating (one might say) the whole poem in a particular register or key.

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One final, suggestive example about how dominant sounds may lead to theme and meaning, even if not directly productive of it: The Rape of the Lock seems to be dominated by long a rhymes, not very surprising in a poem that is about hair care and airiness and being fair. Pope uncharacteristically repeats a lot of rhyme words here: 'care,' 'repair,' 'fair,' 'prayer,' etc. What is surprising is how long the poem holds back or restrains the expectable rhyme words 'hair,' 'air,' and their homonym, one way or another, 'heir.' In a poem in which the resounding chorus is 'Restore the Lock' and in a political moment- 1714-when the question of succession and monarchical lines was the burning issue, Pope is at the least being careful with where he puts his emphases, at the most leading us semi-silently in an ideological direction he does not wish to specify, stringing along Catholic and Jacobite nostalgists but finally reminding them that restoring the hair is not possible. There's a lot to say about atmosphere and aura and mood and setting and the way sight/sounds lead to questions about meaning, I think, but I don't quite know yet how to query the texts fully enough, only that individual sounds sometimes dominate into patterns, determine word choice and word avoidance, and (yet another way) approach semantics and meaning. You can't say that rhyme here works reasonably according to accepted rules of syntax and logic, but it does lead towards meaning in a suggestive - and decipherable - if not logical and rational way. The text is the work; the reader is the worker.35 Looked at in one way, rhyme is a species of repetition, and its effects in both sound and semantics depend on some kind of re-hearing or reseeing. Looked at slightly differently, it is a species of parallelism (what Jakobson always insisted). There is something to be gained by looking either of these ways. But in each case, it is important to stress the lack of fit as well as the fit. Rhyme is never pure repetition: words virtually never rhyme with themselves in a poem, and poetic guides in most cultures strictly forbid it. Homonyms too are frowned on, and even homoeoteleuton (easier in some languages than others) is usually regarded as somewhat cheap. It is the difference of the introducing consonant that legitimates similarity; near-repetition is closer to what happens, and in several of the functions I have mentioned the sense of difference is crucial. Similarly in parallelism: things, people, places are implicitly compared so that distinctions can be made; the parallel must be close enough to be plausible, even fruitful, but there must be difference too. And it is readers who have to supply the difference, or rather the consciousness that sameness or parallel is not pure and not wholly true.

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Rhyme is not simple. Being able to hear or see or touch a chime, an echo, or a resounding note offers a deceptively simple sense of grasp. That grasp is almost always both allusive and elusive, sounding brass and tinkling cymbal on the one hand and, on the other, a subtle guide to a special world in which similarities of sound lead to discriminations about usefulness, meaning, and beauty. If rhyme was once too mystified, it is now too familiarized, and in many of the wrong ways. Defamiliarizing rhyme and its collected associations involves rethinking the way sound or imagined sound - works towards distinctions, rather than confirming similarity. Repetition looks to be a central mode in the early modern practices of concentrated rhyme, but what sounds at a quick glance like repetition is actually a subtle, differentiated insistence on careful discrimination. Rhyme is not all sound and fury. Rather than a mindless dulling of difference, it triggers a complex engagement of the processes of the mind, proceeding directly from its uses of the senses, both aural and visual, to make, hesitantly, some quavering sense - if not wholly rational sense - out of sound. Notes 1 Philip Larkin, for example, wrote in 1975: 'The notion of expressing sentiments in short lines having similar sounds at their ends seems as remote as mangoes on the moon' (Letter to Barbara .Pym, 22 January, in Selected Letters of Philip Larkin, 1940-1985, ed. Anthony Thwaite [New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992]), 521. 2 Some current cultural critics believe that the wild popularity of phenomena like rap and hip hop may herald a movement in 'serious' poetry as well, arguing that taste, especially in oral arts, now often operates 'upward' from popular to 'higher' cultures. But, while I believe in two-way intellectual history, I am not waiting for the Second Coming of rhyme. Seamus Heaney's headline-capturing praise of the rapper Eminem in mid-2003 was in some circles interpreted as suggesting some such direction, but he seems to have been speaking primarily about the cultural energy generated by rap rather than commending its specific strategies and directions, and rap has as yet demonstrated only its curiosity about rhyme rather than a mastery of its full reach. 3 The most intense - and in many ways the best - discussions of rhyme appeared during the first half or so of the twentieth century, when (although rhyme was already in retreat in contemporary poetry) it was still an issue for

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practising poets. Some good historical work was done then - I think of especially strong analyses of couplets by Ruth Wallerstein ('The Development of the Rhetoric and Metre of the Heroic Couplet, Especially in 162545,' PMLA50 (1935): 166-210) and George Williamson (The Rhetorical Pattern of Neo-Classical Wit,' Modern Philology 33 (1935): 55-82) - but most of the impetus for the study of rhyme came from linguists, especially structuralists. Some very elegant and still usable work came out of that attention, although the determination to find universals across all languages often meant that individual effects (sometimes stronger in some languages than others) were passed over. Many of rhyme's most powerful functions are present across languages, but not all of them are universal or necessarily visible in languages with different kinds of grammars, conjugations, word endings, and sound patterns. The most important overall contribution has been that of Roman Jakobson, who is of course distinguished in a variety of linguistic fields. For a summary of his work on rhyme, see Dean Worth, 'Roman Jakobson and the Study of Rhyme,' in Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship, ed. Daniel Armstrong and C. H. Van Schooneveld (Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1977), 515-33. Besides the critical work that I cite more specifically below, I wish also to mention the valuable contributions of William Rickert, Donald Wesling, Garrett Stewart, Gillian Beer, and William Flesch. But the general quality of rhyme discourse is, I'm afraid, very disappointing. 4 George Chapman's Englishings of the Homeric epics, into pentameter couplets in one case and fourteeners in the other, are good examples of such obligatory moves. 5 T.V.F. Brogan, in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) provides a convenient summary of what is known about rhyme history and its transmission across languages and cultures; see esp. pp. 1061-3. M.L. Gasparov's magisterial account, using 'comparative metrics,' of verse forms throughout Europe offers a persuasive account of the earlier interactions of European languages, but he makes no direct attempt to chart the movement of rhyme (A History of European Versification, trans. G.S. Smith and Marina Tarlinskaja; ed. G.S. Smith with Leofranc Holford-Strevens [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996]). 6 See Brogan, New Princeton Encyclopedia, 1052. 7 See Jakobson's classic analysis of 'I like Ike' in Jakobson: Echoes. 8 See John Foley, How to Read an Oral Poem, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 9 All quotations of Pope are from the one-volume edition of the Twickenham text (ed. John Butt) (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963).

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10 On such devices see Percy G. Adams, Graces of Harmony: Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977). I do not mean to imply that alliteration, assonance, and related sound repetitions always work in the same way as rhyme, but their uses are related, and much - though not all - of what I argue about rhyme applies to kindred sound matchings when they are patterned. I l l agree with Hollander about the general inapplicability - and misleading tendency - of music terms, but there's no denying that traditional poetry develops, separate from musical settings and accompaniments, a kind of music of its own. The problem is how to talk about it in ways that sufficiently differentiate its 'music' from music. 12 Compare the way the rhyme words work in the opening lines of Pope's Eloisa toAbelard: cells/dwells/ reigns/veins/retreat/heat/came/name. 13 The French tradition of 'Bouts-Rimes' - in which only rhyming words are printed, with the rest of the line left blank - highlights the strategy; Roger Lonsdale (in The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984], 414) prints a suggestive English example, to which he gives the title 'The Poetess's Bouts-Rimes': Dear Phoebus, hear my only vow; If e'er you loved me, hear me now. That charming youth - but idle fame Is ever so inclined to blame These men will turn it to a jest; I'll tell the rhymes and drop the rest: desire, fire, He, thigh, wide, ride, night, delight. 14 Early defenders of rhyme, from early modern times well into the eighteenth century, usually phrased their defence almost completely in terms of the ornament of sound or harmony. Joseph Trapp, Lectures on Poetry (1742), for example, speaks unabashedly about 'the Decoration of Verse.' But more recently that argument, no doubt because of the diminished reputation of ornament, has become much less frequent. Arthur Melville Clark, however, in the mid-twentieth century, was still insisting that 'by its very nature rhyme is primarily an appeal to the ear, and it is probably, in some degree at least,

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pleasing in all languages.' He goes on to speak of its 'delectability and therefore its artistic value' (Studies in Literary Modes [Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1946], 178). Some of the rebellion against rhyme can probably be traced to revulsion against Victorian ornament; see E.H. Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon, 1963). A book from the 1990s, for example, describes itself as 'about the fragmentary, the peripheral, and the ornamental - what may be called ... the trivial' (Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991], 1). The traditional figuring of language as a 'dress' to thought sometimes confuses the issue for modern readers. When Pope argues that 'True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed / What oft was thought but ne'er so well exprest,' he is not suggesting boas andjewellery. Henry Fielding, in book 1, chapter 1 of Tom Jones, plays hilariously with the kind of misunderstanding the figure can lead to, quoting the Pope line and pretending that 'dressed' means killed and defeathered, as in dressing game. See, for example, Massimo Carboni, Estetica dett'Ornamento, preprint from Centra internazionale studi di estetica, (1996), 47: 'The present essay examines the aesthetic and philosophical valence of the Ornament, an issue that only from a reductionist perspective can be considered as marginal' (I quote from the English summary on p. 65). Hersey, Lost Meaning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 149. Bloomer, The Nature of Ornament (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 15. I have discussed my reservations about the overapplied term 'closure' in 'Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?' ECS 34, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 8ff, and in 'Serious Reflections on Farther Adventures: Resistances to Closure in Eighteenth-Century English Novels,' in Augustan Subjects, ed. Albert Rivero (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 276-94. Clearly we need a better word to describe end-of-line pauses signalled by something short of the full completion of a sentence. Only about one in five couplets typically ends with a period. [Anne Kingsmill Finch, Countess of Wilchilsea], Miscellany Poems, on Several Occasions. Written by a Lady (London: Printed for J.B. and Sold by Benj. Tooke, 1713), 291-3. See my 'Form as Meaning: Pope and the Ideology of the Couplet,' in The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 37, no. 3 (September 1996, 25770); reprinted in Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. David H. Richter (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1999), 147-62. Genre criticism, of course, often depends crucially on the concept of expectation, and it is curious that the category seldom carries over into other sophisticated criticism.

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24 Kurt Stryjewski, Reimform und Reimfunktion (Breslau: Priebatsch, 1940). 25 See Wimsatt 'One Relation of Rhyme to Reason: Alexander Pope,' MLQ 5 (1944): 323-38; revised in simplified form in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954), 153-68. Wimsatt cites J.S. Schutze as an indirect and unconsulted predecessor; the work of Roman Jakobson conceptually supports Wimsatt's position. 26 Kenner, 'Pope's Reasonable Rhymes,' ELH41, no. 1 (Spring 1974), 82. Kenner believes, as I do not, that it is only Pope who utilizes the system. He goes on to make a useful distinction between kinds of syntactic yokings: 'Incongruous rhymes for satiric observation, normal rhymes for the realm of law.' 27 See Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 8. 28 Henry Lanz, in his scientistic and rather eccentric study of the relation of rhyme to body rhythms, similarly argues for the importance of vowel patterns (The Physical Basis of Rhyme: An Essay on the Aesthetics of Sound [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1931]). 29 I owe this anecdote to Dennis Todd. 30 Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres, ed. Suzanne Bernard and Andre Guyaux, (Paris: Gamier, 1997), 110. 31 Samuel Johnson, in his Life of Pope, famously doubted that sounds actually reproduced the sense so closely: 'the desire of discovering frequent adaptations of the sound to the sense have produced, in my opinion, many wild conceits and imaginary beauties' (Lives of the Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3vol. [1905; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1967], 3:230). 32 See Hollander, 'Rhyme and the True Calling of Words,' in Vision and Resonance, 117-134. 33 See, for example, Jesperson's argument in 'Symbolic Value of the Vowel,' in Linguistics: Selected Papers in English, French, and German (Copenhagen: Levi and Munksgaard, 1933), 283-303. 34 See Lanyer, 'The Description of Cookham,' in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. Robert Cummings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 29-34. 35 There are, arguably, other functions of rhyme as well. Dryden, for example, in the dedication to The Rival Ladies, believed that the formal discipline of rhyme tames the poet's fancy, and mental discipline has been argued other ways as well, even as leading to new or more creative verbal insights or as facilitating and feeding, or even creating, wit. See, for example, the famous argument of Edward Sapir about rhyme as a stimulus to creativity: 'The Heuristic Value of Rhyme,' Queen's Quarterly 27 (1920): 309-12.1 have meant here to be suggestive rather than exhaustive about variety, desiring to imply complexity and energy and interaction in the reading process rather than exhaustion.

PARTY REPLICATING ORIGINALS

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chapter nine

Translation as Original Composition: Reading the Work of Pierre Le Tourneur JULIE CANDLER HAYES

Literature is an institution of repetition. In a discussion of the phenomenology of literary experience, philosopher Edward Casey once argued that literary imagining, being ineluctably deprived of the sensory plenitude of the world, compensates for the absence of the world by 'making present' through form, which can only be apprehended through repetition. And inasmuch as literature's 'peculiar present' cannot persist beyond the act of reading save by further imaginative rehearsal, it must be 're-imagined by means of repetition both within the work and within the mind.'1 This constitutive imbrication of imagination and repetition has been explicitly foregrounded at different historical moments in the literary field, whether through an insistence on mimesis as pre-eminent value, or on the imitation of earlier models, or on 'rules of art' that foreground genre and guarantee formal family resemblances among works. All these models are active in eighteenth-century France, where few practices exemplify all three so well as that of literary translation. And yet translation, as the 'latest and most abundant flowering' or 'afterlife' of a text, according to Walter Benjamin,2 is also a means not only for re-enacting, but also renewing and constantly opening up potential readings, new imaginings, of literary works.3 Translations themselves do not remain 'the same' over time. The practice of translation is itself constantly reimagined within a complex network of literary, linguistic, and cultural practices. A vehicle of change through the importation of foreign literary values, it also becomes the sign of ongoing change when a given translation no longer responds to the needs and expectations of a new generation of readers: the original

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work's afterlife is further extended, amplified, by means of retranslation. In France, beginning with the Sieur de Meziriac's vehement critique of Jacques Amyot's classic translation of Plutarch (published 1559-65), read at one of the earliest meetings of the newly formed Academic franchise,4 it might be said that the consolidation of the neoclassical aesthetic was bound up with an intimation of the temporality of language, an awareness that fuels the tireless (and futile) efforts of Vaugelas and others to define an ever-elusive bon usage.5 By the eighteenth century, despite a widespread wish to imagine the French language as 'fixed,' as having reached a level of perfection from which it need never decline, change was occurring on all fronts: via the importation of new ideas and practices from abroad, especially from England, and via a persistent questioning of aesthetic and linguistic norms. Translation becomes both a vehicle for new ideas and a dramatic instantiation of changes wrought within language itself. In this manner, translation finds itself at the crossroads of repetition and originality. However 'free,' it contains a promise to the reader that it is in some way a repetition, a rewriting of an earlier text. And in the story I am about to tell, other forms of repetition emerge, most notably retranslation, where a translator engages prior translations of the source text as well as the source text itself; pastiche, where a text is (re) constructed and reconfigured from fragments of an earlier text that it nevertheless claims to repeat; and second-hand translation, where the translator works not from the original source, but from an intermediate translation. (While none of Le Tourneur's translations were second-hand, they served as the basis for translations in a number of other languages.) A literary institution, translation is thus also a 'figure' of repetition. Within this echoing framework, Pierre Le Tourneur will seek for something quite new. Neoclassical translators such as Le Tourneur and his contemporaries in both France and England have traditionally been associated with strongly adaptative translation strategies that emphasize the literary values of the receiving culture, sometimes to the detriment of the cultural and aesthetic specificity of the source text. As such, they have been criticized for a lack of openness to foreign values, beginning with Stael and the German Romantics and continuing in the present with critics such as Antoine Berman and Lawrence Venuti.6 In the present article, as in the longer work-in-progress from which it is drawn, I hope to show that such criticisms are reductive. The eighteenth-century 'field of translation' is rendered complex both by the presence of translators whose

