Alexander Pope – An Essay on Man

An ESSAY is a composition of moderate length on a restricted subject, in prose or verse.

There are two kinds of essay, depending on the way the ideas are developed:
1) Formal - it is written in an aphoristic way, uses the philosophical discourse. It can be in prose
(Francis Bacon) and in verses (Alexander Pope).
2) Informal (Michel Montaigne) – usually in prose. The ideas are not logically developed but freely
associated, more intimate. (Lee Hazlitt and Charles Lamb)

The form of Pope’s Essays (On Man and On Criticism) – more closely: heroic couplet.
Heroic couplet consists of a pair of rhyming decasyllabic lines; each line is an iambic pentameter. Heroic
couplet, with its strict rhyming pattern and the restricted number of syllables, limits the thoughts and
ideas of the writers who use this technique. In other words, in the 18 th century, poetry worked within
narrow limits. Poetry was preconceived in form; the writers had ready-made mould (the heroic couplet
pattern) to pour their ideas into. It was not spontaneously taken in keeping with the subject.

The stress in literary theory is on RULES and not originality. (An Essay on Criticism)
Poetry was NOBLY SIMPLE – not base or dull, but without conceit, without extravagances of any kind.
The standard was the highest common factor of civilized men. Nature was seen as a mechanism,
governed by the laws, if you can discover the laws with your mind in order to control it. Apply the human
intellect to the natural world (with a proper method) and find all answers to all problems.
Swift, Johnson, Pope, did not share the optimistic assumptions of the new natural sciences. They saw
rational philosophy as a dangerous assertion of pride. They didn’t want to go back to the 16 th century
religions. They hated irrational approach to religion, too many problems it causes in our life. They
advocated the middle way between rational philosophy and the irrationality of the enthusiastic revivalists.
Reason – Descartes, too abstract/reasoning – common sense, prudence
For Swift and Pope nature revealed the natural order, reflected in church and government.

An Essay on Criticism (1711)

-Turning into polished epigrammatic couplets the main critical ideas of the time
-Part I announces the place of TASTE (mark of a true critic), GENIUS (mark of a poet), the relation
between ART and NATURE, the meaning and the function of RULES, and the importance of the
Ancients
-True taste, Pope affirms, is as rare in a critic as a true genius in a poet, but “ Nature affords at least a
glimm’ring light”
-‘NATURE’ here means something like common sense, though its meaning throughout the poem is often
more comprehensive than this, indicating both the state of things as they are and the ideal

Metaphysical optimism of the age:

All partial evil, universal good,
All discord, harmony not understood.
Metaphysical optimism of the age is deeply imbued by two things:
1) a belief in man’s rational capacity, dating back from Plato
2) the belief in the perfectibility of man, hence the potential perfect society

If Nature is God’s code, creation, it cannot lack a plan, it is the best of all possible worlds.
As far as the evil in physical, or moral world is concerned, it only appears as evil because man cannot see
the whole pattern due to his imperfection, his middle position- “isthmus of the middle state”.
The whole is perfect, but only God can see the whole. God loved variety better than perfection.
Social implications of this kind of optimism: Man cannot change his place, the dominant cry becomes:
admit and submit, stay where you are.

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The supernatural was banished from nature, both in its divine - god, and its diabolical form – Satan. The
universe was created as perfect, ordered. What is present in Nature is his design – immutable laws –,
which proves God’s existence.

All the Air a Solemn Stillness Holds1: Sentimental Poetry in the Age of Sensibility

Sensibility
The term became popular in the 18th century, when it acquired the meaning of ‘susceptibility to tender
feelings’; thus, a capacity not for feeling sorry for oneself as being able to identify with and respond to
the sorrows of others or, as Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of
the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) states:
‘…sympathy must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put into the place of another
man, and affected in many respects as he is affected; so that this passion may either partake of the nature
of those which regard self-preservation’

The quality which Burke terms ‘sympathy’ is actually what we today call ‘empathy’, and this quality of
empathy was probably a reaction against 17th c. stoicism and Hobbes’s theory that man is innately selfish
and motivated by self-interest and the power drive. By mid-century ‘feeling the misery of others with
inward pain’ was an accepted part of social ethics and public morality. It was a sign of good breeding and
good manners to shed a sympathetic tear, as in Gray’s Elegy Written in the Country Churchyard
(1750), Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) and Cowper’s The Task (1785), not to mention
various odes to sensibility from the 1760s onwards. Two other relevant works in the history of this
attitude were Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) and Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771).
Near the end of the century, sensibility became self-indulgent. It declined into sentimentalism, and
showed a propensity for ‘the luxury of grief’. In the 19 th century the term was more or less replaced by
‘sensitivity’ but the latter never established itself as a literary term.

Sublime
(Latin ‘elevated, lofty’)
As a critical and aesthetic 2 term it owes its existence to a treatise, On the Sublime, ascribed to Longinus.
From the 17th c. onwards the idea of sublimity held a particular fascination for people. As an intellectual
concept and as an attainable quality in art and literature it was especially attractive to writers during the
18th c. and during the Romantic period. Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) was an important contribution to thinking on the subject
and the ideas were of great interest to literary critics and those concerned with aesthetics. Burke
distinguished between the sublime and the beautiful. The former is associated with the infinitude,
solitude, emptiness, darkness and terror; the latter with brightness, smoothness and smallness:
‘For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be
smooth, and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from
it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often makes a strong
deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light
and delicate, the great ought to be solid, and even massive.’

The sublime also came to be associated with powerful emotions (fear and horror in particular), with
spiritual and religious awe, with vastness and immensity, with the natural order in its grander
manifestations and with the concept of genius.

1
From Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
2
Aesthetics – branch of philosophy concerned with the essence and perception of beauty and ugliness.

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‘Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any
sort terrible, or is conversant3 about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a
source of the sublime.’

What Burke had to say about terror and the inspiration of terror and the terrible in his Enquiry excited
people’s imagination and this was to have some influence on the Gothic novel, which became extremely
popular in the last forty odd years of the 18th c.

Words Cannot Paint the Horror of the Princess’s Situation4: Gothicism/Gothic Novel

Gothicism is a type of imitation medievalism; Gothic novel/fiction refers to a type of romance very
popular from the 1760s onwards until 1820s. It has had considerable influence on fiction since, and is of
much importance in the evolution of the ghost story and the horror story.
When it was launched in the later eighteenth century, Gothicism featured accounts of terrifying
experiences in ancient castles — experiences connected with
- subterranean dungeons,
- secret passageways,
- flickering lamps,
- screams,
- moans,
- bloody hands,
- ghosts,
- graveyards,
and the rest. (These features are called the Gothic trappings.)

By extension, ‘Gothic’ came to designate the macabre, mysterious, fantastic, supernatural, and, again,
the terrifying, especially the pleasurably terrifying, in literature more generally. Closer to the present,
one sees Gothicism pervading Victorian literature (for example, in the novels of Dickens and the
Brontës), American fiction (from Poe and Hawthorne through Faulkner), and of course the films,
television, and videos of our own (in this respect, not-so-modern) culture.

