Johnson, rambler

We see the essay as a vehicle for an opinion. But for Johnson, as he says in his Life of Addison, the essay aims to

teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and to remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation.

It is an explicitly didactic enterprise, perhaps because didacticism does not seem so loathsome to him as it does to us in the US, who associate all regulation and correction only with outrages of authority upon the individual, and never with the removal of annoyances through a little rambling.

I say this because it might ease one into Johnson's Rambler, which I want to reproduce here every so often, unlocking some of their lessons as I go. Yesterday was the 21st of July, so I thought I'd start with Johnson's Rambler 36, which came out on that day (it was a Saturday) in 1750.

This number is indeed concerned precisely with the removal of annoyance and whether "knowledge of the busy and tumultuary part of the world" (as Johnson will call it below) is better imparted or avoided. And it shows well how Johnson dissolves these extremes by teaching us about them, letting literary critical judgment encounter them in literature: Rambler 36 was a reflection on pastoral poetry, which involves precisely the retreat from such tumult.

Fittingly, it takes it's epigram from two lines of the tumultuary Iliad, giving Pope's translation:

Ham’ éponto nomêes
Terpómenoi súrinxi; dólon d’ oúti pronóêsan.

-- Piping on their reeds the shepherds go,
Nor fear an ambush, nor suspect a foe.

These lines appear in the great description of the shield of Achilles. But the context is not just the tumult of war in general. What makes it all the more poignant is that in the description itself armies siege a city, and just after these lines they fall upon the herdsmen, slaughtering them along with two of the city's scouts they happen to be piping near:

In arms the glittering squadron rising round
Rush sudden; hills of slaughter heap the ground;
Whole flocks and herds lie bleeding on the plains,
And, all amidst them, dead, the shepherd swains!

The retreat cannot be total: the tumult will seek you out.

•••

RAMBLER 36
Saturday, 21 July 1750

There is scarcely any species of poetry, that has allured more readers, or excited more writers, than the pastoral. It is generally pleasing, because it entertains the mind with representations of scenes familiar to almost every imagination, and of which all can equally judge whether they are well described. It exhibits a life, to which we have been always accustomed to associate peace, and leisure, and innocence: and therefore we readily set open the heart, for the admission of its images, which contribute to drive away cares and perturbations, and suffer ourselves, without resistance, to be transported to elysian regions, where we are to meet with nothing but joy, and plenty, and contentment; where every gale whispers pleasure, and every shade promises repose.

It has been maintained by some, who love to talk of what they do not know, that pastoral is the most antient poetry; and, indeed, since it is probable, that poetry is nearly of the same antiquity with rational nature, and since the life of the first men was certainly rural, we may reasonably conjecture, that, as their ideas would necessarily be borrowed from those objects with which they were acquainted, their composures, being filled chiefly with such thoughts on the visible creation as must occur to the first observers, were pastoral hymns like those which Milton introduces the original pair singing, in the day of innocence, to the praise of their Maker.

For the same reason that pastoral poetry was the first employment of the human imagination, it is generally the first literary amusement of our minds. We have seen fields, and meadows, and groves from the time that our eyes opened upon life; and are pleased with birds, and brooks, and breezes, much earlier than we engage among the actions and passions of mankind. We are therefore delighted with rural pictures, because we know the original at an age when our curiosity can be very little awakened, by descriptions of courts which we never beheld, or representations of passion which we never felt.

The satisfaction received from this kind of writing not only begins early, but lasts long; we do not, as we advance into the intellectual world, throw it away among other childish amusements and pastimes, but willingly return to it in any hour of indolence and relaxation. The images of true pastoral have always the power of exciting delight, because the works of nature, from which they are drawn, have always the same order and beauty, and continue to force themselves upon our thoughts, being at once obvious to the most careless regard, and more than adequate to the strongest reason, and severest contemplation. Our inclination to stillness and tranquillity is seldom much lessened by long knowledge of the busy and tumultuary part of the world. In childhood we turn our thoughts to the country, as to the region of pleasure, we recur to it in old age as a port of rest, and perhaps with that secondary and adventitious gladness, which every man feels on reviewing those places, or recollecting those occurrences, that contributed to his youthful enjoyments, and bring him back to the prime of life, when the world was gay with the bloom of novelty, when mirth wantoned at his side, and hope sparkled before him.

The sense of this universal pleasure has invited "numbers without number" to try their skill in pastoral performances, in which they have generally succeeded after the manner of other imitators, transmitting the same images in the same combination from one to another, till he that reads the title of a poem, may guess at the whole series of the composition; nor will a man, after the perusal of thousands of these performances, find his knowledge enlarged with a single view of nature not produced before, or his imagination amused with any new application of those views to moral purposes.