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projects aim explicitly at broadening the cultural horizons of their contemporaries and by the multiplicity of the discursive strategies by which these seek to represent non-native literary traditions to their readers. The work of Pierre Le Tourneur (1737-88) demonstrates both aspects. A prolific and influential translator, he is best remembered for having produced the first complete version of Shakespeare in French, a project that earned him the wrath of Voltaire and - rather unfairly ironies from Victor Hugo. (Voltaire was mounting what might be seen in retrospect as classical tragedy's last stand in the Querelle de Shakespeare, 'Hugo, while considering classical tragedy long dead, wished for nothing to dim the lustre of the new translation of the Bard by his son, FrancoisVictor Hugo.) One cannot, however, underestimate either the scale of Le Tourneur's Shakespeare translation or indeed his intellectual project as a whole.7 In him we encounter a translator manifestly committed to creating a coherent body of work -faire oeuvre - in which critical commentary plays a key role in maintaining the overall unity. An extremely self-reflective translator, he provided each of his major translations with a substantial preface elucidating not only the cultural and intellectual background of the source text, but also his own translating practice and reasons for taking on the project. Until well within the eighteenth century, such careful critical prefaces had generally been the province of classicists: one thinks of the major theoretical statements by Anne Dacier to her Iliad and Odyssey, Jacques de Tourreil's prefaces to Demosthenes, or even d'Alembert's preface to Tacitus.8 While translations from the modern languages were visible throughout the literary marketplace, and while translators of modern languages might be well known to the reading public - Prevost, Desfontaines, and Riccoboni come to mind rarely do their prefaces engage in extended analysis, if indeed a preface is offered at all. Le Tourneur, however, made a career of translating, not simply British writers, but especially those whose work offered new directions for writing in French. While he varied his genres and even occasionally translated from languages other than English, following the overwhelming success of his first translation, LesNuits d'Young (1769), he quickly became identified with the 'strange,' melancholy English writing to which French literary aesthetics was most resistant: Hervey, Gray, Ossian, and, of course, Shakespeare. He is credited with a major role in the diffusion of Young on the continent; the first Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese translations of the Night Thoughts were based on Les Nuits rather than on the English original.9 In my discussion of Le Tourneur's work, I will first look at the practice of retranslation as one form of

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repetition; I will then turn to the 'Discours' preceding Les Nuits d'Young to consider the entwinement of repetition and originality within the act of translation itself. All Le Tourneur's best-known translations were all to a greater or lesser extent ^translations. His versions may offer the first complete translations, as in the case of his Shakespeare or his Clarissa, but in each case he is invariably (re) presenting a work with which the French public is already familiar. We see in these cases that the power of retranslation stems from a form of repetition that takes earlier versions into account and enters into dialogue with these earlier readings and their critical reception. These earlier readings shape the later ones in various ways. Le Tourneur's Nuits d'Young, for example, was preceded by the comte de Bissi's translation of the first 'Night' in the Journal etrangerin 1762 and the second in the Gazette Litteraire in 1764.10 In presenting his excerpt, the academician Bissi comments on the difficulty of Young's style in French and issues an invitation - or a challenge - to other translators: En traduisant la premiere des nuits d'Young, mon objet a etc uniquement d'engager ceux qui possedent la langue Angloise mieux que moi, a les traduire toutes; carj'avoue que cette entreprise est au-dessus de mes forces. Ce n'est pas le terns qui m'arrete, je crains seulement de le mal employer: mais sijamais une main plus habile que la mienne 1'execute, j'ose repondre dusucces. (38-9).

Bissi's modest demurral allows him to fantasize a perfect translation, without having to carry out the full program himself. II seroit a souhaiter qu'on permit aux traducteurs des poemes de M. Young tous les ecarts qu'il s'est permis lui-meme. Les expressions les moins usitees, les transitions les plus brusques, les images les plus hardies, se trouvent a chaque page de son livre. Mais notre langue ne souffre pas de pareilles licences: cependant comment exprimer des idees sublimes, lorsque le style sera dans les fers? Mais c'est aux ecrivains seuls qui ont eu ces hautes idees, a se permettre les expressions & les tournures que ces idees exigent; & je craindrois que les traducteurs de 1'ouvrage de M. Young, en volant s'elever avec lui, ne tombassent dans des obscurites impardonnables, n'employassent des images & des expressions gigantesques. (42-3)

Bissi's description remains torn between admiration for Young's 'idees sublimes' and reticence before his 'ecarts,' enabling us to appreciate the

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extent to which even a well-disposed French reader might find Young's writing disturbing, even alienating. Like his translation of the Night Thoughts, Le Tourneur's highly successful Ossian,fils deFingal (1777) was preceded by a number of short translations of Ossianic poetry, beginning with Turgot's translations of two 'Erse' fragments, again in the Journal etranger (and again reprinted in the Varietes litteraires) .n Even Le Tourneur's second 'graveyard' project, Hervey's Meditations, appeared after a version by Marie-Genevieve-Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville (1771).12 Thiroux d'Arconville acknowledged abridging the English text, which she also divided into neat chapters wiuh individual tides; Le Tourneur, contrary to his frequent practice of offering longer versions than previous translators, proclaimed in his preface tihat he had abridged even more than his predecessor, on the grounds that much of Hervey's text was simply derived from and inferior to Young, hence expendable.13 On the other hand, he included translations of related works, such as letters by Hervey and a prose version of Gray's Elegy. Le Tourneur's later major projects were also retranslations, very conspicuously so in the case of his version of Richardson's Clarissa, given the unflagging popularity of Prevost's version. In his preface he is polite, but firm, in dealing with the shortcomings - primarily the extensive abridgements - of his predecessor. Ces fautes echappoient a sa plume elegante & facile, mais rapide, & qui couroit vers d'autres productions originales plus flatteuses pour son talent & sa reputation. L'un & 1'autre sont si bien etablis, qu'on ne peut nous soupconner d'aucune vue de les deprimer ici pour nous clever, & que le plaisir de lui rendre justice nous dedommage de la necessite d'eclairer le Public sur le nouveau travail qui lui est offert.14 Unlike his other major projects, Le Tourneur's Clarissa never dominated the scene, although its conscientiousness was appreciated in intellectual circles.15 Diderot, of course, had criticized Prevost's translation for its cuts in his 'Eloge de Richardson': 'Vous qui n'avez lu les ouvrages de Richardson que dans votre elegante traduction francaise et qui croyez le connaitre, vous vous trompez.'16 The 'Eloge,' originally published in the Journal etranger (January 1762), was reprinted in the same 1768 number of Varietes litteraires as Bissi's translation of Young, which it followed (2:6396). It is striking that both pieces contained 'calls' for retranslation to which Le Tourneur would respond, beginning with his Young, the following year.

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Le Tourneur's Shakespeare, the apogee of his career, may also have been the first complete French version, but few incompletely translated writers could have enjoyed as widespread and controversial a reputation: from Voltaire's translation of Hamlet's soliloquy in the Lettres philosophiques (1734) to the abridged translations in Pierre-Antoine La Place's Theatre anglois (1745), to Jean-Francois Ducis's stage versions in the 1760s. Le Tourneur thus offered his readers an opportunity to gain a broader perspective on a body of work whose reputation preceded it, if only 'sous une sorte de travestissement ridicule.'17 Like his other (re)translations, this one clearly responded to an important, if incompletely articulated, cultural trend, but unlike the translations of Richardson, Ossian, and the graveyard poets, the translation of Shakespeare would not confer instant canonical status on the writer.18 Aware that his translation constituted a major, controversial, intervention in the literary field of the day, Le Tourneur presented the first of what would ultimately be a twenty-volume project with an elaborate paratextual apparatus - one would almost say a 'protective' apparatus consisting of: 1. a 'prospectus des gravures' to accompany the work; 2. a distinguished list of subscribers that included the French royal family, the English king, and Catherine the Great of Russia; 3. a ten-page dedicatory epistle to Louis XVI; 4. a three-page discussion of Jean-Francois Marmontel's 'errors' regarding Shakespeare in his Chef d'oeuvres dramatiques; 5. a twenty-page account of the 'Jubile de Shakespeare' celebrated in 1769; 6. a forty-page 'Vie de Shakespeare'; 7. a forty-page 'Discours extrait des differentes prefaces' by a number of English critics, including Rowe, Pope, Johnson, and others; 8. and-almost as an afterthought - a five-page 'Avis sur cette Traduction.' Le Tourneur and his collaborators, the comte de Catuelan and Fontaine Malherbe (neither of whom appears to have played a significant role in the translation and whose names are dropped in later volumes), appear to have spared no effort in presenting an imposing frame for shaping the reader's perception of the text. Although a detailed analysis of the apparatus is beyond the scope of this essay, several points are worth making. The single most important prior French critical statement on Shakespeare, La Place's 1745 'Discours

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sur le theatre anglois,' had discussed Shakespeare's theater in terms of an alternative dramaturgy, unfamiliar and potentially shocking to French readers, yet possessing its own Verite de sentiment' and even certain goals in common with French theater.19 Le Tourneur, on the other hand, scarcely discusses dramaturgy - at least not in his own words turning that part of the discussion over to the English writers on whose commentaries the 'Discours extrait des differentes prefaces' is based. Instead, he situates the plays in terms of Shakespeare the man, the individual artist in search of truth: 'Ne dans un etat obscur, & dans un siecle encore barbare, il n'avoit devant lui qui la Nature. II devina que c'etoit-la le modele qu'il devoit peindre; & que le grand secret de 1'Art du Theatre consistoit sur-tout a creer sur la scene des homme entierement ressemblans a ceux qui sortent de ses mains' (l:ii-iii). Le Tourneur even presents the playwright as an implicit model for Louis XVI: descendant dans la Cabane du Pauvre, il y a vu 1'humanite, & n'a point dedaigne de la peindre dans les classes vulgaires. II a saisi la nature par-tout ou il Fa trouvee, & il a developpe tous les replis du coeur humain, sans sortir des scenes ordinaires de la vie. Ces peintures naives & vraies ne seront point sans charmes aux yeux de Votre Majeste, qui se plait a descendre quelquefois du Trone pour aller chercher sous 1'humble toit du Laboureur ou de 1'Artisan, la Verite, la Nature, & des objets a sa bienfaisance. (l:vi-vii)

As we shall also see in the case of Young, Le Tourneur's presentation of Shakespeare situates his work as an organic expression of his life; life, work, and literary biography repeat an overriding idea. Not all the 'Discours des prefaces' has been traced to English sources, suggesting that Le Tourneur may have woven threads of his own making into the fabric of the text; the pastiche, a dense patchwork of translation, paraphrase, and commentary, enables him to speak indirectly, as another.20 The ongoing reference to English sources further enables him to introduce a new word (or at any event a new meaning for the word) into the French language: romantique, which he carefully distinguishes from both romanesque and pittoresque (l:cxviii). The oddly constructed set of 'prefaces' may thus be said to quietly usher in the next literary revolution by giving it a name.21 After the wealth of reflection preceding it, Le Tourneur's 'Avis sur cette Traduction' may appear disappointingly cursory. Here, however, the translator makes several important observations regarding the differences in register affecting certain lexical fields in French and English,

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and the problem of remaining true to the source text while maintaining a 'noble' register in French. If the French translator arrogates the right to make changes in his source, it is because the literal 'repetition' constitutes an even more significant change: 'II y a souvent des metaphores & des expressions qui, rendues mot-a-mot dans notre langue, seroient basses ou ridicules, lorsqu'elles sont nobles dans 1'original: car en Anglois il est tres-peu de mots bas' (l:cxxxv-cxxxvi). The adherence to a canon of 'noble' usage may distract us from noticing Le Tourneur's justification of his own usage of 'quelques termes ou vieillis ou nouveaux peutetre' (such as romantique), even as he modestly disclaims any desire to 'perfect the instrument' of the French language (Lcxxxix). The remarks on language are sufficiently nuanced to merit a better assessment than Hugo's patronizing account: 'Letourneur n'a pas traduit Shakespeare; il 1'a candidement, sans le vouloir, obeissant a son insu au gout hostile de son epoque, parodie.'22 Clearly, however, the 'preface' to Shakespeare is too segmented to offer a fully developed program for the translator's project, partly perhaps because it was the nature of the project to re'sist containment in a single masterful discourse, and partly as well because in many respects the larger project had already been presented, in the 1769 preface to Les Nuits d'Young. Let us turn to the earliest and most programmatic of Le Tourneur's prefaces, his 'Discours preliminaire, contenant un abrege de la vie d'Young, quelques reflexions sur son genie, sur les Nuits & sur cette Traduction, avec une idee de tous ses Ouvrages.' As the title suggests, the essay gives an overview of the poet's work and reserves a place of special importance to the Night Thoughts as well as to the life of the poet. The mention of 'genie' is an oblique reference to what will turn out to be an important excursus on Young's famous Conjectures on Original Composition. In the concluding section, the translator also goes to some trouble to justify what might appear to modern readers as unconscionable liberties taken with the text, which he has freely abridged and rearranged. Such practices were hardly unusual in the context of neoclassical translation, but nevertheless appear paradoxical in the present case, given Le Tourneur's evident interest in writers at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from French style,23 Like the later Shakespeare preface and others, the 'Discours' can be read as part of the construction of 'preRomantic' sensibility, in which it undoubtedly played an important role.24 In this reading, however, I will focus on the prominent place given the Conjectures and the way that Le Tourneur uses Young's essay both to

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understand the Night Thoughts and to explicate his own practice of translation. At stake here is a reconsideration of the strongly adaptative strategies of the French translators and their English counterparts from Denham to Tytler, so often criticized for their supposedly 'hegemonizing' approach to foreign cultural products. I would argue that in the Le Tourneur preface multiple personal, aesthetic, and philosophical projects intersect with translation and indicate the path towards a richer, more nuanced account of the relation between translation and the Enlightenment literary world. The 'Discours preliminaire,' which runs from thirty-five to fifty pages depending on the edition, frames Young as a somewhat problematic writer for French audiences from the very start. Noting Young's association with Addison, Richardson, Swift, Shaftesbury, and Pope, Le Tourneur promptly claims that 'Young cut moins de gout que ces Ecrivains.'25 But, he adds, 'on diroit qu'il dedaigna d'en avoir ... Ne pour etre original, il a voulu 1'etre & remplir une tache qui lui fut propre' (l:i). The introduction to Young's life and work is thus linked from the outset to the notion of originality and the critique, or at least questioning, of conventional (French) taste. Young's work is characterized equally as having 'defauts' and as possessing 'sublime' qualities - for which the 'defects' may of course be prerequisite. This complexity, according to Le Tourneur, prompts interest in the author's life: Tl est impossible de lire cet ouvrage, unique dans son genre, sans desirer de connoitre plus particulierement le caractere d'un homme si singulier' (l:ii). Following a biographical exposition, we are then offered an account of Young's 'genie,' which proves to be an extended set of excerpts from the Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), a work that Le Tourneur sees as crucial to our understanding of the Night Thoughts: 'Ce petit Traite developpe parfaitement les idees d'Young comme critique. On diroit qu'il auroit compose ses Nuits d'apres les principes qu'il y expose, ou qu'il auroit ajuste ces principes sur ses Nuits' (l:xii). I will have more to say about the place of the Conjectures in the 'Discours' in a moment, but for now would like only to underscore the ways in which Le Tourneur sees the 'meaning' of Young's poem as extending beyond the margins of the page, into his life on the one hand and into his literary-critical writing on the other, so that neither 'life' nor 'writing' is a clearly demarcated field.26 The passage from the Conjectures takes up nearly a quarter of the 'Discours' (eight to ten pages, depending on edition), and furnishes the occasion for Le Tourneur to embark upon a sustained reflection on

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taste, originality, and genius, in which the former term is increasingly dissociated from the latter two. Evoking the general idea of an ouvrage bienfait, Le Tourneur notes its failings: L'ouvrage est fini; le style en est pur; il est meme elegant: mais vous le sgaviez par coeur avant de 1'avoir lu. Vous n'y trouvez point de ces idees qui interrompent le lecteur, donnent une secousse a 1'ame, & 1'avertissent de penser. Rien qui vous e tonne, rien qui inonde tout-a-coup votre ame de lumiere, en eclaire un coin nouveau que vous n'aviez pas observe, ou 1'affecte d'emotions vives & durables. (l:xx-xxi)

Unlike such conventional works, the Night Thoughts provoke 'astonishment' because they are the product of a particular environment and a particular personality: Mais, concevez un homme d'un caractere grave & serieux, intimement persuade de 1'immortalite de 1'ame, se nourrissant par devoir & par gout des verites qu'enseignent la Religion & la Morale, accoutume a les mediter, conformant sa vie a sa croyance, vivant en homme de bien dans le monde & a la Cour ou le retiennent la faveur des Grands, & 1'envie de faire une fortune proportionnee a son merite, quoique porte a la retraite par le penchant de son ame melancolique & meditative: a 47 ans, commencant a se degouter du monde, & deja detrompe des vaines promesses de la fortune, cherchant a reposer son coeur sur le coeur d'une compagne digne de lui, trouvant dans un seul mariage une epouse vertueuse & tendre, & deuxjeunes amis dans les deux enfans dont il remplace le pere, goutant dix annees les plaisirs & le charme d'une societe si douce..... [ellipsis in the original] c'est alors que Philandre meurt, que Narcisse meurt, & son epouse aussi! (l:xxi-xxii)