The Gothic revival, which appeared in English gardens and architecture before it got into literature, was
the work of a handful of visionaries, the most important of whom was Horace Walpole (1717–1797),
novelist, letter writer, and son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. In the 1740s Horace Walpole
purchased Strawberry Hill, an estate on the Thames near London, and set about remodeling it in what he
called "Gothick" style, adding towers, turrets, battlements, arched doors, windows, and ornaments of
every description, creating a kind of spurious medieval architecture that survives today mainly in
churches, military academies, and university buildings. The project was extremely influential, as people
came from all over to see Strawberry Hill and returned to Gothicize their own houses.

When Gothicism made its appearance in literature, Walpole was again a chief initiator, publishing The
Castle of Otranto (1764), a short novel in which the ingredients are a haunted castle, a Byronic villain
(before Byron's time — and the villain's name is Manfred!), mysterious deaths, supernatural
happenings, a moaning ancestral portrait, a damsel in distress, and, as the Oxford Companion to
English Literature puts it, "violent emotions of terror, anguish, and love." The work was tremendously
popular, and imitations followed in such numbers that the Gothic novel (or romance) was probably the
commonest type of fiction in England for the next half century.

3
Familiar
4
From The Castle of Otranto

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It is noteworthy in this period that the best-selling author of the genre (Ann Radcliffe, nicknamed "Queen
of Terror," famous for The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)), the
author of its most enduring novel (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein), and the author of its most effective
parody (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey) were all women. Male authors, apart from Walpole, were
William Beckford (Vathek (1786)) and Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk (1796), involving
seduction, incestuous rape, matricide and other murders, and diabolism)

A number of these novels feature villainous, tyrannical, egotistical, even maniacal male characters —
Manfred in Otranto, Caliph Vathek, Montoni in Udolpho, Ambrosio in The Monk — who are the main
or ultimate source of almost unrelieved terror once the plot gets under way. These have their Satanic
connections and are forerunners of Byron's own heroes in somewhat the same vein.

Architecture: Gothic style refers to the style of art produced in Europe in the latter part of the Middle
Ages 12-16 c.
Gothic novels, stories and films are generally defined as works of imagination designed to evoke fearful
responses. They are not defined by form or content but by the emotion they produce in the reader/viewer,
or the emotion in the text itself – fear.
Gothic refers to architecture, gardening and designing. The Goths were northern Germanic tribes, which
invaded Europe after the fall of Rome. These waves of invaders brought an architectural and artistic
sensibility different from Greek-Roman style, which was controlled, classical. Gothic style was extreme,
uncontrolled, its purpose was to evoke strong emotional response (pity, horror, fear). When we talk about
human representation, the classical style was naturalistic and idealistic. In Gothic style, human body and
face is an exaggerated caricature, a grotesque. These characteristics became important in literature.
Literature: the term Gothic was used only after the period was over. In the Enlightenment people used
the word to denote something that is backward, primitive, feudal. The whole era was labeled as the dark
ages. In the 18th century many novelists began to look to older traditions (legends, fairy tales) in a reaction
against the rational ideals of the Enlightenment, it was also a reaction against the conventions of the
realistic literature.
It is connected with the emphasis in emotions. Gothic came to mean emotions. Gothic art, architecture
was intended to have a magical effect on the consumer – the sense of awe, terror, vulnerability – a
medieval world view. In some way, we can recognize the return to the mythical view of reality, but it was
not a complete return. Gothic novel is a strange blend of religious – mythical – and scientific worldview.
Gothic first appeared in architecture, garden designing and then got into literature.
Horace Walpole – the most important figure for the Gothic revival. The Castle of Otranto – published
anonymously, by an intellectual, a letter-writer. The Castle of Otranto has some of the elements of any
Gothic novel:
- a haunted castle
- a villain
- a lady-in-distress
- mysterious deaths
- supernatural happenings
- a moaning painting
- secret passages
- dark corridor
- violent feelings of love, anguish and terror
Gothic romances were the commonest type of fiction in the second half of the 18 th century. Other famous
authors were: Anne Radcliffe - The Mysteries of Udolopho, Anna Laetitia Barbauld – Sir Bertrand and,
later, Mary Shelley with her Frankenstein (sometimes considered as the greatest Romantic novel)
It is possible to trace the influence of Gothic elements in Byron, Coleridge, Shelley and Mary Shelley.
Certain elements are common to all horror stories and films: Rhetoric of fantasy:

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RECURRING THEMES
CHARACTER TYPES
NARRATIVE SITUATIONS
Early Gothic novels are situated in the past. Characters are more types than individuals. Plot patterns and
themes involve family and marriage issues complicated by the dark secrets from the past (forbidden
sexual passions). Character types were borrowed from the sentimental novel. Villain – a combination of
autocratic power and brutality who threatens a young heroine. His apparent counterpart is a young,
beautiful and virtuous lady, but his real spiritual counterpart is the lady’s lover. Usually the villain
realizes that he is doomed to fail.
Gothic trappings create the proper Gothic atmosphere – screams, ghosts, moans, and graveyards, bleeding
statues. In some of the early Gothic novels there was a trend of explaining everything rationally – not in
Walpole. Gothic trappings, furthermore, are not the essence of Gothic novels but are just devices to create
the atmosphere.
Gothic reveals the UNSEEN OF CULTURE, in its later development, in the 19 th century. “The common
denominator of Gothic novel is a fascination with transgression. Gothic novels go beyond the limits of
everyday social and psychological reality challenging the basic perceptual models the human beings
depends on, challenging the sociocultural status quo.”

3 concepts important in the Gothic novel:

1) the concept of PARANOIA
2) the concept of the BARBARIC
3) the concept of TABOO

GOTHIC
As an aesthetic term, ‘Gothic’ was first used by Italian art historians during the early Renaissance to
describe European art and architecture from the middle of the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. The
comments of one of these critics, Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists (1550), indicate the main
attitude of the time to this ‘monstrous and barbarous’ style of architecture, which ignores ‘every familiar
idea of order’.

Clearly it is possible to speak of the Gothic as a historical phenomenon, originating (in its literary sense,
but not necessarily in other senses) in the late eighteenth century. Equally, it has seemed to many critics
more useful to think of it in terms of a psychological argument, to do with the ways in which otherwise
repressed fears are represented in textual form. A more radical claim would be that there are very few
actual literary texts which are ‘Gothic’; that the Gothic is more to do with particular moments, tropes,
repeated motifs that can be found scattered, or disseminated, through the modern western literary tradition
- the Gothic generally represents ‘the self finding itself dispossessed in its own house, in a condition of
rupture, disjunction, fragmentation’ (Miles 2002: 3)

Then again, one might want to think of Gothic, especially in its more modern manifestations, in terms of a
collection of subgenres: the ghost story, the horror story, the ‘techno-Gothic’ – all of these would be ways
of writing that have obvious connections with the ‘original’ Gothic, but their differences might be seen as
at least as important as their similarities.

The birth of Gothic as a genre of fiction, the ‘Gothic novel’, and all its numerous successors came about
as a direct result of changes in cultural emphasis in the eighteenth century. The reputation of the
eighteenth century has mainly been as an age of reliance on reason, as a time when enlightenment was
seen as possible and the rational explanation of natural and human activities formed an agenda in the

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service of which most of the European intellectuals of the age worked. However, as is always the case
with such simple histories of ideas, this inevitably tells only part of the story.