The range of pastoral is indeed narrow, for though nature itself, philosophically considered, be inexhaustible, yet its general effects on the eye and on the ear are uniform, and incapable of much variety of description. Poetry cannot dwell upon the minuter distinctions, by which one species differs from another, without departing from that simplicity of grandeur which fills the imagination; nor dissect the latent qualities of things, without losing its general power of gratifying every mind by recalling its conceptions. However, as each age makes some discoveries, and those discoveries are by degrees generally known, as new plants or modes of culture are introduced, and by little and little become common, pastoral might receive, from time to time, small augmentations, and exhibit once in a century a scene somewhat varied.

But pastoral subjects have been often, like others, taken into the hands of those that were not qualified to adorn them, men to whom the face of nature was so little known, that they have drawn it only after their own imagination, and changed or distorted her features, that their portraits might appear something more than servile copies from their predecessors.

Not only the images of rural life, but the occasions on which they can be properly produced, are few and general. The state of a man confined to the employments and pleasures of the country, is so little diversified, and exposed to so few of those accidents which produce perplexities, terrors and surprises, in more complicated transactions, that he can be shewn but seldom in such circumstances as attract curiosity. His ambition is without policy, and his love without intrigue. He has no complaints to make of his rival, but that he is richer than himself; nor any disasters to lament, but a cruel mistress, or a bad harvest.

The conviction of the necessity of some new source of pleasure induced Sannazarius to remove the scene from the fields to the sea, to substitute fishermen for shepherds, and derive his sentiments from the piscatory life; for which he has been censured by succeeding criticks, because the sea is an object of terrour, and by no means proper to amuse the mind, and lay the passions asleep. Against this objection he might be defended by the established maxim, that the poet has a right to select his images, and is no more obliged to shew the sea in a storm, than the land under an inundation; but may display all the pleasures, and conceal the dangers of the water, as he may lay his shepherd under a shady beech, without giving him an ague, or letting a wild beast loose upon him.

There are however two defects in the piscatory eclogue, which perhaps cannot be supplied. The sea, though in hot countries it is considered by those who live, like Sannazarius, upon the coast, as a place of pleasure and diversion, has notwithstanding much less variety than the land, and therefore will be sooner exhausted by a descriptive writer. When he has once shewn the sun rising or setting upon it, curled its waters with the vernal breeze, rolled the waves in gentle succession to the shore, and enumerated the fish sporting in the shallows, he has nothing remaining but what is common to all other poetry, the complaint of a nymph for a drowned lover, or the indignation of a fisher that his oysters are refused, and Mycon's accepted.

Another obstacle to the general reception of this kind of poetry, is the ignorance of maritime pleasures, in which the greater part of mankind must always live. To all the inland inhabitants of every region, the sea is only known as an immense diffusion of waters, over which men pass from one country to another, and in which life is frequently lost. They have, therefore, no opportunity of tracing, in their own thoughts, the descriptions of winding shores, and calm bays, nor can look on the poem in which they are mentioned, with other sensations, than on a sea-chart, or the metrical geography of Dionysius.

This defect Sannazarius was hindered from perceiving, by writing in a learned language to readers generally acquainted with the works of nature; but if he had made his attempt in any vulgar tongue, he would soon have discovered how vainly he had endeavoured to make that loved, which was not understood.

I am afraid it will not be found easy to improve the pastorals of antiquity, by any great additions or diversifications. Our descriptions may indeed differ from those of Virgil, as an English from an Italian summer, and, in some respects, as modern from ancient life; but as nature is in both countries nearly the same, and as poetry has to do rather with the passions of men, which are uniform, than their customs, which are changeable, the varieties, which time or place can furnish, will be inconsiderable: and I shall endeavour to shew, in the next paper, how little the latter ages have contributed to the improvement of the rustick muse.

Moral music and the shirt-sleeve manner

Paul Fry makes a great point about the "undue solemnity" of literary theoretical writing in the following, which is from his excellent 1988 book, The Reach of Criticism. Fry is introducing a (particularly good) chapter on Dryden:

Shelley's Defence of Poetry [...] rivals any theoretical text of which I am aware in its metaphysical precision and range, but also succumbs in a good many places to the undue solemnity and curdling of expression that lessens the impact of much current writing [...]. Dryden's "Preface to Fables, Ancient and Modern," to which I now turn, is theoretically precocious almost by accident, perhaps, although its intricacy of thought remains extraordinary however one accounts for it, but is written in the enviably casual manner that has been tacitly forbidden in modern criticism, especially in American universities, ever since impressionism became a code word for irresponsibility and laziness.
-"The Other Harmony of Dryden's 'Preface to Fables,'" in The Reach of Criticism 87.