Le Tourneur continues reciting for a second time the circumstances of Young's life, the loss of his family, the composition of the Night Thoughts. This time, of course, it is not 'Young' but 'un homme d'un caractere grave & serieux' and later 'un vieillard,' just as the young people now have the names given them in the Nuits. As the 'Discours' proceeds in this second biographical account, the relational logic connecting life and work moves from a certain explanatory coherence to something more inexorable, more organic, as suggested by the verb devoir in Le Tourneur's initial evocations of the poem:

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Que le debut doit en etre sombre! Comme 1'etat de son coeur aura tout-acoup change 1'aspect de 1'univers! Qu'il doit voir 1'espece humaine miserable dans le sentiment de sa propre misere! Comme toutes ses idees, toutes ses reflexions doivent aboutir au tombeau! ... En voila assez pour faire juger quels doivent etre le ton, le caractere & les couleurs de 1'ouvrage; combien il doit etre sublime par intervalle, presque toujours irregulier, monotone & diffus, plein de defauts & de beautes. (l:xxii-xxiii)

This creative necessity bespeaks much that is familiar in 'pre-Romantic' aesthetics, but Le Tourneur gives his account an interesting epistemological twist: Si 1'Ecrivain, au lieu de peindre de memoire des sentiments affoiblis, ou de s'en preter de factices qu'il n'eprouva jamais pour lui-meme, exprimoit ses idees & ses sensations, a mesure qu'il les regoit; non pas, il est vrai, dans ces premiers instans de trouble, ou Fame employee toute entiere a sentir, ne peut produire hors d'elle que des sons inarticules, & se repand en desordre par tous les organes; mais dans cet instant ou 1'ame se partageant entre la sensation & la reflexion, commence a devenir assez tranquille pour se voir agitee, & peut se rendre compte de toutes ses impressions; s'il fixoit alors sur le papier les idees fugitives, les reflexions extraordinaires, les illuminations soudaines qui passent devant sa pensee, s'il laissoit ses sentimens s'exprimer eux-memes, que 1'ame alors tendue seroit bien autrement retentissante, & rendroit bien d'autres sons! (l:xxiv)

What I find most interesting about this form of semi-automatic writing is less the evocation of 'trouble' or 'agitation' or even the echo of philosophical debates on language, 'natural order,' and the order of ideas, but instead the unusual intermediary mental state posited by Le Tourneur between sensation and reflection. This is a new 'place' in the classical order of things, in which the familiar terms of the empiricist credo must be each redefined in order to make room for another faculty or, more accurately, 'moment.' The altered state is defined by writing, and is hence a form of cognition beyond 'feeling,' yet not so distanced from feeling as to impinge on the insights unavailable to the fully conscious, reflective, and disciplined mind. Writing is thus a revelation, and a representation, of hitherto undisclosed mental events. The notion that the mind is a largely unexplored territory, and the understanding of originality and ultimately genius as the exploration of

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this 'unknown,' are of course among the principle points of Young's Conjectures: 'for who hath fathomed the mind of man? Its bounds are as unknown, as those of the creation; since the birth of which, perhaps, not One has so far exerted, as not to leave his Possibilities beyond his Attainments, his Powers beyond his Exploits.'27 It is to that text that I now turn, as to Le Tourneur's use of it, before looking at the concluding section of the 'Discours,' in which he discusses his practice of translation. Written late in Young's career, the Conjectures are generally understood as representing a very different aesthetic and philosophical orientation than the more religiously orthodox Night Thoughts. Whether his understanding of the poem has been influenced by his reading of the Conjectures, or he has found in the Conjectures a tool for justifying his approach to the poem, Le Tourneur's conflation of them in the preface is the first indication of the secularizing aspect of his translation.28 The Conjectures appear in the form of a letter addressed 'to the author of Sir Charles Grandison.' Richardson was another author admired and translated by Le Tourneur, of course, and he remains a constant, if subtly felt, presence throughout the text, which turns not infrequently to the second person, occasionally inserting dialogue between sender and receiver, and at one point would seem to bow in Richardson's direction, when Young praises the moral qualities of 'a friend of mine' who has brought virtue to 'a species of composition, once most its foe' (77-8). Richardson's moral authority anchors the seriousness of Young's purpose, even as in the opening words of the essay Young describes it as a 'Pastime ... miscellaneous in its Nature, somewhat licentious in its Conduct' (2). The 'conduct' of the essay is indeed loose in its organization, although a broad progression can be discerned from the discussion of 'composition' or writing, to the question of originality, and then to the consideration of genius, followed by critical assessments of Pope, Swift, Johnson, Dryden, and Addison. Despite what he deems the frivolity of the setting, however, Young assures Richardson and us that the occasional 'serious Thought' in a light context might engage a 'careless Wanderer,' just as 'monumental Marbles scattered in a wide PleasureGarden' might strike someone who would never seek them out in a 'Churchyard-walk of mournful Yews.' He then strongly suggests that it is to precisely such a 'monument' that he will be leading us. This pact with the reader is the essay's strongest structuring element. Young reminds us of his promise at one point, somewhat unexpectedly, when in the midst of a discussion of the capacity of genius to 'wander wild' he suddenly reflects that even the 'Painter of the most

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unbounded and exalted Genius' could never truly paint 'a Seraph,' since we can only paint what we have seen - and suddenly he finds himself asking, 'who can give us divine Truth unrevealed?' (38). The question marks a rupture in the text, both because it is all but a non sequitur and because Young gives no answer, only another, metacritical, question: Ts this too serious for my subject? I shall be more so before I close' (38). Ultimately, I think it is the rupture that counts here, the opportunity to remind us that although the ultimate 'point' of the Conjectures is hidden as yet, it will ultimately be revealed. The promise is fulfilled in the final pages, in Young's edifying description of Addison's deathbed piety. As for the ostensible subject of the Conjectures, Young informs us, it was in fact 'my chief inducement for writing at all ... For this is the monumental marble ... to which I promised to conduct you; this is the sepulchral lamp, the long-hidden lustre of our accomplished countryman, who now rises, as from his tomb, to receive the regard so greatly due to the dignity of his death.' (108-9). There are other deaths in the Conjectures: Young's critical comments on the misanthropy of Gulliver's Travels leads him to a personal reminiscence of Swift's reflections on his own death (64-5); similarly, his criticism of Pope for having produced a mere translation, rather than something more worthy of his genius, leads Young to regret this friend's early death: 'for I heard the dying swan talk over an Epic plan a few weeks before his decease' (69). These references both prefigure the final scene of Addison's deathbed and function as early memento mori in the 'Pleasure-Garden' of the text. The key textual puzzle for the reader, in the end, is to consider what is at stake in the juxtaposition of the two subjects: originality, the ostensible subject, and death, specifically the contemplation of Addison's death, which proves to be the 'chief inducement for writing' and whose revelation - much is made of the fact that the public is unaware of the story - is equated with resurrection, 'rising from the tomb.' Clearly the reminders of death serve, as in the Night Thoughts, to inspire contemplation of eternal life. Genius and originality are, of course, constantly described in terms of life, both organic life and the life everlasting. But it is not altogether clear whether the creative genius serves more to remind us of eternal verities, or to divert us from them by focussing our attention on its own sheer exuberance and brilliance. With that in mind, let us look at Le Tourneur's use of the Conjectures within his preface. It will be recalled that he offers 'le passage que j'insere ici' as a theoretical groundwork for understanding the Nuits that

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follow. Readers familiar with the Conjectures might quickly notice that all reference to death and deathbeds is gone; Le Tourneur offers only an extended passage on genius and originality. What becomes clear on closer inspection, particularly if one compares Le Tourneur's translated 'quotation' with the original, is that this fifteen-hundred-word 'excerpt' is in fact a patchwork quilt of quotations from throughout the Conjectures, sewn together with great care, in which some sequences are translated in a (relatively) straightforward manner, while other paragraphs are constructed of sentences from entirely different contexts. Some passages from the Conjectures are broken up and inserted in more than one place in the 'excerpt.' Although there is no passage in the French without any textual basis in the English, Le Tourneur edits freely, dropping some phrases (he deletes 'contract full intimacy with the Stranger within thee' [53] from the series of injunctions following Young's command to 'Know thyself), reversing the order of sentences within a paragraph, transposing third person to second person, eliminating any trace of anti-Catholic sentiment, and the like. The French text so constructed - and, again, presented as a continuous 'passage' - certainly bears a family resemblance to the Conjectures, with its exhortatory style and striking imagery. The 'message' is forcibly simplified to some degree, and Young's 'licentious' organization is brought into a more sharply defined form. The digressions and repetitions of the original make it possible for Le Tourneur to choose a sentence here, a sentence there, rearrange the paragraphs, pare down others, and bring together passages originally twenty or forty pages apart, without any discontinuity. Discontinuity, actually, is the characteristic of the original; the pastiche reads smoothly, persuasively, ending on an evocation of mirroring and recognition: Aux premiers rayons qu'un genie qui se decele vient a repandre sur leur composition, 1'Ecrivain tressaillit comme la vue du meteore etincelant dans la nuit. II ne peut revenir de son etonnenient. II a peine a se croire luimeme. Tant que cette heureuse pudeur enflamme sesjoues, on peut lui dire ce que Milton addresse a Eve, lorsqu'elle se voit pour la premiere fois dans Fonde tranquille du lac d'Eden. 'Cette belle creature que tu vois & qui te charme, c'est toi-meme.' Le genie ressemble alors a un ami tendre qui nous accompagne deguise: nous gemissons de son absence [ellipsis in the original] II se fait connoitre en nous embrassant; & notre surprise egale notrejoie. (xvi)29

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Le Tourneur's penchant for amplification, here reinforced in a series of reflexive verbs ('se croire lui-meme,' 'se voit,' 'se fait connoitre'), and the fuller evocation of the scene from Paradise Lost underscore the significance of repetition in these twin recognition scenes. Here, genius is not portrayed as the startlingly new (which would be unrecognizable), but rather as that which is most intimately ours: a dear friend, even one's own face. Both scenes tell a story of estrangement and restoration, in which that which we should know best is first hidden or unrecognizable, then revealed, recognized, made clear. Self-estrangement is a recurring theme in Young - a few lines after the Miltonic allusion, in a passage not translated by Le Tourneur, he notes that 'men may be strangers to their own abilities' and earlier (in a translated passage), he commented on our ignorance, not only 'of the dimensions of the human mind in general, but even of our own' (49).30 In Le Tourneur, the 'recognition scenes' respond to the earlier injunctions 'Connois-toi' and 'Respectetoi' (xiii-xiv; 'Know thyself and 'Reverence thyself,' [52-3]), which actually follow the recognitions in the original. The pursuit of self-knowledge, in Young, is accompanied by a host of evocations on the strangeness of the self, the fundamental unknowability of that which is radically new, or original. Who can give us 'the true portrait of a Seraph? ... who can give us divine Truth unrevealed?' (38). In Le Tourneur, the placement of the recognition scenes, coming as a response to the earlier exhortation to self-knowledge and giving the last word in the passage, suggest not so much that the self is strange, but rather that the strange-seeming is actually the self, something we knew all along. Of course, this account can also be found in the Conjectures, where it coexists with the notion of originality as the resolutely new, the undiscovered, the radically other. It is akin to divine revelation. Look again at the Addison story: you thought you knew him but you did not, Young tells Richardson; only after his death is his truth able to be recognized. The echoes of the Gospel of John are already such that it is hardly surprising to hear the event described as a kind of resurrection. Originality - divine truth - isn't exactly impossible, but it is a miracle. It contains an element of repetition. Truth is not something 'never seen,' but rather it is apprehended in the moment of seeing again, and for the first time, revealed truth in the hitherto familiar, now made strange. To return to Le Tourneur: following his extended quotation from the Conjectures, he reflects on the importance of genius and originality. He is critical of French taste: 'Si les Anglois s'egarent souvent par trop de

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licence & de temerite, les Francois pourroient bien etre accuses quelquefois de lachete dans le champ du genie; souvent ils etouffent leur talent a force de gout & de servitude' (xix). As we have seen, he then strives to show that Young embodied both genius and originality, and that his life and work are indissolubly connected. However 'strange' Young may appear to a French public (it will be recalled that the opening sentences of the 'Discours' warn of us the 'defects' of the Night Thoughts), Le Tourneur is bent on showing that the work derives organically from the author's life and character. Again, here the work of genius is conceived not as a sudden revelation of something utterly new, but rather the necessary emanation of the self: completely recognizable. The tension between (unrecognizable) originality and recognition becomes most manifest in the transition, or lack of transition, from the evocation of the state of altered consciousness that supposedly enabled Young to produce his work, to the discussion of translation. Quelle energie, quelle nouveaute d'expressions & d'idees! Quelle difference avantageuse & frappante on remarqueroit dans les ecrits! Get etat de 1'ame, si propre a produire des idees originales, etoit a peu pres celui dans lequel Young entretenoit la sienne par des meditations assidues & profondes dans le calme de la solitude. Nourrissant avec soin le sentiment de la melancolie active, il suivoit les mouvemens divers de son ame, tragoit toutes ses pensees dans 1'ordre ou elles naissoient, exprimoit tout ce qu'il sentoit, & 1'exprimoit autant de fois que le meme sentiment renaissoit, sans beaucoup s'embarrasser de ses lecteurs. II est terns que je previenne les miens sur les libertes que j'ai prises dans cette traduction. Ce sont les defauts que j'ai cru remarquer dans 1'ouvrage qui m'y ont autorise. (xxiv-xxv)

It may come as quite a shock to the reader, after the impassioned account of what makes Young's text extraordinary, to say nothing of the critical remarks levelled at conventional French taste, that Le Tourneur should give such an unabashed account of his 'liberties' as a translator, a taste of which we've seen in his treatment of the Conjectures: editing, rearranging, transposing, and generally 'correcting' various defauts. 'Mon intention a etc de tirer de 1'Young Anglois, un Young Frangois qui put plaire a ma nation, & qu'on put lire avec interet, sans songer s'il est original ou copie' (xxvi). Perrot d'Ablancourt, the seventeenthcentury classicist whose translations are regarded as the prototypical belles infideles, could hardly have said it better, and indeed, in his com-

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ments on Young's 'superfluities,' undignified wordplay, repetitions, and general disorderliness, Le Tourneur goes much further than d'Ablancourt, who never expressed anything but admiration for his classical authors. He compares the original to building materials and himself to an architect (xxviii). Even if he assures us that he has not 'profane ces elans de 1'enthousiasme, cette succession rapide & tumultueuse des mouvemens & des transports d'une ame agitee qui s'elance & bondit d'idees en idees, de sentimens en sentimens' (xxix), his editorial work, Tespece de bouleversement de mon original' is clear. How are we to understand Le Tourneur's technique in the context of what he persists in presenting as a 'foreignizing' project, opening the eyes of the French public to something new? Part of the answer lies in his account of his process: S'il etoit vrai que j 'eusse quelquefois embelli 1'original, ce seroit une bonne fortune dontje lui rends tout 1'honneur. Je ne la devrois qu'au sentiment dont il me penetroit. Quand notre langue resistoit a 1'expression Angloise, j'ai traduit 1'idee, & quand 1'idee conservoit encore un air trop etranger aux notres, j'ai traduit le sentiment, (xxx)

At first glance, this procedure resembles what Sylvain Auroux called the 'structure ternaire' of eighteenth-century semiotics, in which language represents (or 'translates') thought, while thought represents the world.31 According to that model, differences among languages (their different 'genies') could be resolved through an appeal to the universality of thought and human reason, and hence even a strongly adaptative translation could be considered as completely adequate to its source, with neither gain nor loss. In this way, some commentators have argued, philosophical grammar can be seen as providing the theoretical foundation for neoclassical translating practice. But something more complicated is taking place in Le Tourneur's account, where the translator arbitrates language differences by having recourse to thought, and then finds it necesary to arbitrate 'thought differences' by having recourse to feeling, a new fourth term, since it is presumably distinct from the external world. The implication is that different languages produce different 'ideas' (a notion that one also finds in Diderot, d'Alembert, and Maupertuis). This creates a scenario different from that of Auroux's 'hypothese langue-traduction' by attributing a certain 'opacity' to language, which is endowed with the potential to shape thought, rather than transparently 'representing' it. Now, in

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a sense, the insertion of 'feeling' into the structure constitutes a simple deferral of the moment when a universal intervenes to guarantee translatability. And something else is happening as well. As we saw earlier in Le Tourneur's evocation of Young's altered consciousness, 'feeling' and 'thought' are permeable and interpenetrating, and what emerges from their fusion is language: not just any language, but something quite radically new, true, and unfettered by 'la main temeraire et glacee de la methode' (xxix). For Young, the transformative action of originality is either incomprehensible or comprehended in religious terms, as conversion or even resurrection. For Young, there can be no originality in translation, which is merely a form of imitation. By shifting the emphasis away from the religious context and focusing on originality as recognition and selfdiscovery, Le Tourneur is able to position his own project in the same, or similar, terms. Translation becomes a secularized miracle. There is no 'sepulchral lamp' in Le Tourneur's writing, no tomb - except perhaps that of Young himself, his deeply held faith in the reality of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Le Tourneur attempts instead to produce a disenchanted sublime within a discursive context - translation - that Young, certainly, would have found unsuitable. In his recent study of the place of forgery in art history and contemporary aesthetics, philosopher Sandor Radnoti argues that 'the forgery of works of fine art... is deeply interconnected with the autonomy of works of art, with the cognizance of artistic individuality and originality, with historical reflection on art - in short, with the modern system of art.'32 The emergence of the modern concept of originality - for which he gives considerable credit to Young's Conjectures - occurs at a moment when the imbrication of forgery and creation in the literary world was indeed particularly acute, as the boundary between fake and fiction dissolves in the works of MacPherson and Chatterton. The fragility of that distinction can be felt in Le Tourneur's preface to Ossian: 'Mais ses Poemes n'ont pas etc recueillis par M. Macpherson tels qu'il les a donnes dans sa traduction en prose Angloise. II n'aura trouve que des lambeaux epars qu'il a arranges, lies ensemble, etendus peut-etre, en conservant 1'esprit, le ton & les couleurs du Poete Caledonien. Editeur habile & en etat de composer lui-meme, il a fit pour Ossian, ce qu'il paroit qu'on a fait pour Homered MacPherson's technique here resembles Le Tourneur's practice as translator, and shows us a path toward understanding how a work could be both ancient and modern, both repetition and revelation.