During the eighteenth century, there was, for example, a shift in the meanings and connotations of the
word ‘Gothic’. Whereas previously it had referred specifically to the ‘Goths’ (q.v.) themselves, or at least
to later imaginings of them, to the barbarian northern tribes who played so reviled a part in the collapse of
the Roman Empire (…) ‘Gothic’ broadened out to become descriptive of anything medieval – in fact, of
all things preceding about the middle of the seventeenth century. Another connotation was attached to
this: if ‘Gothic’ meant to do with what was perceived as barbaric and to do with the medieval world, it
could be seen to follow that it was a term which could be used in structural opposition to ‘classical’.
Where the classical was well ordered, the Gothic was chaotic; where the classical was simple and pure,
Gothic was ornate and convoluted; where the classics offered a world of clear rules and limits, Gothic
represented excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilized, a world that constantly
tended to overflow cultural boundaries.

(…) as early as the 1740s we can trace the development of a form of poetry which was radically different
from anything Pope advocated, and which came to be called ‘graveyard poetry’. Graveyard poetry is
significant here because it prefigures the Gothic novel in several ways, and its emergence was sudden and
dramatic: Edward Young’s massive Night Thoughts came out between 1742 and 1745; Robert Blair’s The
Grave in 1743; James Hervey’s major work, Meditations among the Tombs, between 1745 and 1747;
Thomas Warton’s On the Pleasures of Melancholy in 1747; and Gray’s famous Elegy in a Country
Church-Yard in 1751.

Horace Walpole
- the third son of the Whig politician Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1721 to 1742.
- the author of what is usually considered the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764)
- Horace Walpole was also partly responsible for the eighteenth-century Gothic architectural revival. In
1749, after a summer spent visiting and studying ruins, churches and old houses, Walpole determined to
reconstruct his home, Strawberry Hill, in the Gothic style. Over the following years, he doubled the size
of the building, adding battlements, pinnacles, a gallery, a cloister and two towers, and filling it with art
objects and rare books. It was here that he had the dream which supposedly inspired Otranto, a dream of a
gigantic hand in armour restingon a banister – ‘a very natural dream’, Walpole wrote, ‘for a head filled
like mine with Gothic story’.

- Walpole was also responsible for the first Gothic drama, The Mysterious Mother (1768), a tragedy set in
the period before the Reformation. Only fifty copies of the play were produced, on Walpole’s private
printing press at Strawberry Hill, and circulated amongst his friends. This limited circulation was
apparently due to the possible impropriety of the subject matter. The mysterious mother of the title, the
Countess of Narbonne, not only has an incestuous relationship with her unknowing son, but also
deliberately plans the incest when overcome by passion caused by his close resemblance to his dead
father. Her son, whom she subsequently exiles, returns and marries Adeliza, the result of the incestuous
union, and the Countess, upon discovering the marriage of her children, kills herself.

- Set in a southern Italian principality during the time of the Crusades, The Castle of Otranto tells the
story of the tyrant Manfred, prince of Otranto. Fearing an enigmatic prophecy which states ‘That the
castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be
grown too large to inhabit it’, Manfred attempts to ensure his line by marrying his only son, Conrad, to
Isabella, the daughter of Frederick, marquis of Vicenza. His plans, however, are quite startlingly thwarted
when, during the marriage ceremony, Conrad is crushed to death by a huge helmet that, as a young man
later identified as Theodore observes, closely resembles that belonging to the nearby statue of Alfonso the
Good in the Church of St Nicholas. Manfred, enraged by the discovery Alfonso’s helmet is missing,

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blames Theodore for the event and imprisons him beneath the helmet. Undeterred by the death of his son,
however, he resolves to ensure a new heir by divorcing his wife Hippolita and marrying the very
unwilling Isabella himself.

- The appearance of the disconcertingly large helmet is the first of many supernatural occurrences in the
novel. A statue bleeds from the nose; a massive armor-clad foot appears in the gallery and an arm on the
stairs; an ancestor in a portrait sighs, hops out of his frame, and walks away. While Otranto may have
been an attempt to combine the fantastical elements of the old romances with the naturalistic features of
the modern novel, it is the fantastical elements that predominate. Walpole’s supernatural effects have,
from the start, frequently been dismissed as ludicrous and self-indulgent.

- the supernatural comes to represent the past, whether psychological or historical, rising up to assert its
power within the present.
- Walpole’s character types – the tyrannical Manfred, a prototype for the Gothic hero-villain, his
victimized wife, the bland hero and the selfless, passive heroine.
- architecture, the labyrinthine and claustrophobic spaces of castles, monasteries, ruins and prisons, will
come to serve an important function in suggesting such emotions as fear and helplessness.
- The castle has even been seen as the primary protagonist of Otranto; all the events take place either
within or near it, and its physical presence dominates the text, creating a sense of oppression that
emphasizes the powerlessness of the characters to control their own lives.
- Walpole’s thematic concerns also had a great influence on later Gothic fiction, in particular his focus on
issues of succession and inheritance. Supernatural forces emerge here primarily in order to effect the
restoration of Otranto to its rightful owner.

SATIRE
The eighteenth century was the satirical century par excellence. The ancient satirists were still widely
read, edited, and commented upon. Diderot, for example, admired Juvenal, who came into vogue in the
second half of the eighteenth century, with the search for a less refined, more immediate art that was
deemed to be closer, at least in aesthetic terms, to the growing bourgeois public. He also read Persius,
correcting the abbe, Le Monnier’s translation of the Satires in 1771 and subsequently writing a satire, first
published (posthumously) in 1798. And he was greatly influenced by Horace too, translating Satires 1.1
and writing an imitation of Satires. Boileau, too, had his fair share of defenders and detractors in the
eighteenth century (Miller 1942). However, attempts to write formal verse satire in the period were
limited. Instead, satire found its voice in many different kinds of writing, including comic drama, travel
literature, philosophical fiction, and personal polemic. And more importantly still, the eighteenth century
broadened its satirical focus from ridiculing human foibles to denouncing humankind’s capacity for
cruelty and injustice.

The Enlightenment satirists targeted social problems, religious intolerance, and political abuse. Believing
that society was free to work out its own destiny through tolerance and the community spirit, the
eighteenth-century satirists were not interested in exploring human psychology in the same way as their
seventeenth century forebears; rather, they concentrated on human needs. They championed freedom, not
least freedom of thought, and they often did so satirically.

Satire found a home in the theater in this stage-struck age. Satirical theater in the Molieresque model
persisted throughout the century, from Lesage’s Turcaret (1709), which provoked a scandal because of its
biting satire of a corrupt tax farmer at a time of poverty and suffering in France, via Destouches’s Le
Glorieux (1732), about a poor but obsessively rank-conscious noble, to Voltaire’s Le Depositaries (1772),
which echoes Moliere’s Tartuffe. Like their seventeenth-century models, such plays focus on character
types who are satirized for their absurd unwillingness to change their foolish ways.