This is of course right about Dryden, and the idea of not an answerable, but an enviable style is a wonderful one, exactly capturing how we feel while reading his flexible (and often funny) prose: we sink under Milton, as Johnson (quoting Addison) once said, but we reach out and over to Dryden--despite having been put to shame.

But Fry's remark is also right about "current" writing: though the solemnity in theoretical writing has definitely fallen off from the unbearable years--right at the time Fry pens these lines--I think Fry might be (and probably is) surprised at just how solemn theory still is. Lightness is returning as theory rediscovers literature (and critical theory fritters itself away, gets replaced by more practical theoretical ventures like architecture and media studies, or turns to philosophy departments finally made tolerant by its efforts), and we are truly entering a new age of interpretation and theorizing about interpretation. But we still are subjected to so much "curdling of expression" or, to use another apt characterization, "weird moral music." This last phrase is used by Michael Wood to characterize "certain sentences" of Paul de Man (in a current work, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, see p. 181), and I think it not inappropriate--as de Man, however much the solemn also solemnly detest him, can be considered the type and symbol as well as a key originator of this sort of attitude.

Fry takes a broader view of the origin of this phenomenon, and attributes it to a certain tradition that has governed criticism in America. But what's most fascinating about this is that, for Fry, the tradition doesn't directly encourage solemnity: the curdling of expression isn't a result of any sense that American criticism needs to be serious. It emerges instead from a prohibition of unseriousness, of a casual manner in interpretation.

This is a claim that supports and is supported by the main position of the book and his massive, more nuanced, more expansive, more recent Defense of Poetry (1995): namely, that interpretation proceeds despite its method, surrendering to the suspension of sense produced by the multiple senses of words. This might seem completely unrelated, but the connection is easy to make and forceful one it's made. Though Fry isn't an enemy to all method in all endeavors, he believes that methods for interpretation try to minimize this suspension of sense. It is not that the aim of following a method will often limit the attentiveness one can have for multiple meanings, but in every interpretation it is the words that call to us, not the procedure, regardless of whether we follow method or not. So what we end up doing when following a method of interpretation is remain open to meanings, and then proceed to sacrifice the openness we had to produce a reading. The interpretation comes from this jockeying between what the method accepts and what we read in the text, not from the effort to bring out more of we read in the text and to supply it with some shape. Naturally, this latter effort is going to be more frivolous, more playful, since the suspension of meaning involves precisely allowing that words might not have a serious, earnest intention behind them. So method cultivates solemnity as it curbs meanings, and the tradition of Anglo-American criticism in America has always encouraged the subjection of interpretation to a method or methodized sort of procedure. Indeed, for Fry, this is encouraged by much "current" theory as well. We never really have allowed to experiment with casual interpretation.

But all this is clear enough from the passage, though the point is made by developing this last claim. This, however, actually makes things more poignant, since it involves developing its other side: the notion that everything we take to be casual in interpretation never really has been truly casual at all. We think the casual manner is the freedom allowed to impressionism, but the real situation is that the latter only flourishes with solemnity--as evidenced by the fact that it can turn back into solemnity in an instant (de Man, for me, is again the best example of this). Never acquainted with the hard work involved in the casual manner--which is hard work, involving a deft control of that indirectness Americans have never tolerated--we think we can pass of the products of laziness as the same thing.

But in the book Fry adds to a wonderful footnote to all this, which is really my reason for discussing his claim. Why? Because it recommends two critics who defy this prohibition. Now, you might think Fry may or may not be right about all the above. I personally don't think method is as responsible for the problems of criticism as the desire to follow a method in criticism, and I think that while it is very justifiable to group these things together and oppose method tout court, it might be better to stress the difference. Another way of putting this is actually to put Fry's claim another way as well: real methods are developed only after we think we have followed them. So the problem is the desire to get out in front of a method and just coast. But what this tells you is that the desire to methodize is something different altogether than the desire to follow a method, and I myself think this former desire should be cultivated--instead of the desire for theories, which we could for the sake of argument just call the grounds of various methods. It has become too easy to come up with the ground of something, and we have too many of them now: instead of developing grounds, what needs to be developed are more ways over the ground, which are more closely related to the paths actually traversed in an interpretation. And involved in that is (if you'll indulge the overdrawn metaphor one last time) a refusal to conflate these ways with those actual paths, such that people can come along and think they can just follow a way instead of an actual path--as if the way existed before they interpreted. Fry isn't, you see, too far from this, and of all the critics out there I think he most admits of this other approach (and certainly in my eyes he has the most definitive view of what a literary text is and what interpretation involves). But regardless of what you think, you have to grant that he is exactly right in the following, the footnote, which I'll leave you with:

Nearly all critics adopt the shirt-sleeve maner from time to time in order to indulge their audience or themselves, but the only modern critics since the decline of belletrism who consistently write with negligent ease (though others write very well in more formal, more severely plain, or more playful styles) are two of the best, William Empson and Kenneth Burke.
-The Reach of Criticism, Note 1 to Chapter 3, 217.

Plain dealing

A week or so ago I chanced upon perhaps the best academic review that I have ever seen (and reviews in my corner of academia--literary studies--tend to be extremely good). The review is by Arnold Stein, an amazing, principled critic of Donne and Milton, as well as a subtle theorist of the high humanist movement in literary studies after the war. It concerns Wesley Trimpi’s interesting 1962 book Ben Jonson’s Poems, A Study of the Plain Style, and is published in the third number of the thirtieth volume of ELH in 1963 (p. 306-316), and is entitled “Plain Style, Plain Criticism, Plain Dealing and Ben Jonson.” It begins with a whopper:

It is now a braver thing than all the Worthies did to write the history of a literary tradition (306).

I knew I was in for something special, though, when I read what followed:

Even the loyal historian of a religious or political vision, whatever his difficulties, may at least begin with a cheerful confidence in the firm shape of what he is chronicling. But the modern historian of a literary tradition must assemble the materials by which he is to establish the existence of what he proposes to describe. A certain amount of strain and overdecisiveness are therefore to be expected, nor does one demonstrate the existence of a literary tradition without some awareness that history may be made by being written. It will require unusual generosity on the part of the historian not to be influenced by the thought that literary objects which uninstructed taste has been admiring are in the process of having their value corrected (306).

The apology utterly damns Trimpi, but what struck me was the degree to which Stein frames it as an apology. Histories of literary traditions are extremely difficult to write, because they usually end up not being histories at all: such a statement ends up revealing itself as wonderfully sarcastic, but tarrying with it so long in a serious vein, thinking hard about how a project’s lack of accuracy actually is a burden the nonliterary historian does not have to encounter--this comes out on the other side of sarcasm and makes us think hard about how much we indeed should indulge misguided projects. A certain amount of strain and overdecisiveness is expected when one is willing into being the history one wants to write, but how much should such bravado be excused, when the problems of the brave task are so much more global? I was thus happy to find that Stein gave such prominence to what I found most disturbing about Trimpi’s work: a certain unwarranted forcefulness that takes advantage of your indulgence rather than rewarding it. But that Stein here also suggests we might consider such bravado to be more inexcusable than the aim of the study--this was almost as impressive as seeing Stein go on to argue it:

The basic charge to be made against the scholarship of this book is that it practices an eclectic dogmatism. It disparages rhetoric in poetry and does not hear its own rhetoric. The degree of critical self-awareness is limited. As F. H. Bradley wrote, "You are left in short with brute conjunctions where you seek for connexions." In this book the "brute conjunctions" are many, and confidently pass themselves for "connections"; a few key points are brought in as if their truth were to be proved by the frequency with which they can be made to appear.

The account of the plain style culminating in Jonson is not believable as argument partly because the saw and glue are too much in evidence. To begin with, in rummaging among the ancient rhetoricians Trimpi takes what he needs without much concern for what he leaves behind. Firm discriminations are made and supported by a quotation or two from Quintilian, or Cicero, or Demetrius, or Dionysius of Halicarnassus, or Horace--though in some instances the ancients themselves differed over fine points which may still be debated. The origins and development of the plain style as we get them in Fiske's account [another study of the fate of ancient rhetoric] are more varied and do not grow cleanly in straight lines. The origins are Socratic but also Cynic and Stoic. The "freer and looser tradition of the nature and limits of the plain style," which Fiske finds in Lucilius [Stein cites Fisk], and the contribution of sententious writing, do not belong in Trimpi's version of the classical model, but with quiet astuteness he converts these hints to the English scene where they reappear in the native tradition and in Senecan excess (310-11).

I’ll continue this look at Stein’s piece in another post soon.