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Notes 1 Edward Casey, 'Imagination and Repetition in Literature: A Reassessment,' Yak French Studies 52 (1975): 267. 2 Walter Benjamin, 'The Task of the Translator,' trans. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 71-2. 3 For a recent interpretion of translation as 'representation' rather than repetition of 'the same,' see Arno Renkin, La Representation de I'etranger: Une reflexion hermeneutique sur la notion de traduction (Lausanne: Centre de traduction de Lausanne, 2002). 4 See Michel Ballard, De Ciceron a Benjamin: Traducteurs, traductions, reflexions (Lille: Presses universitaires de Lille, 1992), 161-70; Ballard has also contributed a substantial preface to his facsimile edition of Meziriac, De la traduction [1635] (Artois: Presses universite, Ottawa: Presses de 1'universite d'Ottawa, 1998). 5 See my 'Translation's Temporal Rhetoric: Pierre du Ryer and Le Quinte-Curce de Vaugelas,' forthcoming in Mediaevalia. 6 Germaine de Stael, 'De 1'esprit des traductions,' in Oeuvres completes, 2 vols. (1861; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), 2:294-7; Antoine Berman, L'Epreuvede I'etranger: Culture et traduction dans I'alkmagne romantique (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility (London: Routledge, 1995). 7 For a thorough examination of the Shakespeare project, its context and reception, see Andre Genuist, Le Theatre de Shakespeare dans I'oeuvre de Pierre Le Tourneur, 1776-1783 (Rennes: Presses de 1'universite de Rennes, 1971). Le Tourneur's extensive multipart preface has been reprinted with an excellent critical apparatus by Jacques Gury: Preface du Shakespeare traduit de I'anglois, ed.J. Gury (Geneva: Droz, 1990). The only full-length biographical study of Le Tourneur remains Mary Gertrude Gushing, Pierre Le Tourneur (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908). 8 The most elaborate French theoretical statements to modern works in the first half of the eighteenth century include Etienne de Silhouette's and the abbe du Resnel's prefaces to their competing translations of Pope's Essay on Man (1736-7) and Pierre-Antoine La Place's preface to Le Theatre anglois (1745). The abbe Desfontaines wrote a substantial preface for his translation of Gulliver's Travels, but his most significant theoretical statement on translation remained his 'Discours sur la traduction des poetes,' prefaced to Les Oeuvres de Virgile traduites enfrancois, 4 vols. (Paris: Chez Quillau Pere, 1743), 1:xiii–xliv. 9 On the diffusion of Young and the other graveyard poets, see Paul Van

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Tieghem, La Poesie de la nuit et des tombeaux, in his Le Preromantisme: Etudes d'histoire litteraire europeenne, 3 vols. in one (Paris, 1924-47; repr. Geneva: Slatkine, 1973), 2:1-203. 10 The Journal etranger translation was reprinted in Arnaud and Suard's Varietes litteraires. Unable to consult the Journal etranger, I cite the reprint: Claude de Thyard, comte de Bissi, Traduction de la premiere nuit de Young, precedee de quelques reflexions sur le caractere & les poesies de cet auteur,' Varietes litteraires (1768), 2:38-62. On the publication history of the Journal etranger and the Varietes litteraires and their role in diffusing translations, see Jin Lu, 'La Traduction de romans anglais dans \ejournaletranger,' in La Traduction romanesque au XVIIIe siecle, ed. Annie Cointre, Alain Lautel, and Annie Rivara (Arras: Artois Presses Universite, 2003), 187-202. 11 Turgot's translations appeared in the Journal etranger of September 1760, and were preceded by an important essay by him on language theory; Diderot, Suard, and others later tried their hand at the Ossianic fragments. These early translations, as well as Turgot's preface, have recently appeared in a modern edition, Fragments depoesie andenne: Traduction de Diderot, Turgot, Suard, ed. Francois Heurtematte (Paris: Jose Corti, 1990). Like his Young, Le Tourneur's Ossian became the pre-eminent European version and served as the basis for a number of translations in other languages. See Van Tieghem, Ossian et Ossianisme au XVIIIe sieclem Le Preromantisme: Etudes d'histoire litteraire europeanne (Paris, 1924-7; repr., Geneva: Slatkine, 1973), 1:197-287. 12 [Marie-Genevieve-Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville], trans., Meditations sur les tombeaux, parHervey: Traduites de I'Anglois (Paris: chez Lacombe, 1771). Le Tourneur's translation also appeared in 1771; his preface, however, refers to an earlier translation. L'Annee litteraire reviewed both translations: an anonymous version, presumably Thiroux d'Arconville's, in mid-1771, and Le Tourneur's - which the reviewer preferred - a few months later. See Van Tieghem, L'Annee litteraire (1754—1790) comme intermediate en France des litteratures etrangeres (Paris: F. Rieder & Cie., 1917). Like Van Tieghem's other studies, this volume offers invaluable bibliographic resources. 13 Le Tourneur, trans. Meditations d'Hervey, traduites de I'anglois, parM. Le Tourneur, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez Lejay, 1771). See the end of Le Tourneur's lengthy biographical preface, 'Vie d'Hervey,' for the discussion of Hervey's 'merite litteraire' (64-73). 14 Pierre Le Tourneur, prospectus to Clarisse Harlowe: Traduction nouvelle et seule complete, 10 vols. (Geneva: chez Paul Barde/Paris, Chez Moutard, Chez Merigotlejeune, 1785) l:xi-xii. 15 For an astute analysis of Prevost's translation, see Thomas O. Beebee,

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18

19

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Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1990). Diderot, Oeuvres, ed. Dieckmannetal., 33vols. (Paris: Herman, 1975-), 13:199. Pierre Le Tourneur, trans., Shakespeare traduit de I'Anglois, 20 vols. (Paris: Chez la Veuve Duchesne [et al.], 1776-83), l:iv (same edition as the reprint edition cited above). The bibliography on Shakespeare's reception in France is immense, even when restricted to the eighteenth century. Here again, Van Tieghem furnishes a useful overview for the period, Shakespeare en France, vol. 3 of Le Preromantisme; Howard Weinbrot gives a good, well-documented account of the critical context on both sides of the Channel, in 'Enlightenment Canon Wars: Anglo-French Views of Literary Greatness,' ELH60 (1993): 79-100. On Le Tourneur's role, see Genuist, Le Theatre de Shakespeare; for one of his main predecessors, see John Golden's book on Ducis, Shakespeare for the Age of Reason, SVEC295 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993). While PierreAntoine La Place's translation of Tom Jones has received recent critical attention, his Theatre anglois, although often referred to, has not been given the degree of study it deserves. In spite of his ultimate insistence on common ground between English and French theater, La Place's essay is noteworthy for its attempt to come to terms with a radically different aesthetic; certain of the features La Place ascribes to Shakespeare bear a striking resemblance to the theatrical innovations Diderot would announce in his Entretiens sur le Fits naturel more than a decade later. Unlike Diderot, however, La Place cannot imagine a dramaturgy that would allow a fusion of comedy and tragedy 'contraire a la raison, a la nature, a la verite du sentiment' (Ixxxi). On the sources of the 'Discours' see Gury, introduction to Preface du Shakespeare, 251—2. As Gury points out, the apparently heterogenous set of materials composing the Shakespeare 'preface' function as a coherent work: 'D'un texte a 1'autre, les memes themes revenaient, les memes propos etaient developpes avec les memes intentions, et 1'ensemble constituait un monument a la gloire de Shakespeare' (33). See Gury, introduction to Preface du Shakespeare, 41-50. On the echoes of Diderot in the 'Discours' and in many of the notes accompanying the plays, see Genuist, Theatre de Shakespeare, 174-5. Le Tourneur's philosophical and political orientation remains implicit, but it is worth noting his long, close friendship with radical writer Sebastien Mercier, who wrote a moving tribute to 'une liaison intime et non interrompue de vingt-deux annees' at the time of his friend's death in January 1788 (cited by Gushing, Pierre Le Tourneur, 17-18.)

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22 Victor Hugo, preface to Oeuvres completes de W. Shakespeare, trans. FrancoisVictor Hugo (Paris: Pagnerre, 1865), 1:15. 23 Nicholas Rand points to the 'self-defeating tension' in Le Tourneur and other French translators of the period as a demonstration of the inadequacy of the concept of'horizon of expectations,' arguing that the translators' efforts both to predict and to structure their audience's response to foreign works result in incoherency and failure. See 'The Translator and the Myth of the Public: "Introductory Remarks" to the First French Translations of Swift, Young, and Shakespeare,' ML7V100 (1985): 1092-1102. While Rand seizes acutely on the tensions inherent in the translators' projects, his analysis, focused as it is on a debate within twentieth-century hermeneutics, overlooks the extreme diversity of his three examples and cannot tell us much about either the theoretical stakes for the translators themselves or the discursive context in which they wrote. 24 I use the term 'pre-Romantic' for lack of a better one, not to imply a teleological vector, but rather in reference to a strain of writing that resists not only Enlightenment rationalism but also a thoroughly naturalized 'literature of sensibility,' and that, for many French readers, carried with it a distinctly 'foreign' flavour, both alluring and unsettling, usually coded as English. See Jennifer Keith's review of the term in '"Pre-Romanticism" and the Ends of Eighteenth-Century Poetry,' in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Po^ryed.John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 271-90. 25 Le Tourneur, 'Discours preliminaire, contenant un abrege de la vie d'Young, quelques reflexions sur son genie, sur les Nuits & sur cette Traduction, avec une idee de tous ses Ouvrages,' Les Nuits d'Young, traduites de I'angloispar M. Le Tourneur, Nouvelle edition, 2 vols. (Paris: Chez Cailleau, 1783), l:i. 26 On eighteenth-century critics' tendency to map Young's work onto his life and the evolving judgments of that life - see Stephen Cornford's introduction to his critical edition of the Night Thoughts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 20-2. 27 Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759; repr. Leeds: Scolar Press, 1966), 48. 28 Cornford's introduction to the Night Thoughts stresses their orthodox Anglican underpinning: 'By omitting a lot of Young's specifically Christian writing, and by relegating other theological passages to notes, Young's French translator, Pierre Le Tourneur, turned Night Thoughts into an inspiring night-time exploration of a poet's response to personal grief as he wanders among the tombs' (18). 29 Young: 'Few authors of distinction but have experienced something of this

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nature, at the first beamings of their yet unsuspected Genius on their hitherto dark Composition: The writer starts at it, as at a lucid Meteor in the night; is much surprized; can scarce believe it true. During his happy confusion, it may be said to him, as to Eve at the Lake, What there thou seest, fair creature! is thyself MILT. Genius, in this view, is like a dear Friend in our company under disguise; who, while we are lamenting his absence, drops his mask, striking us, at once, with equal surprize and joy.' (50-1) 30 Although, as noted earlier, he declines to translate Young's reference to 'the stranger within thee,' perhaps finding 'contract intimacy' too 'intimate' for the French public. 31 Sylvain Auroux, La Semiotique des Encyclopedistes (Paris: Payot, 1979), 22-6. 32 S. Radnoti, The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art, trans. Ervin Dunai (Lanham, MD: Rowman and "Littlefield, 1999), 164. 33 Ossian, fils de Fingal, barde du troisieme siecle: Poesies galliques, traduites sur I'Anglois deM. MacPherson, parM. Le Tourneur, 2 vols. (Paris: chez Musier fils, 1777), l:lix.

chapter ten

Multiple Heads: Pope, the Portrait Bust, and Patterns of Repetition MALCOLM BAKER

When Voltaire remarked that the 'Picture of the prime Minister hangs above the Chimney of his own Closet, but I have seen that of Mr. Pope in twenty Noblemens Houses,' he was not only remarking admiringly on the significance that the English accorded the arts but also assuming a familiar linkage between portraiture and repetition.1 But the example he chooses is telling. Despite his own deformity - or perhaps because of it - no eighteenth-century author had more of an interest in portraiture than Pope himself, and Voltaire's remarks about the ubiquity of his image are borne out by the large numbers of surviving portraits of the poet, at least some of them commissioned by the sitter. Portraits, of course, included sculpted as well as painted images, and, given Pope's interest in sculpture, it should be no surprise that some of the most striking of the poet's portraits took the form of busts. Since it was the bust, far more than the painted portrait, that involved various modes of repetition and was itself more readily repeatable, Pope's interest in having sculptural images made of himself was perhaps appropriate for a poet whose work employed devices of recapitulation and imitation so frequently and so effectively. The busts of Pope, then, may serve as a focus for a discussion of the way in which institutions of repetition operated in the case of a genre that was by 1730 fast becoming a central mode of representation within a culture in which portraiture of various types was already prominent. Busts of Pope were produced by several of those foreign-born sculptors who had established themselves in London from around 1720 and were taking advantage of the growing market for sculpture and other luxury goods. The Flemish-born 'statuaries' Peter Scheemakers and

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Michael Rysbrack were attracting steadily more commissions for busts as well as orders for both elaborate funerary monuments and richly carved chimney pieces to be placed in new town and country houses. Pope's portrait was executed in marble by both sculptors. But the most subtle and ambitious of all the busts of Pope is the image executed by Louis Francois Roubiliac (1702-62). This is known in one terracotta and four signed marble versions, all produced by Roubiliac between 1738 and 1741. Trained in Dresden and Paris, this Lyon-born artist spent almost all of his working life in London and, in the eyes of both contemporary and modern commentators, outshone his rivals to become the leading sculptor of eighteenth-century England. Through their combination of inventiveness and virtuosity, Roubiliac's monuments, statues, and busts are of such distinction that he must be regarded as one of the outstanding European sculptors of this period. In particular, his portrait busts of many of the leading inventive figures of the eighteenth century - from Newton and Pope to Handel and Garrick - show him shaping the imagery of a culture in which many of the key components of modernity were being fashioned. Roubiliac himself was very much part of this culture, and the ways in which he reconfigured the traditional format of the bust to meet new needs in themselves exemplify these new concerns and attitudes. Among all the classes of visual representation current during the eighteenth century it was, above all, the portrait bust that most tellingly drew on patterns and practices of repetition. Whether in its form or in its modes of production and use, the bust offers a close parallel with those literary genres in which the creative imitation - both recapitulation and reproduction - of earlier forms was so central. Given the frequency with which authors themselves formed the subjects of these images, this was indeed appropriate. By considering the ways in which one particular bust of Pope was repeated, replicated, and reproduced, this essay will explore the different and highly productive ways in which repetition operated in the case of the bust and will concentrate on the economy of the portrait bust in eighteenth-century England, where the bust was most popular. If the practices, patterns, and institutions of repetition examined can be claimed to constitute a significant strand running through Enlightenment culture, portrait busts - and busts of Pope, in particular - provide an especially telling instance of how these operated. Unlike the painted portrait, the sculptural image was quite evidently based on a tradition of classical sculpture. As essentially a reworking of