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SWIFT
What higher accolade can a reviewer pay to a contemporary satirist than to call his or her work Swiftian?
The term is often employed in reviews of Martin Amis’s novels, for example, and is not infrequently used
to describe the work of certain decidedly non mainstream filmmakers. And yet, unlike most terms meant
to draw a comparison with some great master of a form, the laurel, Swiftian, signals not only surpassing
satiric achievement, but something less evidently complimentary. A review that describes a novel or a
film as a laugh-out-loud-satire on sex, politics, religion, business, or the like expects to attract a willing
audience, but the review that draws a comparison with Swift signals that a work is no mere send up of its
subject. Its greater substance brings a graver sort of humor, comic levity mixed up with, if not giving way
to, both weight and darkness.

Swiftian signals not only a serious use of humor, but also something deeply unsavory: the gastronomical
adjective ideally suited to the author who imagined, in A Modest Proposal (1729), commercially
slaughtered Irish infants being “Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled” and served up in a fricassee or
ragout. If the label Swiftian identifies a novelist or filmmaker as a satiric genius, it also suggests that this
is not the sort of genius one would be pleased to be introduced to at a potluck dinner.

Calling a work Swiftian will make us look at once admiringly and warily on the author/creator, and this
comes directly from the long history of how readers have approached Swift’s own satires. It is rare, if not
unknown, for even the most naive of readers to attribute Iago’s ideas to Shakespeare, but something like
this has been a common – at times pervasive – practice of readers of Swift from naive to professional.
So insistent is the conflation of Swift and his works that the critical success of the term the “intentional
fallacy” – the principle that, because no reader can recover what was in an artist’s mind at the time of
composition, a work of art must necessarily be considered on its own terms – did little to slow such
reading of Swift’s works. Student readers still regularly interchange Swift for Gulliver in their discussion
of the Travels, even as they recognize that Gulliver is a character Swift has created. And professional
readers become more nuanced, often discovering places in Swift’s fiction where Swift dropped his
fictional cover and revealed his “true” position, in effect making Swift’s fictions elaborate illustrations of,
or disguises for, more straightforward religious, political, or philosophical ideas.

Our contemporary term Swiftian means funny, dark, cruel, unsavory, insightful, revealing, mean, biting,
ironic, difficult, brilliant. A Swiftian work should leave you exhilarated and aghast at the same time. You
have been moved to look at the world or yourself in some new and unexpected way, but, rather than new
horizons, you have discovered some new shocking depth to your own sense of reality. The challenge of
reading Swift’s work is first, and maybe last, to our own assumptions. If we can say the creator of some
darkly humorous film or of A Modest Proposal is “sick,” or “warped,” or if we are able to employ a label
from our arsenal of terms for mental illness – the satirist is obsessed, or fixated, paranoid, or a sociopath –
we add a layer of defense between us and works we find disturbingly engaging. In this chapter I will try
to demonstrate how the conflation of satiric author and satiric work is a way into the unsettling insights of
the texts, rather than a means of defense, or distance or domestication. Satirist and satiric narrator are in
relation as actual readers are in relation to fictional readers figured in the satires, the argument being that,
properly read, the most Swiftian of satiric characteristics is when a work allows no one, neither satirist
nor reader, a safe place beyond the often violent implications of the satire.

It must be acknowledged that Swift criticism is replete with reflections on the difficulties of reading
Swift’s works. It is almost ritualistic in the criticism to point out that Swift mocked critical enterprises
analogous in discomforting ways to nearly every professional reading of his work. While critics may be
motivated in such reflections by humility and respect, observations on the difficulty and indeterminacy of
elucidating Swift’s satires can be intimidating to those new to the critical study of Swift’s work. But both
new and long-time students of Swift do well to remember that critics, at their best, open paths to great

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works of art, that many paths may lead to the same destination, and that the work, to the extent that it is
great, will not ultimately be contained by our attempts to map it. Above all, a reader new to the serious
study of Swift’s work will do well to recognize that Swift himself was extremely playful: he loved puns
and pranks, mocked himself, his loved ones, and his benefactors, usually in rhyme, throughout his life,
and his signature character, Gulliver, is one that the vast majority of readers are first introduced to as
children’s play. This invitation to set aside critical intimidation and start playing must come with a
typically Swiftian caveat: as he said, “Most kinds of diversion in men, children, and other animals, are an
imitation of fighting.”

Swift wrote a wide variety of satiric works; in fact, a satiric vein runs throughout most of Swift’s writing,
including even the intimate, such as the poems Swift composed for Stella (Esther Johnson) each year on
her birthday. Much can be learned about satire from studying all the forms Swift employed, but it will be
challenge enough in the limited space of this chapter to identify common characteristics of satire in
Swift’s major works. His best known, The Travels into Several Remote Nations (1726), now commonly
referred to as Gulliver’s Travels, is a work that draws upon a hugely popular form at the time, the travel
account, as well as techniques associated with the novel, emerging at the time in its English form. It is the
work’s narrative characteristics – much of it can be read as a fabulous adventure story – that account for
its continuing popular success.

The next best known of Swift’s works is A Modest Proposal. Often anthologized and unforgettable, it is
among the greatest short masterpieces in the English language. After these two works, a general audience
knows of other works by Swift by accidents of education or special interest: a student learns of a poem by
Swift for a standardized test, or a student of Irish history discovers Swift’s many works written in the
Irish interest. Strikingly, a work that many critics consider Swift’s most impressive, A Tale of a Tub
(1704), is largely unknown to a general audience. Here, I will focus at some length on A Modest Proposal
to identify characteristics of Swift’s satire that will be useful to readings of the popular Travels as well as
to the brilliant but difficult Tale.

A Modest Proposal
Swift’s last great satire, A Modest Proposal, is not only an accessible work; it is an object lesson in how
satire works. The Proposal is a pamphlet, purportedly by a projector – a scientifically minded person
interested in progress – offering a solution to the effects of rampant poverty in Ireland. The projector
enumerates the problem, particularly in terms of population, and then uses the high birth rate as a central
factor in his proposed solution. Much of the rest of the short pamphlet is a defense against various
objections that might be raised to the proposal. The twist in this otherwise apparently reasonable tract is
that the proposal is to raise, slaughter, and cannibalize Irish infants to improve the economy and reduce
the population.

Some of the features that I will identify in discussing the Proposal that will be useful for discussing the
Travels and A Tale are as follows. The satire is created within a specific historical context. The satire
approaches the reality of the context as discourse, usually positioning itself at or just beyond the limits of
the historical discourse, often extending the rhetoric in a way that calls into question the stability and even
the reality of the non-fictional discourse. Swift’s prose satires feature central characters who are only
knowable to readers from what can be gleaned or inferred from their first-person testimonials. These
characters seem always to be drawn in some sense from some composite of the biographical author and –
we infer this from negotiating the irony of the satires – from all that he reviles. These first-person
speakers establish relationships in the texts with readers they imagine. Swift’s speakers in the Proposal,
the Travels, and A Tale, each reveal himself, by avowal or inadvertently, to be mad, and the relationships
these speakers establish with their readers, provide the basis for haunting satiric challenges to the sanity
of readers.