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an antique form, the bust was therefore from the start a genre that involved repetition. At the same time, as is the case with any portrait, its role as a substitute - standing in for an absent subject - meant it was necessarily a repetition in another sense. Most often commissioned to perpetuate the memory of an absent or departed one, the bust was from the start assumed to be looking forward to its future use as a memorial. The individual commemorated in this way might often be a family member but could also be an illustrious figure from a national past; authors were common subjects and, as we shall, their busts could serve as a vehicle for advancing and perpetuating authorial reputation. The portrait bust was thus at once proleptic in its function and retrospective in its mode of representation. By making reference to and invoking the past (especially an antique past) through its forms and conventions, the bust as a genre carried for the viewer associations and expectations of repetition through tradition. The specificity of the individual likeness was constantly kept in play with a sameness that articulated both social bonds and continuities of lineage and authority through familiar and shared visual formulae.2 One such visual formula consisted of clearly recognizable drapery types, some of which made little or no reference to contemporary fashionable dress. A pattern frequently adopted in eighteenth-century England for such portraits showed a male sitter with short hair and classicizing drapery. This explicit visual allusion to an antique Roman past carried obvious meaning when employed on busts of aristocratic sitters whose lineage endowed them with those civic virtues which fitted them for public life. But this was not a convention considered appropriate only for the nobility. It was indeed approximately this pattern that Roubiliac employed for his bust of Pope (fig 10.1). The poet is represented, not dressed in a wig, but with short hair and wearing drapery that, while generalized, made unequivocal reference to the patterns employed on antique busts.3 Indeed, it closely resembles the drapery seen in the bust of Homer once owned by Pope. Just as the drapery was immediately distinguishable from fashionable contemporary dress, so the short hair would have been seen as quite different from the wig invariably worn in public or the soft cap that would have replaced this in less formal settings. This combination of loose, classicizing drapery and the short hair represents a modification of a still more severe type that was based directly on Roman Republican images and by 1730 was becoming one of various options for sitters who wanted busts of themselves. A sitter like Richard Hurd, later Bishop of Worcester, might describe in

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Figure 10.1. Louis-Francois Roubiliac, bust of Alexander Pope. Marble. 1741. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (Photo: Yale Center for British Art, Yale University)

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apparently straightforwardly descriptive terms how the sculptor Michael Rysbrack, having recommended that his 'bad head would not be disgraced by being turned into stone,' agreed with the sitter that the 'head is to turn a little on one side, no cap or wig but a thin hair upon it - a little loose drapery over the shoulders.' But an informed contemporary observer would have been left in no doubt as to such a bust's classical associations.4 This particular mode seems to have been considered especially appropriate for the representation of a poet, as Pope's Boston correspondent, Mather Byles, hints in writing to him about his portraits, albeit painted rather than sculpted. Byles's remark that images showing Pope in what was evidently generalizing classical dress, rather than modern dress, were more 'poetical' suggests that the antique manner was considered more suitable for such a writer.5 But the mode of dress was not the only antique and repeatable feature of the portrait bust. While familiar from the numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century examples that populate the halls and corridors of public institutions, the very form of the bust, truncated across the chest and just below the shoulders, and supported on a socle (a shaped base), constitutes a highly conventional and artificial format.6 This format was developed by the Romans from Greek sculptural portraits - perhaps reduced from full-length statues - and then combined in fifteenth-century Italy with a pattern employed for reliquary busts of saints. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries various more elaborate types of bust were developed, including a more severely classicizing mode. All employ the fundamentally antique pattern consisting of a truncated body, usually supported on a socle, but (apart from a few isolated earlier examples) the type of bust that makes conscious and conspicuous reference to its antique antecedents becomes widespread only in the early eighteenth century. Like, and indeed more than, any neo-Palladian villa or landscape garden with its temples and Elysian groves, a bust such as Roubiliac's of Pope invoked and reworked the antique as knowingly as that poet's Imitations of Horace. Sculpture, of course, retained a far closer relationship to surviving antique models than any painting could, and a modern bust might imitate a Roman portrait head in a way that was impossible for any painted portrait for which there was no antique precedent. Through such imitation, appropriation, and repetition of an antique model, the bust carried an authority lacking in the painted portrait. The lineage of the genre, then, ensured that a strong pattern of repetition was operating in both the production and consumption of the busts, in their

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composition and the way in which they were viewed. But with this came the risk of the modern appropriation's seeming indistinguishable not only from that antique model, but also from the numerous other similar repetitions of that model. Indeed, for many viewers today the very idea of the marble portrait bust suggests the notion of sameness. One more positive aspect of the bust's repetitive character lay not only in its authority but the way in which this authority had come to be articulated through a visual and iconographic tradition - that of portrait busts of authors. Drawing on precedents cited in classical literature, such as Pliny's description of Cicero's library with its busts, Gabriel Naude, Mazarin's librarian, and his English translator, John Evelyn, could recommend that a library be adorned with 'Pictures and Images [of authors], which joyn'd to the description which may have been made of their lives, may serve as a puissant spurre to excite a generous and wellborn Soul to follow their track and to continue form and stable in the wayes and beaten paths of some noble enterprise and resolution.'7 By the mid-eighteenth century the decoration of a library in this way was so familiar that it was almost a sign of a generally current politeness. Yet when Dr Richard Mead peopled his library with portraits of Pope, Halley, and Newton 'near the Busts of their great Masters, the ancient Greeks and Romans,' such an arrangement could still be seen as a register of Mead's intellectual aspirations and range of scholarly interests.8 This practice was evidently being followed by Pope himself (whose countenance was, incidentally, described by Reynolds as 'something grand, like Cicero's') when he not only set up both painted portraits and busts of Homer, Newton, Spenser, Dryden, Milton, Shakespeare, Inigo Jones, and Palladio in his library at Twickenham, but also advised his friend Ralph Allen on the purchase from Roubiliac of busts of Milton and Raleigh.9 If one mode of repetition employed with the bust was the adoption of a standard format, another was the arrangement of similarly formulated images in regular sequences. Repetition was not only expected of the single portrait but also operated in how the group was perceived. Such series had their effect in part through their cumulative power, as in the case, for example, in libraries such as those at All Souls, Oxford, or, more contrapuntally, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where busts of ancients on one set of book presses confronted those of the moderns opposite. The point of such arrangements was that they were above all regular, and by the mid-eighteenth century this was assumed in the way that collections of busts were set out in an interior. The way in which such arrangements worked is suggested in the sketches of the interiors of Wilton

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House (Wiltshire) made by George Vertue, the engraver and chronicler of artists and collectors in England, in his annotated copy of Gambarini's 1731 guide book to the Earl of Pembroke's art collection displayed there. In his view of Inigo Jones's classically regular Double Cube Room, Vertue depicted the large Van Dyck family portrait in some detail, but he showed the many antique portrait busts collected by Pembroke as blank forms, each placed on a plinth so that they collectively constituted a regular pattern of repetition that further articulated the measured proportions of the interior's architecture (fig. 10.2).10 Like repetition's role in classical rhetoric, this arrangement in a regular sequence served to emphasize and reinforce. But by being placed in such a sequence an individual bust - or rather the author whom it represented - was shown to belong, just as the repetition of a standard classicizing drapery convention for many such busts made a claim that the sitter had the right to be admitted to that group. This all might seem rather straightforward, not to say dull, in the way that busts are so often seen as boring because, at first glance, they all look the same. But repetition and variation are interdependent, even if their relationship is complex. As Deleuze has remarked, 'might we not form such a concept [of repetition] once we realize that variation is not added to repetition in order to hide it, but is rather its condition or constitutive element, the interiority of repetition, par excellence?'11 In the case of the portrait, the conventions of drapery might be repeated, often as variations and sometimes through direct reproduction. Yet at the same time each image will'differ from those flanking it through the specificities of individual appearance. Just as Pope might use the familiar and established conventions of the epic or satire in a way that left the reader in no doubt that the verse was by Pope, so his bust by Roubiliac, even when placed (as at Trinity, Cambridge) in a sequence that included Addison and Shakespeare, was manifestly recognizable as an image of that author. Pope the author was here being placed within a tradition - a tradition to which his own verse made overt if complex and subtle reference - but, at the same time, that author's singularity was made just as explicit. While belonging to a tradition was signified by the familiar classicizing drapery, the highly distinctive and subtly modelled facial features of the bust registered the poet's singularity. But in Pope's case the classicizing mode of drapery not only indicated the sitter's membership in a group of worthies and great writers, but also had a particular and singular significance, in view of the poet's distinctive use of classical forms of verse.

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Figure 10.2. George Vertue, View of One End of the Great Room Designed by Inigo Jones. Pen and wash. About 1740. In Gambarini's Description of the Earl of Pembroke's Pictures (1731). The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University (Photo: courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library)

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The relationship between the ways in which Pope both used his classical models in a distinctive way and at the same time asserted his own individuality as an author has been explored in recent Pope scholarship, most notably by Helen Deutsch. According to Deutsch, Pope 'enlists classical sources in the service of a bourgeois entrepreneurship which he endeavors to cast as cultural authority.'12 But by drawing attention to 'Pope's deployment of his person,' Deutsch has also demonstrated how Pope's singularity - his self-assertion - employed deformity 'as a selfconsciously created figure.' This linkage of Pope's singularity with his disability was made explicitly by Joshua Reynolds when he remarked that 'there was an appearance about his mouth which is to be found only in the deformed, and from which he could have known him deformed.'13 And this singularity of appearance, associated with deformity, was articulated in the bust through the modelling of face and brow, making plausible James Prior's report that 'Roubiliac ... observed that his countenance was that of a person who had been much afflicted with headache, and he should have known the fact from the contracted appearance of the skin between his eyebrows, though he had not been otherwise apprised of it.'14 The repetitive nature of the genre and in particular the conventions of that sub-genre co-exist with the distinctiveness of both authorship and Lockean notions of personal identity as consisting of 'the unity of the continued life.'15 Just as Pope's poetry keeps in tension both his self-representation as a modern author and his self-effacement as a writer in a long-established (and by implication authoritative) historical tradition, so Roubiliac's bust of the poet uses a traditional (and repetitive) form in a modern and original way. During this same period when modern authorship - most notably in the case of Pope's using 'classical sources in the service of a bourgeois entrepreneurship' — could be increasingly understood in terms of the production and ownership of a literary estate, an artist such as Hogarth could likewise claim status as well as the copyright of the images he had produced, by laying stress on his powers of invention. While sculptors had historically lacked the status of painters and usually followed in their wake, Roubiliac's attempts to have his work recognized for its inventiveness and distinctiveness were in everyway comparable,16 and indeed the two artists were closely linked. The earliest of Roubiliac's works to become famous was his statue of Handel, commissioned by Jonathan Tyers for his pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and erected there in 1738. As early as that same year a poem published to 'puff Vauxhall by celebrating the statue of Handel could make the surprising claim that

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When times remote dwell on Roubillac's [sic] name They'll still be just to thee who gave him fame. Together blended, faithful friends you'll rise, Whilst thou the means and he the art supplies.17

Although extolling the praises of a patron might have been very familiar, the way in which this verse assumes the fame and status of the sculpture and the sculptor is quite exceptional. One way in which Roubiliac achieved this reputation was through the distinctive qualities of his sculpture, and at this date that, the Handel statue apart, meant primarily portrait busts. Unlike most busts of this period, Roubiliac's portraits have a subtlety of finish and ambition of conception that not only set them apart but also are predicated on the expectation of unusually close and sustained attention on the part of the viewer. These were not generalized, standard images simply to be glanced at, but portraits that were to be looked at closely and thoughtfully. With his bust of Pope Roubiliac was fashioning an image that, in its combination of physical specificity and psychological insight, was functioning as a register not only of Pope's distinctiveness but also of Roubiliac's. Authorial singularity was being claimed for both poet and sculptor, and so for both sitter and artist. Yet, quite crucially and wholly appropriately, the form employed - the bust in classical dress - was a familiar and conventional one. In the case of Pope's poems and Roubiliac's busts, what was distinctive was the way in which the well-established genre was being appropriated, the way in which the familiar form was repeated yet so tellingly varied. But at this point we encounter a further twist, which does not have obvious parallels in Pope's texts, since it involves the repetition of the form through technical processes of casting and carving the various materials employed for sculptural images. The variation now itself becomes both repeated and varied. The standard procedure of workshops from the fifteenth century onward was to produce a clay model that was then fired as terracotta, and from this model the sculptor (or his workshop) took the measurements to be followed in the carving of the marble version. This relatively straightforward pattern of repetition was made more complicated in the case of Roubiliac's practice, as far as we can judge from the material and circumstantial evidence available about the image of Pope.18 The making of Pope's bust would certainly have begun with the modelling of a bust in clay. Likewise, a marble version would be based on such a clay (or terracotta) model. Unsurprisingly,

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then, the close correspondence in format and details such as the configuration of the hair between the surviving terracotta now in the Barber Institute, Birmingham, and the signed marble, dated 1741, in the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, indicates that the marble was based on this particular model. This, however, was not the only marble version signed by Roubiliac (fig. 10.3). The Barber terracotta was also apparently used as the model for the signed marble formerly in the collection of the Fitzwilliam family at Milton (Cambridgeshire), though this repeats the image in a truncated form and consists of the head alone without the shoulders and drapery. Two other signed marbles (Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead; Temple Newsam House, Leeds) vary this pattern in different ways, each reproducing the drapery arrangement, though varying its extent according to the shape of the particular bust. The Shipley and Temple Newsam marbles agree closely in the detailed configuration of the hair. While agreeing with each other, however, these two versions differ markedly in this respect from both the Barber terracotta and the Yale and Milton marbles, all three of which show the hair arranged in a discernibly different but equally consistent pattern. From this we may infer that while the Yale and Milton marbles are repetitions of the Barber terracotta, the Shipley and Temple Newsam marbles are based on a related but different terracotta model that no longer survives. We have here, then, several different types of repetition. The various signed marbles repeat an image of Pope that had been executed in clay. But this clay model had itself been repeated in two slightly different versions in terracotta. We know that one unusual procedure characteristically employed by Roubiliac and his workshop was to use moulds to reproduce the shoulders and drapery used on his models.19 This allowed him, for example, to repeat the drapery used on the bust of Pope for a later bust of Plato by adding a different head. But this practice also opened up the possibility, among others, of creating other 'models' of Pope in which details of hair and expression might be varied, although the drapery remained identical. This appears to have happened in this case. One model (now lost) was used (albeit in differently truncated or reduced forms) for the Temple Newsam and Shipley marbles and another (the Barber terracotta) was repeated complete in the Yale marble and simply as a head for the Milton marble. One point that this alerts us to is the way in which repetition here is neither simply a linear sequence (from terracotta to a single marble) nor a pattern in which one model was repeated (or reproduced) in a number of variant marbles. In this case, the 'model' seems itself to have been

Figure 10.3. Photograph taken in 1961 of the four signed marbles of Roubiliac's Pope (including fig. 10.1), the terracotta model, and a plaster from Roubiliac's workshop. (Photo: National Portrait Gallery, London)

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repeated in a way that had significant implications for the replication of such images to a wider market, and this is something to which I shall return. But for the moment I should like to consider the way in which what was fundamentally the same image could be repeated in four marble versions, each of which was presented as the work of Roubiliac himself. The way in which all four of these marble busts are signed, along with the degree to which they are finished, together indicate that, while repeating and in most cases varying the terracotta portrait, each of these marble versions is equally able to assert Roubiliac's distinctiveness as a sculptor as much as Pope's singularity as an author. (As in the case with many Old Master paintings of which several 'autograph' versions - that is, versions thought to be by the sculptor's hand - exist, this is not a simple case of a 'primary' and 'secondary' versions, less still of 'copies' and an 'original.') If, then, these marbles are an instance of repetition, it is repetition that carries no diminution of value or meaning. In one way, the variations that are made add meaning. Apart from the differing extents to which the full shoulders and drapery are replicated, the principal difference between them consists in the inscriptions that have or have not been added. But in giving a distinctive meaning these added elements are themselves repetitive, in that both are not simply citations from Horace but are citations of this classical author that refer to two earlier authors. Thus, one bust has a line - ' Qui nil molitur inepte (Who never toils foolishly) - praising Homer, and another a line - ' Uni Aequus Virtuti Atque Ejus Amicis1 (Friendly only to Virtue and her Friends) alluding to Horace's admired predecessor, Lucilius.20 Through the addition to these busts of quotations that themselves repeat an earlier author citing still earlier writers, Pope as an author is located within a classical tradition, just as he is situated through his representation in this format of bust, with its direct reference to an antique past. Rather frustratingly, none of these four signed marble busts of Pope by Roubiliac may be traced back to an owner in the 1740s, and despite Pope's active interest in both portraits and sculpture, there is no reference in his correspondence, will, or the inventory made at his death to suggest that the poet himself owned one or more of them. But the uses to which multiple versions of an image commissioned from the same sculptor might be put is suggested by the evidence available about other portrait busts in mid-eighteenth century England. Numerous examples might illustrate the range of functions and settings that busts could have,