9
I will always remember the reaction of a first-year college student to reading the Proposal. He observed,
with what appeared a guarded admiration, that “in those days, when they had a problem, they didn’t
pussy-foot around.” He had reasoned that the harsh times of the early eighteenth century meant people
were open to addressing problems in ways we (more recent readers) would find unacceptable. In other
words, he assumed the Proposal was a straightforward document in the debate of the issues of its
historical moment. His more sophisticated classmates – those who knew to equate Swift’s name with
satire – laughed at this student’s failure to negotiate irony and felt themselves in-the-know with the
professor and, ultimately, with the great satirist. Ironically, this student was in one very important sense
closer to the meaning of the Proposal than were his classmates who ridiculed him for thinking the work
was “serious.”

Those who are introduced to Swift’s Proposal together with related documents of the period, as in The
Longman Anthology of British Literature, recognize that Swift’s piece is an extension of the discourse on
the Irish situation of his time rather than a wicked fantasy concocted for shock value. In fact, readers of
William Petty’s Political Arithmetic (1691), a foundational work in the history of modern economics,
recognize that proposals for dealing with Irish “savages” in systemic and inhumane ways had been part of
the discourse among the English and the Anglo-Irish for nearly half a century when the Modest Proposal
appeared. For example, one of the shocking aspects of Swift’s Proposal is the way in which his speaker
dispassionately tallies the number of Irish people to estimate the number of women who “are breeders”
and so to figure how many children will be available for his scheme (Prose Works 12.110). In Political
Arithmetic, Petty had systematically counted the Irish with a particular focus on the numbers of “teeming
women,” the percentage of those who were married, and the birth rate (“a child every two years and a
half”) in connection with his own scheme for removing most of the Irish from Ireland (Sherman 1999:
2458). Read in its historical context, the humor of Swift’s Proposal is created out of the stuff of a non-
fictional discourse well known to his readers, a discourse that had deadly serious consequences for the
Irish of Swift’s day. The outrageousness of the Proposal is arresting, immediate, and easy to spot, but one
important step in understanding this work, and each of Swift’s major satires, is recognizing the
relationships between the satiric discourse and the historical discourse in which it participates.

Reading the satire in its historical context is a step to understanding rather than a key to it. Swift’s satires,
like other important works of literature, are made of the stuff of the author’s world but manage to speak to
readers in their often distant places and times. The native Irish were subjects of a political discourse in
which they were regularly figured as sub-human. This rhetoric allowed political decisions that
systematically stripped the Irish of even the basic means of subsistence. The closest thing to a key to
Swift’s Proposal is recognizing that it is, in context, modest. That is, in relation to a system in which
poverty, and consequent indigence, disease, starvation, and unlawfulness are the givens, the proposal to
organize the “savages” on a model of animal husbandry is a logical, even a measured, next step. The
human taboo against cannibalism makes the proposal shocking to readers of any time or place, but Swift’s
proposal is built on the idea that the taboo has been rendered largely meaningless in practice. In rhetoric
and in political and economic practice, the native Irish have already been reduced to sub-human status.
This proposal is modest in that it merely aims to acknowledge, clean up, and organize what we might
describe, with a Swiftian phrase of our own time, the facts on the ground.

Discussion of A Modest Proposal invariably considers the speaker’s claim that the slaughtered Irish
infants will be food “very proper for Landlords; who, as they have Already devoured most of the Parents,
seem to have the best Title to the Children” (Prose Works 12.112). Critics have called the technique Swift
uses here, literalizing the metaphor. Thinking through the common metaphoric description of landlords
devouring their tenants, the satirist develops a proposal for systematic cannibalism.

A less strict understanding of the critical term applies to the work as a whole. The relentless description of
the Irish as “savages” gives rise to a proposal in which the ultimate marker of savagery, that is,

10
cannibalism, will be used to domesticate (hence, civilize) the Irish. Swift’s satire, and presumably all
satire, is fundamentally rhetorical.

The clichéd hyperbole of a landlord devouring his tenants is re-energized, not only by the image of the
landlord being served a steaming dish of freshly carved infant flesh but by the argument in the Proposal
that the suffering of the tenants is such that they would embrace the cannibalistic solution over the
unbearable, morbid economic trap they find themselves in. Similarly, the Proposal exposes the way in
which the epithet ”savages” has allowed the ascendant class to treat the native Irish as sub-human without
actually making them non-human: no one will really be comfortable eating the flesh of these beings who
have in every other respect been treated worse than animals. The work then reveals itself as satire at the
level of rhetoric. Everything I have said about the Proposal so far suggests a fairly clear line between
monstrous English policies and the oppressed native Irish. One may further this reading by noticing that
the metaphor of devouring is extended to the English nation as a whole: “I could name a Country, which
would be glad to eat up our whole Nation” (Prose Works 12.117).

But other aspects of the Proposal add unsettling complications to this simple Irish/English formulation. A
passage that should receive at least as much attention as those concerning rapacious landlords is the
following: “As to our City of Dublin, Shambles may be appointed for this Purpose in the most convenient
Parts of it; and Butchers we may be assured will not be wanting; although I rather recommend buying the
Children alive and dressing them hot from the Knife, as we do roasting Pigs” (Prose Works 12.112–13).

The shocking brutality of the end of this sentence can obscure what is at its center. The Irish will be the
butchers of their own children. If the intent of this piece is to expose the way in which the English are
oppressing the Irish, why would the satirist represent the Irish as willing participants in the
dismemberment of their own children? Perhaps this says more about Swift’s speaker than about the Irish
themselves? This explanation might work if the speaker were English, but he tells us in a chillingly
brilliant final paragraph that his own children are grown and his wife past childbearing so that he can in
no way profit from his proposal. In In other words, he confirms what is apparent throughout: he is Irish.
His own children, were he to have any of appropriate age, could be subject to the terms of the Proposal.
With the policies of the English a given, the Irish are imagined in the Proposal conceiving and executing
their own final solution.

How to understand the role of the speaker is one of the great puzzles of this work and raises a question
central to reading all of Swift’s satire. First, it is clear that the speaker is in important respects a character
invented for a particular role. The few biographical details he gives us – he is married and has had
children – definitively distinguish him from the biographical Swift, who was, by all mainstream accounts,
always unmarried and without offspring. But the impulse of readers to align Swift’s characters with Swift
himself goes beyond the simplistic inclination to line up any first-person narrator with the work’s author.
This impulse helps explain why, rather than referring to the Proposer, or the Hack of A Tale of a Tub, or
Gulliver, as character says we do when speaking of drama or novels, an important trend in Swift criticism
has been to discuss how Swift speaks through a persona or mask. The term persona helped readers avoid
the mistake of directly attributing the words of Swift’s various speakers to Swift himself, formalizing the
need for at least a double reading of the text. Claude Rawson, one of the most important Swift critics of
our time, has argued that persona criticism went too far, treating Swift’s first-person speakers “as if they
were autonomous creations analogous to the characters of a novel or play” (2000: 250). Rather than too
far, it is my own sense that this is precisely the direction in which we as readers should head,
acknowledging the usefulness of the term persona and leaving it behind. It makes sense to speak of a
persona when Horace adopts a mask for part or all of a satire, but leaves the reader with little doubt about
the author’s moral point.

11
The term is similarly useful in considering much of Swift’s poetry, when, for example, in his Market Hill
poems, he adopts a variety of masks but never leaves the reader with any doubt about his esteem for his
hosts. In the major satires, including A Modest Proposal, the characters Swift creates are too complex to
be called masks.