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but three will give some impression of the central importance of repetition, not only in the production but also in the reception and viewing of the sculptural portrait around 1740. One concerns the Earl of Pembroke, whose father assembled the collection of antique busts displayed at Wilton House. Appropriating this genre for modern purposes and thereby both repeating and adding, Pembroke commissioned from Roubiliac not only his own bust but marbles of Sir Andrew Fountaine and Martin Folkes, two friends who shared his antiquarian enthusiasms as well as his interest in coins and medals, another important category of multiple heads. But versions of both Pembroke's image and Fountaine's own were also apparently displayed by the latter at his house at Narford in Norfolk. Whether these were given to him by Pembroke or purchased by Fountaine from the sculptor is unclear, but whichever may have been the case, these images served as tokens of friendship, substitutes for absent friends. Similarly, this relationship was articulated through repetition when Fountaine chose to have his own funerary monument designed in imitation of Pembroke's own.21 As well as registering a bond of friendship, the repetition of a bust could allow the commemorative role of the sculptural image to be enacted in both the private and public spheres. A bust of one George Pitt was commissioned by his son from the sculptor Henry Cheere as part of the monument erected to the father in the parish church near to his country estate in Dorset. But at the same time a further marble was evidently carved for display in the family house.22 In the latter case, the image perhaps operated less as a means of commemorating a single individual and more as one component in a narrative of family history, a succession of images (both painted and sculpted) that emphasized the continuity of that family lineage on which the inheritance of estates was based. An arrangement of busts and paintings in regular sequence (along the regular lines seen in the antique busts at Wilton) involved the use of repetition for well-established and familiar social ends. Several of these factors seem to have been in play in my third example, which concerns the busts of the Scottish noblewoman Lady Grisel Baillie and her daughter, Lady Murray, both of whom had links with members of Pope's circle. Either just before or shortly after the death of Lady Grisel in 1745 - the evidence for the dating is ambiguous - Lady Murray commissioned busts of herself and her mother from Roubiliac. While they served a commemorative function, these busts were from the start

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evidently intended for a domestic setting, probably in proximity to each other, to judge from the evident closeness of the daughter to 'my dear mother' as well as the busts' complementary modes. But since the extended family, through its intermarriages with the Binning and Stanhope families, had several houses, each with their sequences of family portraits, more than one bust was required of mother and daughter. It is probably for this reason that an entry in the continuation of Lady Grisel Baillie's scrupulously kept account book, as maintained by her daughter, records the terracotta models for both (they were apparently painted white) as being sent to Tyninghame while marble versions, together with two plasters, were dispatched to the family's other house at Mellerstain.23 In all these cases repetition was necessary if the bust was to fulfil its social function and be inserted into a variety of different family, narrative, and commemorative contexts. But as in the case of the multiple versions of Pope's busts, all these different busts had a comparable status, and as far as the Roubiliac examples were concerned, manifested qualities that gave them an authorial authority appropriate to their subjects. Seen in terms of their commissioning from an exceptional sculptor by some unusually discriminating patrons, these were images that had been ideated and executed with considerable thought and care, and were subsequently used and displayed with this in mind. The close and mutually respectful relationship between patron and sculptor that this implied was not, however, the norm in a culture in which the portrait bust was an increasingly common and widely visible part of visual imagery. And here the repetition of such images carried with it all the associations that we might expect of a widespread distribution throughout a people that was commercial as much as it was polite. The commodification that was so characteristic of a growing consumer society found other uses for patterns of repetition, just as the portrait bust could itself, like other registers of politeness, become commodified. Commodification through replication had of course long been a possibility - perhaps an economic necessity - for sculptors. This was so even for a sculptor such as Roubiliac, whose strategy had been to present himself as rather apart from other 'statuaries' with their close links to masons. Despite this claim to inventiveness, his particular (and in many respects unusual) workshop practice often involved the casting of parts of the clay and terracotta model, opening up the possibility of producing multiple replicas without their being individually carved and in materials such as plaster that were considerably cheaper than marble. In the case of the Pope bust, the same drapery pattern seems to have been em-

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ployed by the sculptor (through the use of moulds) for rather later busts of Plato and John Leland, with the incorporation of different heads.24 And the facility of his workshop with moulds and casting procedures meant that Roubiliac himself could market cheaper plaster replicas of this image. Ironically, two examples of such replicas - a plaster purchased in 1738/9 by Pope's friend the Earl of Marchmont and one bought at Roubiliac's posthumous sale in 1762 for the British Museum provide us with evidence about Roubiliac's clients that considerably predates anything that is known of the four signed marble busts.25 Here, then, we have casting techniques not used simply as a means of making the models that served as the basis for individually carved and highly finished marbles, but employed as a technical process - the mechanics of repetition - that made possible the replication of images through a less labour-intensive procedure and in cheaper materials. While such a practice was evidently important in the business of this sculptor's workshop, the more widespread commodification through repetition comes with the dissemination of Roubiliac's image of Pope by those entrepreneurial 'plastermen' other than Roubiliac himself. As early as 1741 Benjamin Rackstrow's advertisement was offering to 'all Lovers of their Country ... all sorts of busts, figures and Basso-Relievo's, either in Plaster or Metal, ... and several fine busts of the Ancient and Modern Poets, Philosophers and Great Men.'26 By around 1750 the workshop of John Cheere - the 'Man at Hyde Park Corner' - was making available for libraries what was almost a standard set of author busts that included a reduced version of Roubiliac's Pope.27 And in the 1780s Charles Harris's catalogue lists this image, along with others based on Cheere's plasters, in no fewer than three different sizes.28 The mode of repetition seen in these busts of Pope contrasts markedly with that type of repetition represented by those marble busts executed individually, albeit based on a shared model (or rather models) and signed by Roubiliac. The latter, despite being in some sense multiples or at least variant versions, were made for elite patrons, most if not all of them being members of a close circle and probably friends of the poet. The former, on the other hand, were a register of that wider demand for those images, ownership and display of which signaled 'politeness.' The commodification and dissemination of the bust in this way was akin to the growth and widespread distribution of a range of polite subjects from poems to antiquarian accounts - through the medium of periodicals, such as the Gentleman's Magazine (established in 1731) and the Universal Magazine (first published in 1747 and, according to its title

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page, intended for a readership of 'Gentry, Farmers, Merchants and Tradesmen'). Pope's image thus became part of the same commercial economy as his texts. Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that this very image was itself repeated in a two-dimensional form, amidst laurel, pipes, and lyre, as a decoration to Robert Dodsley's poem 'The Cave of Pope' in his Collection of Poems by Several Hands, published in 1748.29 Set within the context of one of the most widely distributed poetic anthologies of the mid-eighteenth century, Roubiliac's bust of Pope was thus made available to very many readers and viewers. If repetition of various kinds played a key role in the way that Pope's poetry was both conceived and received, it was of still more importance in the production and reception of his bust. Repetition was indeed assumed at all stages in the case of the portrait and had, on account of the mechanics of sculptural production, a central importance as far as the portrait bust was concerned. In this consideration of Pope's bust I have attempted to explore the ways in which patterns of repetition operated and to map out the institutions of repetition that conditioned the making and viewing of the bust. Since any portrait was understood as a simulacrum of a particular sitter, the practice of portraiture might be seen as an institution of repetition. But the portrait bust above all was a repetitive genre, especially in the eighteenth century, when the antique form was being appropriated to emphasize the authority of the subject in this case the authorial authority, thereby leaving the viewer in no doubt that Pope was the equal of an antique author. At the same time, differences from the repeated antique form drew attention to Roubiliac's authorial distinctiveness, just as Pope's mode of appropriating the classical did his. Yet another mode or institution of repetition was evident in the way busts were displayed, forming regular sequences and articulating the orderly architectural structure of an interior - in this case a library through the placing of these similar shaped images at equal distances. Repetition was also a necessary part of the process of producing sculptures such as the bust of Pope, not only through the well-established procedure of taking the measurements required for the carving of a marble from a clay or terracotta model, but also, in this particular case, because of Roubiliac's unusual procedures for repeating in part the clay model itself. Here the workshop and its procedures constituted an institution of repetition, as did the market for multiple images-produced in cheaply available materials and through techniques of almost mechanical reproduction. Such institutions of repetition governed the production of the various versions of Roubiliac's bust of Pope, and conditioned their reception by underpinning those sets of expectations that patrons, viewers, and con-

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surners brought to these images, allowing them to value equally the various multiple autograph marbles while at the same time prizing the distinctiveness of the sculptor's work as this was manifested in both the finish of the marble and the invention of the model. To recognize the ubiquity of repetition in the eighteenth century, whether in Pope's poetry or in the production and use of the portrait bust (including Pope's own), is to acknowledge at least implicitly the attention that the very notion has enjoyed within postmodern culture. Perhaps a familiarity with Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes or repeated images of Marilyn has made us more aware of the complexity of repetition as seen in the portrait bust. But to see repetition being manifested as reproduction, replication, and the dissemination of multiples is also to recognize the fascination it has held for those outside the debates concerning literary theory and poetics. If the writings of Deleuze and Derrida alert us to the potential of repetition as a hermeneutic tool in other areas, they may also be brought into productive conjunction with a key text that has been much used in discussions of visual culture - Walter Benjamin's influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.'30 Benjamin's assertion that a work of art loses its aura through multiple reproduction might seem to be very much at odds with the concepts of repetition formulated by Deleuze and explored in this volume. But Benjamin's thesis about loss of aura has been increasingly challenged, as has his linking of mechanical reproduction with modernity. Anthony Hughes, for example, has argued that the aura of Michelangelo's sculpture has been heightened rather than diminished by later copies, and Horst Bredekamp has demonstrated that mechanical reproduction was being widely employed in the late Middle Ages.31 While such responses make it difficult to accept Benjamin's thesis without reservation (as some art historians have done), they have at the same time served to emphasize rather than lessen the significance of replication. More importantly for our purposes here, these interventions, by constructing a far less negative notion of replication, open up the possibility of linking a Benjaminian notion of mechanical reproduction with a Deleuzian concept of repetition. By linking the two strands of debate together (as I have attempted to do in this essay), we are left in no doubt as to the centrality of the notion of multiple reproduction for an understanding of visual images and the ways in which we might read their production and use as institutions of repetition. Mindful of these debates, perhaps we need to reappraise the eighteenth-century portrait bust and its multiples in terms of strategies of repetition, much as is being done so productively with the poetry of Pope.

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1 Voltaire, Letters Concerning the English Nation, ed. Nicholas Cronk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 113. 2 Recent discussions of the conventions of portraiture and the way portraiture operated as a social practice include Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books, 1991); Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Joanna Woodall, ed., Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Critical Introductions to Art Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Harry Berger, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Edouard Pommier, Theories du Portrait: de la Renaissance aux Lumieres (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). For the conventions of the portrait bust, see Malcolm Baker '"A Sort of Corporate Company": Approaching the Portrait Bust in Its Setting,' and John Gage, 'Busts and Identity,' both in Return to Life: A New Look at the Portrait Bust ed. Penelope Curtis, Peter Funnell, and Nicola Kalinsky (Leeds: Henry Moore Foundation, 2000); Willibald Sauerlander, Ein Versuch uber die Gesichter Houdons (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002). 3 The standard account of Pope's iconography is W.K. Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965); see also John Reilly and W.K. Wimsatt, 'A Supplement to The Portraits of Alexander Pope,' in Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall Osborne, ed. Rene Wellek and Alvaro Ribiero (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 123-64. 4 Letter of Richard Hurd to Sir Edward Littleton, March 1753, Staffordshire Record Office, MS D1413/1; quoted in Baker, '"A Sort of Corporate Company,"' 34. 5 Letter of 18 May 1728 from Mather Byles to Pope, for which see George Sherburn, ed., The Correspondence of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 2:494. 6 Literature on the classicizing portrait bust includes John Wyndham PopeHennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966); Thomas Martin, 'Michelangelo's Brutus and the Classicising Portrait Bust in Sixteenth-Century Italy,' Artibus et historiaeZl (1993): 67-84; Malcolm Baker, Colin Harrison, and Alastair Laing, 'Bouchardon's British Sitters and the Classicising Bust in Rome around 1730,' Burlington Magazine 142 (2000)-.752-62. 7 Pliny, Natural History, books 25, 2 and 35, 9; Gabriel Naude, Advis pour dresser une bibliotheque (Paris, 1627; trans. John Evelyn, London: Printed for G. Bedle, and T. Collins ... andj. Crook ..., 1661); for library busts see A. Masson, Le

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decor des bibliotheques du moyen age a la revolution (Geneva: Droz, 1972), and Malcolm Baker, 'The Portrait Sculpture,' in The Making of the Wren Library Trinity College Cambridge, ed. David McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 110-37. 8 Matthew Maty, Authentic Memoirs of the Life of Richard Mead M.D. (London: J. Whiston and B. White, 1755), 62-3, states that' [h]e was the friend of Pope, of Halley, of Newton, and placed their portraits in his house near the Busts of their great masters, the Greeks and Romans.' Busts are shown on the bookcases in the frontispiece representing his library, and busts by Peter Scheemakers of Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope were listed in his catalogue. 9 For Reynolds's comment, see Fred W. Hilles, ed., Portraits; Character Sketches of Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Johnson, and David Garrick, together with other manuscripts of [SirJoshua] Reynolds, The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell Series (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1952); Pope's library busts are discussed by Morris Brownell, Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 333-4. For Allen's busts, see Sherburn, Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 4: 340, 343, 360. 10 For busts and their arrangement at Wilton, see also Malcolm Baker, '"For Pembroke, Statues, dirty Gods and Coins": The Collecting, Display and Uses of Sculpture at Wilton House,' in Eike Schmidt, ed., Collecting Sculpture in Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art), forthcoming. 11 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xvi; for the relationship between repetition and variation see also Andreas Fischer, ed., Repetition (Tubingen: G. Narr, 1994), 9. 12 Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3. 13 Reynolds's remark, probably based on his sight of Pope at Lord Oxford's sale around 8-13 March 1742, was included in the notes made by Boswell for a projected 'Life of Reynolds,' for which see Frederick Whiley Hilles, ed., Portraits (London: Heinemann, 1952), 24-5. 14 The attribution of this view to Roubiliac was made by James Prior, Life of Edward Malone, Editor of Shakespeare (London: Smith, Elder, 1860), 429, where Prior was drawing on Malone's anecdotes ('Maloniana') gathered together between 1783 and the death of Reynolds in 1792. This anecdote is usually linked with the remarks made by Reynolds about Pope after he saw him in 1742. 15 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), chap. 27, sec. 9. For analyses of the complexities of Locke's ideas about identity and the person, see Ruth Mattern,

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'Moral Science and the Concept of Persons in Locke,' Philosophical Review 89 (1980), 24-45; and John Dunn, 'Individuality and Clientage in the Formation of Locke's Social Imagination,' in John Locke: Symposium, Wolfenbuttel, 1979, ed. Reinhard Brandt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981). 16 For Roubiliac, see David Bindman and Malcolm Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1995); Katharine A. Esdaile, The Life and Works of Louis Francois Roubiliac (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928). 17 The full text (from London Magazine! [June 1738], 302) is transcribed and discussed in Malcolm Baker, 'Tyers, Roubiliac and a Sculpture's Fame,' SculptureJournal?. (1998): 41-5. 18 The following account draws on Wimsatt's exhaustive study (Portraits of Alexander Pope, 223-66) but departs from this in seeing the Barber Institute terracotta as being one, rather than the only, model employed in the carving of the marbles. This will be argued in detail in my study of Roubiliac and sculptural portraiture at present in preparation. 19 For Roubiliac's use of this practice see Malcolm Baker, 'The Making of Portrait Busts in the Mid Eighteenth Century: Roubiliac, Scheemakers and Trinity College, Dublin,' Burlington Magazine 137 (1995): 821-31. 20 As Wimsatt (Portraits of Alexander Pope, 235, 237) states, the first quotation is from Horace's ArsPoetica, 140, and the second from the same poet's Satires, 2.i.70. The latter line was used by Pope in the Advertisement to his Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated and appears translated as 'To Virtue Only and her Friends, a Friend' in The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace Imitated, 120. Its association with Pope's portrait had already been established in the engraving by Peter Foudrinier after William Kent that appeared as the tailpiece to the 1734 edition of An Essay on Man. But it evidently continued to be seen as an appropriate line to be used in association with portraits of Pope and his friends, since it was used again in 1779 on Joseph Nollekens' marble bust at Kenwood House, London, of William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, a friend of the poet who owned one of the Roubiliac marbles of Pope. For the fascinating complexities of Pope's self-identification with Horace and Lucilius, see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 566-72, and Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, 147-50. 21 For the interconnections of Pembroke, Folkes, and Fountaine, their busts and the sculpture collections at Wilton, see Baker, '"For Pembroke, Statues, Dirty Gods and Coins."' 22 For the bust of George Pitt, see Malcolm Baker, 'Rococo Styles in English

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Sculpture' and cat. no. S.I in Michael Snodin (ed.), Rococo: Art and Design in Hogarth's England (exhibition catalogue) (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1984), 278-309. 23 For the busts of Lady Grisel Baillie and Lady Murray, see Malcolm Baker, 'Public Fame or Private Remembrance? The Portrait Bust as a Mode of Commemoration in Eighteenth-Century England,' in Memory and Oblivion: Proceedings of the XXIXth International Conference of the History of Art held in Amsterdam, 1-7 September 1996, ed. Adriaan Wessel Reinink andjeroen Stumpel (Boston: Kluwer, 1999), 52*7-35. Pope visited Lady Murray, the cousin of the Earl of Marchmont, in 1739, for which see Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life, 762. 24 For the Plato bust (in Dublin), see Baker, 'Roubiliac, Scheemakers and Trinity College at Dublin.' The lost bust of Leland will be discussed in a forthcoming article I am preparing with James Carley. 25 For the Marchmont plaster, see Bindman and Baker, Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument, 347; for the British Museum example, see Aileen Dawson, Portrait Sculpture: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection c. 1675-1975 (London: Published for The Trustees of The British Museum Press, 1999), 165-8. 26 For Racks trow, see Rupert Gunnis, Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851 (London: Odhams Press, 1953), 314; Alan Q. Morton and Jane A. Wess, Public and Private Science: The King George III Collection (Oxford: Oxford University Press in association with the Science Museum, 1993), 157-8. 27 For John Cheere's business, see Terry Friedman and Timothy Clifford, The Man at Hyde Park Corner: Sculpture by John Cheere, 1709-1783 (Leeds: Temple Newsam House, Stable Court Exhibition Galleries, 1974). 28 The sole remaining copy of Harris's catalogue is in the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 29 Wimsatt, Portraits of Alexander Pope, 243. 30 Benjamin, 'The Work of Art,' in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 217-51. 31 Anthony Hughes, 'Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo,' in Sculpture and Its Reproductions, ed. Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 28-45; Horst Bredekamp, 'Der simulierte Benjamin Mittelalterliche Bemerkungen zu seiner Aktualitat,' in Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte ed. Andreas Berndt, Peter Kaiser, Angela Rosenberg, and Diana Trinker (Berlin: Reimer 1992), 117-40.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Ablancourt, Nicolas Perrot d', 216-17 Abrams, M.H., 15n7 Adams, John, 21 Adams, Marilyn McCord, 98n2 Adams, Percy G.: Graces of Harmony, 196nlO Addison, Joseph, 209, 212, 213; portrait bust of, 230 Adorno, Theodor W., 41; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 13nl, 21, 50 Albion, in Blake's works, 70 Alembert, Jean Le Rond d', 203, 217 Ali, Muhammad, 174 Allen/Ralph, 229 Amadis, of Gaul, in Lully's Amadis, 31 Amyot, Jacques, 202 Anderson, Laurie, 21 Angel, Roger, 185 Anglebert, Jean-Henry d', 30-1, 31, 35-6 Anne, Queen, 148 Armide, Saracen sorceress in Lully's Armide, 34, 38 Armstrong, John: The Art of Preserving Health, 166-7, 179

Auerbach, Erich: Mimesis, 14n2 Augustine: Confessions, 51 Auroux, Sylvain: La Semiotique des Encyclopedistes, 217 Aylmer, Gerald: The Crown's Servants, 125n9 Babbitt, Milton, 21 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 35-6, 41-2, 44n29; Cantata no. 78:Jesu, derdu meine Seele, 36, 36; Crucifixus in the B Minor Mass, 36; Partita II in D Minor for Unaccompanied Violin, 7, 35-42, 37, 39, 40 Bachet, Claude Gaspard. SeeMeziriac, Sieur de Baillie, Lady Grisel, 237-38 Baker, Henry: The Universe, 179 Baker, Malcolm, 242n2, 242n6, 243n7, 243nlO, 244nl7, 244nl9, 244nn21-2, 245nn23-4; Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument, 244nl6, 245n25 Ballard, Michel: De Ciceron a Benjamin, 219n4

248

Index

Bancks,John: 'Fragment of an Ode to Boreas,' 162 Bannet, Eve Tavor, 124nl Barfleld, Owen: History in English Words, 99nl6 Barney, Richard A.: Plots of Enlightenment, I7n20 Battestin, Martin: The Providence of Wit, 14n2 Becker, Carl: The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, 50 Beckett, Samuel: Endgame, 60; Waiting for Godot, 51 Beebee, Thomas O.: Clarissa on the Continent, 220nl5 Beethoven, Ludwigvan, 21, 22, 41-2 Belloc, Hillaire, 185 ' Bender, John, 4 Benjamin, Walter, 12, 16nlO, 201, 241 Bennet, Henry, Sir, 121 Berger, Harry: Fictions of the Pose, 242n2 Berman, Antoine: L'Epreuve de I'etranger, 202 Bilton, Charles: Repetition and Reading Book, I7n20 Bindman, David: Roubiliac and the Eighteenth-Century Monument, 244nl6 Bishop, Elizabeth: 'North Haven,' 51 Bissi, comte de, Claude de Thyard, 204-5 Blair, Hugh: A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, 15n9 Blake, William, 8-9, 63-78; The Four Zoas, 65, 66, 78; ferusalem, 65; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 77; Milton, 64, 65, 70; There Is No Natural Religion,' 63

Bloomer, Kent, 179-80 Borges, Jorge Luis, 58 Bos, Lambert van den: The Life and Raigne of King Charles, 129n56 Boswell, James, 243nl3 Boulez, Pierre, 21 Brady, Robert: An Introduction to the Old English History, 130n66 Bredekamp, Horst, 241 Brilliant, Richard: Portraiture, 242n2 Brogan, T.V.F.: The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 174, 195n5 Brooke, Henry: Universal Beauty, 179 Brown, James, 21 Brownell, Morris: Alexander Pope and the Arts of Georgian England, 243n9 Brownley, Martine Watson: Clarendon and the Rhetoric of Historical Form, 124n5 Bruce, Lord, 117 Burgess, Geoffrey, 43nl9 Butler, Joseph, 9, 80-3, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97; Fifteen Sermons, 83—6 Butler, Samuel, 185 Byles, Mather, 228 Carboni, Massimo: Estetica dell'Ornamento, 197nl7 Casey, Edward, 4, 5, 201 Castle, Terry: The Female Thermometer, I7nl6 Catherine, the Great, 206 Catuelan, comte de, 206 Cave, William: Apostolici, 139 Cervantes, Miguel de, 23 Champion, J.A.I.: The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken, 130n65 Chapman, George, 195n4

Index Charles I, 103, 104, 105, 109, 115, 116, 119, 120, 150n23; Solemn League and Covenant, 107; Basilika, 121-2 Charles II, 103-6, 107, 108, 110, 111, 126n38, 131n7l, 132, 134; Act of Attainder, 115, 116; Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion, 107, 111, 113-15, 123; Declaration of Acknowledgement in the Act of Uniformity, 106, 110, 118; Declaration of Breda, 104-12, 117, 118; A Proclamation, for Observation of the Thirtieth day of January, 115-17; Worcester House Declaration, 111, 117 Chatterton, Thomas, 15n9, 218 Cheere, Henry, 237 Cheerejohn, 239 Christ, 87, 88, 90, 92; in Bach's Cantata no. 78, 36; in Book of Common Prayer collect, 142 Christmas, WilliamJ.: TheLab'ring Muses, I70nl0, I7lnnl7-18 Cicero, library of, 229; portrait bust of, 229 Clapton, Eric, 30 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 107, 111, 112, 114; History of the Rebellion, 106, 108, 109, 110, 121, 125nl8 Clark, Arthur Melville: Studies in Literary Modes, 196nl4 Clarke, Samuel, 9, 81, 83, 89, 90, 92, 95, 96; Sermon CLX, 90-2 Claydon, Tony: William III and the Godly Revolution, 127n46 Clifford, Timothy: The Man at Hyde Park Corner, 245n26 Cocteau, Jean, 53

249

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 78; 'This Lime Tree Bower,' 150n29 Collier, Mary: The Woman's Labour, 160-2, 163 Corbetta, Francesco, 30 Cornford, Stephen, 222n26, 222n28 Corns, Thomas N.: The Royal Image, 124n4 Coward, Noel, 185 Cowley, Abraham: Davideis, 179 Cowper, William, 135 Cragg, Gerald R.: The Church and the Age of Reason, 99n5 Cranmer, Thomas: Book of Common Prayer, 133,144 Crawford, Patricia, 124n6 Cressy, David: Bonfires and Bells, 124n4 Cromwell, Oliver, 120, 132 Cross, F.L.: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 99n8, 99nll, 99nl5 Gushing, Mary Gertrude, 219n7, 221n21 Dacier, Anne, 203 Damrosch, Leopold: Symbol and Truth in Blake's Myth, 76, 77 Daniel, Samuel: Civil Wars, 179 Dante Alighieri: Inferno, 37 D'Aquili, Eugene: Why God Won't Go Away, 44n21 Darwin, Charles, 59 Davies, Horton: Worship and Theology, 149n7 Davies, J.G., 134-5 Dawson, Aileen: Portrait Sculpture, 245n25 Defoe, Daniel: Moll Flanders, SO Deleuze, Gilles, 4; Difference and Repetition, 230, 241

250

Index

Demosthenes, 203 Denham, John, 209 Dennis, John: The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, 14n2 Derrida, Jacques, 241 Desfontaines, Pierre-Francois Guyot, 1'Abbe, 203, 219n8 Deutsch, Helen: Resemblance and Disgrace, 18n22, 232 Diderot, Denis, 8, 50, 51, 57, 58, 59, 205, 217, 221nl9, 221n21; Jacques le Fataliste, 8, 51, 57-8, 59, 60, 61 Dodsley, Robert: Agriculture, 165, I7ln22; Collection of Poems by Several Hands, 240 Downie, R.S., 98nl Drayton, Michael: Poly-Olbion, 179 Drydenjohn, 119,188, 198n35, 212; portrait bust of, 229; The Hind and the Panther, 179; Religio Laid, 179; translation of Virgil, 159, 160, 163 DucisJean-Frangois, 206, 221nl8 Duck, Stephen: Poems, 157; The Thresher's Labour, 157—60,161, 163 Dudding, Rousseau disguised as, in Confessions, 55, 58 Dunn, John, 244nl5 Duppa, Brian: Private Forms of Prayer, 128n51 Dyerjohn: TheFkece, 167-8,171n20 Edie, Carolyn, 126n34 Edward VI, prayer book of, 138, 139 Elliott, Missy, 21 Eminem, 194n2 Enitharmon, in Blake's works, 69 Epinay, Mme d', in Rousseau's Confessions, 60

Erie, Walter, Sir, 117 Esdaile, Katharine A.: The Life and Works of Louis Francois Roubiliac, 244nl6

Evelyn, John, 229 Ewing, A.C.: The Morality of Punishment, 98nl Ferrars, Nicholas, 144 Fielding, Henry: Tom Jones, 197nl6, 221nl8 Finch, Anne Kingsmill: A Nocturnal Reverie, 183 Finch, Heneage, Sir, 115, 117 Fischer, Andreas: Repetition, 243nll Fitzwilliam, family of, 234 Flesch, William, 195n3 Foley, John: How to Read an Oral Poem, 195n8 Folkes, Martin, portrait bust of, 237 Foreman, George, 174 Foudrinier, Peter, 244n20 Fountaine, Andrew, Sir, portrait bust of, 237 Frederick the Great, 41 Frescobaldi, Girolamo, 25 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 8, 42, 51, 53, 55, 57, 60, 77 Friedman, Terry: The Man at Hyde Park Corner, 245n26 Frye, Northrop: Fearful Symmetry, 66, 71-2 Fumerton, Patricia: Cultural Aesthetics, 197nl5 Gabriel (angel), 142,143 Gage, John, 242n2 Gambarini, Carlo, conte: A Description of the Earl of Pembroke's Pictures, 230, 231

Index Garrick, David, portrait bust of, 225 Gasparov, M.L.: A History of European Versification, 195n5 Gauden,John: Certain Scruples and Doubts of Conscience, 125n25 Gelley, Alexander: Unruly Examples, 15n6 Genuist, Andre: Le Theatre de Shakespeare, 219n7, 221nl8, 221n21 Gerbier, Balthazar, Sir: The None-Such Charles His Character, 129n56 Gershwin, Ira, 185 Gibbon, Edward, 52 Gifford, William, 170n 12 Gihnore, John: The Poetics of Empire, I7ln20 Glass, Philip, 21 Golden, John: Shakespeare for the Age of Reason, 221 n!8 Gombrich, E.H.: Meditations on a Hobby Horse, 197nl4 Goodridge,John: Rural Life in Eighteenth-Century Poetry, I7ln20 Gordon, Robert M.: The Structure of Emotions, 99nl9 'Goton,' in Rousseau's Confessions, 53, 54 Grainger, James: The Sugar-Cane, 165, I7ln20 Gray, Thomas, translated by Pierre Le Tourneur, 12, 203, 205 Greaves, Richard L.: Deliver Us From Evil, 130n65 Greenblatt, Stephen: Renaissance SelfFashioning, 43nl2 Grob, Alan: The Philosophic Mind, 79 Grove Dictionary of Music, 144 Guerchy, M de, in Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, 57 Gunnis, Rupert: Biographical Dictio-

251

nary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851, 245n26 Gury, Jacques, 219n7, 221nn20-l Haber, Joram Graf: Forgiveness, 98n2 Halley, Edmond, portrait bust of, 229 Hampton, Jean: Forgiveness and Mercy, 98nnl-2 Handel, George Frideric, portrait bust of, 225; statue of, 232-3 Haramaki, Gordon, 43n9 Harris, Charles, 239 Harrison, Colin, 242n6 Harte, Walter: Essay on Reason, 179 Hastings, James: Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 99n9 Hawes, Clement: Mania and Literary Style, 136 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 148 Hawley, Judith: Literature and Science, 1660-1834, 15n3 Hay, Denis, 128n55 Hayes, Julie Candler, 219n5 Heaney, Seamus, 194n2 Heath, James, 121; A Brief Chronicle, 120, 130n65; Flagellum, 120 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 77 Heidegger, Martin, 77 Herbert, George: The Temple, 144-5, 147, 148 Hersey, George: The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture, 179 Hervey, James: Meditations, translated by Le Tourneur, 12, 203, 205; translated by Thiroux d'Arconville, 205 Hesiod: Works and Days, 155, 164, 165 Hewitt, John: Prayers of Intercession, 128n51

252

Index

Heylyn, Peter: A Short View of the Life and Reign of King Charles, 129n56; Observations on The Historic Of the Reign of King Charles, 129n56 Heywood, Thomas: Troia Brittanica, 179 Hilles, Fred Whiley: Portraits, 243n9, 243nl3 Hobbes, Thomas: Behemoth, or The Long Parliament, 113, 118, 121 Hogarth, William, 232 Hollander, John: Vision and Resonance, 190, 191, 196nll Homer, I70n3,195n4, 228; portrait bust of, 226, 229; translated by Dacier, 203 Hood, Thomas, 168; 'The Song of the Shirt,' 153-4, 160; 'The Workhouse Clock,' 169 Horace, 228, 236 Horkheimer, Max: Dialectic of Enlightenment, 13n 1,21,50 Houdetot, Mme d', in Rousseau's Confessions, 60-1 Howell, James, 118-19 Hudson, Richard, 23 Hughes, Anthony, 241 Hughes, Martin, 98nl Hugo, Francois-Victor, 203 Hugo, Victor, 203, 208 Hume, David, 18n23, 49, 50, 51, 55, 57, 58, 59 Hunter, J. Paul, I7n22,197n20, 197n22 Hurd, Richard, Bishop of Worcester, 226 Hutcheson, Francis, 92, 96 Hutton, Ronald: Charles II, 125nl6 Hyppolitus, 133