A part of the critical inclination to call Swift’s characters masks is the recognition that Swift’s speakers
seem, in sometimes disturbing ways, to be drawn from Swift’s own life. Swift’s speaker in A Modest
Proposal is a Dubliner, is evidently highly educated, clearly distinguishes himself from the native, largely
Roman Catholic, population, has a clear sense of responsibility about the social ills that plague Ireland,
despises absentee landlords, blames the English for unjust policies, implicates the Irish as participants in
their own degradation, is one who has thought at length about the economic underpinnings of the Irish
situation, and who has made various proposals for improvement that have been ignored, and, not least, is
a writer with a clear and direct style who is able to draw visually arresting images with his words.

Each of these things can be said of both the speaker and of Swift himself. That we can draw
correspondences between a character and its creator should not in itself lead us to conclude that the
character is a mask for the author. In fact, many of the richest characters in fiction and drama have just
such correspondences. Here, I am not thinking of thinly disguised autobiographical novels, but of
complex links, which we could invoke from the usual sources when discussing Swift – Sterne, Joyce,
Beckett, Roth – but which I will illustrate by invoking that moment when a reader notices that Milton’s
Satan is using the revolutionary vocabulary against God that Milton himself had employed in his political
writings against the monarchy. In a manner not wholly dissimilar to Milton’s relationship with his Satan,
Swift has created a character he disdains – Swift is not endorsing stewing Irish children anymore than
Milton is advocating war against God – and yet who, largely because he is created out of the predicament
Swift lived every day, is anything but a mask that can be lifted to reveal some clear moral truth.

Just as we will go on debating the meaning of Milton’s representation of Satan, so Swift’s Satan – a
systematizer of human slaughter – is not reducible to a technique that can be figured out and fixed. Just as
we are certain Milton would have us contemplate his Satan in the context of timeless human questions
about good and evil, so Swift has given us a character born of the horrifying ironies of Swift’s own life
and times, and embodying an evil arguably more terrifying than the intentional evil of ego-wounded
Lucifer. Swift’s monster is a man convinced of his own good intentions, empowered by a scientific
(economics) vocabulary and logic that allows him to think of human beings and human lives as so many
numbers that can be arranged and figured. One benefit of his program that the speaker twice points to is
that it would greatly lessen “the Number of Papists among us” (Prose Works 12.112), advocating what we
would now term ethnic cleansing. If Swift had chosen a straw man for his speaker – an English visitor, for
example, who offered the same solution to Ireland’s ills – much of our reading so far would remain the
same and the condemnation of the English might be even more explicitly drawn. But by creating his
speaker out of his own endlessly frustrating engagement with poverty – economic, political, and cultural –
in Ireland, Swift managed, not only to represent his sense of the complexities of the English/Irish
situation, but to imagine a time when evil would come packaged, not as Satan or Iago, villains, however
tortured, of choice, but as an enlightened program of human advancement. Satan, for many in the
contemporary world, has become a philosophical abstraction – a metaphor, but monsters who advocate
genocidal “solutions,” often in the name of advancing civilization, often following efficient economic
models, are anything but an abstraction.

Ultimately more important than the historical and biographical context of A Modest Proposal is the
relationship between the satire and the reader. The thing that makes the Proposal a work of unending
interest to readers is not what it says about Ireland and England in the eighteenth century, but what it says
about a reader’s own world. One necessarily enters the world of the Modest Proposal with the somewhat
pompous but sympathetic speaker. He decries the poverty and suffering he sees, and believes that society

12
should reward whoever (himself, of course) can correct the situation. Rather than wallowing in the
sentimental, the speaker shows his attractive modernism by undertaking an accounting of the situation:
images of the poor beggar mother with her brood give way swiftly to population figures and estimates of
necessary resources. This is so universally the approach to social and economic ills in modern cultures
that it is hard to imagine the reader who would not travel alongside the speaker, despite his quirks, right
up to the point where he reveals his scheme. Moving then as quickly as possible from the speaker, readers
will move to a place of solidarity with the poor Irish victims.

An historical approach can leave some readers stuck at this point, but the reader who continues to travel
through the work finds that this, too, is an untenable position either because the suffering is unimaginable
or because the vile charge of complicity –butchers will not be wanting – rings true in a way that cannot be
countenanced. At the point a reader realizes his or her distance, however much abstract sympathy is
retained for the victims, the experience of A Modest Proposal actually becomes more uncomfortable. For
each of us lives in a world where economic and political suffering, including genocidal suffering, exists.
Where in the template of the Proposal am I? Some of us will, miserably, find ourselves absentee
landlords, individuals concerned with our own economic and social comfort with only passing
involvement with the policies paid for by our taxes or the specific consequences of our investments.
Where should I be? If the satire offers an answer, it must be to return us to the speaker, an individual
concerned enough to crunch the numbers, put pen to paper, risk the calumny of critics of his work, and
one whose efforts are not determined by his own financial interest. He is a monster to be sure, but a
monster who, by comparison with everyone else on the satiric landscape, deserves the statue he asks for at
the outset of his pamphlet.

JONATHAN SWIFT
1667-1745
Jonathan Swift—a posthumous child—was born of English parents in Dublin. Through the generosity of
an uncle he was educated at Kilkenny School and Trinity College, Dublin, but before he could fix on a
career, the troubles that followed upon James II's abdication and subsequent invasion of Ireland drove
Swift along with other Anglo-Irish to England. Between 1689 and 1699 he was more or less continuously
a member of the household of his kinsman Sir William Temple, an urbane, civilized man, a retired
diplomat, and a friend of King William. During these years Swift read widely, rather reluctantly decided
on the church as a career and so took orders, and discovered his astonishing gifts as a satirist. About 1696
—97 he wrote his powerful satires on corruptions in religion and learning, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle
of the Books, which were published in 1704 and reached their final form only in the fifth edition of 1710.
These were the years in which he slowly came to maturity. When, at the age of thirty-two, he returned to
Ireland as chaplain to the lord justice, the earl of Berkeley, he had a clear sense of his genius.
For the rest of his life, Swift devoted his talents to politics and religion—not clearly separated at the time
—and most of his works in prose were written to further a specific cause. As a clergyman, a spirited
controversialist, and a devoted supporter of the Anglican Church, he was hostile to all who seemed to
threaten it: Deists, freethinkers, Roman Catholics, Nonconformists, or merely Whig politicians. In 1710
he abandoned the Whigs, because he opposed their indifference to the welfare of the Anglican Church in
Ireland and their desire to repeal the Test Act, which required all holders of offices of state to take the
Sacrament according to the Anglican rites, thus excluding Roman Catholics and Dissenters. (For Swift's
"Argument against the Abolishing of Christianity in England," go to Norton Literature Online.)
Welcomed by the Tories, he became the most brilliant political journalist of the day, serving the
government of Oxford and Bolingbroke as editor of the party organ, the Examiner, and as author of its
most powerful articles as well as writing longer pamphlets in support of important policies, such as that
favoring the Peace of Utrecht (1713) (…) In Ireland, where he lived unwillingly, he became not only an
efficient ecclesiastical administrator but also, in 1724, the leader of Irish resistance to English oppression.

13
Under the pseudonym "M. B. Drapier," he published the famous series of public letters that aroused the
country to refuse to accept £100,000 in new copper coins (minted in England by William Wood, who had
obtained his patent through court corruption), which, it was feared, would further debase the coinage of
the already poverty-stricken kingdom. Although his authorship of the letters was known to all Dublin, no
one could be found to earn the £300 offered by the government for information as to the identity of the
drapier. Swift is still venerated in Ireland as a national hero. (…)
For all his involvement in public affairs, Swift seems to stand apart from his contemporaries— a striking
figure among the statesmen of the time, a writer who towered above others by reason of his imagination,
mordant wit, and emotional intensity. He has been called a misanthrope, a hater of humanity, and
Gulliver's Travels has been considered an expression of savage misanthropy. It is true that Swift
proclaimed himself a misanthrope in a letter to Pope, declaring that, though he loved individuals, he hated
"that animal called man'' in general and offering a new definition of the species not as animal rationale
("a rational animal") but as merely animal rationiscapax("an animal capable of reason"). This, he
declared, is the "great foundation" on which his "misanthropy" was erected.Swift was stating not his
hatred of his fellow creatures but his antagonism to the current optimistic view that human nature is
essentially good. To the "philanthropic" flattery that sentimentalism and Deistic rationalism were paying
to human nature, Swift opposed a more ancient view: that human nature is deeply and permanently
flawed and that we can do nothing with or for the human race until we recognize its moral and intellectual
limitations. In his epitaph he spoke of the "fierce indignation" that had torn his heart, an indignation that
found superb expression in his greatest satires. It was provoked by the constant spectacle of creatures
capable of reason, and therefore of reasonable conduct, steadfastly refusing to live up to their capabilities.
Swift is a master of prose. He defined a good style as "proper words in proper places," a more complex
and difficult saying than at first appears. Clear, simple, concrete diction; uncomplicated syntax; and
economy and conciseness of language mark all his writings. His is a style that shuns ornaments and
singularity of all kinds, a style that grows more tense and controlled the more fierce the indignation that it
is called on to express. The virtues of his prose are those of his poetry, which shocks us with its hard look
at the facts of life and the body. It is unpoetic poetry, devoid of, indeed as often as not mocking at,
inspiration, romantic love, cosmetic beauty, easily assumed literary attitudes, and conventional poetic
language. Like the prose, it is predominantly satiric in purpose, but not without its moments of comedy
and Lightheartedness, though most often written less to divert than to agitate the reader.

"A Modest Proposal" is an example of Swift's favorite satiric devices used with superb effect.
Irony (from the deceptive adjective modest in the title to the very last sentence) pervades the piece. A
rigorous logic deduces ghastly arguments from a premise so quietly assumed that readers assent before
they are aware of what that assent implies.

Parody, at which Swift is adept, allows him to glance sardonically at the by then familiar figure of the
benevolent humanitarian (forerunner of the modern sociologist, social worker, and economic planner)
concerned to correct a social evil by means of a theoretically conceived plan. The proposer, as naive as he
is apparently logical and kindly, ignores and therefore emphasizes for the reader the enormity of his plan.
The whole is an elaboration of a rather trite metaphor: "The English are devouring the Irish." But there is
nothing trite about the pamphlet, which expresses in Swift's most controlled style his revulsion at the
contemporary state of Ireland and his indignation at the rapacious English absentee landlords, who were
bleeding the country white with the silent approbation of Parliament, ministers, and the crown.

Pretender in Spain - James Francis Edward Stuart (1688-1766), the son of James II, was claimant
("Pretender") to the throne of England from which the Glorious Revolution had barred his succession.
Catholic Ireland was loyal to him, and Irishmen joined him in his exile on the Continent. Because of the
poverty in Ireland, many Irishmen emigrated to the West Indies and other British colonies in America;
they paid their passage by binding themselves to work for a stated period for one of the planters.

14
George Psalmanazar (ca. 1679—1763) - a famous impostor. A Frenchman, he imposed himself on
English bishops, noblemen, and scientists as a Formosan. He wrote an entirely fictitious account of
Formosa, in which he described human sacrifices and cannibalism

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
(1756)
(…) in A Philosophical Enquiry (1756), Edmund Burke set out to explore the terms ‘sublime’ and
‘beautiful’. In the process, he articulated an approach to sympathy and to the passions that has a direct
bearing on the development of the rhetoric of sensibility. In particular, his belief in the affective power of
rhetoric, combined with his interest in the reasons why we appear to enjoy representations of pain or
suffering, creates an approach to rhetoric, if not an actual system of rhetoric, which is distinctly
sentimental. Burke identifies ‘three principal links’ in the ‘great chain of society’ which are ‘ sympathy,
imitation, and ambition’, and it is:

By the first of these passions that we enter into the concerns of others; that we are moved as they are
moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost anything which men can do or suffer
[. . .] It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions
from one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a delight on wretchedness, misery, and
death itself.

Burke’s analysis is voyeuristic, imagining that the ‘delight’ we feel when sympathizing with the distresses
of others, particularly when those distresses are conveyed to us via the ‘affecting arts’, is little more than
a species of relief at not being the person who suffers. Burke tackles this problem by introducing a social
and religious dimension. ‘Our Creator’, he tells us (without any scriptural evidence), ‘has designed we
should be united by the bond of sympathy.’ Moreover, society is not held together merely by this
sympathetic bond. The ‘delight’ we feel at viewing a scene of misery is also mixed with some positive
pain. Thus, society is held together by a fusion of the two principles which many Enlightenment thinkers
considered mutually exclusive: altruism and selfishness. The ‘delight’ that we experience in witnessing
the distresses of others (a necessary result of the God-given ‘bond of sympathy’) ‘hinders us from
shunning scenes of misery; and the pain we feel, prompts us to relieve ourselves in relieving those who
suffer’. Finally, Burke insists that this entire process is ‘antecedent to any reasoning’, that is, entirely
emotional or irrational.

Burke’s argument is not essentially original and, in particular, it draws on the work of Locke and Hume.
It was, however, a timely and to some extent an influential addition to the growing body of philosophical
literature which dealt with the concept of sympathy. But Burke was also opening a discussion of the use
of sympathy in the art of rhetoric. His thoughts follow on directly from Hume’s, with the difference that
Burke asserts more firmly that rhetoric is essentially emotional. In the final pages of the Philosophical
Enquiry he turns his attention to ‘words’ as a source of the sublime. Earlier, he had made it clear that the
sublime is ‘productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’. Here, his argument
turns upon the power of language to raise this strong emotion. Burke argues that words produce ‘three
effects in the mind of the hearer’. Of these, ‘the first, is the sound; the second, the picture, or
representation of the thing signified by the sound; the third is, the affection of the soul produced by one or
by both of the foregoing’.

The latter is the most important for his theory of language. The sublime, or any of the emotions which
tend towards producing the sublime, are not found in simple sounds or pictures. Rather, there is an
interaction between those simple representations of external realities and ‘the soul’, that is, the irrational,
emotional part that makes up the self. The implication is that the sublime in literature (which he calls
‘poetry and rhetoric’) is a purely internal phenomenon suggested by the sounds and pictures of words, and

15
that we feel the sublime regardless of whether there is any actual sublime object or event brought before
our view. The mechanism by which we do this is sympathy, with language the agent of the sympathetic
impulse:

Poetry and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as painting does; their business is to
affect rather by sympathy than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the mind of the speaker,
or of others, than to present a clear idea of the things themselves.