Jakobson, Roman, 186, 193, 195n3, 198n25 James I, 119, 123; A Proclamation for the confirmation of all Authorized Orders, 123 James II, 103 Janowitz, Anne: Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, 168 Jeoffry, cat of Christopher Smart, 148 Jesperson, Otto, 191 Johnson, Samuel, 12, 90, 212; Life of Pope, 198n31; Preface to Shakespeare, 206; Rambler no. 4, I7n21; The Vanity of Human Wishes, 13n2 Jones, Inigo, 230, 231; portrait bust of, 229 Kant, Immanuel, 64 Keble,John: The Christian Year, 154 Keeble, N.H.: The Restoration, 124n7, 125n 11; The Literary Culture of NonConformity in Later SeventeenthCentury England, 130n65 Keegan, Bridget, 170nl2 Keith, Jennifer, 222n24 Keller, Charlie, 'King Kong,' 174 Kennedy, X.J., 185 Kenner, Hugh, 187, 188 Kent, William, 244n20 Kenyon,J.P.: The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688,124n2, 125nl4, 125nl9 Knoppers, Laura Lunger: Historicizing Milton, 124n4; Constructing Cromwell, 124n4 Rnox, John: Book of Common Order, 135 La Bruyere, Jean de, 50 Lacan, Jacques, 16nl5, 77

Index Lacey, Andrew, 128n51 Laing, Alastair, 242n6 Lambercier, Mile, in Rousseau's Confessions, 52-3, 54 Langford, Paul: Englishness Identified, 15n5 Lanham, Richard A.: A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 16nl2 Lanyer, Emilia: 'The Description of Cookham,'192 Lanz, Henry: The Physical Basis of Rhyme, 198n28 Laocoon, 38 La Place, Pierre-Antoine de, 206-7, 219n8, 221nl8 Larkin, Philip, 194nl Larnage, Mme de, in Rousseau's Confessions, 54, 55 La Rochefoucauld, Francois, due de, 50,58 Lausberg, Heinrich: Handbook of Literary Rhetoric, 16nl2 Lea, Kathleen: The Poetic Powers of Repetition, 18n22 Lehrer, Tom, 184 Lejeune, Philippe: LePacte Autobiographique, 51, 52, 53 Leland, John, portrait bust of, 239 L'Estrange, Hamon: The Reign of King Charles, 129n56 L'Estrange, Roger, 111, 120 Le Tourneur, Pierre, 202, 203, 219n7; 'Discours,' 12; translation of Gray, 12, 203, 205; translation of Hervey's Meditations, 12, 203; translation of 'Ossian,' 12, 203, 205, 206, 218, 220nll; translation of Richardson's Clarissa, 204, 205, 206; translation of Shakespeare, 12, 203, 206, 207;

253

translation of Young's Conjectures, 208-18; translation of Young's Night Thoughts, 12, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210-11, 212, 220nll Levine, George: Aesthetics and Ideology, 17n22 Levine, Joseph: The Battle of the Books, 15n4 Livingston, E.A.: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 99n8, 99nll, 99nl5 Locke, John, 49, 63, 74; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 18n23, 70, 232 Lonsdale, Roger, 196nl3 Louis XIV, 30, 31, 33, 43nl8 Louis XVI, 206 Lu, Jin, 220nlO Lucilius, 236 LullyJean-Baptiste, 31, 32, 41, 44n25; Amadis, 31-2, 32, 33, 34, 34, 37-8; Armide, 34-5, 36, 37, 38 Lyons, John D.: Exemplum, 15n6 MacGillivray, Royce: Restoration Histories and the English Civil War, 130n65 Mack, Maynard: Alexander Pope: A Life, 244n20, 245n23 MacPherson, James. See 'Ossian' Malherbe, Fontaine, 206 Malone, Edward, 243nl4 Mandeville, Bernard, 97 Marais, Marin: Tombeau pour Mr de Saint-Colombe, 33 Marchmont, Earl of, 239 Marmontel, Jean-Frangois, 206 Martin, Thomas, 242n6 Masson, Andre: Le Decor, 242n7

254

Index

Mary, Blessed Virgin, Annunciation of, 142, 143

Mattern, Ruth, 243nl5 Maupertuis, 217 May, Thomas, 120; The History of the Parliament of England, 119; A Breviary of the History of the Parliament of England, 119 Mazarin,Jules (cardinal), 30, 229 McClary, Susan, 42nn2-3, 43nl2, 43nl4, 43nl8, 44nn26-8, 45n33 McNeill, William H.: Keeping Together in Time, 17nl9, 22 Mead, Richard, 229 Mercier, Sebastien, 221n21 Meziriac, Sieur de, Bachet, Claude Gaspard, 202, 219n4 Michelangelo, 241 Miller, J. Hillis: Fiction and Repetition, 17nl6 Milton, John, 120, 157, I70n3; portrait bust of, 229; Paradise Lost, 214-15, 223n29 Minas, Anne C., 98n2 Mocket, Richard: God and the King, 122-3 Monet, Claude, 157 Monk [Monck], George, 1st Duke of Albemarle, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111 Monroe, Marilyn, images of, 241 Monteverdi, Claudio, 36, 41; Lamento delta ninfa, 33, 38; Psalm 150, 26-8, 29-30; 'Zefiro torna,' 25-6, 27, 28, 28-9, 29, 35 Moore, Kathleen Dean: Pardons, 98nl Moroney, Davitt, 44n25 Morton, Alan Q.: Public and Private Science, 245n26

Mounsey, Chris, 150nl4, I7ln22 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 41 Murphy, Jeffrie G.: Forgiveness and Mercy, 98nnl-2 Murray, Lady, 237-8 Murray, William, Earl of Mansfield, 244n20 Musial, Stan, 'the Man,' 174 Nabokov, Vladimir, 57 Nalson, John: An Impartial Collection of the great affairs of State, 130n66 Naude, Gabriel, 229 Needham, Marchamont, 120 Nelson, Robert, 137; A Companion to the Fasts and Feasts of the Church of England, 138-9, 140, 143, 149 Newberg, Andrew: Why God Won't Go Away, 44n21 Newman, Paul, 185 Newton, Isaac, portrait bust of, 225, 229 Nollekens, Joseph, 244n20 Nyro, Laura, 190 Ocampo, Stuart De, 43nl5 Ogilby, John: The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II, 126n26 'Ossian,' 15n9, 218, 220nll; Hugh Blair's A Critical Dissertation, 15n9; translated by Le Tourneur, 12, 203, 205, 206, 218, 220nll; translated by Turgot, 220 Palladio, Andrea, portrait bust of, 229 Parliament (funk music group), 21 Patey, Douglas Lane, 13n2, 15n4 Paul, Lewis, in Dyer's The Fleece, 167-8

Index Paul, Saint, 90, 91, 133 Pembroke, Thomas Herbert, Earl, 230, 237 Perrinchiefe, Richard, 121 Peter, Saint, 92 Philalethes, in Mocket's God and King, 123 Philips, John: Cyder, 165 Pitt, George, portrait bust of, 237 Plath, Sylvia: 'Daddy,' 192 Plato, 67; portrait bust of, 234, 239; Republic, I7n21 Pliny, 229 Plume, Sir, in Pope's Rape of the Lock, 187 Plutarch, translated by Amyot, 202 PocockJ.GA., 129n57 Pointon, Marcia: Hanging the Head, 242n2 Pommier, Edouard: Theories due Portrait, 242n2 Pope, Alexander, 15nlO, 175, 187, 188, 198n26, 206, 209, 212, 213, 224, 226, 228, 229, 232, 237; portrait busts by Roubiliac, 12-13, 225-6, 227, 228-34, 235, 236-41; portrait busts by Rysbrack, 224—5; portrait bust by Scheemakers, 224-5; TheDunciad, 176, 192; 'Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' 176; Eloisa to Abelard, 196nl2; 'Epistle to a Lady,' 178; Essay on Criticism, 176, 180, 182, 191, 197nl6; Essay on Man, 176, 179, 219n8, 244n20; Imitations of Horace, 228; The Rape of the Lock, 176, 187, 193 Pope-Hennessy, John Wyndham: The Portrait in the Renaissance, 242n6 Porter, Cole, 185

255

Porter, Roy: Eighteenth-Century Science, 14n3 Potter, Lois, 127n46 Poulet, George, 16nll Prevost, Antoine Francois, 1'Abbe, 203, 205 Prior, James, 232, 243nl4 Prior, Matthew: Predestination, 179; Solomon on the Vanity of the World, 179 Purcell, Henry, 36, 38; 'When I Am Laid in Earth,' 7,33 Rackstrow, Benjamin, 239 Radnoti, Sandor: The Fake, 218 Raleigh, Walter, Sir, portrait bust of, 229 Rand, Nicholas, 222n23 Rause, Vince: Why God Won't Go Away, 44n21 Reid, Thomas, 50 Reillyjohn, 242n3 Renkin, Arno: La Representation de I'etranger, 219n3 Resnel, abbe du, 219n8 Reynolds, Joshua, Sir, 229, 232 Reynolds, Simon: Generation Ecstacy, 43nlO Riccoboni, M., 203 Richardson, Samuel, 209, 212; Clarissa, translated by Le Tourneur, 204, 205, 206; translated by Prevost, 205 Rickert, William, 195n3 Rimbaud, Arthur: Voyelles, 190-1 Rivers, Isabel: Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 99nl3 Robinson, Crabb, 75 Roland, in Lully's Armide, 34-5, 38 Rosand, Ellen, 44n22

256

Index

Rose, Mark: Authors and Owners, 15n8 Roubiliac, Louis Francois, 12-13, 224-6, 227, 228-34, 235, 236-41 Rouget, Gilbert: Music and Trance, 43nlO Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 8, 50, 57, 58, 59; The Confessions, 50-6, 60-1; Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire, 56-7 Rowe, Nicholas, 206 Royle, Nicolas: The Uncanny, I7nl6 Royston, Richard, 121 Rushworth, John: Historical Collections, 121 Rysbrack, Michael, 225, 228 Said, Edward W.,13nl Samson, 38 Sanderson, William: A Compleat History of the Life and Raigne of King Charles, 129n56 Sapir, Edward, 198n35 Sauerlander, Willibald: Ein Versuch iiber die Gesichter Houdons, 242n2 Sawday, Jonathan, 113 Scheemakers, Peter, 224-5, 243n8 Schoenberg, Arnold, 21, 22, 42 SchutzeJ.S., 198n25 Schwartz, Hillel: The Culture of the Copy, 14n2 'Scriblerus Club': Memoirs o f . . . Martinus Scriblerus, 18n23 Seaton, Thomas: The Devotional Life, 144, 146, 147, 148 Seaward, Paul: The Cavalier Parliament, 127n43 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 9, 81, 83, 89, 209; CharacterISTICS, 92-6

Shakespeare, William, 206, 207, 208, 221nl8, 221n21; portrait bust of, 229, 230, 243n8; translated by Le Tourneur, 203, 204, 206, 207, 208; Sonnet no. 73, 181 Sherburn, George, 243n9 Siebert, Fredrick Seaton: Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776, 130n67 Sihouette, Etienne de, 219n8 Sisyphus, in Duck's The Thresher's Labour, 159,161 Small, Christopher: Musicking, 42n8 Smart, Christopher, 10, 132-50; The Hop-Garden, 164, 166, I7ln22; Jubilate Agno, 136, 146-7, 148; A Song to David, 10, 135, 136; A Translation of the Psalms of David, 10, 135, 136, 140, 143, 149; Hymns, 135, 136, 137, 140, 142, 143 Spenser, Edmund, portrait bust of, 229 Sprat, Thomas: History of the Royal Society, 118, 121 Spurrjohn, 115, 128n51 Stael, Germaine de, 202 Starbuck, George, 185 Starobinski, Jean, 53 Stephenson, George, 155 Stevens, Wallace, 'World Without Peculiarity,' 76 Stewart, Garrett, 195n3 Stewart, Susan, 15n7 Stravinsky, Igor, 21 Stryjewski, Kurt, 186 Stukeley, William, 137,147, 148 Suard, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine, 220nl 1 Subotnik, Rose Rosengard: Developing Variations, 45n34 Swift, Jonathan, 185, 209, 212, 213;

Index Gulliver's Travels, translated by Defontaines, 219n8 Tacitus, 203 Tatersal, Robert: The Bricklayer's Miscellany, 156-7, 160 Tharmas, in Blake's works, 69, 72 Theodidactus, in Mocket's God and King, 123 Theophrastus, 7 Thiroux, Marie-Genevieve-Charlotte Darius, d'Arconville, 205 Thomson, James: The Seasons, 155, 162-3, 168 Thrale, Hester, 150nl6 Thyard, Claude de, comte de Bissi. See Bissi Tillotsonjohn, 9, 81, 83, 91, 92, 95, 96; Sermon no. 33, 87-90 Todd, Dennis, 198n29 Toland, John, 92 Tourreil, Jacques de, 203 Trapp, Joseph: Lectures on Poetry, 14n2, 196nl4 Tulljethro, 171n22 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, Baron de Laune, 205 Tyers, Jonathan, 232 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, Lord Woodhouselee, 209 Urizen, in Blake's works, 63, 66, 68, 70,75 Urthona, Spectre of, in Blake's works, 69 Van Dyck, family portrait, 230 Van Tieghem, Paul: L'Annee litteraire (1754-1790), 220nl2; LePreromantisme, 219n9, 220nll, 221nl8

257

Vaugelas, Claude Favre de, 202 Vega, Lope de, 23 Venuti, Lawrence: The Translator's Invisibility, 202 Vertue, George, 230, 231 Vickers, Brian, 16nl2 Virgil, 157, I7ln22; Eclogues, 163; Georgics, 155, 159-60, 163, 164, 165-66 Vivaldi, Antonio, 35, 36, 41 Voltaire, 90, 203, 206, 224 Vulson, Mile, in Rousseau's Confessions, 53, 54 Wallerstein, Ruth, 195n3 Walpole, Robert, Sir, 187 Walsh, Marcus: The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, 135-6, 149nl3, 150nl5, 150n21 Warens, Mme de, in Rousseau's Confessions, 54, 55, 56, 58 Warhol, Andy, 16nlO, 241 Warner, William: Albion's England, 179 Warton, Joseph: translation of Virgil's Georgics, 165 Watson, J.R.: The English Hymn, I70n2 Watt, James, 155 Watts, Michael: The Dissenters, 134 Weinbrot, Howard, 221nl8 Weldon, Anthony: The Court and Character of King James, 128n56 Wesley, John, 135 Wesling, Donald, 195n3 Wess, Jane A.: Public and Private Science, 245n26 West, M.L., 165 Whitefield, George, 135 Wickins, William: The Kingdoms Remembrancer, 125n25

258

Index

Wilkins, John: An Essay Towards a ... Philosophical Language, 188 Williamson, George, 195n3 Williamson, Karina, 136; The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, 150n 15, 150n21 Wills, Jeffrey: Repetition in Latin Poetry, 16nl4 Wilson, Arthur: The History of Great Britain, 128n56 Wimsatt,W.K, 187; The Portraits of Alexander Pope, 242n3, 244nl8, 244n20, 245n29 Wolfson, Susan J.: Formal Charges, 18n22 Woodall, Joanna: Portraiture, 242n2 Woolf, Daniel R., 128n55, 129n56, 130n66 Wootton, David, 129n64

Wordsworth, William, 5, 8, 65, 75, 78; The Excursion, 64; 'Expostulation and Reply,' 73; 'Ode: Intimations of Immortality,' 65, 75-7; Poems, 64; Prelude, 73-4; Tintern Abbey,' 9, 65, 74, 76 Worth, Dean: RomanJakobson, 195n3 Young, Edward: Conjectures on Original Composition, 12,15n7; translated by Le Tourneur, 208-18; Love of Fame, 179; Night Thoughts, 213, 216, 222n26, 222n28; translated by Le Tourneur, 12, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210-11, 212; translated by Bissi, 204-5 Younger, William: The History of the Late English Rebellion, 130n65