In Burke’s view, that entire category of writing or speaking which came under the rhetoricians’ headings
of ‘artificial’ or ‘artistic’ existed to ‘affect’, that is, to appeal to the emotions; the medium through which
these emotions could be transmitted was words, and the mechanism was sympathy. Almost at the
conclusion of the Enquiry, he brings together all his thoughts on words, feelings, and sympathy to argue
why exactly words are such a powerful persuasive tool:

We take an extraordinary part in the passions of others, and [. . .] we are easily affected and brought into
sympathy by any tokens which are shewn of them; and there are no tokens which can express all the
circumstances of most passions so fully as words; so that if a person speaks upon any subject, he can not
only convey the subject to you, but likewise the manner in which he is himself affected by it.

This is a highly sentimentalized account of communication between feeling individuals whose opinions
are formed according to their passions (feelings) and modified according to the passions of others. In
Burke’s rhetorical world, communication—and particularly persuasion—do not merely employ the
emotions as one set of tools amongst many. Rather, the emotions are the main thing which words are used
to convey. The implications for the discipline of rhetoric are clear: to persuade, one must pay more
attention to the emotional state of the audience than to the logical proof of the argument. If your argument
involves the suffering of others, that means one must go straight for the heart.

Preromanticism, a general term applied by modem literary historians to a number of developments in

late 18th-century culture that are thought to have prepared the ground for *ROMANTICISM in its full
sense.
In various ways, these are all departures from the orderly framework of *NEOCLASSICISM and its
authorized *GENRES. The most important constituents of preromanticism are the *STURM UND
DRANG phase of German literature; the *PRIMITIVISM of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of
*OSSIANISM; the cult of *SENSIBILITY in the *SENTIMENTAL NOVEL; the taste for the
*SUBLIME and the picturesque in landscape; the sensationalism of the early *GOTHIC NOVELS; the
melancholy of English *GRAVEYARD POETRY; and the revival of interest in old *BALLADS and
*ROMANCES. These developments seem to have helped to give a new importance to subjective and
spontaneous individual feeling.

Sensibility, an important 18th-century term designating a kind of sensitivity or responsiveness that is both
aesthetic and moral, showing a capacity to feel both for others' sorrows and for beauty. The term is also
used in a different sense in modern *CRITICISM, the sensibility of a given writer being his or her
characteristic way of responding-intellectually and emotionally-to experience (see also dissociation of
sensibility). Its major significance, though, is as a concept or mood of 18th-century culture. In terms of
moral philosophy, it signaled a reaction against Thomas Hobbes's view of human behavior as essentially
selfish: the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury and other 18th-century thinkers argued that human beings have an
innate 'benevolence' or sympathy for others. In literature, the quality of sensibility was explored and
displayed in the 'novel of sensibility' (see sentimental novel), in *SENTIMENTAL COMEDY, in
*GRAVEYARD POETRY, and in the poems of William Cowper among others.

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The cult of sensibility is also apparent in late 18th-century *PRIMITIVISM and in the new interest in the
*SUBLIME. At its self-indulgent extreme slater criticized by Jane Austen in Sense and Sensibility
(1811)-it is called sentimentalism. It was one of the cultural trends that gave rise to *ROMANTICISM.

The prestige of mathematical reasoning in seventeenth-century Europe was immense, and the end of the
century might in England be called the Age of Reason. To some thinkers, it looked as if having
accomplished so much in interpreting the natural world, reason could go on to solve problems hitherto left
to less clear and distinct methods of investigation – matters of values and morals. But poets and critics in
England never accepted the total primacy of reason, and they were very willing to take over a moral and
aesthetic doctrine which was in reaction against a too great demand on reason. Such a doctrine existed:
the elaboration of a notion of a personal, inner faculty, an emotional consciousness which came to be
called sensibility. The doctrine assumed great importance in English thought in the eighteenth century, so
much so that after mid-century, the Age of Sensibility would be a better label for the critical context of
English literature. The book that crystallized this idea was the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of
Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1708–11).Shaftesbury develops a not very clear neo-Platonic argument
and an ethic, based on this inner aesthetic sense, ‘tolerant what is just in Society and beautiful in Nature,
and the Order of the World’. The natural moral sense is also the individual taste, though Shaftesbury did
not abandon all traditional restrictions on its free workings.

It is too neat to see the development of the powerful idea of sensibility only as a reaction to prevalent
philosophical doctrine, or as a component in the history of Western empiricism. Northrop Frye, in a
valuable article ‘Towards defining an age of feeling’ (reprinted in J. L. Clifford (ed.), Eighteenth-Century
English Literature, 1959) suggests that there are two polar views of literature. One is an aesthetic,
Aristotelian view that considers works of literature as ‘products’ that seek to distance the audience. The
other view is psychological, seeing the creation of literature as a ‘process’, and seeking to involve the
audience in this. Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime is the classical Greek statement of the latter, and
Longinus is an important source for eighteenth-century aesthetic theory.

Sensibility is the important constituent in the eighteenth-century form of the second view. There had been
a shift in critical interest from the late seventeenth century onwards, away from categorizing works of
literature to investigating the psychological processes involved in creating and responding to art. ‘Genius’
is the fascinating concept in discussions of the artist, ‘sensibility’ both in discussing the artist and
analyzing the audience’s response.

Since ‘process’ is also to be seen in history and in nature, sensibility involves a sense of the past and is
frequently the informing principle of reflective ‘nature’ poems like Thomson’s Seasons (1726–30).
Shaftesbury held that ‘the Beautiful, the Fair, the Comely were never in the Matter, but in the Art and
Design: never in Body it-self, but in the Form and forming Power’. Wordsworth and Coleridge developed
this idea of the ‘aesthetic imagination’, which leads to the Coleridgean ‘primary imagination’ where
sensibility, human perception, is ‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite
I AM’. Shaftesbury’s ‘sensibility’ was a little more modest than that, but it had an all-important moral
side. This was later developed by Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759), which had great
influence on critics in later discussions of sensibility. Smith added a related doctrine: the power of
sympathy.

Sympathy powered the benevolence that Shaftesbury advocated, and Shakespeare, it was agreed, had it to
a sublime degree. A poet to be truly great also needed a concomitant of sensibility, the ‘enthusiastic
delight’ of imagination. Sensibility was the particular faculty that responded to the greatest imaginative
power, the sublime, another important part of the later eighteenth-century critical picture. This whole
aesthetic was audience-based. Sensibility, though instinctive, could be cultivated, and the whole

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psychological theory gave greater and greater prominence to education, a ‘sentimental education’.
Obviously, sensibility and sentiment could become a cult.

It did, giving rise to a good deal of attitudinizing. It is the cult of ‘sensibility’ taken beyond the bounds of
reason and common sense that Jane Austen portrays in Sense and Sensibility (1811), in the character of
Marianne Dashwood, whose selfish concentration on her own feelings is contrasted with the self-control
and consideration for other people s feelings shown by her ‘sensible’ sister, Elinor.

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